Henosis

Henosis (ἕνωσις), unitive vision or mystical union, is the culminating moment of the soul’s ascent in the enneads — the rare experience in which the soul is no longer merely contemplating the-one but is, momentarily, identified with it. It is distinct from epistrophe as the consummation is distinct from the movement: epistrophe is the soul’s structural turning back toward source, henosis the rare actuality of arrival.

The locus classicus is Enneads VI.7.22, preserved in Sharpe and Ure: the soul “is borne… bears it upwards, lifted by the giver of that love. Beyond Nous it passes, but beyond the Good it cannot go, for nothing stands above That” (Sharpe and Ure 2021, citing Enn. VI.7.22). The famous opening of Enn. IV.8.1 is the first-person testimony: “Many times it has happened: Lifted out of the body into myself; becoming external to all other things and self-encentered; beholding a marvellous beauty; then, more than ever, assured of community with the loftiest order; enacting the noblest life, acquiring identity with the divine; stationing within It by having attained that activity” (Plotinus, Enneads IV.8.1, in Sharpe and Ure 2021).

plotinus‘s language strains against its own limits. As Sharpe and Ure note, “Plotinus’s texts on this unitive experience strain against the limits of language. Alongside a language of love and desire, we read metaphors of intoxication, inspiration, madness, flight, illumination and initiation into the mysteries (epopteia).” The closing phrase of the entire Enneads — phyge monou pros monon, “the flight of the alone to the Alone” — is the canonical formula.

For the Lineage henosis is the philosophical ancestor of two later motifs. First, the alchemical coniunctio in its highest stage, the union with the unus mundus, which Jung explicitly traces back through Dorn to the Neoplatonic tradition. Second, the Sufi unitive vision recovered by henry-corbin in Alone with the Alone — Corbin’s title is the direct translation of Plotinus’s monou pros monon. The mystical traditions Jung and Corbin draw on for the highest reaches of psychic transformation are the historical descendants of Plotinian henosis.

Relationships

• the-one
• epistrophe
• coniunctio
• unus-mundus
• mundus-imaginalis
• self

Primary sources

• enneads (Plotinus 270, esp. IV.8.1, VI.7.22, VI.9)
• Philosophy as a Way of Life (Sharpe and Ure 2021)
• Alone with the Alone (Corbin 1969)