In February 2022, space ceased to be the passive backdrop of my life. It became aggressive and fragile at once. When you stand in the corridor of your own apartment, following the “two-wall rule,” architecture stops being a matter of comfort. It becomes a question of whether this wall will hold. In those moments you physically feel how the matter of your familiar world — glass, stone, concrete — vibrates under the pressure of non-being.
This was not fear for property. It was the sudden exposure of a truth: the external home has always been only a temporary configuration. We had simply grown used to the illusion of its permanence. When the windows shudder from an explosion, you understand: if your sense of belonging is limited to these walls, you are already homeless. It was then that Neoplatonism revealed itself as the only language capable of describing what happens to a person whose world is falling apart. I turned to Plotinus not to escape, but to find a foothold that does not belong to the order of things that can be bombed.
The Patience of Matter
In the Neoplatonic hierarchy, matter is “the last glimmer of light” — the boundary with darkness. But in the context of war, I saw something I can only call the patience of matter. Matter is extraordinarily obedient. It consents to being ground to dust, to being mutilated or burned. But in this obedience there is a remarkable testimony: the destruction of form does not mean the annulment of the principle that held that form together.
When I look at the pockmarked walls, I see not simply chaos. I see a “pause.” Matter is dispersed, but something has retreated to its source — and waits.
Eros: The Nausea of Things
I recognized Eros not through a longing for perfection, but through a nausea toward things. It happened one morning before an open wardrobe: my dresses, books, and jewelry — everything that for years had composed the texture of my “self” — went flat in an instant. They lost their molecular weight, becoming cardboard props for a performance that had just been cancelled.
This is the moment of fracture. Eros is not a sweet gravitational pull, but the sensation of a vacuum that forces you out of your room and out of your skin — toward an emptiness that suddenly felt more real than this wardrobe. You lose your grip on the world not because it has become bad, but because things can no longer contain you. Your soul has grown too large for your own apartment.
This is the gravity that acts when the world becomes too light to hold onto. We search for home only because we have become disproportionate to this reality.
The Inner Person
One of those nights when electricity disappeared along with any sense of safety, I was reading the Enneads in the dark. When the outside world shrinks to the dimensions of a concrete shelter, the words about “the inner person” suddenly acquire physical density. We are not our body, nor even our soul dissolved in the worries of the day. We are that motionless witness who dwells in intellectual contemplation of the Source.
But the witness is not a safe haven. It is a point that has no right to look away. A constant not because it is protected from pain, but because it alone registers this disintegration without dissolving into it. When you recognize this inner person in yourself, you discover not a refuge, but a responsibility: to see everything — and not to close your eyes.
The Collapse: When Plotinus Falls Silent
There was a moment when all of it — Plotinus, Eckhart, my own texts — seemed to me an elaborate lie. It happened in a shelter where the air was so thick with the smell of unwashed bodies, damp earth, and cheap plastic from unrolled sleeping mats that metaphysics simply suffocated.
I looked at the trembling flame of a candle and saw not “inner light,” but simply the burning of a wick. Plotinus’s inner person seemed to me a ghostly mannequin with no connection to this real darkness. This was my collapse. I understood: if my home is only an intellectual construction, then I am truly homeless. Philosophy did not save me. It only illuminated the scale of my emptiness.
I lay down on the mat and stared at the spine of a book. In the darkness of the shelter it looked like nothing more than a dark strip. I could not recall a single quotation, and did not want to. The cold from the concrete was something no blanket could stop. There was only this sensation of cold in the small of my back and the smell of damp earth — a smell that made you want to close your eyes and not wake up.
The Liturgy of Emptiness
There is a particular silence that settles between explosions. It is not empty — it is pregnant with anticipation. In this silence something becomes clear: there is something that cannot speak within you until you have become poor even in your thoughts about salvation.
It was there, in the dense darkness between explosions, that I recognized “poverty of spirit.” It is the state of becoming weightless: you no longer have plans for tomorrow, no certainty of your own name, nothing left to hold onto. But it is precisely at this point of absolute “nothing” that something occurs: when you finally become empty enough, you suddenly recognize that you have not been abandoned. Home is not where you must arrive — it is what arrives in you when you finally stop making noise with your fears.
The Geometry of the Cross
When the external roots are torn out with the flesh, the soul is forced to grow upward. This is what decreation is: the moment when your “self” stops eclipsing the sky. Looking at the map of destroyed cities, I saw this process in action. It is painful, it is nearly impossible — but it is the only way not to wither.
Yet rootedness in the eternal is not an escape from earthly horror. On the contrary — it provides the optics to see the true nature of evil. Evil in wartime is an aggressive anti-logos. It does not simply destroy walls — it attempts to replace a person’s name with a number on a body bag. This is the triumph of formlessness over form: to convince us that a human being is merely biological waste, and the world merely a random heap of rubble. Horror is not a consequence but a method. And it is precisely here that beauty ceases to be an aesthetic indulgence and becomes a barricade.
Beauty as Testimony: Under the Gaze of Medusa
How can one speak of Neoplatonic Beauty — that which is the radiance of Truth — in a world where Bucha and Mariupol exist? Is this not intellectual hypocrisy? When you see mutilated flesh and shattered lives, the idea of “universal harmony” seems not merely wrong, but offensive.
But Beauty for a Neoplatonist is not a “pretty picture.” It is ontological testimony — the presence of form where chaos and non-being should reign. To bear witness to beauty during war is an act of intellectual fury. It is a refusal to allow horror to colonize your inner space.
In Bucha, beauty is visible not in the ruins, but in the astonishing, almost impossible dignity of those who survived. This is the beauty of refusal — the soul’s refusal to become a mirror of evil. When a person plants flowers among the rubble, or when a soldier reads a philosophical text in a dugout, they are asserting that the Source is more real than the shell. Beauty becomes testimony that the darkness could not consume the order of being. We look at Medusa, but instead of turning to stone, we begin to trace her boundaries — determining where her power ends and where the territory begins that she will never be able to occupy.
Living on the Threshold
Today the experience of a person on the Threshold is one of existing in the space between a world that has vanished and a world that has not yet come into being. For us, in Ukraine, this threshold became visible in February 2022. But it exists wherever a person loses the ground beneath their feet.
This is the condition of a flame in a draft: it does not belong to the wind that tries to extinguish it, but it is no longer sheltered in a safe lamp. To live on the threshold means to see things without the illusion of possessing them. When you do not know whether you will see this landscape or this person tomorrow, they become sacred to you in their fragility. You become acutely attentive to a presence that does not depend on your plans. You are a witness whose gaze has grown sharp as a blade.
A Return to the Question
In the end, I found no answer. I only learned to sustain the intensity of the question. Home ceased to be a place of rest for me. It is now a place of the highest tension, where every moment may be the last — and it is precisely this that makes each moment transparent.
I cannot say that I have returned. I still stand on the threshold, in that same interval where the flame of my life flickers in the draft of history. Perhaps home is not what receives us, but what compels us to keep our eyes open even when looking is unbearable.
True recognition brings no relief. It brings responsibility for the light we glimpsed in the epicenter of darkness. And this question — whether I will have enough transparency for that light not to go out in me — remains open.