Having sex with the one
erotic mysticism in Plotinus and the problem of metaphor
pp. 67-83
in: Panayiota Vassilopoulou, Stephen L. Clark (eds), Late antique epistemology, Berlin, Springer, 2009Abstract
At several points in the Enneads, Plotinus describes what appears to be a first-hand experience of a moment of mystical union with the supreme principle, the One.1 And yet — despite the large volume of scholarship on Plotinian mysticism in the context of philosophical hermeneutics — a seemingly fundamental question has been neglected: what, in practical terms, was Plotinus actually doing during these extraordinary moments? Indeed, it seems that the importance of this question has typically been underestimated. For if we remain in the dark about what was (according to Porphyry)2 the ultimate goal of Plotinus' life and philosophy, one might wonder whether we can in fact claim to have any real understanding of his thought. The essential difficulty for the historian of philosophy is that the experience of union with the One transcends ordinary intellection and thus (according to Plotinus' own repeated injunctions) can-not be expressed in literal or discursive terms. Nevertheless, he does try to communicate the essence of the experience through the use of various images: images which ostensibly are metaphors for more abstract and ineffable states of consciousness. In this chapter I would like to suggest that the curiously physical, erotic — and indeed frankly sexual— imagery Plotinus uses to describe mystical union is not an arbitrary metaphor, but is in fact central to both his metaphysics and his experiential praxis.
