1

ALBERT CAMUS

BETWEEN PLOTINUS AND

SAINT AUGUSTINE.
translated with a postscript
by David Rathbone

CONTENTS

page

Translators' Preface

BETWEEN PLOTINUS AND SAINT AUGUSTINE by Albert Camus

Foreword to French Edition by Roger Quilliot
Introduction.

4
5

1. The differences
2. The common aspirations
3. Position of the problem and the plan of this work.

9
10
12

Chapter One. Evangelical Christianity

I. Main themes of Evangelical Christianity
1. The tragic agenda
2. The hope in God
II. The Men of Evangelical Christianity
1. the works
2. the men
III. The Difficulties and the Causes of the Evolution of Evangelical Christianity
1. the concurrences
2. the resistances
3. the problems

15
16
19
22
27
29
31
32

Chapter Two. Gnosis

I. Main themes of the gnostic solution
II. The elements of the gnostic solution
III. Conclusion: Gnosticism in the evolution of Christianity

36
48
51

Chapter Three. Plotinus and Mystic Reason

I. The solution of Plotinus
1. Rational explanation according to procession
2. Conversion, or the path of ecstasy
II. Resistance
III. The meaning and influence of Neoplatonism.

53
56
65
69
72

Chapter Four. Word and Flesh

I. The second revelation
1. The psychological experience of St. Augustine and Neoplatonism.
2. Hellenism and Christianity according to Saint Augustine
3. Faith and Reason according to Saint Augustine
II. Christian thought at the dawn of the middle ages.

Conclusion.
Bibiliography.

76
79
86
88

89
92

Postscript: Plotinus, Nietzsche, Camus and the Uses of Animal Symbolism

Introduction
I : Plotinus Transcend the Beast
1. Hen, Nous and Psyche: the One, Intelligence and the Soul
2. Plotinus on animals

96
97
102

II : Nietzsche Interesting Animal

1. Symbolism and animals in the Birth of Tragedy
2. The animal and the mask in The Gay Science
3. Zarathustras symbolic animals

107
110
116

III : Camus The Importance of the Implicit

1. Transcendence, immanence and animal symbolism
2. Ineffable experience in the presence of animals

Conclusion
Bibliography

127
131

140
144

Translators' Preface
Two entries in Camus early notebooks shed light on the relation between the
project undertaken by the 23 year-old Camus in his thesis for the Diplme dtudes
Suprieures1 at the University of Algiers in 1936, and his subsequent career as a novelist.
In January of that year he jotted down this note :
People can think only in images. If you want to be a philosopher, write novels. 2
Then two years later in the September of 1938, he wrote:
Resume work on Plotinus. Theme: Plotinian reason. Reason not an
unambiguous concept. Interesting to see how it behaves in history at a time when
it must either adapt itself or perish. Cf. Diplme. It is the same reason, and it is
not the same, because there are two kinds of reason, the one ethical and the other
aesthetic. Pursue further: images in Plotinus as the syllogism of this aesthetic
form of reason. The image as a parable: the attempt to express the undefinable
nature of feeling by what is obvious and undefinable in concrete things.3
Obvious and undefinable: in this way, concrete things can become parables for feelings
when sensed through the logic of aesthetic reason. This theme runs implicitly through
Camus' fiction, and also remains in the background of his non-fiction works. Camus'
intention to bring this theme to the fore by resuming his work on Plotinus still remained
unfulfilled at the time of his premature death in a car accident in 1960 at the age of 47.
Would Camus ever have returned to this project? We can only conjecture; but the fact is
that the project itself remains incomplete, and this work is an attempt to reactivate it by
offering a new translation into English of Camus' thesis, together with an essay tracing
the theme of the image and the animal in Camus, in Plotinus, and also in Nietzsche. It is
in the field of tension generated between Plotinus's and Nietzsche's thoughts on the theme
of symbolism that we can situate Camus use of animal imagery, which is able for Camus
to to stand as an icon of languages failure, and so disseminate significance even or
rather, especially where language fails us.
1

The approximate equivalent of a Master's degree in the Anglophone world.

In Philip Thody (tr. & ed.) Albert Camus, Notebooks 1935-1942 (New York: Knopf, 1963), p.10.
3
ibid p.103
2

4
Maurice Blanchots description of Albert Camus as a writer for whom writing is
as much an instrument of meditation as a means of expression4 indicates an atheistic
spirituality can be found in Camus' fiction. In the introduction to the volume of essays
entitled Hommage Albert Camus which he edited in 1967, Blanchot wrote:
I think of that letter written to Tolstoy by the dying Turgenyev: I write to you to tell you how
happy I was to be your contemporary. It seems to me that, through the death which hit Camus
and which returned everything to us, already dying in a deep part of ourselves, we felt how happy
we were to be his contemporaries, and in what a treacherous manner this happiness found itself at
the same time both revealed and obscured, all the more so: as if the power to be contemporaries of
ourselves, in this time in which we belong with him, suddenly sees itself gravely altered.5

Today we are no longer contemporaries of Camus and Blanchot, yet there are ways in
which we have inherited the alterations in thinking, and the changes they have wrought in
the ways available to us to be our own contemporaries.

4
5

Maurice Blanchot Faux Pas (1943) tr. C.Mandell (Stanford: Stanford University Press 2001).
Blanchot (ed.) Hommage Albert Camus (Paris: Gallimard, 1967)

BETWEEN PLOTINUS AND SAINT AUGUSTINE

by Albert Camus
Thesis submitted for the Diplme dtudes Suprieures at the University of Algiers, 1936.
First published in French in Albert Camus: Essais Editions Gallimard, 1965, pp. 1220 - 1310.

Foreword to the French Edition by Roger Quilliot

Introduction.
1. The differences between Plotinus and Augustine.
2. Their common aspirations.
3. Location of the problem and the plan of this work.

Chapter One. Evangelical Christianity

I. Main themes of Evangelical Christianity
1. The tragic plan
2. The hope in God
II. The Men of Evangelical Christianity
1. The works
2. The men
III. Difficulties and Causes in the Evolution of Evangelical Christianity
1. The concurrences
2. The resistances
3. The problems

Chapter Two. Gnosis

I. Main themes of the gnostic solution
II. The elements of the gnostic solution
III. Conclusion: Gnosticism in the evolution of Christianity

Chapter Three. Plotinus and Mystic Reason

I. The solution of Plotinus:
1. Rational explanation according to procession
2. Conversion, or the path of ecstasy
II. Resistance
III. The meaning and influence of Neoplatonism.

Chapter Four. Word and Flesh

I. The second revelation
1. Neoplatonism and the psychological experience of St. Augustine
2. Hellenism and Christianity according to St. Augustine
3. Faith and Reason according to St. Augustine
II. Christian thought at the dawn of the middle ages.

Conclusion
Bibiliography.

Foreword to French Edition

by Roger Quilliot (1965)
The culmination of the licence in philosophy is the Diplme dEtudes Superieures,
a preliminary for candidature in the Agregation1. In 1936, Camus was still planning to
take this examination: according to Charles Poncet, he dreamed of an overseas post which
would allow him sufficient opportunity for his personal travels.
In 1935 Camus lived on the Hill of Hydra2 and got to know Marguerite Dobrenn
and Jeanne Sicard, fellow students who assisted him in many of his undertakings. At this
time he pursued the courses offered by Professor Poirier dedicated to contemporary
philosophy: Kierkeggaard, Husserl, and Heidegger. Under his direction, Camus set
himself the task of studying the relations of Hellenism and Christianity, and the role of
neo-Platonism in Christian thought. No doubt this choice had also been influenced by
Jean Grenier, who remained his mentor.
For the young Camus, religion was either an affair for old ladies (i.e. a distraction
in the face of death), or else a vague expression of the surge of youth towards something
greater than oneself (i.e. the obscure desire to outlive oneself, and to give meaning to
existence) in short, the senses of the tragic, and of the sacred. In a way, Camus was at
once both a stranger to the religious spirit, but also profoundly moved by metaphysical
anxiety. His Diplme thus enabled him to deepen his intellectual knowledge of Christian
thought.
In his introduction, Camus distinguishes the Greece of light, and the Greece of
shadow recognizing both the serenity but also the torment of the ancient Greeks. He
evokes, as he does also later in his Nuptials, the running of a young man on the shore
alongside the reality of the ancient world, as the setting of the tragedy of man without
God. In this sense, Greek thought prefigures yet also at the same time rejects the
Christianity which gave to things the character of the tragic, and the necessity which is
lacking in certain games of the Greek spirit.
The first part of Camus' Diplme considers Evangelical Christianity, exposing its
physical terror in the face of a solitary death, its incarnation scandalous to human nature,
1
2

Competitive examination for a university fellowship.

The house overlooking Algiers upon which The House Above The World of A Happy Death was based.

7
and its hope of redemption and salvation. Then, confronting Christianity with Greek
thought, he states: it is necessary to be Greek in order to believe that wisdom tells you
something nothing in Christian literature counts as moralistic until Tertullien. Then
following a careful study of the Gospels, Camus lingers next on the first attempt at a
conciliation between Hellenism and Christianity, namely that of Justin. Christian dogma
issues forth from Justin's combination of evangelical faith and Greek metaphysics.
The second part of the Diplme deals with Gnostisim, which he defines as an
attempt at a Greco-Christian intellectual collaboration, an attempt at reconciliation
between the spirit of knowledge and the search for salvation, or even an anachronistic
ancient Greek reflection upon Christian themes. Evoking Marcion, he writes these lines
into which the themes of the absurd and of revolt are woven: In this pessimistic view of
the world and this proud refusal of acceptance, the resonance of a fully modern sensibility
prevails. In fact it has its source in the problem of evil.
With part three, Camus arrives at Plotinus and Mystic Reason. He starts with
some interesting reflections on style, and the conceptual landscape of Plotinus: The
philosophy of Plotinus is the point of view of an artistit is then with his sensibility that
Plotinus seizes the intelligible. Is that not a method very close to that which Camus
instinctively uses in his own essays: thinking with his sensibility? Along with Plotinus,
Camus clearly partakes of a skepticism in the face of a pure faith which believes it is able
to do without virtue, and of a certain irritation with the arbitrariness inherent in the
whole doctrine of salvation.
The fourth part, Word and Flesh, introduces us to Saint Augustine, whom he
conceives as divided between sensuality, the taste for the rational, and the desire for faith,
which gives birth to the discovery of evil. Plotinus revived the thirst for knowledge and
the desire to understand, whereas Saint Augustine humiliates reason, unsuited to the full
comprehension of things and of beings. As Camus puts it: There is a limit to the
elasticity of intelligence.
The Diplme concludes with a double movement. On the one hand, a sympathy
for Christianity, considered as a refusal of indolence of heart and of Socratic serenity, as a
sort of spiritual heroism and permanent exaltation of engagement. But on the other, a

8
defiance before that which he calls "the providentially Christian," which to him seems to
emerge necessarily out of a philosophy of history. It emerges out of Greek innocence and
light; but it leads into the world of sin and generalized guilt.
Briefly summarized and without disentangling the innumerable references to
texts, commentators and historians (notably to M. de Labriolle), these are the major
themes of Camus' Diplme, in which all of this appears along with the personal
reflections of Camus. I have tried to shed light on this in order to make the movement
which culminates in The Myth of Sisyphus more clearly perceptible. Plotinus fortifies
himself with the uncompromising desire to understand. Saint Augustine, just like Pascal,
opposes insurmountable limits to knowledge. Plotinus advocates distrust in the
arbitrariness of all faith, and Saint Augustine in the erring ways of reason. Plotinus is
inclined to serenity, Augustine to intransigence and destitution. Camus feels closer to the
Greeks, for whom our kingdom is of this world, but has a Christian fascination with the
death which triumphs over the flesh. Drawn to Plotinus by his passionate effort to color
feelings in logical forms, by his returning to living reason its suppleness and emotion, and
by his creation of a mixture of water and light which reflects the beauty of the universe,
Camus is none the less seduced by the tragic anguish of Saint Augustine. And who could
fail to see that the description that he gives of Augustine could just as well suit Camus
himself: Greek in his need for coherence, Christian in the anxieties of his sensibility?
Camus thus finds himself at the crossroads of the two civilizations.
Or rather, he projects upon Hellenism as upon Christianity his own difficulties
and aspirations: to him, together they constitute a conceptual landscape which catalyzes
Camus's own spontaneous reactions. In writing his Diplme, perhaps Camus learnt as
much about himself as about Greek and Christian thought, which perhaps simply helped
him to delineate his own problems. For just as in The Right Way and the Wrong Way, the
absurd appears from the outset: the appetite for knowledge is satisfied neither by reason
nor by faith, and the appetite to live is shattered by death, which is not an appetite for an
eternity in the carnal world of beings and forms. We never possessed that which we have
lost, and innocence is always behind us. The mother and the son can only communicate
in silence. It is not even possible to be a son, for the intellectual variety no less than all

9
other kinds. Knowing himself to be at the same time both indifferent and sensitive, both
secretive and generous, Camus refuses to be judged, yet knows that he cannot avoid it:
At the boundaries and beyond: the game. I deny, I am slack and weak, yet I behave as if I
affirmed, as if I was strong and courageous. Question of will = to push the absurdity to the limit = I
am capable of How to seize the game: as the tragic in its effort, as the comic in its result
(preferably indifferent). 3

Camus suffers from this duality of man, this conflict of aspiration and reality, but he
understands that he must content himself with it by means of lucidity and pride:
Intellectual? Yes. And never to renounce. Intellectual = this one who unfolds. That pleases me.
I am happy to be two. If that can unite itself? Practical question. It is necessary to apply
oneself.4

This haughty and detached tone avoids deception. Of the tragedy of duplicity, Camus
willingly made a game, and even pushes it onto the stage; he decided to be happy even in
the heart of the absurd, happy in an ever new joy, always questioning and eroding anxiety.
Joy and torment, life and death: these are hereafter inseparable, as are Plotinian Greece
and Augustinian Africa, the two daughters of the shadows and of the light who sway
indefatigably across the Mediterranean.
The text reproduced here is based on a photocopy belonging to the Faculty of
Literature at Clermont-Ferrand. It is typewritten, and corrected in a few places in Camus
own handwriting, and the entire bibliography is handwritten. The photocopy did not have
a title, however, a typewritten manuscript in the possession of Mme. Camus bears the
following title: Hellenism and Christianity: Plotinus and Saint Augustine. It seems
nevertheless, consulting the work of M. Viggianni and my own notes from 1954, that the
exact title was: Christian Metaphysics and Neoplatonism, which is confirmed by the copy
held by the university library of the Sorbonne. I have settled on Between Plotinus and
Saint Augustine.

Carnets I, May 1936, p.39

ibid., p.41.

10

Introduction.
In the paintings of the Catacombs,5 the Good Shepherd6 readily adopts the face of
Hermes.7 But if the smile remains the same, the symbol is altered in the transfer.
Christian thought, thus altered and compelled to express itself as a coherent system, tried
to inject itself into the mold of Greek thought and to express itself in metaphysical
formulas that it found already complete. But in doing so, Christianity transfigured these
formulas. The aim of the present work is to understand the originality of Christianity, and
the necessity for clarification of both that which constitutes Christianity's profound
meaning, as well as from a historical point of view the need to retrace its sources. All
research, in order to be coherent, needs to order itself following one or two basic steps.
This introduction enables us to define these steps, to the extent that, considering the
complexity of the historical subject matter which here occupies us, will nevertheless
enable us to exhibit some constants.
It is often asked what makes Christianity original in comparison to Hellenism.
Besides the evident differences, there are many themes in common. In fact, in all cases in
which a civilization is born, the main concern of humanity is a change of agenda
[changement de plans], not a substitution of systems. It is not in comparing Christian
dogma to Greek philosophy that we can get an idea of that which separates them, but
rather in noticing that the emotional agenda [le plan sentimental] in which the
evangelical communities are situated is foreign to the classical tone of Greek sensibility.
It is in the affective agenda [le plan affectif] where the problems are posed, and not in the
system which attempts to respond to them. And it is there that we must seek for that
which constitutes the novelty of Christianity. In its beginnings, Christianity is not a
philosophy, and even opposes philosophy; it is an ensemble of aspirations, a faith which
moves on a specific plan, and which seeks its solutions within this agenda.
But before speaking of that which is irreducible in the two civilizations, it is
appropriate first to take into account the nuances of the complexity of the problem. It is
5

Subterranean cemeteries composed of galleries and passages with side recesses for tombs and funerary
urns under the Basilica of Saint Sebastian in Rome, dating from the third century A.D.
6
i.e. Jesus Christ
7
Greek god of messages, roads, trickery and boundaries. Hermes was renamed Mercury by the Romans,
after a substance which is both heavy and motile, partaking of both solid and liquid properties.

11
always arbitrary to talk of a Greek Spirit in opposition to a Christian Spirit.
Aeschylus stands next to Sophocles; the primitive masks,8 the Panathenaia,9 and the
vases of the fifth century are juxtaposed with the metopes10 of the Parthenon. And finally
the mysteries11 exist at the same time as Socrates: all of which supports the idea of the
development of a Greece of light alongside a Greece of shadows, less classical, but no
less real. On the other hand, it is certain that we can disengage from this civilization a
certain number of favorite topics, and, with the help of Socratism, to trace in the interior
of Greek thought a specific number of privileged patterns, the arrangement of which
inspires precisely that which we calls Hellenism. Something in Greek thought prefigures
Christianity, while at the same time something else in it rejects it in advance.
1. The Differences
We can contrast the irreconcilable attitudes in the face of the world of the Greeks
and the Christians in this way. As it formulates itself around the first centuries of our era,
Hellenism implies that man can be self-sufficient, and that he carries in himself
explanations of fate and of the cosmos. His temples are built to his measure. In a certain
sense, the Greeks accepted a sportive and aesthetic justification of existence. The curve
of their hills, or the young man on the running track: these delivered the whole secret of
the world to them. Their gospel said: our kingdom is of this world. This is the
Everything harmonises with me, which is harmonious to thee, O Cosmos of Marcus
Aurelius12.
This purely rational conception of life that the world can be entirely understood
8

All Greek actors wore masks on stage, and the drama itself evolved out of the Dionysika, a religious ritual
in worship of the god Dionysus in which masked maenads and satrys danced the ritual orgia. See W.F.Otto
Dionysus: Myth and Cult (Spring Publications, 1965) and J. Wise Dionysus Writes: the Invention of
Theatre in Ancient Greece (Cornell University Press, 1998).
9
Ancient Greek religious ritual in which fire is carried in a torch race from the grove of Akademos through
the market place to the alter of the goddess Athena on the Acropolis.
10
Square space for ornamentation at the top of Doric column. Camus in this passage is arguing for the
thesis proposed by Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy that modern classicists have ignored Ancient Greece's
dark (or Dionysian) side in favor of a biased overestimation of the importance of its light (or Apollonian)
aspect.
11
see M.W.Meyer ed. The Ancient Mysteries: a Sourcebook (Harper & Row, 1987)
12
7 Meditations IV, 23: Everything harmonizes with me, which is harmonious to thee, O Universe. Nothing
for me is too early nor too late, which is in due time for thee. Everything is fruit to me which they seasons
bring, O Nature: from thee are all things, in thee are all things, to thee all things return.

12
leads to moral intellectualism: virtue is something which you learn. Without always
admitting it, all of Greek philosophy makes a wise man an equal of God. And God being
only a higher science, the supernatural does not exist: the whole universe centers itself
around man and his efforts. If then moral culpability is ignorance13 or an error, how do
you include the notions of redemption and sin in this attitude?
Also in the physical order, the Greeks' belief in a cyclic world, eternal and
necessary, could not accommodate a creation ex nihilo, nor an end of the world.14 In a
general way, attached to the reality of the pure idea, the Greeks could not understand the
dogma of a bodily resurrection. Celsus, Porphery, and Julian for example could not scoff
enough in this respect. Whether this would be a physical, a moral or a metaphysical
resurrection hardly mattered: the whole difference was in the way of posing the problems.
But at the same time some points in common remained. Neoplatonism, which is the final
effort of Greek thought, could not understand itself, nor Christianity, without considering
the background of common aspirations to which all thought of this era was obliged to
respond.
2. The Common Aspirations
Few epochs have been so tormented. In an extraordinary incoherence of races and
peoples, the old Greco-Roman themes joined with the new wisdom which came from the
orient. Asia Minor, Syria, Egypt, and Persia sent thoughts and thinkers to the occidental
world.15 The jurists of the era were Ulpien, de Tyr, Papinien and dHerese. Ptolemy and
Plotinus were Egyptians; Porphery and Hamblique, Syrians; Diasconide and Gellius,
Asians. Even Lucien, that spirit consecrated attic, is from Commagne on the banks of
the Euphrates. It is in this way that in the same epoch the heavens were able to be
populated with the gnostic Eons, with the Judaic Jahweh, with the Father of the
Christians, with the One of Plotinus and even with the old Roman gods, still worshiped in
13

Cf. Epictetus: Dialogues I, 7: If you cannot correct the wicked then dont complain about them because
all wickedness is corrigible; rather, complain about yourself, you who do not find in yourself sufficient
eloquence and perseverance to bring in the good.
14
Cf. Aristotle: Probl. XVII, 3 : If, then, there is a circle, and a circle has neither beginning nor end, men
would not be before because they are nearer the beginning, nor should we be before them, nor they
before us. (Loeb I 367).Cited by Rougier. Celse, chap. II, p. 76; cf. Plotinus: II, IX, 7.
15
Cf. F. Cumont: les Religions orientals dans le paganisme romain.

13
the countryside (paganus) of Italy.
Certainly we could find political and social causes here: such as
cosmopolitanism,16 or the actual economic crisis of the epoch. But also a certain number
of emotional claims [revendications passionnes] are conceived which will strive for
satisfaction by any means - the Orient was not solely responsible for that awakening. If it
is true that Greece had made the gods ethereal, and if it is also true that the problem of
the destiny of the soul had disappeared beneath Epicurean and Stoic ideas, then it is also
no less the case that through an actual tradition, the Greco-Roman world returned. But
something new also made itself felt.
In this world, where the desire for God grew stronger, the problem of the good
loses ground. The humility of spirits in pursuit of inspiration is substituted for the pride
in life which animated the ancient world. The aesthetic agenda [le plan esthtique] of
contemplation is obscured by the tragic agenda [le plan tragique] in which such
aspirations content themselves with the imitation17 of a God. One acts the painful drama
of Isis in search of Osiris,18 one dies with Dionysus,19 one is reborn with him. Bitterness
pursues Attis through the worst mutilations.20 At Eleusis,21 Zeus unites with Demeter in
the person of the great priest and hierophant.
At the same time, the idea is disseminated that the world does not orient itself
around the sunt eadum omnia semper22 of Lucretius, but that it serves rather as the setting
of the tragedy of man without God. The problems themselves become incarnate, and the
philosophy of history is born. From that moment one will be less repelled by the
admission of that alteration to the world which constitutes the redemption. It is not a
matter of knowing and understanding, but of loving. And Christianity will only embody
that idea, hardly Greek, that the problem for man is not to perfect his nature, but to escape
16

Alexander in his campaigns in the Orient had created more than forty Greek villages.
Cf. Lhomme nouveau in the rites of purification at Eleusis; La deesse Brimo a enfant Brimos.
Philosoph. : V. 8. Cf. Plutarch, de Iside, 27 apud Loisy: Mysteres paiens et mystere chretien, ch IV, p.139.
After having compressed and suffocated the rage of Typhon, [Isis] did not want the battles that he had
undergone to fall into oblivion and silence. She then instituted some very simple initiations which were
represented by images, allegories and by scenes representing the suffering of her struggle.
18
Cf. Loisy, op. cit., ch. 1.
19
Cf. Cumont, op. cit. appendix: les Mysteres de Bacchus.
20
Cumont, chap. III.
21
Loisy, chap. 11.
22
All are always
17

14
from it. Love of god, humility, imitation, aspirations towards a resurrection, all these
themes intertwine in the mysteries and oriental religions of Mediterranean paganism.
Above all, from the 2nd century B.C. (the cult of Cybele is introduced to Rome in 205),
the major religions prepared the road for Christianity by their influence and by their
extent. In the era that occupies us, these new problems are set down in all their acuity.
c. Position of the problem and the plan of this work.
To consider Christianity as a new form of thought suddenly following Greek
civilization would be to evade the problems. Greece continues into Christianity, which in
turn finds itself prefigured in Hellenic thought. It is all too easy to see in the dogmatic
Christian an addition to Greece: nothing in the evangelical doctrine legitimates that. But
on the other hand, one cannot deny the Christian contribution to the thought of the time,
and it seems difficult to exclude entirely the notion of a Christian philosophy.23 One thing
is common: an anxiety which gives birth to problems. It is the same evolution which
directs practical concerns, from Epictetus to the speculations of Plotinus, and from the
inner Christianity of Paul to the dogma of the Greek Fathers. Can one untangle that
which constitutes the originality of Christianity from similar confusions? That is the
whole problem.
From a historical point of view, Christian doctrine is a religious movement, born
in Palestine, and inscribed in Judaic thought. At a time which is difficult to determine
precisely, but which is certainly contemporary with the moment at which Paul authorizes
in principle the admission of the gentiles, and exempts them from circumcision, that is to
say towards the middle of the first century, Christianity parts with Judaism. At the end of
the first century, John proclaims the identity of the Lord and of the Spirit. Between A.D.
117 and 130 the epistle of Barnabus is already resolutely anti-Jewish. This is an
important point. Christian thought then parts with its origins and separates entirely from
the Greco-Roman world. The latter, prepared by its anxieties and the religions of the
mystics, eventually ends up accepting it.

23

Bulletin de la Societe franaise de Philosophie, mars 1931. Revue de mtaphysique et de morale

(Brehier) april 1931; and ibid Juillet 1932 (Souriau).

15
It is no longer interesting after that point to separate the two doctrines absolutely,
but rather to search for how they unite their efforts, and to see what in each of them stays
intact in that collaboration. Such an Ariadne's thread leads a way through the confusions
of ideas and systems. Let us say immediately that that which constitutes the irreducible
originality of Christianity is the theme of the incarnation. The problems are made flesh,
and immediately take the character of tragedy and of necessity, which is lacking so often
in the games of the Greek spirit. Even after the Jews are rejected, and the Mediterranean
world accepts Christianity, Greeces deeply innovative character survives. However
Christian thought, which borrows inevitably from the already existing philosophy of the
ready-made formulas, also transfigures them. The role of Greece was to universalize
Christianity in orienting it toward metaphysics. The mystics had prepared it for this role,
as had a whole tradition which has its source in Aeschylus and the Doric Apollo. In this
way a movement is explained in which the Christian miracle was able to assimilate to the
Greek miracle, and to lay the foundation of a civilization sufficiently durable that we
could still be fully absorbed with it today.
Our task and our plan is now outlined. To trace in Neoplatonism the effort of
Greek philosophy to give a specifically Hellenic solution to the problems of the era; to
outline the Christian effort to adapt its dogma to its primitive religious life, up to the
moment when, recognizing in Neoplatonism the metaphysical framework already molded
by religious thought, Christianity opens out in that second revelation which is
Augustinian thought. There are three moments in this Christian evolution. Evangelical
Christianity from which it takes its source; the Augustinian dogma in which it ends in the
conciliation of the word and the flesh; and the spaces where it lets itself be carried along
to try to identify knowledge and salvation, that is to say the heresies of which Gnosticism
gives a complete model. Gospel, Gnosis, Neoplatonism, Augustinianism: we will study
these four stages of a common Greco-Christian evolution in the historical order, and in
the relation that they sustain with the movement of thought in which they appear.
Evangelical Christianity spurns all speculation but introduces from the outset the
theme of the incarnation. Gnosis pursues a particular solution where redemption and
knowledge merge. Neoplatonism endeavors to achieve its goals by trying to reconcile

16
rationalism and mysticism and, aided by its formulas, allow dogmatic Christians to model
themselves on Saint Augustine on the metaphysics of the incarnation. At the same time,
Neoplatonism sets in place a witness-doctrine. The movement which animates it is the
same as that which moves Christian thought, but to it, the notion of the incarnation
remains foreign. As early as the sixth century, this movement consummates itself:
Neoplatonism dies with the whole philosophy and culture of Greece: the sixth and the
seventh centuries are times of great silence.24

24

Emile Brehier: Histoire de la philosophie I, II, chap. VII, p. 484.

17

Chapter One. Evangelical Christianity

It is difficult to speak of evangelical Christianity as a whole. But it is at least
possible to detect a certain state of spirit which serves as the source of later evolution.
The theme entitled to preference, which is at the center of Christian thought at that time,
and towards which everything converges as the natural answer to the aspirations of the
era, is the incarnation. The incarnation: the putting into contact of the divine and the
bodily in the person of Jesus Christ, the extraordinary adventure of a God taking upon
himself the sin and the misery of man, the humility and the humiliation presented as so
many symbols of redemption. But this notion crowns a group of aspirations that it is our
task to define.
There are two states of the soul in evangelical Christianity: pessimism and hope.
Evolving according to a certain tragic agenda [un certain plan tragique], humanity at that
time relies only upon God, and, placing in his hands all hope of a better destiny, aspires
only to him, sees only Him in the Universe, and abandons all interests except for faith,
incarnating in God the very symbol of that anxiety torn from ascension. One must choose
between the world and God. These are the two aspects of Christianity that we are going
to examine successively in the first part. The study of the milieu and of the literature of
the era will show us then the different themes among the men of evangelical Christianity.
The most certain method is to return to the New Testament texts themselves. But
a supplementary method consists in appealing each time it is possible to a pagan
polemicist.25 Their reproaches, effectively give us an exact idea of what in Christianity
was shocking to a Greek. And in closing, we consider the novelty of the contribution of
Christianity to Greek thought.

25

P. de Labriolle: la Reaction paienne, Lavis 1934.

18

I. Main themes of evangelical Christianity

1. The tragic agenda.
Ignorance of and contempt for all systematic speculation characterizes the state of
spirit of the first Christians. Facts blind and press them. And above all, the fact of death.
A. Death
At the end of the fourth century, Julius Quintus-Hilarianus, Bishop Proconsular of
Africa, calculates in his De mundi induratione that there remains 101 years to live in the
world.1 This idea of an impending end, linked directly moreover to the passion of Christ,
obsessed the whole first Christian generation.2 This is a unique example of a collective
experience of death.3 In the world of our experience, to realize the idea of our death gives
us a new sense of our life. What is discovered here effectively is the triumph of the carnal,
the physical terror in the face of that repulsive problem. And how amazing that Christians
had so sharp a sense of the humiliation and the distress of the flesh, and that these notions
are able to play a major role in the elaboration of Christian metaphysics.
My flesh is clothed with worms and clods of dust; my skin is broken, and become loathsome.
My days are swifter than a weavers shuttle, and are spent without hope.4

We can see that the Old Testament already set the tone with Job5 and Ecclesiastes.6 But
the Gospels put this sense of death at the center of their devotion.
We cannot, in effect, reflect sufficiently upon the fact that Christianity is centered
around the person of Christ and his death. One can make of Jesus an abstraction or a
symbol. But the true Christians are those who realize this triumph of the martyred flesh.
Jesus being man, the whole stress had been put on his death: physically, one cannot go

P. de Labriolle: Histoire de la litterature latine chrietienne.

On the imminence of that passion cf. Mark: VIII, 39-XIII, 30; Matthew: X. 23; XII, 27-28, XXIV, 34;
Luke: IX, 26-27, XXI, 32. Cf. also the Vigilate; Mt. XXIV, 42-44; XXV, 13; Luke: XII, 37-40.
3
P. de Labriolle, op. cit., p.49: Pervaded by the sentiment that the world was going to die soon [one knows
that this belief was common to the first Christian generations, but they appear to have been sincere with an
intensity of entirely specific anguish] they wanted
4
Job VII, 5-6.
5
Job II, 9; III 3; X, 8; X, 21-22; XII, 23; XVII, 10-16; XXI, 23-26; XXX, 23.
6
Passim, but above all: II, 17; III, 19-21; XII, 1-8.
2

19
through something more horrible.7 It is upon certain Catalan sculptures, in the torn up
hands and cracked joints, that one should reflect in order to imagine the terrifying image
of torture that Christianity established in this symbol. But it is also enough to consult the
famous texts of the Gospel.
Another proof, if it is necessary, of the importance of this theme in evangelical
Christianity, is the indignation of the pagans:
Let her remain as she pleases in her foolish deception, and sing false laments to her dead God, who
was condemned by right-minded judges, and perished ignominiously by a violent death.8

And again:
He allowed himself to be struck, to be spat on in the face, to be crowned with thornseven if he
had to suffer by order of God, he would have had to accept the punishment, but not to endure his
passion without some bold discourse; some wise and vigorous words, addressed to Pilate, his
judge, instead of allowing himself to be insulted like the any old rabble of the street corner.9

But that is enough to show the importance of the sense of death and the carnal message in
the thought which occupies us.
B. Render Unto Caesar
We are ridiculous, says Pascal, resting in a society of our fellow creatures:
miserable like us, powerless like us, they will not help us: we will die alone. The
experience of death brings about instead a certain position that is very tricky to define.
Many are the texts of the Gospel where Jesus recommends indifference or even hatred
towards ones close relatives as a means of achieving the kingdom of God.10 Is this the
foundation of an immoralism? No, of a higher moral: If any man come to me, and hate
not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his
own life also, he cannot be my disciple.11 One understands by these texts how much the
render unto Caesar marks a contemptuous concession rather than a declaration of
conformism. What is from Caesar is the coin where his effigy is printed. What is from
7

Cf. Renan: Vie de Jesus, ch. XXV, p. 438: The particular atrocity of the torture of the cross was that one
could have lived three or four days in that horrible state. The hemorrhage of the hands stopped and was not
mortal. The true cause of death was unnatural position of the body, which carried a ghastly trouble of the
circulation, of terrible ills of the head and the heart, finally the rigidity of the limbs.
8
Porphyry, Philosophy from the Oracles, cited in Saint Augustine, City of God, XIX, 23, Modern Library
Edition page 701.
9
Porphyry, cited in P. de Labriolle, la Reaction painne, p.211.
10
Mt., VIII, 22; Mt., X, 21-22; Mt., 35-37; Mt., XII, 46-50; Luke, III, 34; XIV, 26-33.
11
Luke, XIV, 26-28.

20
God is the heart of man alone, having broken all attachment with the world. This is the
mark of pessimism and not of acceptance. But it is only natural that these rather vague
themes and attitudes of the spirit materialize and are summed up in the properly religious
notion of sin.
C. Sin
In sin man becomes aware of his misery and of his pride. No one is good 12 for all
have sinned13: the sin is universal. But amongst all of the significant texts14 of the New
Testament, few are as rich in sense and observation as this passage in the Epistle to the
Romans:
...For that which I do, I allow not: for, what I would do, that I do not; but what I hate, that I do. If
then I do that which I would not, I consent unto the law that it is good. Now then it is no more I
that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me. For I know that in me (that is, in my flesh) dwelleth no good
thing: for to will is present with me; but how to perform that which is good, I find not. For the
good that I would, I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do. Now if I do what I would not,
it is no more I that do it, but the sin that dwelleth in me. I find then a law, that when I would do
good, evil is present with me. For I delight in the law of God after the inward man: But I see
another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to
the law of sin which is in my members.15

Here the Non posse non peccare of Saint Augustine is outlined. At the same time the
pessimistic soul of the Christians concerning the world is explicit. It is to this view and
to these aspirations that the constructive part of Evangelical Christianity responds. But it
is good to note beforehand that state of the spirit.
Imagine a number of men in chains, all under sentence of death, some of whom are each day
butchered in the sight of the others; those remaining see their own condition in that of their fellows,
and looking at each other with grief and despair await their turn. This is an image of the human
condition16.

But just as that Pascalian thought placed at the beginning of the Apology serves to bring
out the adherence to God, likewise, from those condemned to death, the hope which had
begun to transport them is gone.

12

Mark, X, 18.
Romans, III, 23.
14
I John, I, 8; I, Corinth., X, 13; Matthew, XII, 21-23; XIX, 25-26.
15
VII, 15-24.
16
Penses, no. 199 (Penguin page 165).
13

21
2. Hope in God
A. Disdain for Speculation.
Deum et animam scire Cupido, said Saint Augustine - nihil ne plus - nihil
omnio. 17 It is indeed this way in the Gospel, where only the Kingdom of God counts,
and for the conquest of which renunciation is so necessary here below. The idea of the
Kingdom of God is not absolutely novel in the New Testament. The Jews already knew
the word and the thing [le mot et la chose].18 But in the Gospels this kingdom has
nothing to do with the terrestrial.19 It is spiritual. It is the contemplation of God himself.
Besides this conquest, no speculation is desirable. Let no man beguile you of your
reward in a voluntary humility and worshipping of angels, intruding into those things
which he hath not seen, vainly puffed up by his fleshly mind.20 It is the humility and the
simplicity of small children that one must endeavor to reach.21 It is to the children that
the Kingdom of God is promised, but also to the wise people who have known to despoil
their knowledge in order to understand the truth of the heart. In this way, they have added
virtue, even simplicity, to the precious merit of the care of the self. In Octavius, Minucius
Felix made Caecilius, defender of paganism talk in these terms:
One must not become annoyed that the men who have not studied, strangers to letters, inept even in
the lowly arts, spout opinions that they take for certain about everything that is most elevated and
most majestic in nature, while philosophy has discussed it for centuries. 22

This disdain for all pure speculation explains itself among the people who took the
outpouring in God for the aim of all human effort. But a certain number of consequences
still follow.
B. Humility
Incorporating into the initial agenda the effort of man towards God, one
subordinates this whole movement. And the world organizes itself following that
orientation. History has the meaning that God wanted to give it. The philosophy of
17

God an animals alike know Cupid. Nothing is greater, nothing at all See Song of Solomon chs. 1, 2, 7.
Wisdom of Solomon, X, 10: When the righteous fled from his brothers wrath, she guided him in right
paths, shewed him the kingdom of God, and gave him knowledge of holy things.
19
Luke, XII-14; Mt., XVIII-11; Mt., XX-28.
20
Colossians, II, 18.
21
Mt.: XVIII, 3, 4; XIX, 16; Mk., X, 14, 15.
22
VI, 4.
18

22
history, a foreign notion to a Greek spirit, is a Judaic invention. The metaphysical
problems incarnate in time and in the world are only the carnal symbol of this effort of
man towards God. Thus major importance is still accorded to faith.1 It is enough that a
paralytic or a blind person believe - and they are made better. It is that the essence of that
faith is to consent and to renounce. Faith is always more important than works.2
The reward in the other world retains its unwarranted nature. It is of so high a
value that it surpasses the stringency of a price. And this again concerns an apology for
humility. One must prefer the repentant sinner to the virtuous one full of himself and of
his good works. The worker of the eleventh hour will be paid but a penny as always.
And one will have a party for the prodigal son in the house of his father. For repentant
sinners, eternal life. This very important phrase of eternal life is taken in its broad sense
of immortality each time it is cited.3
C. Incarnation
Here then the notion which interests us is introduced. If it is true that man is
nothing, and that his destiny is entirely in the hands of God, and that works are not
sufficient to assure man of his recompense, if the assertion that no one is good1 is wellfounded, who then will attain this kingdom of God? The distance is so great from man to
God that nobody could hope to span it. Man cannot attain it, and only despair is open to
him. But then the incarnation brings his salvation. Man cannot get back to God, but God
descends to him. And it is the universal hope in Christ which is then born. Man was
right to leave it up to God to decide, since God makes his grace towards man most
infinite.
It is in Paul that this doctrine express itself for the first time in a coherent fashion2.
For him, the will of God has only one aim: to save men. The creation and the redemption
are only two manifestations of this will, the first and the second of his revelations3. The

Matt. XIV, 33; XII, 58; XV, 28.

Matt. : X, 16-18; XX, 1-16; XXV, 14-23.
3
Mt. XX, 46; XXV, 34-36; Mt., X, 17; Luke, X, 24.
1
Mark X: 18
2
Col., I, 15; Corinth., XV, 45; Rom., I, 4.
3
Rom., I, 20; VIII, 28; Eph., I, 45; III, 11; Tim I, 9.
2

23
sin of Adam corrupted man and drove him to death.4 There are no personal means left for
him. The moral law of the Old Testament effectively contents itself with giving to man
the image of the need for attainment. But it did not give them the strength. It thereby
leaves him doubly culpable.5 The only way to save us was to come to us and release us
from our sins by a miracle of grace. It is Jesus, of our human race, of our blood,6 who
represents us and substitutes himself for us. Dying with him and in him, man paid for his
sin, and the incarnation is at the same time the redemption.7 But for all that, the total
power of God is not damaged, because the death and the incarnation of his son are his
grace, and not a reward owing to human merit.
This solution of events resolved all the difficulties of the doctrine, establishing
such a great gap between God and man. Plato who wanted to unite the Good to man was
forced to construct a whole ladder of ideas between these two terms, thereby creating a
discipline. In Plato this is a point of reasoning. But for Christianity this is a mere fact:
Jesus has come. Christianity opposes itself like a state of things to Greek wisdom, which
is only a science.
To understand finally the whole originality of a notion become too familiar to our
minds, let us ask the opinions of the pagans of the time. Even a mind as cultivated as
Celsus does not understand. His indignation is real. Something escapes him which was
too new for him:
That if, said he, among the Christians and the Jews, it is from them that declares that a God or a
Son of God, the ones, need to descend, the others, being descended, is there from their most honest
claimWhat meaning for a God could a voyage like that one have? Was it to learn that which
happens among men? But does he know everything? Is he then incapable, given his divine power,
to improve them without sending someone corporally to this effectAnd if, as the Christians
affirm, he is come to help men to return to the right path, why is he only advised of these duties
after leaving them in error for so many centuries.8

Likewise, the incarnation seems unacceptable to Porphyry:

Even supposing that some of the Greeks were obtuse enough to think that the Gods inhabited
statues, this was still a purer conception than admitting that the Divine descended into the breast of
the Virgin Mary, that he became an embryo, that after his birth, he had been wrapped in blankets,
entirely dirtied with blood, bile and worse still.9
4

Rom., V, 12-17; VI, 23.

Rom., III, 20; Rom., V, 13; Rom., VII, 7-8.
6
Rom., I, 3; IV, 4.
7
R.om., III, 25; VI, 6; Cor., VI, 20; Gal., III, 13.
8
Celse: Discours vrai. Trad. Rougier: IV, 41.
9
Porphyry: Contre the Chretiens. Fragment 77 in P. de Labriolle: la Reaction paienne, p. 274.
5

24
And Porphyry is amazed that Christ had to be able to suffer on his cross, when he became
by nature impassive.10 Nothing then is as specifically Christian as the notion of the
incarnation.
The obscure themes that we have tried to delimit amount to this. It is in this
evidence of an immediately comprehensible event that the movement of thought is
fulfilled. We must now look at life among those so animated.

II. The Men of Evangelical Christianity

1. The Works.
The disgust for speculation; the practical and religious anxieties; the primacy of
faith; the pessimism towards man; and the immense hope born of the incarnation: all so
many themes which are resurrected in the men and the works of the first centuries of our
era. And, in effect, one has to be Greek to believe that wisdom is learnt. From the outset
Christian literature does not recognize any moralists until Clement and Tertullian.11 Saint
Clement, Saint Ignatius, Saint Polycarpe, and the author, known as Barnabus, of the
doctrine of twelve apostles and that of the Apocryphal Epistles, are only interested in the
religious side of the problems. The literature known as apostolic12 is exclusively practical
and popular. It is necessary for us to examine its details in order to obtain a more precise
idea of its spirit and characteristics. This literature developed from 50 to 90 A.D. In other
words, it could present itself as reflecting the instruction of the apostles themselves. This
literature consists of:
a). from Rome, the first epistle of Saint Clement (93-97 A.D.);
b). from Antioch and along the coast of Asia Minor, the seven epistles of Saint Ignatius
(107-117 A.D.) ;
c). from Egypt, the Apocryphal epistle or Didache of Barnabus
(between 130 and 131 A.D.);
d). probably from Palestine, the doctrine of the twelve apostles, (131-160 A.D. );
e). from Rome the Pastor of Hermas (140-155 A.D.); and
from Rome or Corinth, two epistles of Saint Clement (150 A.D.);
f). from Hierapolis in Phrygia fragments of Papias, (150 A.D.); and
from Smyrna, the epistle of Saint Polycarpe and his Martyrdom (155-156 A.D.).
Let us look at each of them and try to retrieve the pure state of the passionate postulates
[postulates passionns] that we have already indicated.
10

Fragment 84-ibid
Tixeront: Histoire des dogmes, chap. III; Le temoignage des Peres apostoliques.
12
Ibid Chap. III, p.115: The name Apostolic Fathers is given to the ecclesiastical writers who lived until
the end of the first or in the first part of the second century, and who were supposed to have received
immediately the instruction that they transmit to us from the apostles or their disciples .
11

25
a) Clement
The first epistle of Saint Clement presents itself as if its only aim was to restore peace in
the Church of Corinth. Its character is thus purely practical. It insists on the filiation
which exists between the head of the Church and the Apostles, then next between this
latter and Jesus Christ whose Incarnation saved us.13 Wanting the Corinthians to submit
to their spiritual leaders, Clement shows them that the cause of discord resides in envy,
and he adopts the pretext of talking of humility and of the virtue of obedience which
accompany the praise of charity.14 It is by humility that we obtain the remission for our
sins. A second, specifically evangelical point of view can be introduced here: those who
are saved are not saved by their works but by their faith in God.15 A bit further on, in any
case, Clement speaks of the necessity of works and of the inefficacy of faith without
them.16
b) Ignatius
The letters of Saint Ignatius17 are nothing but occasional pieces, alien to all
methodological speculation. But Saint Ignatius is the apostolic Fathers who had the
keenest feeling for Christ made flesh. He fought with fury the tendency within
Christianity to docility. Jesus is Son of God following the will and the power of God,
truly begotten of a Virgin,18 of the race of David according to the flesh; he is son of man
and son of God."19 He affirms the real maternity of Mary20 Truly born of a virgin
He has really been pierced full of nails for us under Pontius Pilot and Herod the
Tetrarch.21 He really suffered, just as he really rose himself, and not, in the way that
certain unbelievers said who pretend that he suffered only in appearance.22 Ignatius
insisted more still, if he could, upon the humanity that adorned Christ. He affirmed that it
is in the flesh that Christ arose:
I know that after his resurrection, Jesus had been in the flesh and I believe that he is still so. And
13

XXXI, 6, append. Tixeront: III, 2.

XLIV, ibid.
15
XXXII, 3, 4, ibid
16
XXXIII, 1, ibid
17
For all that follows, cf. Tixeront, III, 5.
18
To the inhabitants of Smyrna, I, 1.
19
Eph., XX, 2.
20
Eph., VII, 2.
21
Smyrna, I, 1, 2.
22
Smyrna, II
14

26
when he came to those who were with Peter, he said to them: Come over, feel me, and see that I
am not a spirit without a body. And straight away they touched him and they believed, being
joined with his flesh and his spiritAnd after the resurrection, he ate and he walked with them, as
being corporal although being spiritually united with his Father23.

Upon this communion of Christ in us, Ignatius established the unity of the Church
and the rules of religious life. For him, nothing counts but faith and love: All is faith and
charity: there is nothing more precious.24 And pushing to the extreme one of the themes
of primitive Christianity already indicated, he affirms that he who has faith does not sin:
The carnal cannot do spiritual works, nor the spiritual carnal works, no more than faith
can do works of infidelity, nor infidelity those of faith. The things that you do according
to the flesh are spiritual, because you do all in Jesus Christ.25 That is the character of
this exalted Christianity, extreme in its faith and in the consequences that it presupposes,
that we have already defined. We should not be surprised nevertheless to find in Saint
Ignatius tones of the most passionate mysticism: My love is crucified, and there is no
fire in me for the cause; but there is a live and speaking water which says within me: Go
to the Father.26
c) Barnabus
The epistle attributed to Saint Barnabus27 is above all a polemic work directed
against Judaism. It contains hardly any doctrinal elements and in any case only presents a
mediocre interest. The author insists solely on the redemption, and with much realism
and it is this which is to be noted. This flows from Jesus having delivered his flesh to
destruction, and our sprinkling of his blood.28 And it is the Baptism that enables us to
participate in that Redemption: We go down into the water, full of sins and stains, and
we come out of it bearing fruits, possessing in heart and in spirit, the hope in Jesus."29
d) The doctrine of the twelve apostles
There exist two paths, one of life, the other of death, but there is a great
difference between the two.30 The doctrine of the twelve apostles is connected only to the
23

Smyrna, III.
Smyrna, VI, 1.
25
Eph., VIII, 2.
26
Rom., VII, 2.
27
Tixeront, op. cit., III, 8.
28
V, I; VII, 3, 5.
29
XI, XI, 1-8.
30
I, I. Ap. Tixeront, III, 7.
24

27
teaching of what constitutes the path of life, and what one must do to avoid the path of
death. It is a catechism, a liturgical formula, which does not contradict our proposition of
the exclusively practical character of all this literature.
e) Hermas and Clement
The Pastor of Hermas and the 20th epistle of Clement are above all works of
edification.31 The common theme of these two works is penitence. This Hermas admits
only of his sins committed up until the moment when he wrote. And from this moment
the penitential doctrine becomes impregnated with the particular rigor of the pessimistic
doctrines. To the Christians of his time, he accorded this penitence only once.32 He
established a tariff according to which an hour of ungodly pleasure must be atoned for by
thirty hours of penitence, and a day by a year. According to him the wicked are doomed
to the flames, and whosoever knows God will be commended, however the bad will
expire eternally.33 The second epistle of Clement is a homily offering frequent analogies
with the Pastor of Hermas. The aim there remains wholly practical: to exhort the
faithful to charity and penitence. In chapter IX the real and tangible incarnation of Jesus
is demonstrated. The remainder endeavors to describe the punishments and the rewards
which will be inflicted or accorded after the resurrection.
f) Papias and Polycarpe
The narration which is given to us of his martyrdom in the fragments of Papias
ultimately does not teach us anything appreciably new.34 The epistle of Polycarpe is
dedicated to practical aims, and these works meet in an Antiocean Christology,35 a
classical theory of sin and the exaltation of faith. They in fact summarize faithfully what
was already known of this apostolic literature and its contempt for all speculation. Let us
only ask ourselves in which milieu this preaching developed.
2. The Men.
We could say that the thought of the apostolic fathers reflects the true face of the
era in which they lived. The first evangelical communities shared these worries and
31

Tixeront, III, 3 and 4.

Manduc, IV, 3.
33
Similit. IV, 4.
34
Tixeront, op. cit., III, 6.
35
Antioch = present day Antakya, Turkey, near the Syrian border.
32

28
withdrew from all intellectual ambition. Nothing better illuminates that state of mind
than the efforts of Clement of Alexandria to disperse it as a prejudice. If we remember
that Clement lived at the end of the second century,36 we see the tenacity with which
Christianity clung to its origins, and all the more since the fantasies of Gnosticism were
not fabricated to turn the mind towards philosophy.
Clement of Alexandria37 met vigorous resistance to Greek spirit and culture in his
milieu, and his whole effort was to rehabilitate pagan philosophy from out of disrepute,
and to accustom Christian minds to it. But these objections are of another order, and the
concerns that are often present in the Stromates show us the vexation of the author
concerning the strong hostility of the milieu towards all speculation. Those who Clement
calls the Simpliciores (simpletons) are certainly the first Christians, and we find in them
the postulates of the apostolic predication: The vulgar fear Greek philosophy like
children fear a bogey"38. But the vexation is palpable: Certain individuals who think that
spiritual people deem that one must mix neither with philosophy, nor dialectic, nor even
apply oneself to the study of the universe.39
Or again:
There are some people who make this objection. What end does it serve to know the causes which
explain the movement of the sun, or of the other stars, or to study geometry, dialectics or the other
sciences? These things are not of any use, since it is a question of defining duties. Greek
philosophy is only a product of the human intelligence: it does not teach the truth40.

The opinions prevalent in the Christian milieu of Alexandria were perfectly clear. Faith is
enough for man and the rest is literature. Let us compare rather an affirmation of
Tertullian, contemporary of Clement, with a text of the latter, which corresponds exactly:
There is something in common, said Terteullian, between Athens and Jerusalem, between the
Academy and the ChurchThe mores the pity for those who have brought up to date a Stoic,
Platonic, or dialectical Christianity. For us, we do not have curiosity about Jesus Christ, nor
research the Gospel41.

And Clement wrote:

36

Between 180 and 203 A.D.

De Faye: Clement dAlexandrie, livre II, chap. II.
38
Stromates, VII, 80.
39
St., I, 43.
40
VI, 93.
41
De Perscriptione, VII Haereticorum.
37

29
I do not ignore that certain ignorant people who are afraid of the smallest noise, keep on saying
that to know, one must confine oneself to the essential things, to those which relate to faith, and
that one must neglect that which comes from outside and which is superfluous42.

But these simpliciens (simple ones) confined themselves to books of the Saints. Saint
Paul had put them on guard against the deceptive philosophy.43 None can be without
concern for others; without charity, one is a resounding gong or ringing cymbal.44 That is
why in the fourth century, Rutillius Namatianus defined Christianity as the sect which
turns souls into morons'45. This merely annoyed Clement of Alexandria, whereas Celsus
is indignant.46 This is positive proof of the vitality of a tradition that to us now appears as
established.
III. The Difficulties and the Causes of Evolution of Evangelical Christianity
If we cast a backward glance, we must conclude that primitive Christianity can be
summed up in a few elementary but vital themes around which communities group
together, full of those aspirations, and attempting to embody them through their example
or their preaching. These are the powerful and bitter values that this new civilization
implemented. Where does the exaltation which accompanies its birth and the interior
richness that it arouses among man come from?
But, on this basis, an evolution is prepared. The outline of it already appears from
Matthew to John. The kingdom of God cedes place to eternal life.47 God is spirit, and it
is in spirit that one must adore him. Christianity is already universalized. However, the
trinity, still shapeless, only half expresses itself. 48 Christianity has already surveyed the
Greek world, and, before surmounting other forms of its evolution, it must come to terms
with the causes which impel it to go constantly deeper into itself, and to propagate its
doctrines under Greek cover. The rupture with Judaism and the entry into the
Mediterranean mind created certain obligations for Christianity: to satisfy the Greeks
42

Sodom, I, 18.
Colossians, 2: 8: See to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which
depends on human tradition.
44
1 Corinthians 13: 1: If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a
resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.
45
De Reditu suo, I, 389, in Rougier-Celse, p.112.
46
Discours vrai, III, 37, trad. Rougier.
47
John, 3:16, 36; 4:14.
48
V, 19, 26.
43

30
already won over to the new religion; to entice others by showing them a less Judaic
Christianity and a general way of speaking their language; to express itself in
comprehensible formulas, and consequently to introduce into the convenient molds of
Greek thought the uncoordinated flights of a very profound faith. These are the necessities
that we must clarify.
1. Concurrences.
During this epoch, and throughout the whole second century, Christianity attracts
adherents from amongst the most cultivated of Greeks.49 Many minds come to the new
religion, and cement the union of a speculative tradition with a renewed sensibility in the
Mediterranean basin: Aristides Apology to Antonin the Pious, from between 136 and 161
A.D.; Miltiade (towards 150); Justin, whose first Apology dates between 150 and 155, and
the second between 150 and 160, and from which the famous Dialogue with Tryphon had
been published towards 161; and finally Athenagole (Supplicatio pro christianos 176 178 A.D.)
From that moment on, it was for them a matter of reconciling a mind made Greek
by education with a heart penetrated by Christian love. Historically, these fathers were
apologists, because their whole effort was effectively to present Christianity in
accordance with reason. Faith, according to them, completes the facts of reason, and it is
not unworthy of a Greek mind to accept it. It is then on the terrain of philosophy that the
two civilizations meet each other.
Justin, in particular, will go very far in this direction. He relies on the
resemblances between Christian doctrine and Greek philosophies: the Gospel is
continuous for him with Plato and the Stoics.50 Justin sees two reasons for this
concurrence. Firstly, that idea, so widespread in the era51, that the Greek philosophers had
had knowledge of the books of the Old Testament, and from it were inspired (a
supposition without support, but which had enormous prosperity). Secondly, Justin
thinks that the logos was manifested in us in the person of Jesus, but that he pre-existed
49

Puech: les Apologistes grecs du II siecle.ibid Tixeront op. cit., V, I.

Apol., II, 13.
51
Apol., I, 44, 59; Tatien: Oratio ad Graecos, 40; Minutius Felix op. cit. 34; Tertullien: Apologet. 47;
Clement dAlex.: Str. I, 28; VI, 153; VI, 159.
50

31
that incarnation, and inspired the philosophy of the Greeks.52 That does not prevent our
author from drawing conclusions about the moral necessity of revelation, because of the
incomplete character of pagan speculation.
At the same time as they sought rapproachment with the Greeks, the Apologists
also moved away more and more from Judaism. The hostility of the Jews towards the
new religion was a sufficient motive. But a political reason was also added, namely their
role keeping the Jews in persecution by their accusations.53 The whole argument of the
Dialogue with Tryphon is the demonstration of the accord between the Prophets and the
New Testament, from which Justin drew the prescription of the Old Testament and the
triumph of the Christian truth.54
2. Resistances.
But at the same time, resistances also developed. In any case we know the
contempt of Tertullian towards all pagan thought. Tatien55 and Hermias56 also became
apostles of this particularist57 movement. But resistance is the most natural tendency, and
the resistances of which we spoke were those of the pagans. One could say without
paradox that these resistances contributed greatly to the victory of Christianity. P. de
Labriolle58 insists that the pagans at the end of the second century and at the beginning of
the third made every effort to divert the religious enthusiasm of the era towards the
figures and the personalities modeled on Christ.59 Celsus had already touched upon this
idea when he opposed Jesus, Aesculapius, Hercules and Bacchus.
But this soon became a polemical system. At the beginning of the third century
Philostratus wrote the marvelous history of Apollonius of Tyane, which seems at many
points to imitate scripture.60 Socrates, Pythagoras, Hercules, Mithra, the sun, the
52

Ap. II, 13, 8, 10.

Justin. Dialogue avec Tryphon: 16, 17, 108, 122, etc. Apologie: I, 31-36.
54
Dialogue. 63 and sq.
55
Oratio ad graecos (165 A.D.).
56
Irrisio gent ilium philosopher (second century).
57
Particularism: the doctrine that divine grace is provided only for the elect.
58
La Reaction paienne: deuxime partie, ch. II.
59
Cf. Boissier: la Religion romaine, preface, tome I, IX: paganism tries to reform according to the model
of the religion which threatened it and against which it fought.
60
Compare above all the episode of the daughter of Jairus (Luke, 8:40) and Life of Apollonius, IV, 45 (p.
184 of the Chassaing translation).
53

32
emperor: all help themselves to the favor of the Greco-roman world and figure in turn as a
pagan Christ. The method had its dangers and its advantages, but nothing shows better
how much the Greeks had understood the power and the seduction of the new religion.
But this Christianization of decadent Hellenism proves also that the resistances became
ingenious. Thus for Christianity, the necessity is to use its angles, to show preference for
its great dogmas on eternal life and the nature of God, and to introduce metaphysics into
itself in this way. In any case, we would not go wrong in saying that this was then the
role of the apologists. This work of assimilation came from the most high. It can be
traced back to Paul, born in Tarsus, an academic and Hellenic city. Chritianity is
particularly clear from a Judaic point of view, according to Philon. We have noted it only
in the apologists because it is the first time in history that this movement takes a coherent
and collective form. We will only consider the problems which resulted from it.
3. The Problems.
So from the combination of evangelical faith with Greek metaphysics the
Christian dogmas arose. Furthermore, bathed in that atmosphere of religious tension,
Greek philosophy yielded Neoplatonism.
But this did not happen overnight. If it is true that the oppositions between
Christian ideas and Greek ideas were alleviated by the cosmopolitanism which we have
indicated, nevertheless antimonies remained. We must reconcile creation ex nihilo
which excluded the hypothesis of matter, with the perfection of the Greek God who
involved the existence of that matter. The Greek mind saw the difficulty of a perfect and
immutable God creating the temporal and the imperfect. As Saint Augustine wrote much
later: It is difficult to comprehend the substance of God which makes changeable things,
without them undergoing any change, and of temporal things without any motion in
time.61
Put otherwise, history made it necessary for Christianity to go deeper into itself if
it wanted to universalize itself, to create a metaphysics. But it is not a metaphysics
without a minimum of rationalism. Intelligence is powerless to restate its themes when
61

De Trinitate: I, I, 3.

33
feelings vary with the infinity of nuances. The effort of reconciliation inherent in
Christianity will be to humanize and to intellectualize its sentimental themes, and to
restore the thought of the limits within which it struggles. Because to explain is in a
certain way to seize: it is to reduce slightly this disproportion between God and man that
Christianity had instituted. On the contrary, it certainly seems that at its beginnings,
Christian thought, under the influence of these values of death and of passion, in the fear
of sin and of chastisement, has arrived at the point at which, as Hamlet said, time is out of
joint.62 It is now necessary that intelligence give its endorsement.
This was the task, in a rather weak capacity, of the first theological systems of
Clement of Alexandria and of Origin, and of the councils in reaction to the heresies, and
above all of Saint Augustine. But, at this precise point, the thought is inflected.
Christianity entered into a new phase in which it was a matter of knowing if, in order
better to popularize, its profound originality would be jeopardized; or if, on the contrary,
its powers of expansion would be sacrificed to its need for purity; or if it would
eventually get to reconcile these equally natural preoccupations. But its evolution was not
to be harmonious. It was to follow some dangerous paths which would teach it prudence.
Namely, Gnosticism. Christianity used Neoplatonism and its convenient framework to
house religious thought. Definitively detached from Judaism, Christianity inserted itself
into Hellenism through the door that it kept open to the Oriental religions. Several
centuries of Christian speculation would go into raising the image of the crucified Saviour
on the altar to the unknown God that Paul had found in Athens63.

62

Let us go in together; And still your fingers on your lips, I pray. The time is out of joint; O cursed spite,
That ever I was born to set it right (Act II, scene V).
63
Acts, 17:16-23.

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Chapter Two. Gnosis

If one accepts this Christianization of Mediterranean Hellenism as an established
fact, one must consider the Gnostic heresy as one of the first attempts at Greco-Christian
collaboration. Gnosticism is effectively a Greek reflection on Christian themes. Thus it
was disavowed by the one no less than by the other. Plotinus wrote "against those who
say that the world is bad."64 And Tertullian reproaches the Gnostics in the Adversus
marcionem (as would Saint Augustine later the Manicheans) for believing that a rational
explanation could be added to the Gospel. It is nevertheless accurate to say that the
Gnostics had been Christian, for we find amongst them the theme of the incarnation.
The problem of evil obsessed them. They comprehended all the originality of the New
Testament and consequently, of the redemption. But instead of esteeming Christ made
flesh, symbolizing a suffering humanity, the Gnostics took the incarnation as wholly
mythological. On authenticated postulates, they devote themselves to all the subtle games
of the Greek mind. And on several simple and passionate aspirations of Christianity, they
built, as if on so many solid pillars, all the decorations of a metaphysical carnival.
But a difficulty lies in the historical scheme [le plan historique]. The Gnostic
schools succeeded one another for more than two centuries.65 Several generations of
Gnostics speculated in divergent directions. Valentine and Basilides are as different
minds, all things considered, as were Plato and Aristotle. How then do we define one
Gnosticism? This is a difficulty that we have already encountered. If it is true that we
can define only various Gnosticisms, it is, however, possible to characterize a Gnosis.
The first Gnostic generation,66 that of Basilides, Marcion and Valentine, supplied the
loom upon which later disciples wove. The small number of common themes suffice to
glimpse the sense of this heretical solution. Historically, Gnosticism is in effect a
philosophical and religious teaching, dispensed by initiates, based on Christian dogma,
mixed with pagan philosophy, and assimilating all therein which is splendid and brilliant
in these most diverse religions. But before indicating the main themes of the Gnostic
64

Enneads II, 9.
From the beginning of the second century to the end of the third.
66
First part of the first century.
65

35
solution and uncovering their origins, it is necessary to see how this solution fits into the
movement of thought considered in this work, defining Gnosis again, but this time
through the metaphysical agenda [le plan mtaphysique]. This poses the problems in a
Christian way, but it resolves it into Greek formulas.
Basilides and Marcion were effectively persuaded of the ugliness of this world.
They complain of its carnal aspect, they list a catalogue of sins and ugliness, and they
widen more and more the rift between man and God. There comes a moment where
neither penance nor sacrifice can leap such an abyss. It is enough to know God in order
to be saved.67 Otherwise through some kind of work, or through some other way, man
could be drawn out of his nothingness. That is, as we have seen, the Christian solution of
salvation through incarnation. It is also in a sense the Gnostic solution too. But Christian
grace preserves a character of divine arbitration. Not knowing the profound meaning of
the incarnation and so restricting it in its scope, the Gnostics transformed the notion of
salvation into that of initiation. Valentine effectively separated humanity into three
orders:68 the Materialists, attached to worldly goods, the Psychics, balanced between God
and matter, and the Spirituals, who alone live in God and know him. These latter are
saved, just as later the elected of the Manicheans will be.
The Greek concept thereby introduced itself the Spirituals are saved only by
Gnosis, a secret knowledge of God. They learnt this Gnosis from Valentine and others.
Salvation is learnt. It is thus an initiation. For if initially these two notions seem to be
descended from a common ancestor, analysis still detects some differences, subtle,
without doubt, but fundamental. Initiation gives man a grasp of the divine kingdom.
Salvation introduces it without partaking of such a result: one could believe in God
without thereby being saved. For the mysteries of Eleusis it is sufficient to contemplate.69
Baptism, in contrast, does not imply salvation. Hellenism cannot separate itself from that
hope, for them tenacious, that man holds his destiny in his hands. And, even within
Christianity, there was precisely a tendency to slowly return the notion of salvation to that
67

Cf. in Buddhism the parent form of Amidisme.

De Faye: Gnostiques et Gnosticisme, I, ch. II. Amelineau: Essai sur le Gnosticisme egyptien.
69
Cf. Hymne homerique a Demeter, 480-483 Happy, those of the men living on the earth who have seen
these things. But those who have not been initiated into the sacred ceremonies and those who took part there
will never have the same destiny after death in the vast darkness. P. Loisy, op. cit., p.76.
68

36
of initiation. Just as the Egyptian fellah gradually won from the Pharaoh the right to
immortality, the Christian, through the intervention of the Church, eventually had the keys
to the celestial kingdom in his hands.
It is with good reason, we see, that we could consider Gnosticism as one of the
solutions, one of the Christian steps in the problem that we detected, for Gnosis is an
attempt at reconciliation between knowledge and salvation. Let us now see the details of
that attempt.
I. The Main Themes of the Gnostic Solution.
More or less pronounced among different authors, four fundamental themes
nevertheless converge at the heart of the whole Gnostic system: the problem of evil, the
redemption, the theory of intermediates, and a conception of God being ineffable and
incommunicable.
A).

If it is true that the problem of evil is at the core of all Christian thought, then

nobody is as profoundly Christian as Basilide. This original figure is not very well
known. We know that he lived under the reigns of Hadrian and Antonin the Pious (that is,
circa 140 A.D.), and that he began writing probably around 80 A.D. The only partially
complete account of his thought is now considered not very well-founded; namely, that of
the Philosophumena, which in all likelihood deals with a pseudo-Basilide. Our more
important source remains Clement of Alexandria in his Stromates. Irenaeus speaks of
Basilide in his catalogue and Epiphane in his Contra Haeresios (chap. XXIV). We can
also reassemble some allusions in Origin.70
The origin and the cause of this bad doctrine, said Epiphane, is the research
into and the discussion of the problem of evil.71 It is, in effect, this which pertains to the
little that we know of Basilidian thought. Aloof from all speculation, he attached himself
to the problem of morality alone, and more precisely to that moral problem which gives
birth to the relation between man and God. That which interests him is sin and the human
aspect of our problem. He even made of faith a natural and real existence: Basilide
70
71

Comm. in Rom. V; Hom. In Luke I; Com. In Matt. 38.

Contre Haer, XXIV, 6, 72 c.

37
seems incapable of conceiving of an abstraction. It is necessary that he dresses it in a
semblance of body.72 It is from this point of view that Basilide develops his thought, and
endeavors to establish a theory of original sin. To tell the truth, the word itself does not
appear, but only the idea of a certain natural predisposition to sin. He adds finally two
complementary affirmations: sin always entails a chastisement; and, there is an
improvement and a redemption to be drawn from suffering. These three themes are
attributed indistinctly to Basilide and to Isidore, his son.
Be that as it may, Basilide is vividly impressed by the lot of the martyrs.
According to him, theirs was not useless suffering. And each suffering demands a
preceding sin which legitimates it. It is necessary then to conclude that the martyrs
sinned. Besides, this state is reconciled perfectly with their saintliness. It is rightly their
privilege to be able to expiate so completely their past. But who is the greatest of the
martyrs, if not Jesus himself. If I am pushed, I will say that a man, whomsoever you
name, is always still a man, whereas God is righteous. Because as one says, nobody is
pure from all stain."73 The allusion is transparent, and one understands that this doctrine
is false in the eyes of Epiphanus. Christ does not escape the universal law of sin. But at
least he shows us the road of deliverance that is the cross. That is why Basilides and his
son Isidore introduced an ascetic life to a certain extent.74 In addition to which this was
necessary for Isidore, because it is to him that we owe the appendix theory of the
passions. The passions do not depend on us, but hang on the soul and exploit us. Isidore
well saw that such a theory could lead the wicked to appear as victims and not as
culpable, and hence the rule of ascetic life.
Consider what remains of the philosophy of Basilides. We do not see how these
few pieces of information could accord with the note of Hippolytus in the
Philosophumena75. According to him Basilides might have conceived of the idea of an
abstract God living in the ogdoad,76 separated from our world by the intermediate or
hebdomad77 universe. The God of this intermediate world, the great Archon, could have
72

De Faye, op. cit., page 31.

Cited by De Faye, ch. 1.
74
Cf. De Faye, op. cit., ch. I.
75
Book VII.
76
eighth heaven
77
sevenfold : i.e., cosmos of the seven celestial spheres.
73

38
been identified by Basilides with the God of the Old Testament:
The ogdoad is ineffable, but one can say the name of the hebdomad. It is this Archon of the
hebdomad who spoke to Moses in these terms: I am the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and I did
not reveal the name of God to them, that is to say of the ogdoad who is ineffable.78

This metaphysical cosmology hardly seems compatible with the profound tendencies of
our author, above all when one attributes to him a) the idea that the crucified Christ is not
dead, but that he substituted Simon of Cyrene for himself; b) the grandiose eschatology
which is presaged in the following passage:
When all will be definitively accomplished, when all the confused forms will have been freed, and
returned to their primitive place, God will scatter an absolute ignorance on the entire world so that
all the beings who compose it will stay within the limits of their nature and desire nothing which
would be outside of it79.

The centre of the meditations of Basilides is the problem of evil, and to speak
anachronistically, of predestination. The doctrines which precede are too highly evolved:
we could even say decadent. A sole affirmation of Hippolytus could make us doubt this,
when he attributes to his author the idea that the soul does not have more liberty of action
than liberty of belief. The soul is by nature sinful and will inevitably fail.
We can grasp the importance of the problem of evil among the least known of the
Gnostics. It is the same in all the Gnostic sects80. It is not surprising then to find, placed in
the same rank, the adjacent problem of the Redemption.
B).

Marcion81 is the Gnostic who felt most vividly the originality of Christianity. At

the point of the scorn of the Judaic law, Christianity becomes moral. Marcion was not a
speculative but a religious genius. We are unable to recognise in him a system similar to
that of Valentine. He founded neither a church nor a school, and his books are exegetical,
not original.82 In a general way his thought revolves around three points: 1. God; 2. the
redemption and the person of Christ; 3. morality.

78

VII, p. 125, ap. Amelineau, op. cit., II, 2.

Cited by Amelineau, p. 135. Compare the old Egyptian belief: The rebels become immobile things
during millions of years, cited by Amelineau p. 152.
80
De Faye, op. cit., conclusion pp. 460-463.
81
In Tertullian (Adversus Marcionem); Clement of Alexandria (Stromates III); Origin de Principiis lib. II,
ch. IV and V; and Philaster Epiphane pseudo Tertullian; Irenaeus.
82
De Faye, op. cit., I, 4.
79

39
There are two divinities for Marcion: the one, superior, reigns in the invisible
world; the other, subordinate, is the God of this world: Our God has not been revealed
since the beginning; he was not there at the creation; he reveals himself in Jesus Christ.
83

The second God, cruel and aggressive, is the God of the Old Testament, he who

persecuted Job to prove his power to Satan, who demanded blood and battles, and whose
law oppressed the Jewish people. There is no avestic influence there. It is not a matter of
two principles opposed and of equal force from whence the struggle which sustains the
world, but of a God and a demiurge between which the battle is unequal. This being so,
Marcion claimed to possess the truth, and drew on the Gospels (or rather on the sole
Gospel that he accepts, that of Luke): No man putteth a piece of a new garment upon an
old; if otherwise, then both the new maketh a rent, and the piece that was taken out of the
new agreeth not with the old84. And again: For a good tree bringeth not forth corrupt
fruit; neither doth a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit85. Above all he commented on the
Epistle to the Galatians. And in the continual opposition that Paul made between the Law
and the Gospel, Judaism and Christianity, Marcion believed that he saw the proof that the
two Testaments were inspired by different authors. In Valentine also, we find the idea of a
different creator from the unique God, but for him it is a question of a logically necessary
solution by the problem of evil. In Marcion on the contrary, we find the very vivid
sentiment of the novelty of Christianity which gives birth to a radical opposition. In this
sense it is right to speak of political thought86, rather than metaphysical, in Marcion.
We already see what importance Christ will assume. He is nothing less than the
messenger from the supreme God to fight the evil God, creator of the world, freeing man
from his domination. Jesus accomplished here below a revolutionary mission. If he
redeems our sins it is because he fights the work of the cruel God. Emancipator as much
as redeemer, he is the representative of a sort of metaphysical coup dEtat:
Marcion claimed that there were two Christs: the one is revealed in the time in Tiberius by a God
whom we do not know, with a mission to save all people; the other was destined by the creator God
to restore Israel and had to appear one day. He created between these two Christs just as much
83

In Adv. Mar. ch. VIII. Cf. again Adv. Mar. I, 16: Consequently there are two kinds of entities, visible and
invisible, and two creators, a visible and an invisible deity and L, XVII, I, 6.
84
Luke, 5:36.
85
Luke, 6: 43.
86
De Faye, p. 130.

40
difference as there is between the Law and the Gospel, Judaism and Christianity. 87

In support of this singular theory, Marcion cites a great many texts that he interprets
following his sense and drawn mostly from the Gospel of Luke88.
If a son shall ask bread of any of you that is a father, will he give him a stone?If ye then, being
evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children: how much more shall your heavenly Father
give the Holy Spirit to them that ask him. 89

This strange interpretation finds its completion in morality. The rule of life that Marcion
proposes is ascetic. But it is an asceticism of pride. It is for the sake of hatred for the
creator that it is necessary to despise the goods of this world. The minimization of the
grip of his domination is the ideal of Marcion. Thus follows the most extreme asceticism.
And if Marcion preaches sexual abstinence it is because the God of the Old Testament
said: go forth and multiply. In that pessimistic view of the world and in this proud
refusal to accept, the reasoning of a fully modern sensibility prevails. It also finds its
source no less in the problem of evil. He considers the world bad, but he refuses to
believe that God could be its author. If his solution revolves around the redemption, it is
because he envisages the role of Jesus in a more ambitious way than the Christians
themselves. It is a question of nothing less than the complete destruction of creation.
C).

These two latter themes of Gnosticism should be considered closely linked. For if

one makes of God an incommunicable and timeless being, one does not for all that
renounce the supposition of his the interest in the world. It is necessary then to explain the
relations between man and God, and, not being able to connect this nothing to that
infinity, to admit one or more intermediates participating at the same time in both the
divine infinity and our finitude. To find these middle terms is more or less the big
problem of the first centuries of our era. The Gnostics did not fail to devote themselves to
it. They even brought an unequalled luxury and splendour to their scenario.
The first Gnostic generation contented themselves with considering God as
ineffable and inexpressible. But at least they believed in him firmly. The successors went
still further, and some of their expressions are reminiscent of a Brahman of the
Upanishads, who could only define themselves by a repeated no, no:
87

Tertullien: Adv. M. IV, 6.

5:12-14; 5:27-32; 7: 9 and 10; cf. chapters 11 and 16 passim; and 18:19.
89
Luke 11: 11-13.
88

41

This God was when the nothing [le rien] was, but this nothing was not some one of the things
which exist now, and, to speak openly, simply and without subtlety, only the nothing existed. But,
when I say it existed, I do not mean that it really existed. I only want to show my thought90.

And again:
That which spoke did not exist, and that which was then created was no longer; then of this which
was not made, the seed of the world, that is to say this utterance which was said by the nothing
God: Let there be light. And it is this which is written in the Gospel. He is the light illuminating
all men coming into this world91.

Hippolytus sums this up in the following way: In this way a non-existing God made a
non-existing cosmos out of non-existing elements upon emitting a unique seed which
contained all the germs of the cosmos.92 But it is necessary to take into account the
sentiments of Hippolytus, and such excessive subtlety is not the rule among the Gnostics.
It seems on the contrary that Valentine had had a very vivid sensation of the divine nature.
It is only in the doctrine of the intermediates that he gave free run to his imagination.
D).

Valentine is that one of the Gnostics that we know best.93 But on the other hand,

we do not have any information about his life, concerning which there is much doubt.
Highly coherent, his system could be divided into a theology, a cosmology and a morality.
It is the most curious example of that incarnation of mythology of which we spoke above.
The Pleroma that Valentine places between God and the world is to tell the truth a
Christian Olympus. At least, Christian in intention, but Greek in form and imagination.
The philosophy of Valentine is a metaphysics in action, an immense tragedy which plays
itself out from heaven to earth and, in the infinity of time, is a struggle of problems and of
symbols. Something like a Novel of the Rose of Gnostic thought.
1). The God of Valentine94 is an uncreated and timeless God. But, solitary and perfect, he
abounds in the fact of his perfection. This being so he created a Dyad, that of the Spirit
and the Truth. This couples in turn, engendering the Word and the Life which produce
Man and the Church. From these six principles come now the entire Pleroma which is
composed of two groups of angels or Eons, one of twelve, the other of ten, that is to say
90

Pseudo-Basilides, Philosoph. 1. VII, p.20.

P. 340, lines 12-15.
92
VII, 22.
93
Philosoph. and Stromates XIII.
94
De Faye, op. cit. : I, 2. Amelineau, op. cit. : III, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.
91

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in the Gnostic language, the decade and the dodecade.95 The Spirit and the Truth wanting
to glorify the divinity create a choir of ten Eons of which the mission is to return homage
to God. These are in order: the Deep and the Mingling, which when Unageing is called
the Union; that which is Self-Produced, the Pleasure; that which is Immovable, the
Mixture, the Only-Begotten, the Blessing. The Word and the Life are next in turn, but this
time with the aim of glorifying the active Spirit, creating the dodecade. It consists of
twelve Eons arranged in syzygies, that is to say in couples: male and female. This is: the
Paraclete and the Faith, the Paternal and the Hope, the Maternal and the Love, the
Everlasting and the Intelligence, the Ecclesiastical and the Blessedness, the Willed and
the Wisdom. The whole of these Eons form the Pleroma, intermediate between God and
the world.96 Valentine is going to teach us that which is of this world, and the relations
that it has with this theology and this Eon-ology.
2). It is remarkable that up to this point God had produced alone without help a female
principle. Only he is perfect. Only he is superabundant. It is by their union that the Spirit
and the Truth, or the Word and the Life, have achieved, respectively, the engendering of
the decade and the dodecade. But, the second-born of the Eons, Sophia (or Wisdom), at
the bottom of the ladder of the principles, turned around and wanted to see God97. And
Sophia knew in this way that God alone had created. By pride and envy, she tried to create
unaided. But she only succeeded in bringing a shapeless being into the world, that very
one of which it is said in Genesis: the earth was without form and void.98 Sophia then
recognised with pain her ignorance, and, full of fear, let herself be taken by despair. These
four passions constitute the four elements of the world. And Sophia bound her life forever
to this shapeless foetus that she had engendered. But God had pity on her, and created
anew a special principle, Horos99 or Limit. This latter comes to the help of Sophia to
95

The dodecade is devoted to the Spirit acting on the decade; perfect number according to the
Pythagoreans, devoted to the perfect God.
96
Translators note: here following the terminology employed in The Other Bible, ed. Willis Barnstone,
(San Francisco: HarperCollins 1984) pages 610ff. See also Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion (Boston:
Beacon Press, 2nd ed. 1963) Part II, chapter 8; Robert M. Grant, Gnosticism: an Anthology (London:
Collins, 1961), chapter V. Also, Kurt Rudolph, Gnosis: the Nature and History of Gnosticism (San
Francisco: HarperCollins 1987), and Ugo Bianchi ed. The Origins of Gnosticism: Colloquium of Messina
13-18 April 1966 (Leiden: Brill, 1967).
97
De Faye, ch. II.
98
Genesis 1:2.
99
Cf. De Faye: op. cit., p. 238.

43
reinstate in her her primitive nature, and rejects the world outside of the Pleroma, reestablishing in this way the primitive equilibrium. At this moment a demiurge intervenes
and, arranging the matter, he makes the cosmos. Using the passions of Sophia, he creates
from them men. These men divide into three categories following the degree of
consciousness they have of their origin.100 The Spirituals who aspire to God, the
Materialists who do not have any memory of, and hence no anxiety concerning, their
origins. And between the two, the Psychics, undecided, who pursue the coarse life of the
senses to the most elevated anxieties without knowing where to cling. But they carry all
the marks of their birth: they were made of fear, ignorance and pain. Hence the necessity
of redemption. But it is the Spirit this time, who being transformed into Christ, has come
to deliver man from his nefarious germination. Things become still more complicated
when one learns that the redeemer is not Jesus. The latter is born from the gratitude of the
Eons towards God, who had re-established order. They then reunite their virtues and offer
in actions of grace being itself, formed in this way for God. The redemption on the
contrary is the work of the sacred Spirit who revealed to men their divine part, and who
realised in them the death of their sinful element. This is without doubt the meaning of
this enigmatic text of the Stromates:
You are immortal from the beginning; you are children of the life eternal, and you would like to
partake of death in order that you consume and exhaust it, and that death would die in you and for
you. For since you disintegrate the world and yet you yourself are not disintegrated, you are
masters of the creation and of the whole corruption. 101

3). The morality of Valentine is closely linked to his cosmology. Incidentally, this latter is
only a an adapted solution to a problem which obsessed Valentine: evil.
From it I came to believe in the reality of that represented in the tragedies. I was persuaded that
they alone put truth before the eyes. I believe in the desire of Oenomas during his rapture. I do not
think it an incredible thing that two brothers could have fought one another. And I did not find in
me the strength to say that God was the author and the creator of all the evils.102

It is then the problem of evil which oriented Valentine in these speculations. And the
conclusion that he draws from his cosmology is altogether simple: due to the fault of
Sophia, there is no liberty in the human soul. Only those who recover their origins will be
saved: the Gnostics or the Spirituals. Salvation is contemporary with knowledge. As for
100

Cf. Amelineau: op. cit., p. 219. De Faye: op. cit., p. 45.

XIII, 85. Ap. De Faye: op. cit., p. 42.
102
Cited by the author of Dialogue contre les Marcionites, Amelineau: op. cit., p. 230.
101

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the Psychics, they can be saved, but it is necessary to leave it to the divine will.
The thought of Valentine thereby rejoins the font common to all the Gnostics. But
in its turn, his Eon-ology and his cosmology came to know a great success among the
plethora of minor schools with which Gnosticism came to an end. It remains for us briefly
to characterise this in order to complete our study of Gnosticism.
If one adopts the classification of M. de Faye, which would seem to be the best
informed, the themes that we come to cover meet in three groups of schools: a group
studied by the heresiologists, whom one could call the Followers of the Mother; then,
by the intermediary of these latter, these themes are passed on to the Gnostics whom for
the most part are mentioned in the Philosophumena; and thirdly, the group of Coptic
Gnostics of which the Papyrus of Bruce and the Pistis Sophia give us a faithful image.
This is an entirely theoretical filiation, because, if it is broadly true that the Followers of
the Mother precede in time the latter two groups, each of the three schools is composed
of so great a number of sects that it is probable that they overlapped with each other and
that they intertwined in their themes. But the intellectual filiation is real, and the
necessities of exposition also yield this indispensable classification. We shall limit
ourselves to a few indications, and from some few texts to complete our portrait of
Gnostic thought.
The Followers of the Mother are so named because they almost entirely admit a
female principle in the origin of the world. But even under this rubric, one can understand
the Barbelo Gnostics (Barbelo is the name of the female principle), the Orphites of which
Hippolytus and the Gnostics of Irenaeus speak. They insist for the most part on the rivalry
of the first principle, the Mother, and of a male principle or Iadalboath. The latter created
man, and the mother corrected that which that creation had disastrously put in man as a
divine germ. From there, is introduced the classic history of the redemption following
Valentinian themes.
The Philosophumena cite and comment on so great a number of Gnostics that it
would be vain to try to recapture a way to recover those ideas already encountered. The
most simple method will be to cite a few texts which, by their strange ways or curious
intentions, shall illustrate in a way the doctrine of Valentine, Basilides or Marcion, just as

45
a pastiche often delivers the spirit of a work. They give us at the same time a very precise
idea of a common enough way of thinking in that era, strange, often condemned, but
sometimes suggestive. The Naassenes103 declare pessimism about the world, and instead
refine theology:
It is the God of whom a psalm speaks, who clothed the earth with flood and who raised the voices
and cries of the multitude in the bosom of the waters. The water is the place where the multiple and
varied generations of mortal men are.104

From there he cries out to man that no form is definitive, saying: Save your only son
from the lions. It is to him that these words are addressed: You are my son Israel, do not
fear since you crossed the river, they will not submerge you, if you cross the fire, it will
not consume you 105
The Perates insist upon the redemption and make it consist in an attraction that the
Son has to all that which has a resemblance with the Father. This is the theory of the
imprint as he carried off from on high the imprints of the Father, likewise reciprocally
he carries off from here to heaven these imprints of the Father since they have been
awoken.106
For the Sethiens the superior world is that of light and ours that of darkness. And
it is in this way that they illustrate our search for divinity:
The image of these things, is the pupil of the eye. On one hand, it is dark; there are fluids
immediately under which envelop it in darkness. On the other hand, a soul illuminates it: as the
darkness of the pupil attaches to that clarity, and would like to keep it and enslave it in order to see,
likewise light and the spirit investigate with ardour their errant virtue in the darknesses 107.

Justin, the Gnostic of whom Hippolytus speaks, is rather a leader of a religious

brotherhood. Sexual symbolism plays a large part in his speculations. It is in this way that
there are three parts in the world: the Good God; Elohim the creator father; and Eden his
wife who represents the world. The tragedy gives birth to that Elohim, who attracted by
the Good God, abandons Eden. The latter to avenge herself creates evil man. From
whence the necessity of Redemption .
Elohim cries out: Open the doors for me so that I may enter and see the Lord. For I believe the
Lord to be here. Immediately the door opens and the Father, without the angels, enters and goes
103

That is the name that E. de Faye gives them at least.

see Psalm 104: 6; Genesis 7:20.
105
V, 8.
106
V, 16.
107
V, 15.
104

46
towards the Good. And he contemplates the things that the eye has not seen and that the ear has not
heard and that are not shown in the heart of man. Then the Good says to him: Sit down on my
right.108

One can finally note a Gnostic docte of somewhat obscure ideas, which describes the
redemption in this way :
Here is how the Monogene Son, seeing from on high the ideas transmuted into dark bodies, wanted
to save them. Knowing that even the Eons could not sustain the vision of the entire pleroma, but
struck with amazement, they became mortal and perished. He shrank himself and reduced his
brilliance to the smallest magnitude; I could say that he was made small like the light under the
eyelids. Then he moved up to the visible heavens: he touched the stars which were there and
enfolded anew under his eyelids In this way Monogene came into this world, without brilliance,
unknown, without glory: one does not even believe in him.109

If we add to this enumeration a certain Monoimus the Arab, neo-Pythagorean and juggler
of numerals, we will have a sufficiently just idea of the variety of the sects and the ideas.
Let us just note here the doctrines of the Papyrus of Bruce and of the Pistis
Sophia which reproduce entire both of the dialogues of Jesus, where the classical
themes are abundantly developed and where it is explained that possessing the gnosis, is
to know the why of light and darkness, chaos, treasure of lights, sin, baptism, anger,
blasphemy, insult, adultery, purity, splendour, life, scandal, obedience, humility, wealth
and slavery.110
To this end we are once more going to leave aside the direct disciples of Valentine:
Heracleon and Ptolemaeus, Apelles disciple of Marcion, Marcus and his followers, the
licentious Gnostics. We see then the richness of a movement too often disdained. It
remains now for us to disentangle the strange material in this ensemble of assertions,
whether they be stirring or mere curiosities.
II. The Elements of the Gnostic Solution
That metaphysics which is incarnated for the duration of this epoch maintains its
eloquence. But it could not claim originality. It would appear that Christianity and
Hellenism meet in Gnosticism without being able to assimilate one another, and have
juxtaposed the most heterogeneous themes. Our task here then will be to set out again as
schematically as possible their outward contributions.
108

Cited by de Faye: op. cit., p. 191.

Cited by E. de Faye: op. cit., p. 217.
110
Cited by de Faye, p. 269.
109

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a) A great number of the themes seem to come from Plato, or at least from the
tradition that he represents. Emanations of Intelligences within the Divinity; distraction
and suffering of the spirits alienated from God and engaged in matter; anxiety of the pure
soul linked to the irrational soul in the Psychics; regeneration by return to the primeval
source; this is all purely Greek. Horos, he of the significant name, making Sophia return
to the limits of her nature, is typical in this respect. Greece introduced the notion of order
and harmony into morality no less than aesthetics. If Prometheus suffered it is because he
diverged from his nature of man. Sophia did the same and it is upon reinstating the place
which was designated to her that she found peace.
b) Moreover, Gnosticism took from Christianity the basic essentials of its
dogmas. It contented itself with playing with them. Nevertheless the whole Gnostic
system is accompanied by a few ideas concerning the resonance of which we could not be
mistaken. The preoccupation of all of our authors is the problem of evil. We have seen
this in Basilides, Marcion and Valentine. Thus their effort to explain the redemption as
well. Another influence less distinct, but nonetheless valid, is the meaning of history, that
is to say, the idea that the world progresses towards an aim as to the conclusion of a
tragedy. The world is a point of departure. It is a beginning. Truths are not for beholding.
We act them out rather, and with them our salvation. The Christian influence here resides
less in a set of doctrines than in a state of mind and an orientation. In none of the
doctrines does that which is irreducible in man take on such an explicit value.
c) But to these influences are added some very diverse elements, which are even
less perceptible and upon which we elaborate a little more. That which has preceded has
been illustrated in our exposition of the doctrines.
1. Upon that notion of a superior science which constitutes gnosis, one can also
see the influence of mystics. We have already defined the initiation as the union of
knowledge and salvation. We find the same problem here. A Spiritual could appropriate
these Orphic hymns found on the tablets of gold at Croton:
I flee from the circle of pain and sadness and now I advance towards the realm of the reigning
sovereigns, the saint Persephone and the other divinities of Hades. I glory in belonging to their
blessed race. I ask them to take me into the abode of the innocents, to receive there the saving
word. You will be goddess and no longer mortal.111
111

In Toussaint, Saint Paul et lHellenisme, chap. I.

48
2. A more suggestive coincidence is that one which links the Gnostics to Philo.
The latter there sometimes prophesised like an initiate:
Limited men withdraw, ears blocked. We transmit divine mysteries to those who have received the
sacred initiation, to those who practise a genuine piety, those who are not enchained by the vain
formality of the words or the spell of the pagans 112.

And again, even more significant :

O you initiates, you whose ears are purified, receive into your soul that which in the manner of
mysteries must never go forth. Do not reveal it to any of the profane; hide it and keep it in yourself,
as a treasure which is incorruptible, in the manner of gold and of silver, but which is more precious
than all other things, since it is the science of the great reason for virtue and of that which is born
from the one and the other.113

From that time on we shall not be surprised to encounter among the Gnostics a
great number of themes dear to Philo: the supreme Being, home of the light which shines
forth throughout the universe;114 the struggle of light and darkness for the domination of
the world; the creation of the world by intermediary beings; the visible world as an image
of the invisible world; the theme (foremost for Philo) of the image of God in the pure
essence of the human soul; and finally the deliverance assigned as the aim of human
existence115.
3. Finally it is possible to recognise in some of the Gnostic doctrines the
influence of a number of oriental speculations, and particularly of Zend-Avesta.
Zoroastrianism, aware of the exile of the Jews, the protection that Cyrus accorded them,
and the benevolence that he extended to Zend-Avesta, also played a considerable role in
the evolution of ideas in the first centuries of our era. The Ameshas Spentas and the
Yazatas, who lead the struggle against the evil demons, constitutes them also as a
Pleroma, intermediate between God and the Earth. And Ahura Mazdah has all the
characteristics of the infinite Gnostic God. These indications are sufficient to bring out
the complexity of Gnosticism. We see what a glistening patchwork this Christian heresy
is. Once more we must attempt to summarise our investigations in some general
characteristics.

112

De Cherubin, pp. 115-116; Matter, Histoire du Gnosticisme, I, chap. V.

M. Matter, ibid
114
Cf. Brehier, les idees philosophiques et religieues de Philon dAlexandrie. Part 2: Dieu, les
Intermediaires et le Monde.
115
ibid III Part. Le culte spiritual et le progress moral.
113

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III. Conclusion: Gnosticism in the evolution of Christianity
In lieu of eternal acts of divine volition, of the theatrical effect or the
passionate initiatives; the errors replacing the causes; at the site of the union of
two natures in the person of Christ incarnated; the dispersion of the divine
portions into the matter; instead of history, a sequence of acts without link; the
confusion of the carnal and the spiritual; and, in sum, in lieu of the distinction of
eternity and time, a time saturated with eternal influences and a passing eternity,
punctuated with tragedies. 116

We know of no better way to sum up the spirit of Gnosticism than the following.
Spanning more than two centuries, it gathers up all the ideas which are found in that
epoch in order to form from them a monstrous Christianity, woven out of oriental
religions and Greek mythology. That this heresy was Christian cannot be doubted, for a
certain very harsh resonance runs between the lines. It is evil which obsesses the
Gnostics. They are all pessimists regarding the world. It is with a very sharp fervor that
they address the God whom they make inaccessible. But Christianity draws from that
incalculable emotion in the face of the divinity, the idea of his omnipotence and of the
nothingness of man. Gnosticism sees in knowledge the means of salvation, and in that it
is Greek, because it seeks that which illuminates, and regenerates at the same time. It
elaborates a Greek theory of grace.
Historically, Gnosticism shows Christianity the road not to follow. It is because of
its excesses that Tertullian and Tatien slow down Christianity in its march towards the
Mediterranean. It is partially because of him that Christian thought will take from the
Greeks only their formulae and their frameworks of thinking - but not their sentimental
postulates irreducible to evangelical thought, at most capable of being juxtaposed with it,
but without the least coherence. We have already explained that Christianity, implanted in
the Greco-Roman world of the end of the first century, did not have its definitive
expansion until the middle of the third century. We understand also the importance that
we have accorded to the Gnostic doctrines from the perspective of the evolution that we
want to retrace. Gnosticism shows us one possible Greco-Christian combination. It marks
an important stage, an experience that one could not pass over in silence.
This excess itself makes us better sense that which risked being lost in details and
116

John Guitton, le temps et lEternity chez Plotin et Saint Augustin, chap. II, I, p. 27.

50
nuances. That irreducible remainder, Christianity had nevertheless fought Gnosticism
ruthlessly. But it is harder to get rid of its false children than its enemies. And also, from a
singular sense of history, the Church Fathers appeared to have understood which works
were going to be compromised by a similar excess, for they were often moved: thus the
march of Christianity towards the role to which it was destined. But having arrived at this
turning of its history, let us leave Christian thought. Parallel to it, Alexandrian
metaphysics crystallised during that epoch in Neoplatonism, and the material which the
dogmatic Christian will use is on the verge of elaboration. In this way that second
revelation prepares itself for different directions: the Augustinian doctrine.

Chapter Three: Plotinus and Mystic Reason

I. The solution of Plotinus
With regard to our subject, a study of Plotinus is interesting on two accounts. For
the first time the problem through which the fate of Christianity is played out is clearly
posed. And what is more, the Plotinian synthesis supplies Christian opinions, but not a
doctrine (according at least to certain authors), but a method and a manner of seeing
things. The Plotinian frees itself, effectively, on the basis of religious and mystical
aspirations common to the whole era. It often even borrows the language of the mystics.117
And it is the passion for God which animates it.118 But Plotinus is a Greek as well. And
gladly determined to be since he wanted nothing more than to be a commentator of
Plato.119 In vain however. His world soul is stoic, and his intelligible world comes from
Aristotle, but his synthesis preserves a totally personal accent. But he has an enduring
taste for the rational explanation of things. And it is in that that his personal tragedy also
reflects the drama of Christian metaphysics. He worries about the destiny of the soul120

117

Comparing Enn. I, they obtain it unaidedthose who divest themselves of their garments and the
description of the voyage of the soul in the mystics of Mithra; M. Cumont, les Mysteres de Mithra, pp. 114
and sq.
118
Cf. Arnou, le Desir de Dieu dans la philosophie de Plotin.
119
III, 7, 13; V, I, 9.
120
Cf. I, 12: But if the soul is sinless, how is it judged?.

51
but he also wants, following his master, to make it return to the intellectual forms.121 The
conceptual content does not change with Plotinus; only, the sentiment is occupied with
new investigations. The whole ambience of the Plotinian landscape is there: a certain
tragedy in that effort to shape sentiment into the logical forms of Greek idealism. From
there still, and from a stylistic point of view, that indolence, that advance by degrees, that
apparent self-control which gives birth rather to a freely accepted hindrance. And then
also the profound originality of this solution and the grandeur of this enterprise. Because
clearly Plotinus intends to make do with only the resources of Greek philosophy and
without the help of Faith, that which ten centuries of Christianity has succeeded in doing
with great difficulty.
This explains a sort of sparkling in the thought of our author. To tell the truth,
each Plotinian doctrine reveals a double aspect of which the coincidence precisely
determines a solution to the problem that we have indicated above. That solution is the
confusion of the destiny of the soul and of the rational knowledge of things. Here, as in
psychoanalysis, the diagnosis coincides with the treatment. To reveal is to cure, and to
know the One is to return to its homeland. The demonstrations themselves [of the Good]
were a kind of leading up on our way. 122
It is by this expedient that we reach the study of Plotinus. We will attempt to find
this double aspect in each of the moments of his doctrine. But let us remark already how
much his solution depends upon the conception he has of reason. To know is to love in
accordance with reason. Science is a contemplation and an interior meditation, not a
construction. The rationalism of Plotinus is certainly based on the explicability of the
world, but with such infinite suppleness. The principles or hypostases which underlie that
explicability only apply in a perpetual motion which leads them to the cosmological
explication of the particular state of grace that each of them represents. In one sense they
mark the order of a procession, and in another they show the way to a conversion. In a
certain sense, Plotinian reason is already the heart of Pascal. But that does not mean
that one could reconcile it with a Christian thought, because that conception of reason,
121

Enn. I, 2, 2: The civic virtues, which we mentioned above, do genuinely set us in order and make us
better by giving limit and measure to our desires, and putting measure into all our experience (Loeb
p.133).
122
I, 3, I.

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being based on contemplation, inscribes itself in an aesthetic: as well as a religious
thought, the philosophy of Plotinus is the point of view of an artist. If things are explained
it is because things are beautiful. But that extreme emotion which seizes the artist before
the beauty of the world, is transported by Plotinus into the intelligible world. He admires
the universe to the detriment of nature. All that is here below comes from there, and
exists in greater beauty there.123 It is not the appearance for which Plotinus searches, but
rather that wrong side of things which is his paradise lost. And of that solitary landscape
of the sensible, each thing here below becomes the living reminder. Which is why
Plotinus describes the intellect in a sensual fashion.124 His reason is living, material, and
moving like a mixture of water and light:
As if there was one quality which held and kept intact all the qualities in itself, of sweetness along
with fragrance, and was at once the quality of wine and the characters of all tastes, the sights of
colours and all the awareness of touch, and all that hearings hear, all tunes and every rhythm (Loeb
VII 127)125.

It is thus with his feelings that Plotinus seizes the intelligible.

But this, which could have been believed to be a point of contact between
Christianity and Neoplatonism, appears to us on the contrary to be one of their irreducible
oppositions. For every act of contemplation is only valid in an eternal world, once and
for all harmonious. And in fact, for Plotinus, this is not a contemplation of history. But for
a Christian, art is not enough. The Christian world unfolds following a divine scenario;
and to be revived is to be incorporated into the movement of that tragedy. The dramatic
turn of events of the incarnation has no meaning for Plotinus, a far reaching opposition.
For a Christian who separates the reason for beauty from the truth of beauty, reason is
reduced to its role of logical legislator. And so conflicts become possible between faith
and reason. For a Greek, these conflicts are less acute, because beauty, which is at the
same time order and sensibility, economy and object of passion, remains a common
ground:
But if someone who sees beauty excellently represented in a face is carried to that higher world,
will anyone be so sluggish in mind and so immovable that, when he sees all the beauties in the
world of sense, all its good proportion and the mighty excellence of its order, and the splendour of
123

V, 8, 7.
Cf. again the abuse of a Metaphysics of Light in Plotinus. Light is that which is the limit of the
corporeal and of the incorporeal.
125
VI, 7, 12.
124

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form which is manifested in the stars, for all their remoteness, he will not thereupon think, seized
with reverence, What wonders, and from what a source? If he did not, he would neither have
understood this world here nor seen that higher world.126

We already know this passage, directed against the Gnostic Christians.

1. The rational explication according to procession.
a) If the world is beautiful, it is because something in it lives. But it is also
because something organises it. That spirit which animates it is the soul of the world. The
superior principle which restricts that life to determinate limits is Intelligence. But the
unity of an order is always superior to that order. There is thus a third principle superior to
intelligence and which is the One. Let us reason in the inverse sense. There is no being
which is not one.127 But there is no unity without form and without logos, logos being
exactly the principle of unity. That is also to say that there is no being without soul, since
logos is necessarily an act of the soul. In one sense, we have discovered three levels in the
explication of the world; in another sense, three stages of deepening of the self. These two
senses coincide.128 Metaphysical reality is spiritual life considered in itself. The one is the
object of knowledge, the other of interior asceticism. But where the objects coincide, the
methods meet. To know is to partially return to the intimior intimo meo. Knowledge is
not an acquisition, but an endeavour and a desire, and in a word, a creative evolution.
Thus, once again, the divine character of metaphysical principles. The One, the
Intelligence, the Soul of the World, the primary in its plenitude, and the two others as if
reflecting on it, all express the same divinity. How can this unity and this multiplicity be
reconciled? In the procession of the three hypostases. This, which underlies the rational
explication of the world, naturally finds its likeness in conversion, which is the movement
of the soul in the search for its origins.129
Let us indicate only the movement of that procession, observing in detail each of
its moments.
All things which exist, as long as they remain in being, necessarily produce from their own
126

II, 9, 16 (Loeb page 291).

VI, 9, I.
128
For the religious role of the hypostases, see especially V, I Of the Three Hypostases. For its
explanatory value, see V, 3, Of the Hypostases which Know.
129
V, I, 6 Everything longs for its parent and loves it (Loeb page 33).
127

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substances, in dependence on their present power, a surrounding reality directed to what is outside
themfire produces the heat which comes from it; snow does not only keep its cold inside itself.130

As he is a perfect and timeless substance, God himself is superabundant. He creates the

Intelligence, and from it the Soul of the World emanates. It is in this way that the
Intelligence and the Soul both are and are not the One. They are it in their origin, but not
in their outcome, where they fragment, one into duality, the other into multiplicity.
The One is all things and not a single one of them: it is the principle of all things, not all things, but
all things have that other kind of transcendent existence; for in a way they do occur in the One; or
rather they are not there yet, but they will be.131

We see here how the notion of procession opposes itself to that of creation: the latter
separating the sky and the creator, the former unifying them in the same gentle movement
of superabundance. But this divine emanation does not determine the forms, since the
Intelligence, stemming from God, turns around towards Him and receives light from Him,
and since the soul in turn contemplates the intelligible sun, and is illuminated by it. It is
then by the contemplation of the superior hypostases that each principle is fully
realised.132 God here only arouses his worshipers. But the latter, barely noticed, ask to be
taken back in detail.
b) The First Hypostasis. Let us immediately confront the ambiguity already
indicated in the notion of the One, which is both a rational principle of explication and a
desire of the soul. Plato said that the Good is the greatest knowledge: it apprehends by
knowledge not the vision of the Good, but by reasoned cognition that we have of it prior
to that vision. That which instructs us concerning the Good are analogies, negations,
knowledge of the beings stemming from it, and its ascending gradations. But that which
conducts us up to it are our purifications, our virtues, our interior disposition and so on.
In this way one becomes a contemplator of oneself and of the other things, and at the
same time the object of this contemplation. And, having become essence, intelligence and
a whole animal one no longer sees the Good from the outside.133
Let us remark that these two aspects are not coexisting, but identical. That which

130

V, I, 6 (Loeb page 31).

V, 2, I.
132
V, 1, 6; V, 2; V, 3, 4.
133
VI, 7, 35.
131

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achieves the first hypostasis is the principle of unity. It is that which one contemplates.134
In the same instant in which we look at a star, the star defines us and limits us in a certain
measure. And to say that the One is the principle of all things is to say that contemplation
is the only reality. If we seek now to define the One, we run into great difficulties.
1. Firstly it is nothing; no distinct being, being pure unity. But it is everything, as
the principle of all things. Certainly, it is both the Beautiful and the Good at the same
time.135 But these are not definitions. These are ways of speaking which do not bind it.
Because clearly it is only a nothing or, at most, a point of convergence.136 But
fundamentally the difficulty does not lie here. Why did the One which held the whole of
contracted reality within itself create? And above all, how did that unity become
multiplicity?
2. The One being perfect is superabundant, and this superabundance produces a
thing different from itself. The thing engendered turns itself towards the One; it is
enriched, and upon turning its eyes on itself, becomes intelligence. Its halt, on account of
the One, produces it as being; and its eyes turn towards itself as intelligence. And
because it stopped to look at itself, it becomes both intelligence and being at the same
time.137 The One produces, then, like fire yields its heat or a flower its perfume. And it is
as object of contemplation that it gives to intelligence the forms in which it dresses
itself138. But how can we acknowledge that the One is scattered in the multiplicity of the
intelligibles? This is the true difficulty and the centre of the Plotinian system. For this
problem links to the no less important one of divine transcendence or immanence, and to
that which sets down the relations between intelligence and the intelligibles, or between
the Soul of the World and individual souls. And it is precisely here that a certain way of
seeing, particular to Plotinus, intervenes, and we will have to define this in terms of our
study.
At certain moments, he is content to describe the mechanism of the operation:
134

III, 8, 10.
I, 6, 6: So we must follow the same line of enquiry to discover beauty and goodness, and ugliness and
evil. And first we must posit beauty which is also the good.
136
VI, 8, 9; V, I, 6.
137
VI, 2.
138
Cf. again VI, 7. At the moment in which life directs its gaze upon it, it is unlimited; one time that it saw
it, it limits itselfThat gaze towards the One carries immediately in it the limit, has determination and
form; that life which received a limit is the Intelligence.
135

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For that Good is the principle, and it is from that that they are in this Intellect, and it is this which
has made them from that Good. For it was not lawful in looking to him to think nothing, nor again
to think what was in him; for then Intellect itself would not have generated them. Intellect139
therefore had the power from him to generate and to be filled full of its own offspring, since the
Good gave what he did not himself have. But from the Good himself who is one there were many
for this Intellect; for it was unable to hold the power which it received and broke it up and made
the one power many, that it might be able so to bear it part by part.140

But if, from the description, Plotinus passes to the explication, he appeals to certain
images. How can the One, at the same time, both be and not be dispersed in the
multiplicity? As the tree is dispersed in its branches without them altogether being found
there,141 just so light divides between the rays that it emits without for all that being
collected there,142 and just as fire emits heat and communicates it by sympathy143, and
finally just as from a spring, rivers can be born which will flow to the sea of the different
and yet similar waters.144 In other words, the principle of contradiction would be able to
be in play if it were a question of creation, but under the category of procession, it is
necessary to appeal to another principle, largely similar moreover to the principle of
participation that M. Levy Brhl attributes only to primitive mentalities. But it is into the
interior of the intelligible world that it is necessary to venture in order to now
comprehend that particular solution.
c) The Second Hypostasis. Upon the rational agenda by which we attempt to guide
ourselves here almost exclusively, it is the Intelligence which is endowed with the
greatest explanatory power. In any case the theory is not well determined. Firstly, we can
note a double aspect already classical for us. The Intelligence is a metaphysical principle,
but remains a stage in the repatriation of the soul. Via the first aspect, it identifies with the
world of the Platonic Ideas. But in the same interior of this latter notion, one can detect
juxtaposed three interpretations of the second hypostasis. Intelligence is in the first place
a sort of intuitive art which is reflected upon the crystal of the world, just as sculpture
shows through even in roughly cast clay. Secondly, it is the perfect model on which to
139

Translators note: Camus citation reads here: the One had the power to engender (Page 1275), not
the Intelligence had the power to engender. The Greek is apparently ambiguous.
140
VI, 7, 15. (Loeb 135)
141
V, 2, end.
142
V, 1, 6.
143
V, 4, 1.
144
III, 8, 10.

57
mould the Forms. And finally it is a God, or rather a demiurge, which informed matter.
But let us keep ourselves from exaggerating that diversity of interpretation. And let us
take here the notion of Intelligence in the broadest sense of the world of ideas. From that
instant a problem becomes essential, which is a close relative of that one which we
confront in the theory of the One. How does the Intelligence overflow into the
intelligibles? Are these different from Intelligence, in which they are in the interior of the
form which is common to them?
Plotinus solution is transparence. The intelligibles are in Intelligence, but their
relations are not those of any currently accepted logic. Like the diamonds that water itself
replenishes, and from which each glimmer is fed by fires which play also in the other
faces in order that the same light infinitely repeated only defines itself through these fires,
but at the same time could not know how to gather themselves up. In this way Intelligence
spills its glimmer into the intelligibles which are in it, as it is in them, and as long as we
say that that they are from it and it is from them:
Everything is transparent, nothing obscure or unyielding; every being is visible to every being even
unto its infinity; it is a light for a light. Every being has in it all things and sees all things in the
other. Everything is everywhere. Each being is everything. Yonder sun is all the stars, and each of
them is the sunA different character goes out in in each being but all the characters are manifest
thereHere below a part comes from another part, and each thing is fragmentary: yonder each
being comes to every instant of all and it is at the same time particular and universal.145

The result of this is that Intelligence carries in itself the whole richness of the intelligible
world. To know is for it wholly to know oneself - and from there to know the One. It is in
this idea that the unity of the second hypostasis is found which in some sense we directly
apprehend. But even here the thought changes agenda in order to enter into conversion
and inner asceticism, which we still have not yet taken into account. Let us note only that
the ideal Intelligence marks a state where the object identifies itself with the subject, and
145

II, 8, 4. Similarly we cite in note, for its length, a suggestive text, and by the image and by the meaning,
on that aspect of Plotinian thought. VI, 8, 9: Suppose that in our visible world each part remains that which
is without confusion, but that everything reassembles itself into one, in order that if the One among them
appears, for example the celestial sphere, it is followed immediately by the apparition of the sun and of the
other stars; one sees it in it, as on a transparent sphere, the earth, the sea and all the animals; effectively
then, one sees there all things. Be then, in the soul, only the representation of one such sphere. Keep for
yourself the image and represent to yourself another similar sphere in making the abstraction of its mass;
make an abstraction also of the differences of position and of the image of the matter; do not content
yourselves with representing for yourselves a second sphere, smaller that the firstGod comes then, to
carry in you his own world united in all the gods which are in him. All are each and each are all; all together
they are different by their powers; but they are all a unique being with a multiple power.

58
in which pure thought is solely thought of oneself. It is by a progressive concentration, by
a dive into self, that Intelligence seizes its interior richness. Do we want to go further? It
is to an image again that Plotinus appeals:
In the one figure of Intellect holding as within an outline outlines inside itself and again
figurations inside and powers and thoughts; and its division does not go in a straight line, but
moves always to the interior, as the natures of living beings are included in and belong to the
universal living being, and again other natures going on to the smaller living things and the
weaker powers, where it will come to stop at the indivisible form.146

It is by the collapse of these walls that Intelligence grasps its most profound truth. That
Being which lodges at the heart of all things, which gives to the world its existence and
its true sense, draws all its unity from its origin. And distributed among its intelligibles,
although knowing itself like Intelligence, it is the ideal intermediate between the
indefinable Good for which we hope, and the Soul which emanates behind sensible
appearances.
d) The Third Hypostases147.
It occupies a middle rank among realities, belonging to that divine part but being on the lowest
edge of the intelligible, and , having a common boundary with the perceptible nature, gives
something to it of what it has in itself and receives something from it in return, if it does not use
only its safe part in governing the universe, but with greater eagerness plunges into the interior and
does not stay whole with whole.148

In Plotinian terms, explicating a notion is equivalent to circumscribing the exact place

where it fits into the flow of the hypostases. The above text clearly explains this first
aspect of the soul, heir to the intelligible world in its superior part, and submerging its
inferior extremity in the sensible world. But at the same time the religious content of that
conception appears, and we see how the soul as metaphysical principle could equally
serve as mooring post for a theory of the fall or of original sin.
The Soul of the World defines all which lives, in the manner of the Stoics world
as animal. But at the same time it is also the intelligible world, more and more divided
and fragmented (since it already marked the dispersion of the One). Thus it is the
146

VI, 7, 14. (Loeb VII 133)

Principal texts: a) in general: IV, 3, 4, 5. b) definition: I, 8, 14; III, 4, 3; IV, 8, 7; IV, 8, 3; VI, 7, 35. c)
analysis: III, 8, 5; IV, 3, 4, 9; IV, 9. d) relations between Soul of the World and individual Souls: III, 1, 14;
IV, 3, 5, and 6; IV, 3, 12; IV, 3, 17; V, 8, 6; IV, 9, 8; VI, 1, 2; V, 2, 7; VI, 4, 16; VI, 5, 7; VI, 1, 7.
148
IV, 8, 7.(Loeb IV 419)
147

59
intermediate between the sensible world and the intelligible world. There are a few
difficulties in its relations with the intelligible. The Intelligence produces the Soul just as
the One engendered it itself.149 But, if it is true that the Soul of the World is dispersed
throughout the sensible world, and if it is true that the individual souls are parts of the
Soul of the World, which take themselves to be playing, in their respective spheres, the
role that it itself plays in the theatre of the world,150 then how do we reconcile these parts
and this whole? And how do we reconcile this continuity of principles with the continuity
of beings which gives to the Plotinian doctrine its whole meaning, as we shall be
maintaining? A new problem arises concerning the soul, just as it arose in the two first
hypostases.
First: Plotinus considered it particularly important, since he devoted three
treatises of the fourth Ennead151 to it exclusively. The safest course is to return to these
treatises. They envisage two problems: the relation between the Soul of the World and the
individual souls; and that of the human soul to its body. But the latter, which deals more
particularly with psychology, will be studied in turn, and will serve as a wholly natural
transition from our study of conversion.
In the ninth treatise of the fourth Ennead, Plotinus demonstrates the fundamental
unity of the souls, and their liaison with the force which animates the world. To tell the
truth, above all he gives an image. He represents that unity as that of a seminal reason
containing all organs of the body, or defines it as a science containing in potential all its
theorems.152 But this established, the issue of the production of individual souls arises.
Plotinus solution is as always less a reason than a sentiment, from which he endeavours
to provide the equivalent in an image - a solution already employed for the One and
Intelligence, and from which the essential returns according to M. Brehier to the
affirmation of a unity between the souls which are not a confusion and the affirmation of
a confusion which is not a division.153 The image of light intervenes again here.154 Or
else that other image:
149

V, 4, 2.
III, 2 and 3.
151
IV, 3, 4, 5, Difficulties relative to the soul.
152
IV, 9, 5.
153
Footnote to IV, 3, p. 17.
154
IV, 3, 4.
150

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So it is also in the All, to whatever it reaches; it is in one part of a plant and also in another, even if
it is cut off; so that it is in the original plant and the part cut off from it: for the body of the all is
one, and soul is everywhere in it as in one thing.155

How do we explain then the differences between the individual souls?

It is that they do not have the same relation to the intelligible. They are more or less opaque. And
the least transparence which renders them different on the road of the procession, hierarchises them
on the road of the conversion156. On this subject the explication by contemplation intervenes again
with force.157
By one being united in actuality, one being in a state of knowledge, one in a state of desire, and in
that different souls look at different and are and become what they look at.158

Second: When all is said and done, the unity of the souls is a unity of convergence, in
which they fully participate in the same living reality. Their multiplicity is that of a
spiritual life, which is going to darken little by little until the dispersion of the parts. It is a
loosening which brings to the fore the particularities of the individual souls. Darkening
little by little, the souls plunge into matter. Here, in short, Plotinian thought is not
definitive. For him the cause of that fall of the soul is both audacity159 and blindness.160
The latter interpretation seemed more orthodox. The soul reflects itself in matter, and
taking this reflection for itself, it goes down to unite with it, when it should have on the
contrary risen up to rejoin its origins.
3. Finally the Plotinian conception of the human soul is strictly linked to all which
precedes. The principle which rules it is this: it is only in its inferior part that the human
soul participates in the body. But there is always in it an intelligence directed towards the
intelligible world.161 However, the constraint of piloting the weak body amidst the pitfalls
of sensible nature, it lowers itself and forgets little by little its princely origin. From this
principle the whole psychology of Plotinus follows. Firstly, if the diversity of the souls
imitates that of the intelligible world,162 their function is purely cosmic. And psychology
is still physical. Another immediate consequence is that all knowledge which is not
155

IV, 3, 8. (Loeb IV 61)

Compare IV, 4, 3. (Loeb IV 57)
157
[? not in IV, 3, 1-7.- yet to find]
158
IV, 3, 8.
159
IV, 3, 12; IV, 3, 17; IV, 8, 5.
160
IV, 3, 13; VI, 7, 7; V, 2, 7.
161
III, 12, 4, 5.
162
IV, 3, 14.
156

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intuitive and contemplative participates in the conditions of the corporeal life: reasoned
thought is only a weakening of intuitive thought. Consciousness is an accident and an
obsession. Nothing of that which constitutes it can belong to the superior part of the soul.
The memory itself marks an attachment to the sensible forms. And the soul having arrived
at the contemplation of the intelligibles will not have any memory of its past lives.163 And
it is in this way that a conception of me appears at first glance paradoxical, but very
fruitful: There is a point where one could fix ones own limits, in a manner of speaking:
up to that point is me. 164 We see here the connection where the doctrine of the
conversion is inserted. In contemplation the soul forgets practical necessities. The vision
of Intelligence will be born in the closing of the eyes. The desire for God will animate it.
It will go back up the ladder of things and beings. It will rediscover the procession of a
whole movement of love - which is conversion.
Here then is noted as briefly as possible the diverse moments of the procession.
But not everything here is equally satisfying. We have not given an exact reflection of the
thought of Plotinus. There is a lack of movement. We are going to ask of the conversion
that it restore that continuity without collisions, which draws the soul up to the One.
2. The Conversion, or the Path of Ecstasy.
a) It is in the Soul that the principle of conversion is found. The Soul is desire for
God and nostalgia for a lost homeland. Life without God is only a shadow of life. All
beings strive towards God on the ladder of ideas, and attempt to reascend the path of the
procession. Only matter, that great indigent, this positive nothing, does not aspire to God,
and it is in it that the principle of evil resides: So it is actually a phantasm: so it is
actually a falsity: this is the same as that which is truly a falsity; this is what is really
unreal.165 But as a creator of mirages it only exists at heart in the blindness of souls. The
principle of conversion has its source in soul and not in matter. Such is this principle: it is
the desire for God. And all along this desire is revealed by the religious aspect of the
hypostases, considered as so many stages in the voyage of the soul to the metaphysical
163

IV, 1, 1, 10.
IV, 3, 18.
165
II, 5, 5 (Loeb II 169).
164

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homeland. As if by their longing they had found where it is. And this is Love camping
on the doorstep, even coming from outside into the presence of beauty and longing for it,
and satisfied if in this way it can have a part in it.166
Desire is also contrary to the world. So we must fly from here and separate
ourselves from what has been added to us.167 To desire is to love that which we lack. It is
to want to be, and to want to be one. Because to search for an identity is in a sense to
reassemble. Even beauty is insufficient.168 Virtue is also only a stage that it is necessary to
surpass in order to arrive at God.169 For the One alone, nothing is desirable: this colours
it.170 The Soul in its frantic desire is not even contented with Intelligence.
But when a kind of warmth from thence comes upon it, it gains strength and wakes and it truly
winged; and though it is moved with passion for that which lies close by it, yet all the same it rises
higher, to something greater which it seems to remember. And as long as there is anything higher
than that which is present to it, it naturally goes on upwards, lifted by the giver of its love. It rises
above Intellect, but cannot run on above the Good, for there is nothing above. But if it remains in
Intellect it sees fair and noble things, but has not yet quite grasped what it is seeking. It is as if it
was in the presence of a face which is certainly beautiful, but cannot catch the eye because it has no
grace playing upon its beauty.171

b) This desire of the Soul contaminates Intelligence. Knowing is still desiring. To

say that Intelligence has need of nothing, is only to say that it is independent of the
sensible world. But it is turned towards the beyond. It needs the One. It lived towards it
and depended on it and turned to it.172 It lacks something, and this is its unity. There is in
it an indigence on account of the self and from which it suffers and quivers. The Plotinian
Intelligence is not the Reason of mathematics. In any case, as we have seen, it is through
the return to and the contemplation of the One that Intelligence receives its form. That
advance towards God is fundamental to him. And the entire intelligible world also sets
out towards the One.
c) But the great problem that the conversion raises is analogous to that one which
from the three returns we found in the Procession. It is entirely laid out in one text of the
166

VI, 5, 10. (Loeb VI 349)

II, 3, 9.
168
V, 5, 12.
169
I, 2, 7; VI, 3, 16; VI, 9, 7.
170
VI, 7, 22.
171
VI, 7, 22. (Loeb VII 157). Camus cites the Arnou translation: le Desir de Dieu dans la philosophie de
Plotin, p.82.
172
VI, 7, 16. (Loeb VII 139)
167

63
Enneads: for certainly that which is altogether without a share in the good would not
ever seek the good.173 That is to say: you could not search for me if you had not already
found me. Or in Plotinian terms: desire requires a certain immanence of that which is
desired in that which desires. Will the One then be transcendent or immanent? A
controversial question. Some are partisans of the pantheism of Plotinus (e.g. Zeller),
others detecting a doctrine of transcendence (e.g. Caird174). Without claiming to decide the
question definitively, we can however endeavour to pose it otherwise.
God to us then is immanent. Desire demands it. In any case we carry within us the
three hypostases, since it is by inner contemplation that we realise the ecstasy and the
union with the One. On the other hand, one cannot deny of the God of Plotinus an
incontestable transcendence in comparison to other beings. When he produces he does not
add to himself, but he superabounds without exhausting himself. It is necessary to invert
the terms of the problem to understand this contradiction. If it is true that that which
learns to know itself, knows at the same time from whence it comes,175 and if it is true
that to raise himself above his principle is to gather his thoughts, we must say that God is
not immanent to any being, but that all things are immanent to God.
Soul is not in the universe, but the universe in it: for body is not the souls place, but Soul is in
Intellect and body in Soul, and Intellect in something else; but there is nothing other than this for it
to be in: it is not, then, in anything; in this way therefore, it is nowhere. Where then are the other
things? In it.176

Let us consider on the other hand that all being has two acts: the act of the essence, and
an act which comes from the essence. The first reconnects it with itself, the second pushes
it to produce and to go out from its own core. In this way God appears suddenly from
outside of himself, but without failing in his essence. The whole error of too literal an
interpretation, is one of placing the One in space. The doctrine of Plotinus is an attempt
to think non-spatially. And it is this agenda, qualitative and inexpressible, that we must
endeavour to understand. Otherwise we return after all to a psychological problem: i.e.,
does thought exist in abstraction from space? That is another thing altogether. Upon
173

III, 5, 9. (Loeb III 203).

Edw. Caird: His philosophy is the condemnation of Greek dualism precisely because it pushes it to
excess. The evolution of theology in the Greek philosophers : the Gifford lectures delivered in the
University of Glasgow 1900-1 and 1901-2 vol. II, pp. 210 and 393
175
V, 1, 1.
176
V, 5, 9. (Loeb V 185).
174

64
making the effort to assimilate Plotinian experience, we see that the first principle is itself
present in all its works,177 and that it is not localised and that in a certain sense it is at the
same time both transcendent and immanent in all things.178 However, he is everywhere on
the condition of being nowhere, for he who is not attached to any connection, is not
connected to where he is not.
d) The Ecstasy or the Union with the One. With this problem examined, we will be able
to understand that to ascend to God, one must go back into the self. Nevertheless it is into
the reflection of its origins that the soul must dive. From God to God, such is its
voyage.179 But it is necessary to purify oneself, that is to say, to cleanse oneself of that
which is attached to the soul during its generation. One must not live for that which in the
soul is not the soul,180 but, returning to that homeland,181 the memory of which sometimes
colours our restlessness of soul. The soul has this effect; it is destroyed and lets itself be
absorbed into the Intelligence which dominates it, and this latter in turn endeavours to
disappear only leaving the One which illuminates it. This union, so complete and so
rare,182 is the ecstasy.183 But it is here, in the interior meditation, that it takes place, and
Plotinus stops at this point in his voyage. The analyses cannot go further, nor become
more profound. This feeling is so nuanced and so full with divinity: the exquisite
melancholy of certain Plotinian texts takes us to the heart of the thought of their author.
Often I have woken up out of the body to myself184 Solitary meditation, love of the
world insofar as it is only a crystal where the divinity plays, thought totally penetrated
with the silent rhythms of the stars but also with the restlessness of the God who arranges
them: Plotinus thinks as an artist and feels in philosophy, according to a reason totally
penetrated with light, and in the face of a world where intelligence breathes.
177

Again VI, 5, 12: it did not come in order to be present, but you went away when it was not present. But
if you went away, it was not from it - for it is present - and you did not even go away then, but were present
and turned the opposite way. (Loeb VI 359).
178
Compare Christian mysticism, e.g., Suso ex. No. 54: It is to be at the same time in all things and outside
of all things. It is why a master said that God is like a circle from which the centre is everywhere and the
circumference nowhere.
179
Arnou, op. cit., p. 191.
180
V, 5, 8.
181
I, VI, 8.
182
Porphyry, Life of Plotinus, 23.
183
Major texts: IV, 8, I; VI, 9, 9; VI, 7, 39; VI, 8, 19.
184
IV, 8, 1. (Loeb IV 397).

65
But before extricating the original themes of his philosophy, and above all before
examining in what ways they serve or lead to the evolution of Christian metaphysics, let
us consider the attitude of Neoplatonism towards Christianity according to the texts. We
will then have what is necessary in order to judge the Neoplatonists originality in relation
to Christian thought.
II. Resistance.
The fervor with which Plotinus ascends towards God could mislead us, and push
us to believe him more Christian than he is. His attitude towards the Gnostics, that is to
say, towards a certain form of Christian thought, will permit us on the contrary to judge
the more categorical position of his disciple Porphyry with prudence.
a) It is in the ninth chapter of the second Ennead that Plotinus writes against a
Gnostic sect which cannot be identified with precision.185 He there elegantly contrasts his
own universe, coherent and harmonious, with the romantic universe of the Gnostics. And
one can in this way get a grip on a certain number of irreducible oppositions. The
reproaches of Plotinus revolve around four points, which are furthermore of unequal
importance. He reproaches the Gnostics for despising the created world, and for believing
that a new earth awaits them,186 for thinking themselves to be the children of God, and for
substituting for universal harmony a providence which will satisfy their egotism,187 for
calling brothers most vile men when they do not accord this title to the gods,188 and for
having substituted for virtue of blood the idea of an arbitrary salvation where mankind is
pointless.189
The treatise in effect is entitled: Against those who say that the demiurge of the
world is wicked and that the world is evil. At heart it is the aesthetic point of view which
is employed here:
The whole heaven and the stars there have no share given them in the immortal soul, though they
are made of much fairer and purer material, though these people see the order there and the
excellence of form and arrangement, and are particularly addicted to complaining about the
185

Perhaps a sect of the Adepts of the Mother II, 9, 10; II, 9, 12.
II, 9, 5.
187
II, 9, 9.
188
II, 9, 18.
189
II, 9, 15.
186

66
disorder here around the earth!190

And further: Again, despising the universe and the gods in it and the other noble things
is certainly not becoming good.191
b) It follows that it is his sense of the order and economy of the world that
Plotinus feels is affronted:
If God in his providence cares for you, why does he neglect the whole universe in which you
yourselves are?But they have no need of him. But the universe does need him, and knows its
station. 192

The theatricality, the creation, the human and perceptible God: all are repugnant to
Plotinus. But perhaps even more so, to his aristocratic nature, the humanitarianism of the
Christians: Or do the Gnostics think it right to call the lowest of men brothers, but refuse
in their raving talk, to call the sun and the gods in the sky brothers and the soul of the
universe sister?193 It is then also the ancient Greek naturalism which protests in Plotinus.
But it is certain that all these objections are summed up in the repugnance of the wise
Greek towards Christian anarchy. The theory of a gratuitous and irrational Salvation is
the fundamental object of all the attacks of this treatise. As we have seen, this doctrine of
salvation implies a certain disinterest towards virtue in the Hellenic sense. Addressing
God, believing in and loving him in consequence redeems the good in these errors.
Plotinus, who critiques this precise point with a rare violence, understood this well:
This, too, is evidence of their indifference to virtue, that they have never made any treatise about
virtue, but have altogether left out the treatment of these subjects; they do not tell us what kind of
thing virtue is, nor how many parts it has, nor about all the many noble studies of the subject to
be found in the treatises of the ancients, nor from what virtue results and how it is to be attained,
nor how the soul is tended, nor how it is to be purified. For it does no good at all to say Look to
God, unless one also teaches how one is to look. For someone could say, what prevents me
from looking and refraining from no pleasure, or from having no control over my emotions and
from remembering the name God and at the same time being in the grip of all the passions and
making no attempt to get rid of any of them. In reality it is virtue which goes before us to the
goal and, when it comes to exist in the soul along with wisdom, shows God; but God, if you talk
about him without true virtue, is only a name. 194

The arbitrariness inherent in the whole doctrine of salvation could not be reconciled with
190

II, 9, 5 (Loeb II 239) above all II, 9, 17: it is not really possible for anything to be beautiful outwardly
but ugly inwardly (Loeb II 295) .
191
II, 9, 16. (Loeb II 285).
192
II, 9, 9.(Loeb II 263).
193
II, 9, 18.(Loeb II 297).
194
II, 9, 15 end. (Loeb II 285)

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a doctrine where beings behave according to the necessities of their nature, and not,
which was what annoyed Plotinus, at these moments rather than at some other.195 Note
well that this is about Gnosticism, and that these reproaches address certain caricatures of
Christianity. But in the end Plotinus combats much more an attitude in the face of the
world, than doctrinal details. What is thus opposed are two reflections on the human
condition. Of both we already know enough to foresee how much they remain
irreconcilable on certain points.
However, one disciple of Plotinus went much further and did not hesitate to write
an entire work against the Christians. He wrote it aged between 35 and 40 (after 208
A.D.). This treatise contained no less than 15 books. We only know it by fragments196
gathered by Harnack. We will leave aside critiques of the details (improbability,
contradiction) that Porphyry did not fail to formulate. They constitute the common core of
all the works of pagan polemics. We will cite only a few texts which contrast Christianity
and Neoplatonism on some doctrinal points.
Porphyry complains that the apostles were rustics without intelligence.197 The
work is classical, but further it reproaches believers for attaching themselves to an
irrational faith198 and it is expressed in these terms: the great godsend of Christ on this
earth is to have dissimulated to the sages the rays of knowledge in order to disclose it to
the beings deprived of meaning and to the foundlings.199 Concerning the creation of the
world, he stumbles on this text of Paul. For the fashion of this world passeth away.200
How could this be so, asks Porphyry, and who could make it pass?:
If it was the demiurge who exposed himself to the reproach of stirring up trouble, of altering a
whole peacefully establishedIf the condition of the world really is lugubrious, it is the demiurge
against whom a chorus of protests must be raised, for having arranged the elements of the universe
in such an unfortunate way, to the scorn of the rational character of nature.201

The Christian eschatology offends not only his idea of order but also his aesthetic
sensibility:
195

II, 9, 4; II, 9, 11.

Saint Jrme Eusbe, Manuscrit de Macarius.
197
Fragment 4 cited by Labriolle, la Raction paenne, p. 256.
198
Fr. 73 ap. Labriolle: op. cit., p. 212.
199
Fr. 52 ap. Labriolle: op. cit., 272.
200
1 Corinthians 7: 31.
201
Fr. 34 ap. Labriolle, op. cit., p. 260.
196

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And the Creator could see the sky liquefy itself (and could one imagine something more
wonderfully beautiful than the sky?) while the body corrupts, destroying resuscitated men,
including those who before death presented a hard and repulsive appearance. 202

Porphyry nevertheless passes occasionally from indignation to insult.203 A

cultivated Greek could not adopt such an attitude without good reason.
III. Meaning and Influence of Neoplatonism.
It is time to determine the meaning of the Neoplatonist solution, and its role in the
evolution of the Christian metaphysics. Our task here will be to make the novelty of
Neoplatonism stand out, and to indicate in which directions its influence is exercised. Our
study of Christianity will permit us to enter into the details of that influence. But let us
summarise firstly in a few words the general nature of Neoplatonism.
a) Neoplatonism is a perpetual effort to reconcile contradictory notions with the
aid of the principal of participation, valid only in a non-spatial and timeless logic.
Mystical Reason, sensible Intelligence; immanent and transcendent God: the oppositions
abound. They all mark however a constant balance between the sensible and the
intellectual, the religious aspect of the principles and their explanatory power. In this
dialogue at the heart of Reason, truth can only express itself in images. Hence the
abundance of comparisons in Plotinus. This superabundance corresponds without doubt
to the same need as the evangelical parables: pouring the intelligible into a sensible form,
returning to intuition that which belonged to Reason. But at the same time these apparent
contradictions are illuminated by the hypothesis of a thought situated outside space and
time. That is why the originality of Plotinus resides above all in the method which
presides in his reconciliations. But a method is only valid insofar as it expresses a
necessity in the nature of its author. We have also shown that this was so.
What place between Hellenism and Christianity must one then attribute to
Neoplatonism? Regarding the first, we have sufficiently shown what of pure Hellenism
the Enneads contained. But something however made Plotinus a totally original figure.
In Plotinus the myths concerning the destiny of the soul seem superfluous and juxtaposed
to the properly rational explications. In Plotinus, the two processes were joined and were
202
203

Fr. 94 ap. Labriolle, op. cit., p. 287.

Fgts 23, 35, 49, 54, 55 ap. Labriolle, op. cit., p. 287.

69
not incompatible since they overlap at the heart of the same reality. We can clearly see the
essential difference which singularises Plotinus in his era. A difference which is equally
valuable for Christianity since this time it is the rational aspect which Christianity will
lack. Halfway between the two doctrines204 Plotinus alone is designated to serve as
intercessor.
b) To tell the truth, that which Neoplatonism supplied to Christianity for its later
evolution is a method and an orientation of thought. A direction of thought, because in
supplying to religious thinking prefabricated frameworks, it oriented it strongly towards
the kind of inner vision from which these frameworks had been created. It is towards the
reconciliation of a metaphysics with a primitive faith that Alexandrian thought
encouraged Christianity to move. Here there was little to do, for the movement was
already given. But the method was attained at the right moment. It is effectively according
to the principle of participation that Christianity is going to resolve its great problems
with the Incarnation and the Trinity. But let us endeavour to clarify this in a particular
example.
Arrian205 depended upon certain scriptural texts to affirm the creation of the Son
by the Father and the subordination of the former to the latter. The Lord created me to be
the beginning of his ways.206 For neither the angels of heaven nor the Son are instructed
of the day or of the hour: the Father alone knows it.207 Arrian cites certain texts from the
Gospel of John: The Father who sent me is greater than me.208 And this is life eternal,
that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent.209
The Son can do nothing by himself.210
To this affirmation Athanase, defender of the orthodoxy, opposed three very
explicit texts of John: I and my Father are one211. The Father is in me, and I in him212.

204

The question of the Orientalism of Plotinus belongs here.

For the history of Arianism see Tixeront, Hist. des dogmes, vol. II, chap. II.
206
VIII, 22.
207
Acts 1:7
208
John 14: 28.
209
John 17: 3.
210
John 5: 19; also John, 11:33, 38; Luke, 2:52; Mat., 26:39; Phil.1:9; Hebrews, 1: 9.
211
John 10:30.
212
John 10:38.
205

70
And he that seeth me seeth him that sent me213. The Son according to these texts both
was and was not God. But the classic question of Neoplatonism saw the problem posed in
only this way. And how shocked we are if it is according to a similar method that
Christian thought concludes the debate. The Nicene creed (325 A.D.) poses the principle
of consubstantiality, and opposes the Christ engendered in Jesus invented by Arrian:
We believe in one God, Father almighty, creator of all things visible and invisible, and in the
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, light of lights, true God of true Gods, begotten not made, of one
substance with the Father through whom all things were made which are in Heaven and on earth,
who descended from Heaven for us and for our salvation, was incarnated, became man, suffered,
and rose again on the third day, ascended into Heaven, and will come again to judge the living
and the dead. And in the Holy Spirit.214

And if this text does not appear sufficiently explicit, let us add another that Athanase in
the Letter on the decrees of the council of Nice215 cites following Theognoste, chief of the
catechistic School of Alexandria between 270 and 280 A.D.216
The substance of the Son did not come from outside. It was not derived ex nihilo; it issues from the
substance of the Father as brightness issues from light, or vapour from water, for the splendour is
not the sun itself, nor the vapour the water itself. This is not however a strange thing. It is an
emanation from the substance of the Father, without which no division would occur. Just as the sun
remains that which is not diminished by the rays which it emits, the substance of the Father submits
to no alteration upon having his Son for an image.

These texts are significant, and show us which attributes exhibit the influence of
Neoplatonism, and which concern the methods of resolution. Numerous texts exhibit
this217. But as eloquent as were these parallels, we should not draw hasty and over
generous conclusions from them concerning Neoplatonism. Christianity is quite different,
and hence its fundamental originality.
c) We see then in what sense we can speak of an influence of Neoplatonism on
Christian thought. It is in truth the influence of a metaphysical doctrine on a religious
thinking: an example to follow, a stirring up of ambitions. It is then with good reason that
we have taken the thought of Plotinus as the symbol of that influence. It prepared and
softened up some formulas, which needed eventually to turn out ready-made. Apart from
that in itself which it allows is touching and original, its role stops here. Too many things
213

John 12:45.
In Hesele, Histoire des Conciles, vol. I, pp. 443, 444.
215
No. 25.
216
Plotinus died in 270.
217
Saint Basil, Homelies sur le precepte Observation, par. 7, and Eusebius of Cesarea, Preparat. Evang.
XII, 17: It is the ray of a light which escapes from it without troubling its quietude, etc.
214

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separate Saint Augustine and Plotinus.

Chapter Four. Word and Flesh

I. The Second Revelation.
1. The psychological experience of Saint Augustine and Neoplatonism.
a) Before showing how the evolution that we have endeavoured to retrace finds in
Augustinianism one of its most moving formulas, we must concern ourselves with the
Neoplatonism of Saint Augustine. Let us firstly pose the problem: the novel Platonic
philosophy exerted an influence on the great doctor. He cites several texts of the
Enneads.218 One can compare a certain number of Augustinian texts with certain Plotinian
thoughts. The more suggestive in that regard concern the nature of God.
Concerning his ineffability: Sermo, 117, 5; De civitate Dei, IX, 16 with Enn., VI,
9, 5; De Trinitate, VIII, 2 and XV, 5 with Enn., V, 3, 13; on his eternity: Conf. XI, 13 and
Enn., III, 6, 7; on his ubiquity: Sermon 277, 13 and 18 with Enn. VI, 4, 2; on his
spirituality: De civitate Dei, XIII, 5 and Enn. VI, 8, 11. Regarding this influence we have
been able to draw extensive conclusions.219 The teaching of Saint Augustine is however
sufficiently explicit. And the famous passage of the Confessions on the books of the
Platonists gives a very clear summary of the question. We shall cite it in spite of its
length. In all that which is going to follow he will teach us:
I readIn the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and that Word was God: the
same was in the beginning with Godthe Word, God himself, is that true light that lighteth every
man that cometh into the worldBut that the Word was made flesh and dwelt amongst us, did I not
read thereBut that he made himself of no reputation, taking upon him the form of a servant, and
was made in the likeness of men, and was found in fashion as a man, and humbled himself, and
became obedient unto death220

Contrasting the Incarnation with Contemplation, Saint Augustine immediately set out the
oppositions and the resemblances of the two thoughts.
b) But at least to the extent to which that influence pervades. In a few years, that
which can be grasped in Augustinian thought gathers up the hesitations and the repetitions
218

I, VI, Du Beau; III, VI, De la Providence; III, IV, Du Demon qui nous est donne en partage; IV, VI, Le
principe superior a letre ne pense pas.
219
Alfaric, lEvolution intellectuelle de Saint Augustin.
220
Conf. VII, ch IX. (Loeb I pp365-367).

72
of Christian thought. Extremely passionate and sensual, the fear of not being able to
control himself delays his conversion for a long time.221 At the same time he has a taste
for rational truths. It is this anxiety about reason which makes him adhere to
Manicheanism, even at Carthage in the middle of an exuberant and voluptuous life222.
Some aspects of Manicheanism only served to extend Gnosticism, but yet in its favour it
promised proofs. This is what attracted Saint Augustine.223
But at the same time the problem of evil obsessed him: I searched for the source
of evil and I did not cease.224 And he is pursued by the idea of death: Without having
discovered the truth the fear of death gnawed at me.225 Greek in his need for coherence;
Christian in worries and in his sensibility; he remained for a long time aloof from
Christianity. The allegorical method of Saint Ambrose and Neoplatonic thought both
convinced Saint Augustine at once. But at the same time, they did not persuade him. The
conversion was postponed. It appeared to him above all that the solution lay not in
knowledge, and that the way out of his doubts and his disgust for the flesh lay not in
intellectual evasion but in full consciousness of his depravity and his misery. Loving the
goods which dragged him so low: grace raised him up higher. Saint Augustine finds
himself then at the crossroads of the influences that we have attempted to determine here.
But to what precise degree? That is what we must define.
c) What Saint Augustine demanded along with faith was truth, along with dogma,
metaphysics. And following him, the whole of Christianity. But if he adopts a moment of
Neoplatonism, it was soon to be transfigured, and along with him the whole of
Christianity.226 It is the sense of that transfiguration which we must clarify. Plotinus brings
221

Conf. VIII, ch. 1: For very strongly was I enthralled with the love of a woman (Loeb I p.405)
Cf. Salvien, Degulernatore Dei, Patrologie latine, VII, 16-17: overflowing with vices, boiling with
iniquity, men engorged with vice and swollen with food the obscene voluptuaries stank.
223
It persuaded me that I should trust in the masters who instructed me rather than those who proceeded by
authority Conf. VII, 67, 24. Tes. Col. 739.
224
De Beta vita 4.
225
Conf. LVII, col. 152 P.L.,vol. 33 col. 737; cf. also on his fear of death: Conf. VI, 16; VI, 19-26; Sol. I,
16; II, I.
226
John Martin: Philon, 1907, p. 67. The fathers endured naturally following Saint Paul, adopting the
language that Greek speculation and Alexandrian speculation had created; and by means of that language
they express truths that neither Philo nor any Alexandrian had conceived . And Puech, les Apologistes
grecs (1912) p. 297: The essential fact is religious and not philosophical; they believe firstly in Jesus,
Son of God. And they explain then his divinity by the pre-existence of the Word. And finally Le Breton,
les Origines du Dogme de la Trinite (1910), p. 521: If the theology of the Word appears so profoundly
transformed it is because the person of Jesus to whom it was applied imposed upon it these
222

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to Saint Augustine, as we have seen, the doctrine of the intermediate word and, in
addition, a solution to the problem of evil.
The hypostasized intelligence lights up the destiny of Christ like the word of God:
We have learned of the divine source that the Son of God is only other than the wisdom
of God - and certainly the Son of God is Godbut do you think that be the wisdom, if
not the truth. And effectively, he again said: I am the truth.227 As for evil, Plotinianism
teaches him that he is linked to matter and that his reality is totally negative.228 Thereby all
the doubts of Saint Augustine seem to have dissipated. But for all that conversion did not
come from here. There is something curious about the author of the Confessions in that
his experience remains the perpetual reference of his intellectual researches. Appeased but
not convinced, he said to himself: it is the Incarnation and its humility that Neoplatonism
cannot restore to him. It is only after having understood the latter that an explosion and
tears and joy come to deliver him in the garden of his house. An almost physical
conversion, and so total that Saint Augustine is progressively going to renounce all that
which was his life, and to devote himself to God.
It is then that place given to Christ and the Incarnation in the originality of
Christianity that he must keep with him. These are some formulas and some themes
which he requires of Neoplatonism. The figure of Jesus and the problem of the
redemption will transfigure everything. It is that interference between Greek themes and
Christian dogmas which makes it necessary to attempt to examine his doctrine on some
points.
2. Hellenism and Christianity in Saint Augustine.
1. Evil, Grace and Freedom.
In the examination of problems so specifically Christian, our constant effort will
be to bring to light, in Augustine, the fundamental themes of Christianity. In truth, a
simple recap will be enough, since we have already considered these themes.

transformations.
227
De Beta vita, ch. IV, no. 34 P.L. vol. 32, col. 975
228
Conf. VII, 12, VIII, 13

74
a) We will not return to the importance that the problem of evil assumes in Saint
Augustine. But it is necessary however to note the extreme fecundity of that obsession.
Starting with it our author was able to develop his most original doctrines. That fertility
will even force us to divide our material. The thought of Saint Augustine asserts itself
doctrinally on one hand, and in reaction against Pelagius on the other. Let us examine
firstly his general doctrine, and then the controversy with the Pelagians will clarify the
fundamental tendencies of Augustinianism in the light of that polemic.
Neoplatonism maintains that evil is a privation and not a proper reality. Saint
Augustine agrees.229 But still one must distinguish two sorts of evil: natural evil (the
misery of our condition, the tragedy of human destinies); and moral evil, that is to say sin.
The former explains itself in the manner in which shadows justify themselves in a
picture.230 It serves universal harmony. For the latter, the question is more complex. How
was God able to endow us with a free will, that is to say, with a will capable of doing evil:
Man, as he is now, is not good, and it is not in his power to be good, whether he does not
see that which ought to be, or whether, seeing it, he lacks the power to realize it.231 The
evil consequences of original sin can be imputed to us. God bequeathed to us the free will
of Adam, but our will gained the desire to use it for evil. And we are so profoundly
corrupt that the entirely good use of free will comes from God alone. Left to himself,
man properly only possessed wickedness, untruthfulness and sin: None have escaped
falsehood and sin232 It is God who raises him up when he deigns. It is why the virtues
which subsist in us are only meaningful and valuable with the help of God, particular and
adapted to our weakness: grace. Saint Augustine insists emphatically on the vanity of
virtue itself. We recognize as an evangelical theme firstly grace, and only then virtue.
It is in this way that the virtues of the pagans are inoperative. God gave virtues to
them to incite us to have virtues if we lack them, and to disparage our pride if we already
possess them. Never in Christianity has virtue, in the Hellenic sense, met with so harsh a
test and on so many occasions.233 Still more, these natural virtues become so may vices
229

De natura Boni, IV P.L, vol. 42; col. 553.

Contre Juliannum, III, 206 P.L, vol. 45; col. 334.
231
De libero arbitrio, L 3, ch. 18, no. 51; P.L, vol. 32 col. 1268.
232
In Johann. V, 1; P.L, 18;vol. 35: col. 414, and also Sermo 156, I, 12; P.L, vol. 38: col. 856.
233
De civ. Dei, V, 18, 3; P.L, vol. 41, col. 165-166; Epist. 138; III, 17; P.L, vol. 33, col. 33; De Patientia,
XXVII, 25; P.L, vol. 40; col. 624. De gratia christi, XXIV, 25. P.L, vol. 44. col. 376.
230

75
since man takes great pride in them. Pride is Satans sin. Our only legitimate aim is God.
And the gift that God makes of his grace is always a consequence of his generosity. This
grace is free. Those people who believe in acquiring it by good works take things the
wrong way. It would not be free if it was possible to merit it. But we must go even further.
Believing in God is already to be subject to grace. Faith is the beginning of Grace.234
We can see the extremities attained by Augustinian thought. It does not shirk any
of the problems difficulties. But in fact there is not as yet a problem where there is only
submission. However, as is the rule for that which concerns evil, this absolute dependence
raises some great difficulties. Divine grace is here absolutely arbitrary: man must have
confidence only in God. How then do we speak then of human freedom? It is precisely
that our only freedom is that of doing evil.235 The last confession of Saint Augustine on
this vital question for a Christian is thus a confession of ignorance. Divine discretion
remains intact.236 This is the theory that Saint Augustine was moved to develop in all its
details in the face of the Pelagian heresy. As it happens, he was able to surpass his
thinking for the needs of the cause. But it is also the case that his pessimism and his
renunciation retained their full bitterness. It is in this way then that his doctrine of
freedom takes shape.
b) The animosity that Saint Augustine brings to his struggle against Pelagianism
will be explained if we summarize the thought of this latter.237 His profoundest
experience is his acute sense of the evil in man, from which Saint Augustine also
suffered. Pelagius, a Breton monk, feared at heart a certain complacency in sin, which
would escape the doctrine of predestination. A man of consciousness rather than ideas, his
disciples are above all Celestius and Julianus, who propagated his doctrines. According to
Pelagius man was created free. He can do good or evil as he pleases. That liberty is an
emancipation from God. Free will, in so far as man is emancipated from God, consists in
admitting the possibility of sin and abstaining from it.238

234

De divers quaest book I, 2.vol. 40, col. III, and passim.

According to the metaphysical plan. In psychology, Saint Augustine concedes free will.
236
De div. quaest I, 2, 16; P.L,vol. 40; col. 120, 121.
237
For the works of Pelagius (Commentarium in Epistulas Sancti Pauli; Epistula ad Demetridem; Libellus
Fidei ad Innocentium papam) and that of Julien and Celsius, see P.L, vol. 30.
238
Julien: ap. Aug. Contra Julianum: I, 78; P.L, vol. 45, col. 1101. See also Pelagious: Libelles Fidei 13.
235

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The loss of that liberty was for Saint Augustine a consequence of original sin.
Some Pelagians think on the contrary that freedom was entirely ruled by the will, and
that man could avoid sin if he so wished: I declare the possibility of man without sin.239
But then original sin loses all meaning. The Pelagians absolutely reject this as entailing
Manichean conclusions. If Adam injures us, it is only through his bad example. One
must not even accept the secondary consequences of the fall, like the loss of the
immortality of the soul. Adam was born mortal. None of his sins trickle down to us.
Because infants during birth are in that state in which Adam was before he entered into
collusion240
If we sin easily it is because sin has become in us a second nature.241 One realizes
this, and that, strictly speaking, grace is useless. But always according to Pelagius,
creation is already a grace. Incidentally, grace keeps its usefulness not ad operandum
but ad facilius operandum.242 It is an aid, a kind of reference that God gives us.
This doctrine finds itself summed up in the nine points of accusation made by the
Council of Carthage (29 April 418 A.D. 243). In a general way, it had confidence in man
and rejected explanations resorting to the divine will. This is also an act of faith in the
nature and the independence of man. So many things which make a man indignant
penetrated this cry from Saint Paul: O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me
from the body of this death?244 But graver consequences followed. The fall was
repudiated and the redemption lost its meaning. Grace was a pardon and not a protection.
Above all, declaring the independence of man towards God and denying his constant need
for the creator is at the heart of the Christian religion.
Against that thought, Saint Augustine completes his theories with a number of
affirmations. Adam possessed immortality.245 He was free in that he had the posse non
peccare 246 and already benefited from divine grace. Original sin came to destroy this
239

Pelagious, ap. Aug. De natura et Gratia. Cf. also, De Gratia Christi I, 5. De gestis Pelag.
Ap. Aug. De gestis Pelag. 23.
241
Ad Demetriadem, 8, 17.
242
i.e. not as an action but as facilitaing action. See Augustine, De gratia Christi, I, 27, 30.
243
Ap. Tixeront, Histoire des Dogmes, ch. XI.
244
Rom. 7:24.
245
De Gen. Contra manich. II, VIII, 32.
246
ability not to sin: De concept. et gratia 33.
240

77
happy state. Scripture is definite on this point, and Saint Augustine depends upon it.247
Our nature is tainted, and without baptism, man is destined to damnation (according to
John 2:54). Saint Augustine sees in this nature a proof of the universal distress of the
world and the misery of our condition of which he draws some powerful pictures.248
But these are secondary effects of original sin. Others, more intimate and more
irremediable, will give the measure of our unhappiness. From the outset we have lost the
liberty of the posse non peccare. We are dependent on divine grace. On the other hand
damnation is universal in principle. The entire human race is doomed to the flames. Its
only hope is divine mercy.249 From this follows another consequence: the damnation of
dead children without baptism.250
Grace becomes then imperious. And we become dependent upon it from three
points of view; for protecting us from our tainted nature; for believing the truths of the
supernatural order;251 and for making us act according to these truths.252 But it is our faith,
not our works, for which we deserve this primary grace. We can however merit it to a
certain extent by doing good.253 In any case that which rules our entire kind is
predestination. And Saint Augustine returns constantly to the gratuity of this.254 The
number of the predestined, as of the damned, is fixed invariably once and for all. Only
then, God considers the merits and the demerits for the degree of penalty. What we are
not able to know is why. Our freedom is the freedom to refuse the primary grace on the
one hand, and on the other hand to merit the secondary grace. Our spontaneity is only put
into play in the interior of the total divine power.255
2. The Word and the Flesh: the Trinity.
We have achieved a grasp of the vigor with which in Saint Augustine is
specifically Christian. If we think back to the ideas of Plotinian metaphysics we will see
247

Psalm 50; Job. 29:4; Ephesians, 2:3; above all Rom., 5:12; John, 3:5.
Contra Julien I, 50, 54, vol. 45, col. 1072. De Civit. Dei, 22; I, 3.
249
Universa massa perditionis. De div. Ad simpl. I quaest. II, 16.
250
Contra Julian III, 199, P.L, vol. 45, col. 1333.
251
De praedestin Sanctor 5, 7, 22.
252
Epist. CCXVII.
253
Epist. CLXXXVI, 7.
254
Enchiridion XCVIII and XCIX. Epist. CLXXXVI, 15. De dono perseverantiae, 17.
255
De Gratia et libero arbitrio 4.
248

78
the infinite distance which separates the two attitudes. In this way at least we will not be
deceived by frequent comparisons, and we will know how to take into account the
Christianity in Saint Augustines Neoplatonism. We have seen that what he took from the
Platonic authors was a certain conception of the Word. But his role was to usher in Christ,
and thereby to devote his full scope to the Word made flesh in the fourth Gospel. Let us
endeavor then to understand what Saint Augustine was able to ask of Neoplatonism. We
will then show these borrowings transformed by the doctrine of the Incarnation.
a) The Word . It is in God, said Plotinus, that the pure soul lives with the
intelligibles.256 But Saint Augustine says: The ideas are like the primary forms or the
reasons for things, stable and immutable, not having received their eternal form,
consequently and always the same, which are contained in divine Intelligence.257 He
seizes God with its heart, but also with intelligence. We clearly see that his conception is
utterly philosophical, for the intelligible world that we admire surrenders its secret to us.
Our spirit accomplishes a double movement in his presence. Before the variety of beings
produced by the intelligible, he distinguishes the ideas that he contains. But his second
effort synthesizes these ideas in a single reality which expresses them: Ideas are not the
foundation but are the very source, by which eternity is, and of the same mode and also
unchangeably abiding.258
That reality is God, which Saint Augustine in this way grasps as Intelligence,
pure and first truth.259 This is a Plotinian conception. That which is in play here is the
principle of participation. The ideas participate in all things divine. They are in him, and
nevertheless he is something more. We are even more aware of that relation in a forceful
text of de Trinitate260:
Since the Word of God through which everything had been made is one; since he is the immutable
truth, it is in him, as in their immutable principle, that are at the same time all things: not only those
of this present world, but still those which have passed, and those which will come. In him, they are
neither past not future. They are simply and wholly life, and all are one, or rather it is a sole thing
which is, and a sole life.261
256

Enn. IV, 3, 24.

De div. quaest. LXXXIII qu. 46, no. 2, P.L, vol. 40, col. 30.
258
De div. quaest LXXXIII qu. 46, no. 2, P.L, vol. 40, col. 30.
259
I think, therefore he is: if we are able to bring this together with the cogito, it is because the Augustinian
God is an interior God. [translators note: the source of this citation is not given]
260
Bringing together Enn. V, 7, 3 and VI, 7, 3.
261
De Trinit. L. 4, G. 1, no. 3. P.L, vol. 42, col. 888.
257

79

The Plotinian method shows through here. But in the instant in which Saint Augustine
incorporates that doctrine of the Word, of intelligence in the theory of the Trinity, things
change meaning. Plotinus effectively hierarchies his hypostases and affirms the distance
which separates the One from the Intelligence. Saint Augustine in his account starts with
God, not as source of the two others essences, but as the unique nature of Trinity: God is
indeed one in himself, Trinity and thus one God in the manner of one creator.262
The three persons are then identical. From that three fundamental consequences
follow. Firstly, that the three persons are only one will, and one sole operation. Wherein
nothing is natural, and there is no diversity of will.263 For It is not the Word alone
which appears on the earth but the whole Trinity and In the Incarnation of the Son it is
the Trinity wholly which is unites with the human body.264 Secondly, that each of the
three persons are equivalent to the whole Trinity and God himself, who contains the two
other persons: As great as the Father alone, the Son alone or the Holy Spirit alone, so
great is the Father, Son and Spirit all at once265. And thirdly, the theory of the Trinity
endeavors to reconcile the equality and the distinction of the Persons. A problem which
already exceeds Plotinianism but which engages his method. In any case the doctrine of
the Trinity is thereby united with Augustinian Christology, and it is then that the Word
deviates from the Neoplatonic Intellect.
b) The Flesh. The Word was in effect made flesh, its body real, terrestrial and
born of a woman.266 That union of a body and a word is indestructible. Man and Christ
are fundamentally one; this is the entire Christian mystery:
Because the word is made flesh, the word incarnate does not cease dying, but as flesh the word itself
dies, accessing the same divinity as man and as God, the very man, not to be confused with
nature, but the unified personae.267

It is necessary to note here both that the notion of the word for Saint Augustine is
Plotinian, and also that he separates himself from Neoplatonism to the extent that the
union of this word and this flesh becomes more miraculous. But everything justifies itself
262

Contra Sermon. 3.
Contra Maximinum II, 10.
264
De Trinit. II, 8, 9, P.L, vol. 42, col. 85.
265
De Trinit. VI, 9,vol. 42, col. 93.
266
Sermo CXC, 2.
267
Sermo CLXXXVI, 1.
263

80
through this one fact. If the case is contradictory, at least this fact is obvious. In any case,
considering the grandeur of the task, the grandeur of the miracle is conceivable.
3. Faith and Reason in Saint Augustine.
Certainly, we do not pretend to have given an account of Augustinian thought,
although in fact this task is not so very daunting. From the perspective of our subject the
important thing has been to consider a certain interference of two thoughts in our author,
to try to locate it in the living part and the acquired part, and to draw from these some
conclusions concerning that which concerns the relations of Neoplatonism and
Christianity. It is why we have attempted our study of Augustinianism around two
particularly suggestive themes on this subject.
Now it remains only to draw particular conclusions of that study. That done, we
will attain the possibility of recounting in broad strokes that which we have observed to
this point only in detail. And placing ourselves within Christian metaphysics at this point
of its evolution, we will be able to envisage the latter, and see how its entire effort
succeeds. Saint Augustine enables the reconciliation of a metaphysics and a religion, of
the Word and the Flesh, without telling the truth about the original physiognomy of the
Christianity lost thereby.
The following passage sums up the significance of Augustinianism with regard to
that evolution:
Nor in all these which I thus run over consulting thee, can I find any one safe place to settle my
soul in, but in thyself only; into whom let all my scattered pieces be gathered together, nor let
anything of mine be turned back from thee. At sometimes thou inwardly admittest me into an
affection that I am not usually acquainted with, rising to a strange sweetness, which, could it be
once perfected in me, it should be I know not what, which this life shall never be.268

Saint Augustine finishes where the Platonic conversion is achieved. Both persued the
same aim, but their paths, although sometimes mixed, are nevertheless different.
Augustinianism proclaims at each step the insufficiency of philosophy. The only
intelligent reason is that one which is lit up by faith. True philosophy begins with an act
of adherence to the supernatural order which saves the will of the flesh through grace, and

268

Conf. L. X. ch. XL (Loeb II p.197)

81
skeptical thought through revelation269. This point cannot be overemphasized.
The dialogue of Faith and Reason is staged for the first time in plain light by Saint
Augustine: it was to become the whole history of Christian evolution. One often seeks for
Christian thought superadded to Hellenic doctrine. Truth is the crux of the matter. Faith
eventually accepted the Reason that it had ignored; but if one believes Saint Augustine,
this was in order to assign it an appropriately singular rank.
Even if you are not capable of intelligence, still trust intelligence, for faith comes
first, and intelligence will follow. Thus query not intelligence about how to believe, but
rather ask of belief how to be intelligent.270 Reason here becomes more supple. It is
illuminated by the light of Faith. This is where there are two things in Augustinian faith:
adherence to the spirit of supernatural truths, and the humble abandon of man to the grace
of Christ. It is not about God that you must believe, but in God. When you are
persuaded not prior to reason, but to faith, you are taught.271 Reason must humble itsel:
Beatitude begins with humility. Blessed are the poor in spirit, they who are not proud,
but surrender themselves to divine authority. 272.
It is in this way that we can understand how it was that the Alexandrian word
had served Christian thought without harming it. Looking at Saint Augustine, one can
understand all the labors of the evolution of Christianity: making Greek reason more and
more flexible and incorporating it into its structure, but in a domain where it is
inoffensive. Beyond this domain, obligation to it defers to other authority. In this respect
Neoplatonism serves for Saint Augustine as a doctrine of humility and faith. His role in
the evolution of Christianity was to help make Reason more supple, to involve Socratic
logic in religious speculation, and to thus pass on this tool already fashioned by the
Fathers of the Christian Church.
In this sense moreover, it is possible to consider Augustinianism as a second
revelation; that of Christian metaphysics following after that of evangelical faith. The
miracle is that the two are not contradictory.
269

E. Gilson: Introduction a lEtude de Saint Augustin. Conclusions.

In Joan Tract. 29, 6 P.L,vol. 35, col. 1630.
271
Camus supplies no reference for this quote which is in Latin: Quam tibi persuadetur non prius ratione
quam fide te esse docendam.
272
De sermone domini in mente I, ch. III, no. 10, P.L,vol. 34, col. 1233.
270

82

II. Christian Thought at the Threshold of the Middle Ages.

Here the evolution of primitive Christianity ends and the history of Christian
doctrine begins. Augustinianism marks both an outcome and a birth at the same time. We
have indicated the road by which evangelical thought is reached. The main feature of this
evolution is the break with Judaism and entry into the Greco-Roman world. From that
moment the fusion begins to operate. Prepared by oriental religions, Mediterranean
thought disposes itself towards fertilization by the new civilization. If Neoplatonism can
be considered as the cultivator of that fertilization, it is because it was born of this Grecooriental syncretism. The dogmatic formulae of Christianity came out of a combination of
Neoplatonism the proper truths of the evangelical faith. Announced by Paul and John,
elaborated by the Greeks arrivals to Christianity, these formulas find their full expression
in Augustinian thought, not however without Christians being in part mislead into a false
reconciliation.
At heart the enigma is that this fusion could operate, because if the sensibility of
the Greco-roman world was open to the Gospel, Reason refused to admit a certain
number of its postulates. Providentialism, creationism, philosophy of history, and a taste
for humility all the themes that we have indicated collided with the Greek attitude.
That Greek navet of which Schiller speaks was too concerned with innocence and light
to abdicate without resistance. The effort of the reconcilers was to transform even the
instrument of that attitude (Reason governed by the principle of contradiction) in a notion
kneaded together with the idea of participation. Neoplatonism was the unconscious
artisan of this reconciliation. But there is a limit to the elasticity of the intelligence. And
Greek civilisation in the person of Plotinus stopped midway. It is precisely in this gap that
the originality of Christianity can be felt. Certainly it is the Alexandrian word that
Christian thought transported in its dogmas. But this word did not distinguish itself from
God. But it is begotten, not emanated.
He is in direct contact with his creature for whom he came to die. And he, who
might have seemed contradictory to a Greek spirit, justified himself in the eyes of
Christians by this fact: the appearance of Jesus on the earth and his incarnation. It is that

83
statement that one finds from the beginning to the end of the evolution of Christian
metaphysics. It is also the proof that Christianity, despite dressing itself in Greek
thoughts, has abdicated nothing of its original savor.
On the eve of the Middle Ages the venerable human theme of the voyage of a God
on the earth is applied for the first time to a metaphysical notion of divinity. And the more
the metaphysics develops itself, the greater the originality of Christianity is, in so far as
the gap will grow between the Son of Man and the notions which he transfigures.

Conclusion.
We have secured the solution of two problems: the one of vast extent, touching
upon the relations of Christianity to Hellenism, the other inscribing itself within the
interior of the first. The solution has revolved around the role of Neoplatonism in the
evolution of Christian thought. The material was too vast for there to be any hope of
providing a definitive answer, however we have considered, on the one hand, three steps
in the evolution of Christian thought, and on the other, the outcome of the workings of
Greek thought in Neoplatonism. A simple comparison supplied us with a few conclusions.
From Greek thought Christianity borrowed its matter, and from Neoplatonism its
method. It kept its profound truth intact, dealing with all difficulties with the idea of the
Incarnation. And if Christianity did not exactly condone this disconcerting way of posing
the problem, it was without doubt absorbed by Greece, who had seen the solution
elsewhere. This at least remains definite, but many other difficulties remain. For example,
the role played by Philo in the constitution of Alexandrian metaphysics, or the
contribution of Origin and of Clement of Alexandria to Christian dogma, or the multiple
influences that we have eliminated: Kabbalah, Zend-Avesta, Indian philosophies or
Egyptian Theurgy. Just stating this is sufficient.
Let us review the evidence. We spoke at length of the Hellenism of primitive
Christianity. And in that which concerns morality matters are not uncertain.273 But
Christian morality is not the object of a doctrine, for an inner asceticism stems from
sanctioning a faith. On the contrary, we must speak rather, according to this thesis, of the
273

The first systematic treatise of Christian morals, that of Ambrose, in the second part of the fourth century,
is modelled not upon the Gospels, but upon the De Offciis of Cicero.

84
Christianisation of a decadent Hellenism. And here the words have an historical and even
geographical sense.
But is it possible finally, at the end of this study, to determine what constituted the
novelty of Christianity? Are there even such things as properly Christian concepts? The
question remains topical. In fact, it is a particular paradox of the human spirit to seize the
elements and to not be able to embrace the synthesis: an epistemological paradox of a
certain knowledge of these facts, but yet insufficient: sufficient in its theories, but yet
uncertain; or a psychological paradox of a self, perceptible in some parts, but inaccessible
in its profound unity. In that regard history does not deliver us from our disquietude, and
restoring the profound novelty of the Gospel appears as an impossible task. We will see
under which influences, and out of what syncretism Christian thought is born. But we feel
no less, that, were Christian thought demonstrated entirely through foreign elements, we
would recognise it still as original owing to the more muted resonance to which the world
has not attended.
And if we reflect on the major themes of Christianity, (incarnation, a philosophy
of history, the misery and pain of the human condition), we recognise that what counts
here is the substitution of a Christian man for a Greek man. This difference that we
ascertain, which falls short of outlining, in the doctrines we test it upon, comparing Saint
Jerome in the desert of the struggles with the temptation, to the young men who listened
to Socrates.274 Moreover, if we, believing Nietzsche, accept that the Greece of darkness
which we indicated at the beginning of this work - pessimistic Greece, sordid and tragic was the mark of a strong civilisation, we must agree that Christianity in that regard is a
renaissance in comparison with Socratism and its serenity. Men, said Pascal, cannot
cure death, so they are advised not to think about it. The whole Christian effort opposes
itself to this laziness of the heart. Christian man thereby defines himself and in the same
way also a civilisation. Charles Guignebert in his Ancient Christianity speaks of
Christian thought as a religion of fanatics, desperate people and rogues. This is true, but
not in the way that the author would like.
274

And Ep. XXII, 7: Me, yes me, who for fear of Gehenna dedicated myself to one such prison, inhabited
only by the scorpions and the wild beasts, often I believed myself to be transported to the middle of virginal
dances. I was pale with youth and my imagination boiled with desires. Ap. P. de Labriolle: Histoire de la
littrature latine chrtienne, p.451.

85
Be that as it may, at the death of Saint Augustine, Christianity was constituted in
philosophy. It is now sufficiently armed to resist the torment into which everything sinks.
For many years it remains the only common hope, and the only effective shield against
the unhappiness of the occidental world. Christian thought thereby achieved its
catholicity.

86
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Note: Camus bibliography is reproduced here with a minimum of editing. None of the works of
commentary upon which Camus relied most heavily exist in English translation (i.e. Tixeront, de Labriolle,
Brhier etc.), with the exception of the works of Etienne Gilson. For more recent English-language
literature, see my own bibliography below.
Auxiliaries of Christianity
Cumont, Les Religions orientales dans le paganisme romain, 1907
Cumont, Les Mystres de Mithra.
Foucart, Recherches sur lorigine et la nature des mystres dleusis, 1895.
Foucart, Les Associations religieuses chez les Grecs.
Gernet & Boulanger, Le Gnie grec dans la Religion, Paris, 1932.
Loisy, Mystres paens et mystre chrtien. Paris, 1919.
Alexandrian Metaphysics
(a) Texts:
Damasius, Des principes, tr. Chaignet, 1898.
Plotin, Ennades, tr. Brhier and Bouillet.
Porphyre, Vie de Plotin, tr. Brhier
Proclus, Commentaires du Parmnide, tr. Chaignet, 3 vol.
(b) Studies:
Arnou, Le Dsir de Dieu dans la philosophie de Plotin, Paris 1921.
Bois, Essai sur les origines de la philosophie judo-alexandrine, Toulouse, 1890.
Brhier, Les Ides philosophiques religieuses de Philon dAlexandrie, Paris 1908.
Brhier, La Philosophie de Plotin,Paris, 1903.
Bret, Essai historique et critique sur lcole juive dAlexandrie.
Cochez, Les Religions de lEmpire dans la philosophie de Plotin, 1913.
Cochez, Plotin et les Mystres dIsis, Revue noscolastique, 1911.
Guitton, Annuaire de lcole des Hautes-tudes, 1917: Le Temps et lternit chez
Plotin et Saint Augustin, Paris 1933.
Guyot, LInfinit divine depuis Philon le Juif jusqu Plotin, Paris, 1908.
Kurppe, Philon et la Patritistique in Essais dhistoire: Philosophie, Paris, 1902.
Picavet, Hypostases plotiniennes et Trinit chretienne.
Picavet, Plotin et les Mystres dleusis, Paris, 1903.
Ravaisson, Essai sur la mtaphysique dristote.
Simon, Histiore de la philosophie dlexandrie, 2 vol., 1843-1845.
Vacherot, Histiore de la philosophie dlexandrie, 3 vol., 1846-1851.
(c) In English:
Caird, The evolution of theology in the Greek philosophers : the Gifford lectures
delivered in the University of Glasgow 1900-1 and 1901-2.
Elsee, Neoplatonism in relation to Christianity, Cambridge 1908.
Fuller, The Problem of Evil in Plotinus, Cambridge 1912.
Fuller, The Evolution of Theology in the Greek Philosophers, 2 vol., Glasgow 1904.
Fuller, Plotinus II, pp. 210-346.
Inge, The Philosophy of Plotinus, London 1918.
Lindsay, The Philosophy of Plotinus, 1902.

87
Gnosticism
(a) Studies:
Alfaric, Les critures manichennes.
Amelineau, Essai sur le Gnosticisme gyptien, Guimet, XIV.
Cumont, Recherches sur le Manichisme. I: la Cosmogonie manichenne dapres
Thodore Bar. Khoni, Bruxelles, 1908.
De Beausobre, Histoire du Manichisme, 2 vol., 1739-1744.
De Faye, Introduction ltude du Gnosticisme, Paris 1903.
De Faye, Gnostiques et Gnosticisme, Paris 1913.
De Faye, Clment dAlexandrie, 2nd edn. Paris 1898.
King, The Gnostics.
Matter, Histoire critique du Gnosticisme gyptien, 2 vol. 2nd edn. Paris 1844.
Mausel, The Gnostic Heresies.
Salmon, Gnosticisme.
(b) Texts.
See above all in Patrologie latine de Migne, vol II:
Tertullien, De Praescriptionibus adversus Haeresos, col. 10-72.
Tertullien, Adversus Marcionem, col. 239-468.
Tertullien, Adversus Valentinias, col. 523-524.
The Evolution of Christianity
De Labriolle, Histoire de la littrature latine chrtienne, Paris 1920. 2nd edn. 1923.
Le Breton, Histoire du dogme de la Trinit, 1920, edn. 1923.
Puech, Histoire de la littrature grecque chrtienne, 3 vol. 1928-1930.
Puech, Les Apologistes grecs du IV sicle notre re, Paris 1912.
Tixeront, Histoire des Dogmes dans lantiquit chrtienne, 3 vol., Paris 1915-1921.
Hellenism and Christianity
(a) Studies:
Aubi, Les Chrtiens de lEmpire romain, Paris 1881.
Bossier, La Fin du paganisme. 4th edn. 1903.
Brhier, Hellnisme et Christianisme aux premiers sicles de notre re,
Revue philosophique, 27 May 1935.
Corbiere, Le Christianisme et la fin de la philosophie antique, Paris 1921.
Douriff, Stocisme et Christianisme, Paris 1863.
Glover, The Influence of Christ in the Ancient World.
Levain de Villemont, Mmoires pour servir lHistoire ecclsiastique des
six premiers sicles, 1702.
Toussaint, LHellnisme et lAptre Paul.
(b) Polemic:
Allard, Julien lApostat, 3 vol., Paris, 1900-1903.
Allard, Julien lApostat, oeuvres: Bridez edition, Paris 1932.
Aubi, La Polmique paenne la fin du II sicle, Paris 1878.
De Labriolle, La Raction paenne, Paris 1934.
Rougier-Celse, tr., Discours de Celse Paris 1925.
(c) Saint Augustine:
See the thorough and nearly complete bibliography in:
Gilson, Introduction ltude de Saint Augustin, Paris 1931.

88

I. Works in Migne ed., Patrologie latine, vols. 22 to 40 incl.

Principle works cited in this thesis:
i) Confessions, vol. 32: col. 659-905.
De civ. Dei, vol. 38: col. 13-806.
Soliloques, vol. 37: col. 863-902.
Mditations, vol. 37: col. 901-944.
De beata vita, vol. 32: col. 959-977.
ii) Against the heresies:
De duabus animis contra Manichaeos, vol. 39: col. 93-112.
Contra Fortunatum manicheoum, vol. 39: col. 111-130.
Contra Admandum manichoei discipulum, vol. 39: col. 129-174.
De Natura Boni contra manichaeos, vol. 39: col. 551 to 578.
Contra Juliannum, vol. 39: col. 1094 to 1612.
De Natura et gratia, vol. 41: col. 199 to 248.
De Gestis Pelagii, vol. 41: col. 319 to 360.
De gratia Christi et peccato originali, vol. 41: col. 359 to 416.
De gratia et libero arbitrio, vol. 41: col. 881 to 914.
iii) Epistolae: vol. 33
iv) Sermones: vol. 36
II. General Studies
Alfaric, Lvolution intellectuelle de saint Augustin,
vol I: Du Manichisme au Noplatonisme, 1918.
Boyer, LIde de vrit dans la philosophie de saint Augustin, Paris, 1920.
Boyer, Christianisme et Noplatonisme dans la formation de saint Augustin, Paris, 1920.
Cayre, La Contemplation augustinienne, Paris, 1927.
Gilson, Introduction ltude de saint Augustin, Paris 1931.
Grandgeorge, Saint Augustin et le Noplatonisme, 1896.
Martin, Saint Augustin, 1901.
Nourrisson, La Philosophie de saint Augustin, 2 vol. 2nd edn., 1809.
Portali, article Saint Augustin in Dictionnaire de Thologie catholique.
Vol. I, col. 2268-2472. 1902.
The Idea of a Christian Philosophy
Brhier, Le Problme de la philosophie chrtienne,
Revue de mtaphysique et de morale, April 1931.
Gilson, La Notion de philosophie chrtienne in
Bulletin de la Socit franais de philosophie, mars 1931.
Gilson, LEsprit de la philosophie mdivale. 2 vol., Paris, 1932
Ch. I: Le Problme de la philosophie chrtienne.
Souriau, Y a-t-il une philosophie chrtienne?
Revue de mtaphysique et de morale, July 1932.

89

Postscript.
The Meaning of Animal Symbolism in Plotinus, Nietzsche, and Camus.

Introduction
Plotinus Transcend the Beast
1. Hen, Nous and Psyche: the One, Intelligence and the Soul
2. Plotinus on Animals
Nietzsche Interesting Animal
1. Symbolism and Animals in the Birth of Tragedy
2. The Animal and the Mask in The Gay Science
3. Zarathustras Symbolic Animals
Camus The Significance of the Implicit
1. Transcendence, Immanence and Animal Symbolism
2. Ineffable Experience in the Presence of Animals
Conclusion
Bibliography

Introduction.
Camus thesis submitted for the Diplme dtudes Suprieures at the University
of Algiers in 1936 sheds light not only upon the thought of the young Camus, but also
upon the two closely linked themes of the sacred and of the absurd, which remained for
Camus constant themes throughout his compact career of a mere twenty years. In the
novel on which Camus began working as soon as his thesis was submitted (entitled A
Happy Death) we see not only the explicit influence of Plotinus, but also the implicit
influence of Nietzsche. For just as Plotinus stands in the twilight of Christianitys dawn,
Nietzsche stands in the twilight of its sunset. As liminal pre- and post- Christian thinkers
respectively, Plotinus and Nietzsche both appeal to Camus philosophical interest in
articulating his sense of the sacred without recourse to the tendencies within Christian
theology to an other-worldly metaphysics.
Camus fiction is pervaded by a subtle but discernible reliance upon the symbolic
presence of animals, a theme which can also be traced in its no less implicit
manifestations both in Nietzsche and in Plotinus. In tracing this theme, one convergence
of clues can be found in A Happy Death. Although Camus simply adopts neither
Nietzsche's nor Plotinus's perspectives without reservation, he nevertheless draws deeply
upon both in his attempt to explore the division between his wholly secular impulse to
immanence, and the enigmatic sense of a sacred pursued through his non-metaphysical
rendition of transcendence. Camus' restless struggle in pursuit of a sacred lucidity beyond
the metaphysical oppositions of religion though his fiction is staged largely in the
presence of animals, a complicated presence whose symbolic significance consists largely
in the animal's ability to enable an access to ourselves which remains otherwise sealed.

Plotinus: Transcend the Beast.

We is used in two senses, either including the beast, or
referring to that which even in our present life transcends it
(Enneads I, 1, 10).

1. Hen, Nous and Psyche: the One, Intelligence and the Soul
Plotinus (204-270 A.D.1) is sometimes anachronistically portrayed as nothing but
the father of the Neoplatonic aspect of early Christianity. While it is true that it was
Augustines reading of Plotinus (in Latin translation) which introduced him to
Neoplatonic monism, precipitating his conversion from Manichean Gnosticism to
Christianity, Augustines synthesis of Hebraic monotheism with Greek henism should be
understood as an exegesis of neither tradition, but instead as a selective synthesis availing
itself of Greek metaphysics in order to supply Christianity with the theological foundation
lacking in the writings of Saint Paul.
Plotinus was well aware of Christianity, his beloved teacher Ammonius having
been born and raised a Christian in Egypt, although reverting to paganism upon
dedicating himself to philosophy.2 Nevertheless, Plotinus ignores Christianity in his
writings, which was to him merely one among the many minor religious sects
proliferating throughout the Roman empire in his day. Even the categorization of
Plotinus as a Neoplatonist is somewhat anachronistic, for the term Neoplatonism was
only coined by 18th Century historians,3 and this neo- is a label that Plotinus would
neither have recognized nor condoned. The intellectual milieu in which Plotinus lived
placed no value on originality: on the contrary, intellectual value was measured solely by
fidelity to ancient sources. As Plotinus himself says, "Our doctrines are not novel, nor do
they date from today: they were stated long ago, but not in an explicit way. Our present
doctrines are explanations of those older ones, and they use Platos own words to prove
1

See Pierre Hadot Plotinus or the Simplicity of Vision.

See Maria Luisa Gattis article in The Cambridge Companion to Plotinus.
3
See Lloyd Gersons Introduction in ibid.
2

that they are ancient. And Parmenides also4 As such, Plotinus was in fact the last of
the great pagan Greek thinkers who wrote and thought solely in Greek, despite the fact
that his school was located in Rome. And despite maintaining that he himself was
nothing more than an exegete of Plato, Plotinus was in fact well-versed in the entire
history of Greek thought from Parmenides to his own day, indeed having himself read a
great deal of Greek literature which is now lost to us.
There can be no doubt that Plotinus drew on and understood Aristotle, the Stoics
and the philosophers of the later academy, emphasizing (as did the medieval Arabs) the
similarities between philosophers rather than their differences and disagreements, upon
which we moderns tend to concentrate. Plotinus's overriding aim was always to oppose
Greek philosophy as a whole to the many and various Gnosticisms of Eastern origin.
However it would not be accurate to describe Plotinus as an eclectic or a syncretist. He
did not merely pick and choose what appealed to him from the Greek tradition, but would
rather be more accurately described as a polymath, comprehending and digesting all of
Greek philosophy before him, and creating for himself a system of thought which he
understood faithfully to expound these insights, but which must from the point of view of
the history of ideas be recognized as a distinct philosophy of its own despite its own
authors disclaimers to the contrary.
The fundamental and uncompromized core of the Plotinian system is a
Parmenidean henism. The highest and ultimate truth about everything is simply this: all is
one. Above and beyond, but also within and throughout all facts of individuality and
objectivity is the one core and ultimate truth of absolute unity, which Plotinus does not
hesitate to call God. But this appellation is not an identification of a personality, an
entity, an unmoved mover, or an abstraction of pure thought. It is purely and simply
everything, and strictly speaking must remain ineffable. For at the same time, Plotinus
also accepts polytheism, recognizing the gods as intellectual entities emanating from the
ineffable One:
If the a soul knows itself for the rest of the time, and knows that its
4

Enneads V, 1, 8; Hadot translation p.18

natural movement is in a circleit willbring itself into accord with that

which all souls ought to, and the souls of the gods always do; and it is by
bringing themselves into accord with it that they are gods. For a god is
what is linked to that center, but that which stands far from it is a multiple
human being or a beast.5
Life itself; the world; the great synthesis of all being, becoming, and experiencing the
One is all these things, and yet cannot be reduced to any of them. For each will invariably
be conceived according to the distorted and inadequate conceptions of the limited mortal
mind:
[The One] must be understood as infinite, not because its size and number cannot be measured or
counted but because its power cannot be comprehended. For when you think of it as Intellect or
God, it is more; and when you unify it in your thought, here also the degree of unity by which it
transcends your thought is more than you imagined it to be.6

How then could Plotinus, or anyone else, claim to know the truth of this doctrine of the
One? To understand how Plotinus thinks that this is not only possible, but actually
essential for those in pursuit of wisdom, we need first to understand his doctrine of what
he calls the amphibious soul. The psyche, or human soul, teaches Plotinus, is polarized
into a higher and lower aspect, just as a frogs life is polarized into an aquatic and a
terrestrial aspect. The lower part of the psyche, fully immersed in the body and its
environment, is that aspect of our mind which we normally refer to as our self. But this
mortal self is only half of the story for Plotinus, for it is nothing but the embryonic,
mortal phase of the higher soul or nous. The nous (or Intellect) is, however, not
individual, but rather a spark of divinity animating the psyches life.
Plotinus metaphysics are primarily organized by a vertical metaphor of hierarchy.
The psyche or individual soul is able to ascend this hierarchy through a process which
Plotinus calls contemplation. It is important to recognize that contemplation is not
conceived by Plotinus as an activity to be conceived along the lines of climbing a ladder.
Central to Plotinus thought is the doctrine that contemplation is pure passivity, for
entities lower down in his metaphysical hierarchy cannot act upon those higher up in any
way, but can only ready themselves to be available to be acted upon by higher powers
through processes of meditation and purification. By calming and detaching itself, the
5

Enneads IV, 9, 8

Enneads IV, 9, 6

psyche is able to yield itself up to the realization that the higher power of nous in fact
already pre-exists within itself as its own ground and principle, which principle will be
able to emerge and manifest its power only if it is allowed to. The first step in Plotinus
conception of religious transcendence is thus a step in, no less than a step up, for the
metaphorical spatial hierarchy is in fact nothing but a cypher for an ineffable, non-spatial
spiritual truth.
The first step in the souls journey in search of its own source thus leaves the
individual behind, and the contemplating psyche deep in meditation no longer partakes of
psychological individuality. In this transcendent state of contemplation, the soul is
entirely reabsorbed into the Intellect (nous) out of which it has emanated. The doctrine of
emanation thus complements the doctrine of contemplation: contemplation representing
an ascension of the metaphysical hierarchy, emanation representing its opposite, a descent
down into what we call the world. Having once attained both aspects of this first phase of
transcendence, we qua nous become aware that our individual psyche is actually nothing
other than one of the Intellect's many emanations.
Having once ascended to this higher state, the mind of the one meditating is now
absorbed in pure Intellect, and in turn prepares itself for the next stage of transcendence,
once again contemplating its superior by engendering within itself a state of pure
passivity and receptivity. For the nous itself is in turn an emanation of the hen (One), and
the second, culminating phase of transcendent enlightenment is for Plotinus nothing but
this intellectual realization. In its contemplation of the pure simplicity and perfection of
the One, the Intellect in turn discovers that its metaphysical superior is in fact its own
innermost ground and core, unity being the one and only principle of thought itself, which
thus must clearly distinguish between individuality and identity. Strictly speaking this
second phase of transcendence cannot be described, for words must fail in the context of
the utter simplicity of absolute unity. However, from the perspective of the nous, and
even more so from the perspective of the psyche, this ascent to divinity proceeds by
means of imagery enabling contemplative identification of the minds own inner principle
with the unity, manifest all the way down to the unity of that bestial entity, the body.

Plotinus (following Plato7) defines time as a moving image of eternity, and so time
along with everything in it (and especially for our purposes animals8) are of primarily
symbolic rather than ontological significance. For as Plotinus says, One must not
conceive time as outside the psyche, any more than eternity as outside real being.9
These are images; and this, therefore, is how the wise among the expositors of holy
things express in riddles how that God is seen.10 As such Plotinus system consists of
three so called hypostases. The first hypostasis consists in the original emanation out of
the hen giving rise to the nous. The second hypostasis is the emanation out of the nous
down into the psyche. And the third and final hypostasis is the hypostasis that locates the
psyche in our animal body, existing as it does in the shadowy and mutable world of
materiality, although in fact for Plotinus, matter, strictly speaking, is not really real.
This can be made clearer if we consider another pervasive metaphor that Plotinus
uses along with his spatial hierarchy, namely, that of light. This second metaphor is
intended to correct the misleading connotations of the spatial hierarchy, which might tend
to give the impression to the unthinking that the One is up there in some heaven and we
are down here on Earth, with the nous hovering in between like a meteoric angel.
Clearly, if all is One, there can be no elsewhere, and the mundane world can in no sense
be ontologically distinct from the One, only phenomenologically distinct. The emanation
of our empirical reality out of the One is thus also conceived by Plotinus in a corrective
mode as the shining of a light. Light emanates from its source in whatever direction it is
allowed, without in any way compromising its unity and its absolute self-identity.

"When the father and creator saw the creature he had made moving and living, the created image of the
eternal gods, he rejoiced, and in his joy determined to make the copies still more like the original, and as
this was an eternal living being, he sought to make the universe eternal, so far as might be. Now the nature
of the ideal being was everlasting, but to bestow this attribute in its fullness upon a creature was impossible.
Wherefore he resolved to have a moving image of eternity, and when he set in order the heaven, he made
this image eternal but moving according to number, while eternity itself rests in unity, and this image we call
time. For there were no days and nights and months and years before the heaven was created, but when he
constructed the heaven he created them also." (Timaeus Jowett trans. in Hamilton ed. 37c-e, page 1167).
8
Following Hadots evocative formulation, we might say that animals for Plotinus are hieroglyphs which
draw themselves (Hadot 39-40).
9
Enneads III, 7, 11
10

Enneads VI, 9, 11

Likewise the thought of the One emanates out, ramifying through those principles
that Plato called Forms. The Forms unfold intellectually until eventually they project
themselves out into particular individuality, and we experience matter participating in
them, confusedly imagining thereby that matter has an independent existence of its own.
But matter cannot be conceived apart from its form; even dust, even mud, even puddles or
squashed bugs exhibit some kind of form and shape, however complex that form, and
removed from the highest and purest and realest Form of unity. Anything at all which can
be identified as existing must partake of the Form of unity in some sense or other. Pure
matter is like pure darkness: as Parmenides says of the very concept of nothing there
simply is no such thing.
2. Plotinus on Animals
Having thus laid out the bare bones of Plotinus metaphysical system, it must be
immediately emphasized that Plotinus attitude to the mundane world is not as negative as
might be thought. Plotinus was vehemently opposed to those Gnostic systems which
denigrate the material world as evil. On the contrary, the world of nature, while certainly
being the lowest rung on the ladder of enlightenment, is nevertheless nothing other than
an emanation of, and hence a reflection of the beauty and perfection of the One (however
faint and distorted), and so is beautiful and perfect in its own feeble way. For although
Plotinus thought proceeds as often as not by way of binary oppositions, such polarity is
purely provisional, and ultimately discarded in the highest form of thought. The world of
nature, and so our bodies body along with it, is temporary and transient, and must
eventually be discarded. But it is nevertheless our one and only portal of initial access to
the mind itself, in the form of the psyche.
Hence Plotinus contempt for all forms of representation, refusing for instance to
allow a bust or portrait to be made of himself, asking why waste time with a copy of a
copy of a copy? Rather close your eyes and turn within to the source of real

enlightenment.11 Plotinus, to repeat, repudiates the world of the senses without

denigraton, and is in fact today recognized as a figure of some significance in the history
of natural science.12 As such, the world of animals, although not directly partaking in the
psyche, are nevertheless something of a revelation to it. In the perception of all living
beings, the psyche is able to apprehend something higher, for it must be kept in mind that
the One is not merely some abstract geometrical or logical principle, (although it
incorporates the ground of all mathematical thought), but is also first and foremost the
very principle of life, itself a living being exceeding all of our concepts of life and entity :
The souls power of sense perception need not be perception of sense objects, but rather it must be
receptive of the impressions produced by sensation on the living being; these are already
intelligible entities. So external sensation is the image of this perception of the soul, which is in its
essence truer and is a contemplation of Forms alone without being affected. From these Forms,
from which the soul alone receives its Lordship over the living being, come reasonings, and
opinions and acts of intuitive intelligence; and this precisely is where we are. That which is below
this is ours, but we, in our presidency over the living being, are what extends from this point
upwards. But there will be no objection to calling the whole thing living being; the lower parts of
it are something mixed, the part which begins on the level of thought is, I suppose, the true man:
those lower parts are the lion-like, and altogether the various beast. Since man coincides with
the rational soul, when we reason it is really we who reason because rational processes are
activities of the soul.13

The lion-like and the various beast mentioned by Plotinus in the first quote above are
references to Republic IX, 588b 591b, which reads as follows:
Very good, said ILet us take up again the statement with which we beganIt was, I believe,
averred that injustice is profitable to the completely unjust man who is reputed justlet us then
fashion in our discourse a symbolic image of the soulWhat sort of image? he said.
One of those natures that the ancient fables tell of, said I, as that of the Chimera or Scylla or
Cerberus14, and the numerous other examples that are told of many forms grown together in one.
Yes, they do tell of them.
Mold, then, a single shape of a manifold and many-headed beast that has a ring of heads of tame
and of wild beasts and can change them and cause to spring forth from itself all such growths.
11

Thus also Plotinus enthusiastic adoption by the Islamic world, who see in him nothing short of a prophet.
However, it must be born in mind that Plotinus specifically condemned sexism, accepting students into his
school strictly according to their intellectual merit, not their gender, beauty, or class.
12
See the articles collected in Michael F. Wagner ed. Neoplatonism and Nature: Studies in Plotinus
Enneads. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002.
13
Enneads I, 1, 7, lines 9-24
14
Chimera: a triple bodied monster, lion before, serpent behind, she-goat in the middle (Iliad 6181).
Scylla: an immortal sea monster with six heads and twelve feet living in a cave opposite Charybdis (Odessy
1285ff). Cerberus: a monstrous dog guarding the entrance to Hades with fifty heads and a voice like bronze
in Hesiod (Theogony 311), and in later literature only three heads and a mane or tail of snakes (OCD).

It is the task of a cunning artist, he said, but nevertheless, since speech is more plastic than wax and
other such media, assume that it has been so fashioned.
Then fashion one other form of a lion and one of a man and let the first be far the largest and the
second second in size.
That is easier, he said, and is done.
Join the three in one, then, so as in some sort to grow together.
They are so united he said.
Then mold about them outside the likeness of one, that of the man, so that to anyone who is unable
to look within but who can see only the external sheath it appears to be one living creature, the
man.
The sheath is made fast about him, he said.
Let us then say to the speaker who avers that it pays this man to be unjust, and that to do justice is
not for his advantage, that he is affirming nothing else than that it profits him to feast and make
strong the multifarious beast and the lion and all that pertains to the lion, but to starve the man and
so enfeeble him that he can be pulled about whithersoever either of the others drag him and not to
familiarise or reconcile with one another the two creatures but suffer them to bite and fight and
devour one another.
Yes, he said, that is precisely what the panegyrist of injustice will be found to say.
And on the other hand, he who says that justice is the more profitable affirms that all our actions
and words should tend to give the man within us complete domination over the entire man and
make him take charge of the many-headed beast like a farmer who cherishes and trains the
cultivated plants but checks the growth of the wild and he will make an ally of the lions nature,
and caring for all the beasts alike will first make them friendly to one another and to himself, and
so foster their growth.
Yes, that in turn is precisely the meaning of the man who commends justice.15

Plato then continues with this metaphor of the fair and honorable things being those that
subject the brutish part of our nature to that which is human in us, or rather, it may be, to
that which is divine, while the foul and base are the things that enslave the gentle nature
to the wild (589c8-d2). This wild nature, that huge and manifold beast (590a8), he
also calls the element of the lion and the snake in us (590b1), as well as the mob-like
beast and ape (590b9,11). This brood of beasts within him must either be controlled
or obeyed. Thus the weak man can learn nothing but the ways of flattering them"
(590c6), whereas in the strong man the brutish part is lulled and tamed and the gentle
part liberated, and the entire soul returning to its nature at the best, attains to a much more
precious condition (591b4-5).
15

Republic 816-17 Shorey trans. in Hamilton ed

Following Plato, Plotinus thus understands the mortal human as a kind of hybrid
of beast and psyche. But unlike Gnostics, or certain ascetic Christians, Plotinus advocates
not the vilification, but rather the detached cultivation of the body to which the
transcendent soul must always return once its raptures of meditation come to an end, as he
says they always inevitably must:
Often I have woken up out of the body to myself and have entered into myself, going out from all
other things; I have seen a beauty wonderfully great and felt assurance that then most of all I
belonged to the better part; I have actually lived the best life and come to identity with the divine;
and set firm in it I have come to that supreme actuality, setting myself above all else in the realm of
Intellect. Then after that rest in the divine, when I have come down from Intellect to discursive
reasoning, I am puzzled how I ever came down, and how my soul has come to be in the body when
it is what it has shown itself to be by itself even when it is in the body. 16

Thus the transcendence allowed to mortals is only ever temporary, and the beast must be
eventually returned to and taken care of. The key to enlightenment in this life according to
Plotinus is to cultivate and tend for the beast without being beholden to it:
We said that the joint entity is part of ourselves, especially when we have not yet been separated
from body: for we say that we are affected by what affects our body. So we is used in two senses,
either including the beast or referring to that which even in our present life transcends it. The beast
is the body which has been given life. But the true man is different, clear of these affections; he has
the virtues which belong to the sphere of intellect and have their seat actually in the separate soul,
separate and separable even while it is still here below.17

There is thus a double sense in which we are amphibious: just as the soul has a higher
non-individual aspect in the nous (intellect) and a lower individuated aspect in the psyche
(higher soul), the lower soul and the body itself form an analogous joint entity. The lower
soul is the principle of the unity of the body, and without being inhabited by the lower
soul, this unity quickly disintegrates, and the body begins to decompose. Does this mean
that animals have souls? For they clearly maintain their bodily integrity so long as they
are alive:
And how does the living thing include brute beasts? If as it is said [by Plato] there are sinful human
souls in them, the separable part of the soul does not come to belong to the beasts but is there
without being there for them; their consciousness includes the image of soul and the body: a beast
is then a qualified body made, as we may say, by an image of soul. But if a human soul has not
entered the beast it becomes a living being of such and such a kind by an illumination from the
universal soul.18
16

Enneads IV, 8, 1
Enneads I, 1, 10
18
Enneads I, 1, 11
17

Clearly Plotinus is reluctant to contradict Plato, and so does allow that a depraved human
soul may be embodied in another kind of animal. But animals in general are really only
symbols: images emanating from the Universal Soul. As such they are in a sense innocent
of the danger to which humans are prey of individualism and egotism. Insofar as they do
not possess individual souls, they simply partake of a Universal Soul of their species, and
so in a sense have bypassed the need for the first level of transcendence, existing already
in a unified way analogous to that achieved on the plane of the Intellect.
But of course this is only an analogy, because the species soul is not at all
intellectual, but rather each is in fact a Form emanated by the Intellect. Thus animals
perform a highly significant symbolic function for those able to decode their significance.
For example, in Porphyrys account of Plotinus death we read:
When he was on the point of death, Eustochius told us, as Eustochius had been staying at Puteoli
and was late in coming to him he said, I have been waiting a long time for you. Then he said, try
to bring back the god in us to the divine in the All! and, as a snake crept under the bed on which
he was lying and disappeared into a hole in the wall, he breathed his last.19

For Plotinus, animals are icons of the vitality of nous, able as it is to emanate a world of
not merely dead matter, but living animals as well.20 Once the metaphysical hierarchy of
19

Porphyry The Life of Plotinus ch.II in Loeb edn of Enneads I

Derridas essay Form and Meaning: A Note on the Phenomenology of Language does not in its body
specifically discuss Plotinus (its topic being the relationship between metaphysics and Husserls
phenomenology). But at the start of this essay stands the inscription from Plotinus: To gar ikhnos tou
amorphou morphe [For form is the trace of the formless], whilst at its close is inserted the following
extensive footnote: Form (presence, evidence) would not be the final recourse, the last instance, to which
every possible sign would refer the arche or the telos; but rather, in a perhaps unheard-of way, the
morphe, arche, and telos would still turn out to be signs. In a sense or a non-sense that metaphysics
would have excluded from its field, while nonetheless being secretly and incessantly related to it, the form
would already and in itself be the trace (ichnos) of a certain non-presence, the vestige of the formless,
announcing and recalling its other to the whole of metaphysics as Plotinus perhaps said. The trace would
not be the mixture or passage between form and the amorphous, between presence and absence, etc., but
that which, in escaping this opposition, renders it possible because of its irreducible excess. Then the
closure of metaphysics, which certain bold statements of the Enneads seem to have indicated by
transgressing metaphysical thought (but other texts, too, could be cited), would not move around the
homogeneous and continuous field of metaphysics. The closure of metaphysics would crack the structure
and history of this field, by organically inscribing and systematically articulating from within the traces of
the before, the after, and the outside of metaphysics. In this way we are offered an infinite and infinitely
surprising reading of this structure and history. An irreducible rupture and excess may always occur within a
given epoch, at a certain point in its text (for example in the Platonic fabric of Neo-Platonism) and, no
doubt, already in Platos text (tr. David Allison in Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserls
Theory of Signs; alternative translation by Alan Bass in Margins of Philosophy). In thus bracketing this
essay on Husserl with these considerations of Plotinus, Derrida is indicating indirectly and thus, for him, all
the more significantly, his assessment of Plotinus as a thinker who already thinks his way out of and beyond
the hegemony of metaphysics in making of immanence a trace of absolute transcendence. Derrida interprets
20

Plotinus is rejected, and his faith in the ultimacy of unity disputed, such an iconic
understanding of animals as symbols of vitality could be taken to displace this
preoccupation with inward contemplation. In the next section, we shall see Friedrich
Nietzsche developed a vitalistic philosophy of life along exactly these lines.

Nietzsche: Interesting Animal

1. Symbolism and Animals in the Birth of Tragedy
Nietzsches great innovation in the Birth of Tragedy was to overturn the
Classicists vision of the Heiterkeit (cheerfulness, mirth, serenity) of the Ancient Greeks
and their gods. The prevailing view of Nietzsches time was that Apollo embodied the
highest impulses of Greek religion: worship of light and enlightenment, reason and order.
Against this one-eyed view, Nietzsches Birth of Tragedy aims to reinstate the recognition
of the significance of a dark side to the Greeks and their religion, centered around
Dionysus, god of the vine and hence intoxication, and of the suspension of social and
personal taboos brought about by alcohol consumption. Dionysus was a latecomer to the
Greek Pantheon, an import from Thrace (present day Bulgaria/Turkey) around 1000 B.C.,
and of ultimately Eastern origins. As such, Nietzsche characterizes Dionysus as
representing a Greek attempt to domesticate and incorporate the savage and the barbaric
aspects of human nature into their culture. The pre-Greek barbaric Dionysus is
characterized as a deity with a mixed human and animal nature, and as such, his festival
in Babylon (the Sacaea21) involved his worshipers going wild, changing into animals
both metaphorically, and according to the myths, literally.
If we observe howthe Dionysian power revealed itself, we shall no doubt recognise in the
Plotinus to have already deconstructed the metaphysics of presence. As Plotinus says: For the One is not
absent from any, and absent from all, so that in its presence it is not present except to those who are able and
prepared to receive it, so as to be in accord with it and as if to grasp it and touch it in their likeness
(Enneads VI, 9, 4).
21
Oxford Classical Dictionary entries for Dionysus ( 352-353), and Sacaea (942). See also Silk and
Stern Nietzsche on Tragedy. Cambridge University Press, 1981. Chapter 6, Nietzsches account of
Greece. Silk and Stern cite Guthries The Greeks and their Gods, who points out that the worship of
Dionysus has its roots in the fecundity of animals and plants (181).

Dionysian orgies of the Greeks, as compared with the Babylonian Sacaea with their reversion of
man to the tiger and the ape, the significance of festivals of world redemption and days of
transfiguration. It is with them that nature for the first time attains her artistic jubilee; it is with
them that the destruction of the principle of individuation for the first time becomes an artistic
phenomenon.22

Nietzsche portrays the Greeks as having tamed the anarchic power of this wild life-force
with music, an art form which has the capacity, he says, to express such primal forces
symbolically:
The very element which forms the essence of Dionysian music (and hence of music in general) is
carefully excluded as un-Apollinian namely, the emotional power of the tone, the uniform flow of
the melody, and utterly incomparable world of harmony. In the Dionysian dithyramb man is incited
to the greatest exaltation of all his symbolic faculties; something never before experienced
struggles for utterance the annihilation of the veil of Maya, oneness as the soul of the race and of
nature itself. The essence of nature is now to be expressed symbolically; we need a new world of
symbols; and the entire symbolism of the body is called into play, not the mere symbolism of the
lips, face, and speech but the whole pantomime of dancing, forcing every member into rhythmic
movement. Then the other symbolic powers suddenly press forward, particularly those of music, in
rhythmics, dynamics, and harmony. To grasp this collective release of all the symbolic powers man
must have already attained that height of self-abnegation which seeks to express itself symbolically
through all these powers and so the dithyrambic votary of Dionysus is understood only by his
peers. 23

Apollinian music was the music of the lyre accompanying a poetic narrative, and hence
the word lyrics have come to be applied to just the words themselves. Dionysian music
was the music of the Pan pipes played by Dionysus himself, calling the women of the city
into the woods to take up their role of maenads,24 in a temporary festival staging the
resurgence of a suppressed barbarism. Nietzshe is pointing out that Apollinian and
Dionysian approaches to music understand its function very differently. For Apollo,
musics basic function is communication: the lyric is the main thing, and the melody a
mere mood-setting accompaniment to the main semantic content. For Dionysus on the
other hand, music is not communicative, but rather symbolic. The words of the song are
at most a chanted mantra, and not a narrative. It is the emotional force of the melody that
is the main thing from the Dionysian perspective, for it has the power to enchant the
22

Birth of Tragedy 2, Kaufmann ed. Basic Writings, pp. 39-40

Birth of Tragedy 2, 40-41
24
Women inspired to ecstatic frenzy by Dionysus. Wearing fawn or panther skins and wreaths of ivy they
carry snakes or bunches of grapes, wave wands or torches and celebrate the power of Dionysus in song,
music, and dance. They roam through mountains and woods, oblivious of all human concerns, conventions,
and fears. Dionysus inspires them with strength so that they can uproot trees and kill strong animals
(Oxford Classical Dictionary). This myth of the seductive effect of pipe music finds a distant echo in our
fairy tale of the Pied Piper
23

listener, to influence their mood, and to transport them beyond the mundane. This power
of intoxication links both music and wine, and women and animals. Dionysus himself
transforms into animals,25 and his music influences beasts no less than it transforms
women into a state of bestiality. Its primary function is therefore not communication but
inspiration, and its modus operandi is not the word, but rather the symbol:
The satyr26 is the offspring of a longing for the primitive and the naturalNature, as yet
unchanged by knowledge, with the bolts of culture still unbroken that is what the Greek saw in
his satyr who nevertheless was not a mere ape. On the contrary, the satyr was the archetype of man,
the embodiment of his highest and most intense emotions, the ecstatic reveler enraptured by the
proximity of his god, the sympathetic companion in whom the suffering of the god is repeated, one
who proclaims wisdom from the very heart of nature, a symbol of the sexual omnipotence of
nature, which the Greeks used to contemplate with reverent wonder. The satyr was something
sublime and divine: thus he had to appear to the painfully broken vision of Dionysian man.27

It was out of these Dionysian festivals that Nietzsche maintains theater evolved. The
music, the drama, and the inspiring experience initially included all participants: only
later do participants polarize into a passive audience and active actors mediated by an
omniscient chorus. In Greek theater, all actors wore a mask (karakter) on stage, and
through this mask the voice of the divine spoke (per-sona). It is Nietzsches conviction in
studying the history of drama that he is not merely filling in an interesting chapter in the
history of art, as a footnote to the real history of politics and society, but rather, that he is
digging deep into fundamental moments in the creation of European psychology and
culture, watching the formation of our very concepts of character, person, actor and
spectator. And it is in the transformative power of symbolism that Nietzsche locates the
most fundamental power of art itself.
Conscious of the truth he has once seen, man now sees everywhere only the horror or absurdity of
existence; now he understands what is symbolic in Ophelias fate28; now he understands the
wisdom of the Sylvin god, Silenus29: he is nauseated. Here, when the danger to his will is greatest,
art approaches as a saving sorceress, expert at healing. She alone knows how to turn these
nauseous thoughts about the horror or absurdity of existence into notions with which one can live:
these are the sublime as the artistic taming of the horrible, and the comic as the artistic discharge of
25

[Dionysus] ability to transform himself into something else is often stressed. He is the god of two
forms, or the god of many forms , who can appear as a bull, or as a many-headed dragon, or as a lion
breathing fire. In other stories, he is a boar, a bear, a panther, a snake, a goat, a ass, a lynx, a tree, fire, and
water. Walter F. Otto, Dionysus: Myth and Cult (110-11).
26
Spirits of wild life in woods and hills, bestial in their desires and behaviour, and having details of animal
nature, either of a horse or of a goat (Oxford Classical Dictionary entry for Satyr 956). Dionysus was
educated by the satyr Papposilenus.
27
Birth of Tragedy 8, Basic Writings 61
28
Nietzsche is also discussing Hamlet in this section.
29
i.e. Papposilenus, the satyr, teacher of Dionysus.

the nausea of absurdity. The satyr chorus of the dithyramb is the saving deed of Greek art; faced
with the intermediary world of these Dionysian companions, the feelings described here exhausted
themselves.30

From this original creative power to transform its participants through a temporary
transcendence of the mundane life of civilization, Nietzsche traces the decline of such
festivals of transfiguration into a mere spectacle performed for the entertainment of an
audience, taking time out, perhaps, but hardly transcending their mundane lives. The
transcendence of the spectator is merely vicarious in comparison to the real temporary
transcendence of the authentic Dionysika. Unlike the maenad, the spectator does not
actually have to enter the orchestra and undergo the orchia, but rather sits back at a safe
distance, and at most undergoes a vicarious association with the persona via the
characters. For Nietzsche this is a decadence of transcendence, from a real, vital, risky
involvement in an experience amounting to an actual alteration, to an alienated, ersatz
pretend-participation which puts the viewer outside the world looking in, comfortable in
the certainty that nothing is really at stake.
This scenario is a critical step in the process which Nietzsche maintains Plato
culminated. For in Platonic metaphysics the entire world has become a theater, a stage of
mere illusion in which nothing is really at stake, a shadow play on the wall of a cave of
delusion in which we are unfortunately imprisoned. According to this metaphysics,
nothing is really at risk in this life, for nothing is really real in the world of the senses.
The really real is hypostasized as a world of forms transcending our immanent
experience, upon which it is no more dependent than we are upon our own shadow. We
can now see why Plotinus becomes such an interesting double to Nietzsche, for since,
despite himself, Plotinus re-values the material world (despite its obviously transient
nature) as the one and only way in which we can access the nous, he walks right across
the pitfall of otherworldly metaphysics which engulfed his master Plato, without himself
falling into it. The dominant discourse of Christian Neoplatonism exhibits the nihilism of
otherworldly metaphysics against which it was Nietzsche's fate to fight, but the escape
route from the prison of nihilism was already mapped out in advance before the
nightmare began, by Plotinus, whose metaphysic is not at all otherworldly. The
30

B of T 7, BW 60

phenomenon of the animal could thus shine forth both in Plotinus and in Nietzsche in was
untypical of orthodoxy in a way which spoke directly to Camus.

2. The Animal and the Mask in The Gay Science

This otherworldly philosophy of Platos is for Nietzsche both the degenerate
terminus of what is original and great in the world of the Greeks, and at the same time is
the starting point of the era of nihilism, which culminates in our own time. For Platonic
metaphysics was to provide the philosophical underpinnings for the newly emergent
religion of Christianity, once Augustine wed the metaphysics he learned from reading
Plotinus with the Hebraic monotheism of his mothers biblical faith. As an heir to two
thousand years of the development of this tradition, Nietzsche is well aware that the mere
pronouncement God is dead is nothing more than the announcement of the revolution
that will bring the dominance of other-worldly metaphysics to a close. Christian-Platonic
ways of thinking are too deeply ingrained in our minds to be overcome with a simple
pronouncement of the loss of faith;
New struggles after Budda was dead, his shadow was still shown for centuries in a cave a
tremendous, gruesome shadow. God is dead; but given the way of men, there may still be caves for
thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown. And we we still have to vanquish his
shadow too.31

As such, Nietzsche is acutely aware that Christian-Platonic patterns of thought still shape
his assumptions and presumptions and possibilities for thinking and for feeling. One such
shadow of God in Nietzsches thinking takes the form of the rigid hierarchical attitude
which the Bible preaches regarding the relation between humans and animals. In Genesis
chapter 1 the Bible records that man was the last of all creatures to be created:
Then God said let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion over
the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over
every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth. So God created man in his own image, in the
image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them, and God
said to them be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the
fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves on the earth.32

In many places Nietzsches thinking clearly replicates this hierarchical understanding of

nature and of mans place in it:
31
32

Gay Science 108 cf. 125

Genesis 1: 26-28

The fancy of the contemplatives What distinguishes the higher human being from the lower is
that the former see and hear immeasurably more, and see and hear thoughtfully and precisely this
distinguishes human beings from animals, and the higher animals from the lower. For anyone who
grows up into the heights of humanity the world becomes ever fuller; evermore fish hooks are cast
in his direction to capture his interestbut he can never shake off a delusion: he fancies that he is
a spectator and a listener who has been placed before the great visual and acoustic spectacle that is
life; he calls his own nature contemplative and overlooks that he himself is really the poet who
keeps creating this life (Gay Science 301).

And in the AntiChrist, Nietzsche clearly articulates the manner in which his perspectivism
and his skepticism problematize this attitude of chauvinism towards animals:
We have learned differently. We have become more modest in every way. We no longer derive
man from the spirit or the deity; we have placed him back among the animals. We consider him
the strongest animal because he is the most cunning; his spirituality is a consequence of this. On
the other hand, we oppose the vanity that would raise its head again here too as if man had been
the great hidden purpose of the evolution of the animals. Man is by no means the crown of
creation: every living being stands beside him on the same level of perfection. And even this is
saying too much: relatively speaking, man is the most bungled of all the animals, the sickliest, and
none have strayed more dangerously from its instincts. But for all that, he is of course the most
interesting (the AntiChrist 14).

Thus Nietzsche is emphatic in placing man back among the animals in immanence on this
planet. Far from being the mere chattels which the Judeo-Islamo-Christian tradition
teaches, which man has the right, and perhaps even the duty, to exploit as he sees fit,
Nietzsche invites us to imagine the animal's perspective upon man:
Animals as critics I fear that the animals consider man as a being like themselves that has lost in
a most dangerous way its sound animal common sense; they consider him the insane animal, the
laughing animal, the weeping animal, the miserable animal.33

The interesting animal is interesting not only due to his diversity, but also and most
importantly because he is the thinking animal, the fantasizing animal.
Gradually, man has become a fantastic animal that has to fulfill one more condition of existence
than any other animal: man must from time to time believe that he knows why he exists; his species
cannot thrive without a periodic trust in life! Without faith in the reason in life!34

He is mistrustful, curious, restless:

Outside the lecture hall In order to prove to you that man is at bottom one of the good-natured
animals, I should like to remind you how credulous he has been for such a long time. Only now
has he become, very late and after an immense self-conquest, a mistrustful animal yes, man is
now more evil than ever before. I do not understand this: why should man be more mistrustful
and evil now? Because he now has and needs a science.35

33

Gay Science 224

Gay Science 1
35
Gay Science 33
34

Therefore, more than anything, the human animal turns this curiosity upon itself, asking
not only what are we?, but also and all the more importantly, what is to become of us?
Here we touch upon Nietzsches doctrine of the bermensch. Without taking this image
which Nietzsche borrowed from Goethe in a crudely biologistic way,36 the crucial
difference between any previous stage in evolutionary history and the current one is that
for the first time, the animals undergoing the evolution can ask themselves what should
happen next:
The problem I pose is not what shall succeed mankind in the sequence of living beings
(man is an end), but what type of man shall be bred, shall be willed, for being higher in
value, worthier of life, more certain of a future. Even in the past this higher type has
appeared often but as a fortunate accident, as an exception, never as something willed.
In fact, this has been the type most dreaded almost the dreadful and from dread the
opposite type was willed, bred, and attained: the domestic animal, the herd animal, the
sick human animal the Christian.37

Nietzsche sets himself two tasks, which although intimately related, are
nevertheless distinct: on the one hand, overcoming and breaking out of nihilistic
traditions in metaphysical thinking which have held sway ever since Plato; and on the
other hand, looking forward to a new future and new possibilities, in which man is no
longer prey to his own misunderstandings in the same old way, by understanding those
other texts and other traditions marginalized by, but not eradicated by, the dominant
discourse.
Thus his stance is, ironically enough, not entirely unlike the prophets of the Old
Testament. But rather than interpreting such prophetic powers as a communication with
God, or even as a vision of the future, Nietzsche understands his own insights as a kind of
hypersensitivity and affliction:
Prophetic human beings You have no feeling for the fact that prophetic human beings are
afflicted with a great deal of suffering; you merely suppose that they have been granted a beautiful
gift , and you would even like to have it for yourself. But I shall express myself in a parable.
How much may animals suffer from the electricity in the air and in the clouds! We see how some
species have a prophetic faculty regarding the weather; monkeys, for example. But we pay no
heed that it is their pains that make them prophets. When a strong positive electrical charge, under
the influence of an approaching cloud that is as yet far from visible, suddenly turns into negative
electricity and a change of the weather is impending, these animals behave as if an enemy were
36

In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche calls Darwin a respectable but mediocre Englishman who
displayed a certain narrowness, aridity, and industrious diligence, something English in short (253),
describing his principle as the smallest possible force and the greatest possible stupidity (14).
37
AntiChrist 3

drawing near and prepare for defense or escape; most often they try to hide. They do not
understand bad weather as a kind of weather, but as an enemy whose hand they already feel38

Here we can see Nietzsche connecting what might be called his irreligious spirituality
with a holistic sense of nature. The deepest insights are insights not into a Christian
heaven or a Platonic realm of Ideas, but into nature in its infinite subtlety and
complication. The hierarchy of Judeo-Islamo-Christian chauvinism has broken down
altogether, for with their superior sense and instincts unclouded by self-consciousness,
animals surpass humans in their spirituality. Consciousness, and especially selfconsciousness, only seems to increase our insight, but in fact it obscures our access to our
instincts:
On the genus of the species the problem of consciousness (more precisely, of becoming
conscious of something) confronts us only when we begin to comprehend how we could dispense
with it; and now physiology and the history of animals place us at the beginning of such
comprehension. For we could think, feel, will, and remember, and we could also act in every
sense of that word, and yet none of all this would have to enter our consciousness (as one says
metaphorically). The whole of life would be possible without, as it were, seeing itself in a mirror.
Even now, for that matter, by far the greatest portion of our life actually takes place without this
mirror effect; and this is true even of our thinking, feeling, and willing life, however offensive to
older philosophers. For what purpose, then, any consciousness at all when it is in the main
superfluous? it seems to me as if the subtlety and strength of consciousness always were
proportionate to a mans (or animals) capacity for communication, and as if this capacity in turn
were proportionate to the need for communicationConsciousness is really only a net of
communication between human beings.39

In terms of the vocabulary of the Birth of Tragedy, consciousness itself is thus Apollonian,
whereas the vitality of the life-force which animates us along with all the other animals is
Dionysian, and operates not according to communication, but to symbolism. It is this role
that the animals play most profoundly for Nietzsches thinking, not as objects of scientific
investigation, but as symbols of a thinking not side-tracked into the labyrinth of
consciousness. It is as masks that animals are significant in Nietzsches thinking.
On the problem of the actor The problem of the actor has troubled me for the longest time
Falseness with a good conscience; the delight in simulation the inner craving for a role and
mask, for appearance The incorporated and inveterate art of eternally playing hide-and-seek,
which in the case of animals is called mimicry until eventually this capacity, accumulated from
38

Gay Science 316. In a letter to Overbeck on Oct. 28, 1881, Nietzsche asked for a book by Foissac on
Medical Meteorology, on account of the terrible effects of atmospheric electricity on me. Then in a
letter to Overbeck Nov. 14, 1881, he writes that he has received the book, but found it disappointing, saying
I should have been at the electricity exhibition in Paris, partly to learn the latest findings, partly as an
exhibition; for as one who senses electrical changes and as a so-called weather prophet I am a match for the
monkeys and am probably special.
39
Gay Science 354

generation to generation, becomes domineering, unreasonable, intractable, an instinct that learns to

lord it over other instincts, and generates the actor, the artist.'40

The artist in general, and the actor in particular, cannot be understood in terms of a literal
act of communication. The actor is not aiming so much to transmit a specific message to
an audience, as evoke a mood or motivate an attitude, or provoke a response not
necessarily determined in advance. Symbolic gestures are not directly communicative,
and for this very reason, are more widely understood than direct linguistic utterances,
which are always tied to a very specific community.
The animal with a good conscience The vulgar element in everything that gives pleasure in
Southern Europe whether it be Italian opera or the Spanish novel of adventure does not escape
me, but it does not offend me any more than does the vulgarity that one encounters as one walks
through Pompeii and, actually, also as one reads any ancient book. How come? Is it because there
is no sense of shame and everything vulgar appears as poised and self-assured as anything noble,
lovely, and passionate in the same sort of music or novel? The animal has as much right as any
human being; let it run about freely. And you, my dear fellow man, are also still an animal in spite
of everything! That seems to me to be the moral of this story and the peculiarity of Mediterranean
humanity. Bad taste has its rights no less than good taste, and even a prior right in cases in which it
corresponds to a great need, provides sure satisfaction and, as it were, a common language, an
unconditionally understandable mask and gesture. Good, select taste has always in comparison
something ulterior and contrived, not fully certain how it will be understood. It is not and never
was of the people. What is and remains of the people is the mask.41

What symbolism sacrifices in specificity, it gains in generality: a symbol shows, whereas

words say. By thus bypassing the necessity of conscious mediation, symbolism affects the
heart without being able to be certain in what way. But despite this lack of determinacy, or
rather because of it, symbolism is able to unite where communication excludes.
How morality is scarcely dispensable A naked human being is generally a scandalous sight
it seems that we Europeans simply cannot dispense with that masquerade which one calls clothes.
Now consider the way moral humans are dressed up, how they are veiled behind moral formulae
and concepts of decency the way our actions are benevolently concealed by the concepts of duty,
virtue, sense of community, honorableness, self-denial should the reasons for all this not be
equally good? I am not suggesting that all this is meant to mask human malice and villany the
wild animal in us; my idea is, on the contrary, that it is precisely as tame animals that we are a
shameful sight and in need of the moral disguise, that the inner man in Europe is not by a long
shot bad enough to show himself without shame (or to be beautiful). The European disguises
himself with morality because he has become a sick, sickly, crippled animal that has good reasons
for being tame; he is almost a mutant, a half-man, weak, clumsy. It is not the ferocity of the beast
of prey that requires a moral disguise, but the herd animal with its profound mediocrity, timidity
and boredom with itself. With morality the European dresses up let us confess it! to look
nobler, more important, more respectable, more divine 42
40

Gay Science 361

Gay Science77
42
Gay Science 352
41

And so, in Nietzsche, we can see a very basic project of the enlightenment being called
into question and found wanting. To construe wisdom as the quest for ever greater
degrees of consciousness and self-consciousness is for Nietzsche to condemn it to illusion
and confusion:
As regards the animals, Descartes was the first to have dared, with admirable boldness, to
understand the animals as machina: the whole of our physiology endeavors to prove this claim.
And we are consistent enough not to except man, as Descartes still did: our knowledge of man
today goes just as far as we understand him mechanistically Formerly, the proof of mans higher
origin, of his divinity, was found in his consciousness, in his spirit. To become perfect, he was
advised to draw in his senses, turtle-fashion, to cease all intercourse with earthly things, to shed his
mortal shroud: then his essence would remain, the pure spirit. Here too, we have reconsidered:
the development of consciousness, the spirit, is for us nothing less than the symptom of a relative
imperfection of the organism; it means trying, groping, blundering an exertion which uses up an
unnecessary amount of nervous energy. We deny that anything can be done perfectly as long as it
is still done consciously. The pure spirit is a pure stupidity: if we subtract the nervous system and
the senses the moral shroud then we miscalculate that is all! 43

Wisdom is sought, rather, in the depths of symbolism, and in its impact upon how we feel
and think:
New domestic animals I want to have my lion and eagle near me so that I always have hints and
omens that help me to know how great or small my strength is. Must I look down on them today
and feel fear? And will the hour return, when they look up to me and in fear? 44

This is no more a crude atheistic materialism that would make of man, or of any animal
for that matter, a mere machine, than it is an idealism which would make of him a pure
spirit. The interesting animal is so interesting because, in a way, he reflects within himself
the diversity of the whole animal kingdom.
The Consciousness of appearance How wonderful and new and yet how gruesome and
ironic I find my position vis--vis the whole of existence [gesammten Dasein] in the light
of my insight! I have discovered for myself that the human and animal past, indeed the
whole promal age and and past of all sentient being [die alte Mensch- und Thierheit, ja
die gesammte Urzeit und Vergangenheit alles empfindenen Seins] continues in me to
invent, to love, to hate and to infer. I suddenly woke up in the midst of this dream, but
only to the consciousness that I am dreaming and that I must go on dreaming lest I perish
as a sonambulist must go on dreaming lest he fall. What is appearance for me now?
Certainly not the opposite of some essence: what could I say about any essence except to
name the attributes of its appearance! Certainly not a dead mask that one could place on
an unknown x or remove from it!45

Man is the mimicking animal not simply due to a highly developed mimetic faculty, but
43

AntiChrist 14
Gay Science 314
45
Gay Science 54
44

even more so because as he looks inward, he discovers ever more animal forms within
himself, teeming like microbes in a drop of water under a microscope. Man is thus the
animal able to imagine in himself and therefore to imitate whichever of the other animals
he sees fit. For it is the animals in their specific diversity which decide the forms of his
imagination, and as such each kind of animal is able to symbolize for man something
different. In the mute face of the animal, man sees something which he recognizes from
within, and so the panorama of animal species arrayed before man provides him with the
symbolic vocabulary forming the only access he has to these mute depths within himself.
Not only do the species of animal serve man as so many screens upon which to project his
inner diversity of emotions and attitudes; they are in an even deeper sense mirrors of the
animals within which we actually still are, although wrapped in a protective human
sheath. Thus in Thus Spake Zarathustra we see Nietzsche using animals not only as
symbolic tokens of affect, but also as reflexive ontological microscopes, and perhaps even
telescopes of new human potentials yet to make sense in a far-off future, for if our body
is but a social structure composed of many souls,46 and souls are for Nietzsche
sublimated drives identical to animality.
3. Zarathustras Symbolic Animals
Would that you were as perfect as animals at least! But animals have innocence (PN 166).

Nietzsche sets himself the project of rethinking a worldly transcendence in

contrast to the otherworldly transcendence dreamed of in Christian metaphysics, which at
least at the time of the Birth of Tragedy (1872), he conceived of as a return to pre-Platonic
Greek culture through a renaissance of the non-alienated theatrical experience which he
envisaged Wagners operas would embody. In the second Untimely Meditation, On the
Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life (1874), Nietzsche envisages a new generation
of post-Christian neo-pagan aesthetes, who will conduct this revolution in art and culture:
Here I recognize the mission of that youth I have spoken of, that first generation of
fighters and dragon-slayers which will precede a happy and fairer culture and humanity
without itself having more than a presentiment of this future happiness and beauty. This
46

BGE 19

youth will suffer from both the sickness and the antidotes: and nonetheless it will believe
itself entitled to boast of a more robust health and in general a more natural nature than its
predecessors, the cultivated man and greybeard of the present. Its mission however, is
to undermine the concepts this present has of health and culture and to incite mockery
and hatred against these hybrid monsters of concepts; and the sign that guarantees the
superior robustness of its own health shall be that this youth can itself discover no
concept or slogan in the contemporary currency of words and concepts to describe its
own nature, but is only aware of the existence within it of an active power that fights,
excludes and divides and of an ever more intense feeling of life (10, 121).

Nietzsche was soon to realize that his romantic vision of the early 1870s of a neo-pagan
renaissance built around Wagners colony of artists in Bayreuth was hopelessly nave, and
fatally flawed by an insidious anti-Semitism which gradually came to pervade the Wagner
circle. By the time Human All Too Human appeared in 1878, Nietzsches break with
Wagner had become complete and he had realized that the task of the revaluation of
Christian-Platonic values and the conquest of nihilism was deeper, greater and altogether
more difficult than anything that could be achieved through the performance of a few new
operas. So it is that Nietzsche conceived his Thus Spake Zarathustra, a text which reaches
back into Dionysus Persian roots to resurrect the ancient prophet of the Zoroastrian
religion, Zarathustra. In this work Nietzsche draws upon every resource of his extensive
education - philological, philosophical, theological, mythological although the work
falls into none of these genres, but rather attempts to create its own new genre with the
audacity of a re-written scripture. Thus Spake Zarathustra operates not in the mode of
communication and consciousness, but rather attempts to tap the deeper springs of life
and thought through the power of symbolism. As such, the symbolic function is primary
in Thus Spake Zarathustra, and even the most cursory reading reveals that it is animals
that for Nietzsche serve as the primary symbols.47
The prologue opens with the restatement of the Gay Science 342, with
Zarathustra in solitude in his cave high in the mountains. The romantic image of the
hermit-sage alone with his thoughts on a mountain top is however one of which Nietzsche
is in fact suspicious:
47

In chapter 6 of Within Nietzsches Labyrinth, entitled The Resurrection of Zarathustras Soul, Alan
White approaches the question of interpreting the animals in Thus Spake Zarathustra by a reading of the
two sections entitled Of the Vision and the Riddle and The Convalescent. White says the animals way
of looking at things is important to Zarathustra not because it is the right way, or because it is to
become his way, but rather, precisely, because it reminds him that there are many ways (90).

 Often [wisdom] is a screen behind which the philosopher saves himself because he has become
weary, old, cold, hard as a premonition that the end is near, like the prudence animals have
before they die: they go off alone, become still, choose solitude, hide in caves, and become wise
What? Wisdom as a screen behind which the philosopher hides from spirit? 48

But Zarathustra is not in fact alone in his cave on the mountain at the start of the
prologue, for he has been living there for ten years with his eagle and his serpent. These
two animals are perhaps of all animals the most symbolically charged. The eagle is a
symbol of nobility, pride and solitude. The eagles perspective transcends that of all other
animals and gazes down upon them from on high with its powerful eyesight. The snake in
contrast is of all animals in most intimate contact with the earth. In Christian mythology
as adopted from the Jewish Old Testament, the snake is the messenger of the evil one,
tempting Eve to sin by eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. As
such the snake is a symbol of wisdom: of a dangerous knowledge and a rebellious desire
to know hidden secrets. For the classical Greeks, on the other hand, the snake was
associated with Asclepius49, god of healing, an ambiguous figure who travels back and
forth between the underworld and our world. The sacred snake regularly assists in his
cures, and Asclepius is represented in art and on coins holding a wand or staff around
which the snake is coiled. This indicates the connection for the Greeks between the
snakes poison and the pharmakon (medicine/ drug; cure/poison; venom/anti-venom),
showing that for the Greeks, as for the Hebrews, the snake was a symbol of dangerous
wisdom, and symbolic of the fragility of the boundary between life and death, good and
evil.
Thus these two animals symbolize transcendence and immanence. Zarathustra in
his solitude is alone with them in their incongruous pairing. To himself he applies the
symbol of the bee, saying behold, I am weary of my wisdom, like a bee that has gathered
too much honey; I need hands outstretched to receive it (Z 1, PN 122). The bee is of all
animals one of the most social, and by having Zarathustra liken himself to the bee,
Nietzsche is on one level, indicating that Zarathustra's isolation is not incompatible with a
factual but superficia sociality, while also on another level also reiterating the sentiment
of Gay Science 359 cited above that isolation (and especially lonliness in a crowd) is
48

Gay Science 359

Zarathustra would even seem to be explicitly likened to Aesclepius in the discours of Zarathustra called
On the Gift Giving Virtue: His disciples gave him as a farewell present a staff with a golden handle on
with a serpent coiled around the sun. Zarathustra was delighted with the staff and leaned on it (PN 186).
49

often nothing more than a preliminary to death. And so Zarathustra realizes that, like the
sun, I must go under go down, as is said by man to whom I want to descend.
His first encounter on his way down the mountain is with another hermit also,
called Saint. This hermit has renounced his humanity and embraced his animality to the
point of identification, he says do not go to man. Stay in the forest! Go rather even to the
animals! Why do you not want to be as I am a bear among bears, a bird among birds?.
But in this, the Saint is actually deluding himself, for when he sings, he sings not as an
animal to the animals, but as he says, to God. Zarathustra senses that something is
deeply wrong here. The Saint does not see the symbolic power of the animals, but only
his own deluded belief in God.
Next Zarathustra comes to the town on the edge of the forest, where he preaches
his doctrine of the bermensch:
All beings so far have created something beyond themselves; and do you want to be the ebb of this
great flood and even go back to the beasts rather than overcome man? What is the ape to man? A
laughing stock or a painful embarrassment. You have made your way from worm to man, and
much in you is still worm. Once you were apes, and even now, too, man is more ape than any ape.
Whoever is the wisest among you is also a mere conflict and cross between plant and ghost. But do
I bid you become ghosts or plants?50

Whereas the lone Saint has degenerated to a confused attempt to be a mere beast among
beasts, the townsfolk have fallen prey to the even greater error of vegetating in the
delusions of the soul superstition. Neither know what animals can really be for them, nor
what they themselves can be for animals. It is in their symbolic function that animals are
in fact gatekeepers to Zarathustras message of the bermensch, the one and only antidote
to what Nietzsche calls the great contempt:
What is the greatest experience you can have? It is the hour of the great contemptthe hour when
you say, what matters my reason? Does it crave knowledge as the lion his food?51

And so, Zarathustra says:

I love him who works and invents to built a house for the bermensch and to prepare earth,
animal, and plant for him: for thus he wants to go under.52

The whole of Thus Spake Zarathustra can be understood as an attempt to build a house
50

TSZ 3, PN 124
TSZ 3, PN 125-126
52
TSZ4, PN 127
51

for the bermensch in which he can dwell amongst earth, animal and plant as among
symbols and so overcome his great contempt for the confused animal that he used to be.
Zarathustra is next a spectator at the performance of the tightrope-walker in the
town square. When he first pronounced his doctrine of the bermensch, Zarathustra
characterises man as a tightrope stretched between animal and bermensch:
Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman a rope over an abyss. A dangerous across, a
dangerous on-the-way, a dangerous looking-back, a dangerous shuddering and stopping. What is
great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end: what can be loved in man is that he is an
overture and a going under.53

This performance ends in disaster, for as the tightrope-walker is in the middle of the rope
a jester jumps out and jumps over the man on the rope causing him to fall. The tightropewalker falls maimed and disfigured, but not yet dead at Zarathustras feet, and says:
I have long known that the devil would trip me. Now he will drag me to hell. Would you prevent
him?. By my honour, friend answered Zarathustra, all that of which you speak does not exist:
there is no devil and no hell. Your soul will be dead even before your body: fear nothing further.
The man looked up suspiciously. If you speak the truth he said, I lose nothing when I lose my
life. I am not much more than a beast that has been taught to dance by blows and a few meagre
morsels. By no means said Zarathustra. You have made danger your vocation; there is nothing
contemptible in that. Now you perish of your vocation: for that I will bury you with my own
hands.54

The tightrope-walker forms a pair with the hermit-saint. Both have a deluded
understanding of transcendence, the one praying to an imaginary God in his head, the
other fearing an equally imaginary devil. It is important to note that these two deluded
understandings of transcendence are in both cases joined with a deluded understanding of
animals, for in both cases the delusion is that they are none other than animals
themselves.
So at the conclusion of the prologue, we can see that the figure of Zarathustra
should be neither confused with his animals any more than he can be understood in
isolation from them. They are the lexemes of his symbolic vocabulary, and what the
prologue establishes is an image of the attempt to think immanence and transcendence
together:
53

TSZ4, PN 126-127
TSZ6, PN 132

54

This is what Zarathustra had told his heart when the sun stood high at noon; then he looked into the
air, questioning, for overhead he heard the sharp call of a bird. And behold! An eagle soared
through the sky in wide circles, and on him there hung a serpent, not like prey but like a friend: for
she kept herself wound around his neck. These are my animals, said Zarathustra and was happy
in his heart. The proudest animal under the sun and the wisest animal under the sun they have
gone out on a search. They want to determine whether Zarathustra is still alive. Verily, do I still
live? I found life more dangerous among men than among animals; on dangerous paths walks
Zarathustra. May my animals lead me! (Prologue 10).

So it is that Zarathustra sets out upon the strange fantastic journey that is Thus
Spake Zarathustra, led by animals. One central image of the book is that of the three
metamorphoses of the spirit, from the camel to the lion to the child. This evolution
symbolises the becoming of Geist (spirit/mind), from a stage of burdensome slavery, to
one of a lion who would conquer his freedom and be master in his own desert. The
problem of mankind, symbolically the problem of the child, is the problem of freedom,
and of overcoming the forms of slavery and of mastery in the higher form of creativity.
But creativity must be trained and cultured: children are creative but not artists, but must
learn how to create great things through an apprenticeship of imitation. Thus it is that the
child turns to the animals, able to mimic any one of them and so learn from the great
creativity of nature itself. Too often, Zarathustra laments, the child grows up imitating
what is weak in nature: the herd animal, the sheep, the motley cow.
Humanity itself is for Zarathustra still just a child, almost nothing but potential,
faced with no question greater than what it should become, at peril from the preachers of
death and despisers of the body. Even these sick creatures and pale criminals are not
beyond hope, says Zarathustra: once you had wild dogs in your cellar but in the end they
turned into birds and lovely singers. Out of your poisons you brood your balsam. You
milked your cow, melancholy; now you drink the sweet milk of her udder, saying we
are all of us fair beasts of burden, male and female asses. And so on one level,
Zarathustras problem, the one issue which preoccupies him in a multitude of ways
throughout the book, is the question of how mankind, the child, will choose to symbolize
itself. Upon what animal shall it model itself: the herd animal? The beast of prey? The
swift monkeys, who clamber over one another and thus drag one another into the mud
and the depths? (PN 162), or the insects of the market place in the buzzing hives of

commerce? (163-166). These are not merely stylistic questions, but rather a symbolic
approach to metaphysical problems of the highest order: are you a new strength and a
new right? A first movement? A self-propelled wheel?You call yourself free?Free for
what? (174-5).
So it is that the traditional religious question of transcendence and the traditional
secular questions of immanence are newly connected and recast by Nietzsche in a form
beyond this traditional dichotomy. Nietzsches irreligious spirituality hinges upon a
reinvestment in the world as the rightful locus of symbolism and even worship, no less
than it revolves around the deflation of the otherworldly phantasms of God, Satan, and
the imaginary hosts of Heaven. The traditional questions of transcendence of the soul and
of supernatural entities are thus brought down to earth, and revealed instead to be
immanent issues of psychology and culture, and at the same time an aura of mystery is
reinstated to the mundane, such that the body and its environment encode possibilities of
which we children can scarcely dream.
Remain faithful to the earth, my brothers, with the power of your virtue. Let your gift giving love
and your knowledge serve the meaning of the earth. Thus I beg and beseech you. Do not let them
fly away from earthly things and beat with their wings against eternal walls. Alas, there has always
been so much virtue that has flown away. And now lead back to the earth the virtue that flew away,
as I do back to the body, back to life, that it may give the earth a meaning, a human meaning
(PN 188).

In the section the Child with the Mirror, Zarathustra turns to his animals, asking What
has happened to me, my animals? Have I not changed? Has not bliss come to me as a
storm? (PN 195). This transfigured perspective in which Zarathustra sees immanence in
transcendence and transcendence in immanence makes him seem a stranger among men:
Look at Zarathustra! Does he not walk among us as if we were animals? But it were
better said he who has knowledge walks among men as among animals. (200).
And so it is that Zarathustra journeys through his elaborate symbolic menagerie,
populated by worms (201), pigs (208), tarantulas (211-14), wolves and dogs (214), asses
(215), butterflies (220), owls (223), bees (224), fabulous sea-monsters (228), tigers and
bulls (229), cats (234), snakes (235), fish (240), peacocks and buffaloes (241),
rattlesnakes (255), wildcats, toads and crocodiles (256), among other animals, until he

arrives upon the mountain of the vision and the riddle at the start of section three (267).
The vision is of course his most abysmal thought of the eternal return, his crucial
metaphysical allegory for the interpenetration of transcendence and immanence.
And this slow spider, which crawls in the moonlight, and this moonlight itself, and I and you in
the gateway, whispering together, whispering of eternal things must not all of us have been there
before? And return and walk in that other lane, out there, before us, in this long dreadful lane must we not eternally return? Thus I spoke, more and more softly; for I was afraid of my own
thoughts and the thoughts behind my thoughts. Then suddenly I heard a dog howl nearby. Had I
ever heard a dog howl like this? My thoughts raced back. Yes, when I was a child, in the most
distant childhood: then I heard a dog howl like this. And I saw him too, bristling, his head up,
trembling, in the stillest midnight when even dogs believe in ghosts(270-1).

This central passage is highly over-determined, for at the age of five, Nietzsche had
experienced the traumatic and sudden death of his father in an epileptic fit, an event he
specifically associates with the howling of a dog.55 The transcendence of this dramatic
past collapses here into the immanence of an uncanny present, as Zarathustra presents his
reader with an invitation to undertake a thought experiment designed to problematize the
immanence of the moment itself.
Thus at the focal point of the intellectual tension of Thus Spake Zarathustra the
animal imagery of the spider slowly spinning in the moonlight while the dog howls
nearby is playing a crucial symbolic role, voicing the abysmal angst at the heart of all
nature and the suffering ingrained in all history. And then as soon as Zarathustra has
related this vision, the scene abruptly alters: as if waking from a dream, Zarathustra is
suddenly on a cliff top, confronted with a riddle in the form of the distressing sight of a
shepherd into whose mouth a snake has crawled while he slept. Zarathustra tries to save
the shepherd, attempting to pull the snake from his throat, but he cannot, and cries out
instead Bite! Bite its head off! Bite! (271). This Nietzsche tells us is a riddle, a riddle to
introduce his other profound symbol of the bermensch. The heavy black snake choking
the shepherd's throat is the symbol of nihilism choking Christianity, and in his
foreseeing Zarathustra envisages the overcoming: the shepherd bites the head off the
snake and spits it out, jumping up, no longer shepherd, no longer human one changed,
radiant, laughing! (272).
55

Hollingdale Nietzsche: the Man and His Philosophy, pages 7-12.

These symbolic visions lead Zarathustra into involuntary bliss in which the
decadence of the modern world is transfigured into a restless dream before sunrise, and
the world becomes once again potential and possibility: over all things stand the heaven
Accident, the heaven Innocence, the heaven Chance, the heaven Prankishness (278).
Indeed, the world becomes magical, and fabulous things take place within its transcendent
immanence. Various dream-like journeys lead Zarathustra through the worlds infinitude,
until defying the spirit of gravity, Zarathustra finally returns to his cave at the close of part
three. He collapses, exhausted, and when he finally awakens, he begins to rave and
Zarathustras voice resounded so that his animals approached in fright Unfasten the
fetters of your ears: listen! For I want to hear you (327), and immediately then passes out
again.
For seven days and seven nights his animals did not leave him by day or night,
except that the eagle flew off to get foodthen his animals thought that the time had
come to speak to him (328). They admonish him to step out of his cave and re-enter the
world, Zarathustra replies:
Oh my animals, chatter on like this and let me listen. It is so refreshing for me to hear you
chattering: where there is chattering, there the world lies before me like a garden. How lovely it is
that there are words and sounds! Are not words and sounds rainbows and elusive bridges between
things which are eternally apart? To every soul there belongs another world; for every soul, every
other soul is an afterworld. Precisely between what is most similar, illusion lies most beautifully;
for the smallest cleft is the hardest to bridge (329).

To think that Zarathustra is undergoing mere hallucinations at this point would be to miss
the crucial link which Nietzsche is forging between language and transcendence. For
every soul, every other soul is an afterworld: in other words, the transcendence effect is
generated in and through communication, which moreover is never completely
transparent, but always mediated symbolically. The element of indeterminacy is
irreducible: how should there be any outside-myself? There is no outside. But all sounds
make us forget this; how lovely it is that we forget (329). 56 The presence of the animal
56

In his Nietzsche volume II chapter 7. Heidegger says Zarathustras animals are not chosen arbitrarily:
their essence is an image of Zarathustras proper essence, that is to say, an image of his task which is to be
the teacher of eternal return. Heidegger only considers the symbolic meaning of the eagle and the serpent,
which he says symbolise pride and discernment respectively (which interpretation ironically enough reveals
a lack of discernment on Heidegger's part, based on a pride at having mastered Nietzsche without
apparently actually reading his published books. Nevertheless he rightly says These two are his animals;

in human experience is not simply the sheer immanence of a material object, but rather
the complex interplay of immanence and transcendence which constitutes their enigmatic
being. Their symbolic potential is something quite different to an efficient cause which
brings about an effect upon us. Its significance lies rather in those aspects of ourselves to
which they enable access: i.e., what in us is enabled in their proximity?

they belong to him in his solitude. And when Zarathustras loneliness speaks it is his animals who are
speaking (45). Heidegger warns against interpreting the animals as pets: to hold out in loneliest
loneliness does not mean to keep these two animals as company or as a pleasant pastime; it means to
possess the force that will enable one to remain true to oneself in their proximity and to prevent them from
fleeing (48). What I have called the symbolic power of the presence of animals is precisely that they
possess the force that will enable one to remain true to oneself in their proximity. Where I differ from
Heidegger is in the detail of what exactly remaining true entails.

4. Camus: The Importance of the Implicit

Art disputes reality, but does not hide from it. Nietzsche could deny
any form of transcendence, whether moral or divine, in saying that
transcendence drove one to slander this world and this life. But perhaps
there is a living transcendence, of which beauty carries the promise,
which can make this mortal and limited world preferable to and more
appealing than any other (R 224).

1. Transcendence, Immanence and Animal Symbolism

We have emphasized the importance of understanding Plotinus as the last pagan
philosopher, rather than as a proto-Christian. We have seen how Nietzsche understands
himself as the first post-Christian philosopher, striving to free himself of two thousand
years of nihilism and decadence. Both thinkers fascinate and compel Camus, for both
reject Christianity in the name of a deeper and less nihilistic spirituality. As Camus once
put it in an interview:
I dont believe in God, that is true. But I am not an atheist nonetheless. I would even agreethat
there is something vulgaryesworn out about being against religion (Excerpt from Interview
L&CE 320).

But this yearning for a non-Christian concept of the sacred choses not to draw upon, say,
the Western Orientalists interest in Buddhism, or upon any new-age mysticism:
Q: You once wrote: secret of my universe: imagine God without the immortality of the soul. Can
you define more exactly what you meant?
A: Yes. I have a sense of the sacred and I dont believe in a future life, thats all. (ibid 364).

The key to understanding Camus attempt to articulate a non-nihilistic sense of the sacred
thus lies in his unequivocal rejection of otherworldliness, both in the sense of life after
death or reincarnation, and also in the sense of the positing of an other world
transcending this one. Along with his adoption of Nietzsches suspicion of
otherworldliness goes his parallel acceptance of the adamant Plotinian refusal to
anthropomorphize or even in any way identify the concept of a deity who created the
world:
What matters here is not to follow things back to their origins, but, the world being what it is, to
know how to live in it. (Rebel 12).

To know how to live without falling prey to idealizing dreams of otherworldliness is thus

for Camus the artistic problem par excellence. But Camus does not follow the suspicion
of idealism quite so far as does Nietzsche, fearing that this path descends literally into
fragmentation and insanity. Camus does not deny that the philosopher and the artist share
with all thinkers in general the longing for unity.1 His challenge is to do justice to this
longing without blinding himself to the importance of absurdity, after the fashion of
Hegel. He can settle for Hegels extreme idealism and monism2 no less than he can settle
for Nietzsches equally extreme anti-idealism and chaotic pluralism, maintaining instead
that the concept of moderation must play a crucial and indispensable role:
This law of moderation equally well extends to all the contradictions of rebellious thought. The
real is not entirely rational, nor is the rational entirely realThe desire for unity does not demand
that everything should be rational. It also wishes that the irrational should not be sacrificed. One
cannot say that nothing has any meaning because, in doing so, one affirms a value sanctified by an
opinion; not that everything has a meaning, since the word everything has no signification for us.
The irrational imposes limits on the rational which, in its turn, gives it moderation. Something has
a meaning, finally, which we must obtain from meaninglessness (R 259).

This law of moderation is at the core of Camus conception of thoughtfulness. As he

emphasizes in his interpretation of Nietzsches concept of nihilism, nihilism means for
Camus ignoring the obvious, and refusing to see what is under ones own nose.3 In other
words, it is the refusal to recognize ones limits, such as the human limit of mortality, or
the limit to comprehension imposed by the undeniably irrational aspects of reality.
1

See in Volume 9 of La pense de Camus:

1. Camus: le probleme du mal et ses solutions gnostiques by Paul J. Archambault
2. Camus et Nietzsche: philosophie et existence, by Frantz Favre.
3. La signification dautrui chez Camus et chez Kafka, by Lionel Cohn.
2
Camus calls Hegel the Napoleonic philosopher (R 104), who envisages a history without any kind of
transcendence (R 105), for Hegels deepest conviction is that reason is able to make spirit fully explicit and
absolutely present to itself. Thus for Camus, Hegel represents the culmination of all attempts to destroy,
more and more thoroughly, all idea of transcendence and any nostalgia for transcendence (R 106). Thus:
Animals, according to Hegel, have an immediate knowledge of the exterior world, a perception of the self,
but not the knowledge of self which distinguishes man[whose] essential characteristic is selfconsciousness (R 107). Hegel thereby epitomises for Camus what I have characterized as Christianitys
chauvinistic understanding of animality.
3

If nihilism is the inability to believe, then its most serious symptom is not found in atheism, but in the
inability to believe in what is, to see what is happening, and to live life as it is offered (R 59). Nietzsche
defines nihilism as the self-devaluation of the highest values. Camus redefinition of this term as the
inability to believe emphasizes the existential dimension of this problem over its geneaological analysis by
Nietzsche. The senses in which Camus definition differs from the moral connotation is brought out most
clearly in his analysis of terrorism in chapter 3 sections three to five of The Rebel. Despite repudiating the
term existentialist, it is nevertheless the case that Camus concern remains primarily with the individuals
struggle to find meaning in existence, and as such his analysis of nihilism focuses primarily upon the
overcoming of false consciousness as induced by ideological manipulation and exploitation.

It is as moderators of human hubris that the animals appear in Camus fiction, for
they symbolize human limitation. Certainly humans are other to one another, and no
person sees with certainty into another persons heart. But this often overlooked subtle
limitation to inter-subjectivity is writ large when it comes to animals. In the face of an
animal, the thoughtful human must recognize radical and ineradicable limits to their
perceptive and communicative powers, all anthropomorphism notwithstanding. We can
no more imagine the perspective of the animal than we can deny its existence, and as such
animals serve as excellent symbols of the limitations of our nature.
Animals also play at the same time the contrasting but not necessarily
incompatible function of symbolizing the continuity and unity of nature of which nonnihilistic humans must understand themselves as a part.
To feel ones ties to a land, ones love for certain men, to know there is always a place where the
heart can find rest these are already many certainties for one mans life. Doubtless they are not
enough. But at certain moments everything yearns for this homeland of the soul. 'Yes, it is to this
we must return (Summer in Algiers L&CE 90).

This deeply naturalistic impulse, which verges on pantheism, is perhaps the strongest of
Plotinus influences upon Camus:
What is strange about finding on earth the unity Plotinus longed for? Unity expresses itself here in
terms of sea and sky. The heart senses it through a certain taste of the flesh that constitutes its
bitterness and greatness. I am learning that there is no superhuman happiness, no eternity outside
the curve of the days...Not that we should behave as beasts, but I can see no point in the happiness
of angels. All I know is that this sky will last longer than I shall. And what can I call eternity except
what will continue after my death? What I am expressing here is not the creatures complacency
about his condition. It is something quite different. It is not always easy to be a man, even less to
be a man who is pure. But to be pure means to rediscover that country of the soul where ones
kinship with the world can be felt, where the throbbing of ones blood mingles with the violent
pulsations of the afternoon sun. (ibid. 91).

So the challenge of thoughtful existence is the challenge to achieve moderation, without

sacrificing rebellion to complacency:
If we are to save the mind we must ignore its gloomy virtues and celebrate its strength and wonder.
Our world is poisoned by its misery and seems to wallow in it. It has utterly surrendered to that evil
which Nietzsche called the spirit of heaviness. Let us not add to this. It is futile to weep over the
mind, it is enough to labor for it. But where are the conquering virtues of the mind? The same
Nietzsche listed them as mortal enemies to heaviness of the spirit. For him, they are strength of
character, taste, the world, classical happiness, severe pride, the cold frugality of the wise. More
than ever, these virtues are necessary for today, and each of us can choose the one that suits him
best (The Almond Trees L&CE 136-7).

In The Myth of Sisyphus Camus says:

A symbol, indeed, assumes two planes, two worlds of ideas and sensations, and a dictionary of
correspondences between them. This lexicon is the hardest thing to draw up. But awakening to
the two worlds brought face to face is tantamount to getting on the trail of their secret relationship.
In Kafka these two worlds are that of everyday life on the one hand, and, on the other, that of
supernatural anxiety. It seems that we are witnessing here an interminable exploitation of
Nietzsches remark: Great problems are in the street. (p.114, Penguin) 4

It is with this pursuit of an affective lexicon in mind that Camus approaches his vocation
as an artist, specifically, a novelist.5 His prose is characterized by a simplicity of
expression avoiding all sentimentalism. As he says: Each image becomes a symbol. The
whole of life seems reflected in it, insofar as it summarizes our own life at the moment
(Love of Life L&CE 54). Although never explicitly discussed by Camus, an examination
of his fiction clearly reveals that Camus employs animals in just such a symbolic
capacity.6 A kind of primal scene recurs in Camus, in which a character undergoes a
deeply significant moment of what might be called transcendence into the world. By this I
mean that in such moments these characters seem to transcend themselves and their own
mundane existence, but never into an other-worldly realm, but only into an intensity of
immersion in the ineffability of their own experience, a sort of transcendence into pure
4

In Transparence in Camus and Kafka. Yale French Studies 25 (1961): 98-103, John Darzins discusses
animal symbolism but only in relation to Kafka. Nonetheless, Darzins does discuss the failure of the spoken
word in literature and language, and hence the symbolic use of animals. He also mentions an interesting
comment by Maurice Blanchot about the relationship between imagery and the attempt to represent
transcendence and the infinite.
5
Artist was the appellation Camus always preferred for himself above novelist or philosopher: see
Youthful Writings (11); Speech of Acceptance upon the Award of the Nobel Prize for Literature (R, R&D
195-98), and preface to 1958 reissue of the Wrong Side and the Right Side (L&CE 10).
6
In The Short Stories of Albert Camus Yale French Studies 25 (1961): 75-80, Anne Minor focuses on the
short stories in Exile and the Kingdom. Minor discusses how these stories explore the limits of man and the
transcendent universe in comparison to the earthly predicaments which Camus develops. She also considers
the silence of the characters, and the symbolism Camus uses to express the emotions of these quiet
characters he has created. She says: The exile finds in the drama of solitude a unique opportunity to
perceive the beyond, and precisely because of his isolation to feel a direct communion with the transcendent
universe, to experience the instant suspended in eternity. (Minor 76). This is important because Camus
uses animals as symbols to express the same idea. Minor also says: But while the characters psychological
aspects are only suggested, they themselves are enveloped by a universe which is both their place of exile
and the possible site of the kingdom, yet to reach it and this is what Camus makes one realise the gift of
silence and a sense of elevation are necessary (Minor 77). This passage is relevant because it indicates the
relation between the limits of man and of language, and what other means are used to express an idea of
transcendence or infinity. Finally, Minor concludes: There man becomes aware of his stature. He knows
that he is riveted to the earth, to the world of immanence, but that he can also draw near to the other man by
an act of love and perhaps for a fleeting moment commune with the unknown truth of the infinite universe
(Minor 80).

immanence. And in each of these moments in which transcendence and immanence fuse
in a contradictory and ineffable union, an animal stands by, not entirely unlike the
barnyard scene of the Christian nativity.

2. Ineffable Experience in the Presence of Animals

After finishing his thesis in 1936 Camus spent the summer traveling in central
Europe, and 1937 traveling in Italy, during this time he worked on the manuscript of the
work entitled A Happy Death. This manuscript, which eventually evolved into his first
novel The Outsider (finished in May 1940, published in 1942), was never published by
Camus during his life, appearing only posthumously in 1971. It exhibits a degree of Jean
Greniers influence, whom Camus later referred to as my friend and teacher. (L&CE 7)
Grenier who was both a novelist and a philosopher, was Camus philosophy teacher at the
Lyce dAlger and later at the University of Algiers, eventually supervising Camus thesis
on Plotinus. In a review of Greniers les Iles, published in 1959, Camus says that he first
read this book in Algiers when he was twenty (i.e., 1933), and describes its effect upon
him at the time as overwhelming (L&CE 326).
Animals take their pleasure and die, man marvels and he dies where is his harbor?[Grenier]
prefers to tell us about a cats death, a butchers illness, the scent of flowers, the passage of time.
Nothing is really said in this book. Everything is suggested, with incomparable strength and
sensitivity (On Jean Greniers Les Iles L&CE 328-30).

Drawing on Greniers stylistic influence, Camus first attempt at a novel takes up a theme
broached in that section of Thus Spoke Zarathustra entitled On Free Death:
Many die too late, and a few die too early. The doctrine still sounds strange: die at the right time!
Die at the right time thus teaches Zarathustra. Of course, how could those who never live at the
right time die at the right time? Would that they had never been born! Thus I council the
superfluous. But even the superfluous still make a fuss about their dying; and even the hollowest
nut still wants to be cracked. Everybody considers dying important; but as yet death is no festival.
And as yet men have not learned how one hallows the most beautiful festivals. I show you the
death that consummates a spur and a promise to the survivors (PN 183).

In his hommage to Andr Gide, published in 1951, Camus wrote:

To die is such appalling torture for some men that it seems to me as if a happy death redeems a
small patch of creation (Encounters with Andr Gide L&CE 253).

A Happy Death is in a sense an exploration of this thought. From a literary point of view,

the work is immature. The dialogue is artificial, reading more like a series of
philosophical monologues than a natural flow of conversation. But it is for this very
reason that A Happy Death is extremely interesting, for the thinking behind the fiction is
in fact barely concealed at all; conversely, we might say that we can see here a Camus in
transition, searching for a vehicle better suited to his thought than the academic prose of
the thesis, which he has altogether altogether yet left behind.
As early as 1932 (at age 19), Camus had written an essay on Nietzsches Birth of
Tragedy and his relations with Schopenhauer and Wagner, in which he sided with
Schopenhauer, resolutely detaching ourselves from the aspect of Nietzsches aesthetics
that contradicted the philosopher of the Will, adding, in truth, this aspect of Nietzsches
thought is problematic (YW 120).7 Nietzsche is mentioned more affirmatively in the
conclusion of Camus thesis on Plotinus, where Camus indicates that he accepts the basic
thesis of The Birth of Tragedy that Greece can only be fully understood if we take into
account not only Apollinoan enlightenment, but also Dionysian darkness. This merely
passing mention indicates that Nietzsche continued both to interest and to disturb Camus
throughout this period, until his disquieting influence breaks out fully fledged in A Happy
Death.
Mersault assesses himself according to Nietzsches famous thought experiment of
the eternal return:
Am I happy? Catherine! You know the famous formula if I had my life to live over again
well, I would live it over again just the way it has been. Of course you cant know what that
means (HD 91).

His concept of transcendence is explicitly this-worldly, and inseparable from a kind of

hyper-immanence:
7

The irony of opposing Nietzsche by maintaining the centrality of forgetfulness is brought out in Beyond
Good and Evil 217: Blessed are the forgetful: for they get over their stupidities too cf. Genealogy of
Morals first essay 10; Human All Too Human Wanderer and his Shadow 40, and Assorted Opinions
and Maxims 122, Truth and Lies in a Non-moral Sense 1. Camus mature statement on Nietzsche is in
chapter two, section three (Absolute Affirmation) of The Rebel. (this section first appeared separately as
an article Nietzsche et nihilisme Les Temps modernes 70, August, 1951). The young Camus opposes
Nietzsche with a position which can only be described as entirely in keeping with the young Nietzsche in
the second half of The Birth of Tragedy if not the mature Nitetzsche of Nietzsche Contra Wagner, when he
says for anyone who conceives of music as we do that is to say, as a means of dispensing forgetfulness
Wagner will be one of the rare composers who fully realize the ideal (YW 121)

In his hours of lucidity, he felt that time was his own, that in the brief interval which finds the sea
red and leaves it green, something eternal was represented for him in each second. Beyond the
curve of the days he glimpsed neither superhuman happiness nor eternity happiness was human,
eternity ordinary (HD 85).

This human, all too human transcendence is explicitly tied to forgetting:

Believe me there is no such thing as great suffering, great regret, great memoryeverything is
forgotten, even a great love. Thats whats sad about life, and also whats wonderful about it.
Theres only a way of looking at things, a way that comes to you every once in a while (81).

Opposites continually oppose one another in An Unhappy Death in contradictions which

maintain their productive tension, while yet refusing any form of Hegelian synthesis or
reconciling resolution: characters do not hesitate to state that they feel sad and happy at
the same time (83); or say and think opposites at once Yes [he said]. He was thinking
No. (84); Mersault maintains What matters to me is a certain quality of happiness. I
can only find it in a certain struggle with its opposite a stubborn and violent struggle
(91). And when the doctor Bernard says to Mersault To think the way you do, you have
to be either a man who lives on a tremendous despair, or on a tremendous hope,
Mersault replies On both, perhaps (94). All these contradictory thoughts and feelings
finally culminate in Mersaults very body when he undergoes the fatal slide into fever:
It was hard to breathe. He was smothering under his blankets. He was cold. He was hot. He was
burning with a great confusing rage, his fists clenched, his blood throbbing heavily under his skull
(101).

This perspectival and temporary transcendence, continually struggling with an

immanence which switches back and forth between contradiction and identification, is
unambiguously linked with animals, whose mute and enigmatic presence pervades A
Happy Death:
Day after day, Mersault let himself sink into his life as if he were sliding into waterthus he
became one with a life in its pure state, he rediscovered a paradise given only to animals of the
least or the greatest intelligence. At the point where the mind denies the mind, he touched his truth
and with it his extreme glory, his extreme love (HD 86-87).

Even the body participates in the alterity of animals which makes them a symbol of the
limits of inter-subjectivity and the heterogeneity of intellect and sensation: Lucienne
often realised through her body what her mind could not understand (76); Mersaults
body had served him faithfully, had opened him to the world. But at the same time, it

lived a life of its own, detached from the man it represented. For these few years it had
passed through a slow decomposition; now it had completed its trajectory, and was ready
to leave Mersault, to restore him to the world (105). At times Mersault even apprehends
his own body as a strange creature: He looked again at his hands, which lay like living,
wild animals on his kneesHe knew them, recognized them, yet they were distinct from
himself, as though capable of actions in which his will had no partthe emblem of his
life(55).
And yet if animals and the body thus transcend consciousness in their inscrutable
alterity, they nevertheless are able also to symbolize a reliability grounded upon stability
which is actually in a sense the foundation of intersubjectivity:
Yes, Mersault said. He marveled at the strange blindness by which men, though they are so aware
of what changes in themselves, impose on their friends an image chosen for them once and for all.
He was being judged by what he had been. Just as dogs dont change character, men are dogs for
each otherWhat a distance there was between them, and yet what complicity! (82-83).8

There are three scenes in A Happy Death which stand out clearly as instances of Camus
use of animals as symbolic mediators of contradictory moments when transcendence and
immanence conspire in the precipitation of a temporary sense of the sacred. The first
concerns the character Cardona, Mersaults tenant, whose very appearance seems to be a
contradiction in terms, for he is both deaf, half dumb, a mean and violent man and yet
also thirty, short, rather handsome (38). Having been spoilt by his over-indulgent
mother who is now dead, this pathetic character is barely able to feed himself and clean
his room and so lives in utter filth, sleeping with his dog on fetid blankets. One night on
his way home from a caf, he takes out a photo of his mother, which wakened the echoes
of a dead past:
In the hideous room, alone with the futility of his life, mustering his last forces, he had become
conscious of the past which had once been his happiness. Or so he must have thought, at least,
since at the contact of that past and his wretched present, a spark of the divine had touched him and
he had began to weep. Now, as whenever he found himself confronting a brutal manifestation of
life, Mersault was powerless, filled with respect for that animal pain. He sat down on the dirty,
rumpled blankets and laid one hand on Cardonas shoulder (HD 40).
8

Perhaps this explains Mersaults strange pet name for his lover Marthe: image (HD 23, 83), a strange
pet name made even stranger by the fact that Marthe tells Mersault that her previous lover Zagreus, the
cripple whom Mersault murders in the same detached manner in which the character of the same name kills
the Arab in The Outsider, also used to call her (HD 26).

Detached, and yet touched, Mersault both wants to leave this disgusting room but also to
help, saying you cant stay here like this. The tolerance demanded by this intolerable
impasse then appears symbolically in the form of Cardonas dog:
Mersault let go of Cardonas shoulder, and he collapsed on the dirty pillows. From under the bed
came a deep sigh and a sickening smell. The dog dragged itself out, flattening its rump, and rested
its head on Mersaults lap, its long ears pricked up, its golden eyes staring into his ownIn the
miserable room where there was scarcely enough air to breathe, with the dogs warmth under his
fingers, he closed his eyes on the despair which rose within him like a tide for the first time in a
long while. Today, in the face of abjection and solitude, his heart said: No. And in the great
distress that washed over him, Mersault realized that his rebellion was the only authentic thing in
him, and that everything elsewhere was misery and submission (HD 41).

It is immediately after this discovery of an inner purity despite, or perhaps even because
of, the squalor which forms its context that Mersault kills Zagreus, steals his money and
flees the oppressive heat of Algiers to set out on a journey thorough central Europe,
(Camus himself undertook this journey at this time). Drifting first through Czech hotels,9
watching huge black birds with glistening wings (56) from the windows of trains,
following the ardent animal coiled in his loins in and out of brothels (60), Mersault
submits to time realizing that to come to terms with time was at once the most
magnificent and the most dangerous of experiments (61). He thereby makes good the
claim he made to Zagreus before he killed him: I wouldnt make an experiment out of
my life: I would be the experiment of my life (33). Although Mersault is in no sense
fleeing from the crime he committed, and is apparently entirely devoid of remorse or
guilt, his travels nevertheless catalyze the blessing of forgetfulness:
Mersault realized that not once since Vienna had he thought of Zagreus as the man he had killed
with his own hands. He recognized in himself that power to forget which only children have, and
geniuses, and the innocent. Innocent, overwhelmed by joy, he understood at last that he was made
for happiness (62).

This second revelation in the progress of this profane pilgrim is a turning point in the
structure of the book. Up to this point (the end of part II, chapter II), Camus had been
writing in the past tense. But for the duration of chapter III, the prose changes to the
present tense10, and Mersault finds himself back in Algiers living with three others, Rose,
9

Where I prefer to live and work (and what is more unusual, where I would not mind dying) is in a hotel
room. I have never been able to succumb to what is called home life (so often the very opposite of an inner
life); 'bourgeois happiness bores me and terrifies me. This incapacity is nothing to brag about: it has made
no small contribution to my worst faults (1958 preface to The Wrong Side and The Right Side). An
incapacity Camus shared with Nietzsche, whether consciously or not.
10
This is not mere sloppiness on Camus behalf, but was deliberately included in Camus plans for the

Claire and Catherine, in a hilltop house overlooking the bay which he refers to as The
House above the World, and in which he is always referred to by his Christian name,
whereas up this point in the novel he had been referred to only by his surname.
This house is also inhabited by two cats, Gula and Cali. The line between the cats
and the women is blurred. When Mersault notices that Claire is gaining weight, for
instance, he addresses her as one would a cat: Youre disgusting. A lovely creature is not
entitled to grow ugly (65); Rose, on the other hand, speaks to the cats as if they were
people: Rose had explained to them yesterday, now you animals know its too hot in the
summer to be hungry (66). Catherine herself seems to cross the line between the
feminine and the feline: Eyes closed, Catherine takes the long fall which carries her deep
into herself, down where some animal stirs gently, breathing like a god (68). This
descent into immanence, which is nevertheless reminiscent of a divine transcendence,
prepares the scene for the second passage on which I wish to focus attention. Mersault
and the women, high up in The House above the World, are joking about Roses ideals
of love and happiness, and hypothetical questions of marriage and pregnancy:
Rose closes her eyes. Gula has jumped into her lap, and by slowly caressing the cats skull and
back, Rose anticipates that secret marriage in which the squinting cat and the motionless woman
will see the same universe out of the same half-closed eyesRose lets Gulas purring rise within
her, starting from the coiled beast in the hollow of her body. The heat presses on her eyes and
immerses her in a silence inhabited by the throbbing of her own blood. The cats sleep for days at a
time and make love from the first star until dawn. Their pleasures are fierce, and their sleep
impenetrable. And they know that the body has a soul in which the soul has no part (HD 71).

Here we can clearly see the distancing from the body commented upon above being
linked with the thought of an impossible association with experience from an animals
perspective. The secret marriage anticipated by Rose is of course impossible, but this
impossible thought acts as a symbol for the thought of a marriage, not at all impossible,
with another man. The symbolic point is that from the point of view of consciousness,
humans are in fact as impenetrable to one another as is a sleeping cat. And yet just as his
wife Luciennes body often realized what her mind could not understand, and
Mersaults body lives a life of its own, the cats "know that it is the bodys soul, and
not the minds soul, which is the true uniting force behind all human love.
novel: see afterword by Jean Sarocchi, page 109.

But Patrice Mersaults utopian days in The House above the World come to a
close at exactly this point, and he returns to his wife, and the text returns to the past tense,
when he rediscovered a familiar and overwhelming miracle on Luciennes lips (72). He
is entranced by his wifes devotion to him, by her way of following him, of taking his
arm, and of trusting him:
Her silence, too, by which she put all of herself into each momentary gesture and emphasised her
resemblance to the cats, a resemblance to which she already owed the gravity characterising all her
actionsthere was something like a great cry within him, abstract yet ardent. From the starry night
and the city that was like a spilt skythe limitless longing to seize from these vibrant lips all the
meaning of that inhuman and dormant world, like a silence enclosed in her mouth. He bent over
her, and it was as if he had rested his lips on a bird (72).

The House Above the World is for Camus a utopian vision of pure presence purely
present, which must however remain temporary. Just before Mersault leaves he is on the
balcony with Claire as she holds her face up to the sky: facing everything noble and
elementary in the world she united her life with her longing for life, identified her hopes
with the movement of the stars. Suddenly turning around, she said to Patrice: on good
days, if you trust life, life has to answer you(73). Thus is transcendence conceived by
Camus: temporary, pure, and strictly mundane on good days.
But upon good days, bad days follow, and the pursuit of happiness is not
Mersaults guiding light. Despite all intimacy, human relations are transient, and man
must learn that his destiny is impersonal union with the earth alone: Mersault sniffed the
bitter fragrance which consecrated his wedding to the earth this afternoon (96). He is
beset by illness and wanes. He takes to his bed and pleurisy confined him to his room for
a month (98). Time is highly variable throughout A Happy Death: sometimes it passes
with an agonizing slowness, at others such as this, an entire year seems to pass like a
day.11 The contradiction of life and death that we call illness converges now for Mersault
upon this third passage, through which the mournful sound of a howling dog reverberates,
just as it had for Zarathustra when he conquered the dwarf who symbolised the spirit of
gravity:
11

When Mersault had nothing to do, his time stretched out, measureless before him. Each minute
recovered its miraculous value, but he did not yet recognize it for what it was. Just as the days of a journey
seem interminable whereas in an office the trajectory from Monday to Monday occurs in a flash, so
Mersault, stripped of all his props, still tried to locate them in a life which had nothing but itself to consider.
Sometimes he picked up his watch and stared as the minute hand shifted from one number to the next,
marveling that five minutes should seem so interminable (85).

He heard the sea, the pebbles rolling under the receding wave, the night throbbing behind his
windows, the dogs howling on distant farms. He was hot now, threw back the blankets, then cold
again, and drew them up. As he wavered between one suffering and another, between somnolence
and anxiety, he suddenly realised he was ill, and anguish overwhelmed him at the thought he might
die in this unconsciousness, without being able to see clearly. The village steeple chimed, but he
could not keep count of the strokes (HD 100).

Thus it is with time out of joint that Mersault confronts what is for him his most abysmal
thought: not of eternal return, but rather, that fate is not in man but around him (101).
This surrounding fate is thus neither purely immanent nor purely transcendent, but
partakes of both, like the distant howl of a dog, able to stir the soul despite its distance:
The fragrance of wormwood, the wild flowers among the ruins, and the solitude of the cypresses in
the Sahel generated an image of life where beauty and happiness took on an aspect without the
need of hope, a countenance in which Patrice found a kind of fugitive eternity. That was what he
did not want to leave he did not want that image to persist without him. Filled with rebellion and
pity, he saw Zagreus face turned towards the window He waited for the new spasm which would
plunge him back into the blind fever. The chill came, restoring him to a moist, sealed world in
which he silenced the animal rebellionBut before losing consciousness, he had time to see the
night turn pale behind the curtains and to hear, with the dawn and the worlds awakening, a kind of
tremendous chord of tenderness and hope which doubtless dissolved his fear of death, though at
the same time it assured him he would find a reason for dying in what had been his whole reason
for living (HD 101).

One more feverish day and night passes in which a kind of symbolic reconciliation with
Zagreus takes place in Mersaults mind, and images of huge fantastic animals which
nodded over desert landscapes (103) come and go. Finally Mersault faces the end, not
alone, but rather in the presence of his wife:
He looked at Lucienne. He smiled without wincing, and this smile too came from inside himself.
He threw himself back in the bed, and felt the slow ascent within him. He looked at Luciennes
swollen lips and, behind her the smile of the earth. He looked at them with the same eyes, the same
desire (HD 106).

Thus in the end there is for Patrice Mersault a sacred coincidence of his temporary tie to
his wife, and his eternal wedding with the earth into which all earthlings must return:
Stone among the stones, he returned in the joy of his heart to the truth of the motionless
world. (106)
Just as there is a moment when the artist must stop, when the sculpture must be left as it is, the
painting untouched - just as a determination not to know serves the maker more than all the
resources of clairvoyance - so there must be a minimum of ignorance in order to perfect a life in
happiness. Those who lack such a thing must set about acquiring it: unintelligence must be earned
(HD 86).

Conclusion.
[The One] did not come in order to be present, but
you went away when it was not present. But if you
went away, it was not from it - for it is present - and
you did not even go away then, but were present and
turned the opposite way (VI, 5, 12).

Having traced in some detail the significance of animal symbolism in Plotinus, in

Nietzsche and in Camus, we have now prepared ourselves to be able to appreciate that
which constitutes the crucial point of Camus interpretation of Plotinus in Between
Plotinus and Saint Augustine. The central passage appears in chapter three, part one,
section B The Conversion, or the Path of Ecstasy subsection (c). In this section, Camus
contrasts two differing interpretations of Plotinus. The first, that of Zeller,12 assimilates
Plotinus to the pantheism of Spinoza, for whom the One is entirely immanent, the
difference between immanence and transcendence itself being only apparent. Against this
assimilation of Plotinus to pantheism, Camus follows the interpretation of the Scottish
philosopher Edward Caird, who maintained the irreducibility of the transcendence of the
One in any determinate finite context. For although Plotinus and Spinoza both agree that
determinatio est negatio (determination is negation i.e., something is determined by
specifying what it is not), and as such both accept a kind of negative theology in which
the concept of God can only be determined as different to anything and everything that
can be specified, Caird points out that Plotinus and Spinoza draw very different
conclusions with this same method.
Spinoza immediately identifies the idea of the indeterminate with that of the
self-determinate, the causa sui, which is perfectly determined by itself, and, therefore,
receives no determination from without, but is rather the source of the determination of
all other things (Caird vol II, 229). From this it follows that for Spinoza the One is a
substance manifesting itself in infinitely many attributes and modes, the ground of all
being which is in fact nothing apart from its manifestation: Deus sive Natura [God
12

See Eduard Zeller, Outlines of the History of Greek Philosophy. Trans. Palmer. New York: Meridian,
1950, 87-89.

and/or nature], God and nature being so entirely and purely immanent to one another as to
be wholly identified. But Plotinus could never accept this assimilation of the One to pure
immanence, for he does not accept the identification of the indeterminate and the causa
sui. Plotinuss God is no creator, for Plotinuss concept of emanation is radically different
from the Judeo-Christian concept of creation, and for this reason Plotinus and Christian
metaphysics shall remain forever irreconcilable. The unity of the One is not strictly
speaking in any way represented, for it is infinitely different from and superior to even the
most abstract and intellectual concept of unity or logical identity. Not only are the worldly
identities of material entities and animals and men mere symbols of the One; even the
intellectual identities of the numerical and logical units are in their turn purely symbolic
of the strictly ineffable unity of the One beyond Intellect: The absolute One decisively
repels the many, and cannot in any way admit difference of multiplicity into itself. Its
unity, therefore, must be conceived not as immanent but as transcendent (Caird 231).
Neither the conceptual world of the nous nor the material world of the psyche is
conceived by Plotinus as a mode or an attribute of the One. The One simply has no modes
or attributes of which we can conceive: its transcendence is irreducible. And thus so also
is its indeterminacy. Unlike Spinoza, Plotinus will not take the step from indeterminacy to
self-determination. The via negativa does not culminate in any representation whose
positivity would convert thought back into metaphysical theology, as it does for Spinoza
no less than it does for Saint Augustine.
Therefore for Plotinus, symbolism plays a crucial role in thinking, which cannot
be reduced to representation. We simply cannot represent the One: this is the limit of the
nous, and the reason why not even the purest Intellect can do without symbolism. For just
as the transient manifestation of forms in the material world of the psyche are ultimately
only symbols able to prepare it to receive the realization of its higher life in the Intellect,
the concepts which constitute the medium of the life of the nous are in turn also nothing
more than symbols preparing the nous itself to become the passive receptor of the One
beyond representation in discursive concepts. It is precisely because they are not
discursively determinate that symbols are able to play this crucial mediating function in
Plotinus thought, for they are as Derrida points out immanent traces of transcendence.

Although he does not put it in exactly this vocabulary, Camus grasps this crucial orienting
role of the trace in Plotinus:
For certainly that which is altogether without a share in the good would not ever seek the good
[Enneads III, 5, 9]. That is to say: you could not search for me if you had not already found me. Or
in Plotinian terms: desire requires a certain immanence of that which is desired in that which
desiresGod to us then is immanent. Desire demands iton the other hand, one cannot deny of
the God of Plotinus an incontestable transcendence in comparison to other beings (Plotinus and
Christian Metaphysics 44-45).

Inscribed in immanence is the trace of transcendence. This is the meaning of desire,

which thus for Plotinus must in this life remain forever restless and only ever temporarily
satisfied. The mind cannot help attempting to represent this spatially, for representation is
knowledge, the very medium of the discursive mind. But this irresistible impulse cannot
succeed, for the One is in fact incommensurable with difference, and difference is the
principle of all representation:
The doctrine of Plotinus is an attempt to think non-spatially. And it is this plan, qualitative and
inexpressible, that we must endeavor to understandUpon making the effort to assimilate
Plotinian experience, we see that the first principle is itself present in all its works, and that it is not
localized, and that in a certain sense it is at the same time both transcendent and immanent in all
things (45).

The experience of transcendence is a kind of alias of the One in immanence: a weird

immanence, which we call the trace. The One must in some sense be present in all
immanence, or that very immanence would fail. Immanence means for some one thing to
be there. But at the same time the One would be neither infinite nor eternal if it did not
transcend each and every of its finite manifestations. This elusive mode of the being of
the One is traced out in what we call a symbol. The symbol symbolizes the trace, and
thereby succeeds in expressing what representation cannot capture. For the symbol does
not fall prey to the trap of attempting to represent the unrepresentable, but rather presents
the more complicated dynamic by which experience exceeds itself in a way which it
cannot properly express. The main thing is, as Heidegger says, the power of symbols in
general, and of animal symbolism in particular, to enable one to remain true to oneself in
their proximity.
Camus partakes of this mysticism of Plotinus in a mode which avails itself of this
insight into the nature of symbolism. while distancing itself from the tendency to piety

which Plotinus undeniably exhibits. This healthy dose of Nietzschean scepticism correctly
identifies the performative contradiction involved in calling the ineffable the One and
God. As clearly as any writer of the 20th century, Camus remains uncompromisingly
faithful to the insight that the ineffable must remain implicit. This uncompromising
fidelity to the importance of the implicit marks Camus as a pupil of Nietzsche. The theme
of animal symbolism in particular and the symbolism of the earth in general infuses all of
Camus attempts to remain true to Zarathustras exhortation to remain faithful to the
earth.
This transfigured immanence infused with the trace of transcendence is a
complicated presence which cannot be reduced to representation. It can only be evoked
with symbols, for life must be transformed from absurdity into meaningfulness by being
taken as itself symbolic of the indestructibility of life itself. This is not a representation of
an other-worldly eternal or immortal life, but an appreciation that the fleeting and fragile
lives of mortals can themselves come to symbolise the inseparable and everlasting
mixture of vitality and mortality that is the reality of all life in this world. The animals
which attend such moments of significance in Camus fiction symbolise the trace of
transcendence which lies at the root of the sense of reticent wonder expressed so perfectly
in Camus fiction. This mercurial play of immanence and transcendence exhibits a sense
of the sacred which Camus leaves entirely implicit.

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