Plotinus

Plotinus was born in Roman Egypt and only at twenty-eight found a teacher he could accept, Ammonius in Alexandria, with whom he studied eleven years. Hoping to learn Persian and Indian philosophy, he joined the emperor Gordian III's eastern campaign; when the emperor was murdered he fled, and in 244 settled in Rome to teach. He was gentle and unassuming; his student Porphyry said he seemed ashamed of being in a body, refused to give his birthday and would not sit for a portrait.

He began writing only after fifty. After his death Porphyry arranged the fifty-four treatises into six groups of nine, the Enneads. He thought of himself as merely an interpreter of Plato, but in fact he built a new system. The highest principle is the One, beyond being and thought, unsayable, called only 'One' or 'Good'. From its very fullness the One overflows into Intellect, Intellect into Soul, and Soul into the material world, as light streams from the sun without diminishing it.

The human soul comes from above and is weighed down by the body, but through purification and contemplation it can ascend step by step to union with the One; Porphyry says that in their six years together Plotinus reached that union four times. His system entered Christianity through Augustine, Islamic philosophy through Avicenna, and shone again in Renaissance Florence. His last words were that he was trying to bring the divine in himself back to the divine in the all.