Plotinus

Plotinus (born 205 ce, Lyco, or Lycopolis, Egypt?—died 270, Campania) was an ancient philosopher, the centre of an influential circle of intellectuals and men of letters in 3rd-century Rome, who is regarded by modern scholars as the founder of the Neoplatonic school of philosophy.

Origins and education

The only important source for the life of Plotinus is the biography that his disciple and editor Porphyry wrote as a preface to his edition of the writings of his master, the Enneads. Other ancient sources add almost no reliable information to what Porphyry relates. This must be mentioned because, though Porphyry’s Life of Plotinus is the best source available for the life of any ancient philosopher, it has some important deficiencies that must necessarily be reflected in any modern account of the life of Plotinus that does not use a great deal of creative imagination to fill in the gaps. The Life is the work of an honest, accurate, hero-worshipping, and serious-minded friend and admirer. Apart from a few fascinating scraps of information about the earlier parts of the life of Plotinus, Porphyry concentrates on the last six years, when he was with his master in Rome. Thus, a fairly complete picture is available only of the last six years of a man who died at the age of 65. It is the elderly Plotinus, as it is the elderly Socrates, who alone is known. Plotinus’s own writings contain no autobiographical information, and they can give no unintentional glimpses of his mind or character when he was young; they were all written in the last 15 years of his life. Nothing is known about his intellectual and spiritual development.

According to Porphyry, Plotinus never spoke about his parents, his race, or his country. Eunapius, a late 4th-century writer, and later authors wrote that his birthplace was Lyco, or Lycopolis, in Egypt, either the modern Asyūt in Upper Egypt or a small town in the Nile delta. Though this may be true, there is no real evidence in the Life or in his own writings to suggest that Plotinus had any special knowledge of or affinity with Egypt; the fact that he later studied philosophy in the great cosmopolitan city of Alexandria is not necessarily evidence that he was an Egyptian. His name is Latin in form, but, in the 3rd century ce, this gives no clue to his ethnic origins. All that can be said with reasonable certainty is that Greek was his normal language and that he had a Greek education. For all his originality, he remains Hellenic in his way of thinking and in his intellectual and religious loyalties.

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In his 28th year—he seems to have been rather a late developer—Plotinus felt an impulse to study philosophy and thus went to Alexandria. He attended the lectures of the most eminent professors in Alexandria at the time, which reduced him to a state of complete depression. In the end, a friend who understood what he wanted took him to hear the self-taught philosopher Ammonius “Saccas.” When he had heard Ammonius speak, Plotinus said, “This is the man I was looking for,” and stayed with him for 11 years.

Ammonius is the most mysterious figure in ancient Western philosophy. He was, it seems, a lapsed Christian (yet even this is not quite certain), and the one or two extant remarks about his thought suggest a fairly commonplace sort of traditional Platonism. A philosopher who could attract such devotion from Plotinus and who may also have been the philosophical master of the great Christian theologian Origen must have had something more to offer his pupils, but what it was is not known. That Plotinus stayed with him for 11 years is in no way surprising. One did not enter an ancient philosophical school to take courses and obtain a degree but rather to join in what might well be a lifelong cooperative following of the way to truth, goodness, and the ultimate liberation of the spirit.

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Expedition to the East

At the end of his time with Ammonius, Plotinus joined the expedition of the Roman emperor Gordian III against Persia (242–243), with the intention of trying to learn something at first hand about the philosophies of the Persians and Indians. The expedition came to a disastrous end in Mesopotamia, however, when Gordian was murdered by the soldiers and Philip the Arabian was proclaimed emperor. Plotinus escaped with difficulty and made his way back to Antioch. From there he went to Rome, where he settled at the age of 40. That a Greek philosopher, especially at this period, should be interested in Eastern thought is not extraordinary. Plotinus’s own thought shows some striking similarities to Indian philosophy, but he never actually made contact with Eastern sages because of the failure of the expedition. Though direct or indirect contact with Indians educated in their own religious-philosophical traditions may not have been impossible in 3rd-century Alexandria, the resemblances of the philosophy of Plotinus to Indian thought were more likely a natural development of the Greek tradition that he inherited. That Plotinus was able to join the expedition of the senatorial emperor Gordian, that he went to Rome (an unusual place for a philosopher to settle), and that Porphyry found him, 19 years later, at the centre of a circle of friends and disciples—many of whom were members of the senatorial aristocracy—has been interpreted (probably erroneously) as meaning that he or his family had strong personal connections with Roman senators.