Plotinus

Plotinus was a Greek-speaking philosopher of the third century CE, born in Roman Egypt and active in Rome, who is regarded as the founder of Neoplatonism. Building on Plato, he described all reality as flowing from a single, utterly simple source he called the One, and taught that the human soul can return to it through philosophy and contemplation. His treatises, collected by his pupil Porphyry as the Enneads, shaped late pagan thought, Christian theology, Islamic philosophy and the Renaissance.

Almost everything known about Plotinus comes from the Life of Plotinus that Porphyry wrote around 300 CE as a preface to his edition of the treatises. Porphyry says that his teacher was reluctant to talk about his origins, his parents or his birthplace, and that he seemed ashamed of having a body. From Plotinus's age at death, Porphyry calculated that he was born in 204 or 205. A later writer, Eunapius, names his birthplace as Lyco, probably Lycopolis, modern Asyut in Upper Egypt, but this is uncertain, and nothing reliable is known about his family or ethnic background.

At twenty-seven, according to Porphyry, Plotinus turned to philosophy in Alexandria, but was disappointed by the teachers he heard until a friend took him to Ammonius Saccas. He reportedly exclaimed that this was the man he had been looking for, and he studied with Ammonius for about eleven years. Ammonius wrote nothing, and his teaching is almost entirely unknown.

Eager to learn the wisdom of the Persians and Indians, Plotinus joined the army of the young emperor Gordian III when it marched east in 242 against the Sasanian Empire of Shapur I. The campaign failed and Gordian died in Mesopotamia in 244. Plotinus escaped with difficulty to Antioch and then, at about forty, settled in Rome, the capital of the Roman Empire, which was then passing through a half-century of civil wars and invasions.

He taught there for the rest of his life. His school was informal, open to anyone, and met in the house of a wealthy widow, Gemina. His circle included senators, physicians and women interested in philosophy, and several families entrusted their children and property to his care. He was close to the emperor Gallienus and his wife Salonina, and asked them to refound a ruined town in Campania as a city of philosophers governed by the laws of Plato. The plan came to nothing.

Plotinus lived an austere life, eating little and sleeping little. He began writing only around 253, in his late forties, and wrote without revising, with poor handwriting and little regard for spelling. Porphyry joined him in 263 and encouraged him to write more. In his last years Plotinus fell seriously ill, apparently with a disfiguring disease, and his friends drifted away. He withdrew to a country estate in Campania belonging to his late friend Zethus, and died there in 270. His physician Eustochius reported that his last words urged those present to bring the divine in them back to the divine in the universe.

Plotinus left fifty-four treatises of very different lengths. Porphyry arranged them by subject into six groups of nine, enneads in Greek, moving roughly from ethics through the physical world and the soul to Intellect and the One. The arrangement is Porphyry's, not Plotinus's, and sometimes splits single essays into several parts. The writing is dense and difficult, often taking the form of an inner dialogue in which Plotinus raises objections against himself. He saw himself not as an innovator but as an interpreter of Plato, though he also drew heavily on Aristotle and the Stoics.

The core of Plotinus's philosophy is a hierarchy of three principles, often called hypostases. At the top is the One, the absolutely simple first principle that is the source of everything. Because it has no parts or divisions, it cannot be properly described; even calling it the One or the Good is only a pointer. It is beyond being and beyond thought.

From the One comes Intellect, nous, a timeless mind that thinks the Forms, the eternal patterns that Plato had placed at the heart of reality. In Intellect, thinker and object of thought are one, and all the Forms are present to each other at once. From Intellect, in turn, comes Soul, which gives life and order to the physical world, extending through time and space and animating nature, the stars and individual living beings.

Plotinus explained this production not as a choice or act of creation but as a necessary overflow, often compared to light streaming from the sun or heat from fire, in which the source loses nothing. Modern scholars call this emanation. At the lowest level lies matter, which in itself has no form and is close to non-being; Plotinus described it as the source of evil in the sense of a lack or privation of good.

The human soul belongs to this structure. Its higher part never fully descends into the body but remains in contact with Intellect. Through virtue, philosophical reflection and inward concentration, a person can turn away from the body and the senses, rise to Intellect and finally reach a direct, wordless union with the One. Porphyry says that Plotinus achieved this union four times during the six years they spent together.

Plotinus's successors, including Porphyry, Iamblichus and later Proclus in Athens, developed Neoplatonism into the dominant philosophy of late antiquity. Hypatia taught in this tradition in Alexandria. Christian thinkers adapted his ideas, despite Porphyry's own hostility to Christianity; Augustine of Hippo read Plotinus in Latin translation, and Neoplatonic accounts of the soul's ascent and of evil as privation passed into his theology and, through him and writers such as Boethius, into the Middle Ages.

Parts of the Enneads were paraphrased in Arabic under the misleading title Theology of Aristotle, and this text shaped Islamic and Jewish philosophy, from Al-Kindi onwards. In 1492 the Florentine scholar Marsilio Ficino published a complete Latin translation, which made Plotinus a central figure of Renaissance philosophy. He marks the final great flowering of Hellenistic and Roman philosophy, and his ideas continue to interest historians of mysticism and philosophers of mind.