Plotinus

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The man would not give his birthday. He kept the day secret, refused the customary sacrifice, declined to name the month — and when a friend pressed for a portrait he asked whether it was not enough to carry about the image nature had already enclosed him in, without leaving behind, for posterity, an image of the image. The first words his pupil Porphyry set down about him fix the temper exactly: Plotinus, the philosopher their contemporary, seemed ashamed of being in the body. Everything in the system follows from that sentence. The body is a borrowed garment, the visible world a fading at the far edge of a light that pours endlessly from a source beyond names, and the work of a life is the turning of the soul back along that light toward the One from which it fell. From this one impulse the whole of Neoplatonism unfolds.

Life

Plotinus was born about 204 or 205 CE, almost certainly at Lycopolis in Roman Egypt, into a world where Alexandria was the intellectual capital of the Mediterranean and the schools of Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, and the Pythagoreans contended for the same students. Almost everything that survives of his life comes from a single source: the biography his disciple Porphyry of Tyre prefaced to the collected works, On the Life of Plotinus and the Order of His Books, composed around 301 CE — a memoir written by a devoted pupil more than thirty years after the master’s death, and read accordingly, as the portrait of a sage by one who venerated him.

By Porphyry’s account, the passion for philosophy seized Plotinus at twenty-seven. He went the round of the most reputed teachers of Alexandria and came away from every lecture discouraged, until a friend brought him to a man named Ammonius Saccas. Plotinus heard him once and said to his companion that this was the man he had been looking for. He stayed eleven entire years. Ammonius wrote nothing and left no school in the ordinary sense; his pupils — among them the pagan philosopher Origenes and another, Erennius — are said to have bound themselves not to publish his doctrines, a pact that frayed soon enough. What passed between teacher and pupil in those eleven years cannot be recovered, but the cast of Plotinus’s thought — the harmonizing of Plato and Aristotle, the contemplative inwardness, the silence about the highest things — bears the mark of that obscure and evidently commanding figure.

At thirty-eight, hungry to learn the wisdom cultivated among the Persians and the Indians, Plotinus attached himself to the eastern campaign that the young emperor Gordian III was leading against Persia in 243. The expedition collapsed when Gordian was killed in Mesopotamia, and Plotinus escaped only with difficulty to Antioch. The journey east failed; the curiosity behind it did not, and a reader of the Enneads meets a mind that has thought hard about whether the wisdom of other peoples might converge on the same summit. Around 244 he settled in Rome, where he taught for the rest of his life. For ten years he wrote nothing, conferring only, basing his teaching on what he had gathered under Ammonius. A circle gathered: Amelius, who took copious notes; senators such as Rogatianus, who renounced his property and praetorship to follow the philosophical life; the physician Eustochius, who attended the master at his death; Castricius Firmus; and, from the tenth year of the emperor Gallienus, Porphyry himself, who arrived from Greece at thirty and became the closest of his associates and the eventual editor of his work.

The emperor Gallienus and his wife Salonina honored Plotinus, and on the strength of that favor he proposed a singular project: that a ruined city in Campania be rebuilt as a community living under the laws of Plato’s Republic, to be called Platonopolis, with Plotinus and his circle settling there. The plan went far enough to seem possible before jealousy at court killed it. It was the nearest the ancient world came to founding a philosophers’ city on Platonic principles, and its failure left the school where it had always been — a teaching circle in a private house, training souls one at a time.

In his last years Plotinus fell gravely ill — Porphyry, relying on Eustochius, describes the failing voice, the dimming sight, the ulcers — and withdrew from Rome to an estate in Campania that had belonged to a dead friend. There, in 270 CE, he died, attended only by Eustochius. The last words Porphyry records are these: that he was striving to give back the divine in himself to the divine in the All. A serpent, the account adds, slipped beneath the bed and away into the wall at the moment of his death. He was about sixty-six; the birth year of 204–5 is reckoned backward from that figure, since Plotinus had never disclosed it.

The architecture: three hypostases

Plotinus reads the universe as a single ordered descent from absolute unity to the brink of nothing, and the whole of his metaphysics can be set out as three primary realities — the Greek word is hypostases, subsistent realities — ranked not in time but in dignity and dependence. Each lower level proceeds from the one above without diminishing it, and each finds its perfection only in turning back to contemplate its source.

At the summit stands the One, which Plotinus also calls the Good. It is not a being among beings, not even the greatest of beings, but the source of being itself, and therefore beyond being and beyond thought — for to be a determinate thing is already to be limited, and to think is already to be split into a thinker and a thing thought, whereas the One is utterly without division. Of it nothing can properly be said; even to call it “one” or “good” is to name it from its effects rather than to grasp it as it is. This is the wellspring of the whole later language of apophatic theology — the way of negation, in which the highest reality is approached only by stripping away every predicate. The One does not deliberate, does not lack, does not reach outward; it simply is what it is, and from its sheer superabundance everything else overflows. The treatise placed last in the whole collection, On the Good, or the One, is the work’s true summit.

From the One proceeds Nous — Intellect, or Intellectual-Principle — the first and highest emanation, the realm in which being and thought are one. Here are the Platonic Forms, not scattered or external to the mind that knows them but constituting that mind: Nous is the totality of the Forms thinking themselves, an eternal act of self-contemplation in which knower and known coincide. This is Plotinus’s decisive answer to a problem that had vexed Platonism since the Academy — where the Forms reside and how a mind relates to them — and it is the level at which true being, eternity, and intelligible beauty are found. Nous is the image of the One, turned back in contemplation toward its source, and from its own fullness a further reality flows.

That further reality is Soul — Psyche — the third hypostasis, which faces in two directions at once. Looking upward, Soul contemplates Nous and receives the Forms; looking downward, it gives order, life, and motion to the world of bodies. Plotinus distinguishes the higher Soul, which never wholly descends and remains in contemplation, from the lower soul or “nature” that animates and governs the physical cosmos, and he holds that the world-soul and the individual souls are continuous with one another, each soul retaining an undescended part anchored in the intelligible. Soul is the bridge between the eternal and the temporal, the hinge on which the whole drama of descent and return turns.

Procession and return

Two motions hold the system together, and Plotinus names them with the vocabulary that would govern metaphysics for a thousand years. The first is procession — proodos, often rendered emanation: the outflow of each level from the one above it. His favored images are of overflow and radiance. The One is like a spring that feeds every river without being drained, or like the sun that sheds light without losing substance; what proceeds does so by no decision and no diminution, an automatic abundance in which the higher remains entire while giving rise to the lower. This is the engine of the whole hierarchy. Being unfolds downward from the One through Nous and Soul to the sensible cosmos, each grade a fainter image of the one above, the whole a single continuous radiation thinning toward its limit.

The countermotion is reversion — epistrophe, the turning-back. Everything that proceeds from the One yearns toward it, and contemplation of one’s source is the act by which each level both constitutes itself and is perfected. Nous is Nous by turning back to the One; Soul is Soul by turning back to Nous. In rational souls this same return becomes a conscious task. The whole moral and contemplative life is the soul’s effort to reverse the outward drift, to gather itself inward and upward, to climb back along the chain of being toward the source. Procession and reversion are not two cosmologies but one — the great systole and diastole of reality, the breathing-out and breathing-in of all things.

At the far end of the procession lies matter, the lowest limit, where the outflowing light fails altogether. Plotinus treats matter not as an independent evil power but as sheer privation — the utter absence of form, indeterminate and without quality, the darkness that remains when the radiance has thinned to nothing. And because evil for him is precisely the lack of good, the falling-short of being and order, he identifies this last privation with evil itself. Evil is not a thing the One made; it is what is left where the One’s gift gives out. The soul’s danger is not matter as a force but the soul’s own forgetting — its absorption in the lower, its turning of attention away from the source and toward the shadow at the bottom of the world.

The ascent and the union

The descent of the soul into a body is, in one of Plotinus’s recurring tensions, both a fall and a necessity: the soul errs in becoming wholly absorbed in the particular and the bodily, yet its presence is also part of the cosmos’s completeness, since the world must be filled to its lowest rung. The remedy is not the abolition of the body but the redirection of attention. Through purification — the loosening of the soul’s fixation on bodily goods — and through philosophical contemplation, the soul gathers itself, ascends through the levels it has descended, and recovers its native standing in the intelligible world. The architecture of this ascent is inward rather than ritual: it is a turning of the soul’s gaze, a withdrawal into the self that is at the same time an ascent toward Nous and, beyond Nous, toward the One. This inwardness is what most sharply distinguishes Plotinus from the later Neoplatonists who would make ritual the engine of ascent.

The summit of the ascent is henosis — union — and it lies beyond contemplation itself. In contemplation the soul still stands over against what it knows; in union that last duality collapses, and the soul, no longer a knower confronting an object, is simply present to the One in an act Plotinus can describe only by what it is not: not vision, for there are no longer two; not thought, for thought divides; a presence “beyond knowing.” It is rare, fleeting, and properly ineffable, and Plotinus does not present it as a technique to be mastered so much as a grace that visits the soul that has made itself fit. Porphyry, who lived in the circle for years, reports that during that time Plotinus reached this union four times — and adds, with evident awe, that he himself attained it once, in his sixty-eighth year. The figure is Porphyry’s testimony, the claim of a reverent disciple about his master, and it stands as the hagiographer’s witness to what the philosophy was finally for: not a doctrine to be held but a height to be reached.

The Enneads

Plotinus wrote nothing for the first decade of his teaching. When he did begin, in the first year of Gallienus, he wrote as questions arose at the conferences, in a difficult, compressed, self-interrupting Greek — the prose of a man thinking aloud rather than composing for publication, often careless of spelling and never revising, since his failing eyesight made rereading impossible. He left fifty-four treatises in no settled order. The shaping was Porphyry’s. Entrusted with the master’s writings, Porphyry arranged the fifty-four into six sets of nine — ennea is the Greek for nine, and the collection has been the Enneads ever since. He grouped them thematically and let the difficulty rise: the First Ennead on ethics and the human condition; the Second and Third on the physical cosmos, providence, fate, and time; the Fourth on the Soul; the Fifth on Nous and the intelligible world; the Sixth climbing through being, number, and the categories to the treatise On the Good, or the One. The arrangement is a pedagogy as much as an edition — a ladder from the conditions of embodied life up to the source — and the numerical neatness of six nines pleased Porphyry, who tells the reader so plainly.

That editorial act is why Plotinus survives at all in coherent form, and why his thought reaches us already framed as an ascent. It also means the Enneads are not a treatise but an anthology of occasions, doubling back, restating, contradicting in emphasis — a body of work whose unity is real but must be assembled by the reader, exactly as Porphyry assembled the order of the books.

Reception and the long afterward

The line that runs forward from the school in Rome is among the longest in the history of thought. Porphyry carried the teaching westward and made it lucid; Iamblichus of Syria broke with the master’s contemplative inwardness by setting ritual — theurgy, the “work of the gods” — at the center of the soul’s ascent, holding that human reason alone could not reach the divine and that the gods must be invoked through sacred theurgy; and Proclus at Athens gave the whole edifice its most rigorous systematic form in the geometric propositions of the Elements of Theology. This later, ritual-laden Neoplatonism is a genuine departure from Plotinus, for whom the ascent was an affair of contemplation and inward turning, not of invocation — a distinction that runs through every later quarrel about what the soul must do to return.

The current did not stay pagan. Augustine of Hippo read the Platonists — Plotinus through Porphyry, in Latin translation — at the hinge of his conversion, and carried the Plotinian language of the One, of the soul’s inward ascent, and of evil as privation into the heart of Christian theology. The same architecture, transmitted and transformed, structures Christian Neoplatonism, the Jewish Neoplatonic tradition, and the Islamic philosophers, where a famous paraphrase of the Enneads circulated under the title the Theology of Aristotle and shaped the metaphysics of emanation in al-Farabi and Avicenna. A thousand years after his death, when the Greek text reached Florence, Marsilio Ficino translated the whole of the Enneads into Latin with an immense commentary, printed in 1492 — the first printed Plotinus and, for centuries, the West’s principal door into him — and through Ficino the Plotinian One and the soul’s ascent passed into the Renaissance revival of Neoplatonism and its long entanglement with the Hermetic and magical traditions.

Texts and scholarship

The Greek text rests on the work of Paul Henry and Hans-Rudolf Schwyzer, whose Plotini Opera (the editio maior, 1951–1973, and the Oxford editio minor, 1964–1982) is the modern critical standard. The earliest English renderings are those of Thomas Taylor, who translated about half the treatises across several volumes including Select Works of Plotinus (1817; with related material 1823) — Romantic-era, interpretive, and historically pivotal for transmitting Plotinus to the English-speaking world. The classic and still most widely read complete English version is Stephen MacKenna’s Plotinus: The Enneads, issued in five volumes by the Medici Society between 1917 and 1930 (the fifth with B. S. Page), prized for a literary eloquence its translator frankly preferred over the literal; it is hosted here, together with Porphyry’s Life, which MacKenna placed at its head. The Loeb edition of A. H. Armstrong (seven volumes, 1966–1988) is the standard modern scholarly translation.

For the philosophy itself, the entry on Plotinus in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, by Lloyd P. Gerson, is the authoritative scholarly overview (plato.stanford.edu/entries/plotinus); the corresponding article in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, by Edward Moore, is a fuller narrative treatment of the life and system (iep.utm.edu/plotinus). Porphyry’s Life of Plotinus — the source of nearly every biographical detail above — is available in MacKenna’s translation in the hosted library and in facsimile of an early printing through the World Digital Library (the World Digital Library scan of the Enneads).

What Plotinus built was not a creed but a map of the way home: a single light descending through Intellect and Soul to the edge of matter, and a single road back, traveled inward, by which the soul that has forgotten its origin remembers it, gathers itself, and is given back — as the dying man told it — to the divine in the All.

→ In the library: Plotinus: The Enneads (MacKenna, 1917–1930) · Porphyry: On the Life of Plotinus (MacKenna) · Plotinos: Complete Works (Guthrie, 1918)

→ Related: Neoplatonism · The One · Nous · Emanation · Porphyry · Ammonius Saccas · Plato · Proclus · Iamblichus · Augustine Of Hippo · Marsilio Ficino · Apophatic Theology