Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 80:317 (Jan 1923)
Article: Plotinus
Author: Stewart Means

BSac 80:317 (Jan 1923) p. 38

Plotinus

Stewart Means

The great Gibbon has said: “If a man were called to fix the period in the history of the world, during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would, without hesitation, name that which elapsed from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus.” Without discussing the correctness of this statement, one can at least say that had he been writing of a century later the words could not have been true. The sombre and melancholy apprehensions which overshadowed the noble brow of the great Aurelius had already become realized. Political decay and social degradation were on every hand. From the death of Marcus Aurelius to the reign of Diocletian there were thirty-eight claimants who wore the imperial purple. Yet the culture of the ancient world was so deeply sunken on the mighty foundations of the past that the spirit still moved in the paths which had been so painfully surveyed and which represented the labours of some of the greatest minds the world had ever known. Though the great intellectual habits had not yet died away, the effect of the great changes which were taking place, and the sense felt, rather than thought, that an age was coming to an end, and that no one could read the future, showed itself in the new elements and the new efforts of science. The great cities still had their schools; and from them flowed a steady stream, which, though it had lost the radiant hope which marked the earlier periods, still furnished the light in which the soul could live and still claim its title to spiritual freedom and intellectual growth. The old Hellenic spirit had not yet died out of the world, and once again it shone out with a new beauty, touched with a pathos and yearning foreign to the serene glow of its immortal home. It was kindled in the city which Alexander planted, and it sprang from a race which Alexander had scorned and conquered.

BSac 80:317 (Jan 1923) p. 39

Plotinus was a Copt and a pagan, but he had drunk deeply of the fountain of Greek culture, which still welled forth on the banks of the Nile. In the Second and Third centuries Alexandria was the spiritual metropolis of the world and the home of the representatives of the greatest religions or religious forces which were then influencing the world. Strange as it may seem, in this spirit of general decline and intellectual sterility there appears one who stands alone and apart, and who by his extraordinary genius has marked a new stage in the history of human thought. One of the latest German students of his thought has said of him: “If Plato is the greatest dialectician and artist, Aristotle the greatest scholar, Plotinus is the greatest metaphysician among the philosophers of antiquity, possibly the greatest of which the history of philosophy g...