PATIENT
The Enneads
COMPOSED
c. 254–270 CE (approx.)
FORM
54 treatises in six groups of nine
SETTING
Rome, Plotinus's school
CHIEF COMPLAINT
Where does everything come from, why does the soul suffer in a body, and how does it get home?
HISTORY OF PRESENT ILLNESS
Plotinus was born in Egypt around 205 CE, studied for eleven years under Ammonius Saccas in Alexandria, and settled in Rome, where he taught for decades to an audience that included senators, physicians and aristocrats. He wrote nothing until about age 49, then produced 54 treatises in roughly fifteen years at his students' request. After his death his student Porphyry arranged them into six groups of nine (hence Enneads, from the Greek for nine), putting the most accessible first and the most demanding last. Porphyry also reports that Plotinus refused to have his portrait painted and that he reached union with the One four times. He died around 270 CE.
REVIEW OF SYSTEMS
THE ONE
The source, beyond being, thought and description. It overflows because it needs nothing, like a spring that loses no water or a sun that loses no light.
INTELLECT
Divine mind that thinks itself. The Platonic Forms are its thoughts, not abstractions floating somewhere. When you truly understand something, you are sharing in it.
SOUL
The bridge between Intellect and the physical world. Your highest part never leaves Intellect; philosophy is recovering awareness of it.
MATTER
The edge of the overflow: form runs out. Not evil, just farthest from the source, which is where Plotinus parts ways with the Gnostics.
THE RETURN
Epistrophe. Every level turns back toward what produced it. For a person it becomes the practice of philosophy: withdrawing attention inward and upward until subject and object dissolve.
PHYSICAL EXAM — STYLE & STRUCTURE
- —Fifty-four separate essays on specific problems, not one treatise written in order. The arrangement is Porphyry's, after the fact.
- —Builds on Plato and transforms him: the Forms become the content of a divine mind, and Plato's Good becomes the One.
- —Dense and abstract, but carried by images: a spring, the sun, a chorus facing its conductor, a sculptor removing stone.
- —Describes the One mostly by what it is not, the same move as the Upanishads' neti neti and the Kabbalah's Ein Sof.
- —A guide to experience as well as a theory. The philosophy is meant to be practiced, and the practice is subtraction.
ASSESSMENT & PLAN
The philosophical backbone of the Western mystical tradition; Augustine, Pseudo-Dionysius, Islamic philosophy, Kabbalah, Renaissance Hermeticism, German Idealism and Jung all carry its fingerprints. If you read only three places, make them Ennead 1.6 (On Beauty, the most accessible and most read), 4.8 (the descent of the soul into bodies) and 6.9 (On the Good or the One, the most important). For a translation, Stephen MacKenna's (Penguin, abridged) is the classic English version, and A. H. Armstrong's seven-volume Loeb edition gives the Greek alongside.