Dancing on the Cosmic Stage

Svetla E. Slaveva-Griffin (Florida State University)

In V.9.11, Plotinus states that “indeed all music, since it is concerned with harmony and rhythm, would be of the same kind as the art which is concerned with intelligible number.” The statement evokes a series of powerful images of dancing, dancers, and dances depicted throughout the Enneads: the dance of the heavenly bodies in IV.4.33-34, the dance of Soul around Intellect in I.8.2, the divine dance of the incarnated soul which has achieved a complete union with its intelligible source in VI.9.8-10. The statement is also the focal point of Plotinus’ discussion of the relationship of the mimetic arts—painting, sculpture, dancing and mime—with the intelligible world. At the first glance, Plotinus’ view that we should not attempt to trace the arts back to the higher world since they only duplicate the material copies of intelligible originals is predictably truly Platonic. He elaborates that, if the arts start from the proportions of the individual living things and move on to consider the proportions of all living things in general, then they participate in the power which considers and contemplates universal proportion in the intelligible world. This second thought, however, suggests that there is a higher and more essential relationship between the arts and the intelligible. In this paper I will examine Plotinus’ use of music and dancing in relation to the intelligible.

Plotinus explains in V.9.10-11 that the arts represent the principles of universal proportion not by copying directly the intelligible paradigms but through the facilitation of the artist. The artist, in his turn, participates in the intelligible through the Form of man and hence imparts the knowledge of the intelligible principles to his artifacts. In other words, the arts are included in the forming principle of man (ἀνθρώπου λόγῳ), inherent to the soul. I will argue that, in the case of dancing, the soul of the dancer does not only connects him, through introspection, with the universal Soul but makes him a distant and yet direct participant in the cosmic dance which Soul performs around Intellect from the outside (I.8.2.25). This cosmic dance becomes the modus vivandi of Soul in the intelligible. In VI.9.8-10, Plotinus explicates that the natural movement of Soul is not in a straight line but in a circle around an internal center. Soul reaches a complete union with the One when its center coincides with the center of its intelligible source. That is when Soul, as the seer, becomes one with its seen center which is the One. If we consider the dance of Soul in the intelligible in the context of Plotinus’ understanding of the origin of multiplicity as a separation from the One in VI.6.1, we will discover that the motions of Soul coincide with the two directions in which multiplicity exists. The first is a motion away from the One which gives existence to all beings, including Soul, as different from the One. The second motion of multiplicity is introspective and towards the One, which preserves multiplicity from dissipation in infinity. In order to exist, Soul, as an example of multiplicity, is in constant outward and inward motion. It dances outwardly around Intellect while it is turned inwardly towards the One. As Plotinus describes in III.2.17, Soul performs this cosmic dance on the stage of the universal poetic creation. The closing chapters of the very last treatise in the Enneads according to Porphyry’s arrangement (VI.9.8-11) portray the image of the soul which has achieved its complete union with the One through the rites of mysteries in the language of the cosmic dance of Soul. This fact not only unites the soul of the philosopher-dancer with the universal Soul but also is the last image which the Enneads leave for our mind’s eye to contemplate.