Quotes About Plotinus

Next to this, we must consider the soul receiving its beauty from intellect

The proof of the mightiest power is to be able to use the ignoble nobly, and given formlessness, to make it the material of unknown forms.

Knowledge has three degrees--opinion, science, illumination. The means or instrument of the first is sense; of the second, dialectic; of the third, intuition.

In her, as an Alexandrian, licence was in a curious way a form of self-abnegation, a travesty of freedom; and if I saw her as an exemplar of the city it was not of Alexandria, or Plotinus that I was forced to think, but of the sad thirtieth child of Valentinus who fell, 'not like Lucifer by rebelling against God, but by desiring too ardently to be united to him'.*

As Plotinus tells us, we elected the body, the parents, the place, and the circumstances that suited the soul and that, as the myth says, belongs to its necessity.

Plotinus was preaching the dangers of multiplicity of the world back in the third century. Yet, the problem is particularly and essentially woman's. Distraction is, always has been, and probably always will be, inherent in woman's life.

Plotinus was also the most relentlessly antimaterialist thinker in history. He taught his disciples that everything we see or imagine to be real is actually only a series of faded images of a higher realm of pure ideas and pure spirit, intelligible only to the soul. According to his student Porphyry of Tyre, he was even sorry that his soul had to live inside a physical body.

Plotinus. He is without doubt the most important and influential thinker to appear between Aristotle and Saint Augustine. Yet we know almost nothing about him. His life is an enigma wrapped in a mystery. He declined to tell his disciples any details about his life. He even refused to have his portrait painted or a bust made of his likeness.

The Sermon on the Mount, the third-century Christian Apologist Irenaeus told listeners, takes over where Plato's dialogues left off. Every Christian would realize the elusive goal that Plotinus was seeking in vain: the joyful reunion of the soul with God. He or she could confidently say with Paul, "O Death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?" and hear the answer echo all the way back to Socrates's prison cell.

But truth is not the only merit that a metaphysic can possess. It may have beauty, and this is certainly to be found in Plotinus; there are passages that remind one of the later cantos of Dante's Para- diso, and of almost nothing else in literature. Now

Like Spinoza, he has a certain kind of moral purity and loftiness, which is very impressive. He is always sincere, never shrill or censorious, invariably concerned to tell the reader, as simply as he can, what he believes to be important. Whatever one may think of him as a theoretical philosopher, it is impossible not to love him as a man. The life of Plotinus is known

But how is this to be accomplished? Cut away everything. The experience of ecstasy (standing outside one's own body) happened frequently to Plotinus: Many

Much later, the illustrious teacher (acharya), Shankara (eighth century C.E.), attempted a reformulation of Advaita (Nondual) Vedanta, and in the process introduced some ideas which are controversial to this day. In many ways, his metaphysical worldview is also remarkably similar to that of Plotinus:

Unlike the conception of Moses, in which God's Spirit, or Soul, had been imparted to man alone, Plotinus regarded Soul as a radiation of God's Spirit imparted to the entire universe,

Partly as a result of vivid allegorical readings of Homer, the grotto of the nymphs in the Odyssey gets cosmologically extended in meaning, as in the De antro nympharum of Plotinus's student Porphyry, where cos- mos and cave exist for each other. The one is the symbolon of the other, and man is the tertium, who is prevented by temptation and gentle force from reaching his cave-transcending destiny.

Can a cat vanish, but not its grin? Can structure exist without matter? This may be possible in the abstract interpretation of Plato and Plotinus; in a concrete sense, it is impossible. Structured matter can be interpreted as an excitation of unstructured matter, just as the cat with the grin may be seen as an excitation of the nongrinning cat.