Who was Plotinus, born of Roman parents at Lycopolis in Egypt. It is from his writings we get the best account of Ammonius' doctrine. He was with the latter until 243; then joined Gordian III's expedition against Persia, with a view to studying Persian and Indian philosophies at their source. But Gordian was assassinated; and Plotinus, after a stay at Antioch, made his way to Rome and opened a school there. This was in the so-called Age of the Thirty Tyrants, when the central government was at its weakest. Gallienus was emperor in Rome, and every province had an emperorlet of its own;—it was before the Illyrian peasant-soldiers had set affairs on their feet again. A lazy erratic creature, this Gallienus; says Gibbon: "In every art that he attempted his lively genius enable him to succeed; and, as his genius was destitute of judgement, he attempted every art, except the important ones of war and government. He was master of several curious but useless sciences, a ready orator, an elegant poet, a skilful gardener, an excellent cook, and a most contemptible prince." Yet he had a curious higher side to his nature, wherewith he might have done much for humanity,—if he had ever bothered to bring it to the fore. He, and his wife, were deeply interested in the teachings of Plotinus. Such a man may sometimes be 'run,' and made the instrument of great accomplishment: a morass through which here and there are solid footholds; if you can find them, you may reach firm ground, but you must walk infinitely carefully. It is the old tale of the Prince with the dual nature, and the Initiate who tries to use him for the saving of the world,—and fails.
Plotinus knew what he was about. Was it last week we were talking of the endless need of the ages: a stronghold of the Gods to be established in this world, whence they might conduct their cyclic raidings? What had Pythagoras tried to do in his day?—Found a Center of Learning in the West, in which the Laws of Life, physical, mental, moral, and spiritual, should be taught. He did found it,—at Croton; but Croton was destroyed, and all the history of the next seven centuries suffered from the destruction. Then—it was seven centuries after his death,— Ammonius Saccas arose, and started things again; and left a successor who was able to carry them forward almost to the point where Pythagoras left them. For the fame of this Neo-Platonic Theosophy had traveled by this time right over the empire; and Plotinus in Rome, and in high favor with Gallienus, was a man on whom all eyes were turned. He proposed to found a Point Loma in Campania; to be called Platonopolis. Things were well in hand; the emperor and empress were enthusiastic:—as your Gallieneuses will be, for quarter of an hour at a time, over any high project. But certain of his ministers were against it; and he wobbled; and delayed; and thought of something else; and hung fire; and presently was killed. And Claudius, the first of the Illyrian emperors, who succeeded him, was much to busy defeating the Goths to come to Rome even,—much less could he pay attention to spiritual projects. Two years later Plotinus died, in 270;—and the chance was not to come again for more than sixteen centuries.
But Neo-Platonism was not done with yet, by any means. Plotinus left a successor in his disciple Porphyry, born at Tyre or at Batanea in Syria in 233. You see they were all West Asians, at least by birth: the first spiritual fruits of the Crest-Wave's influx there. Porphyry's name was originally Malchus (the Arabic Malek, meaning king); but as a king was a wearer of the purple, someone changed it for him to Porphyry or 'Purple.' In 262 he went to Rome to study under Plotinus, and was with him for six years; then his health broke down, and he retired to Sicily to recover. In 273 he returned,—Plotinus had died three years before, and opened a Neo-Platonic School of his own. He taught through the last quarter of that century, while the Illyrian emperors were smashing back invaders on the frontiers or upstart emperors in the provinces. Without imperial support, no Platonopolis could have been founded; and there was no time for any of those Illyrians to think of such things.—even if they had had it in them to do so, as they had not:—witness Aurelian's execution of Longinus. The time had gone by for that highest of all victories: as it might have gone by in our own day, but for events in Chicago, in February, 1898. When Porphyry died in 304, he left a successor indeed; but now one that did not concern himself with Rome.
It was Iamblichus, born in the Lebanon region; we do not know in what year; or much about him at all, beyond that he was an aristocrat, and well-to-do; and that he conducted his Theosophic activities mainly from his native city of Chalcis. he died between 330 and 333; thus through thirteen decades, from the beginning of the third century, these four great Neo-Platonist Adepts were teaching Theosophy in the Roman world;—Ammonius in Egypt; Plotinus and Porphyry,—the arm of the Movement stretched westward to save, if saved they might be, the Roman west Europe, —in Rome itself; then, since that was not be done, Iamblichus in Syria. We hear of no man to be named as successor to Iamblichus; I imagine the great line of Teachers came to an end with him. Yet, as we shall see, their impulse, or movement, or propaganda, did not cease then: it did not fail to reach an arm down into secular history, and to light up one fiery dynamic soul on the Imperial Throne, who did all that a God-ensouled Man could do to save the dying Roman world. Diocletian, that great but quite unillumined pagan, was dead; the new order, that subverted Rome at last, had been established by Constantine; and the House of Constantine, with all that it implied, was in power. But a year or two before the death of Iamblichus it chanced that a Great Soul stole a march on the House of Constantine, and (as you may say) surreptitiously incarnated in it, for the Cause of the Gods and Sublime Perfection. And to him, in his lonely and desolate youth, kept in confinement or captivity by the Christian on the throne, came one Maximus of Smyrna, a disciple of Iamblichus;— and lit in the soul of Prince Julian that divine knowledge of Theosophy wherewith afterwards he made his splendid and tragic effort for Heaven.
XXII. EASTWARD HO!
The point we start out from this evening is, in time, the year 220 A.D., in place, West Asia: 220, or you may call it 226,— sixty-five years, a half-cycle, after 161 and the accession of Marcus Aurelius; and therewith, in Rome, the beginning of the seasons prophetic of decline. So now we are in 226; look well around you; note your whereabouts;—for there is no resting here. You have seen? you have noted? On again then, I beseech you; and speedily. And, please, backwards: playing as it were the crab in time; and not content till the whole pralaya is skipped, and you stand on the far shore, in the sunset of an elder day: looking now forward, into futurity, from 390, perhaps 394 B.C.; over first a half-cycle of Persian decline,—long melancholy sands and shingle, to—there on the edge of the great wan water,—that July in 330 when mean Satrap Bessus killed his king, Codomannus, last of the Achaemenidae, then in flight from Alexander;—and the House of Cyrus and Darius came to an end. What a time it was that drifted into Limbo then! One unit of history; one phase of the world's life-story! It had seen all those world-shaking Tiglath-pilesers eastward; all those proud Osirified kings by the Nile;—and now it was over; had died in its last stronghold, Persia, and there was nowhere else for it to be reborn; and, after a decent half-cycle of lying in state under degenerate descendants of the great Darius, had been furied (cataclysmal obsequies!) beneath a landslide of Hellenistic Macedonianism. Its old civilization, senile long since, was gone, and a new kind from the west superimposed;—Babylon was a memory vague and splendid;—the Assyrian had gone down, and should never re-arise:—Egypt of the Pharaohs had fallen forever and ever;—Aryan Persia was over-run;—
"Iran indeed had gone, with all his rose,
And Jamshyd's seven-ringed cup, where no one knows:"
—And the angel that recorded their deeds and misdeed had written Tamam on the last page, sprinkled sand over the ink,—shut the volume, and put it away on the shelf;—and with a Thank God that's done with! settled down to snooze for six hundred years and ten.
For what had he to do with what followed? With Alexander's wedding-feast in 324,—when upwards of ten thousand couples, the grooms all Macedonian, the brides all Persian, were united: what had he to do with the new race young Achilles Redivivus thus proposed to bring into being? These were mere Macedonian doings, to be recorded by his brother angel of Europe; as also were the death of Alexander, and his grand schemes that came to nothing. There was no West Asia now; only Europe: all was European and Hellenized to the borders of India, with periodical overflowings beyond;—just as, long afterwards, Spain was a province of West Asia; and just as Egypt now is submerged under a European power.
Only the trouble is that the seed of something native always remains in regions so overflowed with an alien culture; and Alexander dreamed never of what might lie quiescent, resurrectable in time, in the mountains of Persis, the Achaemenian land, out of the path of the eastward march of his phalanxes;—or indeed, in those wide deserts southward, parched Araby, that none but a fool—and such was not Alexander—would trouble to invade or think of conquering: something that should in its time reassert West Asia over all Hellenedom, in Macedonia itself, and West beyond the Pillars of Hercules and the limits of the world. But let that be: it need trouble no one in this year of 324 B.C.! Only remember that "that which hath been shall be again, and there is nothing new under the sun."