Neoplatonism: What It Is, Who Founded It, and Why It Lasted Centuries

A current born in late antiquity

Neoplatonism is the philosophical current that emerges and develops in the Greco-Roman world of late antiquity, spanning, according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, from the mid-3rd to the mid-7th century CE. It picks up themes from Plato and takes them in a new direction, built around a principle that becomes the heart of the whole system: the One. Tradition links the current’s birth to the name of Plotinus, though the same source notes the attribution remains conventional, not free of scholarly debate.

Plotinus, from Alexandria to Rome

Plotinus was born in Egypt, around 204 or 205 CE.

At 28 he began following the lectures of Ammonius Saccas in Alexandria, remaining his student for the following eleven years; he then moved to Rome, settling there permanently at the end of 244, where he kept teaching without a single break all the way to 270, the year he died. The Recap on Plotinus covers his full biography.

The One, the principle of everything

In Plotinus’s doctrine, the First Principle must be entirely without composition: it is the absolute One. It stands beyond Being itself and transcends all physical reality; of it, according to the source, little can be said, except that it is absolute Unity. The One is also what everything else strives toward, and it is identified with the absolute Good.

The Enneads, a work saved by a student

Most of Plotinus’s writings reached us because a student, Porphyry, lived with his teacher for about five years and, after his death, gathered those texts by theme, trying to arrange them by content. The result took the name Enneads, for its symmetrical structure of six groups of nine treatises each.

Practical example: when a textbook writes “in the Enneads, Plotinus states…”, it is quoting the text in the form Porphyry gave it after his teacher’s death in 270 CE, not a book Plotinus wrote himself with that structure.

From paganism to Christian theology

Neoplatonism did not stay confined to the pagan world of late antiquity: it deeply shaped the emergence of Christian theology. In the West the path runs through Augustine of Hippo, who lived from 354 to 430 and knew the writings of Plotinus and Porphyry well. In the East the channel runs through the Cappadocian Fathers in the 4th century and, in the 6th century, through the writings attributed to Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. It is a legacy the Middle Ages carried forward for centuries, down to Pseudo-Dionysius in the 6th century.

Renaissance Neoplatonism, from Ficino to Botticelli

Neoplatonism returns to center stage over a millennium after Plotinus, in the Florence of the Renaissance. In 1463 Cosimo de’ Medici granted Marsilio Ficino a small property with a house at Careggi. In a letter to Cosimo, dated September 1462, Ficino describes his devotion to the Academy established on the estate as a place of contemplation. Scholars find no evidence of regular meetings in a fixed venue: rather than a school with a classroom, that “academy” was a shared intellectual outlook, and Ficino taught young members of the Florentine elite. In the late 1480s he completed the first full Latin version of Plotinus’s works, with commentary; in his discussion of the levels of being, his main debt is to Plotinus. Among his intellectual circle was also Giovanni Pico della Mirandola.

The influence reached painting too. Many art historians specializing in the Italian Renaissance consider the Neoplatonic reading the key to The Birth of Venus by Sandro Botticelli: in the painting’s nude Venus they recognize a double-faced love, physical and intellectual, which Neoplatonic doctrine calls earthly and celestial respectively. The theory that the Medici commissioned the painting was long accepted, but today is widely questioned by scholars, though still held by some.