A Teacher
Ammonius Saccas
Founder of Neoplatonism; teacher of Plotinus
The transmission
Ammonius Saccas (c. 175-242 CE) was a philosopher of Alexandria, the cosmopolitan crucible where Greek, Egyptian, and Eastern thought intermingled, and is generally regarded as the precursor or founder of Neoplatonism.
According to the biographer Porphyry, he was born to Christian parents but returned to the philosophy of the Greeks once he began to think for himself. The epithet Saccas is traditionally linked to a youth spent as a porter or sack-carrier on the Alexandrian docks before he devoted himself to philosophy.
He left no writings of his own, reportedly binding his closest pupils to an oath of secrecy, so that his teaching survives only through the reports of his students and later commentators. What made Ammonius pivotal was his circle of students rather than any surviving doctrine.
For roughly eleven years, from about 232, he taught Plotinus, who later credited him as the decisive influence on his thought and went on to systematise Neoplatonism in the Enneads. Ammonius also numbered among his pupils the Christian theologian Origen and the literary critic Cassius Longinus.
Ancient sources attribute to him a project of reconciling the apparent disagreements between Plato and Aristotle and of presenting philosophy as a path toward the soul’s return to its divine source, themes his successors would develop into the great metaphysics of the One, the emanation of all things from it, and the seeker’s ascent back to unity.
What they gave
Founded the Neoplatonic tradition, the philosophical fountainhead from which later esoteric and nondual currents flowed,Taught Plotinus for some eleven years, shaping the thought later set down in the Enneads,Reportedly sought to harmonise the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle into a single coherent system,Transmitted philosophy as a living, oral, initiatory discipline rather than a body of written doctrine,Stood at the meeting point of Greek philosophy and the religious ferment of Alexandria, influencing both pagan and Christian thinkers
The line they stand in
Ammonius Saccas drew on the Platonic and Pythagorean inheritance of Alexandria and on the Middle Platonist attempts to systematise Plato’s metaphysics.
Though he wrote nothing, his oral teaching passed directly to Plotinus, who founded the Neoplatonic school proper, and to the Christian Origen, so that his unrecorded thought became the hidden root of two great streams, pagan Neoplatonism (through Porphyry, Iamblichus, and Proclus) and Christian mystical theology, both of which fed the later Western esoteric and nondual traditions.