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Updated: May 23, 2025
They distrusted in themselves any looking back to these flesh-pots of Egypt. Plotinus was ashamed of his body. In short, they might all say of matter, what Michael Angelo said of external beauty, "it is the frail and weary weed, in which God dresses the soul, which he has called into time."
Peradventure all the philosophers of the earth have flocked to my city." "It has, indeed," said Porphyry evasively, "been found necessary to incur certain expenses not originally foreseen." "For a library, perhaps?" inquired Plotinus. "I remember thinking, just before my ecstasy, that the scrolls of the divine Plato, many of them autographic, might require some special housing."
His literary labours, which were enormous, had for their general object the establishment of that eclectic system which Ammonius Saccas, Plotinus, Jamblichus, and others had elaborated, and were endeavouring to impose upon the world as constituting at once true religion and true philosophy. He was of a constructive rather than a destructive turn of mind.
The impersonal Trinity, such as Plotinus taught, was thoroughly in keeping with their Christology. They lacked a clear conception of personality in the second Person of the Trinity. It was inevitable that they should overlook the same element in the incarnate Christ. The Neo-Platonic view of matter finds its counterpart in monophysite theory.
Her character and intellectual traits are what we are most concerned with. "Her early reading was Milton, Young, Akenside, Samuel Clarke, Jonathan Edwards, and always the Bible. Later, Plato, Plotinus, Marcus Antoninus, Stewart, Coleridge, Herder, Locke, Madam De Staël, Channing, Mackintosh, Byron.
There were those once who could tell. Did not Plotinus speak of a direct mystic intuition of the Deity, an enthusiasm without passion, a still intoxication of the soul, in which she rose above life, thought, reason, herself, to that which she contemplated, the absolute and first One, and united herself with that One, or, rather, became aware of that union which had existed from the first moment in which she emanated from the One?
Plotinus states that he had reached this state "but three times as yet."
With the best intention for promoting the happiness of man, Plotinus is to be charged with no little obscurity and mysticism. Eunapius says truly that the heavenly elevation of his mind and his perplexed style make him very tiresome and unpleasant.
John is attested to have declared this, "not even as shaded over, but on the contrary as placed in full view." Stranger still. Whitaker could scarcely have read the Greek. That this is his meaning, consult Plotinus. Ib. 9. p. 107. "Seest thou not," adds Philo, in the same spirit of subtilizing being into power, and dividing the Logos into two.
The design of the following discourse is to bring us to the perception of the beautiful itself, even while connected with a corporeal nature, which must be the great end of all true philosophy and which Plotinus happily obtained. To a genius, indeed, truly modern, with whom the crucible and the air-pump are alone the standards of Truth, such an attempt must appear ridiculous in the extreme.
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