Plotinus

Plotinus was born in 205 CE in Lycopolis, a town in Upper Egypt that was then part of the Roman Empire ^[1]. Almost everything known about his life comes from a single document: the biographical preface that his student Porphyry attached to his edition of Plotinus's writings around 301 CE ^[2]. Porphyry records that his teacher refused to speak about his ancestry, his parents, or his birthplace, and would not sit for a portrait, saying that the body was already an image and there was no reason to make an image of an image ^[2].

Because of that reticence, basic Plotinus facts about his childhood are scarce. His name is Roman, his schooling was Greek, and his birthplace was Egyptian, so scholars have long debated his cultural background without reaching a firm conclusion ^[3]. What Porphyry does report is a late start: Plotinus turned seriously to philosophy at the age of twenty seven, in Alexandria, the great intellectual center of Roman Egypt ^[1].

His first months in Alexandria were discouraging. He attended the lectures of the city's established teachers and left each one dissatisfied, until a friend brought him to hear Ammonius Saccas, a philosopher who wrote nothing and about whom little is known. Plotinus reportedly declared, this is the man I was looking for, and he stayed with Ammonius for the next eleven years ^[2].

At about the age of thirty nine, Plotinus decided he wanted direct knowledge of Persian and Indian philosophy. In 243 CE he attached himself to the military expedition that the emperor Gordian III was leading against the Sasanian Persian Empire, apparently hoping the campaign would carry him east ^[1]. The plan collapsed when Gordian was killed in Mesopotamia in 244. Plotinus escaped with difficulty to Antioch, and from there he made his way to Rome ^[2].

He was about forty when he settled in the capital, and he remained there for the rest of his working life. For his first ten years in Rome he taught only orally, honoring an agreement with two fellow students of Ammonius, Erennius and Origen, not to publish their teacher's doctrines; he began writing only around 253, after the others had already broken the pact ^[2].

His seminars drew an unusually broad audience: physicians, senators, poets, and women as well as men. Porphyry names the senator Rogatianus, who gave up his property and public career after joining the circle, and notes that many aristocrats entrusted their children to Plotinus as guardian before they died, confident that he would manage the estates honestly ^[2]. The philosopher who wanted to escape the material world proved, by all accounts, a careful and patient administrator of other people's affairs ^[4].

The core of Plotinus's achievements is a body of fifty four treatises written between roughly 253 and 270. He composed them quickly, in a difficult Greek shorthand of thought, and because of weak eyesight he never revised or even reread what he had written ^[2]. After his death Porphyry arranged the treatises into six groups of nine, which is why the collection is called the Enneads, from the Greek word for a set of nine ^[5].

The system laid out in these treatises begins from a single first principle that Plotinus calls the One or the Good. The One is beyond being, beyond thought, and beyond description; everything else exists because it overflows from this source without the source being diminished ^[3]. From the One proceeds Intellect (nous), the level of reality containing the Platonic Forms, and from Intellect proceeds Soul, which generates and animates the sensible world. This threefold structure of One, Intellect, and Soul became the signature doctrine of what modern scholars call Neoplatonism ^[5].

Plotinus saw himself not as an innovator but as a faithful interpreter of Plato, and he defended Plato against rivals with real energy. One long treatise attacks the Gnostics for despising the visible cosmos, which Plotinus considered a beautiful image of the intelligible world ^[6]. He also broke new ground on questions Plato had left open, arguing for example that matter itself is the principle of evil, understood as pure privation rather than an active force ^[3]. His analyses of consciousness, memory, and the self are still mined by philosophers today, and historians of philosophy rank him with Plato and Aristotle among the most influential thinkers antiquity produced ^[1].

Any Plotinus biography has to reckon with a man who treated his own body as a temporary inconvenience. Porphyry opens his memoir by saying that Plotinus seemed ashamed of being in a body at all ^[2]. He ate sparingly, often skipping even bread, refused medicines containing animal flesh, and declined the baths, preferring daily massages instead. He never married.

His household in Rome was nevertheless full. He lived in the house of Gemina, a widow of high standing, surrounded by the orphaned children whose guardianship he had accepted, and he checked their accounts and their lessons with the remark that until the young people took up philosophy, their property and incomes had to be kept safe ^[2]. Porphyry also records that Plotinus talked his student out of suicide during a period of depression, sending him away to Sicily to recover, an intervention Porphyry credited with saving his life ^[2].

The philosopher's inner life had a mystical dimension that set him apart from most academic Platonists. Porphyry reports that during the years they worked together, Plotinus attained union with the One four times, an experience of the self merging with its ultimate source that the Enneads describe in careful, almost clinical language ^[2]. Modern interpreters debate what these episodes involved, but the texts make clear that for Plotinus philosophy was a practice aimed at transformation, not just a set of arguments ^[7].

Plotinus stood close to power in his final decade. The emperor Gallienus and his wife Salonina admired him, and Plotinus asked them to rebuild a ruined town in Campania as a city of philosophers, to be called Platonopolis and governed by Plato's Laws. Court opposition killed the project, and the philosophers' city was never built ^[2].

His health failed in the late 260s. Porphyry describes a grim illness, probably beginning around 268, that included hoarseness, failing sight, and ulcerated hands and feet; some modern physicians reading the account have suggested leprosy or a form of tuberculosis, though no diagnosis can be certain at this distance ^[4]. As the disease advanced his friends began avoiding his company, and Plotinus withdrew from Rome to the country estate of his deceased friend Zethus in Campania.

He died there in 270 CE, in the territory of Minturno, at the age of sixty six ^[1]. Only the physician Eustochius reached him in time. Porphyry, who was in Sicily, preserved the words Eustochius reported as the philosopher's last: an exhortation to try to bring back the divine in ourselves to the divine in the universe ^[2].

The influence of Plotinus runs through the entire later history of Western and Near Eastern thought. His immediate successors, Porphyry, Iamblichus, and eventually Proclus, built Neoplatonism into the dominant philosophy of the late Roman world, and it remained the framework within which pagan intellectuals resisted, and Christian intellectuals absorbed, Greek metaphysics ^[5].

Augustine of Hippo read Plotinus in Latin translation and credited the books of the Platonists with clearing his path to Christianity; through Augustine and through the writings attributed to Dionysius the Areopagite, Plotinian ideas about a transcendent, ineffable God entered mainstream Christian theology ^[6]. In the Islamic world a paraphrase of parts of the Enneads circulated under the misleading title Theology of Aristotle, shaping thinkers such as al-Farabi and Avicenna, while Jewish philosophers from Ibn Gabirol onward drew on the same well ^[3].

The Renaissance rediscovered him directly when Marsilio Ficino published the first complete Latin translation of the Enneads in Florence in 1492 ^[5]. Later admirers ranged from the Cambridge Platonists to Goethe, Coleridge, and W. B. Yeats, who kept Stephen MacKenna's English translation close at hand. Among twentieth century scholars, A. H. Armstrong's seven volume Greek and English edition for the Loeb Classical Library (1966 to 1988) made the complete works accessible to modern readers ^[7]. Seventeen centuries after his death, the question who was Plotinus still opens onto one of philosophy's most ambitious answers to what reality is and where the self belongs within it ^[1].