The Alexandrian School. The Scientific Theory of Neo-Platonism. The Life and Writings of Plotinus (204–269 A. D.). Plotinus was born in Lycopolis in Egypt, and received his education in Alexandria, under Ammonius Saccas, who was Origen’s teacher. He campaigned with the emperor, Gordian, against the Persians, in order to pursue scientific studies in the East. He was especially interested in the Persian religion. Inthis way Plotinus became acquainted at first hand with the mysticism of the Orient. In 244 he appeared at Rome as a teacher, and was received with great éclat by the people, and in the highest circles he gained the most reverent recognition. His school contained representatives from all nations and from almost every calling,—physicians, rhetoricians, poets, senators, an emperor and empress. Plotinus lived in a country estate in Campania, and he almost succeeded in inducing the emperor to found a city of philosophers in Campania. It was to be called Platonopolis and, with Plato’s Republic as a model, it was to be an Hellenic cloister for religious contemplation. The literary activity of Plotinus occurred in his old age, and he wrote nothing until after he was fifty. His works consisted of fifty-four Corpuscles which his pupil, Porphyry, combined into six Enneads. For the next three hundred years his school became the centre of the Hellenic movement—the centre of science, philosophy, and literature. The literature of neo-Platonism was enormous, on account of the many commentaries on the philosophy of Plato within the neo-Platonic circle.
The General Character of the Teaching of Plotinus. There is a great division of opinion about the value of the teaching of Plotinus, for he drew his philosophy only in the broadest outlines, and he made no attempt to advance from a general view of the world to exact knowledge of it. Intellectually his philosophy is an abstraction; and yet emotionally, in an intimate way, it touched deeply an age weary with culture. Thus one can see how the actual achievement of Plotinus was small, but how at the same time its force and influence was very great. It was a religious teaching which roseto magnificent heights of contemplation from miserable intellectual surroundings. Nevertheless, the philosophy of Plotinus was an extreme form of intellectualism—it was an intellectual ennobling and transforming of religion. The earlier philosophy had supported the happiness of the individual by offers of infinitude; but Plotinus thought of the individual as never isolated from the Infinite, but as always longing for the Infinite. Fellowship with God is knowledge of Him, but it is knowledge of a peculiar kind. It is enthusiasm, intuition, ecstasy. There is a chasm between man and God, which Plotinus would bridge by placing reality so deeply within consciousness as to annihilate all antitheses and contradictions. Thus this deep reality below consciousness is cosmic and not human; and the religion of Plotinus is cosmocentric and not anthropocentric. Plotinus intensifies and summarizes Greek culture in order to consolidate and defend it. But in thus thinking out the Greek conceptions to their logical completeness, those conceptions collapse.
The Mystic God. There are two characteristics that distinguish the mystic God of Plotinus.
1. The first characteristic is the supra-consciousness of God. God is the indefinable, original Being who is above all antitheses. He is supra-everything, even supra-conscious. Nothing can be attributed to Him, not even thought or will, for these imply two elements and God is a unity. Any description of Him must be in negative terms (“negative theology”). If we speak of Him as the One, the First, the Cosmic Cause, Goodness, or as Light, we are only relatively and not really describing Him. God is present in all, yet He is not divided; He is the source of all, and yet He himself isperfectly finished. In his conception of God as compared to the world, Plotinus added the realm of the supra-conscious and the sub-conscious to the conscious.
2. In the second place Plotinus conceived God in His relation to the world in the terms of dynamic pantheism. This is a pantheism of a peculiar type. God does not create the world; the world is not the act of His will; nor is the world the result of a transference of part of His nature. In ordinary pantheism the world is a diffusion of the substance of God and the whole is static. Not so in the teaching of Plotinus! God permeates the world by His activity, and the world is dynamic through and through. But this dynamic activity of God must not be conceived as an historical or time process. The process is timeless. It is a process of essence or worth. The grades in the process are those of significance or value. All are within the all-embracing unity of God and each particular draws its life from Him. This is called the theory of emanations. Plotinus used the figure which mystics have always employed in this connection,—the figure of the sun and its rays of light in the darkness. The rays become less and less intense with the increasing distance from the Godhead, until they end in darkness. The process is an overflowing from the Godhead in which the Godhead remains unchanged.
The Two Problems of Plotinus. Starting with this conception of the Godhead as a dynamic contentless Being, Plotinus is bound to explain the world of sense-phenomena. His problem is twofold: he must explain the sequence of phenomena from the Godhead, which is the metaphysical problem; he must explain how man, living in the world of sense, can rise to communion withthe Godhead, which is the ethical problem. Metaphysics and ethics are to Plotinus in inverted parallelism.
The World of Emanations.—The Metaphysical Problem of Plotinus. The aim of Plotinus in this is to construct a metaphysical monism out of the dualistic factors which had so long been present in Greek thought. The two fundamental principles upon which he raised his structure were (1) his dynamic series of emanations, and (2) his conception of matter as entirely negative. The highest Being, God, by an excess of energy or goodness, has the natural impulse to create something similar to himself. This creative impulse exists in each creature in turn and the movement propagates itself. Stage is added to stage in a descending series, until the impulse dies out in non-Being as the limit. The ordinary pantheism of co-existence of phenomena is transformed into a succession of stages of values, and all make up a harmony of more or less distinct copies of God. There are three steps in which the process of emanation proceeds,—spirit, soul, and matter.
The Spirit or Nous is the first emanation from the One in point of significance. It is the image of the One sent forth by its overflow of energy. This image involuntarily turns toward its original, the One, and in beholding it becomes Spirit, Nous, or intellectual consciousness. It turns to the One and recognizes itself as the image of the One. Thus, in the first degree away from God, the duality of thinker as subject, and of the thing thought as object, appears. The unconsciousness of the One is thus contrasted with consciousness, and the dual nature of consciousness is thus brought out; and for the first time an exact formulation of the psychological conception of consciousness is given.
The Nous is a unitary function of the One, like the Logos of Philo. At the same time the Nous contains within itself, as content, the Platonic Ideas or arch-types of individuals. These Ideas are not mere thoughts, but have their own existence. The Nous is their unity, however, just as a unity exists for the theorems of a science. These Ideas are pure intellectual potencies and the final causes of the world of nature.
The Soul is the second degree removed from the One. It stands in the same relation to the Nous as the Nous to the Godhead. The Soul belongs to the world of light, but it stands just on the boundaries of the world of darkness. It is the image of an image and therefore doubly dual,—it consists of a higher or world-soul and the lesser souls. The world-soul is divided into two forces,—the formative power of the world, and the body of the world. Individual souls are divided into the supersensible or intellectual soul (the part that has pre-existence and undergoes metamorphosis), and the sensible part which has built up the body as an instrument of its working power. The soul is present in all parts of its body. The individual souls are called plastic forces.