We have our favorite philosophers, or well known philosophers, our philosophers who changed the course of the history of thought. Often, these people are the same person. Who hasn’t heard of Descartes, Nietzsche, Marx? And if you’ve studied a little philosophy, you probably know Beauvoir, Sartre, Kant. They are the rockstars of philosophy, the big names. The headliners, if you will.

But sometimes, sometimes when you go back a little, when you peel back lots of layers and get a little more specialized, you learn about some other philosophers who impacted philosophy as a whole (and a lot of other things besides), and you find that, until you had this weird epiphany, you never even heard of them.

Coming from Roman Egypt in the third century (c. 204/5 – 270 CE), a philosopher called Plotinus wrote some gamechanging metaphysical philosophy that would influence philosophers and theologians from multiple religions for centuries after he had long retired his philosopher sandals. We call his brand of philosophy Neoplatonism. Let’s talk about it more.

The Enneads: A Metaphysical Journey

We do not have much left of what Plotinus wrote, due to the way things get lost over centuries. What we do have is the Enneads, a group of texts that detail a metaphysical formula for the nature of being. In these texts, the “Nine” (as the title is translated from the Greek), Plotinus details a hardcore metaphysical system for the ages.

In this system, three things stand out: The Soul (pretty obvious), The Intellect (much like what we’d see as reason), and The One. All three of these components are important parts of understanding the system Plotinus describes, but the most important of these, and perhaps the most influential, is the idea of The One.

The One: Neither the Highlander, Buffy, Nor Neo

Prepare yourself for some of the philosophiest philosophy you will ever consider.

In order to understand Plotinus and his influential but hipster levels of “you’ve probably never heard of me” work, we need to understand his concept of The One. And to do this, we are gonna need a lot of mental gymnastics, because, honey, this One is not gonna be easy to grasp.

Plotinus is one of those thinkers who does not like living in a material world. (Madonna and Marx would be sad.) To Plotinus, material, that is, the physical world and bodies we inhabit, is not great and is honestly not really relevant. Material ends up decaying and degrading and at the end of the day it’s not eternal.

For human beings, we are comprised of the soul and the body, as many other theologies and metaphysical systems will attest. But what makes us what we are is our soul and body. We are made of parts. In fact, Plotinus argues, everything is made of parts, but if you have the parts without the whole, they don’t make sense.

If, for instance, you gave someone who didn’t know what it was a cable, but they had no idea what it went to, and you expect them to plug it into the right machine, they will shrug at you and say they have no idea what it goes to. In this way, the parts of which everything is made don’t make sense by themselves and without a broader context.

The world around us is thus, but there is something that transcends it. This is The One. The One is not necessarily a creator god. The One is not easily understood. The One is a source, a flowing stream of being from which we and everything else exist. The One pours into us what is good and beautiful, but we are like a reflection of The One, the way the light from the moon is a reflection from the sun.

One of the famous rose windows at Notre-Dame de Paris Cathedral, courtesy of Gerd Eichmann at Wikimedia Commons.

“We’re One but We’re Not the Same”: Religion Takes Up Neoplatonism

For Plotinus, The One is not the same as humans. He might even quote Bono from U2 in saying that “We’re one, but we’re not the same.” The One is an immaterial being, and everything that comes from The One is of The One, but is also derivative.

If it’s a lot to grasp, that is entirely fair. It might be better understood in the light of a religion that decided Neoplatonism was its philosophical buddy: Christianity. 

Plotinus was writing around the same time as the Early Christian thinkers, and though Christianity is not referenced in his work, he most certainly would have been aware of those around him, having lived much of his life in Rome. But Christianity decided, after a time, that it would be great to incorporate a lot of his work into their own musings on the nature of the universe.

In Medieval Christianity in particular, the idea of a God from whom all things flow is frequently posited. You have such people as Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopogyte (don’t mix him with the actual Areopogyte!) and even some female mystics of the time who speak often of the light of the Godhead flowing into his creation. 

For architects in the Gothic style, it was important to illustrate this in the very structure of the cathedral. The stained glass windows and clerestories were made specifically to show that from God flows light, and the light comes to those in the church, bathing them with its eternal brightness and warmth.

The God of Christianity, however, has much bearing over his creation, and plays a bigger role, in many respects, than this almost alien idea of The One. However, if God creates humans in his image, there exists a way in which humans are a part of God, are like the smaller parts that are a portion of the whole, but which do not make sense without the whole.

You Didn’t Hear About Him Before He Was Cool (But Still Get Points!)

While you didn’t hear about Plotinus before he was cool (he’s been cool for a while), you can definitely start to tell your friends that you probably know a philosopher they’ve never heard of. Just make sure they don’t study medieval architecture, philosophy, or religion.

Plotinus may be an obscure name now, but his metaphysical work in the Enneads, informed by Plato’s metaphysical work (which is why we call it Neoplatonism), influenced everything from Christianity, Judaism and Islam, to Gnosticism and, heck, even architecture! 

Elevated and hard to grasp ideas became intellectual fodder for theologians to chew on and then offer to their own people. In a way, the widespread use of Plotinus’s ideas is much more interesting than some Chosen One, because we get to share it, and have shared it a lot in the past thousand years. That, of course, is very cool. (Maybe not as cool as fancy swords or kicking or sunglasses, but still very cool.)

A Small Note

I dove into Plotinus and the Neoplatonists around 20 years ago in a Medieval philosophy course, and once more in an Art History survey course. For me, the thoughts of Plotinus and Pseudo-D, as my art history professor liked to call him, challenged me and caused a creative mind to wonder more about the nature of being and the nature of what we see in the world.

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