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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 July 2023
IN THIS CHAPTER WE leave Epicurus’s tranquil garden, where questioning was necessary only as therapy for the fear of death. While fast-forwarding 500 years, we return to the restless philosophy of Platonism, which asks beyond the visible world for the eternal answers given by the true world. Our philosopher is Plotinus (204–270 CE), who was the main source of the revival of Plato’s thought in the third century after Christ – namely of Neoplatonism (neo means new). We are now in the autumn years of ancient philosophy, which had to give way to Christianity from 529 CE, when the Roman Emperor Justinian outlawed the teaching of pagan philosophy.
The question asked in this chapter is whether the search for timeless answers to philosophical questions must lead to otherworldliness. Will philosophers always have their heads in the clouds? After all, if our world is (or at least appears to be) a world of change, then the idea of a world without change points us elsewhere, away from our world. In fact, things are not so simple. As we shall see when we explore Plotinus’s response to the extreme otherworldliness of Gnosticism, Neoplatonism sought for ways to affirm both what does not change as well as our world of change. Plotinus shows that not only does what changes depend on what does not change, but even timeless truths would be nothing without those transient, temporal things that refer to them. Although Plotinus for his part did not accept the Christian doctrine of incarnation, of God becoming flesh, in many ways Christianity was able to think incarnation thanks to Plotinus’s notion that higher things could not be higher without that which is lowly as their counterpart. What would heavenly mean without that which is worldly?
For his part, Plotinus saw his questions as being the same as Plato’s 600 years before him, and his answers to be faithfully Platonic, too. Yet while Plato’s ‘world’ of ideas, as we saw earlier, is only metaphorically a separate world, Neoplatonism has the reputation of being much more otherworldly.
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