These contradictions need not lower the great Father of Neoplatonism in
our eyes, as a moral being. All accounts of him seem to prove him to
have been what Apollo, in a lengthy oracle, declared him to have been,
"good and gentle, and benignant exceedingly, and pleasant in all his
conversation." He gave good advice about earthly matters, was a
faithful steward of moneys deposited with him, a guardian of widows and
orphans, a righteous and loving man. In his practical life, the ascetic
and gnostic element comes out strongly enough. The body, with him, was
not evil, neither was it good; it was simply nothing--why care about it?
He would have no portrait taken of his person: "It was humiliating
enough to be obliged to carry a shadow about with him, without having a
shadow made of that shadow." He refused animal food, abstained from
baths, declined medicine in his last illness, and so died about 200 A.D.
It is in his followers, as one generally sees in such cases, that the
weakness of his conceptions comes out. Plotinus was an earnest thinker,
slavishly enough reverencing the opinion of Plato, whom he quotes as an
infallible oracle, with a "He says," as if there were but one he in the
universe: but he tried honestly to develop Plato, or what he conceived
to be Plato, on the method which Plato had laid down.
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