(205-270 AD)
Plotinus was the founder and main figure of the neoplatonic school. His contribution is not to the theory of literature but to aesthetics in general, underlining the cognitive value of art and its metaphysical implications. His theory of art is accordingly found in his work on metaphysics, the Enneads.
Being is an emanation from and a return to the Divine One. There is this world, an appearance as for Plato, and then Reality, above it. Its grades form a kind of Trinity: Soul , Intellect, and Oneness. "The One expresses itself in a triad, the Good, the Intellect and its return to it. Beauty, as Plotinus laboriously defines it, is central to his system, since the more beautiful a thing is, the closer it is to the One" (Adams 105). The principle which produces Beauty is itself beautiful and close to the One. Wisdom itself is the highest form of beauty. And both are eternal, above the changes in Nature. The Gods do not contemplate processes, but being. Nature, change, process, are the manifestation of the One and of the intellectual realm, of Being. The One is too lofty to be thought of in terms of "beauty". Beauty belongs rather to the second hypostasis, to the Intellectual realm. Intelligence itself is below the level of the One: Proclus, a disciple of Plotinus, will remark that knowing involves a duality, subject and object. The One can only be reached by negation of differences and not knowing.
Beauty lies in the imposition of the artist's mental form on materials with a struggle. Beauty in art comes from form, and not from the materials. This form is present in the mind of the artist, and is transferred (derivatively and not wholly) to the work. So, the works of art "give no base reproduction of the thing seen but go back to the reason-principles from which Nature itself derives." Art can provide a valuable, though imperfect, spiritual insight. It improves Nature. Beauty in natural objects comes from the same principles: it is present in the idea, rather than in the actual matter. In the realm of literary criticism, these ideas will contribute to the growth of allegorical interpretation: what is important in the literary work, the neoplatonic critics will argue, is not its matter, its literal meaning, but the idea which organizes the whole and gives the work a spiritual meaning (cf. 1.8).
Art is not a wholly rational kind of knowledge, in the sense that it leads beyond human reason. The way to the One is through inner vision, through the mystical shedding of self. The role of the artist is important, but in the last analysis he is only a channel for Beauty to express itself. The principles of beauty are not dependent on him; they are high above the artist and nature:
No doubt the vision of the artist may be the quid of the work; it is sufficient explanation of the wisdom exhibited in the arts; but the artist himself goes back, after all, to that wisdom in nature which is embodied in himself; and this is not a wisdom consisting of a manifold detail coordinated into a unity but rather a unity working out into detail.
The role of the artist is not to create, but to reveal or to reconstruct a unity which is already existent in the realm of ideas. This goes against some of the ideas on unity which we have seen (the Stoics', for instance, saw beauty in the relationship of parts imposed by the artist). In Plotinian aesthetics, "sheer symmetry is not necessarily, as in earlier Greek aesthetics, a sign of beauty" (Adams 105). Plotinus says that each part of the whole must be a whole in itself, just as each part of the Universe mirrors the structure of the whole. Beauty is often linked to brightness . Good, unity and brightness are in eternal association in the human mind. But true beauty is invisible, it no longer needs sensory beauty.
The aesthetic theory expounded by Plotinus opens the way of the "musician" to the realm of ideas, a way which was closed in the original Platonic theory. Art is for the neoplatonists a cognitive, beneficial, and even divine activity. Neoplatonic philosophy was absorbed by the early Fathers of the Church, and therefore the neoplatonic approach to aesthetics and to the interpretation of literary works was an important influence on Christian thought about art and literature all through the Middle Ages. There are neoplatonic revivals in the Renaissance and in the Romantic age. This mystical and ideal conception of art will reappear in some Romantic poets such as Schlegel, Shelley or Keats.