# Plotinus

Plotinus (c. 204 – 270 CE) was born in Egypt, studied philosophy in Alexandria
under Ammonius Saccas, joined a military expedition to Persia in the hope of
learning the wisdom of the East, and after its collapse settled in Rome. There
he taught for twenty-five years, attracting senators and the emperor Gallienus
himself. He began writing only at fifty. His pupil Porphyry arranged the
treatises into six groups of nine, the *Enneads*, and wrote the life that
prefaces them.

## The three hypostases

Plotinus read Plato as a system, and the system has three levels of reality,
each flowing from the one above without the higher being diminished.

1. **The One.** Beyond being, beyond thought, beyond every predicate. It cannot
   be described, only pointed toward. It is the source of everything and the
   goal of everything.
2. **Intellect** (*Nous*). The One's first overflow: a mind that thinks the
   Forms, and in which thinker and thought are the same. Here Plato's Ideas
   live, and here eternity is.
3. **Soul.** Intellect's overflow: the principle of life and movement, which
   turns outward to produce and order the sensible world, and which in each of
   us is our own soul, never wholly descended.

Matter lies at the bottom, the last and dimmest trace of the One's light, and
is the source of what evil there is, not as a rival power but as an absence.

## Emanation and return

The lower comes from the higher as light from the sun or heat from fire,
without will and without loss. But the movement is not only downward. Each
level turns back to contemplate its source, and that turning is what makes it
what it is. For a human soul the return is the whole of ethics: to withdraw
from the body's distractions, to think, and at last to be united with the One.
Porphyry says Plotinus reached that union four times while he knew him.

> Never did eye see the sun unless it had first become sunlike, and never can
> the soul have vision of the First Beauty unless itself be beautiful.

## Afterlife

Augustine read him in Latin and built Christian theology on the frame.
Islamic philosophers read a paraphrase under the title *The Theology of
Aristotle* and did the same. The Renaissance Platonists, the Cambridge
Platonists and the Romantics each rediscovered him in turn. He is the last
great original philosopher of antiquity, and the one through whom Plato reached
the Middle Ages.

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*Stoa Press · Philosophy Essays · Markdown edition*