Neoplatonism

What it is

The philosophical system developed by Plotinus in the third century CE and elaborated by his successors — the most influential body of philosophy in the Western mystical tradition, and the framework within which Christian, Jewish and Islamic mysticism all substantially operate.

Its structure is an ordered descent from unity into multiplicity:

The One. Beyond being, beyond thought, beyond description — not a thing among things, and not even properly an entity. Nothing can be said of it directly, and the via negativa of Christian apophatic theology comes straight from here.

Nous — Intellect or Mind. The first emanation, in which the One is contemplated and the Forms exist. Knower and known are not yet separate.

Psyche — Soul. Contemplating Nous above and generating the sensible world below. The World Soul and individual souls belong at this level.

Nature and matter. The furthest reach of emanation, where being thins toward nothing.

Two motions govern everything: proodos, procession outward, and epistrophē, the return. The soul's task is the return.

Where it came from

Plotinus (c. 204–270), an Egyptian-born philosopher teaching in Rome, whose lectures were edited by his student Porphyry into the Enneads — six sets of nine treatises, arranged for tidiness rather than chronology.

Porphyry records that Plotinus achieved union with the One — henosis — four times during their years together, and that he himself managed it once, at sixty-eight. The claim is made matter-of-factly, in a biography, about a working philosopher.

Then the argument that shaped everything after. Plotinus held that the ascent is achieved through contemplation and purification — philosophy, properly done, is sufficient. His successor Iamblichus (c. 245–325) disagreed, and argued in De Mysteriis that the soul is too fallen for thought alone to save it: what is required is theurgy, divine work — ritual, invocation, material objects consecrated to divine powers, acts performed rather than understood.

That disagreement is the origin of the split running through this entire section. Is the path intellectual or operative? Do you think your way up or do you do something? Iamblichus won institutionally — later Neoplatonism was theurgic — and Western magic descends from that victory.

Proclus (412–485) systematised the whole thing in the Elements of Theology, and it is largely through Proclus that the system reached later readers.

The Athenian school was closed by Justinian in 529, conventionally marking the end of ancient philosophy.

How it is practised

For Plotinus, by contemplation: turning attention inward and upward, away from the sensible and toward its source, with ethical purification as the precondition. There is no ritual, no technique, no apparatus — the ascent is achieved by thinking well enough, for long enough, about the right things.

For the theurgic Neoplatonists after Iamblichus, by rite: invocation, consecrated objects, symbols and names understood to be given by the gods rather than devised by humans, and acts whose efficacy does not depend on the practitioner understanding them.

And beyond its own schools, the system did not end; it was absorbed. Pseudo-Dionysius, writing around 500, transposed Proclus into Christian terms so successfully that his works were treated as apostolic for a thousand years — which means Proclus is in the foundations of Christian mystical theology, unattributed. Augustine read Plotinus and said so. Islamic philosophers — al-Fārābī, Ibn Sīnā — built on the Neoplatonic inheritance. The emanationist structure of the Kabbalistic sefirot is recognisably related.

And it supplies this section's basic grammar: a hierarchical cosmos, correspondence between levels, the human being as a microcosm, ascent and return.

What we can and cannot say

We can say the influence is enormous and largely unacknowledged. A great deal of what people take to be generically spiritual — levels of reality, the higher self, the ineffable ground, ascent through planes — is Neoplatonism in later dress.

We can say the philosophy is serious. This is not marginal material; the Enneads are a major work of ancient philosophy studied in ordinary philosophy departments.

We can say the theurgy dispute has never been resolved and reappears constantly. Every argument about whether meditation needs ritual, whether practice needs a lineage, whether the technique or the framework does the work, is the Plotinus-Iamblichus disagreement in modern clothing. Iamblichus's case — that we are not in a position to think our way out unaided, and that acts do what thoughts cannot — is stronger than its modern reputation.

We can say the One is doing something unusual philosophically. A first principle defined as beyond being and beyond predication cannot be argued about in the ordinary way, which is either the system's deepest insight or its escape hatch, and Neoplatonists were aware of the difficulty.

We cannot say what Plotinus experienced four times. Porphyry reports it plainly and neither man elaborates.

Further reading

• Plotinus, Enneads — start with I.6 (On Beauty) and VI.9 (On the Good or the One).
• Porphyry, Life of Plotinus — short, and the source of the henosis report.
• Iamblichus, De Mysteriis, in the Clarke, Dillon and Hershbell translation — for the case that ritual is necessary.