Plotinus
Neoplatonist
Reality overflows from a single source, the One, and the soul's task is the long climb back.
Plotinus took Plato and made him vertical. From the One, beyond being and beyond words, flows the Intellect; from Intellect flows Soul; from Soul, the visible world, each level a fainter echo of the source. We are amphibians, partly sunk in matter and partly able to turn inward and ascend. His student Porphyry, who edited his disorganized notes into the Enneads, says Plotinus reached union with the One four times in the years they knew each other. Neoplatonism became the philosophical air that Augustine, the Sufis, and the medieval mystics all breathed.
Places
Ideas
Words
“Withdraw into yourself and look. And if you do not yet find yourself beautiful, do as the sculptor does: cut away all that is excessive.”
Works
Life & Moments
Born in Egypt
Born in Lycopolis in Roman Egypt, by the account of his student Porphyry.
The School at Rome
Opened a school in Rome where senators and seekers studied the ascent of the soul from the visible world toward the One.
Influence
Influenced by
- Plato
Plotinus made Plato vertical, reading the Forms as stages in an emanation descending from the One.
Influenced
- Augustine
Augustine read the Neoplatonists before his conversion, and their vision of an immaterial reality shaped his Christianity.
- Porphyry
Porphyry was Plotinus's devoted student and arranged his scattered writings into the six Enneads.
- Proclus
Proclus built the emanationist vision of Plotinus into a vast, rigorously deduced system.
