Plotinus (A.D. 204-270), the founder of Neoplatonism, stands as the last great philosopher of antiquity, his life largely coextensive with one of the most disastrous periods in Roman history. While the Empire faced ruin, war, and pestilence, Plotinus turned away from the spectacle of misery to contemplate an eternal world of goodness and beauty. His philosophy, a profound synthesis of Platonic ideas, Pythagorean mysticism, and Aristotelian concepts, offered a spiritual refuge in a world that seemed devoid of hope. Neoplatonism would become immensely influential, particularly in molding the Christianity of the Middle Ages and Catholic theology, with figures like Saint Augustine drawing heavily from his thought.
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Plotinus’s metaphysics begins with a Holy Trinity, though unlike the Christian Trinity, its persons are not equal: The One is supreme, followed by Spirit (Nous), and finally Soul. The One is a shadowy, indefinable ultimate reality, transcending Being and all predicates, present everywhere yet nowhere. Nous, the image of the One, is pure thought thinking about pure thought, encompassing the world of ideas and all non-sensible knowledge. Soul, the lowest member of this hierarchy, is the author of all living things and the visible world, emanating from Nous when it forgets to look upward. This hierarchical emanation, while not identifying the visible world as evil (a Gnostic view Plotinus rejected), still positions it as less perfect than the intellectual realm.
✨ How Did Plotinus Experience Ecstasy and Divine Union?
A central aspect of Plotinus’s philosophy was the concept of ecstasy—a state of standing outside one’s own body and achieving union with the divine. Plotinus himself experienced this frequently, describing it as being “lifted out of the body into myself; becoming external to all other things and self-encentered; beholding a marvelous beauty.” In this state, one sees not only Nous but also the One, transcending reason and language. This mystical union provides a direct apprehension of truth and reality that is not obtainable through ordinary means. The act of creation, for Plotinus, is the Soul’s desire to elaborate order based on the divine model it has seen in Nous, resulting in a beautiful, though imperfect, copy of the eternal world. This perspective allowed him to account for the existence of the material world without deeming it inherently evil, a problem that would later trouble Christian theologians.
🌌 What Was Plotinus’s View on Matter, Sin, and Memory?
For Plotinus, matter is created by Soul and has no independent reality; it is the lowest sphere, an image generated by the Soul’s downward movement. Sin, a consequence of free will (which Plotinus upheld against determinists and astrologers), results from the soul turning towards itself rather than God, and its punishment is natural, consisting in the restless driving of errors. His views on transmigration of souls, where sinful souls enter animal bodies, align with Orphic beliefs. Interestingly, Plotinus held a unique view on memory: as the soul grows towards eternal life, it remembers less and less of this temporal world, eventually forgetting personality and contemplating only the intellectual realm. This is because memory is concerned with life in time, while the soul’s true life is in eternity. Plotinus’s mysticism, unlike much of the later religious thought, was not morose or hostile to beauty; he strongly felt the beauty of the sensible world as a reflection of the divine, making him a unique and influential figure whose pursuit of inner peace and intellectual beauty resonated deeply with a world in turmoil.
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Russell, Bertrand. A History of Western Philosophy. Simon and Schuster, 1945.
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