Plotinus

Porphyry opens the life of his teacher with a sentence you cannot get past: "Plotinus, the philosopher of our times, seemed ashamed of being in the body." He would not keep his birthday, seeing nothing in it to mark. He refused to sit for a portrait – was it not enough, he asked, to carry about the image nature had wrapped us in, without leaving a copy of it behind? Born in Egypt around 204, he studied for eleven years in Alexandria under the mysterious Ammonius Saccas, and then, hungry to reach the wisdom of the Persians and the Indians, attached himself to the emperor Gordian's military expedition east. The campaign collapsed, the emperor was killed in the East, and Plotinus barely got out alive. Somewhere near forty he settled in Rome and began to teach.

Six centuries after Plato's Academy, he gathered Plato's scattered hints into a single cosmic picture. At the summit is the One, beyond being and beyond speech, so simple that one cannot even say of it that it "is." From the One, like light from a source, pours Intellect – the realm of the eternal Forms; from Intellect flows Soul; and from Soul the individual souls and the whole material world, down to the darkest edge where almost no light is left. The entire universe is a descending cascade of radiance from one unsayable beginning. And the soul has one task: to climb back against the current, to shed first the body, then the senses, and at last thought itself, and for a moment to merge with what it came from. His prose about this is dense and hot, in places almost unbearable with strain.

Porphyry, his student and editor, testifies to a thing easier to believe than to explain: in the six years he was at his side, Plotinus reached that union with the One four times, while Porphyry himself reached it once only, as an old man, in his sixty-eighth year. And it is to Porphyry that we owe having the texts at all. Plotinus wrote in a rush, never reread what he had set down, had dreadful handwriting and weak eyes that near the end all but failed. After his death the student gathered the fifty-four treatises and arranged them into six nines – hence the Enneads, the "nines." Without that labour, the deepest mystic of antiquity would have survived as a heap of illegible drafts.

From there his influence spreads so widely that we often fail to recognise the source. Through Augustine, who in his youth read "the Platonists" and carried out of them both the ascent of the soul and the idea of evil as a lack of good, Plotinus poured his metaphysics into the very heart of Christian theology. An unknown author who hid behind the name of Dionysius the Areopagite carried him further and fixed the language of mysticism for East and West alike. And the Renaissance Platonists drew from him the vocabulary that European art still uses for the divine in beauty. Neoplatonism is a bridge: from pagan philosophy to Christianity, and from Christianity to mysticism in any of its forms. Whoever steps onto that bridge walks in the footsteps of a man who was ashamed to have a body.