17 - Plotinus

Summary

LIFE AND WRITINGS

Among the philosophers of late antiquity Plotinus stands out as a thinker of exceptional depth, subtlety, originality and power. His value was recognized already in his time by a leading critic in Athens, Longinus. Somewhat more than a century later, in the Latin West, Augustine praised Plotinus as a Plato revived and Eunapius testified to the veneration for Plotinus among Platonists in the Greek East. Some decades later, in Athens, Proclus devoted a commentary to Plotinus’ work, a treatment he normally reserved for the highest philosophical authorities, such as Plato. But Plotinus was also something of an outsider. He taught in Rome, in a group that gathered around him, not in a school in one of the major cities for philosophical studies, Athens and Alexandria. He was criticized by Athenian professors. His group dispersed before his death and the strong school traditions which developed in Athens and Alexandria in the fifth and sixth centuries had other roots. Yet even if standing outside the educational institutions of late-antique philosophy, Plotinus’ work provided this philosophy with fundamental ideas, in the absence of which, and despite various doctrinal differences, late-antique Platonism is hardly conceivable (see below, 2(e)). This impact was made possible in large part by the mediation of Plotinus’ pupil Porphyry. Since it is through Porphyry that we have almost all of what we know of Plotinus’ life and of what we have of his work, we might begin by considering the manner in which Porphyry conveyed to us the life and works of his teacher.