Plotinus, Augustine, Aquinas the School of Thought

Plotinus, Augustine, Aquinas

The school of thought of Neoplatonism has had much influence in the philosophies of three major characters, all of which have studied heftily under the same overall pretense of the existence of God and his relation to nature. Plotinus, St. Augustine, and Thomas Aquinas all have certain reasoning regarding the nature of human existence and the hierarchies of creation. In their writings, the three men have indicated the direct and indirect links of the abstract form of existence and the concrete human world. Their ethical worldviews function solely in the prospect of humanity's closeness to the divine through the use of wisdom and intellect.

Plotinus was the founder of Neoplatonism, though he himself called himself a Platonist. In his philosophical studies, Plotinus focused solely on the concept of the One and the Nous, with which the One ruled in classical hierarchy. According to him, the One is the "source of all being," a "source of endless creation, charged with the task of eternally conserving Its own creations at the heart of the world" (Lekkas, 2005). Following the One is the Nous, which is the lesser "image" of the One, the archetype of all existing beings. For Plotinus, the One is the unprovable essence of the Good, which he characterizes as God. In a classical hierarchical sense, the One is ineffable, the One transcends all. On the other hand, the Nous corresponds to thought and being, of "idea and [the] ideal world" (Lekkas, 2005). The second highest sphere, to Plotinus, becomes the human mind and the human intellect.

Influenced by Plotinus was St. Augustine, who also believed in the existence of God's ineffability. Everything was created simultaneously by God, wherein human life was produced in His creation. Augustine takes the thought of the human intellect further from Plotinus' ideas. Wherein Plotinus focuses on the One and the Nous, Augustine's philosophy attempts to resolve and link the divine to human concept through wisdom. "Wisdom unites the spiritual and the material worlds, natural and supernatural spheres of man's life" (Kowalczyk, 2006). To Augustine, wisdom is the divine nature within God, only attainable by the "pure of heart," while science "refers to the authority of the senses" (Kowalczyk, 2006). In Augustine's writings, he bounded the idea of wisdom and provided the link between God's inner essence and the essence of human life.

St. Thomas Aquinas takes to the Neoplatonist ideas as well, further expanding and clarifying the works provided by both Plotinus and St. Augustine. Aquinas believed in the "Divina Potentia," the "power of God" (Schall, 1997). He believed that God's existence was "neither obvious nor unprovable," though he gave five reasons for his existence: God is simple, God is perfect, God is infinite, God is immutable, and God is one. "God has an internal life that seems itself social or containing within it an otherness" (Schall, 1997). As far as the creation of nature and humankind went, Aquinas believed -- just like Augustine -- in God's potentia. Aquinas takes this theory further with the belief of spontaneous generation, or abiogenesis. God "created from nothing"; humans, like the rest of the world surrounding mankind, were "created from nothing" (Schall, 1997).