Plotinus of Lycopolis Simulacrum

The Life

Plotinus was born in Lycopolis, in the Thebaid of Roman Egypt, probably in 204 or 205 CE. He studied philosophy in Alexandria under Ammonius Saccas, an otherwise obscure figure whose teaching exerted a decisive influence on Plotinus and on a generation of others, including the Christian theologian Origen. After eleven years with Ammonius, Plotinus accompanied the emperor Gordian III's expedition against the Sasanians, intending, according to Porphyry, to learn Persian and Indian philosophy; when the expedition collapsed he fled to Antioch and thence to Rome, where in 244 he began teaching. He taught in Rome for twenty-five years, acquiring a substantial circle of students and the patronage of the emperor Gallienus. He died in 270 CE at a friend's estate in Campania.

The Thought

Plotinus's teaching is preserved in the fifty-four treatises his student Porphyry collected, arranged into six groups of nine, and published as the *Enneads*. The treatises are the single greatest monument of late antique philosophy.

At the top of Plotinus's metaphysical hierarchy stands the One, beyond being and beyond thought, the ultimate principle of all that is. The One overflows or emanates, producing Intellect (*nous*), which contains the Forms and thinks them; from Intellect emanates Soul, which turns both upward toward Intellect and downward toward the material world it animates. Individual souls are particular expressions of Soul, and their task is the reverse movement — the return, through philosophical discipline and contemplation, to the source. Matter is the farthest point from the One, a kind of non-being, and human life is oriented either outward and downward toward it or inward and upward toward the divine.

The *Enneads* combine metaphysical austerity with extraordinary psychological and experiential depth. Plotinus wrote about contemplation as someone who had himself known it, and Porphyry reports that his teacher attained union with the One four times in the period they lived together. The treatise *On Beauty* (Ennead I.6) is one of the foundational documents of Western aesthetics, and the treatises on time and eternity, on the nature of evil, and on the descent of the soul have remained philosophically alive ever since.

The Legacy

Plotinus was the founder of Neoplatonism, and Neoplatonism, through Porphyry, Iamblichus, Proclus, and Damascius, became the dominant philosophical framework of late antiquity. Through Augustine, Pseudo-Dionysius, and Boethius, Plotinus's metaphysics entered Christian theology and shaped medieval thought across the Latin West, Byzantium, and the Islamic world. Ficino in fifteenth-century Florence translated the *Enneads* into Latin and placed Plotinus at the centre of the Renaissance recovery of Platonism. Modern philosophy of mind, philosophical mysticism, and the whole tradition of negative theology continue to find in Plotinus a live source.