It is a rarity for a system of thought to be developed in isolation. The learning of subjects from others and experimentation are the natural way for humans to learn. These are built from humble beginnings of the generations before into the mountains of knowledge that are available now. This is not to say that everything old is wrong, but rather that the amount of data that is available today is astronomically large compared to simply 50 years ago, let along 4000 years. As thoughts progress through time, people have often built upon or debated those who have come before them or during their time. Plato and Aristotle would be a great example of this: a teacher and student who looked at the world in completely opposite ways. Through their work and disagreements, the world of philosophy and logic flourished and fleshed out. A similar connection can be drawn between two more distant thinkers. Lucretius and Plotinus saw the world in very contrary ways, both drawing from the teaching of their masters, changing and adding things as they learned through their own observations and thoughts. An analysis of their thoughts in parallel form will show how opposites can challenge each other and current readers. The supernatural, the cosmos, and the natural are three areas that Lucretius and Plotinus had clashing views that set the foundation for medieval philosophy.
Starting at the supernatural, Plotinus began his system of thought with The One, “The Intellectual-Principle stands as the image of The One” (522). From ancient times, the number one is the beginning of all things so calling the Intellectual-Principle an image of “The One” is saying the Intellectual-Principle is actually under the One who started everything. This hierarchy is key to understand before moving on to further explanation of his mythology
This is the meaning hidden in the Mysteries, and in the Myths of the gods: Kronos, as the wisest, exists before Zeus; he must absorb his offspring that, full within himself, he may be also an Intellectual-Principle manifest in some product of his plenty; afterwards, the myth proceeds, Kronos engenders Zeus, who already exists as the [necessary and eternal] outcome of the plenty there; in other words the offspring of the Divine Intellect, perfect within itself, is Soul [the life-principle carrying forward the Ideas in the Divine Mind]. (522)
The Intellectual-Principle, the Divine Intellect, Kronos is the image of The One within the universe. He is the first principle that follows and the one that causes all others to come into being. In order for him to become enough, he has to eat his children until he became plenty. From his plenty, spawned his son Zeus, who is the Soul, the one who carries out the ideas from the Ideal. If Kronos is the creative, then Zeus is the creator. “Yet any offspring of the Intellectual-Principle must be a Reason-Principle; the thought of the Divine Mind must be a substantial existence” (522). Zeus cannot just be Soul because that would not give an explanation for the mind of man. He has to go a step further and give him the title of Reason-Principle. Plotinus gives his own summary of Plato in this quote, “Thus Plato knows the order of generation—from the Good, the Intellectual-Principle; from the Intellectual-Principle, the Soul” (523). He builds in this natural progression of things, but he adds a new entity right at the end with no explanation in this section. What is the “Good” that the Intellectual-Principle comes from? Does this tie back to The One? One has to read to the end of this work, The Six Enneads, in order to get any decent explanation.
The sovranly self-sufficing principle will be Unity-Absolute, for only in this Unity is there a natural above all need, whether within itself or in regard to the rest of things. Unity seeks nothing towards its being or its well-being or its safehold upon existence; cause to all, how can it acquire its character outside of itself or know any good outside? The good of its being can be no borrowing: This is The Good. (674-675)
He is connecting The One to the Unity-Absolute. He is trying to separate things out here. He is making The One distinct from the other two deities here, “Think of The One as Mind or as God, you think too meanly” (674). “Meanly” according to Merriam-Webster is “Lacking distinction or eminence: humble.” So, The One that he has not named yet, is not Mind or God, but rather Unity-Absolute and if one thinks he is god or mind, that person is a poor thinker. To summarize Plotinus’ thoughts on the creative order: the first thing is The Good, which is the Unity-Principle or The One that begats the Intellectual-Principle or Divine Mind which begats the Soul or Reason-Principle. Kronos is the embodiment of the middle two of these things, and Zeus is given the title of Reason-Principle as he begets soul to those beneath him, like humans. There is no mention of a name for The One beyond Unity-Absolute.
Lucretius has a very different view of the supernatural. While Plotinus saw the gods as the absolute controller of creation, Lucretius saw less control, “Where the gods pass serene eternal days I ask you—which of them is strong enough to rule the sum of things, to hold the reins of absolute profundity, or move the skies to turn together?” (29). Here he is saying that there is not a god strong enough to rule everything. This is interesting based upon his opening paragraphs, in referring to Venus, “Since you alone control the way things are. Since without you no thing has ever come into the radiant boundaries of light, since without you nothing is ever glad” (1). He says further down on this page that Venus helps to control even Mars when he is on one of his mood swings. From these two passages, it appears clear that Lucretius believes that the gods have some power, but not to the extent that Plotinus is saying. If not the gods, according to Lucretius, what is the creative force of the cosmos?
This actually leads to Lucretius’ starting point of all things:
Our starting-point shall be this principle: Nothing at all is ever born from nothing by the god’s will. Ah, but men’s minds are frightened because they see, on earth and in the heaven, many events whose causes are to them impossible to fix; so, they suppose, the gods’ will is the reason. As for us, once we have seen that nothing comes from nothing, we shall perceive with greater clarity what we are looking for, whence each thing comes, how things are caused, and no “gods’ will” about it. (3)
If the starting point is that “nothing comes from nothing” that means that everything has to at least come from something. So there has to be something before in order to make anything after the fact. He does credit this to the will of the gods. He does acknowledge that this scares his fellow man because there are things that man cannot explain. The unknown is naturally a thing to fear. He has an explanation for this though: “By natural process, as the atoms came together, willy-nilly, quite by chance, quite casually and quite intentionless knocking against each other, massed, or spaced so as to colander others through, and cause such combinations and conglomerates as form the origin of mighty things, earth, sea and sky, and animals and men” (28). The atom, being in existence, through chance, is ordered into all of nature. He does set up nature as its own, almost sovereign, entity, “Holding this knowledge, you can’t help but see that nature has no tyrants over her, but always acts of her own will; she has no part of any godhead whatsoever” (29). Nature is this creative force that is not under any god but is also not a god herself. The atom is the building block of all that is. If nature and chance are the creative force within the universe, that would make the things of earth the ideals. There would not be anything to follow. Lucretius does address this by way of the finality of the soul, “The truth is, no such area exists— spirit, if scattered to the air, expires” (36). Once a man dies, his soul is gone, scattered to the air. For Lucretius, there is no room for belief in the afterlife. He actually says that what some believe as hell in the future is actually what is happening here and now, “Now all those things which people say exist in Hell, are really present in our lives. The story says that Tantalus, the wretch, frozen in terror, fears the massive rock balanced in air above him. It’s not true. What happens is that in our lives the fear, the silly, vain, ridiculous fear of gods, causes our panic dread of accident” (41). What we think will happen in the future is the very thing that is causing our problems here and now. Life is meant to be enjoyed now.
While Lucretius saw nature as a creative and organizing force of the cosmos and the deities that come after as superstitions that cause bad things to happen now, Plotinus saw the order within life as something different. He saw the cosmos as a thing that was aiming at something else, particularly when it came to the human race, “Let us then suppose Soul to be in body as Ideal-Form in Matter” (302). Here, instead of atoms being the thing that sets matter into order, it is the Soul that is doing this work and is throughout all human life. The Ideal-Form is what sets man apart from other life and is what gives us direction. “And by means of these Ideal-Forms, by which the Soul wields single lordship over the Animate, we have Discursive-Reasoning, Sense-Knowledge and Intellection” (304). Plotinus saw this trinity of gifts that make us human to be from the Ideal-Form, putting the cosmos into order, and giving man a purpose.
Hence we possess the Ideal-Forms also after two modes: in the Soul, as it were unrolled and separate; in the Intellectual-Principle, concentrated, one.
And how do we possess the Divinity?
In that the Divinity is contained in the Intellectual-Principle and Authentic-Existence; and We come third in order after these two, for the We is constituted by a union of the supreme, the undivided Soul—we read—and that Soul which is divided among [living] bodies. For, note, we inevitably think of the Soul, though one and undivided in the All, as being present to bodies in division: in so far as any bodies are Animates, the Soul has given itself to each of the separate material masses; or rather it appears to be present in the bodies by the fact that it shines into them: it makes them living beings not by merging into body but by giving forth, without any change in itself, images or likenesses of itself like one face caught by many mirrors. (304)
Through this sharing of the Soul with the All, it allows humans to become part of the divinity, to become like the gods. It could be extrapolated that if a man were to have his matter match his soul, he would then be divine throughout and become a god. This would fit within their mythologies like Hercules. This would give a person a reason to better oneself in order to become a god. How the person acts on the outside apart from the soul is what needs to be changed.
This leads Plotinus to his biggest problem: what to do with the natural. If Soul is within all humans, then there is only one thing that is stopping humans from being more and that is matter. He had a real problem with the body and how it degrades a person as can be seen in this quote, “The body is brute touched to life” (305). The “brute” is an animalistic man that is given more by the Soul. The body is not just holding man back from divinity, it is actually evil. “The Nature of this Kosmos is, therefore, a blend; it is blended from the Intellectual-Principle and Necessity: what comes into it from God is good; evil is from the Ancient Kind which, we read, is the underlying Matter not yet brought to order by the Ideal-Form” (332). The quote is very important to understanding the relationship between soul and body. By Plotinus saying that the Kosmos is a blend of the Intellectual-Principle and Necessity, he is actually saying that the body, matter, is necessary to the process. It is a bridge or tunnel that must be gone through. To use a cliché, the body is a necessary evil that must be endured. A man who is not moving his matter in a way that is matching up to the Soul within but allowing his body to move as it wills, driven by passions, is evil because it is not being ordered by the Ideal-Form. This is the point of this life for Plotinus, to make matter obey in order to get to the stage beyond, the spiritual. This leads Plotinus to draw this conclusion, “the cause of Evil is Matter” (333).
This is radically different than Lucretius. Instead of seeing matter as the thing to be rid of, he saw matter as the essence of life to the point of it being the cause of free will. “What keeps the mind from having inside itself some such compulsiveness in all its doings, what keeps it from being matter’s absolute slave? The answer is that our free-will derives from just that ever-so-slight atomic swerve at no fixed time, at no fixed place whatever” (19). Our brains are not controlled merely by our thoughts but by the random atomic movement within them. To him, matter was so self-contained that he thought the idea of an immortal soul was ridiculous.
But if our minds were of immortal stuff, they could not die, plaintive about their break-up, but would rather escape as from a prison, or slough off their old integument, like a snake renewed. Next: why are mind and intellect and purpose never produced in heads or feet or hands, but always, and in every man, are found in the same fixed and definite areas? (37)
He goes further a few lines down from this passage, “And furthermore: if spirit were immortal, sentient when separated from the body, it would have to manage, somehow, with five senses” (37). He not only did not see a possibility for immortality but could not comprehend something that was only spiritual having senses which he thought as the main source of knowledge for a person. “You will find all knowledge of the truth originates out of the senses, and the senses are quite irrefutable” (48). The senses were a source of truth for him. Matter is self-contained. It did not need anything above it to give it meaning. The meaning of life is begetting life. This brings back his old motto, “nothing comes from nothing” (3). He had no higher purpose except to exist and to continue the cycle of life.
These two men could possibly not see the world as more different from one another. Plotinus saw the world as conducted by The One with matter being Evil and needing to be shed off like a snakeskin to get to where we are meant to be, while Lucretius saw the world as atomic with nature and chance ruling and running the game and this world being all that there is. The rise of the church during medieval times did end up leaning heavily upon Plotinus and his thinking, burning Lucretius at the stake figuratively for his lack of reverence. During the Renaissance, the resurgence of scientific thought allowed Lucretius to have the impact due to him. At this point, philosophy in the common tongue or by the average person would agree more with Lucretius than with Plotinus. Both of these men have been fundamental to the development of how humans see the world today.
Works Cited
Lucretius. The Way Things Are. Great Books of the Western World. Ed. Mortimer J. Adler and Philip W. Goetz. Translated by Rolfe Humphries. Second Edition. Vol. 11. Chicago: Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.; Robert P. Gwinn, 1990. Print.
“Meanly (2a).” Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 11th ed., Merriam-Webster, 2020, p. 768.
Plotinus. The Six Enneads. Great Books of the Western World. Ed. Mortimer J. Adler and Philip W. Goetz. Translated byStephen MacKenna and B. S. Page. Second Edition. Vol. 11. Chicago: Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.; Robert P. Gwinn, 1990. Print.