Neoplatonism

With Plotinus (c. 204/5–270 CE), Neoplatonism gave ancient philosophy its last great synthesis: the ineffable One, from which all things emanate and to which all things return. But the story did not end there. In the following generations, disciples and successors transformed that vision into an ever vaster and more articulated system — and, at the same time, one ever more bound to religion and ritual. This late Neoplatonism, from Porphyry to Proclus, was the form in which Platonism reached the Latin, Arabic, and Byzantine Middle Ages. This article traces its three great names. (For the starting point, see the article on Plotinus and the emanation of the One.) ...

When the Goths of Alaric sacked Rome in 410 — the city that for eight centuries had thought itself eternal — the ancient world felt the ground give way beneath its feet. It was in that climate of disorientation that a bishop from North Africa undertook, between intimate meditation and a theology of history, the work that would make him the greatest intellectual figure of late antiquity. Aurelius Augustinus of Hippo (354–430) lived on the frontier between two ages: trained in classical Greco-Roman rhetoric, he converted to Christianity and transformed the legacy of Plato and Plotinus into the philosophical idiom of the medieval West. In him, the search for truth ceased to be merely contemplation of the cosmos and became exploration of the inner life of the soul. ...

Few concepts traverse the history of Western philosophy with such persistence as nous (νοῦς). The Greek word designates, depending on context, mind, intellect, intelligence, or reason — but its philosophical reach exceeds any of these translations taken alone. From the moment Anaxagoras elevated it to a cosmic ordering principle, through Plato’s elaboration and Aristotle’s analysis of intellect in the De Anima, to the emanationist metaphysics of Plotinus and the intense medieval debates between Averroes and Thomas Aquinas, nous constitutes a guiding thread that links cosmology, psychology, and theology in a single conceptual arc. ...

At the turn of the third century CE, when the philosophical schools of Antiquity seemed to have exhausted their possibilities, a thinker born in Roman Egypt undertook the most ambitious metaphysical synthesis the ancient world had ever seen. Plotinus (c. 205–270 CE) did more than comment on Plato: he transformed Platonism into a complete ontological architecture centered on the idea that all of reality emanates from an absolute principle — the One — and that the destiny of the human soul is to return to that primordial unity. ...

Marsilio Ficino Italian philosopher and Catholic priest. Leader of the Platonic Academy of Florence under the patronage of Cosimo de’ Medici. He translated the entire works of Plato into Latin for the first time, as well as the Corpus Hermeticum and Plotinus. Born in Figline Valdarno, Tuscany, in 1433, Ficino came of age in an environment shaped by the extraordinary cultural patronage of the Medici family. When Cosimo de’ Medici decided to establish a Platonic Academy modeled on antiquity, he entrusted its direction to Ficino and charged him with the monumental task of rendering Plato’s dialogues into Latin — a corpus virtually inaccessible to the medieval West — alongside the Neoplatonic writings of Plotinus, Iamblichus, and Proclus, and the recently rediscovered Corpus Hermeticum. This translation project, carried out between the 1460s and the 1490s, was decisive in reintroducing Platonic philosophy into European intellectual debate after centuries of Aristotelian dominance. ...

Nicholas of Cusa German cardinal; transitional figure between Scholasticism and the Renaissance. Used mathematics as a philosophical analogy (not as a method in the technical sense) to express the relationship between divine infinity and human finitude. Born in Kues (present-day Bernkastel-Kues, Germany) in 1401, Nicholas studied at the school of the Brethren of the Common Life in Deventer and earned a degree in canon law at Padua, where he came into contact with Italian humanism. He was made cardinal in 1448 and bishop of Brixen (Bressanone), playing an active role in the conciliarist controversies that shook the Church in the fifteenth century — first as an advocate of conciliar supremacy over the papacy, a position he later revised in favor of papal primacy. His ecclesiastical and intellectual trajectory reflects the spirit of the age: a mode of thought suspended between medieval tradition and the new horizons opened by the rediscovery of Platonic and Neoplatonic texts. ...

Pico della Mirandola Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. Italian prodigy philosopher; knew Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, and Aramaic. Proposed to hold a debate in Rome with 900 theses from all philosophical traditions — Pope Innocent VIII condemned some of them. Died at age 31. Trained at the Platonic Academy of Florence in close dialogue with Marsilio Ficino and within the circle of Lorenzo de’ Medici, Pico represented the apex of Renaissance humanism. In 1486, he composed the 900 Conclusions — theses drawn from sources as diverse as Plato, Aristotle, Avicenna, Averroes, Jewish Kabbalah, and the Corpus Hermeticum — with the ambition of demonstrating that philosophical and religious truth was one, accessible through multiple paths. The project was cut short when a papal commission condemned thirteen of the theses as heretical; Pico fled to France and only returned to Italy under the protection of Lorenzo de’ Medici. ...

Plotinus Born around 205 CE, probably in Roman Egypt, Plotinus studied for years in Alexandria under the enigmatic master Ammonius Saccas and later settled in Rome, where he founded a school and led a life of remarkable asceticism. His lessons were gathered and organized by his disciple Porphyry in the Enneads. He is the founder of Neoplatonism and the greatest philosopher of late antiquity, making Plato the starting point of one of the most grandiose metaphysics ever conceived. ...

Porphyry Porphyry of Tyre — in Greek Porphýrios, a name adopted in place of his Semitic birth name Malchus (“king” in Phoenician) — was born around 234 CE in Tyre (on the coast of present-day Lebanon) and died around 305 CE. A caveat: he should not be confused with Porphyry of Gaza (5th century), a Christian bishop with the same name, nor with other late-antique figures bearing it. After studying in Athens with Cassius Longinus, in around 263 CE he joined the circle of Plotinus in Rome, of whom he became the most celebrated pupil. He served as editor of the Enneads (posthumously published c. 301), arranging the master’s writings into six groups of nine treatises and prefacing them with the Vita Plotini (Life of Plotinus) — a fundamental biographical source on Plotinus. His influence, however, reaches far beyond his editorial work: through the Isagoge, Porphyry shaped the entry of Aristotelian logic into the medieval world. ...

Proclus Proclus Lycaeus Diadochus (in Greek Próklos Lýkios Diádokhos, “Proclus the Lycian, the Successor”) was born in Constantinople in 412 CE and died in Athens on 17 April 485 CE. A caveat: he should not be confused with Proclus Procopius (an orator of the 5th century) or other homonymous late-antique figures. The son of a wealthy family from Lycia (in the south of present-day Turkey), he was educated in Alexandria and soon moved to Athens, where he studied with Plutarch of Athens (not to be confused with the essayist of Chaeronea) and with Syrianus, whom he succeeded as head of the Academy — hence his title Diádokhos, “the Successor.” He was the last great systematizer of pagan Neoplatonism before the closure of the Academy by Emperor Justinian in 529 CE. His work organizes the Plotinian inheritance into a rigorous network of propositions and triads, in a project comparable, in ambition, to Aquinas’s Summa — but in an entirely pagan key. ...