away from society.
After Epicurus, many Epicureans developed an overemphasis on self-
indulgence. Their motto was “Live for the moment!” The word “epicurean” is
used in a negative sense nowadays to describe someone who lives only for
pleasure.
Neoplatonism
As I showed you, Cynicism, Stoicism, and Epicureanism all had their
roots in the teaching of Socrates. They also made use of certain of the pre-
Socratics like Heraclitus and Democritus.
But the most remarkable philosophic trend in the late Hellenistic period
was first and foremost inspired by Plato’s philosophy. We therefore call it
Neoplatonism.
The most important figure in Neoplatonism was Plotinus (c. 205-270),
who studied philosophy in Alexandria but later settled in Rome. It is interesting
to note that he came from Alexandria, the city that had been the central meet-
ing point for Greek philosophy and Oriental mysticism for several centuries.
Plotinus brought with him to Rome a doctrine of salvation that was to compete
seriously with Christianity when its time came. However, Neoplatonism also
became a strong influence in mainstream Christian theology as well.
Remember Plato’s doctrine of ideas, Sophie, and the way he
distinguished between the world of ideas and the sensory world. This meant
establishing a clear division between the soul and the body. Man thus became
a dual creature: our body consisted of earth and dust like everything else in
the sensory world, but we also had an immortal soul. This was widely believed
by many Greeks long before Plato. Plotinus was also familiar with similar
ideas from Asia.
Plotinus believed that the world is a span between two poles. At one end
is the divine light which he calls the One. Sometimes he calls it God. At the
other end is absolute darkness, which receives none of the light from the One.
But Plotinus’s point is that this darkness actually has no existence. It is simply
the absence of light—in other words, it is not. All that exists is God, or the
One, but in the same way that a beam of light grows progressively dimmer
and is gradually extinguished, there is somewhere a point that the divine glow
cannot reach.
According to Plotinus, the soul is illuminated by the light from the One,
while matter is the darkness that has no real existence. But the forms in
nature have a faint glow of the One.
Imagine a great burning bonfire in the night from which sparks fly in all
directions. A wide radius of light from the bonfire turns night into day in the
immediate area; but the glow from the fire is visible even from a distance of
several miles. If we went even further away, we would be able to see a tiny
speck of light like a far-off lantern in the dark, and if we went on moving away,
at some point the light would not reach us. Somewhere the rays of light disap-
pear into the night, and when it is completely dark we see nothing. There are
neither shapes nor shadows.
Imagine now that reality is a bonfire like this. That which is burning is
God—and the darkness beyond is the cold matter that man and animals are
made of. Closest to God are the eternal ideas which are the primal forms of all
creatures. The human soul, above all, is a “spark from the fire.” Yet