Neoplatonism

• 1. Introduction

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  Neoplatonism asks one of the boldest questions in the history of human thought: what if all of reality, every particle and every idea, flows from a single source so simple it cannot even be said to exist? That source the Neoplatonists called "the One". They built an entire philosophy around it, beginning in the 3rd century AD, and it would go on to shape the minds of Christian mystics, Islamic philosophers, Jewish Kabbalists, and Renaissance scholars alike. The thinker at the center of that founding moment was Plotinus, born around AD 205, a man whose writings inspired pagans and saints in equal measure. His student Porphyry, his successors in Syria and Alexandria, and a cast of remarkable figures stretching to the 6th century would carry the tradition forward, debating, elaborating, and sometimes radically altering it. What exactly did they believe? Why did their ideas survive so far beyond the ancient world? And what happens to a philosophy when it passes through so many hands across so many centuries?

• 2. The Name and Its Complications

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  Neoplatonism is a modern label, not one the ancient thinkers ever applied to themselves. Scholars had clearly begun separating the philosophy of the historical Plato from that of his Neoplatonic interpreters at least as early as the first decade of the nineteenth century. The German theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher is often identified as an early figure in that effort, though others argue the split was the result of a slower historical process that preceded his work. The label carries a built-in assumption: that Plotinus' reading of Plato was so distinct from earlier interpreters that it launched a genuinely new period. Some contemporary scholars push back on that, pointing out that only marginal differences may separate Plotinus' teachings from those of his immediate predecessors. Between Plato's time and Plotinus', nearly six centuries had passed, and there had been an unbroken tradition of Platonic interpretation running from Aristotle through the immediate successors of Plato's Academy and on through what is now called Middle Platonism. The Renaissance Neoplatonist Marsilio Ficino, for one, thought the Neoplatonic reading was simply an authentic representation of Plato's own philosophy, with no gap between the two. Whether the label is meaningful or merely convenient, it points to a real question: where does interpretation end and invention begin?

• 3. The Founders

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  Ammonius Saccas, who died around AD 240-245, was the teacher through whom the tradition began. His own thought left no surviving writings, but his influence radiated outward in multiple directions. Both Christian writers, among them Eusebius, Jerome, and Origen, and pagan ones, including Porphyry and Plotinus, claimed him as a teacher and as an adherent of their own faith. Eusebius and Jerome wrote that Ammonius remained a Christian until his death; Porphyry countered that he had renounced Christianity for pagan philosophy. Through Ammonius, Plotinus may also have absorbed something of Indian thought: the similarities between Neoplatonism and Indian philosophical traditions, particularly Samkhya, led several scholars to suggest an Indian influence in the tradition's founding. Porphyry recorded that Ammonius believed Plato and Aristotle were ultimately in harmony. Plotinus himself, living roughly from 205 to 270, drew on teachings from classical Greek, Persian, and Indian philosophy and Egyptian theology. His biographical details come mainly from Porphyry's preface to the Enneads, the collected writings Plotinus left behind. He is widely considered the father of the tradition, and his central teaching was a vision of reality as a cascade flowing from a single, utterly simple, and completely transcendent source.

• 4. The Architecture of Reality

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  At the peak of Plotinus' system sits the One, a principle so simple it cannot be divided, multiplied, or even properly named. Although the most adequate names are "the One" or "the Good", the One is so elementary that it cannot be said to exist in any ordinary sense. Plotinus grounded this idea in Book VI of Plato's Republic, where Plato writes that the Good is "beyond being" in power and dignity. From the One there flows, in a process called emanation, the Nous, meaning the divine intellect or mind, which is the first principle after the One. The Nous contains all knowledge in a unified form and is simultaneously the knower, the known, and the act of knowing. The Platonic realm of the Forms lives within it. From the Nous in turn flows the Soul, which takes the information of the Nous and actualizes it, producing the sensible world of time and space. That sensible world is an imperfect copy of the higher realms, and time itself belongs only to it: neither the One, nor the Nous, nor the Soul exist within time. The world-soul, according to Plotinus, occupies a middle position: it can remain unified within the Nous, but it also touches the material world and may become fragmented through that contact. As for evil, Plotinus was no dualist in the manner of certain Gnostic sects. Evil is not an independent force but simply the absence of good, as darkness is nothing but the absence of light.

• 5. After Plotinus

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  Porphyry, born around 233, wrote widely on astrology, religion, philosophy, and musical theory, and produced the biography of Plotinus that remains the primary source for the founder's life. He is also significant in the history of mathematics through his commentary on Euclid's Elements, which Pappus used when writing his own commentary. His Adversus Christianos, a work Against the Christians running to 15 books, survives only in fragments; it was accompanied by the famous statement that "the gods have proclaimed Christ to have been most pious, but the Christians are a confused and vicious sect." Porphyry held that human souls could be reincarnated only into other humans, a position more conservative than Plotinus', who allowed for reincarnation into animals. Iamblichus, born around 245, took the tradition in a different direction. His system expanded the celestial hierarchy to include hundreds of intermediate beings: gods, angels, demons, and other entities mediating between the One and humanity. His final goal was salvation, which he called henosis, and he taught that the embodied soul could return to divinity through specific ritual performances known as theurgy, literally meaning divine-working. His best-known works include The Life of Pythagoras and De Mysteriis. Proclus Lycaeus, born on the 8th of February 412 and died on the 17th of April 485, built perhaps the most elaborate Neoplatonic system of all. He inserted a level of individual units, called henads, between the One and the divine Intellect. Each henad was identified with a traditional Greek deity: one might be Apollo, serving as the cause of all things Apollonian, another Helios, governing all sunny things. In the Middle Ages, many of Plotinus' insights would circulate attributed to Proclus rather than to their original author.

• 6. A Woman at the Center

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  Hypatia, born around 360 and killed in 415, was a Greek philosopher and mathematician who served as head of the Platonist school in Alexandria, Egypt, where she taught philosophy, mathematics, and astronomy. Her death came at the hands of a fanatical mob of Coptic Parabalani monks, and the circumstances behind it were entangled in a political feud: she had been advising the prefect of Egypt, Orestes, during his conflict with Cyril, Alexandria's dynastic archbishop. The extent of Cyril's personal involvement in her murder remains a matter of scholarly debate. Her story sits at the intersection of the two forces that shaped late Neoplatonism: the institutional power of the Christian Church and the persistence of pagan philosophical culture in the great cities of the eastern Mediterranean.

• 7. Survival and Transmission

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  A revived Platonic academy was established in Athens around 410, having no connection with the original institution destroyed in the first century BC. It lasted until 529, when Justinian I closed it because of the active paganism of its professors. Other schools continued in Constantinople, Antioch, Alexandria, and Gaza. In the early seventh century, the Neoplatonist Stephanus of Alexandria brought the Alexandrian tradition to Constantinople, where it became part of secular education and persisted as part of an active philosophical tradition running for close to two millennia until the fifteenth century. At the Council of Florence, held between 1438 and 1439, Gemistos Plethon, who lived from around 1355 to 1452, met Cosimo de' Medici and influenced him to found a new Platonic Academy in Florence. Cosimo then appointed Marsilio Ficino as its head. Between 1462 and 1469, after Cosimo provided him with all 36 of Plato's dialogues in Greek, Ficino translated them into Latin; between 1484 and 1492, he translated the works of Plotinus, making them available in Latin for the first time in the West. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, born in 1463 and died in 1494, brought knowledge of Hebrew and Arabic alongside Greek and Latin to the project, though the pope banned his works as heretical, unlike Ficino's, which had managed to stay within the Church's tolerance. The major pathway by which Neoplatonism entered the Islamic world ran through the conquest of Byzantine centers in Egypt and Syria, which placed Greek manuscripts within reach of Islamic scholars. Thinkers including al-Farabi, Avicenna, al-Kindi, and Ibn Arabi adapted the concepts of the One and the First Principle to conform to Islamic monotheism, attributing the First Principle to God. In Jewish thought, figures including Solomon ibn Gabirol, the Kabbalist Isaac the Blind, Azriel of Gerona, and Nachmanides incorporated Neoplatonic elements filtered through their own monotheistic traditions.

• 8. The Soul's Return

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  Neoplatonists held that human perfection and happiness were achievable in this life, not reserved for an afterlife. Philosophical contemplation was the path, and the destination was reunion with the One. The soul, they believed, pre-existed the body and would survive it. In Plotinus' view, a soul could be reincarnated into another human being or even into a different kind of animal; the purest souls would dwell in the highest regions, while impure souls would undergo purification before descending again into a new body. A soul that achieved genuine union with the One would not descend again, at least not within the current world period. This vision of the soul's journey influenced Augustine of Hippo, who drew on Neoplatonism as a philosophical bridge between his earlier Manichaean beliefs and Christianity. Before his baptism in 387, Augustine had believed evil had substantial being and that God was made of matter; Neoplatonism led him to understand evil as the privation of good and God as immaterial. Even several years after that baptism, when he wrote the treatise On True Religion, his Christianity was still shaped by Neoplatonic thought. In the twentieth century, the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick identified as a Neoplatonist and compiled his own mystical and philosophical reflections in The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick, a document that places the tradition's preoccupation with hidden divine reality in a thoroughly modern register.