Neoplatonism
245 – 529
Everything flows from a single source beyond being and description, and the soul's business is to make the return journey.
- Active
- 245 – 529
- Where
- Rome, Alexandria and Athens
- Status
- extinct as a school, continuous as an influence
- Tradition
- Greek
The claim
The One is beyond being and beyond thought, since to think it would already be to divide it. From it proceeds Intellect, and from Intellect Soul, and from Soul the world — not by decision but by overflow.
What it held
Plotinus solves the problem Middle Platonism had struggled with by refusing to make the first principle a thing at all. The One is not the greatest being; it is prior to being, and nothing can be said of it directly. Everything else follows by emanation, which he compares to light from a source or heat from a fire: the source loses nothing and does not choose.
The structure is three hypostases. From the One comes Intellect, which is the Forms thinking themselves. From Intellect comes Soul, which looks both up at Intellect and down at the world it orders. Individual souls sit at the join, and can turn either way.
The ethics is that turn. Since the soul never entirely descends, the return is available now — Plotinus reports having achieved it four times, and Porphyry once. That claim, and the argument that the One can only be reached by dropping the apparatus of thought, is why Neoplatonism became the philosophical grammar of mysticism in three religions.
How it argued
Close reading of Plato as a unified system, argued dialectically and reported experientially. Porphyry edited the material into the Enneads, six groups of nine, an arrangement that is his rather than his teacher's.
What it was arguing against
The Gnostics, at length and with unusual heat, for holding the cosmos to be a botched work. Also Stoic materialism and Aristotle on the soul.
Where it disagreed with itself
Whether theurgy — ritual practice — is needed to ascend, which Iamblichus insisted and Plotinus had not. Whether the descent of the soul is a fall or a natural function.
Common misconceptions
That it is a mystical religion rather than philosophy. The Enneads are dense technical argument, and the mystical claims are conclusions rather than premises. And it is not a departure from Plato in its own eyes — Plotinus thought he was simply expounding him.
How it began
Plotinus studied in Alexandria under Ammonius Saccas for eleven years, joined a Persian expedition hoping to meet Indian philosophers, and began teaching in Rome around 245.
What became of it
Justinian closed the Athenian school in 529, conventionally the end of ancient philosophy. The texts continued in Arabic and, mistakenly attributed to Aristotle, shaped Islamic metaphysics.
Lasting influence
Augustine says it prepared him for Christianity. Pseudo-Dionysius carried it into Christian mysticism entire. Ibn Arabi, Kabbalah, Ficino, Coleridge and Emerson all draw on it.
Why it still matters
It remains the most rigorous attempt to say what a first principle would have to be like, and why anything said about it must be wrong.
Put another way
Light from a source, which does not diminish by shining and does not decide to.
Where to start
Ennead I.6, On Beauty. It is short, it is the most readable thing he wrote, and Augustine never got over it.
The surprising bit
Porphyry records that Plotinus was so uneasy about being embodied that he refused to sit for a portrait or to say where he was born.
In their own words
Withdraw into yourself and look.
The One is all things and no one of them.
Connections
- Answers
- Middle Platonism
- Opposed by
- Early Stoicism
- Influenced
- Patristics, Augustinianism, Christian Mysticism, Jewish Neoplatonism
The verdict
The last great system of the ancient world, and the one that quietly reshaped the theology of the next thousand years.