Ammonius Saccas

← Encyclopedia

There is no book by Ammonius. No treatise, no lecture set, no letter, not a sentence in his own hand — and yet the school that reorganized the whole of late Greek philosophy traces itself to a room in Alexandria where this man talked and his pupils listened. Everything we have of him is a reflection in other people’s pages. He is the teacher behind Plotinus, and the surest fact about him is the eleven years a younger man spent at his feet.

That figure comes from Porphyry, who wrote the Life of Plotinus a generation later from his master’s own recollections. Plotinus, Porphyry records, came to philosophy at twenty-seven, was sent to the most reputed professors of Alexandria, and left their lectures discouraged; a friend who understood his hunger suggested Ammonius, whom he had not yet tried. He went, heard one lecture, and told his companion, in MacKenna’s rendering, “This was the man I was looking for.” From that day he followed Ammonius without break. When Plotinus left at the age of thirty-eight to join the emperor Gordian’s campaign against Persia — hoping to learn the wisdom of the Persians and the Indians — he had, Porphyry says, passed eleven entire years under Ammonius. The campaign collapsed when Gordian was killed in Mesopotamia in 244; Plotinus escaped to Antioch and made his way to Rome, where he would build, out of what he had absorbed in those eleven years, the philosophy that posterity calls Neoplatonism. The fountainhead, then, is a man who left the river but no spring of his own.

The sack-carrier

The name itself is a riddle that resolves into a legend. Sakkas — Latinized Saccas — is read as the sack-carrier, from the Greek word for one who bears sacks, and from that single epithet grew the tradition that Ammonius began life as a porter on the docks of Alexandria, a laborer who hauled grain at the harbor before he turned to philosophy. The story was already current in late antiquity: the Byzantine bishop Theodoret repeats it, and the corn-carrier detail attaches to him in the Suda and in the soldier-historian Ammianus Marcellinus. The image is irresistible and it has the shape of a parable — the highest metaphysics of the age coming up out of the wharves, the porter who became the master of masters — but the etymology is not secure. The same epithet can be heard as the wearer of sackcloth, the rough garment of an ascetic, which would tell a different story about how he lived rather than where he started. The dockhand and the man in sackcloth are both inferences from a nickname, and the nickname is nearly all we have of his origins; even his floruit is reconstructed backward from his pupil’s, set somewhere in the later second century and closing at his death around 242.

The one fixed coordinate is the city. Alexandria in the third century was the great crossroads of the Mediterranean mind — its harbor a forest of masts, its library and Museum the inheritance of the Ptolemies, its streets carrying Greek philosophy, Egyptian temple-learning, Jewish scripture in the line of Philo, and a young and combative Christianity all within a few quarters of one another. It was the city of the catechetical school, of Clement and the Christian Origen; the city where Greek metaphysics had been steeping for a century in the religious temper of the East. A teacher there could gather pagans and Christians into a single circle without anyone finding it strange, and Ammonius did. That his classroom held both, and that the tradition could not afterward agree which side he belonged to, is the most Alexandrian fact about him.

The Socrates of Neoplatonism

He is called the founder of Neoplatonism and, more pointedly, its Socrates — and the second title carries the first inside it. Like Socrates, Ammonius wrote nothing and taught by living speech; like Socrates, he is known only through pupils who put into writing what he had refused to fix. The comparison is exact in its mechanism. A doctrine entrusted to conversation rather than to a scroll does not survive its speaker except in the form his hearers give it, and so the question of what Ammonius actually held becomes inseparable from the question of how much of his pupils is his. Plotinus, on Porphyry’s account, did not lecture from anyone’s text; at his conferences works by the Platonists and Peripatetics — Numenius, Severus, Atticus, Alexander of Aphrodisias — were read aloud, but he took his own original view, applying, in Porphyry’s phrase, the method of Ammonius to every problem. A method, not a system: that is as close as the record lets us come to the content of his teaching, and it is the hinge on which everything about him turns. It also tells us something about the kind of teacher he was. He left no body of conclusions to be memorized and handed on; he left a way of going at a question — a habit of reading, of pressing past the letter of Plato and Aristotle toward what they had in common — that a gifted hearer could carry off and use long after the voice had stopped. The durable thing was the technique, and the technique passed only through living contact.

What the method was can only be triangulated. Ammonius taught in the generation after Numenius of Apamea, the Syrian who ranked the divine in graded tiers and read Plato and Pythagoras as one ancient wisdom, and all of Ammonius’s known pupils show that Numenius mattered to them — enough that a charge once circulated in Plotinus’s school that the master had merely repackaged Numenius, a charge Porphyry’s circle had to answer. Ammonius stands, on this reading, at the threshold between the eclectic Platonism of the first two centuries — the long interval scholars call Middle Platonism — and the systematic metaphysics Plotinus would raise, in which all things flow from a first principle beyond being. Whether the architecture of the One, the divine Intellect or Nous, and the Soul, and the great pattern of emanation and return, descend from Ammonius or were Plotinus’s own construction on a teacher’s hints, the texts cannot say. The fifth-century Platonist Hierocles of Alexandria, whose account survives only through the summary the patriarch Photius made of his lost work On Providence, called Ammonius theodidaktos — the god-taught — and credited him with the doctrine that Plato and Aristotle were at bottom in full agreement, a harmony that became a governing program of the later schools. But Hierocles wrote two centuries after Ammonius died, and reads back into him a project the schools of his own day were pursuing.

The compact and its breaking

One scene in Porphyry’s Life has fixed the image of Ammonius as a teacher of secrets. Three of his pupils — Herennius, a man named Origen, and Plotinus — made a compact among themselves not to disclose the doctrines Ammonius had revealed to them. The pact was broken: first by Herennius, then by Origen, who eventually put two short treatises into circulation, On the Spirit-Beings and, under the emperor Gallienus, The King the Sole Creator. Plotinus alone, Porphyry says, kept faith, and for a long time wrote nothing at all, founding his teaching on what he had gathered under Ammonius and only later setting it down. The episode is the closest the record comes to telling us that Ammonius had an esoteric teaching worth guarding — yet it also confirms how little of it reached paper, since even the oath-breakers left almost nothing. The secrecy is itself part of why he is unrecoverable.

The Origen of that compact is the most tangled thread in the whole dossier. The name belongs, in Alexandria of this period, to the towering Christian theologian Origen, the allegorist and biblical scholar trained in the same city, who built the first speculative Christian cosmology and was deeply read in Platonist metaphysics. But the scholarly tradition has long doubted whether Ammonius’s pupil Origen and the Christian Origen are one man, and many distinguish a separate pagan philosopher — Origen the Neoplatonist, sometimes called the Pagan — the Origen who moves in the orbit of Plotinus and whose lectures, alongside those of Ammonius himself, the literary critic Cassius Longinus says he attended for a long period. The difficulty is genuine: dates, doctrines, and the bare profile do not align cleanly, and the modern reading by Mark Edwards has pressed the point that neither Porphyry nor Eusebius, in the very passages cited to fuse them, actually asserts that the Ammonius who taught the Christian Origen was Ammonius Saccas the teacher of Plotinus. The identity is contested, not established; the most that can be said is that two — perhaps three — distinguished men named Origen move through the same Alexandrian decades, and the lines between them blur exactly where Ammonius stands.

Christian or pagan

The same blur falls across Ammonius’s own creed, and here the two greatest witnesses flatly contradict each other. Porphyry, in the third book of his work against the Christians, charged that Ammonius had been raised by Christian parents and, once he came of age and began to think philosophically, fell away to a manner of life conformed to the laws — that is, reverted to paganism. Eusebius of Caesarea, who preserves the charge by quoting it in order to refute it in the sixth book of his Ecclesiastical History, answers that Porphyry lies: that Ammonius held the divine philosophy unshaken to the very end of his life, and that his writings prove it, including a work titled On the Harmony of Moses and Jesus. The disagreement is not a minor wrinkle. It is a contest between a pagan philosopher claiming the fountainhead of the schools as one of his own and a Christian historian claiming the same man for the Church — and it may rest on a confusion, since a Christian writer named Ammonius, author of gospel-harmony work, did live in Alexandria and is easily merged with the philosopher of the same name and city. The convert-to-paganism and the lifelong-Christian cannot both be the same Ammonius doing the same thing; the cleanest resolution is that the name was carried by more than one Alexandrian, and the tradition has spent eighteen centuries trying to tell them apart.

What can be known

A teacher who left no text, whose creed two contemporaries described in opposite terms, whose pupils swore secrecy and whose most famous pupil rebuilt the whole of Platonism on his method — Ammonius is the rare figure who is at once indispensable and almost wholly inferred. The skepticism runs deep in modern scholarship: E. R. Dodds and others concluded that the attempts to reconstruct a specific Ammonian doctrine by isolating what Plotinus and the Christian Origen hold in common have not worked, and that the philosophy of Ammonius is, in any strict sense, irrecoverable. The doctrines once advertised as his dissolve, on inspection, into the systems of the men who carried them away.

He must also be kept apart from his namesake. Two and a half centuries later another Ammonius taught in Alexandria — Ammonius son of Hermias, the pupil of Proclus and the lecturer whose commentaries on Aristotle shaped the late Alexandrian school. That later Ammonius wrote, and is known from his own pages; the conflation of the two has muddied more than one account. The Ammonius of this entry is the earlier and the silent one.

What survives is not a doctrine but a direction. The shape of later Neoplatonism — the One beyond being, the descent of all things from it, the ascent of the soul back toward its source, and the conviction that Plato and Aristotle could be read as a single harmony — flowed out of the Alexandrian room where Ammonius spoke and Plotinus listened, and on through Porphyry and Iamblichus and Proclus to every school that called itself Platonist after. The man at the source put none of it in writing; he put it in a pupil. Eleven years, one method, and a silence that the entire tradition has been reading ever since — that is the whole of Ammonius Saccas, and it was enough.

Sources and scholarship

The single indispensable witness is Porphyry’s On the Life of Plotinus and the Arrangement of His Work, prefixed to the Enneads; the account of Plotinus’s twenty-seventh year, the recognition of Ammonius, the eleven years, the Persian campaign, and the compact of secrecy all derive from it. The standard public-domain English is Stephen MacKenna’s, Porphyry: On the Life of Plotinus, published with his translation of the Enneads (1917–1930); the modern critical text is Henry and Schwyzer’s Plotini Opera (1951–1973). The Christian-versus-pagan dispute rests on Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 6.19, which quotes and rebuts Porphyry’s lost Against the Christians; Hierocles’s testimony to Ammonius as god-taught and to the Plato–Aristotle harmony survives only in Photius’s Bibliotheca. For an orientation to the man and the problem, see the Oxford Classical Dictionary entry Ammonius (2) Saccas. The decisive modern argument that no Ammonian doctrine can be reconstructed belongs to E. R. Dodds (Numenius and Ammonius, in Les Sources de Plotin, Entretiens Hardt V, 1960), and the case against fusing the several men named Origen is made by M. J. Edwards in Ammonius, Teacher of Origen, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 44 (1993). The older but still useful overview is in the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica. On Ammonius’s Alexandrian setting — the same milieu that produced Clement of Alexandria and the Christian catechetical school — and on the Numenian background, the entries on Numenius of Apamea and the wider gnostic currents of third-century Alexandria fill in the world he taught in.

→ In the library: Porphyry — On the Life of Plotinus (MacKenna)

→ Related: Plotinus · Porphyry · Neoplatonism · Alexandria · Platonism · Numenius Of Apamea · Origen · Clement Of Alexandria