Episode 11: Forgetting the Ideal idealinthewest.com /episode-11-forgetting-the-ideal Stream Audio Plotinus died in 270 at the age of 66; according to Eustochius, a student who was present, his last words were, “I am striving to give back the Divine in myself to the Divine in the All.” Due to his ill-health, he had retired to a country house some time before, and his circle had diminished. Porphyry, his biographer and editor, went on to publish Plotinus’ works, and to become a carrier of the torch of the Ideal himself, although his light did not shine as brightly. But like Plotinus, he realized that union with the Divine was available to humans; in fact he says, “To this God, I also declare, I Porphyry, that in my sixty-eighth year I too was once admitted and entered into Union.” What came to be known as “neo-Platonism” was given a new life through his work, both in Rome and other parts of the empire. The empire itself, which had been divided into three parts for most of the century, was reunited under the emperor Diocletian. But eventually he had to admit that the size of the empire and the number of attacks and revolts that had become commonplace made it ungovernable. In the late 3d century he deliberately divided the empire into Eastern and Western, each ruled by a senior and junior “Augustus.” This system proved workable for a while, and a period of relative calm ensued. Rome itself however declined in influence as the seat of power moved north to around Milan in the Western Empire, and Byzantium in the Eastern. Just as the emperors during this period were not for the most part native to the Italian peninsula, the “successors” to Plato and Plotinus also came from far-flung parts of the empire. Porphyry himself (this, like “Plato” was also a nickname, derived from the Greek word for “purple,” denoting royalty) had been born in Tyre, in what is now the southern part of Lebanon, and had come to Rome after studying at the Academy in Athens. Late in his life he married a woman named Marcella, and his letter to her exhorting to the study of philosophy still stands as one of his most popular works. “As there is no profit in the physician’s art unless it cure the diseases of the body, so there is none in philosophy, unless it expel the troubles of the soul.”¹ On Plotinus’ death, Porphyry took over as the successor, and he too attracted many students. The Emperor Gaius Aurelius Valerius Diocletianus (245?-312? AD)
One of the most famous of these (although it is not certain he was a direct student) was Iamblichus, who, like Porphyry, was born in what is now Syria or Lebanon. After studying in Rome, he returned to Syria around 304 and founded his own school. Although most of his original writing have been lost, much of his teaching has been preserved in the work of his students, and it consists for the most part of elaborations of the Plotinian hierarchy, the source of which was of course The One. Equally famous was Proclus, who was born also in the Eastern Empire–Constantinople–in 412. He received most of his philosophical training in Alexandria, and then moved to Athens where he eventually became head of the Academy. Because of this, and because of his devotion to the works of Plato, he is often called “The Successor.” He wrote commentaries on a number of works by Plato as well as other philosophical systems. Like Plotinus, he is capable of extremely dense discursive reasoning, alternating with moments of poetic beauty. In his Commentary on the Chaldean Oracles, he says, “Let us not therefore imagine that we may persuade the Master of true discourses by a strange hurricane of words, nor by show or parade adorned with artificial rites: for God loves the simple, unadorned beauty of form.”² Unfortunately, what follows after is one of the most incomprehensible “hurricane of words” in the neo-Platonic literature. Notwithstanding, his influence on other philosophers of the Middle Ages and beyond has been great.³ But of course the real force weighing on “Idealism” around this time, and increasingly during the 5th century was 1/3