We often talk about history in terms of, you
know, the loud people, the conquerors, the revolutionaries,
the people who break things. Right. Generals
who smashed armies, politicians who dismantled
empires. We're just naturally drawn to the noise.
Of course. It's human nature. If something explodes,
you look at it. Exactly. But today I want to
look at a figure who was arguably quieter than
a librarian. but who acted as this massive, almost
invisible bridge between two completely different
eras of human thought. He really did. We're talking
about the connective tissue that links the, let's
say, rigorous logic of ancient Greece, Plato,
and Aristotle to the spiritual, religious intensity
of the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and even
beyond that. It's a fascinating position he holds
because without him, that whole transition from
what we think of as reason to faith in the West,
it just looks completely different. And right
there in the middle of it all, standing on that
bridge, is a man named Plotnus. Plotnus, the
founder of what we now call Neoplatonism. Although,
we should probably clarify right out of the gate,
he never would have used that word. He wouldn't
have called himself a Neoplatonist. No, not at
all. He didn't think he was inventing anything
Neo or new. He just thought he was being a good
Platonist, you know, reading the old... text
correctly but he wasn't just dusting off old
scrolls i mean this is a guy with a serious edge
here's the hook that really got me interested
we are talking about a philosopher who was so
dismissive of the physical world, so completely
over the concept of having a body, that when
his students begged to have his portrait painted,
he actually got angry. He did. It's a famous
anecdote. He flat out refused to sit for a painter.
Which is, you have to admit, a terrible marketing
strategy for a public figure. Oh, terrible. But
his reasoning was perfectly consistent with his
philosophy. He asked them, is it not enough to
carry around this image in which nature has enclosed
us? And then the killer line. Must you also leave
behind an image of the image? An image of the
image. That right there is the key phrase for
understanding him. It is. He saw his physical
body as a shadow of a shadow, a mere mimicry
of his true self. So in his mind, painting a
portrait of his face was, it was like taking
a photograph of a costume. It just wasn't him.
So our mission today is to explore this enigma.
We're going to look at a man born in Egypt in
the 3rd century who ended up changing how humanity
thinks about the soul, the intellect, and this
huge concept of the one. And maybe most importantly
for us listening today, we're going to look at
his radical ideas about happiness. Because for
Plotinus, happiness had absolutely nothing to
do with what was happening to you and everything
to do with what was happening in you. It's a
radically empowering philosophy. It really is.
Especially when you understand the architecture
of reality he built to support it. But it does
require you to rethink what you consider real.
Okay, so we have a stack of sources here. pulling
heavily from the detailed biography left by his
student Porphyry. Porphyry is key. Right. And
also the Ennades, which is his major work. And
of course, modern scholarship on that whole transition
from the classical world to late antiquity. And
we really do have to rely on Porphyry here. Without
him, Plotinus would just be a ghost. So let's
jump into section one, the reluctant biography.
And reluctant really is the perfect word. It
absolutely is. I mean, usually when you study
a historical figure, you start with the basics.
Birthday. Parents, hometown. With Plopness, it's
just a mystery box. We don't even know his birthday.
We don't. We have to do some math to figure it
out. We know he died in 270 CE, and Porphyry
tells us he was about 66. So we place his birth
around 204 or 205 CE, and he was likely born
in Lycopolis, Egypt. So is he Egyptian? Geographically,
yes. But culturally, he was entirely Greek. Oh,
OK. His native language was Greek. He was educated
in the Greek classics. And historians have argued
for centuries about whether his family was, you
know, Hellenized Egyptian or Roman settlers or
Greek immigrants. But honestly, Plotinus would
probably be so annoyed that we're even talking
about this. He'd be rolling his eyes from the
great beyond. He would. To him, discussing his
ancestry or his race was a complete waste of
time. It was like discussing the cage you're
trapped in rather than the person inside it.
Porphyry explicitly says Plotinus never, ever
discussed his parents, his race, or his childhood.
Because of that inherent distrust of materiality.
Exactly. He viewed the physical body as a mimicry.
So if you identify with your history or your
genetics or where you were born, you're identifying
with the shadow. He wanted to identify with the
light that casts the shadow. But his students
were clever, right? They did manage to get that
portrait anyway. They did. This guy, Carterius,
was one of the most famous painters of the time.
Porphyry couldn't get Plotinus to sit, so he
just invited Carterius to the open lectures.
Just to come and hang out? Yeah, the painter
would sit there in the audience, staring intently
at Plotinus, memorizing his features, the way
the light hit his nose, the set of his jaw. Then
he'd rush home and sketch from memory. That's
basically the first unauthorized paparazzi shot
in philosophy. It is, essentially. And he eventually
produced a portrait that Porphyry said was an
excellent likeness. So we do know what he looked
like, despite his best efforts to remain an image
of an image. Now, despite this sort of grumpy
attitude toward his own history, the sources
say he wasn't a hermit, right? I kind of picture
a guy like this living in a cave. Yelling at
clouds. Not at all. And that's the paradox. Despite
dismissing the physical world as an illusion
or a shadow, his social and moral life was, by
all accounts, of the highest standard. He lived
in Rome. He was surrounded by people. And he
was actually a caregiver. He was a very prestid
one. Wealthy Romans who were dying would leave
their children in his care, trusting him to manage
their estates and their education. Porphyry tells
us his house was full of young boys and maidens.
That is just a fascinating contradiction. This
world is a shadow, but... listen, kids, I'm going
to make sure you get a good education and your
inheritance is managed properly. It shows that
his philosophy wasn't about being cruel or indifferent.
It was more like you could participate in the
play of life with total integrity, even if you
knew it was just a play. Okay, let's talk about
his search for wisdom. Because he didn't start
this philosophy gig straight out of the cradle.
No, he was a late bloomer by ancient standards.
He didn't take up the serious study of philosophy
until he was 28. Which is like... Starting your
tech startup at 50 today, basically. In the ancient
world, yes. He traveled to Alexandria, which
at the time was the intellectual capital of the
world. It was the place where everything converged.
Greek, Jewish, Egyptian, Persian thought. It
was all there. And he was picky. Extremely. He
went from teacher to teacher, leaving all of
them dissatisfied. He was actually falling into
a depression about it. He told a friend he was
looking for something he couldn't find, a rigorous
system that also touched the divine. Okay. Finally,
the friend told him to go check out this self
-taught philosopher named Ammonius Saccas. The
sap porter. Right. Ammonius had been a laborer,
a porter, before turning to philosophy. Plotinus
walks in, hears Ammonius. speak and immediately
declares to his friend, this is the man I was
looking for. I love that moment. It's that resonance.
You know, when you're searching for a sound you
can't quite hear and then someone plays the note
and it just clicks. And he stayed with Ammonius
for 11 years. 11 years. We don't know exactly
what Ammonius taught because a bit like Socrates,
he didn't write anything down. But it clearly
formed the bedrock of Plutinus' thought, this
blend of Plato with a very high spiritual drive.
But then... Plutonius gets the itch. He's 38
years old now. He's mastered what Alexandria
has to offer. And he decides he wants to go to
the source of Eastern wisdom. He wants to study
Persian and Indian philosophy. This is where
the biography suddenly turns into an action movie
for a minute. It really does. He doesn't just,
you know, buy a ticket to India. No, you couldn't.
At that time, the Roman Empire and the Persian
Empire were enemies. You couldn't just cross
the border as a tourist philosopher. To get access
to the wisdom of the Magi and the Brahmins, Plutinus
does something drastic. He enlists. He enlists
in the Roman army. I just have this mental image
of him in the back of the legion formation, ignoring
the spear drills and trying to conjugate Sanskrit
verbs in his head. It was an incredibly risky
move. The emperor at the time, Gordian III, was
launching a massive campaign to march on Persia.
So Plotinus, the mystic philosopher who thinks
the body is a shadow, puts on armor and marches
into war. And the outcome? A total disaster.
The campaign failed miserably. Emperor Gordian
III was killed, either in battle or, as some
accounts suggest, murdered by his own troops.
The Roman army just fell apart in Mesopotamia.
So now Plotinus is stuck. He's in hostile territory
with no emperor and no army. Completely abandoned
in a hostile land. He had to flee for his life.
He barely escaped and made his way to Antioch.
He never made it to India. The irony is just
so rich. He joins the army just to get a library
card in Persia and ends up running for his life
in a failed war. But he survived. And at the
age of 40, he finally settled in Rome. And this
is where the deep dive into his actual work really
begins. Rome becomes his base for the rest of
his life. And he attracts quite a crew there.
It wasn't just other philosophers, was it? No,
not at all. It was a very diverse group. He had
senators attending his lectures. He had doctors,
poets, and he had women, which is definitely
worth noting for the time period, specifically
a woman named Gemina and her daughter. He actually
lived in their house. It sounds like a real salon,
a high intellect salon right in the middle of
Rome. It was. And he even had these, well, you
could call them. political philosophical ambitions.
He tried to convince the emperor Gallienus, who
really respected him, to rebuild an abandoned
settlement in Campania. The city of philosophers.
Cladenopolis, that was the name. He wanted to
rebuild it and have the inhabitants live strictly
according to the laws of Plato. No private property,
philosopher kings, total rationality. That sounds
like a recipe for a very quiet, but very argument
-heavy disaster. Perhaps. We'll never know. The
imperial subsidy was never granted. Porphyry
doesn't say why, but you have to assume court
intrigue got in the way. People likely realize
that a city full of philosophers probably doesn't
pay much in taxes. So no Platonopoulos. But we
did get the books. We got the Ennides. But as
you hinted earlier, the writing process was chaotic.
Chaotic is an understatement. For one, Plotnus
didn't even start writing until he was 50. And
by that time, his eyesight was terrible. So he
literally couldn't see what he was writing. Barely.
And he refused to reread his own work. He found
the process of revision tedious and physically
painful for his eyes. So he would just write,
pouring his thoughts out. Porphyry tells us his
handwriting was atrocious. He didn't separate
words. He didn't care about spelling. He was
basically just channeling. He was. Porphyry said
it looked like he was copying from a book that
existed only in his mind. He would work out the
entire argument in his head, then sit down and
just transcribe it. But because he refused to
edit, the whole task fell to Porphyry to organize
this mess of notes. So we owe a huge debt to
Porphyry. Without him, we'd just have a pile
of unreadable scrolls with run -on sentences.
Absolutely. Porphyry is the one who grouped the
treatises into sets of nine, hence the name innates,
which means the nines. He tried to arrange them
by topic, starting with ethics and moving all
the way up to the universe and the divine. Okay,
so that's the man, the reluctant biographer,
the failed soldier, the messy writer. Now let's
get into the meat of it, the ideas. We need to
talk about his architecture of reality. This
is the core of Neoplatonism. Plotinus describes
this. This hierarchy of reality. It's often called
the three hypostases or the three underlying
realities. And at the very, very top, we have
the one. The one or two hen in Greek. Let's try
to take this apart because it's the hardest concept
to grasp. Is the one God? Like, is it a personality?
No. And this is probably the most critical distinction
to make right away. The one is not a person.
It's not a being in the way we think of beings.
It doesn't have a beard. It doesn't get angry.
It doesn't choose favorites. But what is it if
it's not a thing? Plotinus says it is the supreme,
totally transcendent source. It contains no division,
no multiplicity. It is, and this is the key phrase,
beyond being and non -being. Beyond being. That
breaks my brain a little bit. It sounds a lot
like nothing. It's meant to break your brain.
Plotinus uses what we now call apophatic theology,
which basically means you can't describe the
one by what it is because language immediately
limits it. If you say the one is good, You're
implying there's a quality called goodness that
is somehow separate from the one. Oh, okay. So
you can only describe it by what it is not. Exactly.
It is not finite. It is not divided. It is not
moving. It is sheer potentiality. Potentiality.
Think of it like white light. White light looks
simple, right? It looks like one thing. But if
you pass it through a prism, you see that it
contains every color in the spectrum. The one
is that white light. It contains the potential
for everything, but it hasn't been divided into
things yet. Okay. But does it think? Does it
know that it's the one? Proteinus says no. It
doesn't think. Yeah. That seems very counterintuitive
for a supreme God. But think about it. If it
thought, there would be a duality. There would
have to be the thinker and the thought. That's
two things. That's two things. The one is unity,
pure simplicity. So it has to be above thought.
It doesn't need to think because it already possesses
everything. So it's just there. Pure potential.
Yes. So if the one is just sitting there, not
thinking, not planning, how do we get... Well,
us. How do we get coffee cups and podcasts and
traffic jams? Why didn't it just stay one? That
brings us to the second concept, which is the
mechanism of the entire universe. Emanation.
The overflow. Right, really. Host. Imagine the
sun. Okay, picturing the sun. Does the sun decide
to shine? Does it wake up in the morning and
say, you know, I think I'll make some light today?
No, it just burns. That's its nature. It can't
not shine. And by burning, it gives off light.
It emanates light naturally, indiscriminately.
And importantly, does the sun lose anything by
shining? Does it get smaller because the light
leaves it? Well, in modern physics, yes, it's
losing mass. But for the sake of the ancient
metaphor. For the sake of the ancient metaphor,
no. The sun remains the sun. The light is an
overflow of its perfection. This is emanation.
The one is so perfect, so full of reality, that
it necessarily overflows. So the universe isn't
a construction project. It's not a job performed
by a creator god who has a blueprint and a schedule.
No, it's a necessary side effect of the one's
existence. The multiple must exist because the
simple exists. That is a beautiful image. It's
less like a carpenter building a table and more
like a flower producing a scent. The flower doesn't
work to make the scent. The scent just happens
because the flower is there. Or a mirror reflection.
The object doesn't change just because it's reflected
in a mirror, but the reflection exists because
the object exists. Okay, so the one overflows.
What does it overflow into? What's the next level
down the ladder? The first emanation is nu. Nu.
N -O -U -S. which translates to intellect. Divine
mind or intellect, yes. If the one is the source
of the sun's light, noose is the light itself.
This is where being actually happens. This is
where Plato's forms exist. All the perfect ideas
of justice, beauty, truth, mathematic, they all
live in noose. So noose is kind of like the blueprint
for the entire universe. Yes, but a living blueprint.
It's not static. It contemplates the one. It
looks back at its source. And from this contemplation,
it overflows again. And that second overflow
is? The soul. Or the world soul. Okay, we're
getting closer to home now. We are. The soul
acts as the bridge. It's the active agent in
all this. The soul looks up at the intellect
and sees the forms, the perfect ideas, and then
it looks down and wants to express them. It wants
to replicate them. And wants to paint the picture.
Exactly. The soul generates nature. It generates
time. It generates the physical universe to give
a form to the ideas it sees in the noose. And
finally, at the very bottom of the ladder, where
the light fades out. That is matter. The bottom
rung. The least perfected level. It is the darkness
where the light finally dies out. But... And
here is where he always surprises you. Plotinus
asserts that matter is still ultimately divine.
Why? If it's the darkness. Because it still derives
from the one. Even the shadow is connected to
the object that casts it. So the physical world
isn't evil in itself, as some other sects believed.
It's just the furthest point away from the source.
It's the dimmest possible light. So we have this
cascade. The one emanates intellect. Intellect
emanates soul. Soul emanates nature and matter.
It's like a waterfall of reality. A waterfall
where the top never ever runs dry. This brings
us to the big question for everyone listening.
If we are walking around in this dimmest light,
this physical world, what are we? Are we the
shadow or are we the light? And that is the central
question of section three, the true human. Because
I have to say, I feel like I'm my body. I feel
like I'm this thing that gets hungry and tired
and has back pain. And Plotinus would say. You
are mistaken. And that mistake is the source
of all your suffering. He distinguishes between
what he calls the couplement, which is the composite
of the body and the lower soul that manages the
body's functions, and the true human. And who
is the true human? The true human is that higher
incorporeal capacity of the soul. Plotinus argues
that our soul didn't actually fully descend into
the body. Wait, what? There is a part of us that
never left the level of the intellect. So wait
a minute. You're saying part of me is still...
up there so to speak exactly there is a part
of you that is eternally contemplating the one
right now as we speak we just aren't aware of
it because we are so distracted by the sensory
noise of the body we're focused on the traffic
jam not the eternal calm so i'm essentially a
dual citizen i'm living here in the physical
world but my true self is hanging out in the
divine mind yes And realizing this is the key
to his whole definition of happiness or eudaimonia.
And this is where it gets really interesting
for modern mental health, I think, because we
usually define happiness as things going well.
You know, I got the promotion. I'm healthy. The
sun is shining. Right. It's based on external
circumstances. Plotinus argues that if your happiness
depends on external circumstances, you can never
be truly happy. Because circumstances always
change. Exactly. If you need health to be happy,
you will live in constant anxiety about getting
sick. If you need money, you will fear poverty.
Plotinus says true happiness has to be self -sufficient.
It must be invulnerable. So what is true happiness
for him then? It is identifying with the true
human. It is shifting your focus from the outer
shadow to the inner light. He makes a really
provocative argument about this, doesn't he?
He uses the example of a man being tortured.
He does. It's a classic philosophical test case
and a very difficult one for most people to swallow.
Can a man be happy while he is being physically
tortured? And most of us would say absolutely
not. That's absurd. Plotinus says yes. Walk me
through that. I don't get it. How can you be
happy when you're screaming in pain? He argues
that the true self is not the thing being tortured.
The body is in pain, yes. The animal nature,
the couplement, is in distress. But the higher
soul, the true human, remains untouched. So it's
like an observer. It's observing the pain, but
it is not in the pain. It is still contemplating
the good, the one. That is hardcore. It sounds
a bit like stoicism, but amplified. It is very
close to Stoicism, but there's a really interesting
nuance. The Stoics worried that if you were asleep
or mentally incapacitated or senile, you couldn't
be happy because you couldn't use your reason.
You needed your conscious mind to be working.
And Plotinus, what did he think? Plotinus says,
No, that's wrong, because the soul doesn't sleep.
The soul doesn't exist in time. It is always
active, always contemplating, even if you, your
lower consciousness, aren't aware of it. So a
person in a coma or someone with dementia? They
still have a true human inside them that is perfectly
happy, connected to the one. That is a surprisingly
tender idea, actually, that the dignity of the
person remains even when the body or the conscious
mind fails. It is. It's the ultimate form of
resilience. Happiness, for him, is a flight from
this world's ways. The focus is set always and
only inward. So happiness isn't something you
achieve. It's something you remember you already
have. Exactly. You don't have to build the fortress.
You just have to retreat into it. But Plotinus
doesn't just want us to think about this fortress
intellectually. He wants us to actually experience
the source of it. And that brings us to section
four, hynosis. And gnosis, the Greek word for
union or oneness. And this is where we leave
the lecture hall and enter the monastery, so
to speak. It is. The goal of existence isn't
just to be a good person or to understand the
chart of the universe. The ultimate goal is to
return to the one. To merge with the source.
How do you do that? I mean if the one is beyond
thought you can't think your way there You can't
just logic your way to God. You can't that's
the point. You have to strip away thought Plotinus
describes a process of reversing consciousness.
It's a method of subtraction. Subtraction. Yes.
First, you have to ignore the senses. You tune
out the physical world. Then you have to ignore
the emotions. Then, and this is the really hard
part, you have to ignore the intellect. You have
to stop thinking about justice or beauty or any
of the forms. You have to become a blank slate.
A tabula rasa. You have to strip away your ego.
You have to stop being you. You have to create
a space of pure profound silence. And then what
happens? If you are prepared, the one fills that
silence. And we have an eyewitness account of
this from Porphyry. He says that during the six
years he was with Plotinus, he saw his master
achieve this ecstatic state four times. Four
times in six years. So it's not like something
he did every Tuesday morning. It is incredibly
rare. Porphyry says he only achieved it once
himself when he was 68 years old. It's a fleeting,
ecstatic, transformative experience. How do they
describe it? What does it feel like? The flight
of the alone to the alone. That's the famous
phrase. It's not seeing the divine like you're
looking at a painting. It is becoming the divine.
The distinction between the seer and the seen
completely vanishes. You realize that you and
the one are, in the deepest sense, not separate.
That sounds incredibly similar to Eastern traditions.
Nirvana, Samadhi. The parallels are undeniable.
Remember, his whole desire to travel to India.
Even though that expedition failed, his philosophical
destination was very, very similar. The method
of negation saying, I am not this, I'm not that,
until only the real remains, is classic Advaita
Vedanta. And it's classic Plotinus. It's as fascinating
that he reached this conclusion using Greek logic
as a starting point. He didn't just meditate
under a tree. He argued his way to the very edge
of logic, and then he jumped. That's the beauty
of Neoplatonism. It's a kind of rational mysticism.
It builds a ladder of logic, climb by climb,
until you run out of rungs, and then you have
to fly. Now, you'd think a guy who thought the
world was a shadow and wanted to merge with the
Vaal, one would get along with, you know, everyone
else who had spiritual vibes. But Plotinus wasn't
living in a bubble. He had rivals. Let's talk
about Section 5, Plotinus versus the critics.
He had two main targets in his writing, the Gnostics
and the Astrologers. And these disputes tell
us a lot about his character and his philosophy.
OK, let's start with the Gnostics, because on
the surface, they sound like they should be best
friends. Gnostics believed the material world
was a trap, a prison. Plotinus refused to have
his portrait painted because he disliked his
body. Don't they agree? You would absolutely
think so. But Plotinus wrote a specific tract
called Against the Gnostics, and he did not hold
back. He was furious with them. So what was the
beef? Where did they disagree? It comes down
to why the world is the way it is. The Gnostics
believed the material world was created by a
flawed or even evil deity. They called him the
Demiurge. They thought the world was a mistake.
a prison designed to trap souls and keep them
from the true God. So they hated the universe.
They did. They viewed it with resentment and
contempt. And Plotinus. Plotinus, as we've discussed,
believed the world was an emanation of the One,
an overflow of perfection. So while it is the
lowest level, it is still the best possible image
of the divine. He looked at the stars, the order
of nature, the seasons, and he saw beauty. He
saw the One reflecting in the water. So Gnostic
said, this place... is a hell hole built by a
demon and plotina said no this place is a fading
but still beautiful painting of a masterpiece
exactly he accused the gnostics of arrogance
he said you think you alone are sons of god and
that the stars and the heavens are nothing He
found it deeply disrespectful to the cosmos.
He thought you should appreciate the beauty of
the shadow even while knowing it's a shadow.
He also attacked their style, didn't he? He hated
their jargon. The Gnostics had these really complicated
mythologies with secret passwords, magic words,
and these elaborate hierarchies of demons and
angels. Plotinus thought this was all just senseless
jargon. He believed true spirituality was simple
and universal, not some secret club where you
needed a code book to get in. Okay, and what
about the astrologers? Causal astrologers? was
huge back then. I mean, everybody believed the
stars controlled your fate. And Plotinus pushed
back hard on this too. He argued specifically
against causal astrology. Meaning what exactly?
Meaning the idea that the position of Mars causes
you to be angry or that Venus causes you to fall
in love. And why did he reject that? Two main
reasons. First, logic. If the stars cause everything,
then the universe is irrational. Why would a
star, which Plotnus viewed as a divine and soul
being, cause someone to be a thief or a murderer?
It attributes moral depravity to the gods. It
makes the gods accomplices to the crime. Exactly.
And the second reason was free will, or more
accurately, the freedom of the soul. If the stars
are driving the bus, then we're just puppets.
Plotnus insisted that the soul is free. It comes
from the one. It cannot be enslaved by a rock
floating in the sky. But he didn't dismiss astrology
entirely, did he? No, he was a man of his time.
He believed the stars were ensouled and moved
in harmony with the universe. But he viewed them
as signs, like writing on a wall. They might
predict the future because everything is interconnected
like a single organism, but they don't cause
it. That's a really crucial distinction. It's
like a flock of birds predicting a storm. The
birds don't cause the rain, but if you see them,
you know rain is probably coming. Precisely.
It preserves the connectivity of the cosmos without
destroying human responsibility. So we've seen
his life, his system, his practice, and his fights.
Now we come to the end of his life. Section 6.
The Death and Legacy. Plotinus died in 270 CE.
He was about 66 years old. He withdrew to an
estate in Campania, likely suffering from a very
painful illness. Some accounts suggest it was
leprosy, others a throat infection. And he was
alone. Mostly. His circle had dispersed by then.
Porphyry was away in Sicily dealing with his
own suicidal depression. Plotinus had actually
sent him there to recover. So we have to rely
on another student, Eustochius, for the final
moments. And his last words are legendary. They
are. Eustochius arrived late. Platonist said,
I have been waiting for you. And then he said,
try to raise the divine in yourselves to the
divine in the all. Raise the divine in yourselves
to the divine in the all. That is a mic drop.
It summarizes his entire philosophy in one single
sentence. It's not about going somewhere else.
It's about tuning your frequency to the frequency
of the universe. And then there's the snake.
Yes, the snake. Eustochius recorded that at the
exact moment Plotinus took his last breath, a
snake that had been sleeping under his bed crept
out and slipped away through a hole in the wall.
You can't write that stuff. It's just symbolic
perfection. The shedding of the skin, the soul
slipping away from the body. It fits the mythos
perfectly. The shadow is left behind and the
life moves on. So the man dies. Yeah. But the
ideas, they just exploded. The ripple effect
is massive. You almost can't overstate it. Ploteness
is like the operating system running in the background
of Western spirituality for the next thousand
years. Okay, let's trace it. Christianity, for
starters. Huge. St. Augustine. Augustine was
a brilliant man, but he was stuck. He couldn't
conceive of a God that wasn't a physical object.
He was a Manichean at the time. Then he read
the Books of the Platonists, which were Latin
translations of Platonists. It gave him the intellectual
framework to understand a non -material God.
It allowed him to understand God as light, as
spirit. The whole Christian concept of the soul
and the kingdom of heaven being an other world
of perfection that owes a... Massive debt to
Plotinus. It's so strange to think that a guy
who never mentions Jesus influenced Christianity
so much. Well, Bertrand Russell famously said
that to the Christian, the other world was the
kingdom of heaven. To Plotinus, it was the eternal
world of ideas. Christian theologians just sort
of combine the two. And what about in Islam?
Just as significant, and this is a great historical
mix -up, when Greek texts were translated into
Arabic during the Islamic Golden Age, parts of
the Enneads were translated. But they were mislabeled
as the theology of Aristotle. Wait, so they thought
they were reading Aristotle this whole time?
Yes. For centuries, major Islamic philosophers
like Al -Kindi, Al -Farabi, and Avicenna thought
they were reading Aristotle, but they were actually
reading Plotinus. That is a massive error. A
very fruitful error, though. It meant that Islamic
philosophy absorbed all this Neoplatonic mysticism.
It influenced Ismaili thought, Persian philosophy,
the Fatimid state. The idea of emanation fits
very, very well with Islamic mysticism or Sufism.
And then the Renaissance. Marsilio Ficino. He
translates Plautinus into Latin in the 15th century.
The Florentine Academy wanted to reconcile Plato
with Christianity, and Plotinus was the key.
Artists like Michelangelo and Botticelli were
breathing this Neoplatonic air. Oh, so? In what
way? The idea that physical beauty is a ladder
to divine beauty. When you see a Renaissance
painting of a beautiful figure, it's not just
supposed to be a pretty body. It's supposed to
remind you of the divine form of beauty that
exists in the intellect. That's pure Plotinus.
And finally, that connection back to India. As
we touched on, modern scholars and figures like
Kumarswami have drawn direct lines between him
and Advaita Vedanta, non -dualism, the idea that
Atman, the individual self, is Brahman, the universal
reality. Plotnus never made it to India, but
his mind went to the exact same place. It really
shows that there's a universal human longing
there. Whether you're in Lycopolis, Rome, or
Varanasi, people are looking for the same source.
And trying to find a way to escape the suffering
of the shadow world. So let's bring it on. home.
We've covered a lot. The one, the emanation,
the true human. What's the main takeaway for
you when you step back from all the charts and
the Greek terms? For me, it's the definition
of the self. Klotniss tells us that we are not
small. We feel small. We feel vulnerable to the
economy, to sickness, to the opinions of others.
But he insists that those things are just waves
hitting a rock. The rock, the true human, is
ancient, indestructible, and divine. It's an
incredibly dignified way to view human life.
It changes the stakes. You aren't fighting for
happiness. You are uncovering it. Exactly. I
want to leave the listener with a thought, something
to chew on. You mentioned earlier that the one
is sheer potentiality that overflows. It doesn't
work to create. It just creates by being. Yes.
It emanates. So if the true human inside us is
connected to that, what does that mean for our
own creativity? That is a provocative question,
isn't it? We often think of creativity as effort.
We struggle. We build. We strain. But Plotinus
suggests that true creation is an overflow. Are
we really creating things? Or when we're at our
best, you know, in that flow state, are we simply
allowing the one to emanate through us? Are we
the makers or are we just the open window? That's
something to think about the next time you're
trying to force a solution. Maybe the answer
isn't to push harder, but to clear the blockage
and just let the light through. Turn the gaze
inward. Thanks for diving deep with us. My pleasure.
See you next time.