Learning to Read the Signs of Heaven: Plotinus on the Art and Philosophy of Divination
In his Life of Plotinus, Porphyry attributes to his teacher supernatural powers of discernment (κατανοήσως).1placeholder A striking instance of this is when the widow Chione had her necklace stolen, Plotinus immediately is able to identify the thief, long before he is subjected to torture and confesses to the crime. Similarly, Plotinus is said to have an exceptional ability for predicting the outcomes of the lives of his students. His young student Polemo is correctly predicted to live a short life and, in another notable instance, Plotinus’ predictive abilities are directly credited for preventing Porphyry from ending his life in a fit of “pathological melancholy.”
The inclusion of these anecdotes within Plotinus’ biography indicates that Porphyry as a narrator2placeholder is trying to draw a clear parallel between, on the one hand, the piercing philosophical insights of his teacher and, on the other, a closely related insight into other kinds of non-apparent causes. In the case of the stolen necklace, the insight granted is an insight into a causal chain which Plotinus was not physically present for but nevertheless able to discern; in the case of his predictive abilities, Plotinus is seen to consistently demonstrate knowledge of the outcome of events long before they have come to pass. The relationship between these two forms of insight, while not explicitly articulated by Porphyry, nevertheless seems to be somewhat reciprocal in nature. Insight into first principles is confirmed in its application to practical affairs and, conversely, one’s ability to accurately predict the future relies upon an ability to discern causes which are not readily apparent.
To better understand this relationship between (supernatural) foreknowledge and philosophical insight, this essay will focus on the nature of divination as conceived by Plotinus himself. To accomplish this, I will examine a number of passages in which Plotinus discusses the mantic (divinatory) arts, giving special prominence to their role in his early treatise On fate, in which the reliability of divination features centrally within a broader anti-Epicurean polemic. I will then examine some additional passages concerning particular practices of divination, such as divination from disembodied spirits and oracles and divination from the flight patterns of flocks of birds. Finally, I will conclude with a brief discussion of the implication of the role of the mantic arts in both Plotinus’ broader theory of technical knowledge (τέχνη) and its role in cosmological explanation.
Mantic arts as a cosmological concern3placeholder
The treatise III.1, On fate, is framed around a critique of rival philosophical positions regarding the nature fate: the Epicurean, which denies the existence of fate; the Stoic, which posits a single causal principle which governs all things; and that of the astrologers, who attribute all causes of terrestrial phenomena to the various heavenly bodies. While we are primarily concerned with the discussion of Epicureanism in ch. 3 of the treatise, the centrality of astrology in the latter portions of the treatise is certainly noteworthy, even if Plotinus’ attitude toward it is decidedly mixed. We will return to Plotinus’ theory of astrology at a later time, but it will suffice for now to note that Plotinus does in fact affirm that, in this treatise, the stars do serve as a basis for prophecies concerning both the human world and that of broader environmental conditions concerning plants and animals.4placeholder
The core concern of the first half of this treatise is to show that universal necessity or fate are impossible unless one posits the existence of incorporeal entities. His argument is as follows:
- Bodily motion is inherently disorderly.
- The cosmos is an orderly arrangement.
- Order cannot come from disorder.
So, there must be a cause for cosmic order, and that cause cannot be a body.
Plotinus needs to defend all three premises and, following Plato and Aristotle, will appeal to craft analogies in his argumentative strategy. Craft knowledge (τέχνη) is characterized by its ability to reliably and consistently produce its particular object—shipbuilders can demonstrate their knowledge of shipbuilding by reliably building seaworthy vessels, for example—in a way which cannot be attributed merely to chance. Similarly, since the universe exhibits such regularity in the motion of its parts and the relationship between causes and effects, it too must be the product of some sort of craft-like activity (e.g., the Demiurge of the Timaeus). Or, at the very least, the order of the cosmos is craft-like insofar as it cannot be attributed to chance, but rather through the activity of a soul which produces some product with regularity and precision.
In the case of the Epicureans, Plotinus begins his argument by assuming the premises of atomist physics and then trying to show that the resulting commitments are incoherent. The basic assumption is that atoms exist and have an innate downward motion, though some will deviate from this motion in the form of the atomic “swerve” which occurs spontaneously and at random.5placeholder So, atomic motion writ large is disorderly and not governed by any higher cause or principle (the Epicurean gods residing in the intercosmic spaces have no involvement whatsoever with the affairs of the world); the Epicurean therefore agrees with the first premise (bodily motion is disorderly). But, since the Epicurean denies the second premise which affirms the orderly nature of the cosmos,6placeholder Plotinus has to provide decisive evidence that the universe is in fact an orderly arrangement. It is noteworthy, then, that Plotinus here will appeal to the mantic arts to prove that the world has an underlying order which can be predicted through the application of a certain type of technical knowledge:
“On [the Epicurean] view, neither prophecy nor mantic [arts] could exist at all, nor what is produced from a craft – for how could there be craft in things that have no order? – nor what is produced by divine possession and inspiration; for in these cases, too, the future must be determined.”7placeholder
Since crafts are possible, both those which deal with craft objects and those which pertain to knowledge of future events, there must be some principle which determines future events in advance of their realization in the present. Because there is some underlying causal chain at work, crafts are in fact possible and premise (2) must be true; the universe has to have some (incorporeal) principle which guarantees its existence as an orderly thing.
From this argument, Plotinus will hold the position, contra Epicurus, that all things which come to be have a cause. As he notes in his opening remarks to the treatise:
“But if all things come to be because of a cause, it is easy to grasp the immediate causes or to trace them back to these, for example, the cause of going to the agora is the thought that one must see someone or collect a debt…the cause of some things can be traced back to particular crafts; the cause of being healthy is medicine and the doctor.”8placeholder
As such, the atomic “swerve” is thus ridiculed as something meaningless9placeholder and the atomist position as a whole being both “absurd and impossible.”10placeholder Because Epicurean cosmology attributes the generation of the universe to chance—infinite atoms engaged in disorderly motion will, given infinite time, eventually combine into an orderly cosmos—Plotinus has to show that order cannot ever come into existence sui generis; it must always be the product of some prior cause and ordering principle. Order is thus intimately connected with predictability. Because the atomist swerve establishes that uncaused motion (or at the very least, motion not traceable to any prior causal chain; it could be also understood as “self-caused” by the swerving body) is present in reality at the most fundamental ontological level, atomist physics seems to preclude the possibility of any kind of genuine knowledge of future events. Future events may be uncaused or occur differently than would be entailed from the prior causal chain (if they are the product of some swerving motion), yet, for Plotinus, this runs directly contrary to the abilities demonstrated, in the form of technical knowledge, by seers, diviners, and astrologers. And, precisely because these methods of obtaining knowledge of future events comes from the application of technical knowledge, they are able to predict the future with a greater degree of accuracy than would be possible by mere chance (contrary to Epicurus who holds that the wise person laughs at the concept of fate itself and holds it to be a form of superstition dressed up in philosophical garb).11placeholder
Plotinus will ultimately conclude, contrary to the Epicurean position which rejects the necessity of all events, that “everything is presaged and comes about through causes,” though the cause of events is twofold: some things are caused by the (individual) soul while others are the result of causes in the world around us.12placeholder This position allows Plotinus to grant genuine predictive powers to astrologers and other practitioners of the mantic arts without eliminating individual agency entirely, though fate and individual agency are only juxtaposed in terms of a distinction between external and internal causes; the individual guided by reason will act in accord with divine Providence, after all. Turning now to the remaining passages of the Enneads under consideration, this distinction between external causes (traced back to cosmic motion) and internal causes (traced back to the individual soul) will allow Plotinus to maintain the reliability of the mantic arts, at least insofar as they concern knowledge related to these external causes.
Divination from spirits and oracles
Turning now to another early treatise On the immortality of the soul, Plotinus follows a similar compositional structure in which various rival views are addressed in sequential order. From least plausible to most, Plotinus deals with Epicurean, Stoic, Pythagorean, and Peripatetic theories of the nature of the soul before concluding the treatise with an extended discussion of his own, Platonic theory of the soul. The vast majority of the treatise consists of various arguments aimed at those “who are in need of a demonstration,”13placeholder but in the final brief chapter of the treatise, Plotinus gives some examples which would be suitably convincing for those who instead would prefer to have the immortality of the soul confirmed through sense-perception. Among the considerable store of examples, Plotinus includes:
“what the gods have handed down in ordering us to appease the wrath of souls that have suffered wrongs, and granting honors to the dead as if they were still able to perceive them as indeed all human beings do in respect of those who have departed. Also, it is a fact that many souls which were formerly in human bodies, when they have departed from their bodies, have not ceased to confer benefits on human beings; indeed, by instituting oracles and prophesying by other means, they both grant us benefits and demonstrate also by their own examples, too, that the rest of souls have not in fact perished.”14placeholder
Greco-Roman popular religion, therefore, is taken by Plotinus to contain within itself a strong empirical confirmation of the reality of the soul. While duties to honor and appease the dead may help manage restless spirits, disembodied souls also can provide the living with benefits in the form of oracles and prophecy. While this passage has proven controversial due to the appearance of pagan theological dogmatism, the parallel with the previously discussed treatise (On fate)—which this treatise directly precedes in chronological order—is hard to ignore. Here as well Plotinus makes direct appeal to the reliability of oracular knowledge of future events as evidence which directly contradicts the conclusions of his philosophical rivals; in this case, it is presented as empirical evidence decisively in favor of the existence of an immortal soul. Given the Epicurean commitment to the illustory nature of disembodied spirits,15placeholder it is once again the reliability of the mantic arts that grounds one’s belief in their authenticity; because oracles can reliably discern the outcomes of future events by communicating with discarnate spirits, these spirits cannot be, as the Epicureans propose, mere superstition and phantasms.
This nevertheless leaves the more pressing question of how these spirits are able to provide knowledge of future events unanswered, a question which is sadly not addressed by Plotinus anywhere in his concluding remarks. That this can happen is presented as unquestionably true, even if an underlying mechanism is not proposed. That being said, Plotinus does leave us with a fairly helpful indication of a possible answer elsewhere in the text. A few chapters earlier in a discussion of the nature of the soul’s existence purified of corporeal accretions, Plotinus states that “this purification results in him realizing the knowledge of the best things [and] the branches of scientific understanding (ἐπιστῆμαι) come to be revealed as being within him.”16placeholder It is not a stretch, then, to conclude that the soul’s purification comes with a corresponding increase in knowledge—knowledge of the best things, i.e., the content of the intelligible world—and that this knowledge would be, at least in principle, communicable. That Plotinus identifies the transmission of knowledge to oracles as coming from good and pure souls is entirely consonant with the views expressed by him throughout this treatise, as it is only the souls which have the fewest accretions from their sojourn of bodily existence which would be possess both the greatest degrees of virtue and knowledge of the causes that underlie the cosmos. In later treatises as well (such as Enn. III.4’s discussion of knowledge possessed by daimones), the descent of souls into bodies results in the incorporeal soul being subjected to the ever-shifting tides of fate, being compared to a ship blown by strong winds.17placeholder Yet it is precisely because the soul prior to its incarnation into a body is able to grasp the world as a whole it in some sense “chooses” a fate for itself, being “assign[ed] a seat under a certain fortune as though assigned a seat on a ship.”18placeholder
Augury and other signs
The third and final example I will discuss in the time remaining takes us to one of Plotinus’ last treatises, On whether the stars are causes. This treatise begins with a clear reiteration of the conclusion reached in On fate: namely, that the stars are capable of being signs of future events, even though they themselves are not solely responsible for the unfolding of the world’s causal chain. What is interesting, then, is that Plotinus will at multiple points in the treatise draw a comparison between the art of astrology and that of another Roman divination practice, augury. Augury was the practice of observing the behavior of birds to receive omens and was practiced widely throughout the ancient Mediterranean, which in part explains its acceptance by Plotinus as a valid method for discerning future events. But, unlike the account given by many astrologers in which celestial bodies directly cause events on Earth, the augur did not attribute the cause of events to the birds themselves; rather, the motions of the birds provide signs of events to come.
Plotinus himself takes great pains to argue that the stars should similarly be interpreted as signs, rather than the sole cause of terrestrial events (even if their causal role in earthly affairs is as a contributing cause, a position which he affirms in Enn. II.3.10–11). The heavenly bodies, in virtue of their immortality and self-sufficiency, are not concerned with things here on Earth, which gives good reason to believe that they are not producing affects here as the result of intentional or deliberate activity:
“For each [heavenly body] has a life by itself, and the good life for each lies in its activity, which has nothing to do with us. And because they are living beings that do not associate with us, their relationship is accidental and not their primary activity. And if – as with birds – they accidentally provide us with signs, their works are still not directed at us in the least.”19placeholder
By shifting the role of the diviner away from investigating the cause of events to the signs which indicate them, Plotinus is thus able to give an alternative explanation for how the mantic arts are able to generate accurate predictions about the future. Certain parts of the cosmos, in virtue of being connected to another part of the universe through sympathetic relationships,20placeholder give us insight into some other part elsewhere in the universe. (Plotinus gives the example of how looking into someone’s eyes can provide insight into their character to illustrate this principle.21placeholder) As he notes, “everything is full of signs, and the one who understands one thing on the basis of another is a wise man,”22placeholder and this principle should hold true for all forms of divination.
Conclusion
These various passages, taken together, thus paint a rather clear picture of how divination works within Plotinus’ broader philosophical framework. Because the universe proceeds by orderly and predictable causal chains, crafts are capable of operating reliably and this includes both productive crafts (e.g., sculpture, architecture, shipbuilding, medicine, etc.) and arts which produce knowledge; in this case, the knowledge of future events. The boundary between divination and other forms of knowledge of future events—such as the meteorological and agronomic knowledge employed by a farmer to predict future harvests—is vague for Plotinus, to the point where it may not be possible to draw any clear lines of demarcation.23placeholder Certainly, oracles may have access to tools not available for more mundane activities, but the general principle by which divination operates is essentially the same as other sciences: they are able to reliably anticipate how certain effects will precede from given causes, even if the causes themselves may not be immediately apparent. And, crucially, it is only because the universe is a single interconnected and living being that divination is even possible. As Plotinus himself states, it is “the existence of [the universe as] a single system [that] makes reasonable the prediction by means of birds and all the other living beings by which we predict individual events.”24placeholder
Works Cited
Adamson, Peter. “Plotinus on Astrology.” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 35 (2008): 265–291.
Dalzell, Alexander. “Lucretius’ Exposition of the Doctrine of Images.” Hermathena (1974): 22–32.
Edwards, Mark J. “Birth, death, and divinity in Porphyry’s Life of Plotinus.” Greek Biography and Panegyric in Late Antiquity (2000): 52–71.
Emilsson, Eyjólfur K. “Plotinus on sympatheia.” In Eric Schliesser, Sympathy: A History. New York: Oxford University Press (2015): 36–60.
Helleman, Wendy Elgersma. “Plotinus and Magic.” The International Journal of the Platonic Tradition 4, no. 2 (2010): 114–146.
Longo, Angela, and Daniela Patrizia Taormina, eds. Plotinus and Epicurus: Matter, Perception, Pleasure. Cambridge University Press, 2016.
Mazur, Zeke. “Unio Magica: Part I: On the Magical Origins of Plotinus’ Mysticism.” Dionysius 21 (2003).
Noble, Christopher Isaac. “Plotinus on Providence and Fate.” The New Cambridge Companion to Plotinus (2022): 386.
Phillips, John F. “The Universe as Prophet: A Soteriological Formula in Plotinus.” Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 22, no. 3 (1981): 269–281.
Wallis, Richard T., “Plotinus and Paranormal Phenomena.” The Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy Newsletter 266 (1973): 1-11.
Vita Plotini 11.1–2; Porphyry describes this as an “extraordinary insight into character” (περιουσία ἠθῶν κατανοήσως). Discussions of the role of magic in the philosophy of Plotinus have generally focused on ritual and sympathetic magic (e.g., Helleman, 2010 and Mazur, 2003) or treated astrological divination in isolation from his other references to divination (Adamson, 2008). For a brief but extensive survey of supernatural phenomena in the Enneads, see Wallis, 1973.
For an analysis of the philosophical narrative in the Vita Plotini, see Edwards, 2000.
This treatise is discussed in detail in Longo and Taormina 2016, ch. 8.
See III.1.5.
See Philodemus, On Signs 36.12; Epicurus, fr. 280–281; Lucretius, DRN II.292.
In the fifth book of De Rerum Natura, Lucretius gives a number of examples aimed at disproving the intelligent design of the cosmos, such as the extent to which the Earth is covered by inhospitable terrain, the dangers posed by wild animals, and the weakness of human infants.
III.1.3.13–17. The distinction between divine possession and inspiration comes from Plato, Phd. 244c.
III.1.1.25–31.
III.1.1.17.
III.1.3.4.
Epicurus, Epist. Men.
III.1.10.
IV.7.15.1.
IV.7.15.5–12.
Lucretius, DRN IV.29–35. See the discussion of this doctrine in Dazell, 1974.
IV.7.10.41–43.
III.4.6.46–59. See also the discussion of Plotinus’ theory of Providence in Noble, 2022.
III.4.6.50–51.
II.3.3.24-29. See also Philipps, 1981.
For a recent analysis of Plotinus’ theory of sympathy, see Emilsson, 2015. See also the discussion of sympathy in Wallis 1973, 4.
See II.3.7.9–11.
II.3.7.12–14.
As Wallis notes, “the title ‘paranormal phenomena’ is thus misleading; the trouble is that the common man admires only what is unfamiliar and fails to see the same powers as operative in the everyday things he takes for granted. Similarly, being unwilling to recognize that ‘soul’ and ‘life’ admit of degrees, he regards only beings that visibly live and move as alive. Yet, if he conducted a proper philosophical inquiry, he would see that the activities of supposedly inanimate things, such as the burning of fire, are inexplicable without the power of a sustaining and governing soul” (1973, 6).
II.3.7.15–16. As Wallis notes, “paranormal phenomena in Plotinus’ view provide empirical confirmation that the doctrine of cosmic sympathy, like those of the unity of all souls and the organic nature of the sensible cosmos, on which that doctrine depends, is correct” (1973, 4).