(205-270) philosopher
All that is known of Plotinus comes from the Life of Plotinus composed by his student porphyry, who published the biography as a preface to his collected treatises about 30 years after the philosopher’s death. His arrangement of Plotinus’s writing into six sets of nine tracts each, ordered by subject and named the Enneads (which means ‘nines’ in Greek), remains the sole means by which the ideas of Plotinus have survived.
Plotinus was born in Lycopolis in Upper Egypt, and at age 28 he began to study philosophy at Alexandria under Ammonius Saccas. Wishing to study Persian and Indian philosophy, he joined the military expedition of Emperor Gordian III to the East in 243. After Gordian was murdered in Mesopotamia, Plotinus fled to Antioch and, in 244, made his way to Rome, where he began to teach. Ten years later, at 50, he began to write.
Plotinus’s pupils included doctors, politicians, literary men, and women. His method of teaching consisted of conversation; sessions would begin with a reading of a commentary on plato or aristotle and proceed to a debate of certain points of philosophy. Though he had no political aspirations of his own and believed philosophers should not be involved in reform of the state, Plotinus did ask permission from his friends, the Emperor Gal-lienus and Empress Salonina, to establish a city called Platonopolis. He envisioned a community founded entirely on the ideals of Plato. However, too many people opposed the plan for it to become feasible. In 269 an illness, probably leprosy, forced him to retire to the country estate of one of his pupils, where he died the next year.
The scholar Dominic O’Meara correctly notes that “many paths lead back to Plotinus.” Plotinus and his successors, known as the Neoplatonists, continued their teachings during late antiquity in the great schools of philosophy in Syria, Athens, and Alexandria, which in their turn shaped the philosophical foundations underlying the Islamic, Byzantine, and Western worlds of the middle ages, Renaissance, and Enlightenment.
Plotinus’s main achievement was a systematized worldview in which he ordered and defined important metaphysical concepts. For him, philosophy was a religion, a way for the mind to ascend from the material to God. Building on the ideas of Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics, he conceived of reality as a hierarchy of spiritual powers that all had their source in an infinite and transcendent entity he called the First Principle or the One. The One, he believed, contained and was the source for all being. The next state of being he called the Nous, a Greek word roughly meaning Divine Intellect. This was the force that ordered the world, a finite entity comprised of the sum of all living things.
The third state Plotinus called the Soul of the World, and he described it in two parts, the first consisting of intelligence and reason, and the second consisting of material being or nature. For Plotinus, evil and imperfection existed only in the state of matter, and the material could be transcended through contemplation. Contemplation, which turned away from the material or external and focused on the inner soul or true self, was the way an individual could unite with the Universal Soul and, from there, the Nous. The purpose of existence was to strive for moral and intellectual perfection, which would ultimately bring the soul closer to the First Principle or the One, the source of all life. Evil and suffering, though a necessary part of the plan, were caused by a selfish attachment to the body and could be conquered through moral goodness, discipline, and wisdom.
Plotinus revived and popularized the ideas of Plato and Aristotle in the Latin world and became the chief exponent of Neoplatonism. He influenced the Byzantine scholar Michael Psellus, and Arabic translations of the Enneads, particularly the “Theology of Aristotle,” circulated in the medieval Islamic world. He also influenced Christian theologians, such as Gregory of Nyssa, Ambrose, and augustine, and the medieval philosophers boethius and Macrobius. Translator H. A. Armstrong calls him “metaphysician and mystic, a hard and honest thinker who enjoyed intense spiritual experience and could describe it in the language of a great poet.” His ideas have contributed to philosophy, art, literature, and religious thought. See also plutarch.
An English Version of a Work by Plotinus
The Enneads. Translated by Stephen MacKenna. Edited by John Dillon. New York: Penguin Books, 1991.
Works about Plotinus
Hadot, Pierre. Plotinus or the Simplicity of Vision. Translated by Michael Chase. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Miles, Margaret Ruth. Plotinus on Body and Beauty: Society, Philosophy, and Religion in Third-Century Rome. Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell Publishers, 1999.
