Neoplatonism

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Fifty-four treatises, arranged in six groups of nine — enneades, “the nines” — make up the book through which the last great school of pagan Greek philosophy still speaks. The arrangement is not the author’s. Plotinus wrote piece by piece, as the work of his Roman seminar demanded, and left the papers without order; his pupil Porphyry, gathering them after the master’s death, sorted them by theme into an ascent that begins with human conduct and ends at the One. Built as Porphyry built it, the Enneads is at once the school’s map of reality and the itinerary for traversing it: the book starts where its reader stands and finishes at the source of everything that is.

Neoplatonism is the modern name for the school that drew that map: the reading of Plato inaugurated by Plotinus in the third century CE and carried by his successors until the emperor Justinian closed the Athenian school in 529. The practitioners would not have recognized the name — they called themselves simply Platonists, and understood their work as the recovery of what Plato had really meant. The “neo-” is the verdict of later historians, registering how much in the system is in fact new. The school’s other boundary is a historian’s line as well: the confident doctrinal Plato of the Middle Platonists fed directly into it, and that longer story — the Academy, its skeptical centuries, the doctrinal revival — belongs to Platonism. This school’s own story begins with a teacher who wrote nothing at all.

Ammonius Saccas taught in Alexandria, published not a word, and remains one of the most enigmatic philosophers of all antiquity. Plotinus, born in Egypt in 204 or 205, came to him at twenty-eight and stayed eleven years. In 243 he joined the Persian expedition of the emperor Gordian III, hoping to reach the wisdom of Persia and India at its sources; the campaign collapsed with the emperor’s murder, and by late 244 Plotinus was in Rome, where he taught continuously for more than twenty-five years until his death in 270. His teaching was at first entirely oral, and the treatises, when they came, grew out of the seminar’s sessions and kept their searching movement. That nearly the whole oeuvre survives is owed to Porphyry’s editorial devotion: the thematic six-by-nine arrangement, with the chronological order recorded in the Life of Plotinus he set at the front of the edition — the biography that has traveled with the Enneads ever since. The library holds the whole in Stephen MacKenna’s translation, Porphyry’s Life included, alongside Kenneth Sylvan Guthrie’s earlier Plotinos: Complete Works.

The system’s skeleton is a descent. At the summit stands the One — beyond being, beyond thought, beyond every name; from it proceeds Intellect, the eternal mind containing the forms of all things, which the school calls Nous; from Intellect, Soul, which generates and governs the world of nature and the senses. Each level flows from the one above without diminishing it — the undiminished giving whose logic is unfolded under emanation — and everything that exists remains tethered to its source. The same map read downward as cosmology therefore reads upward as a path: the philosopher’s task is the soul’s return, by way of virtue and contemplation, toward union with the principle from which it came. Philosophy here is not analysis only. It is a way of life with an arrival.

The school’s history is a history of additions. Porphyry of Tyre (c. 234–c. 305) added the library: besides editing his master’s treatises he wrote across the whole curriculum — the Isagoge, which served the Middle Ages in Greek, Latin, and Arabic as the standard primer of logic; the Sentences, compressing Plotinus into theses; On Abstinence; the allegorical reading of Homer’s Cave of the Nymphs; fragments of Against the Christians; and a skeptical Letter to Anebo interrogating the claims of traditional rite — the letter that provoked the next addition.

Iamblichus of Chalcis (c. 245–c. 325), whose school was probably at Apamea in Syria, answered the Letter to Anebo with On the Mysteries and, against Porphyry’s objections, brought ritual inside the system: theurgy, the sacramental work by which the gods raise the soul, on the argument that thought alone cannot climb the whole way. He multiplied the grades of the hierarchy, set Pythagoras beside Plato at the center of the curriculum, and gave scriptural rank to the Chaldæan Oracles. The charismatic emperor Julian (r. 361–363), himself a Neoplatonist, carried the movement onto the throne.

In fifth-century Athens the school assumed its final architecture. The succession ran from Plutarch of Athens through Syrianus (d. c. 437) to Proclus (412–485), holder of Plato’s chair — the diadochos — for nearly fifty years and the most authoritative philosopher of late antiquity; his pupil Marinus wrote his life under the title Proclus, or On Happiness. Proclus built the whole inheritance into a vast scholastic architecture: the Elements of Theology derives the system theorem by theorem, and the Platonic Theology executes the program, inherited from Iamblichus and Julian, of demonstrating the harmony of the ancient revelations — Homer, Hesiod, the Orphic theogonies, the Chaldæan Oracles — with Pythagoras and Plato. The school’s mature reading of Plato as scripture is treated under pagan Platonic theology. The school sheltered the late pagan world’s learning.

Then the buildings closed. Damascius (c. 458–after 538), the last diadochos, presided when Justinian’s legislation of 529 ended the teaching at Athens; he and six colleagues, Simplicius among them, traveled east to the court of the Persian king Khosrow I, returning under a clause of the treaty of 532. The ending was not everywhere at once: at Alexandria — where Hypatia had taught and, in 415, been murdered — philosophy continued under teachers who had embraced or come to terms with Christianity, Ammonius son of Hermias (c. 440–c. 520) and Olympiodorus the Younger (c. 495–after 565) among them, to the end of the sixth century, with the Arab conquest of the mid-seventh closing the frame. After 529 the system scattered into its heirs.

The heirs are half of subsequent intellectual history. Augustine of Hippo, intimate with the writings of Plotinus and Porphyry, reached Christianity through Neoplatonist books and carried the structure with him; the pseudonymous Dionysius the Areopagite, a Christian author writing around 500 with Proclus’s works open before him, translated the system’s negative theology into Christian mysticism; and the Liber de Causis, drawn from Proclus, taught the medieval schools under Aristotle’s name — a line followed whole under Christian Neoplatonism. Islamic philosophy received Plotinus anonymously by the same disguise: the Theology of Aristotle, an Arabic paraphrase of Enneads IV–VI circulating under Aristotle’s name, entered the tradition through the circle of al-Kindi — the reception traced under Islamic Neoplatonism and, in its Ismaili flowering, under Fatimid Neoplatonism. In Jewish thought the current runs from Isaac Israeli through Ibn Gabirol — see medieval Jewish Neoplatonism — and medieval Kabbalah’s emanations have long invited comparison with the school’s descending hierarchy.

The Greek text itself wintered in the Byzantine East — the channel kept by Byzantine Platonism — until its manuscripts came west in the fifteenth century. When Marsilio Ficino translated Plotinus for Renaissance Florence, printed in 1492 as the first Plotinus in type, the school acquired a second European life, told under Renaissance Neoplatonism; it ran through the Cambridge Platonists of the seventeenth century and then, by way of Thomas Taylor’s English translations of 1787–1834, to the Romantics and the occult revival — G. R. S. Mead re-edited Taylor’s Select Works of Plotinus in 1895 for that readership. Much of what later esotericism calls “the perennial philosophy” is, on inspection, this one school, repeatedly rediscovered.

Scholarship has spent two centuries deciding whether Neoplatonism is philosophy or religion, and has largely concluded that the question is anachronistic — the school predates the divorce. Its texts argue like mathematics and end like prayer; that combination, unrepeated since, is what the heirs kept trying to recover.

The long return of the texts

Recovering the school’s own words took most of those two centuries. Adolf Kirchhoff’s edition of 1856 first restored the chronological order of Plotinus’s treatises from the data Porphyry had preserved; the text now read everywhere is Paul Henry and Hans-Rudolf Schwyzer’s Plotini Opera — the editio maior in three volumes, 1951–1973, and the revised editio minor in the Oxford Classical Texts, 1964–1982 — the first fully critical Plotinus, which displaced every nineteenth-century edition and underlies every translation since. English readers have had the Enneads whole from Guthrie (1918) and MacKenna (1917–1930), then from A. H. Armstrong’s Loeb (1966–1988), and most recently from the Cambridge University Press team translation edited by Lloyd P. Gerson with George Boys-Stones, John Dillon, R. A. H. King, Andrew Smith, and James Wilberding (2018) — the first complete new English Enneads since the Loeb, built directly on Henry–Schwyzer.

The Athenian system has its own anchors. E. R. Dodds’s Proclus: The Elements of Theology (Clarendon Press, 1933; second edition 1963) gave the school’s most systematic text a revised Greek text, translation, and a commentary still unsurpassed as the gate into Proclus; H. D. Saffrey and L. G. Westerink’s six-volume Théologie platonicienne (Les Belles Lettres, 1968–1997) did the same for the great summa of the old theology. Damascius waited longest of all: no complete English version of any of his works existed until Sara Ahbel-Rappe’s Damascius’ Problems and Solutions Concerning First Principles (Oxford University Press, 2010). For the school entire, Pauliina Remes’s Neoplatonism (Acumen, 2008) remains the standard one-volume introduction.

Even the school’s ending is argued. Alan Cameron’s “The Last Days of the Academy at Athens” (Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society, 1969) unsettled the textbook picture, re-reading the legal and narrative evidence — Malalas’s chronicle, Agathias on the philosophers’ Persian journey — to argue that the end was far less clean than “Justinian closed the Academy.” Edward J. Watts’s “Justinian, Malalas, and the End of Athenian Philosophical Teaching in A.D. 529” (Journal of Roman Studies, 2004) returned to the same record and concluded that philosophical teaching at Athens did effectively end around 529 under Justinian’s measures. Between the two stands the present picture: a real ending at Athens, a long afterglow at Alexandria.

All the editions end in the same place. The treatise Porphyry set last of the fifty-four — Ennead VI.9, On the Good, or the One — carries the school’s destination: the life of gods and of godlike men, closing, in MacKenna’s rendering, with “the passing of solitary to solitary.” That page is what the school transmits forward. Bishops and Baghdad translators, Florentine humanists, Cambridge divines, and the editors of the occult revival each found their own way back to it; whatever else Neoplatonism became in their hands, the destination never moved.

→ In the library: Plotinus — The Enneads (MacKenna, 1917–1930) · Porphyry — On the Life of Plotinus (MacKenna) · The Enneads — VI. 9, On the Good, or the One · Plotinos: Complete Works (K. S. Guthrie, 1918) · Iamblichus — On the Mysteries (Taylor, 1821) · Porphyry — On the Cave of the Nymphs (Taylor) · The Chaldæan Oracles (Mead, 1908)

→ Related: Platonism · The One · Nous · Emanation · Theurgy · Proclus · Iamblichus · Damascius · Christian Neoplatonism · Islamic Neoplatonism · Medieval Jewish Neoplatonism · Byzantine Platonism · Renaissance Neoplatonism · Cambridge Platonism · Pagan Platonic Theology · Marsilio Ficino