SOURCE: “Salvation, Plotinian and Christian,” in Plotinian and Christian Studies, Variorum Reprints, 1979, pp. 126-39.

In the following essay, originally presented as a lecture in 1956, Armstrong contrasts the beliefs of Plotinus with those held by Christians.

Plotinian studies are certainly at the moment in a lively and flourishing condition. Not only is very solid work being done on the foundations, the text of the Enneads, but there is a great deal of active investigation going on of the relationship of the thought of Plotinus to that of his predecessors and successors and of the ideas current in the world in which he lived. And, which is encouraging to those who care about Plotinus, books are appearing which treat his thought as something alive, of significance to us to-day and deserving serious philosophical and theological consideration, and not as something of purely historical interest.

In France, in particular, there has...