Plotinus

PLOTINUS. - Greek philosopher, b. at Lycopolis (Egypt) in 205 A.D. A disciple, for eleven years, of Ammonius Saccas in Alexandria, he followed the emperor Gordian III in the unfortunate expedition against the Persians with the intention of coming to know Eastern thought. In 245 he founded a school at Rome, where he had as disciples Amelius and Porphyry (v.), who published, after 300, the master's six Enneads. He died in Campania in 270.

With P. Greek thought gathers into a brilliant synthesis the Platonic, Aristotelian and Stoic speculation and, orienting it, under the influence of Neopythagoreanism, Hermetism and the Jewish-Alexandrian school, toward religious values, accomplishes the fusion of rationalistic demands with the claims of mystical experience. The monistic demand dominates the Plotinian system, but without annulling the reality of distinctions: the Principle is not only the ineffable One (Ἐν ἄρρητον) of which one can say only what it is not (negative theology), but is the first source of being, of thought, of soul, of life. The One is the Good and its generating power is infinite and inexhaustible (Ενν., V, 5, 11): from the One emanates the eternal Intelligence (Νοῦς), in which the otherness between Thought and Thought-being implies a multiplicity of ideal essences that constitute an immobile and timeless unity (ἐν πολλὰ: ibid., IV, 8, 3; V, 9, 8); from the Intelligence emanates the universal Soul (Ἑναχή), source of movement and of life, which in itself includes the many individual souls and projects its generating power into a sensible world placed in time and space; phenomenal appearances, subject to an incessant becoming, are the extreme offshoot of that multiplicity which, the further it withdraws from the One, the more it disperses and degrades itself (ibid., III, 8, 8). Matter is non-being, the negative term of divine generation, the place of sensible appearances, the limit-concept of thought, the principle of divisibility and of evil (ibid., I, 8, 3; II, 4, 8; III, 6, 15; II, 4, 5). Multiplicity, an expression of vital richness and at the same time of dangerous dispersion, is absent in the One, which is absolute simplicity and the original source of the multiple; it is a richness of ideas in the unity of the noetic world; it is a complexity of individual souls in the universal Soul; it is a fecundity of seminal reasons in the single individual soul; it is a fluidity of sensations and qualities in time and space. The inferior is an image of the superior, on which it depends and to which it leads back. One, Intelligence, Soul are the three hypostases (the "Plotinian trinity") that determine the three substantial planes of reality, coordinated among themselves by a bond of dependence and subordination. The Intelligence generates insofar as it contemplates the One; the Soul generates insofar as it contemplates the Intelligence: every life is a thought more or less clear and conscious (ibid., III, 8, 8).

In this universe of eternally immobile entities that do not know the life of history and whose correlation constitutes one of the gravest aporias of Plotinism, the soul of man bears the dramatic tone of its individual existence, poised between the limits of truth and error, of redemption and perdition, of ineffable joy and irrational anguish. Its free option transforms the metaphysical hypostases into values of the intelligence and of the will, freeing itself at the same time from the constraints of empirical individuality; or else it resolves into terms of spiritual life, that is, into guilt, error and pain, the realm of sensations and of lower nature. The process from the One to the multiple is necessary and involuntary (ibid., III, 5, 3; V, 2, 2); the return from the multiple to the One is the work of the soul's free initiative, to whose will is open the possibility of inserting itself into the order of metaphysical values or of plunging into the whirlpool of passions or of appearances (ibid., III, 8, 6; VI, 9, 7). And the return (ἐπιστροφή: ibid., I, 3) is possible only on condition that the sensible be an image of the intelligible and that the soul, which must depart from empirical immediacy, recognize that affinity and that likeness. Its return is the reconquest of its own interiority and the discovery, within it, of the eternal hypostases. Art, love, dialectic, virtue are the ways of the return (ibid., I, 3; I, 6, 5; II, 9, 16): values that are realized in the human world and form, through man's work, the history of civilization and of culture; the only authentic history, for P., whose task is the conquest of the Universal and the establishment of the Eternal in time, that is, the annulment of historicity understood as infinite renewal. Art is the revealer of the Beautiful, and the Beautiful is the Ideal, free of every sensible and passionate element and the object of pure intuition (ibid., I, 6, 5-7; V, 8, 8). Its function is cathartic and theoretical. The artist does not imitate particular things as such, but intuits the eternal in the phenomenon and suggests it through expressive means (ibid., V, 8, 1): his creating in time and space is the extreme continuation of the generating activity of the One, but his spiritual value consists in making the inevitable means of sensible expression perform an initiatory and suggestive function.

Art, if it is a spiritual act, cannot resolve itself into pure visibility: the artistic work, as revelation of the Idea, is the object of an entirely interior and intellective intuition: its function therefore concludes in a theoretical act, freeing the soul from the irrationality of sensations and leading it back into the region of pure Intelligence (ibid., I, 6, 1; V, 8, 9). Love too (ἔρας), though it is born from the charm of beautiful appearances, can be a way of the return; its initial affectivity is gradually purified according as thought illuminates its object and clarifies its metaphysical conditions. But love too, far from establishing on earth the kingdom of human solidarity, concludes in a contemplative act in which both the lover and the beloved are stripped of their individuality and identified in the universality of the idea (ibid., III, 4, 3; III, 5, 4). Beauty and love are therefore beginnings toward truth only insofar as the λόγος accompanies them and transforms into full rational recognition what was merely ineffable aspiration or vague presentiment. In dialectic the extra-rational elements, present in art and in love, disappear: thought finds itself there in its authentic purity and rediscovers, by means of discursive inquiry, what is beyond discursiveness: the immobile unity of the noetic cosmos; the eternal Being which, though articulating itself in the multiplicity of ideas, preserves its spiritual simplicity; the fixity of the divine Intelligence, which possesses everything insofar as it is everything (τὸ αὐτὸ νοεῖν καὶ εἶναι: ibid., V, 1, 8; I, 3, 4-5). Dialectic unfolds and decomposes the elements, in themselves indissoluble, of the Truth that is one, but in order to recompose them into unity and to comprehend their intimate unitary structure: if it does not succeed in leading us back to the absolute One, since the One surpasses thought and therefore escapes it, it nevertheless succeeds in knowing that unity which alone is granted to the intuition of human thought and which is the authentic preparation for the ineffable One.

Moral activity, in this return of the soul, is not so much a new way as rather the condition of all the ways: catharsis frees the artist's gaze from the dross of practicality and renders it pure intuition; it redeems love from the sexual yoke and makes it clear-sighted; it frees thought from the attractions of the sensible and matures it for the knowledge of the invisible (ibid., V, 3, 17; I, 2, 4). But the One is beyond thought, because it is prior to the Intelligence; art, love, dialectic, the virtues do not reach it insofar as they maintain the otherness of relations. Only in "ecstasy" does the soul become one with the One (μόνος πρὸς μόνον: ibid., VI, 9, 11); and ecstasy is an ineffable act which, however much it may be prepared by the individual's work in attaining cultural values, is nonetheless an unexpected gift: here the soul frees itself from the spatiotemporal limits of individuality and gathers itself entirely into its "center" to savor a joy without name. In ecstasy P., as if disillusioned by the vain presumptions of the λόγος, celebrates the secret impulse of Life; but it must be remembered that that abyssal One, in which the soul sometimes loses itself, is also the first source of thought, of being, of reason, of the λόγος; and that no absurd diaphragm separates the ineffable from the effable, the Divine from the human. Ecstasy does not contradict the authority of thought, but reaffirms, on the plane of life, the conclusions that thought has expressed about its own limits and its own conditions. Nor is it an arrest of life and activity, since from it the soul draws that unitary sense which it then carries among men and which inspires wise laws and just actions. Plotinian mysticism, whose pantheistic accent is suggested more by the literary expressions used to describe the mystical union than by its doctrinal foundations, is therefore not the last word of his message, but one of the many aspects of his thought, intended to interpret the complex manifestations of life and of the Spirit.

The influence of Plotinism has been among the deepest in the history of philosophy. In Greek and Latin patristics the essential motifs of its theology contributed to the speculative framing of the new philosophical-religious problems and to setting in motion a theocentric conception of the world. Through the works of Pseudo-Dionysius (v.), the Liber de causis, the pseudo Theologia Aristotelis, even scholasticism underwent its influence, and not only in the speculative mysticism that runs from Scotus Eriugena (v.) to Master Eckhart (v.). The renewed concept of man and of his spiritual destiny draws, in the Renaissance, from P., whose motifs had by then definitively fused with what is customarily designated as Renaissance Platonism (v.). Almost absent in the Enlightenment era (but Leibniz, Berkeley, the Cambridge school are not strangers to him), Plotinism revives in the Romantic movement, which rediscovers in it the pantheistic sense of the world, the continuity and connection of all beings, the analogical relation between the visible and the spiritual and the consequent poetic symbolism. The idealism of Schelling (v.) and of Hegel (v.), the aestheticism of Schopenhauer (v.) not infrequently appeal to it. Still alive today in not a few of its inspiring motifs (in Bergsonian intuitionism, in the neo-Hegelianism of Bosanquet, in Royce, in Martinetti...), it is the object of extensive investigations, which testify to the perennial vitality of its message.

Giuseppe Faggin