Neoplatonism [Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy]
Neoplatonism
Neoplatonism is a modern term used to designate the period of Platonic
philosophy beginning with the work of Plotinus
and ending with the closing of the Platonic Academy by the Emperor Justinian
in 529 CE. This brand of Platonism, which is often described as 'mystical'
or religious in nature, developed outside the mainstream of Academic Platonism.
The origins of Neoplatonism can be traced back to the era of Hellenistic
syncretism which spawned such movements and schools of thought as Gnosticism
and the Hermetic tradition. A major factor in this syncretism, and one
which had an immense influence on the development of Platonic thought,
was the introduction of the Jewish Scriptures into Greek intellectual circles
via the translation known as the Septuagint. The encounter between
the creation narrative of Genesis and the cosmology of Plato's Timaeus
set in motion a long tradition of cosmological theorizing that finally
culminated in the grand schema of Plotinus' Enneads. Plotinus' two
major successors, Porphyry and Iamblichus, each developed, in their own
way, certain isolated aspects of Plotinus' thought, but neither of them
developed a rigorous philosophy to match that of their master. It was Proclus
who, shortly before the closing of the Academy, bequeathed a systematic
Platonic philosophy upon the world that in certain ways approached the
sophistication of Plotinus. Finally, in the work of the so-called Pseudo-Dionysius,
we find a grand synthesis of Platonic philosophy and Christian theology
that was to exercise an immense influence on mediaeval mysticism and Renaissance
Humanism.
Table of Contents (Clicking on the links below will take you to those parts of this article)
1. What is Neoplatonism?
2. Plotinian Neoplatonism
a. Contemplation and Creation
b. Nature and Personality
c. Salvation and the Cosmic Process
i. Plotinus' Last Words
d. The Achievement of Plotinus
i. The Plotinian Synthesis
3. Porphyry and Iamblichus
a. The Nature of the Soul
i. The (re)turn to Astrology
b. The Quest for Transcendence
i. Theurgy and the Distrust of Dialectic
4. Proclus and Pseudo-Dionysius
a. Being -- Becoming -- Being
b. The God Beyond Being
5. Appendix: The Renaissance Platonists
6. Sources
1. What is Neoplatonism?
The term 'Neoplatonism' is a modern construction. Plotinus,
who is often considered the 'founder' of Neoplatonism, would not have
considered himself a "new" Platonist in any sense, but simply an expositor
of the doctrines of Plato. That this required him to formulate an entirely
new philosophical system would not have been viewed by him as a problem,
for it was, in his eyes, precisely what the Platonic doctrine required.
In a sense, this is true, for as early as the Old Academy we find Plato's
successors struggling with the proper interpretation of his thought, and
arriving at strikingly different conclusions. Also, in the Hellenistic
era, certain Platonic ideas were taken up by thinkers of various loyalties
-- Jewish, Gnostic, Christian -- and worked up into new forms of expression
that varied quite considerably from what Plato actually wrote in his Dialogues.
Should this lead us to the conclusion that these thinkers were any less
'loyal' to Plato than were the members of the Academy (in its various forms
throughout the centuries preceding Plotinus)? No; for the multiple and
often contradictory uses made of Platonic ideas is a testament to the universality
of Plato's thought -- that is, its ability to admit of a wide variety of
interpretations and applications. In this sense, Neo-Platonism may
be said to have begun immediately after Plato's death, when new approaches
to his philosophy were being broached. Indeed, we already see a hint, in
the doctrines of Xenocrates (the second head of the Old Academy) of a type
of salvation theory involving the unification of the two parts of the human
soul -- the "Olympian" or heavenly, and the "Titanic" or earthly (Dillon
1977, p. 27). If we accept Frederick Copleston's description of Neoplatonism
as "the intellectualist reply to the ... yearning for personal salvation"
(Copleston 1962, p. 216) we can already locate the beginning of this reply
as far back as the Old Academy, and Neoplatonism would then not have begun
with Plotinus. However, it is not clear that Xenocrates' idea of salvation
involved the individual; it is quite possible that he was referring to
a unified human nature in an abstract sense. In any case, the early Hermetic-Gnostic
tradition is certainly to an extent Platonic, and later Gnosticism
and Christian Logos theology markedly so. If an intellectual reply
to a general yearning for personal salvation is what characterizes Neoplatonism,
then the highly intellectual Gnostics and Christians of the Late Hellenistic
era must be given the title of Neoplatonists. However, if we are to be
rigorous and define Neoplatonism as the synthesis of various more or less
'Platonistic' ideas into a grand expression of Platonic philosophy, then
Plotinus must be considered the founder of Neoplatonism. Yet we must not
forget that these Platonizing Christian, Gnostic, Jewish, and other 'pagan'
thinkers provided the necessary speculative material to make this synthesis
possible.
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2. Plotinian Neoplatonism
The great third century thinker and 'founder' of Neoplatonism,
Plotinus,
is responsible for the grand synthesis of progressive Christian and Gnostic
ideas with the traditional Platonic philosophy. He answered the challenge
of accounting for the emergence of a seemingly inferior and flawed cosmos
from the perfect mind of the divinity by declaring outright that all objective
existence is but the external self-expression of an inherently contemplative
deity known as the One (to hen), or the Good (ta kalon).
Plotinus compares the expression of the superior godhead with the self-expression
of the individual soul, which proceeds from the perfect conception of a
Form (eidos), to the always flawed expression of this Form in the
manner of a materially derived 'personality' that risks succumbing to the
demands of divisive discursivity, and so becomes something less than divine.
This diminution of the divine essence in temporality is but a necessary
moment of the complete expression of the One. By elevating the experience
of the individual soul to the status of an actualization of a divine Form,
Plotinus succeeded, also, in preserving, if not the autonomy, at least
the dignity and ontological necessity of personality. The Cosmos,
according to Plotinus, is not a created order, planned by a deity on whom
we can pass the charge of begetting evil; for the Cosmos is the self-expression
of the Soul, which corresponds, roughly, to Philo's logos
prophorikos, the logos endiathetos of which is the Intelligence
(nous). Rather, the Cosmos, in Plotinian terms, is to be understood
as the concrete result or 'product' of the Soul's experience of its own
Mind (nous). Ideally, this concrete expression should serve the
Soul as a reference-point for its own self-conscious existence; however,
the Soul all too easily falls into the error of valuing the expression
over the principle (arkhê), which is the contemplation of
the divine Forms. This error gives rise to evil, which is the purely subjective
relation of the Soul (now divided) to the manifold and concrete forms of
its expressive act. When the Soul, in the form of individual existents,
becomes thus preoccupied with its experience, Nature comes into being,
and the Cosmos takes on concrete form as the locus of personality.
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a. Contemplation and Creation
Hearkening back, whether consciously or not, to the doctrine of Speusippus
(Plato's successor in the Academy) that the One is utterly transcendent
and "beyond being," and that the Dyad is the true first principle (Dillon
1977, p. 12), Plotinus declares that the One is "alone with itself" and
ineffable (cf. Enneads VI.9.6 and V.2.1). The One does not act to
produce a cosmos or a spiritual order, but simply generates from itself,
effortlessly, a power (dunamis) which is at once the Intellect (nous)
and the object of contemplation (theôria) of this Intellect.
While Plotinus suggests that the One subsists by thinking itself as itself,
the Intellect subsists through thinking itself as other, and therefore
becomes divided within itself: this act of division within the Intellect
is the production of Being, which is the very principle of expression or
discursivity (Ennead V.1.7). For this reason, the Intellect stands
as Plotinus' sole First Principle. At this point, the thinking or contemplation
of the Intellect is divided up and ordered into thoughts, each of them
subsisting in and for themselves, as autonomous reflections of the dunamis
of the One. These are the Forms (eidê), and out of their inert
unity there arises the Soul, whose task it is to think these Forms discursively
and creatively, and to thereby produce or create a concrete, living expression
of the divine Intellect. This activity of the Soul results in the production
of numerous individual souls: living actualizations of the possibilities
inherent in the Forms. Whereas the Intellect became divided within itself
through contemplation, the Soul becomes divided outside of itself, through
action (which is still contemplation, according to Plotinus, albeit the
lowest type; cf. Ennead III.8.4), and this division constitutes
the Cosmos, which is the expressive or creative act of the Soul, also referred
to as Nature. When the individual soul reflects upon Nature as its own
act, this soul is capable of attaining insight (gnôsis) into
the essence of Intellect; however, when the soul views nature as something
objective and external -- that is, as something to be experienced or undergone,
while forgetting that the soul itself is the creator of this Nature --
evil and suffering ensue. Let us now examine the manner in which Plotinus
explains Nature as the locus of personality.
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b. Nature and Personality
Contemplation, at the level of the Soul, is for Plotinus a two-way street.
The Soul both contemplates, passively, the Intellect, and reflects upon
its own contemplative act by producing Nature and the Cosmos. The individual
souls that become immersed in Nature, as moments of the Soul's eternal
act, will, ideally, gain a complete knowledge of the Soul in its unity,
and even of the Intellect, by reflecting upon the concrete results of the
Soul's act -- that is, upon the externalized, sensible entities that comprise
the physical Cosmos. This reflection, if carried by the individual soul
with a memory of its provenance always in the foreground, will lead to
a just governing of the physical Cosmos, which will make of it a perfect
material image of the Intellectual Cosmos, i.e., the realm of the Forms
(cf. Enneads IV.3.7 and IV.8.6). However, things don't always turn
out so well, for individual souls often "go lower than is needful ... in
order to light the lower regions, but it is not good for them to go so
far" (Ennead IV.3.17, tr. O'Brien 1964). For when the soul extends
itself ever farther into the indeterminacy of materiality, it gradually
loses memory of its divine origin, and comes to identify itself more and
more with its surroundings -- that is to say: the soul identifies itself
with the results of the Soul's act, and forgets that it is, as part
of this Soul, itself an agent of the act. This is tantamount to a relinquishing,
by the soul, of its divine nature. When the soul has thus abandoned itself,
it begins to accrue many alien encrustations, if you will, that make of
it something less than divine. These encrustations are the 'accidents'
(in the Aristotelian sense) of personality. And yet the soul is never completely
lost, for, as Plotinus insists, the soul need simply "think upon essential
being" in order to return to itself, and continue to exist authentically
as a governor of the Cosmos (Ennead IV.8.4-6). The memory of the
personality that this wandering soul possessed must be forgotten in order
for it to return completely to its divine nature; for if it were remembered,
we would have to say, contradictorily, that the soul holds a memory of
what occurred during its state of forgetfulness! So in a sense, Plotinus
holds that individual personalities are not maintained at the level of
Soul. However, if we understand personality as more than just a particular
attitude attached to a concrete mode of existence, and rather view it as
the sum total of experiences reflected upon in intellect, then souls most
certainly retain their personalities, even at the highest level, for they
persist as thoughts within the divine Mind (cp. Ennead IV.8.5).
The personality that one acquires in action (the lowest type of contemplation)
is indeed forgotten and dissolved, but the 'personality' or persistence
in intellect that one achieves through virtuous acts most definitely
endures (Ennead IV.3.32).
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c. Salvation and the Cosmic Process
Plotinus, like his older contemporary, the Christian philosopher Origen
of Alexandria, views the descent of the soul into the material realm as
a necessary moment in the unfolding of the divine Intellect, or God. For
this reason, the descent itself is not an evil, for it is a reflection
of God's essence. Both Origen and Plotinus place the blame for experiencing
this descent as an evil squarely upon the individual soul. Of course, these
thinkers held, respectively, quite different views as to why and how the
soul experiences the descent as an evil; but they held one thing in common:
that the rational soul will naturally choose the Good, and that any failure
to do so is the result of forgetfulness or acquired ignorance. But whence
this failure? Origen gave what, to Plotinus' mind, must have been a quite
unsatisfactory answer: that souls pre-existed as spiritual beings, and
when they desired to create or 'beget' independently of God, they all fell
into error, and languished there until the coming of Logos Incarnate. This
view has more than a little Gnostic flavor to it, which would have sat
ill with Plotinus, who was a great opponent of Gnosticism.
The fall of the soul Plotinus refers, quite simply, to the tension between
pure contemplation and divisive action -- a tension that constitutes the
natural mode of existence of the soul (cf. Ennead IV.8.6-7). Plotinus
tells us that a thought is only completed or fully comprehended after it
has been expressed, for only then can the thought be said to have passed
from potentiality to actuality (Ennead IV.3.30). The question of
whether Plotinus places more value on the potential or the actual is really
of no consequence, for in the Plotinian plêrôma every
potentiality generates an activity, and every activity becomes itself a
potential for new activity (cf. Ennead III.8.8); and since the One,
which is the goal or object of desire of all existents, is neither potentiality
nor actuality, but "beyond being" (epekeina ousias), it is impossible
to say whether the striving of existents, in Plotinus' schema, will result
in full and complete actualization, or in a repose of potentiality that
will make them like their source. "Likeness to God as far as possible,"
for Plotinus, is really likeness to oneself -- authentic existence.
Plotinus leaves it up to the individual to determine what this means.
i. Plotinus' Last Words
In his biography of Plotinus, Porphyry records the last words of his
teacher to his students as follows: "Strive to bring back the god in yourselves
to the God in the All" (Porphyry, Life of Plotinus 2, my translation).
After uttering these words, Plotinus, one of the greatest philosophers
the world has ever known, passed away. The simplicity of this final statement
seems to be at odds with the intellectual rigors of Plotinus' treatises,
which challenge -- and more often than not vanquish -- just about every
prominent philosophical view of the era. But this is only if we take this
remark in a mystical or ecstatic religious sense. Plotinus demanded the
utmost level of intellectual clarity in dealing with the problem of humankind's
relation to the highest principle of existence. Striving for or desiring
salvation was not, for Plotinus, an excuse for simply abandoning oneself
to faith or prayer or unreflective religious rituals; rather, salvation
was to be achieved through the practice of philosophical investigation,
of dialectic. The fact that Plotinus, at the end of his life, had arrived
at this very simple formulation, serves to show that his dialectical quest
was successful. In his last treatise, "On the Primal Good" (Ennead
I.7), Plotinus is able to assert, in the same breath, that both life and
death are good. He says this because life is the moment in which the soul
expresses itself and revels in the autonomy of the creative act. However,
this life, since it is characterized by action, eventually leads to exhaustion,
and the desire, not for autonomous action, but for reposeful contemplation
-- of a fulfillment that is purely intellectual and eternal. Death is the
relief of this exhaustion, and the return to a state of contemplative repose.
Is this return to the Intellect a return to potentiality? It is hard to
say. Perhaps it is a synthesis of potentiality and actuality: the moment
at which the soul is both one and many, both human and divine. This would
constitute Plotinian salvation -- the fulfillment of the exhortation of
the dying sage.
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d. The Achievement of Plotinus
In the last analysis, what stands as the most important and impressive
accomplishment of Plotinus is the manner in which he synthesized the pure,
'semi-mythical' expression of Plato with the logical rigors of the Peripatetic
and Stoic schools, yet without losing sight of philosophy's most important
task: of rendering the human experience in intelligible and analyzable
terms. That Plotinus' thought had to take the 'detour' through such wildly
mystical and speculative paths as Gnosticism
and Christian salvation theology is only proof of his clear-sightedness,
thoroughness, and admirable humanism. For all of his dialectical difficulties
and perambulations, Plotinus' sole concern is with the well-being (eudaimonia)
of the human soul. This is, of course, to be understood as an intellectual,
as opposed to a merely physical or even emotional well-being, for Plotinus
was not concerned with the temporary or the temporal. The striving of the
human mind for a mode of existence more suited to its intuited potential
than the ephemeral possibilities of this material realm, while admittedly
a striving born of temporality, is nonetheless directed toward atemporal
and divine perfection. This is a striving or desire rendered all the more
poignant and worthy of philosophy precisely because it is born in the depths
of existential angst, and not in the primitive ecstasies of unreflective
ritual. As the last true representative of the Greek philosophical spirit,
Plotinus is Apollonian, not Dionysian. His concern is with the intellectual
beautification of the human soul, and for this reason his notion of salvation
does not, like Origen's,
imply an eternal state of objective contemplation of the divinity -- for
Plotinus, the separation between human and god breaks down, so that when
the perfected soul contemplates itself, it is also contemplating the Supreme.
i. The Plotinian Synthesis
Plotinus was faced with the task of defending the true Platonic philosophy,
as he understood it, against the inroads being made, in his time, most
of all by Gnostics, but also by orthodox Christianity. Instead of launching
an all-out attack on these new ideas, Plotinus took what was best from
them, in his eyes, and brought these ideas into concert with his own brand
of Platonism. For this reason, we are sometimes surprised to see Plotinus,
in one treatise, speaking of the cosmos as a realm of forgetfulness and
error, while in another, speaking of the cosmos as the most perfect expression
of the godhead. Once we realize the extent to which certain Gnostic sects
went
in order to brand this world as a product of an evil and malignant Demiurge,
to whom we owe absolutely no allegiance, it becomes clear that Plotinus
was simply trying to temper the extreme form of an idea which he himself
shared, though in a less radical sense. The feeling of being thrown into
a hostile and alien world is a philosophically valid position from which
to begin a critique and investigation of human existence; indeed, modern
existentialist philosophers have often started from this same premise.
However, Plotinus realized that it is not the nature of the human soul
to simply escape from a realm of active engagement with external reality
(the cosmos) to a passive receptance of divine form (within the plêrôma).
The Soul, as Plotinus understands it, is an essentially creative being,
and one which understands existence on its own terms. One of the beauties
of Plotinus' system is that everything he says concerning the nature of
the Cosmos (spiritual and physical) can equally be held of the Soul. Now
while it would be false to charge Plotinus with solipsism (or even narcissism,
as one prominent commentator has done; cf. Julia Kristeva in Hadot 1993,
p. 11), it would be correct to say that the entire Cosmos is an analogue
of the experience of the Soul, which results in the attainment of full
self-consciousness. The form of Plotinus' system is the very form by which
the Soul naturally comes to know itself in relation to its acts; and the
expression of the Soul will always, therefore, be a philosophical expression.
When we speak of the Plotinian synthesis, then, what we are speaking of
is a natural dialectic of the Soul, which takes its own expressions into
account, no matter how faulty or incomplete they may appear in retrospect,
and weaves them into a cosmic tapestry of noetic images.
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3. Porphyry and Iamblichus
Porphyry of Tyre (ca. 233-305 CE) is the most famous pupil of Plotinus.
In addition to writing an introductory summary of his master's theories
(the treatise entitled Launching-Points to the Realm of Mind), Porphyry
also composed the famous Isagoge, an introduction to the Categories
of Aristotle, which came to exercise an immense influence on Mediaeval
Scholasticism. The extent of Porphyry's investigative interests exceeded
that of his teacher, and his so-called "scientific" works, which survive
to this day, include a treatise on music (On Prosody), and two studies
of the astronomical and astrological theories of Claudius Ptolemy (ca.
70-140 CE), On the Harmonics, and an Introduction to The
Astronomy of Ptolemy. He wrote biographies of Pythagoras and Plotinus,
and edited and compiled the latter's essays into six books, each containing
nine treatises, giving them the title Enneads. Unlike Plotinus,
Porphyry was interested primarily in the practical aspect of salvific striving,
and the manner in which the soul could most effectively bring about its
transference to ever higher realms of existence. This led Porphyry to develop
a doctrine of ascent to the Intellect by way of the exercise of virtue
(aretê) in the form of 'good works'. This doctrine may owe
its genesis to Porphyry's supposed early adherence to Christianity, as
attested by the historian Socrates, and suggested by St. Augustine (cf.
Copleston 1962, p. 218). If Porphyry had, at some point, been a Christian,
this would account for his belief in the soul's objective relation to the
divine Mind -- an idea shared by Origen, whom Porphyry knew as a youth
(cf. Eusebius, The History of the Church, p. 195) -- and would explain
his quite un-Plotinian belief in a gradual progress toward perfection,
as opposed to the 'instant salvation' proposed by Plotinus (cf. Ennead
IV.8.4).
Iamblichus of Apamea (d. ca. 330 CE) was a student of Porphyry.
He departed from his teacher on more than a few points, most notably in
his insistence on demoting Plotinus' One (which Porphyry left unscathed,
as it were) to the level of kosmos noêtos, which according
to Iamblichus generates the intellectual realm (kosmos noêros).
In this regard, Iamblichus can be said to have either severely misunderstood,
or neglected to even attempt to understand, Plotinus on the important doctrine
of contemplation ( |
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