Opening

One wrote nothing, another got famous after being published.

Neo-Platonism began with Ammonius Saccas (first half of the 200s AD). He had been brought up as a Christian, studied Plato and developed his own kind of Platonic philosophy.

And he wrote nothing.

His philosophy is known only through his famous disciple, Plotinus, who did not publish anything either. (EB, "Neo-Platonism")

Roots and traces

Plotinus

Neo-Platonism began as a complex thinking enterprise (philosophy). In some ways it was ambiguous. It developed into many and varied forms over a long period. But its leading ideas seem to have included later doctrines of Plato, especially those in the Timaeus, which goes into things the ancient Athenian law-giver Solon was told in Egypt, in the district of Sais (Sau, Zau). Other elements of ancient mystical thinking are also traced in Neo-Platonism.

Ammonius Saccas

Neo-Platonism began with Ammonius Saccas (first half of the 200s CE). He had been brought up as a Christian, studied Plato and developed his own kind of Platonic philosophy. He wrote nothing.

Ammonius is called "the most mysterious figure in the history of ancient philosophy". It is not quite certain he was a lapsed Christian (cf. above). He may also have been the philosophical master of the great Christian theologian Origen. Exactly what he had to offer his pupils apart from what looks like commonplace Platonic thinking, is not known, but the grand aim of thinkers at the time was the ultimate liberation of the spirit.

Plotinus

Neo-Platonism was developed in the 200s CE by the Hellenistic thinker Plotinus (c. 204–70 CE). He was born in Egypt and lived in Rome from 244 CE. The theories of Plotinus were at bottom like those of Plato but included elements of other Greek philosophies. Although Plotinus is the central figure of Neo-Platonism, his teacher, Ammonius Saccas, who was a self-taught labourer of Alexandria, could have been the actual founder.

When Plotinus was 27, he wanted to study philosophy and went to Alexandria. He attended the lectures of the most eminent professors there at the time. They reduced him to a state of complete depression. Then a friend took him to hear the self-taught philosopher Ammonius "Saccas." When he had heard Ammonius speak, Plotinus said, "This is the man I was looking for," and stayed with him for 11 years.

Plotinus (204–270 CE) did not publish anything either. He is still considered a major philosopher of the ancient world, as writings were edited by his disciple Porphyry and published many years after Plotinus' death, in six sets of nine treatises each (the Enneads). The philosophy of Plotinus is known only through this disciple.

Plotinus wrote the essays that became the Enneads over a period of several years from ca. 253 until a few months before his death seventeen years later. It was around 270 CE that his main work was collected and published by his student Porphyry, a Phoenician. Porphyry's edition does not follow the chronological order in which Enneads were written.

Visions

The major, extant Neo-Platonist work is called the Enneads. Porphyry, living in Rome, made skilled use of allegory in expounding Plotinus' rationalistic thought. Apart from editing and arranging the Enneads into six groups with nine treatises in each of them (put down in writing after 253 CE), Porphyry wrote lives of Pythagoras and of Plotinus.

Many philosophical elements in the Enneads came from earlier philosophies; the existence of the Incomprehensible One, or to hen, and the attendant theory of ideas were parts of later writings of Plato. Distinctive in Plotinus' system was the unified, hierarchical structuring of these elements and the theory of emanation.

Plotinus saw reality as a vast hierarchical order containing all levels and kinds of existence. At "bottom" is to hen, which is taken to remain incomprehensible - an all-sufficient unity that flows out in a radiating process called emanation. Thus it keeps giving rise to the Divine Mind, or Logos. The Logos contains all intelligent forms of all individuals. This in turn generates the World Soul, which links the intellectual and material worlds. What is in the Divine Mind, as he saw it, constitutes a multiple reflection of the unitary perfection of to hen.

Developments

Plotinus' method was peculiarly rational, he was skilled in logical traditions of Greeks. His followers took different paths.

In Rome, Porphyry was a front figure. Iamblichus (ca. 250 – ca. 330 CE) taught in Rome for a time and then returned to Chalcis in Syria to found a Neo-Platonist centre there. He seems to have been the originator of the type of Neo-Platonism that came to dominate the Platonic schools in the 400s and 500s CE. Nearly all of Iamblichus' works have been lost.

In Athen another development took place - Plutarch the Younger (350-433 CE), Proclus, Simplicius and Damascius were there. Proclus, the most influential systematic expositor there, produced a carefully argued summary of the basic metaphysics of this kind of "Athenian Neo-Platonism" in his Elements of Theology, which exhibits the causal relationships of the several hierarchies that constituted his intelligible universe. Also, by the end of the 4th century CE the Platonic Academy at Athens had been re-established and had become an institute for Neo-Platonist teaching and research following the tradition of Iamblichus.

Another centre of Neo-Platonism flourished at Gaza during the 400s and early 500s CE.

And in Alexandria was the most scholarly of the developments. The Alexandrian school of Neo-Platonism does not seem to have differed very much from that of Athens, and it survived into the 600s.

Later impact

As for impact, Neo-Platonism was widespread until the 600s CE, and influenced early Christian theologians such as Clement of Alexandria and his pupil Origen, and also medieval Jewish and Arab philosophers. According to Porphyry, Origen attended lectures given by Ammonius Saccas, the founder of Neo-Platonism. And a letter of Origen mentions his "teacher of philosophy". Neo-Platonism was firmly joined with Christianity by St. Augustine, who was a Neo-Platonist before his conversion. It was through Neo-Platonism that Augustine conceived of spirit as being immaterial and viewed evil as an unreal substance. Neo-Platonism has had a lasting influence on Western metaphysics.

Philosophers whose works contain elements of Neo-Platonism include St. Thomas Aquinas, John Scotus Erigena, Boethius, and Hegel. As for the first two of these thinkers, they identify the One with God and the Divine Mind with the angels.

Neo-Platonist aesthetics also influenced the German Romantics, the 17th-century English metaphysical poets, including William Blake. Many mystical movements in the West, including those of Meister Eckhart and Jacob Boehme, owe something to the Neo-Platonist.

This On-line Edition

This updated presentation is rooted in a translation by Stephen MacKenna (1872–1934) and Bertram Samuel Page, who relieved MacKenna of translating Enneads 6:1-3 for the last of five volumes somewhere between 1928 and 1930, when it was published. Page also edited the second edition of the work (1956).

When academics quote Enneads, first comes the Ennead number (1-6), then the treatise number within that Ennead (from 1 to 9), then the chapter number, and the line(s) if referring to certain known editions later than this one. The numbers can be divided by commas. Some translations or editions do not include the line numbers.

Three translations

1. MacKenna relied on a text of Plotinus that is significantly inferior to what is now available. Despite that, MacKenna's versions is very rarely incorrect, and what is more, it is in far better English than the Greek of Plotinus' original.

2. Arthur Hilary Armstrong (1962) has made another, very accurate translation of the classic work in a seven-volume set. His acclaimed text does not rival MacKenna's in stylistic elegance, but it is truer to the original on the literal level. It is not as wordy either. In Armstrong's translation you get an introduction to each treatise, the original text along with the English translation, and notes aiming at explaining obscure passages too.

3. The latest complete edition of the Enneads (Plotinus 2018) is edited by Professor Lloyd P. Gerson. The book also includes Porphyry's Life of Plotinus. ◦A Notre Dame review of the work - by Sara Magrin - contains the following:

[T]he first complete translation into English of Plotinus' Enneads since Armstrong's currently standard translation for the Loeb Classical Library (1966-1988) . . . and it is undeniably a major achievement. [The translation] has clear and significant advantages . . . First, it is based on a superior Greek text . . . Second, . . . all the references . . . also adding to them a considerable number of cross-references. Third, it is very often more readable than Armstrong's translation . . . [T]he non-specialist will probably prefer to use this new translation, specialists and graduate students will welcome it as a much-needed alternative to that of Armstrong, and . . . I think, greatly benefit from a close comparison with the latter. . . .

In general, the team's translation is less literal than Armstrong's, and it also aims to be more consistent. . . .

It seems evident to me that the team's translation conveys Plotinus' remarks more clearly and more accurately. . . .

I hope to have shown that this new translation will be not only extremely useful and enjoyable for the general reader, but indispensable for specialists and graduate students working on Plotinus and, more broadly, on ancient philosophy.