Henōsis

Henōsis, “becoming one” or “union”, is the Neoplatonic term for the goal of the soul’s return to its source. Plotinus describes it as a contact or vision in which the soul, having set aside everything, no longer sees the One as an object but is one with it, “as centre coincides with centre”. His biographer Porphyry reports that Plotinus reached this union four times during the years they spent together.

Later Neoplatonists, notably Iamblichus and Proclus, held that the soul cannot reach union by philosophy alone and gave a central place to theurgy, ritual practices through which the gods themselves raise the soul. This was one of the main disagreements within the school.

Christian writers took up the language of union, above all Pseudo-Dionysius, who speaks of the soul’s union with the God beyond being in unknowing. In Christian use the union is a gift of grace and a union of love in which the creature is not dissolved.