Alexander Mazur PhD on The Neoplatonists & The Sethians

 The following is from Alexander J. Mazur's work, PhD from The University of Chicago, The Platonizing Sethian Background of Plotinus' Mysticism, at the beginning:

"One of the most strikingly and apparent original aspects of Plotinus’ thought—the “end and goal” (telos … kai skips) of his life and philosophy, according to Porphyry—was his notion of a full-fledged mystical union: that is, the conjunction, assimilation, coalescence, or complete identification of the innermost core of the human subject with the transcendent One ‘above’ Being and Intellect. In several passages throughout the Enneads, Plotinus describes this event as an overwhelmingly intense subjective experience that culminates a contemplative ‘ascent.’"

"At the climactic moment—to give one example—the aspirant “neither sees nor distinguishes nor imagines two, but as if having become another and not himself nor belonging to himself there, having come to ‘belong’ to [the One], he is one, as if attached center to center, or, in another passage, '[T]here was not even any reason or thinking, nor even a self at all, if one must say even this; but he was as if snatched away or divinely possessed, in quiet solitude and stillness, having become motionless and indeed having become a kind of status. It must be emphasized that we are not dealing with a mere rhetorical flourish or a conventional metaphor, but rather with something that Plotinus understood to be a discrete, transformative event.'" 

"He repeatedly implies that he has himself experienced mystical union with the One first-hand—he often makes cryptic intimations to the effect that 'whoever has seen, knows what I mean."

More detail:

Though theoretical, the possibility exits that Plotinus was a Johannine secessionist/Sethian (Barbeloite) prior to starting his own school of thought. In fact, this notion is even more conceivable given he lived in the epicenter--Alexandria--as did many secessionists. Plato was held in high regard by both.

If this logic is true, then the possibility exists that Plotinus could have written Trimorphic Protennoia. Per The University of Exter's Dr. Alastair Logan, The Apocryphon of John & Trimorphic Protennoia are both at base fundamentally Christian treatises. The former was written in the second century, likely before Plotinus' time, but the latter both post-dates the Apocryphon & is most likely reliant on the treatise, as discussed in Section XIX.  Trimorphic Protennoia‘s Relation with The Apocryphon of John. As mentioned previously, Plotinus could have been the primary drafter of Trimorphic Protennoia, rather simply supported by Wikipedia: "Some [Sethian] gospels (for example Trimorphic Protennoia) make use of fully developed Neoplatonism and thus need to be dated after Plotinus in the 3rd century."

Plotinus moved to Rome in his forties. Note that A H Armstrong's translation of Against the Gnostics was the only one in existence until Lloyd Gerson's, and this version could have been tailored to his own specific message. Plotinus could have been addressing the Valentinians, not the secessionists / Sethians (though not the Sethites--who again held Seth, born after Cain & Abel of the OT, in the highest regard. Recall that the secessionists disregarded the OT. I believe the Neoplatonists did too.) Furthermore, Porphyry potentially could have edited this work to suit his interests, as Tuomas Rasimus & Alexander Mazur either imply or indirectly discuss below; we do not have a Time Machine to actually know. However,  how could Plotinus have held that the Demiurge was a good character if his primary role was shaping Matter--which is inherently evil per The Stanford University Encyclopedia of Philosophy? The Valentinian Tripartite Tractate is in opposition with ApJohn & TriProt as it holds the Demiurge & Matter as good, a core belief of those who followed Valentinus. As Irenaues describes right at the beginning of his work, Against Heresies (Book I, Chapter 1:) "Absurd ideas of the disciples of Valentinus as to the origin, name, order, and conjugal productions of their fancied Æons, with the passages of Scripture which they adapt to their opinions."

Additionally, per Trinity College's (Dublin) Paul Kalligas' discussion in Plotinus against the Gnostics, "The arrival in Rome of the heresiarch Valentinus, around the year 140, and his stay there for more than two decades, when he was nearly appointed to the Episcopal see of the city, but was eventually outvoted by a colleague with stronger credentials as a martyr, symbolizes, one might say, the beginning of a process of crystallization of this theosophical movement into a more or less philosophically structured theological system, based on Platonic and Pythagorean principles. Valentinus himself is commonly described in our sources as a Platonist, and Hippolytus maintains, not without some plausibility, that his system was based on a famous passage from the Second pseudo-Platonic Epistle, which we know had inspired several other Pythagorising Platonists of the time, like for instance, Numenius. Within the following century, the process continued and acquired considerable momentum through the contribution of numerous disciples of Valentinus, some of whom, like Heracleon and Ptolemaeus, were, according to the testimony of Hippolytus, also active in Italy. A sure indication of the amount of Gnostic material that was circulating in Rome a few years before the arrival of Plotinus is given by the fact that Hippolytus, while compiling his massive Attack Against the Heresies, was able to collect there the immense material of Gnostic provenance that is used in this work. Further fascinating testimony on the presence and the activities of Gnostic sects in Rome during the first half of the third century is provided by the famous hypogaeum of the Aurelii, with the imaginative depiction of Gnostic allegorical scenes on its murals."

Kalligas continues: "The continuing tendency to formulate such speculations in ever more theoretical terminology, their formidable complexity and the effort to support or embellish them by employing philosophical concepts or even forms of argumentation led to the prouction of treatises where, under the guise of phantasmagoric allegories of a revelatory character and the intricacies of a complicated symbolism, one can discern an effort to tackle theological issues that had preoccupied Greek philosophy since the time of the Presocratics. To this category seem to belong at least two of the treatises mentioned by Porphyry in Chapter 16 of his Life of Plotinus, which have miraculously emerged again among the codices found buried in a jar, near the Egyptian village of Nag Hammadi. These are the 'Revelations' of Zostrianus and Allogenes, which contain some of the most theoretically pretentious passages in the whole library. Other Sethian texts included in the collection are the ones under the titles The Apocryphon of John, The Hypostasis of the Archons, The Gospel of the Egyptians, The Three Steles of Seth, Marsanes and the treatise entitled Trimorphic Protennoia. However, we have to note that although Porphyry explicitly characterizes those who circulated these texts in Rome as Christians', the only one of them which bears any distinctively Christian elements is The Apocryphon of John." (However, I do believe Trimorphic Protennoia does as well given the close relationship.)

"It appears that, at first, Plotinus preferred not to engage directly in any kind of polemic with this spiritual movement, with some of the doctrines of which he might even feel a certain sympathy. One can hardly fail to notice some obvious similarities between the theological structure outlined above and the Plotinian system of the three so-called hypostases."

Directly from Plotinus' Enneads, pp. 208-209: "So, we should not go looking for other principles; rather, we should take this as our principle, and next after it Intellect, that is, the primary thinker, and next after Intellect Soul, since this is the natural order. And we ought not to posit any more or any fewer principles in the intelligible world. For if anyone posits fewer, they will have to say either that Soul and Intellect are identical, or that Intellect and that which is first are identical, but it has been shown repeatedly that these are distinct from one another.

What remains for us to investigate right now is what other natures besides these three there could be, then, [were we to concede that] there are more than these. For no one could discover any principle that is simpler or higher than this principle of all things as it was just described. For, certainly, they will not maintain that there is one principle in potentiality and another in actuality, because it would be ridiculous to attempt to establish more natures among those things that are immaterial and in actuality by distinguishing between potentiality and actuality.

But neither [could one establish more natures] among the subsequent principles. One cannot pretend that there is one Intellect that is in some state of stillness and another that is, in a way, in motion. For what would Intellect’s stillness be, and what would its motion and procession be, and what would the idleness of the one Intellect and the work of the other Intellect amount to? For Intellect just is as it is; always the same and established in a steady state of activity. By contrast, motion towards and around Intellect is already Soul’s work, and it is an expressed principle proceeding from Intellect into Soul that makes Soul intellectual, and not another nature between Intellect and Soul.

And surely one cannot attempt to produce more than one Intellect by saying that there is one Intellect that thinks and another Intellect that thinks that it thinks. For even if thinking in the sensible world is distinct from thinking that one is thinking, there is still a single act of apprehension that is not unaware of the results of its own acts. Indeed, it would be ridiculous to make this assumption of the true Intellect; rather, the Intellect that was supposed to be thinking will certainly be identical with the one thinking that it is thinking.

Otherwise, the one will only think, and the other that thinks that it is thinking will belong to something else and not to the one that was supposed to be thinking."

It would appear that Plotinus was referencing the Valentinians, as Alastair Logan stated in his Thesis, from the beginning of this work:

p. 9 of Gnostic Truth and Christian Heresy: “The reference in [Irenaeus’ Against Heresies] 1.11.3-5 and elsewhere to Valentinian claims to be ‘more gnostic than the Gnostics’ must be seen in this context of primal emanations: the Gnostics, Irenaeus is claiming, were the first to develop the concept of emission of mental states or attributes of the Father like intelligence (nous) and reason (logos) as hypostases. The various Valentinian attempts to posit prior emissions and entities to these is to try to outdo these Gnostics—their spiritual ancestors!” 

In fact, Neoplatonism is not entirely inline with Plato's Timaeus, a matter that is particularly curious as regards: "Although the Neoplatonists followed Platonic tradition in talking about a demiurge (divine craftsman), their cosmology has nothing demiurgic about it, as Plotinus rarely failed to point out. Craftsmen think, forge, labor, arrange, and coordinate a host of diverse technical operations towards the creation of some product of their craft. Unlike Plato’s character Timaeus or the authors of Genesis, Neoplatonic metaphysics has no room for such crude analogies." Stanford University on Neoplatonism

Thus, in some ways, the Sethians indirectly were more true to the spirit of Timaeus, though they approached the Demiurge figure quite differently; this could have evolved over time in the Neoplatonic sense given Mazur's commentary that follows. Furthermore, Plotinus might very well have avoided tackling the concept more directly, as potentially he had roots in Sethianism earlier in his life, and he simply would not have wanted to tread on these waters at all.

Again, Alexander J. Mazur (Ph.D., The University of Chicago) argues that many Neoplatonic concepts and ideas are ultimately derived from Sethianism during the third century in Lower Egypt, and that Plotinus himself may have been a Sethian before nominally distancing himself from the movement. Plotinus was a student of Ammonius Saccas, along with Origen, and Trimorphic Protennoia is attributed to The Father, or in Platonic terms the Form of The Good.

Though the Johannine secessionists are more or less associated with spirituality, and the Neoplatonists with philosophy, the two represent the main focal point.

This logic is supported by Dr Alastair Logan on p. 34 of Gnostic Truth & Christian Heresy: "Indeed it could be suggested that the Gnostics were among the first Christians to be influenced by Platonism, and thus that the claims of scholars like Schenke, Turner, and Pearson to detect the Platonization of the later Sethian writings like Allogenes, Zostrianos, the Three Steles of Seth, and Marsanès is slightly misleading: the Gnostics are in dialogue with he evolving Platonic tradition, perhaps even anticipating Neoplatonism in some respects." Of course I equate Logan's Gnostics with the Sethians, who in turn are the same as the Johannine secessionists; however I have added the notion that Plotinus himself could have been originally a secessionist/Sethian, and that he could have written Trimorphic Protennoia. This treatise predates the Sethian Neoplatonic works mentioned.

Incidentally, Logan goes as far as to state the following: "The Gnostics [secessionists] were Platonists from the first! They developed their Platonism in dialogue with the evolving Platonic tradition, [thereby anticipating] Neoplatonism."

Logan very much differentiates the Gnostics [Sethians/Barbeloites] from the Valentinians -- and duly so. I wholeheartedly agree.

Furthermore, the following from Tuomas Rasimus' The Sethians and the Gnostics of Plotinus lends further support to Mazur's thesis:

Summary and Conclusion

"The author of the Sethian Apocryphon of John conceived of the true godhead as an intellectual triad of Father-Mother-and-Son. His description of the intellect’s autogeneration via mirror and childbirth metaphors anticipates the later Neoplatonic procession-and-return scheme and being-life-mind triad, but the Apocryphon’s speculations derive from the author’s Philonic reading of the Gospel of John and other biblical materials. Later Sethians then modified this material into the recognizable Neoplatonic scheme and triad, as we can see in Zostrianos and Allogenes. These texts circulated in Plotinus’ seminars and Plotinus, on his own testimony, had been open to the ideas of his Sethian friends. Though he later discarded his Two Intellect theory as an essentially Sethian misinterpretation of Timaeus 39e, Plotinus continued to use the being-life-mind triad, which he does seem to have inherited somewhere, as Hadot already suspected. Today, the Nag Hammadi evidence, which was not yet available to Hadot, suggests that Plotinus learned of the triad from his Sethian friends and appropriated it as a Platonic doctrine, compatible as it was with Sophist 248e-249a. It may even be due to Plotinus’ own influence on his friends that the raw material in the Apocryphon received its recognizably Neoplatonic form in Zostrianos and Allogenes. Porphyry, then, having arrived at the seminars, learned of the triad and its enneadic structuring (either directly from Allogenes or indirectly from Plotinus’ early works) and appropriated these ideas as compatible with his dear Chaldean Oracles. At any rate, the original innovators of these important metaphysical concepts appear to be Sethian Gnostics, whose role in the history of Neoplatonism has been greatly underestimated."

Finally, Mazur concludes his work with the following regarding the relative closeness of Neoplatonism & Sethianism:

“Although I cannot claim to have done more than a preliminary exploration of the topic in the present study, I believe we can conclude with more or less certainty that Plotinus’s mysticism must now be understood to be inextricably embedded in the context of contemporaneous Sethian thought and ritual praxis.

This comprised the intellectual, spiritual, and practical ground from which Plotinus’s mysticism originally germinated, and with which he remained in continuous dialogue throughout his life. The exact historical relation between Plotinus and his Sethian contemporaries may prove impossible to determine.

Nevertheless, the recognition of the true intellectual- and religio-historical context of Plotinian mysticism—and in particular, its close interrelation with both Sethian derivational schemata and visionary praxis—allows us to understand elements that had previously remained bewilderingly obscure, and that had often been relegated to the inscrutable domain of ‘mystical experience.’

Ironically, however, it is its close relation with Sethian thought that allows us to recuperate Plotinian mysticism for the domain of the history of philosophy.”

“With respect to the study of Sethianism itself, the present study suggests a reconsideration of the position of the Sethians in the course of intellectual history. As I have mentioned in the introduction, the most common assumption is that the Sethians were generally derivative. What we have seen here, however, suggests quite the reverse, that the Platonizing Sethians and other Sethians were extremely innovative interpreters of ancient philosophical tradition, and that they had a far greater degree of intellectual agency with respect to contemporaneous academic philosophy than is usually supposed.

We have seen that Plotinus’s mysticism itself relied upon several Sethian innovations that had emerged from speculation on the nature of the hypertranscendental deity. According to the broad scenario I have suggested, the Sethians are a necessary phase in the development of Plotinian mysticism. Three tendencies specific to the Sethians are at play: first, the emphasis on subjective visionary experience; second, the tendency to reify and hypostatize psychological states and metaphysical abstractions into discrete objective entities; and third, a tradition of sophisticated speculation on the mechanism of transcendental apprehension in the practical service of salvation. Without these Sethian developments, I submit, we would not have Plotinus’s mysticism.”

Mazur’s final word is as regards the actual intersection of Philosophy & Spirituality, often neglected by many in the academic community:

“The final point I would like to make concerns the categorical delimitations of ancient philosophy itself. I believe that this study has demonstrated that Plotinus’s mysticism lies in the liminal domain between discursive philosophy and ritual praxis. Indeed, we cannot assume the conceptual boundaries of the contemporary categories of either “philosophy” or “ritual” are valid for other historical periods. Precisely what these categories involve and their semantic contours vary over time and between cultures. Therefore, I would suggest that—by contrast with the conventional history of philosophy and the study of religion—we dissolve these boundaries, and not limit our definition of philosophical praxis to discursive reason alone, but expand it to encompass non-discursive ritual praxis as well, while also, simultaneously, broadening the category of ritual so as to include purely contemplative acts. This richer conception—which is, after all, merely a robust interpretation of Hadot’s exercises spirituels—will allow us to reconceptualize both Plotinus’s mysticism and Platonizing Sethian ritual as part of a common enterprise. In so doing, we will come to a better appreciation of the seemingly esoteric thought-world of those late antique sectaries who sought salvation through ritual techniques, while simultaneously enriching our conception of ancient philosophy itself.”

Thus, Alexander Mazur’s work suggests a close relationship between Neoplatonism and Sethianism. Mazur argues that Plotinus’s mysticism is deeply rooted in Sethian thought and ritual practices, challenging the notion that Sethians were merely derivative. This connection, along with the possibility of Plotinus’s early association with Johannine secessionists/Sethians, prompts a reevaluation of the boundaries between philosophy and spirituality in ancient thought, the fundamental argument of this thesis, The Neoplatonists & The Johannine secessionists: The Sethian Connection