It may seem odd to attach the most celebrated pagan philosopher of the third century to a chapter on Christianity but, as noted above, Christian theology as it emerged was always linked to the Platonic concept of a world beyond the material that held far greater value than this one. Like Middle Platonism, Neoplatonism is an artificial term, only created in the nineteenth century to define the later developments in the Platonic tradition. It has as its greatest figure Plotinus. Plotinus (20570) was a Greek born in Egypt where he had easy access to the works of not only Plato but also Pythagoras, Aristotle, and the Stoics. If this was not enough, he hoped to travel eastwards to study Indian philosophy (but never made it). He finally made his life in Rome where he practised as a philosopher whose teaching was open to all but was naturally most appreciated by the educated elite of the city. It was one of his devoted students, Porphyry, who recorded his life and brought together his works (publishing the Enneads, treatises ‘arranged in sets of nine’—six of these, making fifty-four treatises in total—in 301).
Platonism had always been a hierarchy of ideas with the soul progressing upwards through the exercise of rational thought to higher levels of understanding. Plotinus breathed new vigour into this tradition, now some 600 years old. Although he may not have seen himself as an original thinker but simply as a traditional Pla-tonist. Plotinus defined a hierarchy of ‘Soul, ‘Intellect, and ‘The One’ more coherently than earlier Platonists. Every living being, including plants, had a soul which, Plotinus argued, had a natural desire to reach for further understanding. In fact the highest form of being consisted in rejecting earthly desires in order to reach towards ‘Intellect’. So there is a strong ascetic streak in Neoplatonism as well as a stress on the need for introspection. Plotinus was also typical of pagans of his time in turning away from traditional rituals, such as sacrifice, as a means of reaching the divine.
The ‘Intellect’ is composed of all the Platonic Forms or Ideas but represents a reduction of the complexity of the material world. Therefore, reaching the state of ‘Intellect’, and seeing all the Forms as a whole in relation to each other, is achieving a form of peace and understanding. But one can move further beyond this to ‘the One’. ‘The One’ is the first principle existing as of and within itself without any explanation for its being. It is a peak of the hierarchy and within it all the complexities of the lower stages of the hierarchy are resolved. Yet at the same time it is the ultimate source of the complexity of the world and so its presence also emanates downwards but without diminishing itself, in the same way, Plotinus tells us, that the Sun continuously emanates light without actually doing anything beyond existing as it is. Grasping the uniqueness of ‘The One’ is a mystical experience in itself. As Plotinus put it: ‘When in this state the soul would exchange its present state for nothing in the world, though it were offered the kingdom of all the heavens; for this is “the One” and there is nothing better. Porphyry says that Plotinus attained this higher state four times during the time he knew him. However, Plotinus argued that ultimately ‘the One’ was unknowable and perhaps might more easily be described in terms of what it was not.
So where does Platonism fit within the Christian tradition, especially when Porphyry later attacked Christianity so powerfully that his works were suppressed by the church? Plotinus, like his Platonic predecessors, had no need for an individual such as Jesus Christ to mediate between the earthly searcher and the ultimate non-material truths. The view that Jesus the Son was subordinate to God the Father, as in Arianism (see below, p. 604), might possibly have been reconcilable with Neo-platonist hierarchies but when Arianism/subordinationism was condemned in the fourth century (see below, p. 615) this avenue was closed. One has to explore the moments when Christianity came into contact with Neoplatonism to see what other possibilities there were.
By the 350s Neoplatonism had pervaded the schools of Athens and it was here that some of the church fathers encountered Plotinus’ works. Gregory of Nyssa, one of the most sophisticated theologians of the period (see below, p. 615), was already drawn to a mystical approach to the experience of God and seems to have absorbed Plotinus’ concept of an ultimate experience with ‘the One’ or, in Christian terminology, ‘God’. Plotinus’ belief that, ultimately, God is unknowable was developed by pseudo-Dionysius (see below, p. 667). in what is known as apophatic theology, the theology that describes God in terms of what he is not.
Plotinus was more immediately influential in Milan, by the 380s the most important city in the western empire. Here his works penetrated through Marius Vic-torinus, a bilingual rhetorician, who made the first Latin translations. Ambrose, the bishop of Milan, cites Plotinus in his works but it was the theologian Augustine who went further in reading several works of Plotinus (it is disputed which ones) as he made his intellectual journey from Platonism to Christianity. Through Plotinus Augustine appears to have absorbed the importance of the eternity of ‘the One’, thus God, the need to look inwards to find God, and the belief that all things exist only insofar as they derive their existence from God. Where Augustine disagreed with Plotinus was on the perfect nature of the soul. For Augustine the soul was fallen (through ‘original sin, see p. 625) and only through the example of Christ and the grace of God could it be made whole. Despite this disagreement, it was through Plotinus’ Platonism that Augustine came to recognize that Platonic thinking was instrumental by providing a path towards Christianity and contributing intellectual backbone for much of Christian belief. It was largely through the authority of Augustine that Platonism remained influential in western Christianity.
World History
