ARISTOTLE TO AUGUSTINE last great pagan philosopher, Plotinus (205–70) After a brief military career Plotinus settled in Rome and won favour at the imperial court He toyed with the idea of founding a Platonic republic in Campania His works were edited after his death in six groups of nine treatises (Enneads) by his disciple and biographer Porphyry Written in a taut and diYcult style, they cover a variety of philosophical topics: ethics and aesthetics, physics and cosmology, psychology, metaphysics, logic, and epistemology The dominant place in Plotinus’ system is occupied by ‘the One’: the notion is derived, through Plato, from Parmenides, where Oneness is a key property of Being The One is, in a mysterious way, identical with the Platonic Idea of the Good: it is the basis of all being and the standard of all value, but it is itself beyond being and beyond goodness Below this supreme and ineVable summit, the next places are occupied by Mind (the locus of Ideas) and Soul, which is the creator of time and space Soul looks upward to Mind, but downward to Nature, which in turn creates the physical world At the lowest level of all is bare matter, the outermost limit of reality These levels of reality are not independent of each other Each level depends for its existence and activity on the level above it Everything has its place in a single downward progress of successive emanations from the One This impressive and startling metaphysical system is presented by Plotinus not as a mystical revelation but on the basis of philosophical principles derived from Plato and Aristotle It will be examined in detail in Chapter below Plotinus’ school in Rome did not survive his death, but his pupils and their pupils carried his ideas elsewhere A Neoplatonic tradition throve in Athens until the pagan schools were closed down by the Christian emperor Justinian in 529 But it was Christians, not pagans, who transmitted Plotinus’ ideas to the post-classical world, and foremost among them was St Augustine of Hippo, who was to prove the most inXuential of all Christian philosophers Augustine was born in a small town in present-day Algeria in 354 The son of a Christian mother and a pagan father, he was not baptized as an infant, though he received a Christian education in Latin literature and rhetoric Most of what we know of his early life comes from his own autobiography, the Confessions, a portrait, by a biographer nearly as gifted as Boswell, of a mind more capacious than Johnson’s 113