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 Gallienus
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.