Plotinus
Reality overflows from a single source, the One, and the soul's task is the long climb back.
Plotinus took Plato and made him vertical. From the One, beyond being and beyond words, flows the Intellect; from Intellect flows Soul; from Soul, the visible world, each level a fainter echo of the source. We are amphibians, partly sunk in matter and partly able to turn inward and ascend. His student Porphyry, who edited his disorganized notes into the Enneads, says Plotinus reached union with the One four times in the years they knew each other. Neoplatonism became the philosophical air that Augustine, the Sufis, and the medieval mystics all breathed.
Places
Ideas
Words
“Withdraw into yourself and look. And if you do not yet find yourself beautiful, do as the sculptor does: cut away all that is excessive.”
Works
Life & Moments
Born in Egypt
Born in Lycopolis in Roman Egypt, by the account of his student Porphyry.
Studies in Alexandria
Studied with the philosopher Ammonius Saccas for eleven years, shaping the mystical Platonism that would become Neoplatonism.
The School at Rome
Opened a school in Rome where senators and seekers studied the ascent of the soul from the visible world toward the One.
Death in Campania
Died on a friend's estate in Campania. Porphyry claimed he had attained union with the One four times.
Influence
Influenced by
- Plato
Plotinus made Plato vertical, reading the Forms as stages in an emanation descending from the One.
- Origen
According to the historian Porphyry, Origen and Plotinus studied together under the same Alexandrian teacher, Ammonius Saccas. One carried that Platonist training into Christian theology, the other into the pagan Neoplatonism that would shape Augustine and the medieval mystics.
Influenced
- Augustine
Augustine read the Neoplatonists before his conversion, and their vision of an immaterial reality shaped his Christianity.
- Porphyry
Porphyry was Plotinus's devoted student and arranged his scattered writings into the six Enneads.
- Proclus
Proclus built the emanationist vision of Plotinus into a vast, rigorously deduced system.
- Hypatia
Hypatia taught a Neoplatonism descended from Plotinus, though her school stayed closer to mathematics and astronomy than to the theurgic ritual occupying some of her contemporaries.
- Al-Kindi
The book al-Kindi's circle produced as the Theology of Aristotle was in fact a paraphrase of Plotinus, which meant that Arabic philosophy inherited a Neoplatonic Aristotle from the beginning and did not discover the mistake for centuries.
- Suhrawardi
The graded procession from a single source that Plotinus described became, in Suhrawardi's hands, a hierarchy of lights, with everything lower owing its reality to what shines above it.
- Ibn Arabi
Ibn Arabi's account of a single reality that appears as many things arrives at a position close to the Neoplatonic One, reaching it through Quranic exegesis and vision rather than through Greek argument.
