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Updated: May 23, 2025
Both Plotinus and Porphyry believed they were privileged to look upon Him whom "no man can see and live." But Emerson states his own position so frankly in his Essay entitled "Circles," that the reader cannot take issue with him as against utterances which he will not defend.
In like manner from Plotinus to Proclus, that is, from A. D. 250 to A. D. 450, philosophy was set up as a substitute for religion: during the dark ages religion superseded philosophy, and the consequences are equally instructive.
Indeed, all the disciples of Plato are remarkable for nothing so much as their profound and exalted conceptions of the Deity; and he who can read the works of Plotinus and Proclus in particular, and afterwards pity the weakness and erroneousness of their opinions on this subject, may be fairly presumed to be himself equally an object of pity and contempt.
Porphyry, Plotinus, Proclus, poor Hypatia herself, and all her school they may have had themselves no bodily fear of Nature; for they were noble souls.
For the fame of this Neo-Platonic Theosophy had traveled by this time right over the empire; and Plotinus in Rome, and in high favor with Gallienus, was a man on whom all eyes were turned. He proposed to found a Point Loma in Campania; to be called Platonopolis.
Though the subject, I admit, fascinates me, I must say no more on it, lest my autobiography should become "a sort of a commentary" on "the ecstasy," featuring Plotinus! Though always intensely interested in things psychical, and a copious reader of all the phenomena of the unseen world, I have only had one other psychic adventure in the whole of my life, and that an insignificant one.
Another class have the perception of identity, and are men of faith and philosophy, men of genius. Each of these riders drives too fast. Plotinus believes only in philosophers; Fenelon, in saints; Pindar and Byron, in poets. Read the haughty language in which Plato and the Platonists speak of all men who are not devoted to their own shining abstractions: other men are rats and mice.
Plotinus left a successor in his disciple Porphyry, born at Tyre or at Batanea in Syria in 233. You see they were all West Asians, at least by birth: the first spiritual fruits of the Crest-Wave's influx there. In 273 he returned, Plotinus had died three years before, and opened a Neo-Platonic School of his own.
Mechanically I turned to the shelves by the fireplace, and examined the volumes ranged in that department. I found they contained the works of those writers whom we may class together under the title of mystics, Iamblichus and Plotinus; Swedenborg and Behmen; Sandivogius, Van Helmont, Paracelsus, Cardan. Works, too, were there, by writers less renowned, on astrology, geomancy, chiromancy, etc.
The abbess' ship took the wounded captain Setnau on board, with his wife, his children, his brother the steersman, and the surviving ship-wrights. At the very hour when Rufinus closed his eyes, the town-watch of Memphis, led by Bishop Plotinus, appeared to claim the Melchite convent of St. Cecilia, and all the possessions of the sisterhood, in the name of the patriarch and the Jacobite church.
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