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Late Antiquity

In Porphyry’s Life of Plotinus, Plotinus at twenty “was caught by the passion for philosophy”, and on hearing Ammonius he said “This was the man I was looking for”. The end of his life, as Porphyry gives it, was “to become Uniate, to approach to the God over all: and four times, during the period I passed with him, he achieved this Term” (3, 23, tr. MacKenna).

Plotinus asked the question himself: “What, then, is Philosophy? Philosophy is the supremely precious. Is Dialectic, then, the same as Philosophy? It is the precious part of Philosophy … by Dialectic it comes to contemplation” (Enneads I.3.5, tr. MacKenna). The work is done on oneself: “Withdraw into yourself and look … act as does the creator of a statue … never cease chiselling your statue, until there shall shine out on you from it the godlike splendour of virtue” (I.6.9). Porphyry wrote to Marcella that he had “recalled you also to your proper mode of life, and gave you a share in philosophy, pointing out to you a doctrine that should guide your life” (Letter to Marcella 3, tr. Zimmern), and his Isagoge, with Aristotle’s Categories, became part of the standard course for beginners.

The schools taught in a fixed order. Proclus, in his biographer Marinus’s account, read in under two years “all of Aristotle’s treatises on logic, ethics, politics, physics, and on the science which rises above all these, theology”, as “a kind of preparatory initiation or lesser mysteries”, before his teacher Syrianus led him “to the Greater Mysteries of Plato” (Life of Proclus 13, tr. Guthrie). A philosopher, Proclus held in Marinus’s account, “should watch over the salvation of not only a city, nor over the national customs of a few people, but that he should be the hierophant of the whole world in common”; and “If I had the power, of all ancient books I would leave in circulation only the Oracles and the Timaeus” (19, 38).

In Alexandria the course began with lessons on what philosophy is. Ammonius, a later teacher of the same name, introduced a sequence of lessons before the study of Aristotle, opening with an introduction to philosophy that gave a number of its definitions, and his school read Aristotle in the order logic, ethics, physics, mathematics, theology. In the introduction that comes down under the name of Elias, the definitions are six. Two are taken from its subject: knowledge of beings as beings, and knowledge of things divine and human. Two are taken from its end: practice of death, and likeness to god so far as is possible for a human. One is from its pre-eminence: the art of arts and science of sciences. And one is from the word itself: love of wisdom. Elias gives the etymological definition and the two from the subject to Pythagoras, the two from the end to Plato, from the Theaetetus and the Phaedo, and the one from pre-eminence to Aristotle’s Metaphysics, and then asks why philosophy should have six definitions (Prolegomena 4). The commentator is to keep his distance from his author: “When expounding Aristotle he must not become an Aristotelian … he must repeat to himself at all times ‘the author is a dear friend, but so also is truth, and when both stand before me truth is the better friend’” (Elias on the Categories, tr. Wilson). The list travelled: the treatise On Definitions, from al-Kindī or his circle, gives six definitions of philosophy drawn from Greek sources, the Alexandrian introductions among them (see The reception and al-Kindī).

In 529 the emperor Justinian decreed that no one was any longer to teach philosophy and astronomy, a decree assumed to have been aimed at the non-Christian philosophers. The Athenian teachers, seven of them under Damascius, Simplicius among them, went to the court of the Persian king Chosroes, and a peace treaty of 532 let them come back without being made to adopt opinions they did not hold. The decree is often referred to as the closure of the Platonic Academy. In Alexandria the teaching went on, given by Christians.

In Byzantium philosophy kept a place in the schools without anything resembling the autonomous universities of the Latin West; the standard course was elementary Aristotelian logic and natural philosophy with elementary mathematics. Michael Psellos, one of the “Consuls of the Philosophers” from the late 1040s, wrote that “Philosophy, when I first studied it, was moribund as far as its professors were concerned, and I alone revived it”, going from teacher to teacher back to “Aristotle and Plato”, and down to “Plotinus, Porphyry, and Iamblichus” and “the mighty harbour of the admirable Proclus”. Its aim, he wrote, is “rather to explore the nature of the universe” than to embellish words; “But there is a new philosophy, based on the mystery of our Christian religion, which transcends the ancient systems … It was this philosophy, rather than the profane, which became the object of my special study” (Chronographia VI.37–42, tr. Sewter). John Italos, who held the same title after him, was condemned by the Church in 1082. In 1439 George Gemistos Plethon published De differentiis, on the differences between Aristotle and Plato, a pamphlet meant to show how inferior Aristotle was to Plato, though Aristotle was the more admired, above all in the Latin West; the controversy it began ran until Cardinal Bessarion’s Against the Slanderer of Plato was printed in Latin thirty years later.