Page:Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology (1870) - Volume 3.djvu/437

Rh PLOTINUS. himself as the protecting spirit of the philosopher, whose high dignity the Egj-ptian could now no longer call in question. These relations, occurring as they do in the comparatively sober-minded Porphyry (c. 10 ; comp. Procl. in Alcihiad. i. 23. p. 198, Cons.;, are well worthy of observation, as characteristic of the tendencies of that age, how- ever little disposed we may be to attach any reality to them. Although Plotinus only attached any faith to the prophecies of the astrologers after a searching examination (c. 1 5, extr.), yet he believed, as that Egyptian did (comp. Ennead. iii. 4), in protecting spirits of higher and lower ranks, and not less, probably, in the power of calling them up through intense meditation, or of working upon those at a distance by magic. It was not indeed to his individual power, but to the divine power, gained by vision, that he ascribed this miraculous agency, but he would none the more acknowledge that the gods had any individual interest in him- self, and on one occasion he put off Amelius' re- quest to share with him in a sacrifice, with the words, " Those gods of yours must come to me, not I to them.'' (c. 10.) After Plotinus's death, Amelius inquired of the Delphic Apollo whither his soul was gone, and received in fifty-one lame hexameters an ardent panegyric on the philosopher, in which he was celebrated as mild and good, with a soul aspiring to the divinity, loved of God, and a fortunate searcher after truth ; now, it was said, he abides like Minos, Rhadamanthus, Aeacus, Pluto, and Pytha- goras, where friendship, undisturbed joy (eCcjypo- (ri/i/Tj), and love to Deity are enthroned, in fellow- ship with the ever-blessed spirits (Sat/xove?, c. 22). Porphyry, his biographer, adds, that he had raised his soul to the contemplation of the supreme and personal God not without success, and that the Deity appeared to him to be something elevated above all body and form, beyond thought and imagination ; yea, that during his own intercourse with him, he (Plotinus) had, by a transcendent energy of soul, /bur times risen to a perfect union with God, and confesses that he himself, during a life of sixty- eight years, had only once attained that elevation. (c. 23 ; comp. Plotin. Ennead. v. 5. § 3.) The acknowledgments of Longinus, however, speak far more for the influence which Plotinus exercised on the mind of his age, than do the manifested Deity or the admiring love of Porphyry. That excellent critic had at first (having been himself a constant hearer of Ammonius and Origen) regarded Plotinus with contempt (c. 20), and even after his death could not profess any kind of agreement with most of his doctrines ; indeed he had written against Plotinus's doctrine of ideas, and not given in to the answers of Porphyry and Amelius ; yet still he was most anxious to get perfect copies of his books, and extolled at once the pregnancy of their style and the philosophical treatment of the inves- tigations. In the same manner he expresses him- self in his work on final causes, and also in a letter written before the death of Plotinus ; in these writings he unconditionally prefers our Lvcopolitan, not only to the other philosophers of his time, whether Platonics, Stoics, or Peripatetics, but also to Numenius, Cronius, Moderatus, and Thrasyllus, more especially in reference to the fullness of the objects treated of (7rpo§A7jjuaTa), the originality of the manner in which they were discussed (rpoTrcp d^ewpias iSicf xP^o"oV*''os ; Amelius is in this PLOTINUS. 425 respect placed by his side), and the closeness of the reasoning, (cc. 21, 22.) When suffering from pain in the bowels, Plo- tinus used no other means than daily rubbing, and left this off when the men who assisted him died of the pest (a. d. 262). Suidas (who, however, is not to be relied on) says, that Plotinus himself was attacked by the plague ; Porphyry on the contrary (c. 15) states, that the omission of these rubbings produced only disease of the throat (Kvvayxos), which gradually became disjointed, so that at last he became speechless, weak of vision, and con- tracted both in hands and feet. Plotinus, there- fore, witiidrew to the country seat of his deceased friend Zethus in Campania, and, according to Eu- stochius, passed by Puteoli. There was only one of his friends present in the neighbourhood when he died (Porphyry had been obliged to go on account of health to Lilybaeum in Sicily, and Amelius was on a journey to Apameia in Syria), and of him he took leave in the following words : " Thee have I waited for, but now I seek to lead back the Divine principle within me to the God who is all in all." At his last breath, Porphyry relates that a dragon glided from under the bed, and escaped through an opening in the wall. (c. 2.) In reference to former systems of Grecian phi- losophy, we are fully able to point out, for the most part with decision, how fiir they had prepared the way for Plotinus by earlier developments, and how much the peculiarity, both of their matter and their form, gained by his additional and creative reflections. It is not so easy, however, to decide by what peculiar ideas Plotinus compressed the New Platonic doctrines into that systematic form in which they lie before us in the Enneads. This result, indeed, we may see was prepared for by the philosophical efforts of almost two centuries. On the one side, Philon and others had attempted to bring the Emanation- theory, peculiar to the East, into harmony with the flower of the Hellenistic philosophy, namely with Platonism ; on the other side, various Greeks had attempted partly to per- fect and complete this theory, as the mature fruit of the Greek philosophic spirit, by a selection from the Platonic, Aristotelian, and Stoic doctrines, partly (as a satisfaction for the religious wants of the age) to base upon it the elements of the symbolism and the faith both of the Oriental and Grecian reli- gions. With reference to the latter, that which first of all had sprung out of the religious wants of the age, was afterwards continued in the hope of raising a barrier against the spread of the Christian doctrines, by ennobling the various polytheistic religions, and by pointing to their common and rational basis. But as, on the one hand, the Ori- ental Emanation-theory, with its hidden and self- excluding deitj', could not strike its roots in the soil of the Grecian philosophy, so neither, on the other hand, could the eclectic and syncretic at- tempts of Plutarch, Maximus Tyrius, and others, satisfy the requisitions of a regular philosophy of religion. Without altogether renouncing these syncretic and eclectic attempts, or rejecting the new intuitional method of the Oriental Emanation- theories, Numenius and his contemporary Cronius appeared to be striving to make these several systems accessible to the Grecian dialectics. In place of emanations from the divine self- revealing essence, which become more and more finite in proportion as they stand further from the godhead, Numenius,