[In the following essay, Dodds traces Plato's influence on the thought of Plotinus.]

expedition to the East with a view to studying the philosophy of Persia and India, but failed to get there; and that on one occasion he accepted the invitation of an Egyptian priest to take part in a spiritualistic seance arranged by the priest at the Iseum in Rome.¹ Add to this the fact that in one passage, dealing with the theory of Beauty,² he expresses his admiration of the Egyptian hieroglyphs; and that (like Plato) he compares philosophy to an initiation into the mysteries—perhaps in his case the Isiac mysteries,³ and perhaps not. Even so might an Englishman, educated and perhaps born in India, take advantage of a punitive expedition to study comparative religion on the North-West Frontier, and of an invitation to a Tantrist temple to see something of Indian devil-worship; he might even praise the sacred sculpture of Benares, and adorn his style with occasional allusions to the car of Juggernaut. We know with certainty that Plotinus' name is Roman, and that he wrote the idiomatic Greek of a native speaker; he may have been an expert in Egyptian religion, but all that he tells us on the subject could have been picked up on a Cook's tour.

The second method of proof is much simpler, since it rests entirely on negative evidence. Certain thoughts and points of view are shared by Plotinus with earlier writers who have been given their passports as ‘true Greeks’; these are deducted from the sum total of Plotinus' system, and the residuum is labelled ‘oriental.’ Three assumptions are involved in this labelling: That the labeller has a safe criterion for distinguishing the ‘true Greeks’ from the half-breeds among Plotinus' prodecessors; that he is intimately familiar with the whole of ‘true Greek’ literature, both with what has survived and with what has not; and, lastly, that Plotinus never invented anything for himself, but composed his works by copying out passages from ‘authorities.’ Clearly these are large assumptions. If we are to avoid making them, we must find convincing parallels between specific passages in Plotinus and specific passages of non-Hellenized oriental religious literature. Perhaps the orientalists will one day help us there. Until such parallels are forthcoming⁴ it seems to me wisest to maintain a position of [épokhé] on the whole question and in the meantime see what can be made of possible sources nearer home.

This was in substance the advice of Zeller, who called attention to the existence of such sources in Stoicism, Neopythagoreanism, and Middle Platonism. They are scattered and for the most part fragmentary. In the last fifty years German scholars like Schmekel and Praechter have done a good deal to illuminate them and bind them together; but easily the most important contribution to the question since Zeller is contained in Werner Jaeger's brilliantly written book Nemesios von Emesa—a book which has not yet received in this country the attention it merits, perhaps because it was published on the eve of the war. Jaeger shows, in my judgment convincingly, that some characteristic Neoplatonic doctrines, in particular the notion of … the universe as a spiritual continuum extending through a definite series of media from the supreme God to bare Matter—go back to the Platonizing Stoic source which the Germans have agreed to call Poseidonius. Jaeger indeed would be more precise, and say that most of them went back to Poseidonius' commentary on the Timaeus—the epoch-making commentary thanks to which, he tells us, the Plato of the Timaeus is the Plato of Neoplatonism and of the Renaissance. He concludes that Poseidonius was the true father of Neoplatonism; had but Poseidonius found a place for the Platonic Ideas there would have been nothing left for Plotinus to do!⁵vIt is apparent that Jaeger has here allowed his discovery to carry him too fast and too far. Poseidonius left out something far more essential to Neoplatonism than the Ideas (which Plotinus might at a pinch have dispensed with had he not found them in Plato): Poseidonius left out the One. If there is one doctrine more than another which the tradition justifies our accepting as echt-Poseidonisches it is his definition of God as ‘a fiery breath which thinks,’⁶ which has no shape of its own, but changes into what it chooses and assimilates itself to all things. Poseidonius' highest principle is thus material, immanent (though in varying grades of immanence), and of the same stuff as the human intellect. But the Plotinian doctrine of an undifferenced ground of all existence, transcending not only Matter but Mind, creative without will or causality, unknowable save in the unio mystica, having no character save the character of being a ground—this is the part of Plotinus' system which has at all times impressed itself most deeply on his readers.

It is also—and very surprisingly, I think—the part which historians have found most difficulty in accounting for. Zeller called it ‘a dialectical development from Stoicism,’⁷ and asserted that it appeared first in Plotinus;⁸ Monrad found it ‘oriental’ in contrast with the echt hellenischen doctrine of [nous];⁹ Vacherot, Guyot, and others derive it from Philo, despite the profound difference in point of view between Philo and Plotinus, and despite the fact that Philo repeatedly calls his God öv and voûs.¹⁰ Some have thought of Numenius or Alcinous (whom we are now taught to call Albinus); but the God of both these writers remains a superior voûs,¹¹ and neither of them speaks of him as the One. Others, more reasonably, have been reminded of the One and the Indeterminate Dyad in some Neopythagoreans and in Aristotle's version of Plato's metaphysic. But, oddly enough, apart from a passing reference in Whittaker's book all the professed historians of Neoplatonism whom I have read ignore for some reason the obvious Platonic source.

Think of a principle of unity which so completely transcends all plurality that it refuses every predicate, even that of existence; which is neither in motion nor at rest, neither in time nor in space; of which we can say nothing, not even that it is identical with itself or different from other things: and side by side with this, a second principle of unity, containing the seeds of all the contraries—a principle which, if we once grant it existence, proceeds to pluralize itself indefinitely in a universe of existent unities. If for the moment we leave fragments out of account and consider only the extant works of Greek philosophers before the age of Plotinus, there is one passage and so far as I know one passage only, where these thoughts receive connected expression—namely, the first and second ‘hypotheses’ in the second part of Plato's Parmenides. Plotinus ignored one or two of the more fanciful conclusions reached in these hypotheses; and to some of those which he adopted he gave a new turn. …

Small wonder that Plotinus¹³ regarded the Platonic Parmenides as a great improvement on his historical prototype; that Iamblichus¹⁴ considered the Parmenides and the Timaeus as the only Platonic dialogues indispensable to salvation; that Proclus¹⁵ found in the Parmenides, and there only, the complete system of Platonic theology. Read the second part of the Parmenides as Plotinus read it, with the single eye of faith; do not look for satire on the Megarians or on anybody else; and you will find in the first hypothesis a lucid exposition of the famous ‘negative theology,’ and in the second (especially if you take it in connexion with the fourth) an interesting sketch of the derivation of a universe from the marriage of unity and existence. What you will find in the remaining hypotheses I cannot so easily predict; even within the Neoplatonic school there were violent differences of opinion about them¹⁶—differences which I must not attempt to discuss here, as they would carry me too far from the main intention of this paper.

Even as regards the first two hypotheses, it is no part of my purpose to argue that the Neoplatonic valuation is an entirely just one; Parmenides' description of his own performance …,¹⁷ taken in conjunction with the obvious fallacies in which some of the hypotheses abound, should be sufficient to warn us against assuming that all his conclusions necessarily found a place in Plato's own system. At the same time, it should not be forgotten that the Idea of the Good, no less than the ‘One’ of the first hypothesis, is beyond Being. … Moreover, some of the most important discoveries of the later Platonic logic, especially the distinction between absolute and relative non-Being, appear first in the Parmenidean hypotheses—surely an odd way to publish them, if these speculations are pure fun. However that may be, I have difficulty in understanding the present position of so distinguished a scholar as Professor A. E. Taylor, who, when he meets with the negative theology in Proclus or the schoolmen,¹⁸ takes it seriously as a necessary and salutary ‘moment’ of religious experience, but when he meets it in the Parmenides, describes it as ‘a highly-enjoyable philosophical jest.’¹⁹ Professor Taylor cannot well have it both ways: what is sauce for all the little Neoplatonic and medieval geese should also be sauce for their parent, the great Platonic gander.

But is Plato indeed the parent, or only the putative father of these theological bantlings? It may be urged that the Plotinian interpretation of the Parmenides is a complete misunderstanding; that important philosophies are not built solely on the misunderstanding of other philosophies, or, if they are, the misunderstanding is not accidental; that the Neoplatonists notoriously found in Plato whatever they wished to find (‘Hic liber est in quo quaerit sua dogmata quisque’); and that, in fine, the Neoplatonic interpretation of the Parmenides is subsequent to the rise of Neoplatonism, not prior to it—an effect and not a cause. …

Sextus Empiricus²⁵ tells us that while some Neopythagoreans derived the material universe from the effluxion of the point, others derived it from two [árchaí] the One and the Indeterminate Dyad. On the basis of this, Schmekel²⁶ and others after him distinguish a monistic and a dualistic school of Neopythagoreanism. But the distinction in this form does not really hold: for some at least of the so-called dualists posited an ultimate unity … prior to the derivative unity which with the Indeterminate Dyad generates plurality. This view is ascribed to ‘the Pythagoreans’ by Eudorus,²⁷ a Platonist who is dated about 25 b.c., as well as by Proclus²⁸ and others. Syrianus attributes opinions of this sort to Archaenetus, Philolaos, and Brotinus.²⁹

This type of monism bears evident marks of Platonic influence. That one of its sources was the sixth book of the Republic appears from the statement ascribed by Syrianus to Brotinus …—an obvious echo of Plato's words in Rep. 509B. But whence come the two Ones, the transcendent and the derivative? Hardly from primitive Pythagoreanism: for in Aristotle's references to the Pythagoreans there is no trace of any such duplication of the One; and the antithesis of the One and the Indeterminate Dyad is Platonic, not Pythagorean.³⁰ The true source is, I think, made apparent by … [a] passage from Simplicius.³¹

This passage was alleged by Vacherot³² as proving that the Neoplatonic trinity and the Neoplatonic doctrine of Matter were anticipated by Moderatus—a Pythagorean who can be dated to the second half of the first century a.d. Zeller³³ replied that it proved nothing of the kind. …

Now it seems to me that the key to the understanding of this passage lies in the fact, which neither Vacherot nor Zeller recognized, that the first eight lines refer to the interpretation of Plato's Parmenides. This should be obvious to anybody who knows his Proclus, or even his Plato. The first, second, and third ‘Ones’ are the three Ones which are posited in the first three hypotheses of the Parmenides, and the interpretation here given to them is the same which was current in the school of Plotinus. …

That Pythagoreans should thus take their material from Plato, and that their interpretation of it should influence later Platonists, need not surprise us. Under the Early Empire the two schools were closely associated. Both Numenius³⁴ and the earlier Neopythagorean epitomized by Photius³⁵ saw in Plato what Moderatus saw in him—the popularizer of the Pythagorean philosophy. This view of the relation between Plato and the Pythagoreans is already implied in the story—which in its earliest form goes back at least to the third century b.c.—about the Timaeus being copied from a Pythagorean book. It was a view agreeable to the Neopythagoreans: and they sought to confirm it in two ways—by emphasizing real or supposed Pythagorean elements in Plato's teaching, and by introducing Platonic elements into their own pseudepigraphic literature. The latter procedure created ‘Brotinus’ and his kind; the former led them to seek in Plato a cosmogony based on the One and the Indeterminate Dyad (which passed for Pythagorean), and to find it in the Parmenides. That their interpretations soon began to influence the revived Platonic school is shown by the fact that Eudorus, one of its earliest known representatives, ‘emended’ or falsified a passage in Aristotle's Metaphysics³⁶ in order to make Aristotle ascribe to Plato the same doctrine which Eudorus found in the Pythagoreanism of his own day. Later, Plutarch shows clearly the influence of Neopythagoreanism; while in the eclectic Platonist Alcinous (or Albinus) the Neopythagorean transcendence theory appears in hopelessly inconsistent combination with the immanence theory (God=[nous]=the sum of the Ideas) which had developed under peripatetic and Stoic influence. In his attempt to connect these divergent views he foreshadows Plotinus: his complete failure to make anything coherent of them is one measure of Plotinus' greatness. In the school of Plotinus himself the works of men like Numenius and his pupil Kronius were studied no less than those of orthodox Platonists.³⁷ Longinus, who was in a position to know, regarded Plotinus as the ablest exponent of the Pythagorean and Platonic [árchaí]: these [árchaí] he tells us, had been expounded earlier by Numenius, Kronius, Moderatus, and Thrasyllus.³⁸

The resemblances between the theology of Plotinus and those of Philo, of the Hermetists, and of certain Gnostics are most easily explained by the assumption of a common source or sources.³⁹ We have seen that one source of the kind required existed in Neopythagoreanism; and that this Neopythagorean theology was, in part, at any rate, shaped by the Parmenides. Who its original creators were, remains uncertain. That Moderatus was not its first sponsor is shown by the testimony of Eudorus, which is something like a century earlier (as to pseudo-Brotinus, I know no means of dating him). Schmekel supposes that this wing of the Neopythagorean school was influenced by Antiochus of Ascalon; but his evidence is meagre, and in view of the wellknown Stoicizing tendency of Antiochus it seems most unlikely that he is the source of a transcendent theology. It is more natural to think of the Old Academy, and especially of Speusippus. I could not here attempt a reconstruction of Speusippus' metaphysic, even were the task less desperate than it is. …

To say that the Enneads were not the starting-point of Neoplatonism but its intellectual culmination⁴⁰ is no disparagement of Plotinus' originality. The philosophical thinking of the first two centuries after Christ was vague, confused and incompetent, as transitional thought is wont to be. Without this thinking the Enneads could not have been written. But Plotinus, after the manner of men of genius, fashioned from this unpromising material an edifice which a few of his predecessors may have seen in their dreams but whose construction had remained altogether beyond their powers. Nowhere is the individuality of his genius more manifest than in the doctrine of ecstasy, which for him is the psychological correlate of the doctrine of the One. A recent German writer⁴¹ has even suggested that Plotinus' personal experience of the unio mystica determined his conception of the One. But we have seen that this conception is in substance far older than Plotinus. It is perhaps truer to say that his conception of the One determined, not indeed the personal experience itself, but the interpretation which Plotinus attached to that experience. The concept of the One can be reached, as Plotinus fully recognizes, by a purely dialectical regress; and the element of personal mysticism is absent, so far as I know, from the fragments of the Neopythagoreans (until we reach Numenius) and of the old Academy. Dialectic, however, as we see in the Parmenides, can only tell us what the One is not. This tedious accumulation of negatives may content the metaphysician; but, as Inge says somewhere, one cannot worship the alpha privative. Before the Absolute of the philosopher can become the God of the worshipper, it must somehow be made accessible to human consciousness. But it was an accepted doctrine since Empedocles that like is known only by like. Hence the ultimate principle of unity in the universe is accessible, if at all, only to some ultimate principle of unity in man. Hence, also, such access must be supra-rational: as the cosmic unity transcends the cosmic mind, so must the incarnate unity transcend the incarnate mind. The supreme act of cognition will thus not be strictly cognitive at all, but will consist in the momentary actualization of a potential identity between the Absolute in man and the Absolute outside man.

Such, I take it, is the logical basis of Plotinus' mysticism—the hypothesis whose verification he believed he found in his own inner experience, as other mystics in the like experience have found verification for other hypotheses. In the hypothesis itself I see nothing un-Greek. … Platonic too, though bearing the imprint of his own genius, is the language in which Plotinus essays to express his inexpressible experience. His favourite metaphor of illumination has often been alleged as evidence of ‘oriental influence.’ Light is a natural symbol of deity, and occurs as such in Judaism and Manichaeanism, as well as in nearly all the religious writers of the Hellenistic period.⁴² But an examination of the passages in Plotinus will show that his use of the metaphor rests partly on the comparison of the sun in Rep. VI., partly on that passage in the Seventh Letter (341C), where the sudden moment of insight is compared to ‘a light kindled from a leaping fire’; it was also doubtless in part suggested by his own experience, since the like language has been used by mystics of all countries and ages to describe the onset of the state of rapt. The notion that such expressions in Plotinus must allude to the vision of luminous shapes offered to the initiate in the Isiac mysteries involves a confusion between two forms of religious experience which are spiritually poles apart. For Plotinus the only ‘mystery’ was the Platonic philosophy. His attitude towards ritual is showed in his reply to the churchgoer Amelius …⁴³

Others have regarded the Plotinian doctrine of ecstasy as oriental on the ground of his supposed dependence on Philo. But Philo, according to the latest Quellenforschung, derives what he has in common here with Plotinus mainly from the Phaedrus of Plato and from Poseidonius.⁴⁴ And the Plotinian ecstasy is in fact profoundly different from the Philonic. Its distinguishing features are: First, that it comes only as the rare crown of a long intellectual discipline—a discipline which in the supreme moment is transcended but not denied; secondly, that it is clearly distinguished from that condition … which we call the mediumistic trance. The Plotinian ecstasy, unlike the Philonic, is achieved by a sustained intellectual effort from within and not by a denial of the reason or by a magical intervention from without; it is presented less as the abnegation of self-hood than as the supreme self-realization. Here as elsewhere, Plotinus appears not as the subverter of the great tradition of Greek rationalism, but as its last constructive exponent in an anti-rational age. It is true that after Aristotle nearly all the Greek thinkers who counted for anything were in their several ways tainted (or touched to life) by quietism and ‘other-worldliness.’ Plotinus is no exception to that rule. What makes him exceptional in the third century is his resolute rejection of every short cut to wisdom proffered by Gnostic or theurgist, Mithraist or Christian—his resolute championship of reason as the instrument of philosophy and the key to the structure of the real. To assume his dependence on Philo because both writers talk about ecstasy is like setting out to derive the ‘mysticism’ of a Bradley from the ‘mysticism’ of a Madame Blavatsky. If anyone doubts that Plotinus was a man of genius, let him study the efforts of Plotinus' nearest predecessors and followers. Let him soak for a while in the theosophical maunderings of Philo and the Hermetists, in the venomous fanaticism of Tertullian, in the tea-table transcendentalism of Plutarch, in the cultured commonplaces of Maximus, in the amiable pieties of Porphyry, in the really unspeakable spiritualistic drivellings of the de Mysteriis—let him do that, and if ever he gets his head above water again, he will see Plotinus in his true historical perspective as the one man who still knew how to think clearly in an age which was beginning to forget what thinking meant.

Notes

1. Ibid. 3 and 10.

2. Enn. V. viii. 6.

3. J. Cochez (in Rev. Néo-Scolastique XVIII. [1911] 328-40, and Mélanges d'Histoire Offerts à Ch. Moeller I. 85-101) claims to have proved this. He is followed by F. Cumont in Monuments Piot XXV. 77 sqq.; but the weakness of their case has been effectively exposed by Erik Peterson in his review of Cumont's paper, Theol. Literaturzeitung (1925), No. 21, 485-7. In this connexion Mr. A. D. Nock has called my attention to Theo Smyrn. Expos. rev. math. 14. 18 sqq., Hiller, where an elaborate parallelism between the Platonic philosophy and the mysteries is built on Plato, Phd. 69D and Phdr. 250C. Such metaphors are common from Plato onwards: e.g. Chrysippus calls discourses about the gods (Vet. St. Fr. II. 1008, Arnim).

4. Up to the present we seem to have little or no evidence that before they were touched to intellectual life by contact with Greek culture the peoples of the Near East achieved anything deserving the name of abstract thought; their thinking hardly existed outside the myths which embodied it (see Th. Hopfner, Orient u. Griechische Philosophie, pp. 27 sqq.; Naville, Religion des anciens Égyptiens, p. 93). Nor is anything really analogous to the close reasoning and intellectual subtlety of Plotinus to be found even in hybrid products like the works of Philo, the Hermetica, and the de Mysteriis, which are generally recognized as combining, in whatever proportion, the results of oriental myth-making with elements derived from Greek Philosophy.

5. Op. cit., p. 70.

6. Stob. [Aetius] Ecl. I. 2. 29 [58H].

7. Phil. dev Griech. III³. 427.

8. Ibid. 435.

9. Philos. Monatsheft XXIV. (1888), p. 186.

10. The Neopythagorean identification of God with the supreme monad is mentioned by Philo only to be amended … Any attempt to extract a coherent system from Philo seems to me foredoomed to failure; his eclecticism is that of the jackdaw rather than the philosopher.

11. Numenius ap. Euseb. Prep. Ev. XI. 22; Alcinous (Albinus), Didascalicus, c. 10. …

12. Cf. Enn. V. v. 9. …

13. V. i. 8 fin.

14. Procl. in Tim. I. 13. 15 sq, Diehl; Proleg. Plat. Phil. 26.

15. Theol. Plat. I. 7.

16. See Proclus in Parm. 1052-64, Cousin.

17. 135^c sqq.; 137^B. …

18. Proc. Arist. Soc., N.S. XVIII., p. 632.

19. Plato: The Man and his Work, p. 370.

20. See K. Praechter in Genethliakon Robert, pp. 120 sqq.

21. See in particular the interesting recent book of M. Jean Wahl, Étude sur le Parménide.

22. In Parm., p. 635, Cousin; cf. Theol. Plat. I. 8 sqq.

23. Isag., c. 3; cf. c. 6, and Didascalicus, c. 4 (p. 155 fin., Hermann).

24. ‘On the Interpretation of Plato's Parmenides,’ Mind, 1896-7, 1903.

25. Adv. Phys. II. 281-2.

26. Philos. d. Mittl. Stoa. 403-39.

27. Apud Simplic. in Phys. 181. 10-30, especially 27 sqq. …

28. In Tim. 54D [I. 176. 9 sqq., Diehl]. … Cf. Theo Smyrn. Exp. Rer. Math. 19. 12 sqq., Hiller; Damascius, de princip. 86. 20 sqq., Ruelle [115, Kopp]; and for what seems to be a different way of putting essentially the same view, Numenius ap. Chalcid. in Tim., c. 293, Mullach, and ps.-Alexander in Metaph. 800. 32, Bonitz (quoted below, p. 138).

29. In Metaph. 925b 27 sqq. … Cf. 935b 13 sqq.

30. Arist. Metaph. A 6. 987b 25. …

31. In Phys. A 7, 230. 34 sqq., Diels.

32. Hist. de l'École d'Alex. I. 309.

33. III³. 126. 2. In the fourth edition the passage is treated more summarily, and some modifications are introduced (III. ii. 143. I; cf. 130. 5). …

34. Ap. Chalcid. in Tim., c. 293, Mullach.

35. Cod. 249, 438b 17, Bekker.

36. Metaph. 988a 10-11 (Aristotle reporting Plato's view). …

37. Porph. vit. Plot. 14.

38. Ibid. 20. Moderatus figures also in the list of authors studied in the school of Plotinus' great contemporary, Origen the Christian (Porph. ap. Euseb. Hist. Eccles. VI. 19. 8. Evidently his was still a name of some significance even in the third century.

39. Since we know that Plotinus had read Numenius, and there is some reason to think that Numenius had read Philo and Valentinus (Norden, Agnostos Theos, p. 109), the possibility that one or both of the last-named writers exercised some indirect influence on Plotinus ought not to be ignored; but it will not account for all the facts without a great deal of forcing. That Plotinus himself could take either Philo or Valentinus seriously as an authority I find it hard to believe in the light of such passages as Ennead II. ix. 6. …

40. The common view, that they were both, appears to be self-refuting; at any rate, it flies in the face of all historical analogy.

41. J. Geffcken, Der Ausgang des Griechisch-Römischen Heidentums, p. 47. …

42. References in J. Kroll, Lehren des Hermes Trismegistos, pp. 22 sq., and Nock, Sallustius, p. xcix, n. 10.

43. Porph. vit. Plot. 10 fin.

44. H. Leisegang, Der Heilige Geist, I. i. 163 sqq. …