Plotinus: Biography Of This Hellenistic Philosopher
Plotinus was a Greek philosopher, author of the Enneads and founder of Neoplatonism, a current that had great influence not only in his time but also in medieval Europe, Islam and Judaism.
Born in Egypt and educated in Alexandria, he was a student of Saccas, a thinker who tried to combine the thought of Aristotle with that of Plato. It is thanks to this thinker that Plotinus knew very well how to combine the best of both classical philosophers.
As a recognized Neoplatonist, Plotinus is seen as the one who knew how to make original comments on Plato’s works and would end up developing his philosophy around him, incorporating certain Christian elements. Here We will learn about his life and work through a biography of Plotinus in which you will find the most relevant information about his career.
It is not known with certainty where Plotinus was born. The Greek sophist Eunapius of Sardis maintains that he was born in Lycon, while the lexicographer Suidas says that it was in Lycopolis (current Asyut). What is known is that he was a native of the province of Egypt under Roman domination, born in 203 or 204 AD. C. Little is known about his childhood, as is often the case with many great classical Greek thinkers. It is known that, as an adult, in 232 he entered the circle of the philosopher Ammonius Saccas in Alexandria. This great character was also a mentor to Origen, Longinus and Erenius.
In 242 Plotinus embarked on a war expedition commanded by Emperor Gordian III to Persia The purpose of this was to have a greater knowledge of the philosophical thought of the Middle East but, unfortunately, the expedition was a failure, the emperor ended up being assassinated and Plotinus was forced to take refuge in Antioch.
A short time later he managed to reach the capital of the empire, opening a school in Rome around the year 246. There he soon enjoyed the favor of the Roman nobility, including the Emperor Gallienus himself and his wife Cornelia Salonina.
Plotinus tried to live as ascetic a lifestyle as possible and, for this reason, he did not have great wealth or many luxuries. Despite this, she was a very generous and selfless personality, as well as charitable. It is said that he used to take in orphaned children in his home and act as their tutor. He was a vegetarian, did not marry and never allowed himself to be portrayed, for fear that this representation was simply “a shadow of another shadow.”
But despite not wanting to be represented or write an autobiography or anything like that His disciple Porphyry could not help but capture his experiences in “Life of Plotinus” It would be this student who would be in charge of systematizing and publishing Plotinus’ main work, his “Enneads.” During the six years that he was at Plotinus’ side, Porphyry claimed that he saw his teacher have contacts with an omnitranscendent God a total of four times.
It is from 254 onwards that Plotinus begins to write down his works In total, he wrote 54 treatises, organizing them into six books of nine chapters, which make up his main work, the “Enneads.” This book is considered one of the most important treatises of Classical Antiquity, alongside those of Plato and Aristotle. Plotinus would die around 270 AD as a result of complications from painful leprosy, at the age of 66 in the Italian region of Campania.
Philosophical doctrine
Plotinus’ main work is the “Enneads”, a compilation of treatises that he began writing from the year 253 until a few months before his death. As we have mentioned, the task of compiling the treatises and organizing them into books was done by his disciple Porfirio, grouping them into six groups of nine, giving a total of 54 treatises. These Enneads collect the lessons that Plotinus taught in his school in Rome.
Plotinus developed a theological structure in which saw the universe as the result of a series of emanations or consequences of an ultimate reality , which is eternal and immaterial. I would call this reality “the One.” From this same another divine principle arises, below the One: the Nous.
In turn, the Soul emanates from the Nous, another divine entity that is below the previous two. Plotinus He agreed with Plato that the body is a prison for the soul and that it tries to return to its creative origin to the One.
Below we will look in more depth at these realities of Plotinus’ doctrine, realities that his disciple Porphyry would call hypostasis. This term does not appear as such in the texts of the Enneads, written in the handwriting of Plotinus, but is a term introduced by Porphyry to better organize the entire theoretical corpus of his teacher.
The One
The idea of “the One” in Plotinus’ theory is somewhat difficult to describe. It has been understood as a concept that refers to unity, to the greatest and even an idea close to that of God as a unique and infinite entity Coupled with his personality and his properly mystical figure, Plotinus, far from specifying what he means by One exactly, prefers to keep it with a certain air of mystery.
The One is the beginning and, at the same time, the end. It is the unity that founds the existence of all things. The One is beyond Being and, because of this, it is not possible to define it specifically since it cannot be known firsthand to begin with.
Plotinus’ conceptualization of “the One” is religious, and he himself promoted a kind of monotheism around this idea. However, it differs from Christianity since the One would rather be a kind of personal God, an entity very far removed from God as an omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent entity.
For a start, Plotinus considers that “the One” cannot be defined, no attribute can be predicated on it Trying to define it implies making a vulgar imitation of this entity, imperfect and limited, something very far from what it really is.
The One is an entity that creates, but it does not do so by its own will, but by emanation. The One, insofar as it is like God, is the cause of everything else and, in creating, loses not a drop of its own substance. The creations that arise from his emanation are structured hierarchically, in successive degrees of imperfection: Nous, soul and matter. Matter is the antithesis of the idea of the One.
But despite being its antithesis, matter reflects “the One”, since the latter continues to be its source, and tries to return to it. The human being also feels the need to return to the One, but according to Plotinus he must avoid the self-deception into which he has fallen by surrendering to the plurality of objects and actions and he must seek the truth in himself and deny all object and mediation.
The Nous
Nous is the second level of reality or hypostasis. This idea is difficult to translate, although there are those who refer to it as “spirit” and others as “intelligence.” Plotinus explains “nous” starting from the similarity between the Sun and Light. The One would be the equivalent of the Sun, while the Nous would be the equivalent for the Light.
The function of the nous as light is that the One can see itself, but since the nous is the image of the One, it is the door through which we can contemplate the One. Plotinus states that “nous” can be observed simply by having our minds concentrate looking in the opposite direction to that of our senses To understand it better, the nous is that intelligence that would allow us to get closer to Plotinus’ particular idea of God, in this case the One.
The soul
The third reality exposed in Plotinus’ proposal is the soul, which is of double nature At one extreme, this is linked to the nous, that is, pure intelligence, which pulls it. At the other extreme, however, the soul is associated with the world of the senses, of which it is the creator and also the shaper.
Movement of the cosmos
As we mentioned, according to Plotinus’ vision of reality or hypostasis, we have three levels: the One, the Nous and the soul. These are hierarchical, turning the cosmos into an ordered structure. In fact, Plotinus considers that the cosmos is a living, eternal, organic, perfect and beautiful reality and that, as long as it has life, it must have movement by necessity.
The movement that can be found in the cosmos is done through two phases. One would be that of development, which comes from unity and makes the multiplicity of things appear through the emanation of the One. The other phase is withdrawal, which is the moment in which the multiple created things, from lower levels Since they are matter, they try to return to unity, to the One.
According to Plotinus, knowledge can only be authentic if it is linked to mystical contemplation of the One The problem here is that human beings, while we are not the One, cannot understand it. The One is an idea so perfect and complete that our soul and material bodies cannot house a faithful representation of it since any representation of it is still an imperfect imitation.
This is where we enter into a contradiction: How can we have pure knowledge, represented in the idea of the One, if we cannot even understand that concept? For Plotinus, the only way to overcome this apparent contradiction is not to lose the knowledge that, really, the One is unknowable. Understanding that it is not possible to know this idea but it is possible to get closer to it is the true acquisition of knowledge.
idea of happiness
The idea of happiness is one of the most interesting aspects of Plotinus’ philosophy and it is considered that this is the vision that has inspired our Western concept of happiness. He was among the first to introduce the idea that “eudaimonia” (happiness) can only be achieved within consciousness.
According to him, An individual has a happy life when reason and contemplation rule his life unlike what the rest of the philosophers of his time thought, who believed that happiness was rather the absence of sadness or a state of mind between normal joy and sadness.
Later influence of his thinking
Plotinus may not have become one of the figures of Greek philosophy as renowned as Socrates, Aristotle or Plato, however His Enneads greatly influenced the thinking of all the cultures settled around the Mediterranean , reaching up to the present day. Already in his time he influenced figures such as the Roman emperor Julian, the Apostate, who was deeply marked by Neoplatonism, and Plotinus also inspired Hypatia of Alexandria.
It also influenced later Christian thought , being able to notice Neoplatonic overtones coming from Plotinus in the philosophy of Dionysius Areopagina and Augustine of Hippo. In the Muslim world it did not go unnoticed either, being especially studied in Egypt under the Fatimid regime in the 11th century, with many da’i being the ones who adopted Neoplatonism. Regarding Judaism we find Avicebron and the famous Maimonides who could not help but consult the doctrine of Plotinus, very intrigued by his way of seeing God with the idea of the One.
