Justified True Belief

(●) The founder of Neoplatonism, the last great philosophy the pagan world produced, who worked out the language Christians still use for a God beyond anything the mind can picture. + A student named Amelius kept asking Plotinus to sit for a portrait, and Plotinus kept saying no. Was it not enough, he asked, to carry around the image that nature had already shut him up in, without leaving behind a longer-lasting image of an image? So Amelius went around him. The conferences were open to anyone who cared to walk in, so he brought his friend Carterius, the best artist of the day, sat him among the listeners, and had him watch session after session until he could draw the face from memory; then Amelius corrected the sketches until the likeness was right. The most admired philosopher in Rome was painted without his consent, from memory, by a man who had come in off the street. The story is worth keeping in mind, because it is easy to mistake Plotinus for a cold man. He was not. He audited the accounts of orphaned children, talked at least one friend out of suicide, and greeted visitors with a kiss even when illness had made him hard to be near. What he would not do was treat the visible surface of things, his own face included, as the thing that mattered. He is on a Christian site for a plain reason. In the middle of the third century, in a rented house in Rome, he took the scattered hints in Plato about a Good beyond being and built them into a system: one source, utterly simple, from which everything else pours out, and a soul that can climb back up to it. That system is what later ages call Neoplatonism, the new Platonism, though the name is a modern one and he would have been puzzled by it. He thought he was doing nothing new at all. He thought he was saying what Plato had meant. Rather more than a century later a North African professor of rhetoric named Augustine read that system in Latin translation, and it broke the intellectual deadlock that was keeping him from Christian faith. A great deal of what Christians say about God being beyond our concepts, and about evil being an absence rather than a power, reaches them through the books Plotinus wrote in that house. He wrote fifty-four of them, never re-read a line of any of them, and his student Porphyry sorted them after his death into six sets of nine, which is why the collection is called the Enneads, from the Greek ennea, "nine."

(●) c. 204 AD: Born somewhere in Egypt, into a childhood he refused for the rest of his life to describe. + Porphyry, who lived with him for six years and wrote his life, opens the book like this: "Plotinus, the philosopher our contemporary, seemed ashamed of being in the body." And then, immediately: "So deeply-rooted was this feeling that he could never be induced to tell of his ancestry, his parentage or his birthplace." That leaves a biographer very little to work with. Every date for the early years has to be worked backwards from a single sentence at the other end of the life, where Porphyry records that Plotinus died in the second year of the emperor Claudius, which is 270 AD, at the age of sixty-six. Porphyry does the counting himself and lands on the thirteenth year of Severus, which is 204 or 205. The birthplace comes from Eunapius, a pagan writer more than a century later, who says he was an Egyptian from a town called Lyco, usually identified with Lycopolis in Upper Egypt, the modern Asyut. That is a late report about a man who deliberately left no evidence, and it should be held loosely. He carried the refusal into small things. He would not keep his own birthday. He did sacrifice on the traditional birthdays of Plato and of Socrates, and afterwards gave a dinner at which every member of the circle who was able to was expected to speak.

(●) 232 AD: At twenty-eight he heard one lecture in Alexandria and stopped looking. + Alexandria in the 230s was the university town of the Mediterranean world, and a young man with money could shop for a teacher the way you might sit in on classes before choosing a major. Plotinus did exactly that, went to the men everyone recommended, and came away from every one of them depressed. A friend finally took him to hear a teacher he had not tried. He listened, turned to his companion, and said, in Porphyry’s report, "This was the man I was looking for." The teacher was Ammonius Saccas, and almost nothing about him is recoverable. He published nothing at all. A later tradition explains his surname as "sack-carrier" and has him working as a dock porter before he turned to philosophy, which may be true and may be the kind of story that attaches itself to a famous nobody. Plotinus stayed with him eleven years, longer than most men spend on a career. Porphyry adds one detail that says a good deal about that classroom. Three of Ammonius’ students, Plotinus among them, agreed among themselves to keep their teacher’s doctrines unpublished. The other two broke the pact and wrote. Plotinus kept it, and for more than a decade after leaving Egypt he taught out loud and put nothing on paper.

(●) 243 AD: He marched east with a Roman army to find the wisdom of Persia and India, and the emperor was killed before he got near either. + This is the one thing in the life that nobody would predict from the books. At thirty-nine, by Porphyry’s reckoning, Plotinus wanted to know what the Persians and the Indians thought, and he could see only one way to get there: the emperor Gordian III was marching a Roman army into Mesopotamia, and Plotinus attached himself to the expedition. It ended in a death nobody has ever fully explained. Gordian died in Mesopotamia early in 244, whether at the hands of his own troops, as the Roman accounts have it, or in battle with the Persians, as the Persian inscription claims, and the philosopher who had come along for the conversation found himself in a leaderless army in hostile country. Porphyry says he escaped with difficulty and made his way to Antioch. Whether he ever spoke to a Persian sage is unknown, and the resemblances people notice between his ascent to the One and Indian thought are more likely a case of two traditions arriving at similar places than of borrowing. What the episode does show is a man willing to cross a war zone for an idea, which is not the profile of someone who despised the world so much that he would not move around in it.

(●) 245 AD: At forty he opened a school in Rome and taught for ten years without publishing a line. + He settled in Rome in the reign of Philip and never left it for long again. The school met in a private house, and it was not a lecture hall so much as a long conversation: people asked questions, Plotinus answered at length, and Amelius grumbled to Porphyry that the discussion wandered a great deal, which it did because Plotinus let it. Who came? Senators, doctors, poets, women of the Roman aristocracy, and at least one man whose life the teaching visibly wrecked and remade. Porphyry tells of a senator named Rogatianus who "gave up all his property, dismissed all his slaves, renounced every dignity, and, on the point of taking up his praetorship, the lictors already at the door, refused to come out or to have anything to do with the office." The praetorship was a senior magistracy of the Roman state, a rung a senator reached only after years of lesser offices and a step on the road to a consulship, and the lictors were the attendants who walked ahead of a magistrate carrying the bundled rods of his authority. They were standing in the street on the morning it began, and he would not come down. Alongside the metaphysics ran an unglamorous second job, and Porphyry describes it plainly. "Not a few men and women of position, on the approach of death, had left their boys and girls, with all their property, in his care, feeling that with Plotinus for guardian the children would be in holy hands." So the man who taught that the source of all things is beyond being also went through the household accounts of orphaned teenagers and made sure their estates were not being robbed.

(●) c. 254 AD: He began to write at about fifty, straight through, and never read a sentence back. + Something changed around his fiftieth year, and he started putting the conferences into essays. Porphyry describes the method, and it is startling: Plotinus worked the whole thing out in his head first, then "wrote out at one jet all he had stored in mind as though he were copying from a book." No draft, no revision. His handwriting was poor and his spelling worse, and his eyesight "did not allow of such rereading." That is why the essays read the way they do. They are not built like Plato’s dialogues, with scenery and characters; they are a brilliant man thinking aloud in a room, doubling back, trying a second image when the first one fails. Over roughly sixteen years he produced fifty-four of them, in no particular order, on whatever question the circle had reached that month. When Porphyry arrived from Greece in 263, twenty-one of them already existed, circulating in manuscript among people Plotinus judged trustworthy, without titles, because he had never bothered to give them any. Porphyry stayed six years and later did the sorting. Amelius, the man who had smuggled in the portrait painter, had been in the circle since 246 and stayed, by Porphyry’s count, twenty-four years in all.

(●) c. 265 AD: He asked an emperor for a ruined town, meaning to run it by Plato’s Laws. + The emperor Gallienus and his wife Salonina thought well of Plotinus, and somewhere in these years, for Porphyry gives no date, he used the goodwill on a scheme that sounds like a young man’s. There was a derelict city in Campania, south of Rome, said to have been a city of philosophers once. Plotinus asked for it. He would move there with his circle, the place would be governed by the constitution set out in Plato’s last and longest book, and it would be called Platonopolis. Courtiers killed it, out of what Porphyry calls jealousy and spite, and the thing that is easy to miss is how nearly it happened. Plato had sailed to Sicily three times trying to make a philosopher of a king, and failed three times. Six hundred years later his best reader in the world had an emperor’s ear and a site picked out. These were also the years of the one polemic in the corpus. A group inside his own lecture room held that the visible universe had been botched together by an inferior god and that they personally carried a divine spark that would escape it. Plotinus argued with them at the conferences for a long time, set Amelius and Porphyry to write against them, and finally wrote the treatise that stands in Porphyry’s list as Against the Gnostics.

(●) 270 AD: He died on a friend’s estate in Campania, and his last sentence was about where he was going. + The end was slow and undignified, and Porphyry does not soften it. Plotinus had an intestinal complaint and refused the standard treatments, the enemas because he thought them unbecoming in an elderly man and the medicines because they were made from the flesh of animals. He had kept himself well with daily massage, and when the masseurs died in an epidemic he gave that up too. Then came the throat disease. Eustochius told Porphyry that "he became hoarse, so that his voice quite lost its clear sonorous note, his sight grew dim and ulcers formed on his hands and feet." He had always greeted people with a kiss, and now most of his friends stopped coming. He left Rome for Campania and the estate of a dead friend named Zethos. Eustochius, the doctor of the circle, was staying at Puteoli and reached him late. Porphyry, who was in Sicily and not there, records what Eustochius heard: "I have been a long time waiting for you; I am striving to give back the Divine in myself to the Divine in the All." A snake, the story goes, slid out from under the bed as he died. He was sixty-six. Thirty years later, somewhere around 301, Porphyry finally published. He gathered the fifty-four essays, cut some long ones into parts to make the numbers work, arranged them by subject rather than by date, and grouped them into six sets of nine. The order a reader meets today is his, not Plotinus’, and the first essay in the book is the fifty-third thing its author wrote.

What He Taught

(T1) Everything that exists comes from one source, and that source is not one more thing among things. + Start with something you do without noticing. Look at a choir and you count one choir; look closer and you count forty singers; closer still and you are counting lungs and vocal cords. At every level, before you can say what a thing is, you have already treated it as one thing. Take the oneness away and there is nothing left to describe. Plotinus turned that ordinary fact into the hinge of his whole system: unity is not a property things happen to have, it is the condition of their being anything at all. So where does the unity come from? Not from any of the things that have it, since they have it on loan. He called the source simply the One, and sometimes, following Plato, the Good. And then he drew the conclusion that most people flinch from. If the One is what makes each thing be one thing, it cannot itself be one thing in that sense, because then it would need a source of its own. It is not a being. It is not even, strictly, thinking, since thinking has two sides, a thinker and a thought, and that is already a kind of twoness. What is left to say? Only what it is not. Theologians call this the negative way, or apophatic theology, from the Greek for "denying": you approach God by stripping away every concept that would cut him down to the size of a creature, the way you might describe a color to someone by ruling out every color it is not. Plotinus did not invent the move, but he is the man who made it rigorous, and the Christian tradition, which had begun the same work in Philo and Clement of Alexandria, took his version over and built on it. When a later theologian says that God is not a being among beings, or that our words apply to him only by analogy, this is the workshop the tools came from.

(Q) "The One is all things and no one of them; the source of all things is not all things." + Source: Plotinus, Enneads V.2.1 (MacKenna translation). The opening words of the essay that comes down under the title "The Origin and Order of the Beings Following on the First." Plotinus is answering the obvious objection to (T1): if the source has nothing in it, how does everything come out of it? His answer is that the One is all things in the sense that everything is derived from it, and no one of them in the sense that it is not any item on the list.

(T2) The world overflows from that source without draining it. + If the One is perfect and complete, why is there anything else? A man who has everything he needs has no reason to act. Plotinus answers with the most characteristic image in his work: fullness spills. The sun does not decide to shine and is not diminished by shining; a fire gives off heat without spending itself; a face in a mirror takes nothing from the face. Whatever reaches its own completeness, he says, produces something after it, and the producing costs nothing. What spills out first is Intellect, in Greek Nous, and Intellect is the level of reality where Plato’s Forms live. A Form is the real pattern behind a kind of thing: not this circle scratched in sand or that one cut in bronze, but Circle itself, which every drawn circle is a rough attempt at and which a geometer is actually reasoning about when she reasons about circles at all. You cannot see a Form or touch one. You can only understand it, which is why Plato and everyone after him called that whole order intelligible, meaning available to mind rather than to eyes. Intellect, then, is the entire intelligible order thinking itself all at once, the way a mathematician who has finally grasped a proof holds every step of it simultaneously instead of working through it one line at a time. From Intellect in turn spills Soul, which cannot hold everything at once and so has to unroll it into a sequence, which is what time is. And Soul, reaching down to organize what lies below it, produces the visible world. Those three, the One, Intellect and Soul, he called hypostases, from a Greek word meaning "what stands underneath." A hypostasis is a really existing level of reality, not a mood or a way of looking at things. The word matters beyond his school, because when the church spent the fourth century hammering out how to say that Father, Son and Spirit are three yet one God, this is the word it reached for. Two things about all this spilling deserve saying plainly. The first concerns what it is not. Later writers gave the process a name, emanation, from a Latin verb meaning to flow out, and the name is worth having because it marks a real difference: emanation is not creation. It happens by nature and by necessity, the way light comes off a lamp whether the lamp likes it or not, and there is no moment before it and no decision behind it. The second is that the levels are not sealed off from one another like floors of a building. Nothing, Plotinus insists, is ever cut loose from what produced it.

(Q) "Imagine a spring that has no source outside itself; it gives itself to all the rivers, yet is never exhausted by what they take, but remains always integrally as it was." + Source: Plotinus, Enneads III.8.10 (MacKenna translation). The essay is on nature, contemplation and the One, and this is his attempt to say how a source can give endlessly without loss. In the next breath he tries a second image for the same thing, the life running through a great tree while remaining gathered in the root, which is a good example of his habit of reaching for another picture rather than repeating the first.

(T3) Evil is a falling short rather than a rival power, and the visible world is not a mistake. + Some of the people sitting in his lecture room were Gnostics. The name covers a range of second- and third-century teachers who held that the material world had been botched together by an inferior and rather stupid god, that a spark of the real divinity was trapped inside a few select people, and that the way out was gnosis, the Greek word for knowledge, meaning here a secret revelation available to insiders. It was a flattering doctrine. It told you that your unhappiness was cosmic, that the universe was your enemy, and that you were one of the few who could see it. Plotinus went after it on two fronts. The first was the question of where evil comes from at all, and his answer follows from the overflow (T2). If everything real is a giving-out from the Good, then evil cannot be a second source pouring out badness. It is what you get at the far edge, where the outflow has run so thin that there is almost nothing left to shape: matter, the last and faintest point, formless, measureless, always in need. Evil on this account is a privation, an absence where something ought to be, the way cold is not a substance in its own right but a shortage of heat, and a hole in a road is not a thing but a missing piece of road. The second front was the insult to the world itself. Look up, he says in effect: the order of the heavens, the beauty of a body, the intelligence running through the whole arrangement. If you find all that contemptible, the fault is not in the cosmos. And he catches the Gnostic in a plain inconsistency, which is that the man who declaims against the architecture goes on living in the house. Christian theology took that first front and used it hard. Evil as a privation, a good thing spoiled rather than a bad thing manufactured, is still the standard Christian answer when somebody asks who made evil. It kept the second front too, and had every reason to, since a faith whose God looks at what he has made and calls it good was never going to agree that the world is a botched job or a prison. What it could not keep is the reason Plotinus gave for the world being good. On his account the world is good because it could not have been anything else: it flows out of the Good by necessity, and necessity does not make mistakes (T2). On the Christian account the world is good because someone chose to make it and chose well. Those are two different kinds of praise, and only the second leaves anyone to thank.

(Q) "Two people inhabit the one stately house; one of them declaims against its plan and against its Architect, but none the less maintains his residence in it; the other makes no complaint, asserts the entire competency of the Architect and waits cheerfully for the day when he may leave it." + Source: Plotinus, Enneads II.9.18 (MacKenna translation). The essay carries the long title "Against Those that Affirm the Creator of the Kosmos and the Kosmos Itself to be Evil," and Porphyry’s own list, like everyone since, calls it Against the Gnostics. The sentence continues past the quotation to the sting: the complainer thinks himself the wiser of the two for having learned to say that the walls are only stone and timber, and does not notice that his one distinction is being unable to put up with necessity.

(T4) Beauty is the soul recognizing where it came from, and a life’s work is to carve your own statue. + The first essay he ever wrote was on beauty, and it opens with an argument against the received wisdom of his day. The Stoics, whose school had been the sensible default for educated Romans for generations, said that beauty is symmetry, the right proportion of parts to each other and to the whole. Plotinus points at a single shaft of light, at gold, at one clear note, at a flash of lightning at night. None of these has parts to be proportioned, and all of them are beautiful. So proportion cannot be the answer. What is happening, he says, is recognition. When you see a face and something in you lifts, you are not measuring it. You are meeting form, the intelligible pattern, showing through matter, and the part of you that responds is the part that came from the place where those patterns live. Beauty is a homesickness you did not know you had. Which turns the whole thing into a practical problem, because the same argument runs in the other direction. If beauty is form present in matter, then a soul becomes beautiful the way a block of stone does, and not by adding anything. The sculptor is not building the statue up; he is taking away everything that is not the statue. Plotinus ends the essay with that instruction, and adds a warning that has been quoted ever since: the eye could not see the sun unless it had already become sunlike, and no soul sees Beauty without first becoming beautiful.

(Q) "Withdraw into yourself and look. And if you do not find yourself beautiful yet, act as does the creator of a statue that is to be made beautiful: he cuts away here, he smoothes there, he makes this line lighter, this other purer, until a lovely face has grown upon his work." + Source: Plotinus, Enneads I.6.9 (MacKenna translation). The close of "On Beauty," the first of the fifty-four essays to be written. The instruction that follows is to cut away all that is excessive, straighten what is crooked, bring light to what is overcast, and never stop chiselling until virtue’s brightness shows in the finished work.

(T5) The soul can climb back to the source, and at the summit there are no longer two. + Everything in the system bends toward this. If the soul came out of Intellect and Intellect out of the One, then the road home runs the same way in reverse, and Plotinus thought a person could actually walk it: turn from the senses to the soul, from the soul to Intellect, and then, at the last step, let go even of thinking. He is careful about what happens there, and the care is what makes him worth reading rather than merely quoting. It is not that you get a very good look at the One. Looking requires a gap between the looker and the thing looked at, and at this point there is no gap. In his own words, "There were not two; beholder was one with beheld" (Enneads VI.9.10). What is left is not a vision but a unity. Everything a person normally uses to take hold of something has by then been laid down: first the senses, then the reasoning, and finally, in his own hesitant phrase, the very self. Each of those is a way of standing at a distance from what you are attending to, and by the last step there is nowhere left to stand. Porphyry gives the numbers, and they are humbling rather than encouraging. In the six years he lived with Plotinus, he says, his teacher reached that union four times. Porphyry adds that he himself got there once, at the age of sixty-eight, writing years after his teacher was dead. Whatever this is, nobody in the school pretended it was a technique you could run on a schedule. Christian mystics from the fourth century onward would use very nearly this map. When later spiritual writers speak of the ascent, and of purgation, meaning the slow scouring away of everything in a person that cannot make the climb, and of union at the top of it, they are handling vocabulary that owes a great deal to him. The difference is one word, and it is not a small one. For Plotinus the summit is reached alone, and what waits there is not someone who came looking for you.

(Q) "This is the life of gods and of the godlike and blessed among men, liberation from the alien that besets us here, a life taking no pleasure in the things of earth, the passing of solitary to solitary." + Source: Plotinus, Enneads VI.9.11 (MacKenna translation), the last sentence of the last essay in Porphyry’s arrangement. The Greek behind the final phrase, phyge monou pros monon, is more often met in the older and more famous rendering, "the flight of the alone to the Alone." It is the one line of Plotinus that people who have never opened him tend to know.

(Q) "I have been a long time waiting for you; I am striving to give back the Divine in myself to the Divine in the All." + Source: Porphyry, On the Life of Plotinus and the Arrangement of his Work 2 (MacKenna translation), reporting what the physician Eustochius heard. The last recorded words, spoken on the estate in Campania to the one member of the circle who reached him in time. Porphyry was in Sicily and had the account secondhand. Whatever else it is, it is a man dying inside his own system: the divine in him going back to the divine in everything, with no one on the other side to meet him.

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) The Christians and the Platonists were arguing inside the same room, not across a wall. + It is tempting to picture third-century Christianity and third-century philosophy as two separate worlds that happened to collide later. They were not. They shared bookshops, vocabulary, students, and in at least one case a teacher. Porphyry, no friend of the church, wrote that a Christian named Origen had been a pupil of Ammonius Saccas, the same Alexandrian teacher Plotinus sat under for eleven years. Origen is a name worth knowing: the most prolific biblical scholar the early church produced, a man who wrote commentaries on most of the Bible and the first full-dress work of Christian systematic theology. Eusebius, the church historian, quotes the passage in his Church History (VI.19) and disputes what Porphyry makes of it, insisting that Ammonius held his Christian faith unbroken to the end. Scholars have argued ever since about both halves of the report: whether Ammonius Saccas was ever a Christian, and whether the Origen who sat in that classroom beside Plotinus, whom Porphyry names again in his life of his teacher, is the great biblical scholar or a pagan philosopher of the same name. The questions are genuinely open. Either way the picture stands: the schools overlapped. Plotinus himself never engaged Christianity directly in anything that survives, and Porphyry, who spent six years with him, later wrote fifteen books against the Christians. Yet the borrowing ran hard in the other direction. The Christian tradition would take Plotinus’ account of a God beyond every category, his account of evil as absence, and his map of the soul’s ascent, and would keep all three. Rivalry is often the most efficient form of transmission.

(†) Augustine read him at Milan, and the wall that had blocked his belief came down. + Augustine tells the story himself in the Confessions. The problem was not evidence and it was not morals; it was that he could not think. He could not conceive of anything real that was not a body occupying space, which meant that every time he tried to think about God he ended up imagining an enormous, very fine substance spread out through the universe, and every time he tried to think about evil he ended up with two rival substances at war. He was stuck there for years. Then, at Milan, someone put certain books into his hands: "You procured for me, by the instrumentality of one inflated with most monstrous pride, certain books of the Platonists, translated from Greek into Latin." Nobody names the contents, but the Latin translations of the period were the work of the rhetorician Marius Victorinus, and the near-universal judgment is that what Augustine read was Plotinus, with some Porphyry alongside. What the books gave him was the one thing he lacked: the idea of something real, and more real than bodies, that takes up no space at all. With that in hand the deadlock broke, and so did the second one, because if evil is an absence then there is no need for a second god to explain it. "That evil, then, which I sought whence it was, is not any substance; for were it a substance, it would be good." He never stopped acknowledging the debt. Decades later, arguing in the City of God that no created mind lights itself, he cites Plotinus by name on the soul receiving its blessedness from a Light distinct from itself and sets the passage beside the Gospel of John on the man sent to bear witness to the light (City of God X.2). The doctrine of divine illumination that runs through Western theology for the next thousand years starts there.

(†) His account of evil as an absence became the church’s standard answer to the problem of a good God and a bad world. + Augustine had spent nine years as a Manichee. The Manichees were followers of the third-century Persian teacher Mani, and their answer to suffering was two eternal powers, one good and one evil, locked in a war that neither started and neither can finish. It is an emotionally satisfying story and a philosophical disaster, because it makes evil as basic and as permanent as God. Plotinus supplied the alternative (T3), and Augustine spent the rest of his life spelling it out for the church: evil is not a thing that exists but a corruption in something that does, a good creature failing to be what it should. Wickedness is not a substance added to a will; it is a will bent away from the good it was made for. Thomas Aquinas takes the same position in the thirteenth century, and it is still the standard Christian move when someone asks who made evil. The negative way (T1) travelled just as far. In the sixth century an unknown Syrian writing under the name of Paul’s Athenian convert Dionysius the Areopagite produced a body of work that carried Neoplatonic negative theology into the heart of Christian mysticism, drawing directly on Proclus, the head of the Platonic school at Athens and himself an heir of Plotinus. Through that channel it reaches Maximus the Confessor, Aquinas, Meister Eckhart and the anonymous English author of The Cloud of Unknowing. Every Christian who has been told that God is not one more item in the universe is standing at the end of a line that runs back to a rented house in Rome.

(†) Where the gospel parts company with him: a source that spills by necessity, a God who cannot be spoken to, a body to be escaped, and a climb only the gifted can make. + The debts are real, and so is the distance. There are four places where the two accounts pull apart, and not one of them is a detail that could be quietly adjusted. - Creation. The One does not choose. It overflows because it is full, the way the sun does not decide to shine, and the overflow has no beginning and could not have been withheld. Scripture has God create freely, by speaking, out of nothing, and then stop and call the result good (Genesis 1:1; John 1:3). A universe that had to happen and a universe that was given are not the same universe, and only one of them can be thanked. - Prayer. Plotinus is consistent to the end: the One is beyond being and beyond thought, so nothing can properly be said of it, and it does not turn and look at you. The God of Scripture gives his name to a runaway shepherd at a burning bush (Exodus 3:14), and the New Testament goes further than any philosopher would dare: "Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love" (1 John 4:8). A fullness that spills by nature is not the same as a Father who loves by choice, and you cannot pray to a fullness. - The body. Porphyry’s first sentence about his teacher is that he seemed ashamed of being in a body. Christianity runs the other way and knows it is scandalous: "the Word became flesh and dwelt among us" (John 1:14), and the body he took, he kept. When Paul reached the resurrection of the dead in front of the Athenian philosophers, some of them scoffed (Acts 17:32). That scoff is the sound of this exact disagreement. - The way up. The ascent (T5) works if you are capable of it, and the numbers are sobering: four times in six years for the finest philosopher of the age, once at sixty-eight for his best student, and presumably never for the illiterate. The gospel reverses the direction of travel. The ladder is let down rather than climbed, and it is let down to people with no aptitude for metaphysics at all: "For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast" (Ephesians 2:8–9). Plotinus is the high-water mark of what unaided reasoning about God reached in the ancient world, and that is precisely why the church kept his books instead of burning them. He shows how far a first-rate mind can climb on its own, and exactly where the rock runs out.