Plotinus

PLOTINUS (205–270), founder of Neoplatonism. The Life of Plotinus, philosopher and mystic, was written by his pupil, Porphyry, who edited his master's lectures into six groups of nine treatises (Enneads). Completed in 309, the work comprises ethics, physics, the human and world souls, the Three Principal Hypostases (the One, the Nous, the Soul), and logical categories.

Plotinus was born in Lycopolis, now Asyut, in Upper Egypt. He studied in from 232 to 243 under Ammonius in Alexandria where a revival of interest in metaphysics and human non-bodily destiny had been influenced by Philo, the Middle Platonists, and the Neo-Pythagoreans in contrast to stoicism, epicureanism, and skepticism. Longing to study Persian and Indian thought, Plotinus joined an expedition of the Emperor Gordian against Persia. When the emperor was assassinated by his soldiers, Plotinus escaped to Antioch, then to Rome, where in 244 he began to teach what he learned from Ammonius. After ten years he was urged by students to write the treatises that have come down to the present. They are responses to students' questions and to teachings of Plato, Aristotle, their commentators, the Middle Platonists, Stoics, Epicureans, and Gnostics. Although he claimed to be merely an interpreter of Plato, the need to respond to the objections of non-Platonic philosophers, and his openness to whatever truth he found in their philosophy resulted in Plotinianism, called Neoplatonism in the modern period. Some main students were Amelius, Porphyry, the Emperor Gallienus, his wife, and Eustochious, a physician who was with him when he died and who reported his last words: "I am trying to bring back the divine in myself to the divine in the All."

Convinced of transcendent truth in Platonic Forms, Plotinus nevertheless agreed with Aristotle on the priority of thinking to the Forms, as well as with the Middle Platonic position that Forms are Ideas within the Divine Mind, adding his own conviction that Forms are living intelligences. Opposing Aristotle, he insisted that complexity of thinking must be preceded by a One, totally simple. Unity is needed for anything to exist, and the degrees of unity establish a hierarchy of ontological value. Influenced by Numenius, Plotinus departed from Plato's oral teaching on the forms arising from unity imposed on the Indefinite Dyad and adopted a radical metaphysical Monism.

The Plotinian First Principle, called the One or the Good, wills itself to be as it is. Thus it is from itself, and its goodness diffuses itself. Everything is a natural overflow from the One. The One is "all things and none of them" (V.2.1). Plotinus does not assume the existence of the One but argues for it.

From the One, actively self-contemplating, proceeds intelligible matter; converting and contemplating the One it becomes Nous, the Primal Intellect, and produces Essential Soul. According to its capacity this Hypostasis, Soul, contemplates the Forms, and there proceeds World Soul or Nature from which proceeds the most limited and faintest trace of the One, namely, matter. Unable to contemplate, matter is given forms by World Soul, and the physical world comes to be. Here Plotinus makes use of Aristotle's matter-form theory but only for sub-human things. The existence of the Three Principal Hypostases in the Intelligible World is eternal.

Whence human souls? They come from Essential Soul. Their individual archetypes are forms within Nous (V.9.12).The individual soul's descent into its body is both a fall and a necessity for carrying the governance of Essential Soul in parts of the world. But the soul does not wholly descend. Its intuitive intellect, its true self, aspiring for union with the One, remains in the intelligible world. It may become satisfied with living on its two earthly levels, discursive reason and perception, by over-occupation with the sensible world. The soul is a continuum of levels, the undescended Intellect intuiting the One the reason deliberating on earthly affairs, the perception of sense objects, the vegetative soul managing bodily appetites and emotions. The human soul can live on any level. Plotinus urges a return to one's true self by philosophical reflection, discipline, and a moral life leading to contemplation of one's transcendent Source, the One (V.3.3; VI.7.36). Living on this level means no return to an earthly body after death.

Contemplation, as productive, is the linchpin of the Intelligible World and of the sensible world, as well as of the return of the human soul to its true undescended self. This is made explicit in Ennead III.8.8.

Plotinus's views on the human body were influenced by Plato's Phaedo and Timaeus. Against the Gnostics (possible Sethians), he affirms the material world's goodness and beauty (Enn. II.9.8); yet he calls matter Absolute Evil (I.8.10) only because it lacks all form (Timaeus 48e–52d). But never existing alone, matter somehow is involved in physical evils and immoral human actions.

The Plotinian system is derived from the Classical Tradition, human reasoning, and everyday experience, not excluding religious experience. Through the Cappadocian fathers by way of the translations and writings of John Scottus Eriugena, Plotinus reached the medieval West. Augustine, freed from Manichaeism by reading treatises of Plotinus and Porphyry, also transmitted Plotinian concepts to Western philosophical theory. As founder of Neoplatonism, developed by Porphyry, Iamblichus, and Proclus, Plotinus became the source of negative theology and mystical theology, which through the works of the fifth century theologian Dionysius the Areopagite, influenced Thomas Aquinas and the Rhineland mystics, Eckhart, Suso, and Tauler. Direct knowledge of the Enneads in the modern world came through the Latin translations of Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499). By its refusal to confuse myths and rituals with religious philosophy, the work of Plotinus led intellectual Christians to recognize how far reason could go toward establishing divinely revealed truths, as well as how limited reason is with respect to a historically revealed and achieved salvation that requires faith in addition to reason.

Neoplatonism.

Armstrong, A. Hilary, and Robert A. Markus. Christian Faith and Greek Philosophy. London, 1960. The tension and interplay of revealed doctrine and philosophical ideas, a dialogue that continues.

Armstrong, A. Hilary, ed. The Cambridge History of Later Greek and Early Medieval Philosophy. Cambridge, U.K., 1957, 1970.

Blumenthal, Henry J., and Robert A. Markus, eds. Neoplatonism and Early Christian Thought: Essays in Honor of A. H. Armstrong. London, 1981. Emphasis on Plotinus's dialogue with his contemporaries, the Neoplatonic background of Augustine, and the encounter between later Neoplatonism and the Christian tradition.

Dodds, E. R. Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety. Cambridge, 1965. Two different responses to the breakdown of classical culture and imperial government.

Gersh, S. Middle Platonism and Neoplatonism: The Latin Tradition. 2 vols. Notre Dame, 1986.

Hadot, Pierre. Porphyre et Victorinus. Paris, 1970.

Harris, R. Baine, ed. The Significance of Neoplatonism. Albany, N.Y., 1976.

Harris, R. Baine, ed. Neoplatonism and Indian Thought. Albany, N.Y., 1982.

Lloyd, A. C. The Anatomy of Neoplatonism. Oxford, 1990.

O'Meara, Dominic J., ed. Neoplatonism and Christian Thought. Norfold, Va., 1981.

Smith, A. Porphyry's Place in the Neoplatonic Tradition. The Hague, 1974.

Wallis, Richard T. Neoplatonism. London, 1972. Discusses the interrelationships of all the Neoplatonic schools of thought.

Wallis, Richard T., and J. Bergman, eds. Neoplatonism and Gnosticism. Albany, N.Y., 1982.

Whittaker, Thomas. The Neo-Platonists: A Study in the History of Hellenism. 4th ed. Hildesheim, 1928, 1968. Before Wallis's book, this was the only survey of Neoplatonism.

This is the complete article, containing 1,189 words (approx. 4 pages at 300 words per page).