Post #629

Plotinus’s opposition to Gnostic violation of the cosmic hierarchy, both with respect to theodicy and the administration of providence, is directly incumbent on the issue of soteriology, to which he immediately turns: “Then, another point, what piety is there in denying that providence extends to this world and to anything and everything? And how are they consistent with themselves in this denial? For they say that God does care providentially for them, and them alone.” For Plotinus, this view is philosophically unpalatable because it violates the modulated hierarchy of beings: the Gnostics do not know their place. They exalt themselves, set themselves separately above Intellect, claim to be “sons of God”—but on the contrary, providence extends not to separate parts (individual, special humans) but unified wholes (all of humanity). Second, this leads them to reject “the beings received from tradition (ἐκ πατέρων).” For Plotinus, Hellenic tradition emphasizes the unity of the cosmos with all of humanity; he wishes to defend the traditional, civic Greek cult, which is precluded by these exclusive claims to salvation. Third, such claims presume an incoherent psychology, making an unsupportable distinction between “true,” elect souls and false, “reflections” (εἴδωλα)” of souls, the non-elect. In contrast, Plotinian salvation is universally accessible to all those who imbibe Hellenic learning (παιδεία). As noted by Arthur Hilary Armstrong, Plotinus’s criticism may have particular Gnostics in mind, but it extends to “all those who make the characteristic claim of Abrahamic religion to be the elect, the people of God, with a particular and exclusive revelation from him which causes them to reject the traditional pieties.” Finally, Plotinus moves from physics to ethics. At first glance, it is tempting to differentiate the Gnostics of 2.9 [33] from (proto)-orthodox Christians on the basis of Plotinus’s accusations of moral libertinism and general lack of interest in ethical philosophy. However, his account of Gnostic libertinism is no more valid than the lurid descriptions, probably false, of a Clement or Epiphanius. Rather, his opponents’ rejection of the civic cult is tantamount in his mind to atheism. Together with the doctrine of elect soteriology (mutually exclusive with his view on providence), it thus merits a tarring with the brush of Epicureanism. Moreover, he says that they do not compose treatises on virtue. This indifference to ethical matters puts them out of order with the hierarchy yet again, this time not with the hierarchy of the cosmos but with a philosophical approach to it: virtue precedes and even reveals God, not the other way around. Much as the debate over the composition of the World-Soul and its demiurgic activity presumed a rejection of Gnostic temporality and narrative imagery, these arguments over theodicy, soteriology, and ethics presume that the Gnostics failed to ascertain the proper location of divinity, its transmission, and how people show evidence of interaction with it. Multiplying needless intermediary entities, the Gnostics reject the entities that are actually necessary for the dissemination of providence (the stars), asserting that they have a special access to God via theophanies that exist outside the proper order of the universe. The ramifications of this axiom of divine theophany extend to a criminal soteriology, empty ethics, and, ultimately, pedagogy antithetical to the philosophical enterprise and its Hellenic heritage. — Dylan M. Burns, Apocalypse of the Alien God