Neoplatonism

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Plotinus considered himself a faithful interpreter of Plato, not an innovator, and the claim is stranger than it sounds, because the system he built out of Plato's dialogues, worked out in Rome from around 244 CE onward and preserved by his student Porphyry in the six sets of nine treatises called the Enneads, pushes one line of Platonic thought to a conclusion Plato himself never quite stated. In the Republic, Plato describes the Form of the Good as beyond being itself, the source of the reality and knowability of every other Form the way the sun is the source of the visibility of every other visible thing, without itself being simply one visible thing among others. Plotinus took that single, difficult phrase and built an entire metaphysics on it. His first principle, the One, is not a being, not even the highest being, because being already implies some determinate character, and the One is prior to every determination, utterly simple, beyond description, beyond even the categories that language and logic can reach. Everything else exists by a kind of overflow from this absolute source, emanation rather than creation, first Intellect, the realm where the Platonic Forms exist as a unified, self-thinking whole, then Soul, which mediates between the unified intelligible world and the divided, changing world of matter, organizing and animating it without being reducible to it. Descent from the One is not a fall in the way later Gnostic systems, which Plotinus wrote directly against, treated the material world as an evil produced by an inferior or fallen power, matter for Plotinus is simply the furthest, faintest point of the One's own outward radiance, good in its own limited way rather than evil. The system is austere and demanding, and it is also, Plotinus insisted, a description of a real path: philosophy, on his account, is not only an intellectual exercise but an ascent, a turning of the soul back toward the One it emanated from, which is why later readers, Christian, Islamic and Jewish alike, found in Plotinus a metaphysics that could be adapted to describe the soul's return to God.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Augustine of Hippo tells the story himself, in the Confessions: before his conversion to Christianity, in the years he was still searching for an account of God and evil he could actually accept, he read certain books of the Platonists, almost certainly Plotinus and Plotinus's own student Porphyry in Latin translation, and found in them something he had been unable to find anywhere else, a way to think about a wholly immaterial reality without picturing it as simply a very large, very powerful physical thing extended through space. Augustine had struggled for years with exactly this difficulty: he had spent roughly nine years as a hearer among the Manichaeans, whose dualism pictured good and evil as two competing physical substances at war in the world, and he could not conceive of God, or of evil, in genuinely non-physical terms until Neoplatonism gave him the conceptual tools to do it. From Plotinus's system he took, and transformed, several ideas that became load-bearing pieces of Christian theology. The absolute transcendence and simplicity of Plotinus's One, beyond every category and determination, became a philosophical vocabulary for describing the transcendence of the Christian God. Plotinus's account of evil as not a positive substance or force at all, but a privation, an absence or falling away of the good the way darkness is simply the absence of light rather than a thing in its own right, gave Augustine his answer to the problem that had defeated his Manichaean years, evil is real as a lack, not real as a competing power, which let him affirm both that the world God made is good and that evil genuinely occurs within it. Augustine's use of Neoplatonism, it is worth stressing, was never uncritical adoption, he rejected the impersonal necessity of Plotinus's emanation scheme in favor of a God who creates freely out of nothing, addressing the relation of soul to body within his own doctrine of creation rather than the Neoplatonic scheme he had inherited it from. But the vocabulary, transcendence, simplicity, the privative theory of evil, the ascent of the soul through stages toward an immaterial highest good, travelled from a pagan philosopher's school in third century Rome into the center of Latin Christian theology, and did so because Augustine judged it, honestly, to be the best available tool for the job.