Neoplatonism

At the head of the Neoplatonic scheme is the One, which is not a being among beings and not, strictly, describable at all. It is beyond being, beyond thought and beyond number, and Plotinus writes about it chiefly by denial: it is not this, not that, not divided, not in motion. It is also identified with the Good, because everything seeks it. The apparent contradiction of writing at length about what cannot be described is one the tradition acknowledged and treated as unavoidable.

From the One proceeds everything else, and the usual term for the process is emanation. The point of the word is that it is not a decision, not a making, and not an event in time. The One does not choose to create and loses nothing by the procession, in the way that a source is not diminished by what flows from it. This distinguishes the scheme sharply from the biblical account of creation, and the difference became important later, when Christian and Islamic thinkers borrowed the machinery while insisting on a creating will.

Below the One stand two further hypostases. The first is Nous, intellect, in which thought and its object are identical and in which the Platonic Forms exist; this is the level of genuine being and of eternal, non-discursive knowing. The second is Soul, which thinks in sequence rather than all at once and which, facing downward, produces and orders the physical world. Nature and matter follow, matter being the furthest point of the procession and effectively a privation, not an evil substance, in Plotinus, but the absence at which the outflow gives out.

Every level both proceeds from what is above it and turns back toward it, and this double motion of procession and return is the structural principle of the whole system. Proclus formalised it as a triad of remaining, procession and reversion, and made it the engine of a metaphysics worked out in extraordinary detail.

The human soul occupies an unusual position. It belongs to the level of Soul but is present in a body, and Plotinus held that some part of every soul never descends and remains in contemplation above. That claim was rejected by Iamblichus and by most of the later tradition, and the disagreement matters, because it settles whether a human being can ascend by thinking alone.

Neoplatonism is not a description of the universe offered for its own sake. It is a map for getting back, and the return is the point of the system.

The path begins with ethics. Porphyry set out a scale of virtues that later became standard: civic virtues that moderate the passions, purificatory virtues that detach the soul from the body, contemplative virtues belonging to intellect, and paradigmatic virtues belonging to the level of the Forms themselves. Ordinary decent conduct is the lowest rung, genuinely required but not the goal. Above it the aim is progressive detachment, then contemplation, and finally a union with the One that Plotinus describes as rare, brief and beyond thought. Porphyry reports that his teacher attained it four times in the years they were together, and that he himself had done so once.

The great internal dispute concerns whether contemplation is enough. Iamblichus argued that it is not. On his view the human soul descends completely, retains no part above, and cannot therefore lift itself by its own intellectual effort; what is required is theurgy, divine work, meaning ritual acts using material things (stones, plants, sounds, images, names), that carry a correspondence to the divine levels and through which the gods act upon the soul. The gods do the work; the practitioner supplies the receptacle. Iamblichus insisted this was not magic aimed at compelling the divine but its opposite, and the distinction mattered to him.

Porphyry had been sceptical, and Plotinus is famously reported to have declined to attend rituals on the ground that the gods should come to him. Iamblichus won the argument in practice. Later Neoplatonism, including the school at Athens, was thoroughly theurgic, and Proclus composed hymns, observed cult and wrote on the sacred art of correspondences.

This is why late Neoplatonism looks like a religion as well as a philosophy. It had a doctrine of salvation, a ritual practice, sacred texts including the Chaldean Oracles and the Orphic poems, and a defence of traditional Greek and Egyptian cult as the outward form of a philosophical truth. The emperor Julian's attempt to restore paganism drew directly on this synthesis, and its collapse after his death in 363 removed the movement's only prospect of state support.

Neoplatonism outlived its schools by being absorbed into the traditions that displaced it, and its vocabulary is now embedded in places where its name is never mentioned.

In Christianity the transmission runs through two channels. Augustine read Latin translations of Platonic books before his conversion and credited them with freeing him from materialism, and his account of evil as a privation rather than a substance is Plotinian in structure. The second channel is the corpus circulated under the name of Dionysius the Areopagite, the Athenian convert of Acts, now generally dated to around 500 CE. Whoever the author was, he was deeply read in Proclus, and his works transmitted the negative theology, the celestial hierarchies and the language of mystical ascent into Greek and Latin Christianity as though on apostolic authority. Aquinas commented on him; the medieval mystical tradition is unimaginable without him.

In the Islamic world the transmission was partly accidental. An Arabic paraphrase of parts of the Enneads circulated as the Theology of Aristotle, and a compilation drawn from Proclus circulated as the Book of Causes. Both were taken to be Aristotle's, with the result that the Aristotle received in Arabic philosophy, and then in Latin translation from it, arrived carrying a Neoplatonic metaphysics of emanation. Al-Farabi and Ibn Sina built on it; the Latin schoolmen inherited the same mixture, and separating Aristotle from it became a project in itself.

Jewish philosophy absorbed the same currents, visible in Ibn Gabirol and in the structures of Kabbalah, where a series of graded emanations from an unknowable source is the organising idea.

The Renaissance recovered the originals. Marsilio Ficino translated the whole of Plato and then Plotinus into Latin in the later fifteenth century under Medici patronage, and read them as part of a single ancient wisdom running through Hermes Trismegistus, Orpheus and Pythagoras, a chronology that Isaac Casaubon would demolish in 1614. From Ficino the tradition passed to Pico della Mirandola, to Bruno, to the Cambridge Platonists, to Coleridge and the Romantics, and into modern esotericism, where the emanationist scheme and the language of ascent remain in use.