Plotinus

Plotinus was born in Egypt around 204 or 205 CE and turned to philosophy at twenty-seven, studying for eleven years in Alexandria under Ammonius Saccas. According to his biographer Porphyry, he joined the emperor Gordian III’s campaign against Persia in 243 in the hope of learning Persian and Indian philosophy; the emperor was killed, and Plotinus escaped to Antioch.

In 244 he settled in Rome, where he taught for about twenty-five years a circle that included senators, physicians and women, and began to write only in his fifties. He was admired for his gentleness and for his indifference to his body; Porphyry says he seemed ashamed of being in a body. He fell ill and died in Campania in 270.

Porphyry, his student, edited his fifty-four treatises into six groups of nine, the Enneads, and wrote his Life. Plotinus regarded himself as an interpreter of Plato; modern scholars call his philosophy Neoplatonism. Through Augustine, Pseudo-Dionysius and the Arabic translations of parts of the Enneads, he shaped Christian, Islamic and Jewish thought, and his descriptions of the soul’s union with the One became classic texts of Western mysticism.