On the Gods V: Plotinus' Intelligible Gods
Intelligible Gods Are Not Religious Gods
Among the gods, some are in heaven—since they are at leisure—they are always contemplating, as if from afar, the things that are in that intelligible heaven above their heads. But other gods are in that intelligible heaven, namely those that have their dwelling on it and in it, dwelling in everything which is there in that heaven…
Plotinus, Ennead V.8 3.25, On Intelligible Beauty
Following our previous post, a few clarifications are necessary concerning how we should understand the gods—both intelligible and psychic—and their relation to theology. As the passage above makes clear, Plotinus distinguishes two orders of gods. One order exists “in heaven,” that is, within the realm of soul. These are the gods portrayed in the Phaedrus, who govern, guide, and lead souls, and whose lives unfold in relation to time, movement, and ascent. These are the gods of cult, myth, and religious devotion.
The other order consists of the intelligible gods, who dwell in intelligible reality itself. These gods are associated with the Forms and, as we have argued previously, are best understood as ideal Platonic persons. However, the intelligible gods are not the gods of religious devotion, nor do they possess the distinctive personalities, narratives, or mythic identities we associate with gods such as Athena or Thor. Those features belong exclusively to the psychic gods. There is therefore no intelligible god who is simply identical to Athena or Thor as they appear in myth and worship.
The reason for this distinction lies in the nature of knowledge. The gods, as Plotinus understands them, are knowers. But the objects known by the intelligible gods are known perfectly, and perfect knowledge is not propositional but ontological. To know intelligible reality in the fullest sense is not to entertain representations or beliefs, but to be identified with what is known. What one knows, at this level, is inseparable from what one is.
Intelligible reality is ultimately unified and whole. Consequently, perfect knowledge of that reality cannot differ from knower to knower. Any subject whose being is fully aligned with intelligible reality will possess the same intelligible content as any other such subject. This does not collapse all intelligible subjects into a single being, but it does eliminate the possibility of idiosyncratic or private intellectual content at the intelligible level.
Lloyd P. Gerson makes this point explicitly:
If disembodied persons are nothing but knowers, do they all know the same things? And if they do, does this result in the elimination or occlusion of individuality? If, as I have argued, knowledge for Plato is non-propositional, and if the tendency of Plato’s thought is to identify Forms reductively, then this would suggest an affirmative answer to the first question. A multitude of disembodied knowers, however, each knowing the same things, does not in principle seem to be a contradiction, just as a multitude of embodied knowers knowing the same thing, in a non-Platonic sense of ‘knower’, is not self-contradictory.
Knowing Persons, p. 279
Plotinus on the Intelligible
With this in mind, the statements that Plotinus makes about the intelligible gods become much clearer. Plotinus repeatedly describes them in ways that appear paradoxical, emphasizing that they are both multiple and unified. What we are seeing is that the gods are multiplied as subjects but unified in what they objectively know. In other words, they are distinct in who they are, but the contents of what they know—as knowing persons—are identical.
Plotinus puts this poetically when he speaks of the intelligible gods:
For everything is transparent and there is nothing dark or opaque, but every god is visible to all the others through and through, for it is light that is visible to light. For every god has everything within himself, and again, he sees everything in another, so that everything is everywhere and all is all and each is all and the glory is unlimited.
Ennead V.8 4.5
While these gods see everything in every other god and are themselves transparent to the others, this does not mean they are indistinct. Their unity consists in the sharing of the same intelligible knowledge of themselves and of one another. Yet this sharing presupposes that each god remains identifiable and intelligible as a subject, not collapsible into an undifferentiated whole.
Plotinus uses the analogy of statues to describe this distinctive mode of being:
All such things in the intelligible world are in a way statues that can see themselves, so that it is a sight seen by ‘supremely happy spectators.’
Ennead V.8 4.40
These “supremely happy spectators” are those mentioned in Phaedo 111a and are analogous to souls that have risen to contemplate the intelligible heaven above.
In this way, each god is distinct in themselves yet fully transparent to all the others. The intelligible contents of each god are the same. And because the intelligible gods are analogous to the Forms, we can say that justice is beautiful, truth is just, and beauty is true. Each is distinct, yet each reflects the others, like “light that is visible to light.”
Gods, Forms, and Religion
The intelligible gods, then, are coextensive with the Platonic Forms. They are not the gods of cult and worship, but rather the living structure of intelligibility itself. They cannot be adequately reduced to cultic images or idiosyncratic personalities. This means a clear distinction must be drawn between intelligible gods, understood as metaphysical principles that structure reality and “nourish” souls, and the souls themselves, which serve as models of perfection within the psychic realm.
The aim of religion is to imitate these perfected souls and, through that imitation, to become like them. This ascent leads ultimately to identification with intelligible reality and, by extension, with the intelligible gods. Yet in that state, we become identical with the content of intelligible knowing. As Gerson observes, this entails the loss of what we ordinarily take to be our idiosyncratic individuality. Since modern people often identify the self precisely with this idiosyncratic personality, noesis can appear as a dissolution of the self. In truth, it is the perfection of the self, and what is “lost” is only a false image. In this sense, the Greek persona—the theatrical mask—aligns remarkably well with our contemporary understanding of personality.
Thus, while the intelligible gods function as standards of reality, this is a metaphysical category rather than a theological one. They are the same for all people, all souls, and all gods. There cannot be multiple intelligible gods corresponding to the same reality, for that would imply competing structures downstream. There cannot, for example, be one intelligible god of Norse justice and another of Greek justice, only justice itself. Any differences must arise later, as intelligible unity is refracted through psychic gods who participate in it in differentiated ways.
This distinction will be the subject of our next post, where we will explore why properly distinguishing metaphysics and theology is essential for understanding how and why there are many pantheons.
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In more Jungian terms, perhaps the “intelligible Gods” seem to (roughly) correspond to raw archetypes in the psyche, while the “psychic Gods” are how those deities manifest through mythos across different cultures?