The Relation of Mysticism and Metaphysics in Plotinian Union with the One
      A significant (though rarely explicit) question underlying much of the scholarship on Plotinian mysticism is the relationship of Plotinus’ subjective experience of mystical union with the One to his objective metaphysical system. His accounts of the ultimate phase of mystical union are typically assumed to be descriptions of an exceptionally powerful and unique kind of subjective experience: one which grounded the entirety of his life and thought. Plotinian mysticism has therefore often been understood to be representative or even paradigmatic of a kind of mystical experience — known from many different cultural and religious contexts — that arises from the unique psychophysical constitution of the individual mystic. However, it is also generally agreed that Plotinus’ mysticism and his metaphysics are interrelated (though irreducible to each other), although there is still substantial disagreement as to whether the experience or the metaphysical system had causal priority; whether, in other words, the experience itself generated, or instead merely confirmed, the system. Now a serious complexity arises from the fact that — as I attempt to demonstrate in my dissertation — the final phases of Plotinus’ ascent towards mystical union with the One bear an extremely close resemblance to the more explicitly ritualized techniques of contemplative ascent in the Platonizing Sethian Gnostic systems known and critiqued in Plotinus’ circle. To be specific, at the final phase of both Plotinian and Sethian ascent one finds an account of a self-reversion followed by a sudden experience of a transcendental manifestation of one’s own self that is identical to the self-apprehension of the transcendental First Principle which emerges during an analogous process of reversion in the first eternal moments of ontogenesis. As I have argued elsewhere, these similarities are too robust and too mutually explanatory to have developed independently; the evidence would therefore suggest that Plotinus developed his mystical system in extremely close dialogue with contemporaneous Platonizing Gnostics in his immediate milieu.
      Thus far the preamble. The question that I would like to address in this paper, however, is the following: if I am correct, where does this leave Plotinus’ putatively “mystical” experience? For if his accounts of union with the One are patterned rather precisely upon shared techniques known in his broader religious and intellectual milieu, we can no longer simply assume that that they are the result of more or less spontaneous, subjective experiential states. The tentative solution I would like to offer is twofold. First, I would like to preserve the notion of experience — indeed, we should probably take Plotinus’ firmly experiential language of union at face value — with reference to Hans Jonas’ proposal that late antique mysticism and metaphysics were related as a kind mutually-influencing “feedback loop,” in that that ‘objective’ metaphysical systems anticipate ‘subjective’ mystical experience, which in turn, supports those metaphysical systems. Second, I would suggest that a useful way to reconceptualize Plotinus’ mystical ascent might be as an interiorized ritual in which the subjective consciousness is deliberately controlled in a prescribed manner — according to the structure of the external forms of ritual praxis — for a discrete period of time. This technique may be described as “visualization” or “contemplation,” although it should not be confused either with the use of ordinary visual imaginations or with discursive philosophical cogitation. To explore this I would like to draw on the theoretical insights of both Jonas and J. Z. Smith, who have both described in different but related ways the mechanism by which, in late antiquity, on the one hand, prior metaphysical systems were internalized as mystical experience and, on the other, public ritual was miniaturized and transformed into private magical rites. This notion of interiorized ritual may thus (a) provide a heuristic model with which to reconceptualize Plotinus’ non-discursive, hypernoetic (and thus paraphilosophical) praxis at the final stage of the philosophical ascent and, simultaneously, (b) situate it more accurately in its original intellectual-historical context.

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