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The Pair Movement-Rest in Plotinus and Maximus the Confessor
Katelis Viglas
Introduction
In this short text which follows we will
compare the neoplatonic system in its dynamic form -
which for the Christians thinkers as Maximus the
Confessor wasn’t sufficiently intense - with the Christian notion of movement. Maximus broke the cyclic pair of neoplatonic
movement-rest, speaking for a movable and social God. As the source of love and
energy, God tends towards beings of the sensible world in the frames of His
economic project for them. In general, we can see the Maximian
philosophy of movement in relation both with Parmenides, Plato and Origen, who
attributed the immobility to the real being, considering movement as a fall,
and in relation with Heraclitus, who believed that
everything are in motion.[1] Maximus connected the immobility of uncreated reality with
the movement of created, in the Aristotelian sense of the “unmoved mover”. But
surpassed Aristotle and attributed movement to the divine nature of Christ and
in general to Divinity. Every being in this world and in the world beyond has
movement. Maximus makes the use of the super-names
for God, taking from the neoplatonism
both the superlative and the apophatic way of
thinking. God is over our definitions of Him and so He is unlimited; but at the
most desirable end, in the ascend towards Him, we
cannot loose ourselves, because movement never stops. At the most desirable
end, we have progress and movement inside identity (Progressus in idem).
The
philosophy of movement and rest
According to the Ancient Greek Philosophers,
Plato and Aristotle, God is static and immovable. This happens because movement
characterizes mainly the world of becoming and so the imperfect beings. God as
perfect and as the principal Being has to be characterized by immobility and
rest.[2]
For Plato movement is a process towards
perfection, either of the formless matter which search for the perfect form in
the realm of becoming, either of the intellectual ascent from the sensible to
the intelligible (the world of Ideas). God because He belongs in the
intelligible realm is characterized by immobility and rest.
For Aristotle movement is a process from the
virtually being to the actually being. And because the virtually being is for
him the matter, as the only being that can become something else, movement is
attributed to the sensible objects, which are composite by matter and form. God
as the principal Intellect has not matter and form; He is a pure “actually
being” without having movement.
The Stoicism and Neoplatonism,
as concerning the nature and the character of God, are exceptions in Greek
Philosophy. Plotinus, who was the founder of Neoplatonism
(3rd century A.D.), derived the five “greatest genera” of Plato’s Sophist[3]–
being, movement, rest, identity, difference – and placed them in the
intelligible world.[4] For Plotinus the relation
between the three hypostases – One, Intellect, Soul – is dynamic. So God or One
or Good on top of hierarchy of hypostases through the process of emanation
produces the world vertically. God’s emanation has as its outcome the lower
hypostases towards the sensible world. Well, this structure of the levels of
reality is not a static system, but it has movement and energy. The inverse
process inside this metaphysical system is possible for the human souls, which
had fallen, taking their place into the bodies. So we have a kind of movement
from God or One towards the lower world and the reverse movement of the souls
toward God, which is the most desired object by every being. The questions
which are raised here are: a) what is the nature of that God’s movement and b)
when the soul arrives again back to God, does it stay immobile into an ecstatic
rest or not?
We can find the same neoplatonic
dynamic structure in the writings of many Christian Theologians. A distinct
example is the case of Origen. He incorporated that neoplatonic
metaphysical dynamism and he accepted the pre-existence of Souls in a divine
place before their fall dawn to the earth. For Origen this fall is a kind of
movement. Consequently the Christian theologian Origen – for whom Porphyrius believed mistakenly that he had the same teacher
with Plotinus in Alexandria[5] –
reached the conclusion that movement is evil as the cause of the sinful mingle
of the souls with the bodies.[6]
Maximus the Confessor in his work, which was known in
the West as Ambigua, reformed and made a refutation of Origens’s doctrine. He changed the order of Origenic triad “abode-movement-becoming” and he placed
first the term “becoming’, second the “movement” and third the “rest” inside
God.[7] So we
can observe that Maximus maintained the neoplatonic structure, changing the order of the names in
the triad.
There are many scholars who observed the origin
of the Maximus’s pair movement-rest in the writings
of Plotinus, who in his Enneads VI.2
and elsewhere he insists, as Plato did, on the theory that movement belongs to
the sensible and perishable world, while rest must be attributed to the beings
of intelligible. Jose Julian Prado observed that
Plotinus prefers the term rest (stasis) for the intelligible “genera”, which
are by its nature immovable (akineta), and the world
stillness (eremia) for these which are movable (kinoumena), but for some reason rest or have came to a stop.[8]
J.J.Prado following especially the works of Hans Urs Von Balthasar[9]
believed that the dualistic opposition sensible/intelligible=movement/rest was
acceptable literally by Maximus. But what is the
nature of God? Is He moving or not? Plotinus although he surpassed the clear
platonic dichotomy between sensible-movement/intelligible-rest and he rejected
the attributes static and immovable to God, he doesn’t insist on His absolute
freedom and spontaneous movement towards the lower hypostases. Although in his
treatise VI.8 (On free will and the will of the One) he speaks for the
voluntary motion of God towards his creatures, he insists on that God doesn’t
need us (emon ouk ephietai).[10] In
fact, for neoplatonism, God
creates the world, due to His spontaneous overflowing, but He hasn’t the
generosity of the Christian God.[11] So
the neoplatonic God doesn’t go outside His substance
because He is sufficient in Himself. Of course Plotinus accepts the free will
and the voluntary tension of the One, but the free will of God hasn’t so great
power due to the lack of any personalistic meaning,
in the way that we find it in the existential doctrine of Christianity. The
free will of God was studied by Plotinus along
with the free will of man (to ephemin).[12] And
it is only in the writings of Plotinus, the Enneads
that we meet for first time the word thelesis as another term with different meaning for the
notion of the will.[13]
This same word obtained a crucial significance in the writings of Maximus the Confessor against the monotheletism.[14]
It is also in the metaphysical course of man,
which is the return towards God, where we can find again the word rest
(stasis). It is about the journey of the human soul through its ecstatic
movement to God. God is the most desired end, not only by the individual souls,
but also, in the eschatological perspective, by all mankind and by all nature.
So we have two kinds of movement and two kinds
of rest. The first movement is the neoplatonic
emanation and the Christian creation by God. The second movement is the
movement of return to God which concerns all the souls and entire Universe.
Accordingly we have one kind of platonic and origenistic
rest inside God before His movement – because God created the Universe ex nihilo for the Christians Fathers[15] and
as we saw, Maximus places first the
act of "becoming" (genesis) and second the notion of "movement" (kinesis), although every act presupposes a kind of
movement, even genesis. Second, everything has to go back to its source and its proper end that is in the rest inside God.
[16]
We can observe in Maximus’s
doctrine of movement and consequently of the social character of God, an
intensity and a persistence. As for the return and the ascent of the soul to
God, it is a kind of reverse movement. In Maximus’s Ambigua the neoplatonic “cyclic dance”, that is the idea of the eternal
cyclic movement of time – which found its expression in the hierarchical
ontological system of hypostases – breaks, because we have a total different
conception of movement and rest. Also exists the neoplatonic
apothatic way of thinking (the formula
"neither-nor"), especially in Dionysius the Areopagite[17] as
regarding movement and rest in the relation between man and God (that is, there
is neither motion, nor rest of the human mind inside God and neither God is
moving, nor He is in rest), along with the
notion of “immovable motion” or similar contradictory expressions about the
divine condition.[18] The same aspect of the
intelligible world is appeared as “movement immovable”
(kinesis akinetos) in Plotinus; but this is not a
proper expression for One or God.[19]
Conclusion
It is known that the Christians thinkers in the
latter decades of the 20th century put emphasis on the historicity
of the Christian conception of God, in opposition with the static and rational
conception of God in Ancient Greek Philosophy. The idea of a personal, social
and mobile God finds its culmination in maximian
philosophy of movement. With the apophatic way of
thinking (neither motion, neither rest) or with contradictory expressions
(“immovable motion” or “continually movable rest”) as regarding the ascent to
God and the phenomenon of creation, Maximus surpassed
the origenistic and neoplatonic
similar and, simultaneously, different ideas.
It is exactly because God is moving and He
doesn’t stay immovable and self-sufficient in Him, that the historicity was
introduced. This latter started by the personal presentation of God to the
Judaic people and passed in the Christian linear conception, which broke the
Greek circle. In the case of Plotinus the “immovable movement” is not
attributed to God but only to the intelligible world.
The activity of God for Maximus
is a free expression of His sovereignty, but it is also an expression of His
condescension towards humankind, as already manifested in His creation and His
subsequent acts of salvation. The maximian doctrine
of creation and of salvation as being motion of God towards created beings and
motion of the ensouled human beings towards God is to
be understood against the general Greek negation of the possibility of movement
in the perfect Being.[20]
In this effort to find another basis for a
positive and optimistic understanding of divine movement, Maximus
used the neoplatonic triadic interpretation which he
felt free to see as indications of Divine Reality. Although Maximus
did not accept the neoplatonic emanation in his
understanding of creation and in the Trinitarian mystery, he was able to use
it. The mystery remains hidden, but God becomes available to human thought
through revelation. Thus the triadic speculations of Neoplatonism
and its dynamic structure, mediated through Pseudo-Dionysius, helped Maximus both to refute Origenism
and to accept movement – in relation to rest – as a special category for Cristian thought as “wisdom about God”.[21]
Notes:
[1] Maximus the Confessor, Philosophical
and Theological Questions (Ambigua). Introduction-Comments by D. Staniloae. Translation I.Sakalis, Ed. Apostolic Deaconry of the Church of Greece,
Athens, 1990,
33 and note 21; see also 18-27 (In Greek)
[2] Plato, Timaeus 57e-58a and Aristotle, Physics 11 1073a
[3] Plato, Sophist 245D-257A
[4] Plotinus, Enneads, VI.2
[5] We shouldn’t
make confusion between the platonic Origen who had the same teacher with
Plotinus and the Christian Origen. This error is due to Porphyrius,
who had heard, when he was young, the Christian Origen to speak about his
teacher Ammonius. But that latter wasn’t the same
person with Ammonius Sakkas
the teacher of Plotinus. Porphyrius, The life of Plotinus, 3.6-13 and
Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History VI 19.5-7
[6] P.Sherwood,
The Earlier Ambigua
of Saint Maximus the Confessor and his Refutation of Origenism. “Orbis Catholicus”, Herder, Romae, 1955,
92
[7] P.Sherwood,
ibid 92-3
[8] We can find
rest ( stasis) in Plato’s Sophist and
the term stillness ( eremia) in Aristotle’s Physics V 6, 229D-231a. See J.J.Prado, Voluntad y Naturaleza. La antropologia filosofica of Maximo el
Confessor. Ediciones de la Univerdidad Nacional
de Rio Cuarto. Rio Cuarto,
Argentina,
1974, 121-122. Cf. C. Evangeliou, Aristotle’s Categories and Porphyry.
Philosophia Antiqua. A series of studies on Ancient Philosophy. Ed. By W.J.Verdenius and J.C.M. Van Winden. Vol. XLVIII. E.Brill,
Leiden, 1988,
161 and Plotinus, Enneads VI.3.27
[9] H. U.
von Bathasar, Liturgie Cosmique. Maxime
le Confesseur. Traduit de l’allemand par L. Lhaumet et H.-A.Prentout. Ed.
Montaigne, Paris, 1947,104
[10] Plotinus, Enneads, VI.9.8.36
[11] A. Kellesidou-Galanos, «Preuves
de l’Existence et Nature du Premier chez Plotin». PHILOSOPHIA. 5-6, 1975-6, 366. Cf. E.R.Dodds,
“Tradition and Personal Achievement in the Philosophy of Plotinus”, Journal of Roman Studies, 50, 1960, 1-7.
See also J. Trouillard, La Purification Plotinienne. Press Universitaires de France, Paris, 1955, 94-104 and A.H.Armstrong,
“Salvation, Plotinian and Christian” The Downside
Review 75 (No. 240). Bath,
1957, 126-139
[12] Plotinus, Enneads VI.8.2-6
[13] J.
D. Madden, “The Authenticity of Early Definitions of Will ( thelesis)”
in Maximus the Confessor. Actes du Symposium sur Maxime le Confesseur.
Friburg,
2-5 septembre 1980. Ed. Par F.
Heinzer et C.Schönborn. Edition Universitaires Fribourg Suisse, 1982, 61-79
[14] Maximus defended the
two energies and the two thelesis
(will) of Christ against the monoenergetism and the monotheletism. N. Loudovicos, The Ontology of Holy Eucharist. Ed. Domos, Athens,
1992, 222-229 (In Greek). Cf. J.J. Prado, Voluntad y naturaleza,
loc. cit. 183-265
[15] Genesis
1, 1-28 and Basil the Great, Exaemeron, 2, 3,
P.G. 29, 33B. Cf. Gregory of Nyssa P.G. 44, 72D-72A
[16] We have to
remark here how close are the philosophy of neoplatonism
and Christian Theology and how similar the notions of motion and rest are in
them, but simultaneously so different
[17] Mystical Theology 5, P.G. 3,
1054. This is the hermeneutical point of view in J.J.Prado and H.U. von Balthasar.
[18] N. Loudovicos,
loc. cit. 242-3
[19] Plotinus, Enneads VI.2
[20] L. Thunberg, Man and Cosmos. The Vision
of St. Maximus the Confessor. With a Foreword by A.M. Allchin. St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, New York, 1985, 31-32
[21] L. Thunberg,
ibid,
32
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