Plotinus, the most prominent and celebrated of the Neo-Platonic philosophers, the most elaborate and
authoritative e\| enl of the school of Alexandria, was
the most transcendental of the ancient trans isi-. .and was mainly instrumental iii transforming into the Pantheism oflamblichus and Proclus the doctrine .l.du.c.i through many successions from Plat...
Life. Tl ulines of the career of Plotinus have
.already been given, and have ben accompanied with a brief notice of his opinions, under Neo-Platonism.
PLOTINUS
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PLOTINUS
The esteem in which the sage of Lycopolis was held by his contemporaries is shown by the application to him of the current proverb, " The productions of Egypt are few, but they are great." His asceticism led him to regard his body, the casket of his soul, with such con- tempt that he would never suffer his likeness to be taken. His pupil Amelius, however, introduced the painter Carterius to his lectures, who was thus enabled to take a portrait of him from memory, without his knowledge. His philosophical temperament is further illustrated by his dying words, addressed to Eustochius, " I am striving to reunite what is divine in me to the pure divinity which reigns throughout the universe." When lie expired, a dragon rushed from under his bed, and escaped through a hole in the wall. Amelius in- quired of the Delphic oracle, not yet entirely dumb, " What has become of him ?" and was informed, in a string of loose hexameters, that he dwelt with Minos, Khada- manthus, Abacus, Pythagoras, and other blessed spirits, in the contemplation of the Deity, to whom he had been conjoined in ecstatic union four times during life. After the biographical notice already given, it only re- mains to give a somewhat fuller account of his writings. and a more extended and connected exposition of his views.
Writings. — The philosophy of the Neo - Platonic school of Alexandria, founded by Ammonius Saccas, was an exclusive cult, designed to be a secret and priv- ileged possession for the training and elevation of an elect body of theorists and enthusiasts. The seal of reticence having been broken by Herennius, his fellow- disciple, Plotinus deemed that there was no longer either obligation or expediency in endeavoring to pre- serve the secrets of the new speculation, and accord- ingly promulgated it by oral lectures at Rome, con- tinued for twenty-five years, and by treatises written at various times during this long course of instruction. His exposition was, however, so curt, intricate, and ob- scure ; so full of inapprehensible subtleties and impal- pable distinctions, that he was under the necessity of invoking the aid of his pupils to interpret and to develop his doctrine. He thus employed his veteran disciple, Amelius, to combat the repugnances and to remove the doubts of the neophyte Porphyry. All the earlier writers who have occasion to mention Plotinus speak of his brief, terse, thought -oppressed, oracular style; and the few among the moderns who have had the patience and have taken the pains to wade through his tantalizing compositions must have often re-echoed the ancient censures. The sublimation of the recondite thought is rendered more evanescent by the dryness of the phraseology and the niggardliness eff words. The difficulty of the compressed and indistinct utterance is made more difficult by the abundance of the nebulous thought. Yet through all the clouds of utterance and of contemplation gleams continually a more than earth- ly radiance, which lights up the darkness, and converts the dim, disjointed, spasmodic communications into ex- quisite revelations of supernal purity and beauty, and into wonderful graces, which are equally without art, in violation of art, and beyond art. The intense name of passionate love illumines dialectical subtleties and scholastic formulas in the Letters of Eloise and Abelard ; and the ethereal splendor of " the heavenly love," which fills his whole intellectual being, frequently clothes with its own light the technical phrases, the visionary ab- stractions, and the jagged points of the diction of Plo- tinus. Knowledge with him is intuition : he sees the divine and the eternal by the influx and the commun- ion of the divine : he is himself in turn apprehended, rather than understood, by an immediate contact be- tween his own rapt spirit and the enkindled intelligence of his readers. He says that in the pure universe of the intelligible there are neither '-discourse of reason" nor the voices of speech, but only immediate knowledge by sympathetic community of thought (ov Si a) (jno- voIq ol/xai xP>~l<>Sai vofiia-kor, iv ftkv r<p vo-qTtp oecac