Man and reality

doi:10.1017/CHOL9780521040549.015

Chapter 14 - Man and reality

from Part III - PLOTINUS

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2008

Edited by

A. H. Armstrong

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Summary

Perhaps as good a starting-point as any for a consideration of the rich, complex and difficult thought of Plotinus is to see what he himself thought that he was really trying to do, what the aim was which he constantly pursued in all his thinking, teaching and writing. As he summed it up himself on his deathbed (whichever version of his last words we accept), it was to bring back the divine in man to the divine in the All. This is an ambiguous enough statement, which can be interpreted in a variety of ways, beginning with the crudest Stoic pantheism. But if we come to understand as precisely as possible what Plotinus meant by it, we shall be well on the way to understanding his philosophy as a whole. Man for Plotinus is in some sense divine, and the object of the philosophic life is to understand this divinity and restore its proper relationship (never, as we shall see, completely lost) with the divine All and, in that All, to come to union with its transcendent source, the One or Good. We must, of course, in studying Plotinus, beware from the beginning of the confusion that can so easily arise if we neglect the wide and vague meaning of theos and theios in Greek and understand his statements about divinity in terms of the Judaeo-Christian tradition, which, in its normal way of speaking, reserves ‘God’ and ‘Divine’ for the transcendent creative cause of all things, and only uses them of created beings rarely, and generally with carefully expressed qualifications (e.g. ‘divine by participation’).

Type: Chapter
Information: The Cambridge History of Later Greek and Early Medieval Philosophy , pp. 222 - 235

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521040549.015 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 1967

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