In the first century BC, the Roman Republic completed its conquest of the Mediterranean region and the Middle East. The Diadochi were replaced by Roman rule, and now the West and the East were welded together by the power of the Roman legions. A new era of world history began. However, the republic, which had conquered the entire world, was itself shaken by bloody slave rebellions and civil wars during the first century BC. The senatorial aristocracy of the republic was powerless to hold on to power; claimants for sole rule were constantly appearing, and the dying republic could do almost nothing to counter them. The death of thousands of citizens, the crumbling economy, and the loss of faith in the original Roman ideals changed the psychology of the Roman citizen. He tried to escape the bloody nightmare into his private life, and sought to find a replacement for the dying gods of his ancestors in new deities, which the East had been supplying him with since a certain time. The intensity of religious life, which Roman formalism had kept for a time within the strict framework of serving state interests, is growing. In this changing society, a demand arises for some new philosophy, which, however, had to appear as a well-forgotten old one.
Neopythagoreanism
In the 1st century BC, Pythagoreanism, which had died out in the 4th century BC, was revived. However, this can only be called a revival in a very relative sense. The new Pythagoreanism, firstly, contained many elements belonging to the Platonic, Peripatetic and Stoic schools. Secondly, it was a much less scientific and much more religious and even mystical teaching than the ancient Pythagoreanism. Wanting to present themselves as the heirs of the ancient Pythagoreans and thereby prove the antiquity of their teachings, the Pythagoreans of that time passed off their own works as the works of Pythagoras and his immediate disciples. Combining Platonic and Stoic doctrines, the Neo-Pythagoreans taught about the original monad (one) as an active principle and about the dyad (two) as a passive matter. The monad gives birth to all ones, the dyad – all twos. Numbers formed from ones and twos generate planes, planes generate three-dimensional bodies, and three-dimensional bodies produce bodies endowed with weight, i.e. the physical world. Within the framework of Neo-Pythagoreanism, a religious-symbolic philosophy is developed. Thus, according to Moderatus of Hades, the ancient Pythagoreans, not wishing to reveal their secrets to the crowd, coded them with special symbols that must be deciphered. These symbols are numbers, and mathematics is nothing other than hidden theology and philosophy. For him, one is a symbol of unity and identity, the cause of harmony and constancy of things, while two is a symbol of otherness and dissimilarity, the cause of change. According to another Neo-Pythagorean, Nicomachus of Gerasa, who wrote the Introduction to Arithmetic, numbers existed as models of things in the mind of God before any creation of the world. His teaching clearly intertwines Pythagorean elements and the cosmology of Plato’s Timaeus. A remarkable representative of neo-Pythagoreanism was the famous Apollonius of Tyana, who lived at the end of the first century A.D. and sought to embody the ideal of Pythagorean morality in his life. This figure was so important for late antique paganism that in the third century, by order of Empress Julia Domna, wife of Septimius Severus, his biography was written, the image of the main character of which was to compete with the image of the New Testament Jesus. Apollonius was depicted as a man of extraordinary education, pure moral life, endowed with magical powers, who united the pagan religiosity of the East and West. As far as can be judged, Apollonius of Tyana professed one God, opposed to the many gods of popular religion. This supreme god did not need any sacrifices, he was separated from everything and could not be called by any earthly name.
The most important figure of Neo-Pythagoreanism is, without a doubt, Numenius of Apamea, an original thinker who lived in the second half of the second century A.D. and who exerted a huge influence on Neo-Platonic philosophy and partly on the “Church Fathers.” Numenius’s main authorities among the Greek philosophers were Pythagoras, Socrates and Plato, and Numenius considered the last two to be Pythagoreans. However, according to Numenius, Pythagoras also owed his wisdom to the “glorious peoples” of the East, and Plato was for him “Moses speaking in Attic.” Based on Plato, Numenius builds his theosophy of three gods. He speaks of the first god, representing pure good, intelligence, the beginning of all essence, a king who produces nothing. The second god is the creator of the world, he is involved with the first god. The second god looks at the prototypes of things, acts on matter and creates the visible world. The third god is the creation of the second, i.e. the world. The first god of Numenius combines Plato’s “idea of good” and Aristotle’s “Mind”, the second god is, of course, the demiurge from Plato’s “Timaeus”. Numenius sharply contrasted the corporeal and the incorporeal. In the field of psychology, Numenius taught about two souls, rational and irrational, present in every person. He also taught about two souls of the world, good and evil. The descent of the soul into the body is for Numenius an absolute evil. The sharp contrast between the corporeal and the incorporeal, the first god and the second god, the good and evil soul gave reason to speak of Numenius’ dualism, and also to see in this dualism not Greek, but Eastern influences. Thanks to his teaching on transcendence, i.e. the “otherworldliness” of the first god, the teaching on the mediating deity who creates the world, the difference between good and evil souls, the synthesis of Platonic and Pythagorean doctrines, and the special place given to Eastern wisdom, Numenius becomes one of the “cult” figures for late antique philosophy.
Adjacent to neo-Pythagoreanism, but not merging with it, are the “Hermetic literature” and the “Chaldean oracles”. Hermetic literature is the revelations of the god Hermes, who in this era was understood not as the rural god of ancient Arcadia, and not even as the deity of the Olympic pantheon, but as the Egyptian god Thoth, who became in the Greek translation “Hermes the thrice greatest”. The main theme of Hermetic literature was the salvation of the soul through the knowledge of its divine nature. This knowledge was given through the revelation of Hermes the thrice greatest.
The “Chaldean Oracles” were the poetic works created at the end of the second century by a father and son who shared the name Julian. Monstrous in form and content, the Greek hexameters revealed the doctrine of divinity and the salvation of the soul. The “Chaldean Oracles”, beginning with Porphyry, enjoy great authority among the Neoplatonic philosophers, who see in them the heights of the mystical ascent to the supreme deity.
Middle Platonism
Middle Platonism is the conventional name for the teachings of a group of thinkers of the 1st-2nd centuries CE who sought to develop Platonic philosophy by incorporating and adapting the doctrines of other schools. This Platonism is called middle because it is located in the middle between the teachings of Plato’s Academy and Neoplatonic philosophy, which appeared in the third century CE. Middle Platonists tried to make Platonic philosophy a teaching that could be systematically presented and taught in schools. The reference point for many middle Platonists was the Aristotelian model of philosophy, with a developed system of presentation, with a relatively strict coordination of the parts of the teaching. Platonists could not ignore the fact that, thanks to Aristotelian and Stoic development, logic had advanced far beyond the undifferentiated state in which it was found in Plato’s dialogues. In order to participate in the general philosophical life, middle Platonists needed to accept into their teaching the logical, as well as physical and ethical developments of the Stoics, Skeptics and Peripatetics. However, in the same Middle Platonism there was opposition to such eclecticism, a desire to return to the unclouded sources of Plato’s work. Hence the rapid development at that time of the literature of commentaries on Plato’s dialogues, which had a huge influence on Neoplatonic commentaries and, through them, on Plato studies of the New Age. It is hardly possible to speak of any single Middle Platonic system of philosophy. There was no such system; in each individual representative of Middle Platonism, orthodoxy and heterodoxy, purely Platonic philosophemes and borrowings from other schools were intertwined to varying degrees. Such moments as the definition of the goal of philosophy as “similarity to the deity” from Plato’s “Theaetetus” (176 b), the doctrine of the mind as the first beginning of all that exists, the doctrine of the ideas-models that the mind looks at can be called common property.
The founder of Middle Platonism can be considered Eudorus of Alexandria, who lived at the end of the first century BC. He proclaimed the Platonic “assimilability to the deity” as the goal of human life. In the field of ontology, Eudorus is a monist, who taught about the highest one, from which the monad, the principle of order and harmony, and the indefinite duality, the beginning of disorder and fragmentation, originate. Stoic and Peripatetic influences are clearly visible in Eudorus’s work, subordinate, of course, to Pythagorean Platonism. A very significant figure of Middle Platonism was the famous
Plutarch of Chaeronea, who lived in the second half of the first century AD. A remarkable historical writer, moralist, who seriously influenced European culture beginning with the Renaissance, Plutarch was also a Platonist philosopher who left a rich philosophical legacy. The beautiful Greek language, the gentleness of his nature, the love of virtue and culture, devoid of rigorism, made Plutarch a mentor to many generations of educated Europeans. In his philosophy, Plutarch was an eclectic; Stoic and Pythagorean elements were mixed with the Platonism that dominated his worldview. Mysticism, which permeated some of his works, was not alien to him. He commented on Plato, wrote critical works against the Stoics and Epicureans, and interpreted Greek and Egyptian religious cults. From Pythagoreanism, he had a love for mystically interpreted mathematics. In ontology, Plutarch represents a dualist. He could not accept, like Plato, that the deity is the cause of everything, and taught that it is responsible only for the good present in our world. To explain the evil in the cosmos, he drew on a second cause, a material cause, existing independently of good. Since the good deity is separated from the world, Plutarch tries to connect God and the world through the teaching of Plato’s “Timaeus” about the world soul and the demons that exist between gods and people. The world soul, if it is partaker of reason, is good, but it also contains something that opposes good. The presence of demons allows Plutarch to explain the interaction of gods and people, to justify the need for cultic actions, of which Plutarch was an ardent supporter. Plutarch was a supporter of not only the Greek, but also any other religion, since, according to his convictions, the same reason and the same providence operate in all religions, revealing itself to different peoples under different signs and symbols. Plutarch was also not alien to the natural interpretation of religion, when deities are considered symbols of the elements of nature. He could also interpret myths allegorically, seeing in the gods symbols of philosophical concepts, as is the case in his treatise “On Isis and Osiris”, where Osiris is a symbol of good, and Typhon of evil.
In psychology, Plutarch combines Platonic and Aristotelian elements. The division of the soul can be three-part (the appetitive, the willing, and the rational parts) or five-part (the nourishing, the sensible, the appetitive, the willing, and the rational parts). Plutarch sharply separates the mind from the rest of the soul, in which he follows Aristotelian psychology; sometimes it is identified with a demon inherent in every human soul. In ethics, Plutarch also depends on Aristotle. He considers understanding (φρόνησις) to be the main ethical virtue, distinct from the purely theoretical one, which is directed toward good and evil, toward striving and avoiding, toward pleasure and pain. The ability to find the right measure between excess and deficiency is practical understanding. Wisdom is directed toward that which exists independently of man, which is comprehended not by practical but by theoretical and scientific reason. Plutarch, contrary to the Stoics and in line with Aristotle, believes that passions cannot be completely eliminated.
An important source for our knowledge of Middle Platonism is the work “Didascalik”, the author of which is named by different scholars either by Albinus or by Alcinous. “Didascalik” is a systematic exposition of Platonic doctrines, to which are added a large number of Aristotelian and Stoic teachings. Philosophy is divided here into logical, theoretical and practical parts. The logical part is divided into the doctrine of division, the doctrine of definition, the doctrine of induction and the doctrine of syllogism. The theoretical part is divided, as in Aristotle, into theology, physics and mathematics. The practical part is divided into ethics, economics and politics. In theology, the author of “Didascalik” distinguishes three principles: matter, ideas and the first god. The first god forms matter according to the model of the ideas on which he looks. Ideas, however, in this work are no longer an independent principle, but thoughts existing in the mind of god. Plotinus will later adhere to this thesis. When matter is transformed and formed by God, forms (εϊδη) appear in it, which are reflections of the original ideas. Here we can see a desire to reconcile Plato’s teaching about ideas existing absolutely independently of the world of sensory things, and Aristotle’s teaching about the inseparable connection of forms or eidos with matter. The first god is followed by the mind, and the mind by the soul. Thus, here the teaching of the Neoplatonists about the three basic principles of being is prepared. In physics, the Didascalik speaks of the eternal existence of the world. The thesis of Plato’s Timaeus about the creation of the world by the demiurge is understood as an assertion of the dependence of the changing and becoming world on the first and immaterial cause. The Stoic problem of the relationship between free will and world necessity is solved in the Didascalik by distinguishing between our actions and the results of these actions. Our actions are free and depend only on our will, while their results are conditioned by world necessity. Unlike the Stoics, the first and proper aspiration of man is knowledge and contemplation of the first good, and the goal of human life is to become like a deity. Ethics is divided into theoretical and practical parts, which are subordinated to the single task of becoming like a deity. Virtues are treated, as with the Stoics, as interconnected: if one virtue is present, then all the others are already present. The author of the “Didascalika” also opposes Stoic “apathy”, the doctrine of the need for complete elimination of passions, preferring to it the Aristotelian doctrine of moderation of passions (“metriopathy”).
An outstanding representative of orthodox Platonism was Atticus, a philosopher of the late second century A.D. Atticus attempted to purify the Platonism of that time from eclecticism, i.e. from elements alien to Platonic philosophy, primarily from borrowings from Aristotle. Atticus was sharply opposed to seeing in Aristotle’s teachings the completion and completion of Plato’s philosophy. He spoke out against Aristotle’s teaching on the deity, which lacked the teaching on providence, opposing it to the theology of Plato’s “Laws”, against Aristotle’s teaching on the eternity and beginninglessness of the world, which contradicts the literal interpretation of Plato’s “Timaeus”. Atticus also opposed Aristotle’s teaching on the soul, which made the soul mortal and dependent on the body. Atticus rightly believed that the teaching on the immortality of the soul formed the main center of Plato’s philosophy, on which both cosmology and epistemology depended. Aristotle’s doctrine of the immortality of the mind alone contradicts Plato’s position that the mind can only arise in the soul. Ideas, according to Atticus, exist in the mind of God, they are eternal entities, and Aristotle’s criticism of them seems to him unfounded. Atticus identified Plato’s idea of the good in the Republic with the demiurge of the Timaeus, and considered the bad or evil soul to be the beginning of matter. However, completely purging peripatetism from Platonism, Atticus imperceptibly inclined towards stoicism, hence, for example, such statements as: “a single animated force permeating the Universe, connecting and uniting everything” (Eusebius of Caesarea, Pr. ev. XV, 12, 3). Thus, the Platonism of this era, even when it sought to free itself from the influences and borrowings from other schools, was forced by historical necessity to unite heterogeneous elements and doctrines. The weakness of Middle Platonic philosophy was not its comprehensiveness, but its failure to unite these disparate elements by subordinating them to a single principle. This task was accomplished at the next stage of Platonism, in Neoplatonic philosophy.
Neoplatonism
Neoplatonism is the last great achievement of Greek thought. From the 3rd to the 7th centuries AD, the Neoplatonists summed up the development of ancient thought, assimilated the teachings of almost all schools, and created a huge body of philosophical and commentary literature. Neoplatonism continues the movement begun in Middle Platonism toward the unification of Platonic, Peripatetic, and Stoic thought, built in accordance with a single principle. This principle was the doctrine of the consistent origin of all other beings from the highest beginning. The monism of the Neoplatonists implies both the origin of everything from a single beginning, dependence on this beginning, and the sequence of stages into which beings are divided in their origin. The main such stages in Neoplatonism were the one, the mind, and the soul (ψυχή), which gives rise to the rest of the physical world. The doctrine of the one was already being prepared in Neo-Pythagoreanism; the Neo-Platonists were also greatly influenced by a special kind of interpretation of the second part of Plato’s “Parmenides”, which treats of the one, to which being and knowledge are alien. Without accepting the materialism of the Stoics, the Neo-Platonists adopted from them the doctrine of dynamic pantheism, according to which the whole world is connected by a single, living and divine sympathy. Monism and the theory of stages gave the Neo-Platonists the opportunity to explain any thing by placing it on one of the stages of the origin of being. Hence the systematic nature of Neo-Platonism, which distinguishes it from the preceding Greek schools and became an anticipation of the grandiose systems of German idealism of the 19th century. All being is systematized, and in later Neo-Platonism, it is pedantically classified. Neo-Platonism, building its philosophical and religious synthesis, becomes from the end of the 4th century the weapon with which the last representatives of ancient culture tried to stop the destructive attack of Christianity. In this they did not succeed, however, ironically, a large number of the provisions of Neoplatonic philosophy, the style of considering philosophical and theological problems have become an integral part of Christian dogma since that time and have had a huge influence on the development of philosophy and theology in the medieval West, the Muslim East and the Byzantine Empire. Since Neoplatonism proclaimed the incomprehensibility and superrationality of the first principle, Neoplatonism was imbued with a special kind of mysticism, the desire for direct knowledge of the deity without the help of reason and intellect. The difference from many other forms of mysticism was that for Neoplatonists, achieving a mystical union with the One was unthinkable without preliminary moral and intellectual preparation, accessible to few. Unlike many other schools of late Antiquity, Neoplatonic philosophy was an aristocratic philosophy, its adherents were recruited from the wealthiest and most educated classes of the society of that time. Indeed, to devote oneself to philosophical subtleties,Only those who had no particular need for their daily bread could devote themselves to the selfless contemplation of the divine and to intellectual perfection. The Neoplatonists saw themselves as the true sons of Greece and the last guardians of the great cultural wealth of Antiquity, hence their hatred of Christianity, which for them was barbaric and stupid fairy tales for the uneducated rabble. Neoplatonism, despite its openly anti-Christian pathos, was destined to have a very long life. Neoplatonic texts were read throughout the history of Byzantium, in some Arabic versions they determined a great deal in the philosophy of the medieval West, they enjoyed enormous popularity during the Renaissance, sometimes obscuring the true thought of Plato and Aristotle with their teachings, and continued to determine many features of science and philosophy of the New Age. The end of this enormous influence of Neoplatonism comes partly with the destruction of the last great idealistic synthesis of the New Age, the philosophy of Hegel. However, even after this, the shadow of Neoplatonism sometimes covers one or another idealistic philosophy. Thus, the father of Neoplatonism Plotinus seriously influenced Henri Bergson’s philosophy of life.
Plotinus
Plotinus lived in the turbulent 3rd century AD (204-270), when the political system of the principate was falling apart at the seams, and emperors changed, sometimes not having time to sit on the throne for even a month. Devastating raids by barbarians, riots and famine, the lush flowering of eastern superstitions, headed by Christianity – all this accompanied the life of one of the last great figures of ancient culture. Plotinus was from Egypt, received a good education, and at the age of 28 turned to philosophy. The philosophy of that time, filled with an eclectic combination of the incompatible and a bias towards rhetoric, could not satisfy him. He went around many philosopher-teachers in Alexandria until he met a philosopher about whom we know almost nothing reliable. This was a certain Ammonius, who was the only one to Plotinus’ liking. He was a Pythagorean Platonist who combined the Pythagorean spirit of chaste asceticism and a non-dogmatic, but research-based approach to the study of philosophy. After staying with Ammonius for eleven years, Plotinus went to the East with the Roman army, wanting, as his student Porphyry writes, to become better acquainted with the teachings of the Hindus and Persians. He failed to do so, and he came to Rome, where a circle of students gradually gathered around him, loyal to the personality of the teacher and his teachings. Plotinus did not write anything for a long time, limiting himself to oral teaching, but at the request of his students, he began to write at the age of fifty. Plotinus’s works are among the most complex in Greek philosophical literature. The extraordinary richness of his thoughts, their abstract nature, and the unusual lapidary style make Plotinus’s texts difficult to understand. Until the end of his life, Plotinus wrote quite a few works, intended not for everyone, but for his closest students. One of them, the Phoenician Porphyry, thirty years after the death of his teacher, will publish them, dividing them into nines (“enneads”) and providing them as an introduction with a biography of his teacher, which is for us almost the only source of knowledge about the life of Plotinus.
From the biography of Porphyry we learn the spiritual features of Plotinus. We are presented with a man burdened with many illnesses, leading an ascetic life, the only goal of which is philosophical knowledge. He eats little, sleeps little, reads little because of his poor eyesight. His life is spent in philosophical conversations with his friends, with whom he devotes himself to the study of the most complex philosophical questions. His main teacher is Plato, in whose philosophy Plotinus sees the embodiment of the highest rationality and evidence. He writes in not entirely correct Greek, disdaining the conventions of the rhetoric and stylistics of that time. The main thing in writing for him was the expression of philosophical meaning, and not the beauty of style. The pinnacle of intellectual activity for Plotinus was mystical ecstasy, union with the single beginning of all that exists. Plotinus experienced this experience of union four times in his life. For his pure life and practical acumen, which he also possessed, Plotinus enjoyed the respect of the Roman aristocracy of that time, many of whom were his students. He was friends with the emperor Galien and his wife Salonina.
In his philosophy Plotinus, as was typical of his archaizing era, wanted to act only as an interpreter of Plato, hence the main division carried out in Plotinus’ philosophy between the sensory and intelligible worlds. But unlike Plato, Plotinus teaches about the sequence of stages going from the very first beginning (the one) to the last level of being, devoid of any quality of matter. The first three divine stages are the one or good, the mind or the world of the intelligible, and the soul. They are followed by the physical world, consisting of the world soul and the world body, in which man lives, consisting of a single soul and body, as well as other living beings. Everything ends, as has already been said, with matter.
Each lower level of being is a manifestation and activity of a higher one. Each level of being depends on a higher one and is its reflection or realization. Each level of being gives birth or creates, but this creation and making cannot be understood mechanically. The process of creation is, according to Plotinus, contemplation (θεωρία), just as a geometer creates lines and figures in the process of contemplation and reflection. A lower level of being is a reflection, reflection or likeness of a higher one, while being inferior to it in its being and value. Plotinus illustrates the process of creation and making with the image of an outflow (in Latin emanatio), but in this outflow its source is not diminished. Thus, the one creates everything, without undergoing the slightest change or weakening. Another image is the image of the sun emitting rays of light. With this image Plotinus usually illustrates the involuntariness of creation, when the source of creation creates everything not by conscious will, but by an excess of creative potential, which cannot help but create. Another image is the image of reflection, used by Plotinus to emphasize the fact that the reflected object is in no way affected in itself by the fact of its reflection in another. It should be noted that the process of creation is subject to necessity at all levels. According to Plotinus, all being is permeated by the relationship of participation. Each level participates in a higher level and depends on it as on a cause. The process of causation and creation does not occur in time, it is eternal. When Plotinus’ philosophy speaks of creation and creation, no temporal process is implied, but the dependence of this or that thing on higher causes is indicated. The beginning of everything, according to Plotinus, as has already been said, is the One or the Good. It creates everything else, without needing either this creation or anything else. It is the beginning of all, but it is none of these. It is not a being, but is completely transcendent, being, in the words of Plato, “beyond essence.” Therefore, all our definitions and descriptions of the one are conditional, and we are not given in thought, concepts and definitions to comprehend its true nature as it is for itself. Nevertheless, we can say much about it by means of negation, when we deny the various definitions that belong to lower levels. Thus, the one is not a being, is not mind and soul. It is devoid of any complexity and composition, there is no structure in it, no parts, therefore it is extremely simple. It is devoid of any form, quantitative and qualitative determination, rest and movement, is not located in any place, in any time, but it is before time, before movement, before rest. Since it is beyond all being, the laws of logic are not applicable to it, for example, the law of the excluded middle (it, as has already been said, neither moves nor rests). We can even call it one in a completely different sense,than when we speak of the one or one in the sensible or intelligible world. Being is not inherent in it, since it is the cause of being, existing before being. Goodness also cannot be attributed to it as a quality or definition, it is super-good, i.e., as Plotinus explains, it is good for everything else, but not for itself. We call it good only because we cannot designate it in any other way. It is above beauty, does not need any beauty, but beauty needs it. It is the cause of itself and “exists” only by itself, its “being” coincides with what it must be. Accordingly, it is completely free. Nor is it the highest genus, since every genus is expressed about something else, but the one must be expressed only in relation to itself. Being the parent and king of all, the one enlightens and illuminates everything, it makes what is in the mind knowable and comprehensible. It is the goal towards which the mind and soul always strive, and all other beings produced by it want to return to it. It does not care in any way about the world it has produced, any providence is alien to it. It is also outside of thought, it does not think anything, not even itself, since in thought there is always the thinking and the thought, i.e., a bifurcation, which by nature cannot exist in the one. Any activity is alien to the one. Since it surpasses everything, it is endowed with infinite power, surpassing everything produced. Since it cannot be known by scientific rational knowledge, the only way to know it is rapprochement, direct contemplation, a special erotic state of the soul.surpassing everything produced. Since it cannot be known by scientific rational knowledge, the only way to know it is through intimacy, direct contemplation, a special erotic state of the soul.surpassing everything produced. Since it cannot be known by scientific rational knowledge, the only way to know it is through intimacy, direct contemplation, a special erotic state of the soul.
How does everything else arise from this simplest one? Since the one is all-perfect, and having achieved perfection cannot but create, then simply by virtue of its perfection the one creates everything. It does not achieve any goals with this creation, does not solve any problems, but simply creates from creative excess.
The first product of the good and its immediate image is the mind. At this level, Plotinus is not talking about the human mind, but about an objective reality independent of man, a second god, as Plotinus puts it, who depends on the first, i.e. on the one. If the one is the ultimate simplicity, the mind is the first duality, the first multitude. This is how it differs from the one, whose image the mind is and to which it aspires. The mind constantly proceeds from the one, as light proceeds from the sun. The mind is light. The duality of the mind consists in the fact that it is the thinker and the thought. However, unlike our discursive thinking, in which the subject and the object of thinking confront each other as separate realities, in the divine mind there is no thinkable that does not think, and there is no thinker that is not itself thought. Thus, the object and the subject here coincide, there is no difference between them, they form a unity, the mind itself is a single multitude, in which one does not exist without the other. Thus, according to Plotinus, the Parmenidean principle of the identity of being and thought is realized. The mind is a model for all things visible to us in our world. It contains all ideas, and not only ideas as genera and species, but also ideas of individual things. Since ideas are truly existing, then Plotinus’s mind is the fullness of truth and being, truly existing, while the one is beyond both truth and essence. Since the mind contains everything, and all this is in unity, when one part is inconceivable without any other, it is all-unity, a living all-encompassing organism. Ideas are in the mind itself, and not outside of it, as was sometimes asserted in the Platonic tradition. If ideas were outside of the mind, then, according to Plotinus, the mind would not possess truth, but only its reflection. The activity of the mind consists not in research, not in search, not in the transition from one conceivable object to another, but in the eternal contemplation of itself, i.e., the fullness of truth, the entire intelligible world. It is eternity, it has neither past nor future, only the present. Time with its variability appears only at the level of the soul. Accordingly, there are no changes in the intelligible world, it remains identical to itself always and in everything. Along with thinking of itself, the mind also has the ability to think of what it originated from, i.e. the one.
The last link of the divine and intelligible world is the soul. It comes directly from the mind, from it arise the world soul and individual souls, which in their higher parts are inseparable from the universal soul. As the mind is the expression and realization of the one, so the soul is the expression and realization of the mind. The soul in relation to the mind is matter, while the mind is the form that gives form to matter. The part of the universal soul that has become the world soul is the organizing principle of the sensory universe; it unites things that would otherwise be divided into separate qualities, sizes, colors, etc. As the principle of the unity of the world, the soul is one, although this unity is a unity-multitude. By virtue of being produced by the mind, the soul is rational, although its rationality, flowing in time and passing from one object to another, is not identical with the rational life of the mind. In addition to rationality, the world soul contains a sensing and a producing part, which is what is usually called nature and essence. Thus, the soul, according to Plotinus, occupies a middle place, being between the mind, to which it aspires, and the world, which it animates and unites. Fulfilling this latter function, the world soul, however, is not entirely immersed in the sensory cosmos and unites with it. Its highest part continues to abide in the intelligible. Thus, the soul is at the last level of the intelligible and at the highest level of the sensory. The world soul also carries out providence in the cosmos. Being everywhere, it sanctifies space and creates it. Logoi, or rational bases for what happens in the sensory world, are present in the soul. They, being messengers of the mind, make the soul rational, and the things created by the soul beautiful and formed. In contrast to the Stoic concept of seminal, i.e. material logoi, the logoi of which Plotinus speaks are incorporeal.
The world is created by the soul, is a likeness and reflection of the highest principles and beginnings of being, so that the sensory cosmos is the most beautiful creation of divine natures, an eternal and unitary creation. Hence Plotinus’s rejection of the Gnostic contempt for the world. Although in the field of ethics Plotinus insists on the separation of the soul from the body, which is the tomb of the soul, in cosmology he, on the contrary, emphasizes the connection of the universal soul with the universal body and the goodness of such a connection. The world is divided into two regions: in the higher, which begins after the moon (the supralunar world), bodies possess individual immortality, in the lower only the elements are immortal and do not perish. The world moves thanks to the soul, thanks to the soul the world also possesses time, which is the life of the soul. The soul makes the world an organic whole in which all parts are interconnected and which is permeated with the sympathy or sympathy of the parts. Providence operates in it, which, to be sure, is not a conscious concern of the higher for any individual, but an internally acting law that brings everything into a coordinated order. Like Plato, Plotinus recognized the existence of heavenly gods and demons.
The world created by divine principles is limited by matter, which is a complete privation of positive content. Matter permeates the entire sensory world, but only at its very last level does it appear in its true form, i.e. as non-substantial and devoid of any quality. Matter is the primary evil, the first cause of all imperfections in the world visible to us. At the same time, one cannot speak of Plotinus’ dualism, matter does not represent an independently existing principle, it is created by the soul and is the last stage of the process of creation of everything from a single good.
Man also acts in the sensory world. According to Plotinus, when analyzing man, one must distinguish between the true man and the “composite whole.” The true man, according to Plotinus, is the highest part of the soul, which does not descend into the sensory world, but remains absolutely pure and free in the divine world. This higher soul gives birth to its reflection, the lower soul, which together with the body forms a living being, which is a complex whole from the image of the soul and the material body. Man’s task is to completely free himself from the material component and return home, to the world of true being. To achieve this goal, one must first acquire political virtues: courage, understanding, chastity, and justice. These virtues become measures in the human soul, restraining, but not completely eliminating the material. Then purification from the material is necessary, and finally, the transition to the prototypes of virtues that exist in the mind. Pure knowledge, which occurs in the mind through dialectical science and direct insight into the ideas of the divine mind, raises us to the penultimate stage of assimilation to the deity, which plays the role of the goal in Plotinus’s ethics. Our soul reaches the final goal only when, having abandoned the highest stage of thinking, having ceased to be dual, it unites in an ineffable unity with the one itself, as if combining its center with the central “point” of all being. Thus, the soul, gradually overcoming the complexity that arises in the process of creation, throwing off all unnecessary covers and garments, becoming more and more like the beginning of everything, reaches the one, which Plotinus calls its God the Father.
The influence of Plotinus’ philosophy in the late Roman Empire was enormous, but in the philosophy of his disciples, who remained faithful to Plotinus’s basic scheme, a number of significant changes occurred. Firstly, the religious element, which in Plotinus played a less noticeable role compared to intellectual search and research, is strengthened. Instead of personal and intellectual mysticism, which distinguished Plotinus, the later Neoplatonists often put philosophically developed magic, the so-called “theurgy”. There is a recognition of sacred texts, authoritative for philosophy, which narrate about the highest reality, for example, the “Chaldean Oracles” and Orphic texts. Like Christianity, Neoplatonism tries to proclaim its sacred scripture. Further, there is a craving for analyticism and scholasticism, when the students and followers of Plotinus begin to carry out in great detail the division of the main levels of being outlined by Plotinus. Infinite triads appear, which in turn are also divided into triads. Finally, in late Neoplatonism, independent philosophical work and independent presentation of results are often replaced by commentary activity. Neoplatonists, beginning with Iamblichus, establish the number of Platonic dialogues that should be studied in philosophical schools, develop the basic methodology for studying them, and create enormous commentaries on them, in which each word of Plato very often gives rise to long, sometimes interesting in themselves, but rarely clarifying Plato’s own thought, reasoning.
Plotinus’ most important followers were his students Amelius and Porphyry
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Porphyry, as has already been said, published the works of Plotinus and also wrote a kind of commentary on them, his “Starting Points in the Movement to the Intelligible.” Porphyry was the first to undertake the division of Plotinus’s fundamental natures of the divine world into further parts. His main area of interest was ethics with a religious bias. Porphyry was a fierce opponent of Christianity, who wrote the famous work “Against the Christians,” in which he tried to oppose the sacred scriptures of Christians by philological methods. Porphyry’s student was the famous Neoplatonist Iamblichus, who strengthened the religious-magical element of Neoplatonism and became the spiritual father of the unsuccessful anti-Christian restoration of Julian the Apostate.
The famous Athenian school of Neoplatonism, represented by Plutarch of Athens, Syrianus and Proclus, in whose work Neoplatonism became a completely systematic and all-encompassing philosophy, dates back to Iamblichus. A man of enormous capacity for work, great dialectical talent, an excellent teacher, Proclus summed up the three-century development of Neoplatonic philosophy, turning it into a strict and closed system of thought. A significant follower of Proclus was Damascius, the last Neoplatonic philosopher, who possessed great speculative talent. Unlike Proclus, Damascius was not a systematizer, but a thinker capable of seeing the problems and difficulties of Neoplatonic philosophy, a man who showed the need for Neoplatonic philosophy to go beyond itself. The activity of the “Alexandrian school” of Neoplatonism was much less speculative, it was aimed primarily at creating commentaries on the texts of Plato and Aristotle, so the “Alexandrians” were able to survive the defeat of ancient philosophy, gradually moving to the positions of Christianity. This defeat occurred in 529, when the edict of Emperor Justinian closed all philosophical schools as a breeding ground for heresies. The empire, which had finally become Christian, could not bear the last elements of paganism in its social and cultural body.
Ancient philosophy, which arose in the early 6th century BC in Ionia, went a long way in its development during the millennium allotted to it by fate. Ancient philosophers were able to create a completely new type of worldview, in which man relies primarily on his own mind, independent of religious or social authorities. The extraordinary freedom of philosophy of this ancient era was crowned with a rich harvest. The Greeks created the main philosophical disciplines, assigned their names to them, the development of logical and ontological problems by the great Greek philosophers in many respects has remained unsurpassed to this day. In their philosophy, the Greeks created the foundation for the development of scientific knowledge, mathematics and physics, linguistics and biology and many other sciences were initially created within the framework of philosophical schools. Greek philosophers were the first to approach the analysis of problems arising from the fact of human coexistence, to the analysis of social and political problems. Until now, the teachings on society of Plato, Aristotle or Epicurus have been capable of causing the most lively polemics. But Greek philosophy, like any other, had its limits, which cannot be exceeded. The main feature of Greek philosophical teachings, an almost limitless faith in reason and its possibilities, a love of abstract speculation, a preference for the general over the particular, very often provoked philosophers to ignore experience, refute it with logical arguments, and defend its unreliability. Love for the general concept or idea made even those philosophers who tried to comprehend this individual forget about the individual. Finally, we should not forget that Greek philosophy is a phenomenon of the childhood of the human race, and childhood is characterized by many things that an adult will not do. However, as Karl Marx once said, the Greeks were normal children, unlike many other peoples of antiquity, and an appeal to them is an appeal to the normal and very fruitful childhood of the human race.
Literature
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