Conatus: REVISED EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

We can make a distinction, I think, between what we might call the ‘philosophical God’ and the God or gods of various religions. A philosophical God is not necessarily one who people might worship. God, in the philosophical sense, is given rather as an explanation of the way the world is. There’s some overlap, of course, as many religions also want to provide explanations of the world, and not simply a context for worship. But the distinction is an important one, nonetheless. So I’m starting this chapter from the ancient Greek perspective, which we’ve touched on a little in earlier chapters. In particular, I’m starting from what’s known as the Parmenidean ‘One’ and seeing how things were developed from there, in particular, by Plotinus.

For Plotinus it is not the One, strictly speaking, that is the cause of the universe, it is Spirit — the first emanation of the One. For Plotinus, the One is beyond life. He seems however to have said that existence emanates from the One, but essence emanates from Spirit and soul. The Spirit (‘animus’ or ‘spiritus’ in Latin, a translation of the Greek ‘pneuma’, or breath) is undivided life — it is pure form in the sense of the Platonic forms looked at earlier. The world though (the realm of soul) is a mix of forms.

(Basilides, in his Seven Sermons to the Dead, used the term ‘pleroma’ for the One, formlessness, or the Good. The Gnostics and early Christians also used this term and it was taken up in modern times by Carl Jung. (The term is sometimes contrasted with ‘creatura’ — that is, the created realm. There is a similar term to pleroma in Mahayana Buddhism that

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