Henosis

← Encyclopedia

The word survives in a single sentence. Of all the lines Plotinus wrote — some thousands of them, copied and arranged after his death by a devoted student — the only phrase that the general memory of the West held onto was the one that ends his treatise on the One: the flight of the alone to the Alone. It is, in the Greek, an unspectacular construction, phygē monou pros monon, a few words that occur elsewhere in the language without metaphysical weight. He gave them weight. Around that small phrase gathers a whole doctrine of what the soul is for and where, in the end, it is going.

The doctrine has a name of its own. Henosis — from hen, “one” — means simply “becoming one,” unification, the act by which a thing that was many or divided is made single. In ordinary Greek it could describe the welding of metals or the binding of a treaty. In the Platonism that runs from the third century into late antiquity it became a technical term for the highest thing a soul can do: the union with the source of all things, the One that stands beyond being and beyond thought. Henosis is not a feeling about that source, nor a vision of it, nor even knowledge of it. It is the closing of the distance entirely.

The genealogy of a word

The intellectual ground was prepared long before the term hardened. Parmenides had taught, in the fifth century BCE, that being is one and changeless and that the world’s multiplicity is appearance laid over a single reality — the Eleatic claim that “all is one” that every later monism would have to reckon with. Plato gave the One a more vertiginous turn. In the Republic the Good lies “beyond being,” epekeina tēs ousias, exceeding even existence in dignity and power; in the dense second half of the Parmenides he sets out a series of hypotheses about a One that, taken strictly, can be said neither to be nor to be known. Whether Plato meant these as metaphysics or as logical exercise has been argued ever since. The later Platonists read them as metaphysics, and built on them.

It was Plotinus, an Egyptian-born teacher who settled in Rome around 245 CE, who turned that inheritance into a living discipline. He did not write systematically; he wrote occasional treatises in response to questions raised in his school, and it fell to his student Porphyry to gather them after his death into six sets of nine — the Enneads, from ennea, “nine.” Porphyry deliberately placed last, at the very summit of the arrangement, the treatise On the Good, or the One, the ninth tractate of the sixth Ennead. The placement is itself an argument: everything in the system rises toward what that final treatise describes.

Marble portrait identified as Plotinus, from Ostia Antica, third century — the teacher whose final treatise made union with the One the end of philosophy. — Museo Ostiense, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Porphyry left one detail that the philosophy itself never claims. In the biography he prefixed to his edition, On the Life of Plotinus, he records that “the Term, the one end, of his life was to become Uniate, to approach to the God over all,” and that “four times, during the period I passed with him, he achieved this Term, by no mere latent fitness but by the ineffable Act.” Porphyry adds, with a touch of pride, that he himself reached it once, in his sixty-eighth year. The numbers are a biographer’s claim, not a teaching — but they fixed in the record the idea that union is rare, achieved rather than possessed, and that even a master of contemplation might touch the source only a handful of times in a long life.

What union is, and is not

The whole architecture of Neoplatonism bends toward the One, and the difficulty of henosis follows directly from what the One is. Below it, in the order of emanation, stand the Nous — the divine Intellect that eternally contemplates the Forms — and below that the Soul, and below that the visible cosmos. Each level proceeds from the one above by a kind of overflow, the higher losing nothing as it gives rise to the lower. But the One itself is not a being among beings, not even the highest being. It is epekeina, beyond. It cannot be known, because knowing splits into a knower and a thing known, and the One admits no such two. It cannot even be named, since every name marks off this from that, and the One is before all marking-off. The most one can say is that it is the Good, the source, the simple prior to all complexity.

Union with such a principle therefore cannot be a seeing or a grasping. This is the decisive move of the doctrine, and Plotinus makes it with great care in the closing sections of the final treatise. “We should not speak of seeing,” he writes in Stephen MacKenna’s rendering, “but we cannot help talking in dualities, seen and seer, instead of, boldly, the achievement of unity. In this seeing, we neither hold an object nor trace distinction; there is no two.” The soul that reaches the One does not look at it as at an object across a gap. It becomes one with it; the gap is what dissolves. To describe the union as knowledge would already be to falsify it, because knowledge keeps its object at the distance required to know it.

Two images carry the teaching. The first is the center. A soul, like a circle, has a center, and so — by analogy, since it is the center of all centers — does the One; and union happens when “centre coincides with centre, for on this higher plane things that touch at all are one.” The second image undoes the very idea of approach. The One, Plotinus insists, is not somewhere else, to be traveled toward. It is “ever present with us; we with it when we put otherness away.” Separation is not spatial; “their separation is solely that of otherness, of differentiation; in the absence of otherness, it is similars mutually present.” We are, he says, always before the Supreme — “but we do not always look.” He offers a homely figure for this: a choir set in order around its conductor may sing badly when its members face away, and well only when they turn toward the one to whom all attention should be given. The soul has never left its source. It has only turned its face.

Gustave Doré’s engraving for the Empyrean of Dante’s Paradiso, 1868 — the ascent into a light that exceeds sight, the visual idiom the Christian West would lend to the Neoplatonic terminus. — via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

If union is not knowledge, what is it? Plotinus calls it, repeatedly, a simplification. The ascent is a stripping: away from the body and sensation, away from the images of memory, away from the step-by-step movement of discursive reason, and finally away even from the Intellect and its plurality of Forms. What remains when all of that is set down is not a richer state but a barer one. He describes the summit as “a going forth from the self, a simplifying, a renunciation, a reach towards contact and at the same time a repose.” The French scholar Pierre Hadot took exactly this word for the title of his study of Plotinus — the simplicity of vision — to mark how foreign the goal is to any program of acquiring. One does not add the One to oneself. One subtracts everything that is not it until what is left is the bare presence that was there all along. In that state “the man is changed, no longer himself nor self-belonging; he is merged with the Supreme, sunken into it, one with it.” And then he comes back, for the union does not last; the soul “fallen back again” rekindles the virtues and begins the climb once more.

For Plotinus this terminus is reached, when it is reached, as a kind of grace — not a technique that infallibly produces it but a sudden presence that arrives when the soul has done the long work of turning. The work is contemplation, the inward gathering of attention, pressed past its own ordinary limit. Nothing is required from outside: no rite, no instrument, no mediating power. The whole movement is a return inward and upward through one’s own depths to the depth they open onto. The soul that has overpassed all, he writes, attains a Term “attained only by those that have overpassed all”; and at the highest, “the essential man outgrows Being, becomes identical with the Transcendent of Being.” The phrasing is exact and worth pausing on. The soul does not arrive at a place above being. It outgrows being — sheds the very condition of being a determinate something — and in that shedding is, for as long as the moment lasts, no longer counted among the things that are.

Theurgy and the later schools

A generation after Plotinus, that confidence in unaided contemplation came under pressure from within the school itself. Iamblichus, a Syrian Platonist of the early fourth century, broke with the position he attributed to Porphyry — that the soul ascends to the divine by thought alone. The human soul, Iamblichus argued, is fully descended into the body and the material order; it is not, as Plotinus had suggested, partly resident still in the intelligible world. Such a soul cannot lift itself to the One by its own intellectual effort, because the effort is itself an act of the very faculty that needs to be transcended. What is needed is something the gods themselves have placed in the world: sacred signs, names, rites, and objects through which the divine reaches down to draw the soul up. This is theurgy, “divine work,” set out in the treatise known as On the Mysteries — not magic that compels the gods, but a consecrated cooperation in which, as the modern scholar Gregory Shaw has emphasized, the soul is acted upon as much as acting. The stones, plants, scents, and sounds used in the rites are not arbitrary tokens; each is a synthēma, a “watchword” or signature implanted in matter by the gods themselves, so that the material thing carries within it a trace of its divine cause and can serve as a thread back along the chain of emanation. Henosis remains the goal; the means now include ritual as well as thought. The shift is more than tactical. Where Plotinus had located the power of ascent in a soul that never wholly fell, Iamblichus locates it in the divine descent that meets a soul which has fully fallen — a relocation that would matter enormously when Christian writers, who held the creature to be radically dependent on grace, came to read the Neoplatonists.

Proclus, the great systematizer who headed the Academy at Athens in the fifth century, took both strands and welded them into the most complete Neoplatonic architecture of all. His Elements of Theology descends in two hundred and eleven geometric propositions from the One through the whole hierarchy of being. At the summit of the soul’s capacity he placed what he called, borrowing from the Chaldean Oracles, the “flower of the intellect,” anthos tou nou — and beyond even that, the “flower of the whole soul,” a faculty in the soul that is itself one, by which alone the soul can touch the One. The principle is exact: “as we apprehend intellect by becoming intellectually-formed, so becoming unit-formed we ascend to unity.” Like is known by like; only what is one in the soul can unite with the One. For Proclus, as for Iamblichus, that ascent is supported by theurgy as well as by contemplation — the rite and the thought converging on a single end.

Reception and afterlife

The doctrine’s longest life came through a forgery, or what the modern academy regards as one. Around the year 500, a Christian writer in the Syrian East composed a body of treatises — The Divine Names, The Mystical Theology, the works on the celestial and ecclesiastical hierarchies — and signed them with the name of Dionysius the Areopagite, the Athenian whom the Book of Acts reports as a convert of the apostle Paul. The attribution gave the writings near-apostolic authority for a thousand years; scholarship since the late nineteenth century has shown that they draw heavily on Proclus, sometimes paraphrasing him closely, and so cannot predate the fifth century. Their author is known, by convention, as Pseudo-Dionysius.

What this writer did was to baptize henosis. The Neoplatonic union with the One became, in his hands, the soul’s deifying union with the Christian God — reached, as in the pagan source, by passing beyond every affirmation into a “brilliant darkness,” an unknowing that is higher than knowledge. The Mystical Theology counsels leaving behind not only the senses but the workings of the intellect, to be united “with him who is wholly unknowable,” knowing “beyond the mind by knowing nothing.” The Plotinian structure is intact — ascent by negation, a summit past concept, a union that is presence rather than grasp — now set inside a theology of grace and a personal God. Through Latin translation the corpus shaped the whole medieval account of the mystical life. It stands behind the grunt, the ground of the soul, in Meister Eckhart; behind the dark contemplation of the Spanish Carmelites; behind the apophatic temper that runs through Eastern Christian hesychasm. When the Latin West speaks of unio mystica, the philosophical spine of the phrase is Neoplatonic henosis carried across in Dionysian dress.

That inheritance accounts for the persistent temptation to read every tradition’s summit as the same summit. The vocabulary of union recurs, after all, far beyond the Platonic line — in the Sufi fanāʾ, the passing-away of the self; in the Akbarian “oneness of being”; in the devekut, the cleaving, of Jewish mysticism; in the non-dual realization of Vedantic Advaita that the self was Brahman all along. The resemblances are not illusions. The grammar of apophatic ascent — the stripping, the unknowing, the language straining against its own dualities — does rhyme across traditions that never met. But the comparative study of mysticism has learned to be wary of collapsing these into one experience under many names, and the wariness applies with full force to henosis. The arrival is not the ascent. Plotinus’s union is with an impersonal One beyond being, reached by a soul that simplifies until nothing of its particularity remains; the Christian who inherited his words placed at the summit a personal God who loves and is loved, and a creature deified by grace who does not cease to be a creature. The broader anatomy of these distinctions belongs to the study of mystical union as such. The point specific to henosis is narrower and sharper: the term that named the pagan terminus traveled into Christian mysticism, but it did not carry the pagan metaphysics with it unchanged.

What Plotinus left, in the end, is less a method than a claim about where the soul already stands. The source it seeks is not distant; it is the nearest thing of all, nearer than the self, the center on which the soul’s own center turns. The flight is not a journey to somewhere else but the turning of a face that had been looking away — and the union, when it comes, is the recognition that the distance to be crossed was never there.

→ In the library: Plotinus, Enneads (MacKenna translation) · Enneads VI.9 — On the Good, or the One (MacKenna) · Porphyry, On the Life of Plotinus (MacKenna)

→ Related: Plotinus · The One · Neoplatonism · Mystical Union · Apophatic Theology · Emanation · Theurgy · Proclus · Iamblichus · Porphyry · Nous · Christian Mysticism · Hesychasm Byzantine Orthodox · Comparative Mysticism · Mysticism · Meister Eckhart · Islamic Sufism · Akbarian Sufism Wahdat Al Wujud · Jewish Mysticism · Hindu Vedanta Tantra