Neoplatonism

Neoplatonism is a religious philosophy associated with Plotinus that understands reality as an ordered flow from the One toward increasingly material levels of existence. Because physical things change while their underlying ideas endure, it directs the seeker away from dependence on the senses and toward contemplative ascent. Its account of return to the One became a major influence on Christian mysticism, though Augustine’s encounter with it also exposed a boundary between Neoplatonic thought and Christian teaching about Christ and grace.

Plotinus and the philosophical setting

Little is known about Plotinus’s early life. He apparently grew up in Alexandria and received a classical education; the book presents his journey east to learn Oriental philosophy as a belief rather than a certainty. His study of Plato led him to distinguish transient physical things from the ideas he regarded as enduring and real. After moving to Rome, he established a school and taught the philosophy later known as Neoplatonism.

Plotinus did not write until about age fifty, when he set down lectures he had given at his school. These writings became the treatises called the Enneads. The account places his philosophy within a spiritual as well as intellectual history: Plotinus was not a Christian, but Christian thinkers were heavily influenced by his work, and his student Porphyry reported that Plotinus had four mystical experiences over six years.

The hierarchy of reality and the way back

The system is organized as a great chain of being. At its source is the One, also described as the Idea of the Good or God. Reality emanates from this source through successively lesser realms: the Nous, identified with Plato’s realm of ideas; the World Soul, associated with intelligence; and finally matter, described as the least real level. The hierarchy gives physical existence a double significance: matter belongs to the order of reality, yet its distance from the One makes it a source of estrangement.

Human beings long for what is eternal and unchanging, but they are caught in physical bodies and in dependence on the material world. The return therefore requires intellectual and spiritual contemplation, which frees the seeker from reliance on sense experience and directs the mind toward the intelligible realm. The movement is figured as both falling and rising: existence descends through the chain, while contemplation retraces the ascent. The book characterizes this as a journey of the mind to God and, in some accounts, as mystical union with the One.

Augustine’s encounter and its limits

The book also traces Neoplatonism’s significance through Augustine, who read a philosophy built on Plotinus’s writings. Its account of the One and the emanation of reality gave Augustine a way to think about God as pure spirit and about material existence as increasingly distant from that source. Reading it turned his attention inward: in what he called his innermost citadel, he found with the soul’s eye a light that transcended his mind. He understood this light as superior to him because it had made him, and described the encounter in terms of radiance, love, and awe.

For Augustine, however, the inward ascent did not complete the path to Christian truth. He came to see that knowing God required embracing Christ as mediator between God and humanity. His friend Alypius helped him understand the Catholic belief that Christ was God clothed in flesh, a claim that differed from the Neoplatonist tendency to regard flesh as inferior to spirit. Reading Paul then showed Augustine what he believed the Neoplatonists lacked: grace, confession, humility, the Holy Spirit, redemption, and the teaching of Christ. Neoplatonism thus appears both as a decisive resource for Christian mystical thought and as a framework Augustine considered incomplete without the incarnate Christ.