PLOTINUS

Plotinus was an ancient philosopher who founded the Neoplatonic school of philosophy.The only important source for the life of Plotinus is the Enneads, a biography that his disciple and editor, Porphyry, wrote as a preface to his edition of the writings of his master. Other ancient sources add almost no reliable information to what Porphyry relates. Unfortunately, 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. 

Plotinus’ own writings contain no autobiographical information, and they can give no unintentional glimpses of his mind or character when he was young. Nothing is known about his intellectual and spiritual development.The main activity of Plotinus, to which he devoted most of his time and energy, was his teaching and, after his first 10 years in Rome, his writing. There was nothing academic or highly organized about his “school,” though his method of teaching was rather scholastic. He would have passages read from commentaries on Plato or Aristotle by earlier philosophers and then expound his own views. The meetings, however, were friendly and informal, and Plotinus encour-aged unlimited discussion. 

Difficulties, once raised, had to be discussed until they were solved. The school was a loose circle of friends and admirers with no corporate organization. It was for these friends that he wrote the treatises that Porphyry collected and arranged as the Enneads. 

Some passages in the Enneads give an idea of Plotinus’ attitude to the religions and superstitions of his intensely religious and superstitious age, an attitude that seems to have been unusually detached. Like all men of his time, he believed in magic and in the possibility of foretelling the future by the stars, though he attacked the more bizarre and immoral beliefs of the astrologers. His interest in the occult was philosophical rather than practical, and there is no definite evidence that he practiced magic. 

A person called Olympius is reported to have once tried to use magic against Plotinus, but he supposedly found that the malignant forces he had evoked were bouncing back from Plotinus to himself. Plotinus was once taken to the Temple of Isis for a conjuration of his guardian spirit. Porphyry stated that a god appeared instead of an ordinary guardian angel but could not be questioned because of a mishandling of the conjuring process that broke the spell. 

What Plotinus himself thought of the proceedings is not known, but apparently he was not deeply interested.In his last years Plotinus, whose health had never been very good, suffered from a painful and repulsive sickness that Porphyry describes so imprecisely that one modern scholar has identified it as tuberculosis and another as a form of leprosy. His last words were either “

Try to bring back the god in you to the divine in the All” or “I am trying to bring back the divine in us to the divine in the All.” In either case, they express very simply the faith that he shared with all religious philosophers of late antiquity.