The Greek historian of the Roman Empire, Polybius (ca. 200-118 BCE), identified six possible types of constitution, three of which he takes to be positive bases for a political state and three their mirrored, corrupted versions. Those are, in order, kingship, aristocracy, and democracy, on the one hand, and tyranny, oligarchy, and mob-rule, on the other (Polybius, Histories VI.ii.3-10). According to his theory of political evolution and revolution, anacyclosis, chiefdoms gradually settle into some form of organized kingship, with a single king governing by a median of assembled power and the loyalty of other warlords and common subjects. Kings pass on their authority to new kings, who are usually worse than their forbears, until one of them, either through abuse of power or through illegitimate seizure of the throne, one produces a monarchia in the classical sense, a tyranny or an autocracy. The tyrant is then ideally restrained by a coalition of the nobility on behalf of the landed populace, like, for instance, when the Roman Senate, under the leadership of Brutus, exiled L. Tarquinius Superbus and his loathsome son Tarquinius Sextus, supposedly for the rape of Lucretia. But the resulting aristocracy will inevitably devolve into oligarchy, “rule by the few” wealthy and powerful whose executive, legislative, and judicial efforts serve their own interests by checking their rivals and subjugating the peasantry. Such politeiai were official arrangements in late archaic and classical Greece, which survived largely on the basis of focused campaigns to convince the demos that the price of ousting the oligarchs and maintaining a thriving civic life in democracy was not worth it. Eventually, however, most ancient poleis did undergo such constitutional revolutions, instituting more or less successful democracies which were still heavily influenced by rich and powerful families functioning unofficially as oligarchs but who now had to share power with the landed (male) citizenry. And this situation was what Polybius envisioned as the ultimate telos of democracy, a descent into ochlocracy or demagoguery, in which the individuals most able to influence public opinion and best able to manipulate public passions were likely to achieve and maintain power, leading, inevitably, to the rebirth of kingship and the renewal of the cycle.
Polybius had a long and sustained tradition of philosophical reflection on political theory to draw on in outlining this cycle, which has a kind of natural veracity to it beyond the mere reaches of Mediterranean societies in its push and pull between the one, the few, and the many. What Polybius does not do, however, that those other thinkers did is to cast anacyclosis within the wider cosmological and metaphysical framework of reality as such. Plato’s Apology, Euthyphro, Republic, Laws, Statesman, and Timaeus all do this, as does Cicero’s De Re Publica: politeia is to transcribe into the realm of human communities and their affairs the same natural laws that govern the universe at large and which especially encourage imitation or participation in the life of the gods, enabling the cultivation of virtue and the eventual ascent to the divine. There is still room on these readings for anacyclosis and the diversity of political best practices according to the particular circumstances of individual households, phyla, poleis, amphictyonies, leagues, and imperial ventures, according to their diverse spheres of influence: the tendency of both Greek myth and philosophy is, after all, to view the world as cyclical, moving through phases of creation, waxing, waning, destruction, and recreation, whether because of theomachy, cosmic dispensation, the ontological weakness of the realm of generation and decay, or some combination thereof. And that world order, so thought Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, and Plotinus, each with their own nuances, is the world that there is: one in which down here below, all things move in cycles and epicycles of life and death, good and evil, better and worse, order and chaos, but from which, the Platonic tradition especially insisted, souls may hopefully ascend back from so much wavering between existence and annihilation to the stability of ultimate reality in Nous, the Divine Mind in which the living archetypes of all things reside, and thereby contemplate and unify with the One beyond and therefore immanently close to all things.
As Stephen RL Clark notes in his recent book on Plotinus’ metaphysical and political vision, Cities and Thrones and Powers, this cumulative vision of things—in which the primary realities of the One, Nous, and Soul stand as the true origin and identity of everything, in which all of our taxonomical divisions between life and not-life, genera and species, human and inhuman, and so forth are at best convenient fictions, and at worst barriers to ascent beyond the confines of dualistic, discursive reasoning—is also more or less the classical worldview of most South Asian religious cultures. In most forms of Hinduism, this universe is impossibly old, has an impossibly long future ahead of it, and has gone through many cycles of internal creation and destruction, in which the rta or dharma goes from open manifestation among gods and men to gradual decline in the various lokas, bottoming out in the Kali Yuga and often requiring the advent of a deity of some sort to bring about the new golden age. For Vaishnavs—probably through some combined influence of Persian and later Islamic presence in the subcontinent—that will be Vishnu’s next avatara, Kalki; for Shaivas, Shiva’s dance of destruction is followed by the dance of new creation, or perhaps tantrically brings the new order into being through his nuptial union with Parvati; for Shaktis, the rise of adharma requires a new manifestation of Devi—as Durga, as Kali, whomever—to restore cosmic stability. Jains redirect this responsibility for the preservation or renewal of the world’s dharma to the tirthankaras, of which Mahavira is the most recent; for Buddhists, this is the role of the Buddha (somewhat modified according to how particular Buddhist traditions answer the question of how many Buddhas there are in any particular universe). Political stability or breakdown, as well as moral quality, are symptoms of the cycle: when dharma is restored and upheld, good social order follows for at least awhile, as pious Brahmins and righteous kshatriyas, or good Buddhist kings and emperors, follow the example of the gods themselves in attending to the teaching of the messianic heroes or enlightened sages who have once more illumined the world with truth, and are able for a time to craft a little world that embodies that logos appropriately, enthroning Nous once more in their midst.
At the macrocosmic level, this very cycle of death and rebirth—samsara, the “wheel” or “cycle” or “world” of change—applies to the universe at large, which is in turn, for most South Asian cosmologies, merely one of an infinite number, both temporally and spatially, arising either from the meditative slumber of Vishnu or the yogic heat of Shiva or the dependent origination of all contingent phenomena from aboriginal emptiness or whatever. At the microcosmic level, each individual being (jivatman) has a similar history and future: an unthinkable number of past and future lives, in which the particular aggregates or material and mental sheaths and succession of experiences in this one either reveal the absence of an underlying “self” (anatta/anatman) or do not touch upon the true “self” (atman) which is infinite (brahman) and therefore identical with world and God, despite the apparent diminution of being and consciousness to the psychocorpoeal existent. Whatever the case, these religions also share with Plotinus and the Platonist tradition the mutual concern of getting off the ride, as it were: of ascending beyond, behind, or out from the cycle of death and rebirth, through moksha, “liberation,” whether conceived as the realization of one’s true identity with world and God which frees from the limitations of involuntary rebirth or the “extinction” (nibbana/nirvana) of those mental and physical cravings which condition rebirth in this or any world. Gods, men, animals, and plants alike, all finite things, really, are subject to existential dissatisfaction and frustration (dukkha)—this is possibly a difference between these two wings of Indo-European philosophy, but perhaps one of degree rather than kind—and liberation is their only ultimately meaningful goal, no matter how many contingently licit and appropriate goals, such as morally appropriate wealth (artha), pleasure (kama), or religious and moral excellence (dharma), might occupy their time otherwise. And liberation consists in the existential realization and perhaps actualization of one’s unity with the All, however conceived: that this atman is brahman, that samsara is nirvana, that all things are empty, that it is one and the same Soul and Mind and God in all things, etc. Politics has and will yet assume many forms appropriate to the needs of conscious, living entities—which is to say, everything, if we are not looking at the world with the blinders of anthropofascism, convincing us of the Cartesian nightmare that everything beyond Homo sapiens is simply dead, insentient matter deceiving us into being haunted with meaning or intelligence—to best reflect in this and these lives here-now the eternal pattern of Nous by which we might achieve liberation, the everlasting dharma or the Tao; and perhaps occasionally a Manu, a Moses, a Saoshyant, a Mahdi, a prophet, a messiah, an imam, or someone might come along to help steer us back where we should go.
The synthesis of Plotinian and dharmic thinking on metaphysics and politics which Clark not just competently, but beautifully describes, admires, speculates, pushes, challenges, and tweaks, in 200+ pages of deeply engrossing prose, is potentially challenged by the Abrahamic religious family. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, principally, and their close Indo-European older cousin, Zoroastrianism, adopt more linear understandings of cosmic history and embrace the concept of the direct intervention of the highest divine principles and persons in ways that Plotinus found inappropriate and South Asian philosophy tends to ignore. The ideas of the liberating messiah, the new, summative, reformative, restorative, iconoclastic divine revelation qualifying and overturning all that has come before, the Wheel of Freedom, Fortune, and Fate being overturned by an apocalyptic intervention of Providence unforeseen and unforeseeable from within the world’s system, resurrection and judgment and new heaven and earth, are not wholly alien in their content to the Plotinian and South Asian systems, as Clark is at pains to point out, anymore than cyclical death and rebirth is wholly alien to the Abrahamic tradition. Some Bible passages envision an endless chain of worlds and ages in which nothing truly novel emerges (Eccl 1:9) and in which the same spirits or souls might be periodically turned out in new bodies (as is probably, contrary to Early and Modern Christian discomfort with the idea, the real concept behind the relation between John the Baptist and Elijah, Lk 1:17); many Jews and some Muslims, like the Ismailis, and their offshoot, the Druze, believe in a form of reincarnation (Hebrew: gilgul) while also professing eschatological resurrection and the world to come. There is room in Plato and Plotinus for the possibility, however likely either thought it, that there might be such a cosmic revolution, though neither saw much need for it given their belief that the world as-is is the best world there can be. Whether one embraces a Jewish vision of the world as a work in progress, in which humans are cooperative with God for its perfection or repair (tikkun olam), or a Christian vision, apocalyptic and sometimes impulsively gnostic, that the present world is at best a sketch of the real world currently ruled by fallen powers who seek the imprisonment and enslavement of humans, the idea that this is the best world possible offends. For Christians anyway, that is partly because of what the politics of the cross demanded of them: that the true Lord of the world had been unceremoniously executed as an enemy of the state by the Roman government meant both the revelation that the gods ruling the world may in fact be at least partly evil (or at least stupid) as well as the ultimate human dignity of those Roman society typically deemed less than fully personal, like women, children, infants, the infirm, slaves, strangers, etc. Christianity was often reviled by late antique pagans, and at least distasteful to Plotinus himself (probably the fellow student of Origen of Alexandria at the feet of Ammonius Saccas), for the rebellion it seemed to constitute against the gods of cosmos and state, and the rites they had long ago established; but it was also for that reason a revolt against the entropy of anacyclosis, the terms of samsara itself, as evidence of at least a fallen creation and at most a fallen creator (for thinkers like Marcion, Valentinus, and Basilides). Christians did eventually find their own balance between the apocalyptic sense of Christ’s imminent overthrow of the powers and the philosophical vision of a world of emanated divinity; already in John and the Deutero-Paulines, and especially in Origen, that balance is beginning to take the cosmological shape it would assume throughout the Middle Ages, where the world has already been judged on the cross and remade in the resurrection, and Christ has already filled the basically Plotinian universe with himself by his descent and ascent.
But still, the challenge endures to determine both the extent of karmic conditioning in the universe as well as the elusive nature of liberation, and whether it shall at last come for the cosmos as a whole. We know what the ancients generally did not: stars and planets are born and die, too, and there is no immutable order in the material universe as it presently stands such that a mere escape to heaven will suffice us. We know not, and presently have no way of knowing, what cousins in Lifekind, what tribes and cities and empires and hermits there are among the worlds, what cosmic and hypercosmic gods and monsters there may be whose shadows our own little marginal planet wander in. We have no idea whether we are the first or only of our kind even here on this planet, nor how long we may yet exist here or elsewhere. Our future is essentially undetermined: while future catastrophes seem certain, whether and how we might survive them is not, and what political forms of life may best ensure maximal happiness of both the worldly and the otherworldly sort now and in the future are unclear and, when visible in outline or detail, not always attainable. Our interdependent universe and world and societies mean that the individualist fantasies that animate European and American politics, especially, on both Right and Left are naive at best and ruinous at worst: our flourishing happens together, in communion, or not at all, forcing us to come to terms with the arbitrary limits of the social bonds we create and inhabit. This does not mean dissolving all parochial affections into an uncritical cosmopolitanism, Clark is careful to assert, which is often simply the projection of the local onto the universal, but rather a sobriety about the pretensions to the universal and the timeless of our own political enterprises. While the progressive impulse that the world could be better than it is remains clearly correct, and ought to be followed to relieve the suffering of (human and nonhuman) others in conjunction with the best Plotinian, Buddhist, and Abrahamic principles of compassion, the conservative impulse to admire and preserve what beauty already exists as our best available model of the eternal also receives some legitimacy here. One may justly wonder—Clark does not say—whether any political party claiming the mantle of “conservatism” today can be seriously said to serve any kind of beauty rather than merely worshiping power and money; but one may also justly note that the political left in the West is not infrequently guilty of standing aloof from the real needs and concerns of people in favor of the abstractions of theory. It is more Plotinian to respond to the real as it phenomenally presents itself to us than it is to deal with the ideal abstraction: what is rather than what should be, what is possible rather than what ought to be. This does not mean that there is no role for the blue-sky thinking of fantasy, science fiction, or political idealism, all of which remain important ways of imagining our future (as well as our past) and potentially orienting us towards better futures than whither our worse inclinations would tend; it simply means that, as Alan Watts (who receives appreciative mention from Clark, which in turn ingratiated me) would have stressed, theories, even good theories, are no substitute for reality, which is “wiggly,” messy, pluralistic, and unconcerned with our expectations of it. Ideas—even ideas about the Tao—sever us from the Tao.
In that sense, Clark’s book does not trot out an answer to the political question, whether antique or contemporary. Polybius was obviously wrong to think as he did that Rome had settled anacyclosis with a mixed constitution, both as Roman society was obviously given to the excesses of bad forms of government and eventually died and was reborn (several times over) as a variety of different politeiai. Clark does not try to resolve the issue (which, to be clear, he does not explicitly name as a model for his thinking here): better, he describes with critical sympathy the political answers of the ancient world to the pressing metaphysical anxieties of human existence, reserving judgment until he has fairly inhabited the minds of the ancients and seen things as much as possible from their own point of view. One gets the sense that Clark intends to describe only the possible benefits and limits of different forms of political society, from the most domestic to the most imperial, none of which will finally resolve the dukkha that only evaporates in the Kingdom of God. No matter how well-structured, Platonopolis will suffer from some of the same problems that afflict all poleis qua poleis. In a blow to progressives and integralists alike, no empire, whether Gallienus’ or Byzantium’s or Charlemagne’s or NATO’s or the Federation’s from Star Trek (my addition), will ever completely, irrevocably balance the duties of all to all (and All) in a finally satisfying way. More likely, good emperors are improbable and there will always be losers in any such imperial system, which will also necessarily war with other like systems, representing contrasting visions of Nous. Likewise, the sangha or the church or the umma will always experience the fracture of schism, such that there is not only external conflict between dar al-Islam and dar al-harb, but internal conflict, as diverse sages, schools, and sects compete for the best interpretation of the meaning of scriptures, traditions, and moments of divine apocalypse. True erimitism of “the alone to the alone” is impossible, at whatever level. There is no final refuge to be had here in samsara: every golden age will fall to silver and down the way; the wheel turns, again and again.
Yet there is room for hope, that the apocalyptic insistence on the linearity of things combines with our observations of the cyclical cosmos to offer a spiraling shape to finite reality. There might really be a better part in the play next time; the worlds might really change for the better, and might go on doing so epicyclically until, eventually, all of them are collectively subsumed into the sophianic ktisis, Aslan’s country, the true Kingdom of God, whatever we might wish to call it. Liberation need not be an individualist enterprise: the boddhisattvic and universalist ideals, that no one can be liberated until everyone is, are both morally superior as well as metaphysically more plausible in a Plotinian world or worlds that flow forth from the One and return thither. There may well not be—I will say, more strongly than Clark does, I do not think there logically can be—any numeric limit to the souls or worlds that God creates, nor that God can or should arbitrarily, voluntaristically limit himself to some portion of what he may be the Creator of (that is, anything logically conceivable). The Father gazes upon the Son and sees in the Son not only his own qualitatively infinite Logos but also the quantitatively infinite logoi, and in breathing the Spirit upon the Son grants unity, being, life, and consciousness to all of them without discrimination or begrudging. And he is their only possible end, just as he is their only possible ground and origin, such that for God, at least, it really is the case that the final communion of all worlds, in which God himself is “all in all” (1 Cor 15:28), is always, already realized. In the worlds created by our experience, that Divine Wisdom is sometimes manifest in the Creaturely Wisdom of the World Soul: our created worlds are really good and beautiful, even if also phenomenally fallen and subject to dualistic division and death and disorder, all the way up to the warring devas and malevolent daimons opposed by choirs of loyal and fallible angels and all the way down through orders of being we cannot conceive and do not understand, all the way to the most fundamental tendencies of matter itself. Perhaps each of these orders undergoes its own death and resurrection, its own falling asleep to the illusion of separation and awakening to the divine pleroma: not deterministically, so as to completely unroot Freedom, but like Origen says, at that aeonic point where all creation freely bends the knee and confesses with the tongue that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father (Phil 2:9-11; Origen, De Principiis III.6). How many turns of the cosmic and political wheel may happen between now and then, our present task remains the same: to hold to what good there is, do what good we can, and “work out [our own] salvation with fear and trembling” (Phil 2:12).
Clarke, Stephen RL. Cities and Thrones and Powers: Towards a Plotinian Politics. New York: Angelico Press, 2022.
Excellent.
Just started reading it last night. A Perennial Digression episode with Clark would be a real treat!