Plotinus was vastly more famous and influential than these predecessors,
in part because he was more systematic in his exposition, writing coherent
treatises instead of commentaries and defenses of earlier philosophers. More
important, the context and purpose of his writing had changed. Plotinus
reflected above all on the nature of transcendence, on what can be conceived
to be beyond the finiteness of every plane, whether material, mental, or formal.
Earlier thinkers had approached their highest categories—God, the Pythago-
rean One, the Form of Forms, Goodness, the Unmoved Mover—from below,
as logical extensions of a number philosophy or a physics or an examination
of the formal level beyond particulars. Plato, who in the intellectual context
of his day was most concerned to combat the schools of relativism and
paradox, gave no consistent doctrine on the issue of the plurality of Forms and
their source; for him, these were rough edges at the outer limits of his thinking.
For Plotinus, transcendence was the starting point, which he set out to make
philosophically respectable. This new emphasis can be attributed to the struc-
tural change that was occurring in the intellectual world around 250 c.e.
The Stoic and Epicurean schools had disappeared by about this time; so
had the neo-Pythagoreans, the wandering Cynics, and the popular rhetors of
the Second Sophistic; so too had the development of Aristotelean science.
Plotinus forged a united front of all the surviving philosophies, together with
the most intellectual elements from the non-particularistic religious or occult
movements. For this purpose he appropriated elements of the schools which
had now collapsed, purging them of their materialism. He used Aristotelean
categories, and drew on Stoic elements such as the universal sympathy of
nature. He took over what he could of natural science, interpreting cause-and-
effect relations as reflections of higher forms, with light as a visible manifes-
tation of divine goodness (DSB, 11:41–42). He rejected occultist practices such
as spirit-calling because they reinforced the particularism and fragmentation
of the inchoate religious movements. Plotinus sublimated them all into pure
transcendence as a banner under which all could unite. The period of the loose
syncretisms and debates among disorganized schools of thought which had
characterized the previous two centuries gave way to a sense of showdown
against an external enemy. Plotinus provided the tightly argued system that
drew together what was now identified as pagan philosophy against the grow-
ing power of the church.
The next generations of Plotinus’ followers intensified the battle. By 275
c.e., the time of Aurelian’s official cult of the sun god, Porphyry had become
the outspoken opponent of Christianity. Plotinus died in 270. His writings,
which circulated only within the circle of disciples, were edited for publication
by Porphyry around 305, as if deliberately to throw them into the death
struggle against Christianity. Porphyry concentrated on technical argumenta-126 •^ The Skeleton of Theory