Neoplatonism

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Neoplatonism is the modern name for the last great school of pagan Greek philosophy: 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 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; from Intellect, Soul, which generates and governs the world of nature and the senses. Each level flows from the one above without diminishing it, and everything that exists remains tethered to its source — so that the same map read downward as cosmology 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, in the school’s own understanding, a way of life with an arrival.

The school’s history is a history of additions. Plotinus’s pupil Porphyry edited the master’s lectures into the Enneads — the edition the library holds, in MacKenna’s translation — and wrote the biography that travels with them. Iamblichus, 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. Proclus, in fifth-century Athens, built the whole into a vast scholastic architecture. The school sheltered the late pagan world’s learning — and then the buildings closed, and the system scattered into its heirs.

The heirs are half of subsequent intellectual history. Augustine reached Christianity through Neoplatonist books and carried the structure with him; the pseudonymous Dionysius translated the system’s negative theology into Christian mysticism; Islamic philosophy received Plotinus anonymously, in an Arabic compilation that circulated as the theology of Aristotle; medieval Kabbalah’s emanations have long invited comparison. When Ficino translated Plotinus for Renaissance Florence, the school acquired a second European life that ran through the Cambridge Platonists to the Romantics and the occult revival. 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.

→ In the library: Plotinus — The Enneads (MacKenna)

→ Related: The One · Emanation · Nous · Marsilio Ficino