If one ancient philosopher shaped the language of Western mysticism, it was Plotinus. His pages on the One, on the soul's descent and its return to the source influenced pagan, Christian, Jewish and Muslim thinkers, and came back to the centre of European culture during the Renaissance. Understanding Plotinus gives you a key to reading much of later esotericism.
A life told by a disciple
Almost everything we know about Plotinus comes from the Life of Plotinus written by his pupil Porphyry. Plotinus was born in Egypt around AD 205. At about twenty-eight he took up philosophy in Alexandria and, after hearing several teachers without finding one who satisfied him, met Ammonius Saccas, with whom he stayed for about eleven years.
Eager to learn the wisdom of the Persians and Indians, he joined Emperor Gordian III's expedition against Persia. The campaign ended badly, Gordian died and Plotinus barely escaped. In 244 he settled in Rome, where he ran his school for a quarter of a century. He died in 270 in Campania, on a friend's estate.
Porphyry records striking human details: Plotinus seemed almost ashamed of having a body, refused to have his portrait made and would never tell the date of his birth. Yet he was attentive to others, so much so that several families entrusted him with the guardianship of their children.
The Enneads
Plotinus started writing late and cared little about style. It was Porphyry, after his death, who arranged the fifty-four treatises into six groups of nine, hence the name Enneads, "nines". The arrangement follows an ascending path: from ethical themes and the sensible world up to the soul, the Intellect and finally the One.
This organisation is not Plotinus's own, but it has conditioned how the work has been read for centuries. Opening the Enneads, you find short and long treatises, answers to questions raised in lectures, polemics with other schools, including pages critical of the Gnostics.
The three hypostases
The heart of Plotinus's thought is a vision of reality as a hierarchy of levels, the hypostases:
- the One, an absolutely simple principle, beyond being and thought, from which everything derives and of which nothing can properly be said;
- the Intellect (Nous), where being and thinking coincide and where the Forms, the models of all things, reside;
- the Soul, which contemplates the Intellect and gives life and shape to the sensible world.
The passage from one level to the next is often described in images: light radiating from the sun, heat spreading from fire, a spring feeding rivers without running dry. The One loses nothing in producing. Modern interpreters speak of "emanation", but Plotinus prefers to stress that the principle remains in itself while what derives from it proceeds outward.
Descent and return
The individual soul belongs to this structure. One part of it always remains united with the intelligible world, while another has bound itself to the body. Evil is not an independent force, but a lack, a turning away from the principle.
Hence the task of philosophy: the return. Plotinus describes it as a work of purification and recollection. In a famous passage he invites anyone seeking inner beauty to act like a sculptor, who cuts away, scrapes and polishes until the statue appears. The soul must remove what is superfluous to rediscover its own nature.
The culmination is union with the One, an experience that cannot be explained but only lived. Porphyry writes that, while he was with him, Plotinus attained this union four times. The last sentence of the Enneads, in Porphyry's arrangement, describes this journey as "the flight of the alone to the alone".
A plan for a philosophical city
One little-known episode deserves mention. Plotinus enjoyed the esteem of Emperor Gallienus and his wife Salonina, and asked them to rebuild a ruined city in Campania, to be called Platonopolis, where people would live by Plato's laws. The project was never carried out, blocked by some members of the court.
The legacy
After Plotinus, Neoplatonism developed through Porphyry, Iamblichus and Proclus, taking on more religious and ritual forms. Through Augustine and Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite his ideas entered Christian theology; through Arabic texts such as the so-called Theology of Aristotle, which actually reworks parts of the Enneads, they influenced Islamic philosophy.
In the Renaissance Marsilio Ficino translated the whole of Plotinus into Latin; the translation was printed in Florence in 1492. Since then the idea of a soul that descends and rises again, and of a living cosmos fed by a single source, has become part of the common heritage of European esotericism.
In short
- Plotinus lived in the third century, studied in Alexandria with Ammonius Saccas and taught in Rome from 244 to about 270.
- Porphyry arranged his 54 treatises into the six Enneads.
- Reality derives from the One through the Intellect and the Soul, and the human soul is called to return to its origin.
- Through Christian theology, Arabic philosophy and Ficino's 1492 translation, Plotinus shaped Western mysticism.