The Neoplatonists

John Gregory

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415187848
• eBook ISBN: 9781134691258
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

This extensively revised and updated second edition of The Neoplatonists provides a valuable introduction to the thought of the four central Neoplatonist philosophers, Plotinus, Porphyry, Proclus and Iamblichus.

Part I

‘Plotinus, the Philosopher of Our Time’

Life and Work

‘Plotinus, the philosopher of our time, seemed ashamed of being in a body.’ So begins the biographical essay by his disciple Porphyry, with a phrase that at once seeks to capture the spirit of Plotinus’ philosophy and to explain his reticence about his origins. He is said to have been born in AD 204–5, but there is no reliable tradition concerning his ancestry or place of birth. He was wary of allowing his personality, rather than his philosophy, to become the focus of his followers’ loyalty, refusing to sit for his portrait and keeping secret his date of birth. Only one fact of his early life was confided to close friends, that his infantile compulsion to suck his nurse’s breast continued till the age of eight, finally surrendering to ridicule – a detail of curiously modern interest.

Plotinus began his serious study of philosophy when in his late twenties, at Alexandria, the cosmopolitan centre of learning where western and eastern cultural influences coincided, and where a variety of philosophical schools were flourishing. His teacher for eleven years, Ammonius, is a shadowy figure who wrote no books, but we know that Plotinus became well-read in the works of Plato, Aristotle and their later commentators, and was familiar with the writings of other major schools of philosophy, notably the Stoics. Outside philosophy, also, his numerous quotations from the poems of Homer and allusions to Greek myth confirm his cultural background as thoroughly Greek.

In his thirty-ninth year, hoping to make acquaintance with the philosophy of Persia and India, he joined a disastrous military campaign against the Persians led by the Emperor Gordian III (238–44 AD) and on its defeat escaped with difficulty to settle in Rome, where the rest of his life’s work was done. No evidence exists that Plotinus ever engaged in systematic study of eastern mystical thought, and modern scholars, when discussing the sources of his ideas, have differed considerably in the importance they have attached to the possibility of oriental influence.

In Rome, he moved among the ruling class, highly honoured by the Emperor Gallienus (253–68 AD) and his wife Salonina, and his seminars were attended by senators; but he took no interest in politics, urging his followers to withdraw from public life and abandon worldly ambition. He once proposed to found a new city in southern Italy, named after Plato, where he could lead his students in retirement from the world to live by Plato’s ‘Laws’, but the project was thwarted by the opposition of courtiers.

His practice of the private virtues was exemplary. Being of a gentle and accessible nature, he was often invited to arbitrate disputes, and many of the highest rank entrusted him with the guardianship of their children and property. Ascetic in his habits, he condemned the eating of flesh, and shunned the social life of the public baths.

At times, he was favoured with a mystical experience, the precious culmination of physical, moral and intellectual discipline, which he interpreted as the union of his highest self with the ultimate source and goal of all existence, the infinite One or Good. The ascent to the brink of this spiritual state, attained on four occasions during Porphyry’s six years with him, is described by Plotinus in a unique autobiographical reference introducing one of his treatises (IV 8):

Often I have woken to myself out of the body, become detached from all else and entered into myself; and I have seen beauty of surpassing greatness, and have felt assured that then especially I belonged to the higher reality, engaged in the noblest life and identified with the Divine; and there established, I have attained to that supreme actuality, setting myself above all else in the realm of Intellect. And after this repose in the Divine, descending from Intellect to reasoning, I am perplexed as to how my descent comes about, and how my soul has become embodied – a soul, though in the body, of such manifest excellence.

As much as his extensive use of the philosophical tradition, his reflection on the personal experience recorded here became the foundation of Plotinus’ metaphysical system, his view of human nature, and his moral and religious teaching.

Plotinus taught in Rome for ten years before starting to publish his thought in writing. Although his philosophy purports to be the authentic interpretation of Platonism, he saw himself not as a scholar or historian of ideas, but as a philosopher, and his classes typically began with a reading from a commentator of his own era as a stimulus to discussion and the introduction of his own ideas.

His teaching was notable for the impassioned but informal manner of his exposition, and for his encouragement of discussion and respect for the contributions of his students, in preference to the strictly deductive presentation of a formal lecture. A personal recollection of Porphyry’s (Life, ch. 13) is illustrative:

For three days I questioned him about the relation of the soul to the body, and he continued to explain. A man called Thaumasius had come in, who said he wanted to hear a general account from him in the form of a set lecture, and that he had no patience with Porphyry’s questions and answers. Plotinus replied, ‘But unless we solve the problems raised by Porphyry’s questions, we shall have nothing to say to put into the lecture.’

This combination of critical dialogue with emotional conviction and informality of exposition is reflected in his written treatises. Fifty-four in number, these were occasional pieces composed in response to problems raised in the seminar, and originally circulated among a small group of carefully chosen students. Plotinus’ entire philosophy, fully developed before he began to write them, is assumed throughout, and the major ideas keep recurring. Modern scholars have had very limited success in detecting signs of development between the earlier and the later works. Plotinus wrote rapidly and continuously, never pausing to revise, and even contemporaries sometimes found his words difficult to follow. The eminent scholar Longinus (213–72 AD), who honoured Plotinus for the scope and originality of his thought, once complained that copies of treatises sent to him were too full of scribal errors to be useful; but Porphyry assures us that they were faithful copies of the original, and that ‘he did not understand the author’s customary manner of exposition’.

During his last years Plotinus suffered a long and disfiguring illness, perhaps leprosy, and died in retirement from Rome at the age of sixty-six. His final words were a summary of his life’s teaching:

Strive to lead back the god within you to the Divine in the universe.

He owes his immortality to the publication of his treatises, thirty years after his death, by Porphyry, who edited them in six sets of nine (Enneads), an arrangement of his own, based roughly on their contents, which sometimes disrupts an original continuity of argument. Fortunately, he preserves the chronological order of composition in his essay On the Life of Plotinus and the Order of his Books. Problems of interpretation remain, and there are tensions and antinomies in the philosophy of Plotinus that the later Neoplatonists, in different ways, attempted to resolve.

The Philosophical Context

Plotinus drew extensively on a Greek philosophical tradition that stretched back to the sixth century BC. He disclaimed originality, professing to be no more than an interpreter of ancient philosophy, particularly the thought of Plato.

The philosophers before Plato, the Presocratics, were concerned chiefly with cosmogony; they sought to discover order, reason and simplicity in the universe by deriving the variety of phenomena from a single principle or set of principles, conceived of in materialist, or quasi-materialist, terms. Fruitful hypotheses were to find their way into later, more sophisticated philosophy, including Neoplatonism. The theory of Mind (Nous) as the moving cause of the material universe, from which it remains separate, was originated by Anaxagoras in the fifth century BC. Even earlier, Heraclitus had proposed a structural principle, or Logos, which maintains a rational equilibrium in the universe by balancing opposing forces. He also made a most significant connection between the exploration of the external world and the exploration of the self: the Logos is also in the soul of each of us, and to understand the world is to understand the self, and the key to right conduct.

In the work of Parmenides, also of the fifth century BC, we find the important rejection of the evidence of the senses and ordinary language as means to understanding the nature of reality. Contradictions are inherent in description of the phenomenal world, and the truth must be divined by reason (Logos): the true Being which thought can entertain without contradiction must be One, without diversity or change, a complete, homogeneous and timeless sphere.

In these notions of Nous, Logos and the One, we see early Greek philosophy gradually feeling its way towards the concept of incorporeal existence. This is equally true of the early Pythagorean principle of Number, and their theory that the mathematical structure of the world was generated by a pair of primal and opposed elements, Odd and Even, or Limit and Unlimit – which entered Platonic and Aristotelian metaphysics as Form and Matter. Platonism, and later Neoplatonism, was also indebted to the Pythagoreans for the religious doctrines of the immortality and transmigration of the soul, and the kinship of all living things; and for the doctrine of inner purification through the contemplation of the underlying order of existence. It was Pythagoras himself who is said to have compared life to a festival, at which slavish men come to compete for fame or profit, but the best people attend as spectators.

Today the philosophy of Plato (c. 429–347 BC) is seen not as a complete and self-consistent system, but rather as an on-going process of exploration and self-criticism. Three major periods of Plato’s thought have been identified: the early ‘Socratic’ dialogues, reflecting the method of the historical Socrates, in which the aim is to examine concepts, question presuppositions, and induce philosophical perplexity especially in the field of ethics; a middle period of constructive metaphysics; and a later critical period in which Plato subjects his idealist construction to close logical scrutiny and begins new lines of development.

This developmental perspective was unknown to the Neoplatonists, who treat Plato’s thought as a unified whole, occasionally obscure but never really inconsistent. Not only the Dialogues, but Plato’s Letters, among them texts of doubtful provenance, and a late and famous lecture on the Good, known to us by report, were authoritative texts. The aspects of Plato’s thought that most influenced them were his conception of the soul, his distinction between intelligible and sensible existence, his allusions to a single, transcendent Principle, and his account of the creation of the universe. These doctrines they found especially in books 6 and 7 of the Republic, in the Phaedo, the Phaedrus, the Symposium, the Parmenides and the Timaeus.

The soul, in Plato, is the source of life and movement, and is an incorporeal substance; it is also a person’s true self, intellectual and moral, and immortal, the body being only a temporary habitation. In the Phaedo he presents a negative view of body as the soul’s ‘tomb’, of the need for soul to despise and master bodily passions, and of the danger of ‘drunken confusion’ caused by sense-perception. The aim here is to escape from body. Elsewhere, soul is portrayed more comprehensively as tripartite – the reason, independent of body, together with emotions and appetites; and virtue is defined as the right functioning and relation of the parts, with reason in command.

In its disembodied existence, the rational part of soul has direct acquaintance with an intelligible realm of abstract Forms or Ideas, possessing substantial, independent and eternal Being, to which the formal properties of sensible existents stand as images to archetypes, and effects to their causes. Originally, a Form was supposed to be simple – nothing but itself, and a perfect instance of itself: Beauty is beautiful in perfection, all other beauties imperfect copies of it. But Plato later saw this to be inadequate: any form must interrelate with other forms – Beauty is Good, Same, Other, etc.; and does not the theory require a further Form of Beauty – ‘a third man’ – to explain the resemblance between Beauty and particular beauties, resulting in an infinite regress?

In the Republic, the form of Good has priority over all other forms. In the myth of the Cave, it is the Sun, which illuminates the world of real Being for the philosopher escaped from the shadows, and once the Good is described as ‘beyond Being (509 b9); but i...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• PART I ‘Plotinus, the Philosopher of Our Time'
• PART II The Neoplatonists after Plotinus
• PART III The Neoplatonist Legacy
• Bibliography
• Index