PLOTINUS

PLOTINUS, philosopher (ca. 204–270). Plotinus was the chief architect of Neoplatonism (q.v.) and was certainly the greatest philosopher of late antiquity. He fused the idea of the cosmos as one organism and the realm of being as constituted by layers of reality. His active mysticism, moreover, fired his concepts with a more than merely academic fervor. Plotinus’s vision was, in short, a powerfully religious one, and it fed the piety (q.v.) and thinking of the best pagan and Christian minds after him. The Cappadocians all read him, as did Augustine of Hippo (qq.v.) and Boethius in the West. His genius lay behind later philosophers in the Neoplatonic tradition: Porphyry, Iamblichus, and Proclus. Porphyry published his master’s fifty-four treatises posthumously as six Enneads, “sets of nine.” Plotinus continued to be read, if infrequently cited, well into the Byzantine era (q.v.).