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The idea of classifying the works of Plotinos chronologically, therefore, has so much external proof, as well as internal indications, to support it, that, no doubt, in the future no reference will be made to Plotinos without specifying to which period it refers; and we may expect that future editions of his workswill undo the grievous confusion introduced by Porphyry, and thus render Plotinos's works comparatively accessible to rational study.
There are besides many other minor proofs of the chronological order of the writings of Plotinos, most of which are noticed at the heading of each succeeding book; but the most startling human references are those to Amelius's departure as a falsefriend;466to Porphyry's desire to suicide at hisdeparture,467and to his own impendingdissolution,468each of these occurring at the exact time of the event chronologically, but certainly not according to the traditional order.
Of all fetishes which have misled humanity, perhaps none is responsible for more error than that of originality. As if anything could be new that was true, or true that was new! The only possible lines along which novelty or progress can lie are our reports, combinations, and expressions. Some people think they have done for a poet if they have shown that he made use of suitable materials in the construction of his poem! So Shakespeare has been shown to have used whole scenes from earlier writers. So Virgil, by Macrobius, has been shown to have laid under contribution every writer then known to be worth ransacking. Dante has also been shown to have re-edited contemporary apocalypses. So Homer, even, has been shown to re-tell stories gathered from many sources. The result is that people generally consider Shakespeare, Virgil, or Homer great in spite of their borrowings, when, on the contrary, the statement should be that they were great because of their rootage in the best of their period. In other words, they are great not because of their own personality (which in many cases has dropped out of the ken of history), but because they more faithfully, completely, and harmoniously represent their periods than other now forgotten writers. Therein alone lay their cosmic value, and their assurance of immortality. They are the voices of their ages, and we are interested in the significance of their age, not in them personally.
It is from this standpoint that we must approachPlato. Of his personality what details are known are of no soteriologic significance; and the reason why the world has not been able to get away from him, and probably never will, is that he sums up prior Greek philosophy in as coherent a form as is possible without doing too great Procrustean violence to the elements in question. This means that Plato did not fuse them all into one absolutely, rigid, coherent, consistent system, in which case his utility would have been very much curtailed. The very form of his writings, the dialogue, left each element in the natural living condition to survive on its merits, not as an authoritative oracle, or Platonic pronunciamento, or creed.
For details, the reader is referred to Zeller's fuller account of these pre-Platonicelements.471But we may summarize as follows: the physical elements to which the Hylicists had in turn attributed finality Plato united into Pythagorean matter, which remained as an element of Dualism. The world of nature became the becoming of Heraclitus. Above that he placed the Being of Parmenides, in which the concepts of Socrates found place as ideas. These he identified with the numbers and harmonies of Pythagoras, and united them in an Eleatic unity of many, as an intelligible world, or reason, which he owed to Anaxagoras. The chief idea, that of the Good, was Megaro-Socratic. His cosmology was that of Timaeus. His psychology was based on Anaxagoras, as mind; on Pythagoras, as immortal. His ethics are Socratic, his politics are Pythagorean. Who therefore would flout Plato, has all earlier Greek philosophy to combat; and whoever recognizes the achievements of the Hellenic mind will find something to praise in Plato. When, therefore, we are studying Platonism, we are only studying a blending of the rays of Greece, and we are chiefly interested in Greece as one of the latest, clearest, and most kindred expressions of human thought.
If however we should seek some one special Platonic element, it would be that genuineness of reflection, that sincerity of thought, that makes of his dialogues no cut and dried literary figments, but soul-tragedies, with living, breathing, interest and emotion. Plato thus practised his doctrine of the doubleself,472the higher and the lower selves, of which the higher might be described as "superior to oneself." In his later period, that of the Laws, he applied this double psychology to cosmology, thereby producing doubleness in the world-Soul: besides the good one, appears the evil one, which introduces even into heaven things that are not good.
It was only a step from this to the logical deduction of Xenocrates that these things in heaven were "spirits" or "guardians," both good and evil, assisting in the administration of humanaffairs.473Such is the result of doubleness introduced into anthropology; introduced into cosmology, it establishes Pythagorean indefinite duality as the principle opposing the unity of goodness.
The next step was taken by Plutarch. The evil demons, had, in Stoic phraseology, been called "physical;" and so, in regard to matter, they came to stand in the relation of soul to body. Original matter, therefore, became two-fold; matter itself, and its moving principle, "the soul of matter." This was identified with the worse World-soul by a development, or historical event, which was the ordering of the cosmos, or, creation.
This then was the state of affairs at the advent of Numenius. Although his chief interest lay in practical comparative religion, he tried, philosophically, to return to a mythical "original" Platonism or Pythagoreanism. What Plato did for earlier Greek speculation, Numenius did for post-Platonic development. He harked back to the latter Platonic stage, which taughtthe evil world-Soul. He included the achievements of Plutarch, the "soul of matter," and the trine division of a separate principle, such as Providence. To the achievement of Xenocrates he was drawn by two powerful interests, the Egyptian, Hermetic, Serapistic, in connection with the evil demons; and the Pythagorean, in connection with the Indefinite-duality. Thus Numenius's History of the Platonic Succession is not a delusion; Numenius really did sum up the positive Platonic progress, not omitting even Maximus of Tyre's philosophical hierarchic explanation of the emanative or participative streaming forth of the Divine. But Numenius was not merely a philosopher: of this gathering of Platonic achievements he made a religion. In this he was also following the footsteps of Pythagoras, who limited his doctrines to a group of students. But Numenius did not merely copy Pythagoras. Numenius modernized him, connecting up the Platonic doctrinal aggregate with the mystery-rites current in his own day. Nor did Numenius shirk any unpleasant responsibilities of a restorer of Platonism: he continued the traditional Academico-Stoical feud. Strange to say, the last great Stoic philosopher, Posidonius (A.D. 135–151) hailed from Numenius's home-town, Apamea, so that this Stoic feud may have been forced on Numenius from home personalities or conditions. It would seem that in Numenius and Posidonius we have a re-enactment of the tragedy of Greek philosophy on a Syrian theatre, where dogmatic Stoicism died, and Platonism admitted Oriental ideas.
Apamea, however, had not yet ended its role in the development of thought. Numenius's pupil, Amelius, had gathered, copied, and learned by heart his master's works. It was in Apamea that he adopted as son Hostilianius-Hesychius. After a twenty-four years' sojourn in Rome he returned to Apamea, and was dwelling there still at the time of the death of Plotinos,with whom he had spent that quarter of a century. Here then we have a historical basis for a connection between Numenius and Plotinos, which we have elsewhere endeavored to demonstrate from inner grounds.
It was however by Amelius that philosophy is drawn into the maelstrom of the world-city. Plotinos, in his early periods a Numenian Platonist, will later go over to Stoicism, and conduct a polemic with the Gnostics, the Alexandrian heirs of Platonic dualism, under the influence of the Stoic Porphyry. However, Plotinos will not publicly abandon Platonism; he will fuse the two streams of thought, and interpret in Stoic terms the fundamentals of Platonism, producing something which, when translated into Latin, he will leave as inheritance to all the ages. Not in vain, therefore, did Amelius transport the torch of philosophy to the Capital.
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Let us in a few words dispose of the general outlines of the fate of the Platonic movement.
Plotinos was no religious leader; he was before everything else a philosopher, even if he centred his efforts on the practical aspects of the ecstatic union with God. Indeed, Porphyry relates to us the incident in which this matter was objectively exemplified. At the New Moon, Amelius invited him to join in a visit to the mystery celebrations. Plotinos refused, saying that "they would have to come to him, not he go over to them." This then is the chief difference between Numenius and Plotinos, and the result would be a recrudescence of pure philosophic contentions, as those of Plotinos against the Gnostics.
As to the general significance of Plotinos, we must here resume what we have elsewhere detailed: that with the change of editors, from Amelius to Porphyry, Plotinos changed from Numenian or Pythagorean dualismto Stoic monism, in which the philosophic feud was no longer with the Stoics, but with the Alexandrian descendants of Numenian dualism, the Gnostics. Even though Plotinos showed practical religious aspects in his studying and experiencing the ecstasy, there is no record of any of his pupils being encouraged to do so, and therefore Plotinos remains chiefly a philosopher.
The successors of Plotinos could not remain on this purely philosophic standpoint. Instead of practising the ecstasy, they followed the Gnostics in theorizing about practical religious reality in their cosmology and theology, which took on, more or less, the shape of magic, not inconsiderably aided by Stoic allegoric interpretations of myths, as in Porphyry's "Cave of the Nymphs."
What Plato did for early Greek philosophy, what Numenius did for post-Platonic thought, that Proclus Diadochus, the "Successor," did for Plotinos and his followers. For the first time since Numenius we find again a comparative method. By this time religion and philosophy have fused in magic, and so, instead of a comparative religion, we have a comparative philosophy. Proclus was the first genuine commentator, quoting authorities on all sides. He was sufficient of a philosopher to grasp Neoplatonism as a school of thought; and far from paying any attention to Ammonius, as recent philosophy has done, as source of Neoplatonism, he traces the movement as far as Plutarch, calling him the "father of us all," inasmuch as he introduced the conception of "hypostasis." Evidently, Proclus looked upon this as the centre of Neoplatonic development, and therefore we shall be justified in a closer study of this conception; and we may even say that its historic destiny was a continuation of the main stream of creative Greek philosophy; or, if you prefer, of Platonism, or Noumenianism, or even Plotinian thought.
Did Greek philosophy die with Proclus? The political changes of the time forced alteration of dialect and position; but the accumulations of mental achievements could not perish. This again we owe to Proclus. Besides being the first great commentator he precipitated his most valuable achievements in logical form, in analytic arrangement, in the form of crystal-clear propositions, theorems, demonstrations, and corollaries. Such a highly abstract form was inevitable, inasmuch as Numenius had turned away from Aristotelian observation of nature. Just like the Hebrew thinkers, who finally became commentators and abstract theorizers, nothing else was left for a philosophy without connection with experiment, when whittled down by the keenest intellects of the times.
This abstract method, still familiarly used by geometry, reappeared among the School-men, notably in Thomas Aquinas. Later it persisted with Spinoza and Descartes. However, rising experimentalism has gradually terminated it, its last form appearing in Kant and Hegel. Kant's "Ding in sich," reached after abstracting all qualities, is only a re-statement of Numenius and Plotinos's "subject," or, definition of matter; and Hegel's dialectic, beginning with Being and Not-being, more definitely proclaimed by Plotinos, goes as far back as the Eleatics and Heraclitus, not to mention Plato. However, Kant and Hegel are the great masters of modern thought; and although at one time the rising tide of materialism and cruder forms of evolution threatened to obscure it, Karl Pearson's "Grammar of Science," generous as it is in invective against Kant and Hegel, in modern terms clinches Berkeley's and Kant's demonstration of the reality of the super-sensual, thus vindicating Plotinos, and, before him, Numenius.
It must not be supposed that in thus tracing the springs of our modern thought we necessarily approve of all the thought of Plotinos, Numenius or Plato. On the contrary, they were far more likely to have committed logical errors than we are, because they were hypnotized by the glamor of the terms they used, which to us are mere laboratory tools. The best way to prove this will be to appraise at its logical value for us Plotinos's discussion of Matter, elsewhere studied in its value for us.
We have elsewhere pointed out the hopelessness of escaping either aspect of the problem of the One and the Many; and that the attempt of the Stoics to avoid the Platonic dualism by a materialistic monism was merely a change of names, the substance of the dualism remaining as the opposition of the contraries, such as active and passive, male and female, the predominantelements,474etc. Plotinos, in his abandonment of Numenian dualism, and championing of Stoicism, undertaking the feud with the Gnostics, the successors of Numenius, must therefore have inherited the same difficulties of thought, and we shall see how in spite of his mental agility he is caught in the same traditional meshes, and that these irreducible difficulties occur in each one of his three periods of life, the Eustochian, the Amelian, and the Porphyrian.
In the Amelian, he teaches two matters, the physical and the intelligible, by which device he seeks to avoid the difficulties of dualism, crediting to intelligible matter any necessary form of Being, thus pushing physical matter into the outer darkness of non-being. So intelligible matter is still a form of Being, and we still hold to monism; as intelligible matter may participate in the good; while matter physical remains evil, being a deprivation of good, not possessing it. This, of course is dualism; and he thus has a convenient pun on the word matter, by which he can be monist or dualist, as the fancy takes him, or as exigencies demand. This participation, therefore, does not eliminate the dualism,while formally professing monism. Therefore Plotinos tries to choose between monism and dualism by surreptitiously accepting both.
In the Porphyrian period, he rejected the idea of intelligiblematter.475Forced to fashion entirely new arguments, he seizes as tool the Aristotelian distinction between potentiality and actuality, or energy as dynamicaccomplishment.476But no logical device can help a man to pull himself up by his boot-straps. If by Being you mean existence, then its opposite must be negative, and to speak of real non-being, as something that shares being, is an evasion. To say that matter remains non-being, while having the possibility of future Being, which however can never be actualized, is mere juggling with words. Even if matter is no more than a weak, confused image, it is not non-being. If it is a positive lie, it is not non-being. To talk of a higher degree of Non-being, that is real non-being, is simply to confuse the actuality intended with the thought of non-being, which of course is a thought as actually existing as any other. Moreover if matter is imperishable, it cannot be non-being; and if it possesses Being potentially, it certainly is not non-existence. The Aristotelian potentiality could help to create this evasion, but did not remove its real nature; it merely supplied Plotinos with an intellectual device to characterize something that would not be actually existing as still having the possibility of existence; but this is not non-existence. In anotherwriting477of this period Plotinos continues his evasions about the origin and nature of matter. First, he grants that it is something that is not original, being later than many earthly, and all intelligible objects; although, if he had returned to the conception of intelligible matter, he would have been at liberty to assert the originality of the latter. Then he holds that Being is common to both form and matter, as to quality, but not as toquantity. Last, he closes the paragraph by saying that perhaps form and matter do not come from the same origin, as there is a difference between them.
In Plotinos's third, or Eustochian period, the same evasions occur. Forinstance478he limits Being to goodness. Then he acknowledges the existence of evil things, and derives their evil quality from a primary evil, the "image of essence," the Being of evil. That he is conscious of having strained a point is evident from the fact that he adds the clause, "if there can be a Being of evil."Likewise,479while discussing evil, which is generally recognized because in our daily lives there is positive pain, and sensations of pain, he defines evil as lack of qualities. To say that evil is not such as to form, but as to nature is opposite to form is nonsense, inasmuch as life is full of positive evils, as Numenius brought out in 16, and Plotinos acknowledged even in spite of his polemic against the Gnostics.
Finally Plotinos takes refuge in amiracle480as explanation of "unparticipating participation." This is commentary enough; it shows he realized the futility of any arguments. But Plotinos was not alone in despairing of establishing an ironclad system; before him Numenius had, just as pathetically, despaired of a logical dualism, and he acknowledged in fragment 16 that Pythagoras's arguments, however true, were "wonderful and opposed to the belief of a majority of humanity."
In other words, monism is as unsatisfactory to reason as dualism. This was the chief point of agreement between Pythagoras and the Stoics; and Pragmatism has in modern times attempted to show a way out by a higher sanction of another kind.
Perhaps the reader may be interested in a side-light on this subject. Drews is interested in Plotinos only because Plotinos's super-rational divinity furnishes a historical foundation for Edouard Hartmann's philosophyof the Unconscious. It would seem, however, to be a mistake to use the latter term, for it is true only as a doubtful corollary. If the Supreme is super-conscious, it is possible to describe this logically as unconscious. But generally, however, unconsciousness is a term used to denote the sub-conscious, rather than the super-conscious, and the use of that term must inevitably entail misunderstandings. It would be better then to follow Pragmatism into the super-conscious, rather than to sink with Hartmann into the sub-conscious. It was directly fromPlotinos481that Hartmann took his expression "beyond good and evil."
Having watched Numenius, for Platonic dualism; and Plotinos for Stoic monism, both appeal to a miracle as court of last resort, we may now return to that result of Platonism which has left the most vital impress on our civilization, its conception of the divine.
Elsewhere we have seen how Numenius waged the traditional Academic feud with the Stoics bravely, but uselessly, inasmuch as it was chiefly a difference of dialects that separated them. In the course of this struggle, Numenius had made certain distinctions within the divinity, which were followed by Amelius, but are difficult to trace in Plotinos because, as a matter of principle,Plotinos482was averse to thus "dividing the divinity." Why so? Because he was waging a struggle with the Gnostics, who had followed in the footsteps of the Hermetic writings (with their Demiurge and Seven Governors); Philo Judaeus (with his five Subordinate Powers); Numenius and Amelius (with their triply divided First and Second gods);—after which we come to Basilides (with his seven Powers); Saturninus (with his Seven Angels); and Valentinus (with his 33 Aeons).
This new feud between Plotinos and the Gnostics is however just as illusory as the earlier one between Numenius and the Stoics. It was merely a matter of dialects. Plotinos indeed found fault with the Gnostics for making divisions within the Divinity; but wherever he himself is considering the divinity minutely, he, just as much as the Gnostics, is compelled to draw distinctions, even though he avoided acknowledged divisions by borrowing from Plutarch a new, non-Platonic, non-Numenian, but Aristotelian, Stoic (Cornutus and Sextus) and still Alexandrian (Philo, Septuagint, Lucian) term "hypostasis."
The difference he pretended to find between theGnostic distinctions within the Divinity and his new term hypostasis was that the former introduced manifoldness into the divinity, by splittingHim,483thus allowing the influence of matter to pervade the pure realm of Being. Hypostasis, on the contrary, wholly existed within the realm of pure Being, and was no more than a trend, a direction, a characterization, a function, a face, or orientation of activity of the unaffected unity of Being. Thus the divinity retained its unity, and still could be active in several directions, without admixture of what philosophy had till then recognized as constituting manifoldness. But reflection shows that this is a mere quibble, an evasion, a paralogism, a quaternio terminorum, a pun. How it came about we shall attempt to show below.
In thus achieving a manifoldness in the divinity without divisions, Plotinos did indeed keep out of the divinity the splitting influence of matter, which it was now possible to banish to the realm of unreality, as a negation, and a lie. Monism was thus achieved ... but at the cost of two errors: denial of the common-sense reality of the phenomenalworld,484and that quibble about three hypostases without manifoldness, genuinely a "distinction without a difference."
This intellectual dishonesty must not however be foisted onAristotle485or Plutarch. The latter, forinstance,486adopted this term only to denote the primary and original characteristics (or distinctions within) existing things, from a comparative study of Aristotle's "de Anima," and Plato's"Phaedo."487These five hypostases were the divinity, mind, soul, forms immanent in inorganic nature, "hexis," in Stoic dialect, and to matter, as apart from these forms.
So important to Neoplatonism did this term seem to Proclus, that he did not hesitate to say that Plutarch, by the use thereof, became "our first forefather." He therefore develops it further. Among the hidden andintelligible gods are three hypostases. The first is characterized by the Good; it thinks the Good itself, and dwells with the paternal Monad. The second is characterized by knowledge, and resides in the first thought; while the third is characterized by beauty, and dwells with the most beautiful of the intelligible. They are the causes from which proceed three monads which are self-existent but under the form of a unity, and as in a germ, in their cause. Where they manifest, they take a distinct form: faith, truth, and love (Cousin's title: "Du Vrai, du Beau, et du Bien"). This trinity pervades all the divine worlds.
In order to understand the attitude of Plotinos on the subject, we must try to put ourselves in his position. In the first place, on Porphyry's own admission, he had added to Platonism Peripatetic and Stoic views. From Aristotle his chief borrowings were the categories of form and matter, and the distinction between potentiality andactuality,488as well as the Aristotelian psychology of various souls. To the Stoics he was drawn by their monism, which led him to drop the traditional Academico-Stoic feud, or rather to take the side of the Stoics against Numenius the Platonist dualist and the dualistic successors, the Gnostics. But there was a difference between the Stoics and Plotinos. The Stoics assimilated spirit to matter, while Plotinos, reminiscent of Plato, preferred to assimilate matter to spirit. Still, he used their terminology, and categories, including the conception of a hypostasis, or form of existence. With this equipment, he held to the traditional Platonic trinity of the "Letters," the King, the intellect, and the soul. Philosophically, however, he had received from Numenius the inheritance of a double name of the Divinity, Being and Essence. As a thinker, he was therefore forced to accommodate Numenius to Plato, and by adding to Numenius's name of the divinity, to complete Numenius's theology by Numenius's owncosmology. This then he did by adding as third hypostasis the Aristotelian dynamic energy.
But as Intellect is permanent, how can Energy arise therefrom? Here this eternal puzzle is solved by distinguishing energy into indwelling and out-flowing. As indwelling, Energy constitutes Intellect; but its energetic nature could not be demonstrated except by out-flowing, which produces a distinction.
Similarly, there are two kinds of heat, that of the fire itself, and that emitted by the fire, so that the fire may remain itself while exerting its influence without. It is thus also there: in that it remains itself in its inmost being, and from its own inherent perfection, and energy, the developed energy assumes hypostasis, as if from a Dynamis that is great, nay, greatest; and so it joins the Essence and the Being. For that was beyond all Being, and that was the Dynamis of all things, and already was all things. If then it is all, it must be above all; consequently also above Being. "And if this is all, then the One is before all; not of an essence equal to all, and this must be above Being, as this is above intellect; for there is something aboveintellect."489
This is the most definite statement of Plotinos's solution of the problem; other references thereto are abundant. So we have a trinity of energy, being andessence,490and each of us, like the world-Soul has an Eros which is essence andhypostasis.491Reason is a hypostasis after the nous, and Aphrodite gains an hypostasis in theOusia.492The One is intellect, the intelligible, and ousia; or, energy, being, and the intelligible (essence).493The soul isactivity.494The soul is the thirdGod,495we are the third rank proceeding from the upper undividedNature,496the whole being God, nous, and essence. The Nous is activity, and the First essence. There are three stages of the Good: the King, the nous, and thesoul.497We find energy,498thinking and being,then499the soul, the nous, and the One. We find Providence threefold (as in Plutarch)500and three ranks of Gods, demons andworld-life.501Elsewhere, untheologically, or, rather, merely philosophically, he speaks of the hypostasis ofwisdom.502
Chaignet's summary of thisis503that504Plotinos holds that every force in the intelligible is both Being and Substance simultaneously; and reciprocally that no Being, could be conceived without hypostasis, or directed force.Again,505the world, the universe of things, contains three natures or divine hypostases, soul, mind and unity; which indeed are found in our own nature, and of which the divinest is unity or divinity.
Let us now try to understand the matter. Why should the word hypostasis, which unquestionably in earlier times meant "substance," have later come to mean "distinctions" within the divinity? For "substance," on the contrary, represents to our mind an unity, the underlying unity, and not individual forms of existence. How did the change occur?
Now Plotinos, as we remember, found fault with the Gnostics in that they taught distinctions within thedivinity.506He would therefore be disposed to remove from within the divinity those distinctions of Plotinic, Plutarchian, Numenian, or Gnostic theology; although he himself in early times did not scruple to speak of a hypostasis of wisdom, or of Eros, or other matter he might be considering. Such terms of Numenius or Amelius as he seems to ignore are the various Demiurges; the three Plutarchian Providences he himself still uses. Still, all these terms he would be disposed to eradicate from within the divinity.
As a constructive metaphysician, however, he could not well get along without some titles for the different phases of the divinity; and even if he dispensed with the old names, there would still remain as their underlyingsupport the reality or substance of the distinction. So he removed the offensive, aggressive, historically known and recognized terms, while leaving their underlying substances, or supports. Now "substance" had become "substances," and to differentiate these it was necessary to interpret them as differing forms of existence. The change was most definitely made by Athanasius, who at a synod in Alexandria, in A.D.362,507fastened on the church, as synonymous with hypostasis the popular term "prosopon" or "face." That this was an innovation appears from the fact that the Nicene Council had stated that it was heretical to say that Christ was of a hypostasis different from that of the Father, in which case the word evidently meant still the original underlying (singular) substance. With this official definition in vogue, the original (singular) substance became forgotten, and it became possible to speak in the plural, of three faces, as indeed Plotinos had done.
In other words, so necessary were distinctions in the divinity, that the popular mind supplied other individual names to designate the distinctions Plotinos had successfully banished, for Demiurges and Providences no longer return. Thus more manifold differences re-entered into the divinity, than Plotinos had ever emptied out of it, although under a name which the poverty of the Latin language rendered as "persons," which represents to us individual consciousness of a far more distinctive kind than was ever implied in three phases of Providence, or of the Demiurge. Thus the translation into Latin clinched the illicit linguistic process, and the result of Plotinos's attempt to distinguish in the Divinity phases so subtle as not to demand or allow of manifoldness, resulted in the most pronounced differences of personality. This was finally clinched by Plotinos's illustration of the three faces around a singlehead,508which established theidea of three "persons" (masks, from "per-sonare") in one God.
Not only in the abstract realm of Metaphysics, therefore, is the world indebted to Greek thought; but even in the realm of religion a Stoic reinterpretation of Platonism, itself reinterpreted in a different language has given a lasting inheritance to the spiritual aspirations of the ages.
Plotinos's date being about A.D. 262, he stands midway between the Christian writings of the New Testament, and the Council of Nicaea, A.D. 325. As a philosopher dealing with the kindred topics—the soul and its salvation,—and deriving terminology and inspiration from the same sources, Platonism and Stoicism, we would expect extensive parallelism and correspondence. Though Plotinos does not mention any contemporaneous writings, we will surely be able to detect indirect references to Old and New Testaments. But what will be of most vital interest will be his anticipations of Nicene formulations, or reflection of current expressions of Christian philosophic comment. While we cannot positively assert this Christian development was exclusively Plotinian, we are justified in saying that the development of Christian philosophy was not due exclusively to the Alexandrian catechetical school; that what later appears as Christian theology was only earlier current Neoplatonic metaphysics, without any exclusive dogmatic connection with the distinctively Christian biography. This avoids the flat assertion of Drews that the Christian doctrine of the Trinity was dependent on Plotinos, although it admits Bouillet's more cautious statement that Plotinos was the rationalizer of the doctrine of theTrinity.509This much is certain, that no other contemporaneous discussion of the trinity has survived, if any ever existed; and we must remember that it was not until thecouncil of Constantinople in A.D. 381, that the Nicene Creed, by the addition of the Filioque clause, became trinitarian in a thoroughgoing way; and not until fifty years later that Augustine, again in the West, fully expressed a philosophy and psychology of the trinity.
To Plotinos therefore is due the historical position of protagonist of trinitarian philosophy.
Christian parallelisms in Plotinos have a historical origin in Christian parallelisms in his sources, namely, Stoicism, Numenius and Plato.
To Christian origins in Plato never has justice been done, not even by Bigg. His suggestion of the crucifixion of the just man, his reference to the son of God are only common-places, to which should be added many minor references.
The Christian origins in Numenius are quite explicit; mention of the Hebrews as among the races whose scriptures are important, of Moses among the great religious teachers, of the Spirit hovering over the waters, of the names of the Egyptian magicians which, together with Pliny, he hands down to posterity. He also was said to have told many stories about Jesus, in an allegorical manner.
The Christian origins in Stoicism have been widely discussed; for instance, by Chaignet. But it is likely that this influence affected Christianity indirectly through Plotinos, along with the other Christian ideas we shall later find. At any rate Plotinos is the philosopher who uses the term "spiritual body" most like theChristians.510The soul is a slave to thebody,511and has a celestialbody512as well as a spiritualbody.513Within us are two men opposing eachother,514the better part often being mastered by the worse part, as thought St.Paul,515in the struggle between the inner and outerman.516
With Plotinos the idea of "procession" is not only cosmic but psychological. In other words, when Plotinos speaks of the "procession" of the God-head, he is not, as in Christian doctrine, depicting something unique, which has no connection with the world. He is only referring to the cosmic aspect of an evolution which, in the soul, appears as educationaldevelopment.517As the opposite of the soul's procession upwards, there is the soul's descent intohell,518or, in other words, the soul's descent andascension.519This double aspect of man's fate upward or downward is referred to by Plotinos in the regular Christian term "sin," as consisting in missing one'saim.520The soulrepents,521and its duty isconversion.522As a result of this conversion comesforgiveness.523
The famous "terrors ofJeremiah"524might have come mediately through the Gnostics, who indeed may have been the persons referred to asChristians.525More direct no doubt was God admiring hishandiwork526and the soul breathing the spirit of life intoanimals.527God is called both the "I am what I am"528and "He is what He ought tobe."528He sits above theworld,529as the king ofkings.530
Plotinos says that it would be a poor artist who would conceive of an animal as all covered with eyes. There is hardly such a reference outside ofRevelations,531to which we must also look for a new heaven and a newearth.532Then we have practically a quotationof the Johannine prologue "In the beginning was the Logos," and by him were all thingsmade.533Light was in thebeginning.534We are told not to leave the world, but not to be ofit.535The divinity prepares mansions in heaven for goodsouls.536
Pauline references seem to be that sin exists because of thelaw.537God is above all height ordepth.538The vulgar who attend mystery-banquets only to gorge arecondemned.539There are severalheavens.540The beggarly principles and elements towards which some turn, arementioned.541The genealogies of the Gnostics are held up toridicule.542General references are numerous. Diseases are caused by evilspirits.543We must cut off any offendingmember.544Thus we aresaved.545In him we breathe and move and have ourbeing.546The higher divinity begets a Son, one among manybrethren.547As the father of intelligence, God is the father oflights.548
However, the most interesting incident is that scriptural text which, to the reflecting, is always so much of a puzzle: "If the light that is in them be darkness,"etc.549This is explained by the Platonictheory550that we see because of a special light that is within the eye.
General theological references may be grouped under three heads: the soul's salvation, the procession of the divinity, and the trinity.
As to the soul's salvation, God is the opposite of the evil ofbeings,551which, when created in honor of thedivinity552is the image of the Word, the interpreter of theOne,553and is composed of severalelements;554but it is a fall fromGod,555and its fate is connected with the "parousia."556
This going forth of the soul from God, when considered cosmically, becomes the "procession of thesoul."557This is the "eternalgeneration,"558whereby the Son is begotten frometernity,559so that there could be no (Arian) "ên hote ouk ên," or, "time when he wasnot."560This is expressed as "light oflight,"561and explained by the Athanasian light and raysimile.562We find even the Johannine and Philonic distinction between God and theGood.563The world is thefirst-begotten,564and the Intelligence is the logos of the firstGod,565as the hypostasis of wisdom is "ousia," or"being,"566and it is the "universalreason."567
As to the trinity, Plotinos is the first and chief rationalizer of the cosmic trinity, which he continuously and at lengthdiscusses.568God is father andson,569and they are "homoousian," or"consubstantial."570The human soul (as image of the cosmic divinity), is one nature in threepowers.571Elsewhere we have discussed the history of the term "persons," but we may understand the result of that process best by Plotinos's simile of the trinity as one head with threefaces,572in which the "persons" bear out their original meaning of masks, "personare." Henceforward the trinity was an objective idea.
Although mentioned above, special attention should be given to the parable of the vine and the branches (iii. 3.7.—48, 1088 with Jno. xv. 1–8), and the divinity's begetting a Son (v. 8.12—31, 571). The significant aspect of this is that it is represented as being the content of the supreme ecstatic vision; what you might call the crown of Plotinos' message. "He tells us that he has seen the divinity beget an offspring of an incomparable beauty, producing everything in Himself, and without pain preserving within Himself what He has begotten.... His Son has manifested Himself externally. By Him, as by an image (Col. i. 15), you may judge of the greatness of His Father ... enjoying the privilege of being the image of His eternity."
We have, elsewhere, pointed out the historic connections between Numenius and Plotinos. Here, it may be sufficient to recall that Amelius, native of Numenius's home-town of Apamea, and who had copied and learned by heart all the works of Numenius, and who later returned to Apamea to spend his declining days, bequeathing his copy of Numenius's works to his adopted son Gentilianus Hesychius, was the companion and friend of Plotinos during his earliest period, editing all Plotinos's books, until displaced by Porphyry. We remember also that Porphyry was Amelius's disciple, before his spectacular quarrel with Amelius, later supplanting him as editor of the works of Plotinos. Plotinos also came from Alexandria, where Numenius had been carefully studied and quoted by Origen and Clement of Alexandria. Further, Porphyry records twice that accusations were popularly made against Plotinos, that he had plagiarized from Numenius. In view of all this historical background, we have the prima-facie right to consider Plotinos chiefly as a later re-stater of the views of Numenius, at least during his earlier or Amelian period. Such a conception of the state of affairs must have been in the mind of that monk who, in the Escoreal manuscript, substituted the name of Numenius for that of Plotinos on thatfragment573about matter, which begins directlywith Numenius's name of the divinity, "being andessence."574
Let us compare with this historical evidence, that which supports the universally admitted dependence of Plotinos on his teacher Ammonius. We have only two witnesses: Hierocles and Nemesius; and the latter attributes the argument for the immateriality of the soul to Ammonius and Numenius jointly. No doubt, Ammonius may have taught Plotinos in his youth; but so no doubt did other teachers; and of Ammonius the only survivals are a few pages preserved by Nemesius. The testimony for Plotinos's dependence on Numenius is therefore much more historical, as well as significant, in view of Numenius having left written records that were widely quoted. The title of "Father of Neo-platonism," therefore, if it must at all be awarded, should go to Numenius, who had written a "History of the Platonic Succession," wherein he attempts to restore "original" Platonism. This fits the title "Neo-platonism," whereas the philosophy of Ammonius, would be better described as an eclectic synthesis of Platonism and Aristotelianism.
Of course we shall admit that there are differences between Plotinos and Numenius, at least during his Porphyrian period; this was inevitable while dismissing his Numenian secretaryAmelius,575a friend "who had become imbued with" such doctrines before becoming the friend of Plotinos, who persevered in them, and wrote in justification thereof. We find that the book chronologically preceding this one is v. 5, on the very subject at issue between Amelius and Porphyry. Plotinos took his stand with the latter, and therefore against the former, and through him, against Numenius;and indeed we find him opposing several Gnostic opinions which can be substantiated in Numenius: the creation by illumination oremanation,576the threefoldness of thecreator,577and the pilot's forgetting himself in hiswork.578
But, after all, these points are not as important as they might seem; for in a very little while we find Plotinos himself admitting the substance of all of these ideas, except the verbiage; he himself uses the light and ray simile, the "light oflight;"579he himself distinguishes various phases of the allegedly singleintelligence,580and the soul, as pilot of the body incarnates by the very forgetfulness by which the creatorcreated.581
Further, as we shall show, during his last or Eustochian period after Porphyry had taken a trip to Sicily to avoid suicide, he himself was to return to Numenian standpoints. This may be shown in a general way as follows. Of the nine Eustochianessays582onlytwo583betray no similarities to Numenian ideas, whileseven584do. On the contrary, in the Amelio-Porphyrianperiod,585written immediately on Amelius's dismissal, onlysix586are Numenian, andsix587are non-Numenian. In the succeeding wholly Porphyrianperiod,588we have the same equal number ofNumenian589andnon-Numenian590books. An explanation of this reversion to Numenian ideas has been attempted in the study of the development in Plotinos's views. On the whole, therefore, Plotinos's opposition to Numenius may be considered no more than episodic.
As Plotinos was in the habit of not even putting his name to his own notes; as even in the times of Porphyry the actual authorship of much that he wrote was already disputed; as even Porphyry acknowledges principles and quotations were borrowed, we must discoverNumenian passages by their content, rather than by any external indications. As the great majority of Numenius's works are irretrievably lost, we may never hope to arrive at a final solution of the matter; and we shall have to restrict ourselves to that which, in Plotinos, may be identified by what Numenian fragments remain. What little we can thus trace definitely will give us a right to draw the conclusion to much more, and to the opinion that, especially in his Amelian period, Plotinos was chiefly indebted to Numenian inspiration. We canconsider591the mention of Pythagoreans who had treated of the intelligible as applying to Numenius, whose chief work was "On the Good," and on the "Immateriality of the Soul."
The first class of passages will be such as bear explicit reference to quotation from an ancient source. Of such we have five: "That is why the Pythagoreans were, among each other, accustomed to refer to this principle in a symbolic manner, calling him 'A-pollo,' which name means a denial ofmanifoldness."592"That is the reason of the saying, 'The ideas and numbers are born from the indefinite doubleness, and the One;' for this isintelligence."593"That is why the ancients said that ideas are essences andbeings."594"Let us examine the (general) view that evils cannot be destroyed, but arenecessary."595"The Divinity is abovebeing."596
A sixth case is, "How manifoldness is derived from theFirst."597A seventh case is the whole passage on the triunity of the divinity, including the term"Father."598
Among doctrines said to be handed down from the ancientphilosophers599are the ascents and descents ofsouls600and the migrations of souls into bodies other thanhuman.601The soul is anumber.602
Moreover, Plotinos wrote a book on the Incorruptibility of thesoul,603as Numenius haddone;604and both authors discuss the incorporeity ofqualities.605
Besides these passages where there is a definite expressionof dependence on earlier sources, there are two in which the verbalsimilarity606is striking enough to justify their being considered references: "Besides, no body could subsist without the power of the universal Soul." "Because bodies, according to their own nature, are changeable, inconstant, and infinitely divisible, and nothing unchangeable remains in them, there is evidently need of a principle that would lead them, gather them, and bind them fast together; and this we namesoul."607This similarity is so striking that it had already been observed and noted by Bouillet. Compare "We consider that all things called essences are composite, and that not a single one of them is simple," with "Numenius, who believes that everything is thoroughly mingled together, and that nothing is simple."608