Plotinus

/ploh tuy"neuhs/, n.

A.D. 205?-270?, Roman philosopher, born in Egypt.

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born AD 205, Lyco, or Lycopolis, Egypt?

died 270, Campania

Egyptian-Roman philosopher.

At age 27 he traveled to Alexandria, where he studied philosophy for 11 years. In about 242 he joined the expedition of the Roman emperor Gordian III against Persia in order to learn about the philosophies of the Persians and Indians. He went to Antioch and then to Rome, where he settled at age 40, becoming the centre of an influential circle of intellectuals. His attempt to form a Platonic republic in Campania с 265 was halted by the emperor Gallienus. He was the founder of the school of philosophy known as Neoplatonism; his collected works, the Enneads (from Greek, enneas: "set of nine"), arranged by his disciple Porphyry (232?–с 305), are the first and greatest collection of Neoplatonic writings. For Plotinus, philosophy was not only a matter of abstract speculation but also a way of life and a religion. His works strongly influenced early Christian theology, and his philosophy was widely studied and emulated for many centuries.

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▪ ancient philosopher

Introduction

born AD 205, , Lyco, or Lycopolis, Egypt?

died 270, Campania

      ancient philosopher, the centre of an influential circle of intellectuals and men of letters in 3rd-century Rome, who is regarded by modern scholars as the founder of the Neoplatonic school of philosophy.

Origins and education.

      The only important source for the life of Plotinus is the biography that his disciple and editor Porphyry wrote as a preface to his edition of the writings of his master, the Enneads. Other ancient sources add almost no reliable information to what Porphyry relates. This must be mentioned because, though Porphyry's “Life of Plotinus” is the best source available for the life of any ancient philosopher, it has some important deficiencies that must necessarily be reflected in any modern account of the life of Plotinus that does not use a great deal of creative imagination to fill in the gaps. The “Life” is the work of an honest, accurate, hero-worshipping, and serious-minded friend and admirer. Apart from a few fascinating scraps of information about the earlier parts of the life of Plotinus, Porphyry concentrates on the last six years, when he was with his master in Rome. Thus, a fairly complete picture is available only of the last six years of a man who died at the age of 65. It is the elderly Plotinus, as it is the elderly Socrates, who alone is known. Plotinus' own writings contain no autobiographical information, and they can give no unintentional glimpses of his mind or character when he was young; they were all written in the last 15 years of his life. Nothing is known about his intellectual and spiritual development.

      Plotinus was born in AD 205. Porphyry states that he never spoke about his parents, his race, or his country. Eunapius, a late 4th-century writer, and later authors wrote that his birthplace was Lyco, or Lycopolis, in Egypt, either the modern Asyūt in Upper Egypt or a small town in the Nile Delta. Though this may be true, there is no real evidence in the “Life” or in his own writings to suggest that Plotinus had any special knowledge of or affinity with Egypt; the fact that he later studied philosophy in the great cosmopolitan city of Alexandria is not necessarily evidence that he was an Egyptian. His name is Latin in form, but, in the 3rd century AD, this gives no clue to his ethnic origins. All that can be said with reasonable certainty is that Greek was his normal language and that he had a Greek education. For all his originality, he remains Hellenic in his way of thinking and in his intellectual and religious loyalties.

      In his 28th year—he seems to have been rather a late developer—Plotinus felt an impulse to study philosophy and thus went to Alexandria. He attended the lectures of the most eminent professors in Alexandria at the time, which reduced him to a state of complete depression. In the end, a friend who understood what he wanted took him to hear the self-taught philosopher Ammonius “Saccas.” When he had heard Ammonius speak, Plotinus said, “This is the man I was looking for,” and stayed with him for 11 years.

      Ammonius is the most mysterious figure in the history of ancient philosophy. He was, it seems, a lapsed Christian (yet even this is not quite certain), and the one or two extant remarks about his thought suggest a fairly commonplace sort of traditional Platonism. A man who could attract such devotion from Plotinus and who may also have been the philosophical master of the great Christian theologian Origen, must have had something more to offer his pupils, but what it was is not known. That Plotinus stayed with him for 11 years is in no way surprising. One did not enter an ancient philosophical school to take courses and obtain a degree, but rather to join in what might well be a lifelong cooperative following of the way to truth, goodness, and the ultimate liberation of the spirit.

Expedition to the East

      At the end of his time with Ammonius, Plotinus joined the expedition of the Roman emperor Gordian III against Persia (242–243), with the intention of trying to learn something at first hand about the philosophies of the Persians and Indians. The expedition came to a disastrous end in Mesopotamia, however, when Gordian was murdered by the soldiers and Philip the Arabian was proclaimed emperor. Plotinus escaped with difficulty and made his way back to Antioch. From there he went to Rome, where he settled at the age of 40. That a Greek philosopher, especially at this period, should be interested in Oriental thought is not extraordinary. Plotinus' own thought shows some striking similarities to Indian religious philosophy, but he never actually made contact with Eastern sages because of the failure of the expedition. Though direct or indirect contact with Indians educated in their own religious-philosophical traditions may not have been impossible in 3rd-century Alexandria, the resemblances of the philosophy of Plotinus to Indian thought were more likely a natural development of the Greek tradition that he inherited. That Plotinus was able to join the expedition of the senatorial emperor Gordian, that he went to Rome (an unusual place for a philosopher to settle), and that Porphyry found him, 19 years later, at the centre of a circle of friends and disciples—many of whom were members of the senatorial aristocracy—has been interpreted (probably erroneously) as meaning that he or his family had strong personal connections with Roman senators.

Life in Rome.

      Whatever may have been the circumstances of Plotinus when he first came to Rome, by the time Porphyry made his acquaintance in AD 263 he was living in dignified and comfortable conditions, though maintaining a considerable degree of personal austerity. His reputation in society was excellent and earned by practical activity as well as by teaching. He acted as an arbitrator in disputes, without ever being known to make an enemy, and many of his aristocratic friends, when they were approaching death, appointed him guardian of their children. “His house,” Porphyry says, “was full of young lads and maidens,” and he most conscientiously fulfilled his obligations under Roman law as their guardian, taking care of their education and their property. Like other great contemplatives, he had plenty of time for other people and could attend to their worries (sometimes quite trivial) without losing his inward concentration. He heard a boy's lessons, found who had stolen a lady friend's necklace, or noticed that Porphyry was in a state of depression and contemplating suicide and so sent him away for a change of scenery and companionship. “Present at once to himself and others” and “gentle and at the disposal of all who had any sort of acquaintance with him” are ways in which Porphyry described him. He was, it seems, a man who gave the impression of being in touch with the eternal without losing awareness of the earthly needs of his many friends.

      His circle of friends was cosmopolitan, including men from the eastern half of the empire as well as Roman senators, their wives, and widows. Among those who venerated Plotinus, according to Porphyry, were the emperor Gallienus (reigned 253–268) and his wife Salonina, and this led Plotinus on one occasion to attempt practical activity on a larger scale. He asked the emperor to restore a ruined city in Campania and endow it with the surrounding land; the restored city was to be called Platonopolis, and its citizens were to live according to the laws and customs of Plato's ideal states. Plotinus promised that he would go and live there himself with his friends. That a philosopher who shows in his writings such a total lack of interest in the political side of Plato's thought and who preached withdrawal from public life should have made such a proposal is interesting. He may well have thought it his duty as a Platonic philosopher to attempt the foundation of a Platonic city, if opportunity offered—however personally disinclined he might have been to such activity. The emperor refused his request, and in the political circumstances of the time there was no chance of its being granted. Gallienus and the Senate were not on good terms. He had excluded members of the senatorial order from all military commands, and they took their revenge by successfully blackening his memory after his death. However much he might have respected Plotinus personally, the emperor would inevitably have regarded Platonopolis as a most undesirable senatorial strongpoint and a centre of intrigue against his authority.

Plotinus' teachings and writings.

      The main activity of Plotinus, to which he devoted most of his time and energy, was his teaching and, after his first 10 years in Rome, his writing. There was nothing academic or highly organized about his “school,” though his method of teaching was rather scholastic. He would have passages read from commentaries on Plato or Aristotle by earlier philosophers and then expound his own views. The meetings, however, were friendly and informal, and Plotinus encouraged unlimited discussion. Difficulties, once raised, had to be discussed until they were solved. The school was a loose circle of friends and admirers with no corporate organization. It was for these friends that he wrote the treatises that Porphyry collected and arranged as the Enneads. Some, it seems from their complexity, were destined for an inner circle of his closest friends and philosophical collaborators, such as Porphyry, Amelius Gentilianus from Tuscany (the senior member of the school), and Eustochius, who was Plotinus' physician and who may have produced another edition of his works, now lost.

      Some stories in the “Life,” and some passages in the Enneads, give an idea of Plotinus' attitude to the religions and superstitions of his intensely religious and superstitious age, an attitude that seems to have been unusually detached. Like all men of his time, he believed in magic and in the possibility of foretelling the future by the stars, though he attacked the more bizarre and immoral beliefs of the astrologers. His interest in the occult was philosophical rather than practical, and there is no definite evidence that he practiced magic. A person called Olympius is reported to have once tried to use magic against Plotinus, but he supposedly found that the malignant forces he had evoked were bouncing back from Plotinus to himself. Plotinus was once taken to the Temple of Isis for a conjuration of his guardian spirit; a god, Porphyry stated, appeared instead of an ordinary guardian angel but could not be questioned because of a mishandling of the conjuring process which broke the spell. What Plotinus himself thought of the proceedings is not known, but apparently he was not deeply interested.

      His attitude toward the traditional pagan cults was one of respectful indifference. Amelius, his closest friend and coworker in philosophy, was a pious man, addicted to attendance at sacrifices. Plotinus refused to join him in his devotions but seems to have thought none the worse of him. Despite his rather aggressive piety, Amelius remained Plotinus' friend and collaborator. Some members of his circle of friends were Gnostics (heretical Christian dualists who emphasized esoteric salvatory knowledge), and they provoked him not only to write a vigorous attack on their beliefs but to organize a polemic campaign against them through the activities of Porphyry and Amelius. Plotinus' reasons for detesting Gnosticism also would have applied, to some extent, to orthodox Christianity—though there is no evidence that he knew anything about it or that he had any contact with the church in Rome. Gnosticism appeared to him to be a barbarous, melodramatic, irrational, immoral, un-Greek, and insanely arrogant superstition. Plotinus' own religion, which he practiced and taught with calm intensity, was the quest for mystical union with the Good through the exercise of pure intelligence.

Last years.

      In his last years Plotinus, whose health had never been very good, suffered from a painful and repulsive sickness that Porphyry describes so imprecisely that one modern scholar has identified it as tuberculosis and another as a form of leprosy. This made his friends, as he noticed, avoid his company, and he retired to a country estate belonging to one of them in Campania and within a year died there (270). The circle of friends had already broken up. Plotinus himself had sent Porphyry away to Sicily to recover from his depression. Amelius was in Syria. Only his physician Eustochius arrived in time to be with Plotinus at the end. His last words were either “Try to bring back the god in you to the divine in the All” or “I am trying to bring back the divine in us to the divine in the All.” In either case, they express very simply the faith that he shared with all religious philosophers of late antiquity.

A. Hilary Armstrong

Additional Reading

The text of Porphyry's Life of Plotinus may be found prefixed to most of the editions of the Enneads of Plotinus. Plotins Schriften, vol. 5c, ed. and trans. by R. Harder (1958), is a critical edition of the Greek text with German translation and notes. A Greek text with English translation and short notes is in Plotinus, vol. 1, trans. by A.H. Armstrong (1966). An English translation is in The Enneads, trans. by Stephen MacKenna, 4th ed. rev. by B.S. Page, pp. 1–20 (1969). The best character study of Plotinus, and also an excellent introduction to his thought, is Pierre Hadot, Plotin, ou la simplicité du regard (1963). See also A.H. Armstrong in the Cambridge History of Later Greek and Early Mediaeval Philosophy, part 3, “Plotinus,” ch. 12, “Life,” and 13, “Teaching and Writing” (1967), with bibliography.

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