visible world he sides with Albinus. The same may also be said for the great Christian theologian Origen (185-254), who perhaps owed his views to
Aristotelian influence.
The Middle Platonists hardly form a clear, organized body of thought. There is very little evidence that they exercised any influence on each other. It has
indeed been suggested that Plotinus read Philo, but that is hardly likely. What unites them, rather, is the possession of certain common concerns and a
general, if ill-defined, allegiance to Plato. The Bible, Pythagoras, and Aristotle were all thought of in their differing ways as being somehow in accord
with Plato. The common concern that unites them is the desire on the part of all to interpret Plato in such a way as to overcome the crucial difficulty in
his system; that of bridging the gulf created by the theory of forms between ultimate, static, reality and the changing unstable world of matter and sense.
Connected with this is the effort towards transcendence manifested in differing ways by all the main authors: the incomprehensible God of Philo, the
simple/complex Mind of Albinus, and the Monad of Plutarch.
Plotinus (204/5-270), the founder of Neoplatonism, is known to us both from the biography written by his devoted, but possibly not altogether
comprehending pupil, Porphyry, and from the collections of his writings, organized topically into six volumes, Enneads, by the same pupil. He was by
birth and early training an Egyptian and claimed to have learnt most of his philosophy from Ammonius Saccas. The content of this teaching is beyond
recovery, since Ammonius left no writings behind him and speculation about him has yielded no certain results. In 244 Plotinus left Egypt for Rome,
where he spent the rest of his life. His teaching was conducted by means of seminars, to which he attracted some of the influential men of his day. An
index of the power of his views and personality is the fact that one of his auditors, a senator, Rogatianus, was persuaded to abandon his life of public
service. This incident highlights the fact that politics was the only branch of ancient philosophy in which Plotinus showed no interest. Indeed at times he
displays a positive antipathy towards it.
Plotinus thought of himself as a Platonist, and in much of his teaching Platonic influence is evident. Like Plato he believed in the superiority of intellect
to sense and of the spiritual world to the material. In this area he consciously rejected precisely those philosophies which he thought undermined the
basis of Platonic intellectualism, above all Scepticism, Stoicism, and Gnosticism, (a body of esoteric doctrines which denied the reality of the flesh and
the physical world). Against the first of these he insisted that we can know, and that our knowledge is neither derived from nor reducible to sense
impressions, but comes on the contrary from a direct, ever present awareness of spiritual reality, which is always available to us if only we concentrate
our minds upon it. Against the Stoics Plotinus argued that 'reality' is not primarily material but spiritual, and that the existence of matter results from the
absence of form and spirit; in other -words, that it is a negative rather than a positive thing. However, we are not to suppose that his critique of Stoicism
made Plotinus into a despiser of the visible order. His third main opponents were the Gnostics, whose devaluation of matter made it necessary for them
to believe in the need to escape from this world. He also objected to their tendency to underrate the importance of choice and mind in their effort towards
salvation. One of his grandest Enneads, 2.9, is directed against the Gnostics and has been described as a 'noble apology for Hellenism' in its insistence on
the goodness and beauty of the visible order and its vindication of the centrality of freedom and reason in the good life. In his reactions to Stoicism and
Gnosticism we can see Plotinus delicately or precariously balanced between two conflicting world views, tending respectively to the deification and
vilification of the world we see.
Apart from the evident Platonism of the Enneads and the no less evident willingness to incorporate into this general system elements drawn from
Aristotle and the Stoa, two other features need mention. The most widely known and distinctive of these is the One, the supreme principle which stands
at the climax of the ladder of reality. The One is impersonal and beyond the reach of predication and of any direct knowledge, yet it is at the same time
the source of all reality and all value.- It combines the One of Plato's Parmenides and the Good of the Republic. It is from the One as the infinite and
generous source of life and value that all else comes. In making this step Plotinus goes beyond both Plato and his own immediate predecessors. For them,
absolute reality is both limited and static. For Plotinus, on the other hand, the One, and even more the second substance, the Mind, is boiling with life.