What was neoplatonism

Daehne had tried to show that he was Neoplatonic, and Reinkens has maintained that he was essentially Aristotelian. After lecturing in her native city, Hypatia ultimately became the recognized head of the Neoplatonic school there c. It was in keeping with the mystic and Neoplatonic current of the time, and afforded it the highest imaginable satisfaction.

In the seventh Book of his confessions he has acknowledged his indebtedness to the reading of Neoplatonic writings. New Word List Word List. Though it was distinct from more academic studies of Plato during the time, Neoplatonism did not receive this name until the s. Neoplatonism is a system of theological and mystical philosophy founded in the third century by Plotinus CE. It was developed by a number of his contemporaries or near contemporaries, including Iamblichus, Porphyry, and Proclus.

It is also influenced by a variety of other systems of thought, including Stoicism and Pythagoreanism. The teachings are heavily based on the works of Plato BCE , a well-known philosopher in classical Greece. During the Hellenistic period when Plotinus was alive, all who studied Plato would have simply been known as "Platonists. Modern understandings led German scholars in the midth century to create the new word "Neoplatonist. The primary difference is that Neoplatonists incorporated religious and mystical practices and beliefs into Plato's philosophy.

The traditional, non-religious approach was done by those known as "Academic Platonists. However, their ideas never really took off in this new age. Ficino -- a philosopher himself -- did Neoplatonism justice in essays such as " Five Questions Concerning the Mind " which laid out its principles. He also revived works by the Greek scholars previously mentioned as well as a person identified only as "Pseudo- Dionysius.

The Italian philosopher Pico had more of a free will view on Neoplatonism, which shook up the revival of Plato's ideas. His most famous work is " Oration on the Dignity of Man. Bruno was a prolific writer in his life, publishing some 30 works in total. A priest of the Dominican Order of Roman Catholicism, the writings of the earlier Neoplatonists caught his attention and at some point, he left the priesthood.

In the end, Bruno was burned on a pyre on Ash Wednesday of after accusations of heresy by the Inquisition.

Neo-platonism or Neoplatonism is a modern term used to designate the period of Platonic philosophy beginning with the work of Plotinus and ending with the closing of the Platonic Academy by the Emperor Justinian in C. The origins of Neoplatonism can be traced back to the era of Hellenistic syncretism which spawned such movements and schools of thought as Gnosticism and the Hermetic tradition.

A major factor in this syncretism, and one which had an immense influence on the development of Platonic thought, was the introduction of the Jewish Scriptures into Greek intellectual circles via the translation known as the Septuagint.

It was Proclus who, shortly before the closing of the Academy, bequeathed a systematic Platonic philosophy upon the world that in certain ways approached the sophistication of Plotinus.

Finally, in the work of the so-called Pseudo-Dionysius, we find a grand synthesis of Platonic philosophy and Christian theology that was to exercise an immense influence on mediaeval mysticism and Renaissance Humanism. That this required him to formulate an entirely new philosophical system would not have been viewed by him as a problem, for it was, in his eyes, precisely what the Platonic doctrine required.

Also, in the Hellenistic era, certain Platonic ideas were taken up by thinkers of various loyalties — Jewish, Gnostic, Christian — and worked up into new forms of expression that varied quite considerably from what Plato actually wrote in his Dialogues. In any case, the early Hermetic-Gnostic tradition is certainly to an extent Platonic, and later Gnosticism and Christian Logos theology markedly so.

If an intellectual reply to a general yearning for personal salvation is what characterizes Neoplatonism, then the highly intellectual Gnostics and Christians of the Late Hellenistic era must be given the title of Neoplatonists.

He answered the challenge of accounting for the emergence of a seemingly inferior and flawed cosmos from the perfect mind of the divinity by declaring outright that all objective existence is but the external self-expression of an inherently contemplative deity known as the One to hen , or the Good ta kalon.

This diminution of the divine essence in temporality is but a necessary moment of the complete expression of the One. By elevating the experience of the individual soul to the status of an actualization of a divine Form, Plotinus succeeded, also, in preserving, if not the autonomy, at least the dignity and ontological necessity of personality. This error gives rise to evil, which is the purely subjective relation of the Soul now divided to the manifold and concrete forms of its expressive act.

When the Soul, in the form of individual existents, becomes thus preoccupied with its experience, Nature comes into being, and the Cosmos takes on concrete form as the locus of personality. Enneads VI. While Plotinus suggests that the One subsists by thinking itself as itself, the Intellect subsists through thinking itself as other , and therefore becomes divided within itself: this act of division within the Intellect is the production of Being, which is the very principle of expression or discursivity Ennead V.

At this point, the thinking or contemplation of the Intellect is divided up and ordered into thoughts, each of them subsisting in and for themselves, as autonomous reflections of the dunamis of the One.

This activity of the Soul results in the production of numerous individual souls: living actualizations of the possibilities inherent in the Forms. Whereas the Intellect became divided within itself through contemplation, the Soul becomes divided outside of itself, through action which is still contemplation, according to Plotinus, albeit the lowest type; cf.

Ennead III. Let us now examine the manner in which Plotinus explains Nature as the locus of personality. Contemplation, at the level of the Soul, is for Plotinus a two-way street. The Soul both contemplates, passively, the Intellect, and reflects upon its own contemplative act by producing Nature and the Cosmos.

This reflection, if carried by the individual soul with a memory of its provenance always in the foreground, will lead to a just governing of the physical Cosmos, which will make of it a perfect material image of the Intellectual Cosmos, i. Enneads IV. This is tantamount to a relinquishing, by the soul, of its divine nature. When the soul has thus abandoned itself, it begins to accrue many alien encrustations, if you will, that make of it something less than divine.

The memory of the personality that this wandering soul possessed must be forgotten in order for it to return completely to its divine nature; for if it were remembered, we would have to say, contradictorily, that the soul holds a memory of what occurred during its state of forgetfulness!

So in a sense, Plotinus holds that individual personalities are not maintained at the level of Soul. However, if we understand personality as more than just a particular attitude attached to a concrete mode of existence, and rather view it as the sum total of experiences reflected upon in intellect, then souls most certainly retain their personalities, even at the highest level, for they persist as thoughts within the divine Mind cp.

Ennead IV. Plotinus, like his older contemporary, the Christian philosopher Origen of Alexandria, views the descent of the soul into the material realm as a necessary moment in the unfolding of the divine Intellect, or God. Both Origen and Plotinus place the blame for experiencing this descent as an evil squarely upon the individual soul. Of course, these thinkers held, respectively, quite different views as to why and how the soul experiences the descent as an evil; but they held one thing in common: that the rational soul will naturally choose the Good, and that any failure to do so is the result of forgetfulness or acquired ignorance.

But whence this failure? This view has more than a little Gnostic flavor to it, which would have sat ill with Plotinus, who was a great opponent of Gnosticism. The fall of the soul Plotinus refers, quite simply, to the tension between pure contemplation and divisive action — a tension that constitutes the natural mode of existence of the soul cf.

Plotinus tells us that a thought is only completed or fully comprehended after it has been expressed, for only then can the thought be said to have passed from potentiality to actuality Ennead IV. Plotinus leaves it up to the individual to determine what this means. After uttering these words, Plotinus, one of the greatest philosophers the world has ever known, passed away.

But this is only if we take this remark in a mystical or ecstatic religious sense. Striving for or desiring salvation was not, for Plotinus, an excuse for simply abandoning oneself to faith or prayer or unreflective religious rituals; rather, salvation was to be achieved through the practice of philosophical investigation, of dialectic. The fact that Plotinus, at the end of his life, had arrived at this very simple formulation, serves to show that his dialectical quest was successful.

He says this because life is the moment in which the soul expresses itself and revels in the autonomy of the creative act. However, this life, since it is characterized by action, eventually leads to exhaustion, and the desire, not for autonomous action, but for reposeful contemplation — of a fulfillment that is purely intellectual and eternal. Death is the relief of this exhaustion, and the return to a state of contemplative repose. Is this return to the Intellect a return to potentiality?

It is hard to say. Perhaps it is a synthesis of potentiality and actuality: the moment at which the soul is both one and many, both human and divine. This would constitute Plotinian salvation — the fulfillment of the exhortation of the dying sage.

This is, of course, to be understood as an intellectual, as opposed to a merely physical or even emotional well-being, for Plotinus was not concerned with the temporary or the temporal. The striving of the human mind for a mode of existence more suited to its intuited potential than the ephemeral possibilities of this material realm, while admittedly a striving born of temporality, is nonetheless directed toward atemporal and divine perfection. This is a striving or desire rendered all the more poignant and worthy of philosophy precisely because it is born in the depths of existential angst, and not in the primitive ecstasies of unreflective ritual.

As the last true representative of the Greek philosophical spirit, Plotinus is Apollonian, not Dionysian. Plotinus was faced with the task of defending the true Platonic philosophy, as he understood it, against the inroads being made, in his time, most of all by Gnostics, but also by orthodox Christianity.

Instead of launching an all-out attack on these new ideas, Plotinus took what was best from them, in his eyes, and brought these ideas into concert with his own brand of Platonism. For this reason, we are sometimes surprised to see Plotinus, in one treatise, speaking of the cosmos as a realm of forgetfulness and error, while in another, speaking of the cosmos as the most perfect expression of the godhead.