ABSTRACT
In his Life of Plotinus Porphyry records how Amelius, the senior student of his circle, once invited Plotinus to accompany him on a pious visitation of the local temples.1 Porphyry and his companions were baffled by Plotinus’ response: ‘They ought to come to me, not I to them.’ Of course Plotinus was not denying the existence or importance of the gods but rather placing a priority on the inner spiritual life and a philosophical rather than ritual encounter with the divine. Porphyry, too, would have understood that Plotinus was not denigrating the gods, but as a man of his age would have found it difficult to understand how a philosophical veneration of the divine could be totally separated from what we might regard as the externals of worship. In a similar way Plotinus accepted the efficacy of magical spells but chose not to ascribe any great importance to them. Magic, according to Plotinus, was simply a way of manipulating or appearing to manipulate the sympathy which existed naturally between all objects in the physical universe; for the artificial use of these links may not in fact indicate any result other than what would have naturally occurred.2 And although these patterns in the universe are ultimately reflections of the intelligible cosmos,3 Plotinus does not exploit this transcendent cause as Iamblichus was later to do. And as a further indication of the neutral value he places on magic he regards the moral state of the petitioner in a magical ceremony as irrelevant.4 The picture is similar when we turn to prophesy, an integral part of traditional Greek religious experience. It too is a product of universal sympathy and thus operative only within the material world. The sharp division between the immaterial realm of Intellect and the lower world is illustrated by his comment that diviners used logismos rather than intellect.5 Nor does he deny that events may be foretold by using the stars, but this is achieved only by learning the various combinations
of signs in a way similar to that in which we can draw conclusions about a person’s character and actions by examining his eyes. For stars are members of the universal order as we are.6 But in his view man could transcend the sublunary world to a transcendent world where the links of sympathy, on which magic depended, had no power. In this attitude he stood somewhat outside the common view of his fellow philosophers who mostly accepted the necessity of coming to terms in some way with these factors and of integrating them more explicitly into their world view. It is thus not surprising that other Neoplatonists engaged more profoundly with issues presented by magic and traditional religious practice. It is difficult to say to what extent, if at all, this interest was influenced by the advances made by organised Christianity. More likely than not it may be ascribed, in its initial phases at least, to the tendency of philosophers, and especially Platonists, to accept conventional expressions of piety. But what is surprising is the new intensity of this acceptance which was linked with a desire to find explanations for religious phenomena and to integrate all religion in a coherent way into a philosophical structure. It would be quite wrong to regard this tendency as a relapse from Plotinian rationalism into superstition. Rather it represents one of the first profound attempts to relate philosophy to religion.
