Filosofi greci che potreste non conoscere (seconda parte)
Quando pensiamo alla filosofia greca, inevitabilmente pensiamo a certi nomi. Socrate, Platone e Aristotele, figure di plauso universale, possono ...
neoplatonismo
Plotino (204/5 – 270) è considerato il padre del <anchor>neoplatonismo</anchor>. Sebbene sia nato nell’Egitto romano e la sua discendenza sia incerta, è riconosciuto come filosofo greco, visto che ha scritto in greco ed è stato un illustre continuatore di Platone. Fu anche influenzato dagli insegnamenti della filosofia persiana e indiana, così come dalla teologia egiziana. ‘’L’Uno’’, ‘’l’Intelletto’’ e ‘’l’Anima’’ sono i tre principi fondamentali della metafisica di Plotino, descritti nelle Enneadi.
Neoplatonism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Neoplatonism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

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# Neoplatonism

_First published Mon Jan 11, 2016_

The term “Neoplatonism” refers to a philosophical
school of thought that first emerged and flourished in the Greco-Roman
world of late antiquity, roughly from the time of the Roman Imperial
Crisis to the Arab conquest, i.e., the middle of the 3rd to
the middle of the 7th century. In consequence of the demise
of ancient materialist or corporealist thought such as Epicureanism
and Stoicism, Neoplatonism became the dominant philosophical ideology
of the period, offering a comprehensive understanding of the universe
and the individual human being’s place in it. However, in
contrast to labels such as “Stoic”,
“Peripatetic” or “Platonic”, the designation
“Neoplatonic” is of modern coinage and to some extent a
misnomer. Late antique philosophers now counted among “the
Neoplatonists” did not think of themselves as engaged in some
sort of effort specifically to revive the spirit and the letter of
Plato’s dialogues. To be sure, they did call themselves
“Platonists” and held Plato’s views, which they
understood as a positive system of philosophical doctrine, in higher
esteem than the tenets of the pre-Socratics, Aristotle, or any other
subsequent thinker. However, and more importantly, their signature
project is more accurately described as a grand synthesis of an
intellectual heritage that was by then exceedingly rich and
profound. In effect, they absorbed, appropriated, and creatively
harmonized almost the entire Hellenic tradition of philosophy,
religion, and even literature—with the exceptions of
Epicureanism, which they roundly rejected, and the thoroughgoing
corporealism of the Stoics. The result of this effort was a grandiose
and powerfully persuasive system of thought that reflected upon a
millennium of intellectual culture and brought the scientific and
moral theories of Plato, Aristotle, and the ethics of the Stoics into
fruitful dialogue with literature, myth, and religious practice. In
virtue of their inherent respect for the writings of many of their
predecessors, the Neoplatonists together offered a kind of
meta-discourse and reflection on the sum-total of ideas produced over
centuries of sustained inquiry into the human condition.

As a natural consequence of their insistence on the undiminished
relevance of the past, the Neoplatonists developed their
characteristically speculative brand of philosophical enquiry in which
empirical facts tended to serve as illustrations rather than heuristic
starting points or test cases. Today, the Neoplatonic system may
strike one as lofty, counterintuitive, and implausible, but to dismiss
it out of hand is difficult, especially if one is prepared to take
seriously a few fundamental assumptions that are at least not
_obviously_ wrong and may possibly be right.

The most fundamental of these assumptions, which the Neoplatonists
shared with the majority of intellectuals of the ancient world,
including most pre-Socratic thinkers as well as Socrates, Plato,
Aristotle and their followers, is that mindful consciousness
( _nous_, often translated as thought, intelligence, or
intellect) is in an important sense ontologically prior to the
physical realm typically taken for ultimate reality (Mind over
Matter). There existed a dispute between Plato and Aristotle over
whether or not the objects of mindful consciousness (abstract
concepts, Platonic or otherwise, numbers, geometrical properties, and
so forth) are also ontologically prior, but the Neoplatonists regarded
this fact as a matter of inconsequential detail. And so, following a
venerable and abiding tradition of Mind over Matter, Neoplatonism
inevitably turned out to be an idealist type of philosophy.

The second assumption, which the Neoplatonists shared with the
Stoics and the Hermetists (an influential group of Egyptian religious
thinkers that predate the rise of Neoplatonism), was that reality, in
all its cognitive and physical manifestations, depended on a highest
principle which is unitary and singular. Neoplatonic philosophy is a
strict form of principle-monism that strives to understand everything
on the basis of a single cause that they considered divine, and
indiscriminately referred to as “the First”, “the
One”, or “the Good”. Since it is reasonable to
assume, as the Neoplatonists did, that any efficient cause is
ontologically prior to, and hence more real, than its effect, then, in
the hierarchy of being, the first principle, whatever it is, cannot be
less “real” than the phenomena it is supposed to explain.
Given the veracity of the first assumption (the ontological priority
of intelligence and consciousness), it follows at once that the first
principle must be a principle of consciousness. In consequence, the
fundamental challenge all Neoplatonists struggled to meet was
essentially the following: How are we to understand and describe the
emergence of the universe, with all its diverse phenomena, as the
effect of a singular principle of consciousness? In
particular—and in this regard Neoplatonism shares certain
concerns with modern cosmology—how is it possible to understand
the emergence of the physical, material universe from a singularity
that is in every sense unlike this universe? Their answer to this
question was entirely new, and went far beyond any prior cosmic
aetiology, including that of Plato’s _Timaeus,_ in
elegance and sophistication.

- [1\. Historical Orientation: Antiquity](#HisOriAnt)
- [2\. The One](#One)
- [3\. Absolute Consciousness](#AbsCon)
- [4\. Soul and Nature](#SouNat)
- [5\. Matter](#Mat)
- [6\. Ethics](#Eth)
- [7\. Later Developments in Antiquity](#LatDevAnt)
- [8\. Influence](#Inf)
- [Bibliography](#Bib)
  - [Essential readings of late-antique Neoplatonic Works](#EssReaLatAntNeoWor)
  - [Selected Introductory Secondary Literature](#SelIntSecLit)
- [Academic Tools](#Aca)
- [Other Internet Resources](#Oth)
- [Related Entries](#Rel)

* * *

## 1\. Historical Orientation: Antiquity

Rightly or wrongly, the Egyptian-born Plotinus (204/5–270) is
commonly regarded as the founder of Neoplatonism. He was a pupil of
the Alexandrian philosopher Ammonius Saccas (3nd century), who reportedly did not
publish anything and remains one of the most enigmatic philosophers of
all antiquity. Around 245, at the age of 40, Plotinus moved from
Alexandria to Rome and founded a school of philosophy there. At first,
his instruction too was entirely oral, until his most talented pupil,
Porphyry, persuaded him to commit his seminars to the page. After
Plotinus’ death, Porphyry edited and published these writings,
having arranged them in a collection of six books consisting of nine
essays each (the so-called “Enneads” or
“nines”).

By any standard of intellectual prowess, Plotinus is one of the
intellectual giants of antiquity, on a par with the likes of Plato,
Aristotle, and Chrysippus, even if modernity is still hesitant to
accord him such an exalted status. As in the case of his preeminent
precursors, Plotinus’ philosophical system combines innovation
with tradition. The question of precisely which predecessors inspired
him is still unclear and in need of further investigation. Carefully
selected passages from Plato’s dialogues and Aristotle’s
_Metaphysics_ often serve him as starting points for his own
speculations; Stoic ethics is very much in evidence, as are the views
of the Peripatetic philosopher Alexander of Aphrodisias (2nd-3rd centuries). A general
intellectual background is provided by the so-called Middle
Platonists, above all Numenius of Apamea (2nd
century). Moreover, it is not impossible that Gnosticism (which
Plotinus vehemently opposed) as well as the writings circulating under
the name of Hermes Trismegistus confirmed or even informed his
metaphysical monism. Lastly, Plotinus may have been well aware of the
rise of Christianity, but if so, he was not as alarmed by it as his
pupil Porphyry.

In the course of its history in late antiquity, Neoplatonism proved
to be adaptable, fluid and dynamic, much more so than the system of
the Stoics, the dominant philosophy during Hellenistic times. It
appealed to the mundane _literati_ as much as to the religious
zealot, to the die-hard pagan as much as to the up-start Christian who
needed a philosophical background to parse the theological fine points
which would eventually distinguish the orthodox from the
heretic. Important figures of late antique Neoplatonism were the
already mentioned pupil of Plotinus, Porphyry, his pupil Iamblichus,
Plutarch of Athens, Syrianus, Proclus, Simplicius, Damascius, Ammonius
Hermeiou, John Philoponus, Olympiodorus, and Stephanus of Alexandria,
to name but the most important. All of them, in different and fascinating ways,
contributed to the development and internal diversification of the
school’s doctrines. (Some of these philosophers have their own
entries in this encyclopedia; see the Related Entries section
below.)

Importantly, the new direction Plotinus, and presumably Ammonius
Saccas before him, had given to Greek philosophy gradually acquired
traction among the Greco-Roman elites. Ironically, it may have
contributed to the acceptance of Christianity among the educated,
thereby elevating the religious sentiments of the empire’s
misfits and downtrodden to the ideology of a political system
sanctified by the will of god. Evidence for the increasing
Neoplatonization of Christianity is abundant: The brilliant Christian
theologian Origen, some twenty years older than Plotinus, may also
have been a pupil of Ammonius Saccas; the Cappadocian Fathers Basil
and Gregory of Nazianzus spent their youth in philosophical study in
Athens in the 4th century, where they most certainly were
exposed to Neoplatonism, while Augustine of Hippo (354–430) was
intimately familiar with the writings of Plotinus and Porphyry. The
cut-throat debates about transubstantiation (in the Eucharist), the
hypostases of the Trinity, or the divine/human nature of Christ, could
not even be followed without a thorough training in current Greek
philosophical discourse. By the end of the 5th century, the
audience in the philosophical classrooms in Alexandria was
predominantly Christian, and Neoplatonism continued to be taught in
some form or other in Athens, Alexandria, Constantinople, Baghdad,
Mistra, and other pockets of learning until its triumphant revival in
Renaissance Italy.

## 2\. The One

What was it that made the radically top-down idealism of the
Neoplatonists so appealing? Disregarding in this context the
religious-sentimental appeal Neoplatonism undoubtedly must have had
and perhaps still has, its _philosophical_ attractiveness and
significance lies in the fact that it offered a maximum of explanatory
power on the basis of just one metaphysical principle. Even though the
system coheres in such a way that it is possible to approach it from
many angles, it is perhaps best to begin at the top of the ontological
pyramid and to return to the question posed earlier: How is it
possible to explain the world’s emergence from a single divine
principle of consciousness?

It may be useful first to state that the pagan Neoplatonists were
not creationists. That is to say, whatever account they were giving
about the universe’s origin, this narrative was not to be
misunderstood as recounting a creation in time or at the very
beginning of time. Instead, they speculated that the process of the
emergence of the universe from the divine principle, as they conceived
of it (described below), has gone on forever, just as it continues at
this very moment and will continue to do so, sustaining a world
without end. When the general outlook of Neoplatonism was appropriated
and adapted to refine and articulate the creeds of Christianity,
Islam, and Judaism, this feature of the doctrine, and the connected
doctrine of the eternity of the world, would become a vigorously
debated issue.

Second, unlike the ancient theologians of Israel and Egypt, the
Neoplatonists did not think that the universe could spring from the
deity directly and in a way that surpasses all understanding, for
example by being thought and spoken into existence. Their more refined
view was that reality emerged from “the First” in coherent
stages, in such a way that one stage functions as creative principle
of the next.

This kind of emanationist cosmology rests on the tenet—based
to some extent in observation, but elevated by them to the status of a
heuristic principle—that every activity in the world is in some
sense double insofar as it possesses both an inner and an outer
aspect. For example, the inner activity of the sun (nuclear fusion,
as we now know) has the outer effect of heat and light, themselves
activities as well. Or the inner activity of a tree that is determined
by the kind of tree it is (its genetic code, we would now say;
the Neoplatonists spoke of an inherent formative principle,
_logos_) results in the bearing of a particular kind of fruit;
or again, thoughts and feelings internal to human beings express
themselves in speech and actions. In each case, the outer effect is
not the purpose or end of the inner activity; rather, it is simply the
case that one falls out of the other and is concomitant with
it. Furthermore, it is also the case that these outer activities will
typically be productive of yet other outer activities that are
ontologically more remote and derivative: Fruit serves as nourishment
or poison for other individual life forms, and human speech and action
constitute, over time, a person’s biography or a society’s
history. It is important to note that, in all cases, the outer
activity will not be some random affair, but rather something
intimately connected with the inner activity it is an expression
of. In other words, any inner activity will somehow prefigure the
character and nature of its outer effect. Thus, the Neoplatonists
insisted that there is nothing on the lower ontological levels within
the chains of causality that is not somehow prefigured on the
corresponding higher levels. In general, no property emerges unless it
is already in some way preformed and pre-existent in its cause.

As regards the very first principle of reality, conceived of as an
entity that is beyond Being, transcending all physical reality, very
little can actually be said, except that it is absolute
Unity. However, we know empirically of its effect, the entire
universe, and we must therefore suppose that the One is the carrier
of, or rather identical with, a boundless sort of singular activity or
energy. Since it is counterintuitive to suppose that the material
universe leapt into being in its present form directly from this
well-spring of energy, the question arises: what precisely is the
first and primary outer activity of the inner activity of the One?

## 3\. Absolute Consciousness

In accordance with the Platonic-Aristotelian commitment to Mind
over Matter the Neoplatonists’ answer to this question was that
the outer activity and effect of the First must be _nous_, a
difficult and ambiguous concept commonly translated as
“Intellect”. It seems preferable to translate the term
_nous_ in an experientially more concrete and accessible way as
pure and absolute “Consciousness”. According to
Neoplatonic theory, Consciousness would not be some kind of emergent
property of material constituents arranged in a certain way, but
rather be the first effect of the activity of the One, the most
supreme form of reality (since the One was posited to be beyond
Being), a kind of pre-embodied power of cognition as
such. Neoplatonists referred to Consciousness as the second
“Hypostasis”, a term that would have a long and complex
history as it acquired new and related meanings in Christian
contexts. “Hypostasis” is an abstract noun derived from a
verb meaning “to place oneself under or beneath”, with the
connotation of “standing one’s ground”. The word
“hypostasis” therefore denotes a distinct substantial
being or realm of reality of a certain kind which, in the case of
Consciousness, is the derivative outer activity of the first
principle. The term could also be applied to the One as the
“first hypostasis”, in which case the connotation of
subordination would recede into the background.

What, then, is the inner activity of Consciousness? The inherent
task of consciousness is to understand, and understanding entails the
cognition of causes. In trying to understand itself, Consciousness can
only turn towards _its_ origin and thus posit or behold the
First as the transcendent principle of its own reality. As the
Neoplatonists would put it, having emerged from the First,
Consciousness “turns back” towards it in order to
understand the pre-condition of its own existence. Becoming thus aware
of another entity, the originary unity of Consciousness breaks up into
duality, and with it emerge the categories of identity and difference,
of greater and smaller, of number, of change and of rest. In fact, in
a way not fully explained, or perhaps even explicable, the entire
ideal world of Platonic forms and ideas emerges effortlessly in the
course of Consciousness’ effort to understand itself.

Before we move on to discuss the outer effect of this inner
activity of Consciousness, we must correct the common assertion that
what we are dealing with here is a process of
“emanation”. To be sure, Consciousness (or Intellect)
somehow emerges from the activity of the First, but calling this a
process of emanation, with its obviously materialist connotations, is
misleading. The Neoplatonists used the words “procession and
return” ( _prohodos_ and _epistrophê_),
which, as spatial metaphors, are not much better either. And even
though the analogy oftentimes invoked in this context is that of light
radiating out from the sun, this too does not do much to help us grasp
the nature of the Neoplatonic theory of how Consciousness, and by
implication the entire rest of reality, eternally emerges from the
first cause. In essence, there is no process of generation or
production; nothing material or spatial is happening; no agent exerts
its influence on a patient. Although the Neoplatonists followed
Platonic tradition in talking about a demiurge (divine craftsman),
their cosmology has nothing demiurgic about it, as Plotinus rarely
failed to point out. Craftsmen think, forge, labor, arrange, and
coordinate a host of diverse technical operations towards the creation
of some product of their craft. Unlike Plato’s character Timaeus
or the authors of Genesis, Neoplatonic metaphysics has no room for
such crude analogies. In the realm of Consciousness, the activity is
one and constitutes itself as a multiplicity within that unity. In the
identity of the activity of thought with its objects, the
Neoplatonists contended, the ideal world of all forms and ideas came
to be conceptualized. Here again, in an unintentional and effortless
way, this inner active life of Consciousness produces further outer
effect, the Soul.

## 4\. Soul and Nature

According to the second law of thermodynamics, structural and
dispositional diversities present in the inanimate material world
converge towards irreversible entropy and disorder. In the biosphere,
however, we witness a tendency to ever increasing diversification of
natural kinds and species. From a Neoplatonic point of view, this
latter fact is readily explained by the entirely non-Darwinian
supposition of eternal Forms of natural kinds in the hypostasis of
Consciousness which gradually emerge in the world, limited by space
and time, in some sort of evolutionary organic process. As has already
been pointed out, the Neoplatonists assumed as axiomatic that nothing
could come to be here below that is not prefigured paradigmatically in
the intelligible realm.

Although one might think that the phenomenon of evolution militates
against Neoplatonic theory, it is actually compatible with it; to some
degree, it is precisely what we should expect as the empirical upshot
of such metaphysical assumptions. Moreover, in distinction to the
Forms posited in the old Academy of Plato and his immediate
successors, the Forms of the Neoplatonists, far from being mere
schemata, definitions, or ghostly blueprints of the natural world, are
rather noetic entities teeming with conscious life. They actively and
dynamically interrelate in such a way as to constitute a living noetic
cosmos; and it is their rich inner life, the conscious activity of
thoughts that they are, which is ultimately responsible for the
appearance of images of them in space and time to make up the physical
universe and everything contained in it. But this is by no means easy
to understand. How exactly can images of eternal and immutable Forms,
prefigured in Consciousness as such, become manifest in, and in fact
constitute, the material world?

To understand and explain how precisely it is that mind and matter
interact with one another in general is a considerable and perennial
philosophical problem. Approaches to it that start from modern
materialist assumptions have not yielded plausible answers any more
readily than the Neoplatonists’ idealist perspective. Even
though the Neoplatonists afforded it extensive treatment, they,
unsurprisingly, have not satisfactorily explained it either. In a
nutshell, the answer they gave has something to do with their
fundamental understanding of the realm of the psychic. Plotinus in
particular struggled in long and meandering treatises to explicate the
precise functioning of the general phenomenon of what the ancients
called “Soul” ( _psychê_). Soul, a further
hypostasis of being that effortlessly “falls out of” the
inner activity of Consciousness in a similar way as Consciousness
“fell out of” the First, is the link that facilitates the
manifestation of form in matter. Their ingenious speculation about
Soul, understood in its relationship to its cause (pure Consciousness)
on the one hand and its effect (the emergence of the living material
universe) on the other, lies at the heart of Neoplatonism. In a manner
of speaking, Neoplatonism is nothing but a philosophy of the soul, or
“psychology” in the original sense of that word.

In living beings, and human beings in particular, consciousness is
but one psychic activity among others. The realm of the psychic
extends in a continuum from the loftiest processes of knowing, memory,
and imagination down to the most rudimentary forms and expressions of
life that characterize the world’s biosphere (natural processes
of metabolism, growth, etc.). Many influential ancient thinkers, both
philosophers and poets, regarded the universe as a living being, not
only in its parts but also and especially as whole. In the
_Timaeus_, Plato had described in detail the structure and
function of the world soul, and had recounted the way in which it was
put together by a divine craftsman (demiurge) and conjoined with the
realm of disorderly matter, upon which it controlled and imposed
order. Plotinus and his followers had a quite different view. There
is no planning on account of anyone, no “construction” of
one metaphysical entity by another; instead, soul, that is to say the
general phenomenon of life capable of animating matter, is merely the
manifest outer aspect of the inner activity of Consciousness.

The general idea is that Soul, _qua_ outer activity of
Consciousness, looks back at _its_ cause in order to understand
itself so as to truly be what it is. Gazing thus at the forms and
ideas eternally present in Consciousness, it becomes
“informed” by them and carries forward, by some manner of
benevolent necessity, images of the eternal forms into the lower realm
of Being. Giving birth to the entire universe and the biosphere on
earth in this way, one could say that the sum total of the corporeal,
sensible world rests in Soul, not the other way round, that soul
resides in the bodies it animates.

According to Neoplatonic theory, then, the world as we know and
experience it in its formal and structural characteristics is the
outer effect of the activity and life of Consciousness, an activity
that was thought to be mediated “from above” by another,
intermediate metaphysical entity, Soul. The precise ontological status
of Soul as another hypostasis in its own right remains somewhat
underdetermined, for in a manner of speaking Soul is the very process
of expressing the intelligible world in the derivative form of
sensible natural living beings and the lives they live.

The Neoplatonists drew a distinction between “Soul” and
“Nature” ( _phusis_) that amounts to a hierarchical
separation of higher and lower psychical functions. For the
Neoplatonists, “Nature” denotes not only the essence or
nature of each natural being or the entirety of the natural world
(Nature as a whole), but also, and in the first instance, a lower
aspect of conscious life (the “autonomic” life activities
that are not consciously controlled by the individual animal’s
consciousness) which beholds, in a kind of diminished vision, relevant
aspects of the intelligible world and brings them forth in an act of
silent contemplation. Thus, every aspect of the natural world, even
the meanest piece of inorganic and apparently useless matter, has an
eternal and divine moment. For all the other-worldliness often
associated with Neoplatonic philosophy, then, it needs to be
emphasized that the material world they inhabited was for this reason
an essentially good and beautiful place, the effortless product of
cosmic providence and divine power, and worthy of reverence.

## 5\. Matter

Without light, it would not make any sense to speak of darkness. In
fact, there would be no such thing as darkness, since darkness is, if
it is anything, light’s absence and opposite. In the same way as
darkness is a by-product of light, so matter, the Neoplatonists
reasoned, is nothing but a by-product of the dynamic emanation of the
First. In fact, it is the limit at which the energy transmitted in the
chain of inner and outer activities at the various levels of reality
exhausts itself and comes to an end. Just as darkness has no capacity
to make itself visible, in the same way matter no longer has any inner
activity that could give rise to a further outer activity. As such, it
is merely passive, and the eternal process of consecutive production
of ever lower levels of reality necessarily comes to an end. But
importantly for us, it is the realm at which the activity of Soul
informed by Consciousness becomes phenomenal and perceptible. It would
be wrong to say that matter does not exist at all, or is a nothing.
According to this theory, at any rate, matter exists, but not as a
separate ontological principle distinct from the One with effects of
its own. Rather, it is a fringe phenomenon of the life of the soul, a
by-product of the activity of higher realms of Being. As such, it is
no thing, an entirely immaterial and formless non-entity. This
Plotinian doctrine was destined to raise controversy among later
Neoplatonists, when it was proposed that matter should at the very
least have the property of undefined three-dimensionality.

An even more controversial doctrine connected to matter was the
explanation of evil. Plotinus had tried to uphold the view, consistent
with his entire ontology, that at no point in the great chain of Being
coming from above does anything emerge that could be regarded as evil,
or the cause of evil. Nevertheless, evil, and in particular moral
evil, is obviously part of our experience of the world, and an
explanation had to be given as to where it originated. Plotinus’
answer was that evil arises from below, not above, and is intimately
connected with matter. Yet importantly, matter is not an independent
principle of evil in any Manichean or Gnostic sense, as it has no
active power on its own. Rather, evil arises if and when higher
beings, and in particular human beings, direct their attention towards
the material world below, instead of the intelligible world above, and
have an all-encompassing concern for _it_. The regard
downwards, as it were, rather than upwards towards Consciousness and
the divine essences, is what contaminates the soul and renders it
morally evil. Even though it is surprising how much explanatory force
for the nature and existence of moral evil this theory affords, it
remained controversial even among Neoplatonists. Proclus, in the fifth
century, dedicated an entire treatise to repudiating Plotinus on this
point. Proclus abandoned the comforting notion of the essential
goodness of humanity and, not unlike Augustine before him, insisted on
the real possibility of the moral depravity of the human soul
_qua_ soul.

## 6\. Ethics

As human beings we are, with our bodies, part of the material
world; but importantly, we are living organisms that can place
ourselves in opposition to the needs and concerns of the body and
reflect upon our own condition. Nothing just material would be able do
that, according to the Neoplatonists, and therefore we have what the
ancients called a “soul”. Moreover, our souls operate on a
level of consciousness and intelligence that surpasses the cognition
of all other creatures. Finally, just as everything else that has
being, we are individual units and participate, again, as the
Neoplatonists would express it, in the form of Unity.

Looked at from this point of view, human existence is a striking
representation of the cosmos as a whole, a microcosm in which all
levels of being (Unity, Consciousness, Soul, Nature, Matter) are
combined into one organic individual. The Neoplatonists took this to
be a clear indication that we, just like the entire cosmic edifice,
“came from above”. A human being is therefore in the first
instance not a social or political being, but a divine being, and
life’s purpose was seen not so much in the exercise and
rehearsal of the traditional virtues that give meaning and quality to
our interaction with others, but in seeking “to bring back the
god in us to the divine in the All”, as Plotinus pressed upon
his followers on the very point of his death (Porphyry, _Life of_
_Plotinus_ 2).

Neoplatonic ethics recognizes the social importance and value of
the so-called cardinal virtues (justice, prudence, temperance, and
courage), but the virtues’ main function lies in purifying and
preparing us for a much more momentous individual relationship, that
with divine Consciousness and, ultimately, the first principle itself.
Necessarily, then, the moral precepts of the Neoplatonists concern the
individual person, the goal being not the mundane fulfillment of life
within the bounds of what is humanly possible, but nothing less than
_eudaimonia_ in its most expansive sense, deification.
Unsurprisingly, the route to salvation turned out to be the
philosophic life, a sincere and arduous effort of the mind to return
to the One and forever abrogate any concerns for the body. It was on
this basis that the Neoplatonists would most vehemently protest
against the latter-day Christian dogma that human salvation has
already been accomplished vicariously through the life and death of a
man revered as the son of god.

## 7\. Later Developments in Antiquity

At a time when the considered wisdom of Greece and Rome came under
increasing pressure to re-articulate its commitments in the face of
waves of novel movements that lay claim to revelatory truth, the
Neoplatonists too strove to refine their teachings and to delineate
the metaphysical architecture of the world as they saw it. No longer
would it suffice to hold forth on philosophical issues, as Plato,
Cicero, and to some extent Plotinus had done, in a serious yet
exploratory and protreptic spirit. In order to be heard in an
increasingly competitive marketplace of ideas teeming with holy men of
every kind and temperament, views had to be laid out clearly and in
systematic fashion. In some of its later manifestations, like Stoicism
and Epicureanism before it, Neoplatonism drifted towards scholasticism
and reveled in dogmatic system building.

Along the way, all kinds of refinements and modifications of
nomenclature were introduced. Distinctions were drawn up within the
hypostases of Consciousness and Soul in order to try to articulate the
transitions from one level of Being to another. An entire industry of
teaching and commenting sprang up to interpret a millennium of
Hellenic philosophy in the light of the core commitments of
Neoplatonism. Certain philosophic predecessors were elevated to the
status of nearly infallible authorities, and the texts of Plato and
Aristotle were comprehensively read, diligently analyzed, and
ruthlessly harmonized. Finally, in an effort to stem the rising tide
of all kinds of new salvation-peddling cults then inundating the Roman
Empire, the ancient religious traditions of the Greeks and especially
the Egyptians were brought into the fold and given new significance
and meaning. But after the untimely death of Emperor Julian (363), a
Neoplatonist himself, none of these efforts could any longer withstand
the tidal wave of Christendom.

The most vigorous group of Neoplatonists, living in Athens and
still adhering to the old rituals, disbanded in the aftermath of
Emperor Justinian’s legislation of 529, which resulted in the
closing of the Platonist academy. Hellenic philosophy and the teaching
of its attendant disciplines went on in Alexandria and Constantinople
until the end of the 6th century, but were now being taught
by people who had either embraced or otherwise come to terms with the
new religion. The Arab conquest in the 7th century
obliterated and appropriated in equal measure, but the real revival of
Neoplatonism occurred when humanists made the treasures of late
antique Greece available to the Renaissance intelligentsia of Italy,
France, and Germany.

## 8\. Influence

It is an undeniable fact, although nowadays rarely acknowledged, that
the general outlook and the principal doctrines of the Neoplatonists
proved exceedingly influential throughout the entire history of
western philosophy. Through Augustine (354–430) in the West and
the 4th-century Cappadocian Fathers (Basil, Gregory of
Nyssa, Gregory of Nazianzus) in the East as well as the
pseudo-epigraphic writings of Dionysius the Areopagite (early
6th century), Neoplatonism profoundly influenced the
emergence of mainstream and not so mainstream Christian theology (John
Scotus Eriugena, Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, Meister Eckhart). In
addition, by way of a pseudo-epigraphical treatise
entitled _Theology of Aristotle_, Neoplatonic thought
facilitated the integration of ancient philosophy and science into
both Islam (especially through Al-Kindi, Al-Farabi and Avicenna \[Ibn
Sina\]) and Judaism (Maimonides).

During the Renaissance, ancient Greek learning, and Neoplatonism in
particular, experienced a dramatic revival in the West in the wake of
the work of Gemistus Plethon (1355–1452), Bessarion
(1403–1472) and, above all, Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499),
whose translation and interpretation of Plato and Plotinus in the
second half of the 15th century influenced not only the
philosophy, but also the art and literature of the period. It may even
be true to say that even more than the writings of Plato and Aristotle
themselves Neoplatonic ideas have continued to influence Western
thinkers of the idealist persuasion, such as the Cambridge Platonists
(who were really Neoplatonists), Leibniz, Hegel, Schelling, Fichte,
Bergson and Teilhard de Chardin, to name but a few.

The history of Neoplatonism until the present day is much too
diverse and complex to be done justice to in an introductory article
such as this. In spite of the ubiquity of proponents of this developed
form of Platonism in all historical periods of western philosophy
since late antiquity, today Neoplatonism has acquired the reputation
of being speculative and abstract to a fault. Modern philosophical
commitments to empiricism, logical positivism, and the analysis of
language have not helped much to arrive at a judicious evaluation of
the movement, its strengths and its weaknesses, and the dramatic
scientific discoveries of contemporary bottom-up materialism tend to
deter students from even attempting to find their way into the world
of Neoplatonism. Perhaps another reason that this kind of thinking
strikes the general public as arcane and alien may be that the Abrahamic
religions, even if they too posit a single divine principle as the
source of all being, conceive of this principle as a person and maker.
This vestige of pre-philosophical anthropomorphism bypasses the
difficult questions that the last pagan thinkers so arduously
struggled to answer when they sought to explain the existence of the
diverse and complex physical world from a non-material principle that
they assumed to be nothing but One.

## Bibliography

### Essential readings of late-antique Neoplatonic Works

- Plotinus, _Enneads_
- ––– I 1 ( _What is the Living Being and what_
_is Man?_)
- ––– I 2 ( _On Virtues_)
- ––– I 4 ( _On Well-Being_)
- ––– I 6 ( _On Beauty_)
- ––– I 8 ( _What is Evil and Where Does it Come_
_From?_)
- ––– II 4 ( _On Matter_)
- ––– III 8 ( _On Nature and_
_Contemplation_)
- ––– IV 8 ( _On the Descent of the Soul in_
_Bodies_)
- ––– V 1 ( _On the Three Primary_
_Hypostases_)
- ––– V 9 ( _On Intellect, The Forms, and_
_Being_)
- ––– VI 8 ( _On Free Will and the Will of the_
_One_)
- Porphyry, _Life of Plotinus_
- –––, _Isagoge_
- –––, _On Abstinence_
- Iamblichus, _On the Egyptian Mysteries_
- Proclus, _Elements of Theology_
- Marinus, _Life of Proclus_
- Damascius, _Life of Isidore_
- Simplicius, _Commentary on Epictetus’ Handbook_
- John Philoponus, _On the Eternity of the World against_
_Proclus_

For further and more detailed information on the development of
Neoplatonism in the history of Western philosophy, or on specific
Neoplatonic doctrines, refer to the Related Entries section below.

### Selected Introductory Secondary Literature

- Chiaradonna, Riccardo and Franco Trabattoni (eds.), 2009,
_Physics and Philosophy of Nature in Greek Neoplatonism_,
Leiden and Boston: Brill.
- Cooper, John M., 2012, _Pursuits of Wisdom: Six Ways of Life in_
_Ancient Philosophy from Socrates to Plotinus_, Princeton NJ:
Princeton University Press, Ch. 6.
- Emilsson, Eyjolfur Kjalar, 1988, _Plotinus on Sense-Perception:_
_A Philosophical Study_, Cambridge (England) and New York, NY:
Cambridge University Press.
- Gerson, Lloyd P., 1994, _Plotinus_, London and New York:
Routledge.
- ––– (ed.), 1996, _The Cambridge Companion to_
_Plotinus_, Cambridge (England) and New York, NY: Cambridge
University Press.
- Gerson, Lloyd P. (ed.), 2010, _The Cambridge History of_
_Philosophy in Late Antiquity_, 2 vols., Cambridge (England) and
New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
- O’Meara, Dominic J., 1993, _Plotinus: An Introduction to_
_the Enneads_, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.
- Remes, Pauliina and Svetla Slaveva-Griffin (eds.), 2014, _The_
_Routledge Handbook of Neoplatonism_, London and New York:
Routledge.
- Smith, Andrew, 2004, _Philosophy in Late Antiquity_, London
and New York: Routledge.
- Wallis, Richard T., 1995, _Neoplatonism_, with a foreword
and bibliography by Lloyd P. Gerson, 2nd edition, London:
Duckworth and Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company.
- Wilberding, James and Christoph Horn (eds.), 2012,
_Neoplatonism and the Philosophy of Nature_, Oxford: Oxford
University Press.

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## Other Internet Resources

- [Enneads](http://classics.mit.edu/Plotinus/enneads.html),
translated by Stephen Mackenna and B. S. Page.
- [Porphyry's _Isagoge_](http://www.tertullian.org/fathers/porphyry_isagogue_02_translation.htm), translated by Octavius Freire Owen, hosted
at The Tertulian Project.

## Related Entries

[al-Farabi](../al-farabi/) \|
[al-Kindi](../al-kindi/) \|
[Ammonius](../ammonius/) \|
[Augustine of Hippo](../augustine/) \|
Damascius \|
[Iamblichus](../iamblichus/) \|
[Ibn Sina \[Avicenna\]](../ibn-sina/) \|
[Maimonides](../maimonides/) \|
Neoplatonism: in the Renaissance \|
[Olympiodorus](../olympiodorus/) \|
[Origen](../origen/) \|
[Philoponus](../philoponus/) \|
[Plotinus](../plotinus/) \|
[Plutarch](../plutarch/) \|
[Porphyry](../porphyry/) \|
[Proclus](../proclus/) \|
[Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite](../pseudo-dionysius-areopagite/) \|
[Simplicius](../simplicius/) \|
Stephanus of Alexandria \|
[Syrianus](../syrianus/) \|
[Theology of Aristotle](../theology-aristotle/)

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