- Length
- 800 pagesGerson et al., The Enneads, Cambridge, 2018 - complete in one volume
- Reading
- SpecialistWritten for a school and normally read with a commentary
- Availability
- In printA current standard edition is available
Enneads
The last great system of pagan antiquity, and the one that turned out to be portable. Plotinus described reality as flowing from a single source beyond description, and within two centuries that structure had been taken up by Christian theology, then by Jewish and Islamic thought, so thoroughly that it became the background assumption of three religions rather than the doctrine of a school.
- Date
- 253-270
- Attributed to
- Plotinus, edited by Porphyry
- Region
- Rome
- Language
- Ancient Greek
- 1492 Latin, Marsilio Ficino The translation that returned Plotinus to Europe Attested
- 1917 English, Stephen MacKenna Public domain; admired as prose, loose as scholarship Attested
- 2018 English, Gerson and others Complete in one volume; in copyright Attested
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Reply — Answers a named earlier work
- Form
- Treatise
- Method
- Demonstration — Proof from premises the opponent already grants
- Transmission
- Continuous — Copied and read without a break in its own language
- Standing
- Absorbed — Its argument became assumption and stopped being cited
- Years back to what it answers
- 630 years
The system was absorbed into Christian, Jewish and Islamic theology so completely that most of its readers for a thousand years did not know they were reading Plotinus.
What the book says
Fifty-four essays, written as answers to questions raised in a seminar and grouped after their author's death into six sets of nine. They describe reality as a descent. At the top is what Plotinus calls the One, which is not a thing among things and cannot be described, since every description would make it one kind of thing rather than another; it is beyond being. From the One, without any decision or effort and without the One being diminished, comes Intellect, which is thought thinking itself and contains the Forms. From Intellect comes Soul, which looks upward to Intellect and downward to the world it organises. At the bottom is matter, which is not evil in itself but is the point at which the outflow runs out. The essays then work in every direction across this structure: on beauty, which is the recognition of form in a material thing; on time, which is what eternity looks like when Soul has to unfold it; on providence and evil; on whether the stars affect us; on the descent of the individual soul into a body and its return. The final treatises describe that return, which is not a journey to somewhere else but a turning of attention inward until the distinction between the one who sees and what is seen no longer holds.
What it argues
That everything derives from a single principle which cannot itself be one thing among others, and that the derivation is not an event. The One does not decide to produce Intellect and does not lose anything by producing it, any more than the sun decides to shine or is diminished by shining. Reality is therefore a hierarchy of decreasing unity rather than a sequence of creations, and the direction of philosophy is upward: to think clearly is to become more unified, and to become more unified is to move closer to the source. Evil is not a rival power but the thinning of reality at the far end of the outflow.
What it answered
Plato, as Plotinus understood him, and the Gnostics, whom he took to be misreading the same texts. The Gnostic treatise is unusually direct: he objects that a doctrine treating the visible world as the work of a botched or malicious power despises the one thing in which order is actually visible, and that contempt for the cosmos is not piety but ingratitude. Against Aristotle he is more respectful and more selective, taking the account of intellect thinking itself and rejecting the claim that the categories of the sensible world apply above it.
How it argues
By pressing on a question until the ordinary way of putting it breaks. Plotinus writes as if thinking aloud in front of people who have asked him something, which is what he was doing; Porphyry says he composed in one draft without revision because his eyesight was poor and he had worked the argument out entirely before writing. The prose is consequently dense, elliptical and full of sudden shifts of person. Where the subject is the One he repeatedly says that what he has just written is not right, because nothing said about it can be, and then says it differently.
The moment
Third-century Rome, in what historians call the crisis of the empire - civil wars, plague, currency collapse. Plotinus taught in a private house to a circle including senators, and Porphyry reports that he was ashamed of being in a body and refused to sit for a portrait. He also reports that Plotinus proposed to found a city of philosophers in Campania, to be called Platonopolis, and that the emperor was nearly persuaded. Neither the withdrawal nor the ambition is incidental to the philosophy.
How it travelled
Under other names. Porphyry arranged the treatises into six groups of nine - hence the title - and the corpus passed to the later Neoplatonic schools and into Christian theology through Augustine, who says he read certain books of the Platonists before his conversion and found much of the Gospel of John already in them. It reached Islamic and Jewish philosophy in an unusual form: sections of the Enneads circulated in Arabic as the Theology of Aristotle, mistakenly attributed, so that generations of readers absorbed Plotinus believing him to be Aristotle. Ficino translated the whole into Latin in 1492 and Renaissance Platonism followed.
The strongest objection
That the emanation does no explanatory work. To say that Intellect proceeds from the One necessarily, without will and without change in the One, is to describe the relation rather than account for it, and the images Plotinus uses - the sun and its light, a spring and its streams - are analogies where an argument is needed. The deeper problem is his own: if nothing whatever can be said of the One, then the statement that everything derives from it is also something said, and he knows it. His answer is that such statements point rather than describe, which readers have found either the only honest position available or a way of exempting the central claim from examination.
Why read it
Not entire, and not first. The treatise on beauty in the first Ennead and the treatise on eternity and time in the third are self-contained and are among the best things written on their subjects in antiquity. Read with Porphyry's Life in front of you, which is short, strange and one of the most vivid portraits of a philosopher anyone has left.
- First printed
- 1492
- First in English
- 1917
- Digitised
- Yes
Henry and Schwyzer's editio maior is the scholarly text. Porphyry's Life of Plotinus is prefixed to every edition and is the source of nearly everything known about him.
Mackenna's 1917-30 English is out of copyright and is admired as prose while being loose as scholarship. Armstrong's Loeb and the 2018 Cambridge version are in copyright.
Where it stands
Absorbed. Very few philosophers today defend emanation, and the vocabulary of the One, procession and return survives mainly in theology and in the study of mysticism. But the questions Plotinus made central - whether unity is prior to plurality, whether the ultimate can be described at all - continue under other headings, and scholarly interest in him has grown considerably since the middle of the twentieth century.
On quoting this book
Greek public domain; Mackenna is out of copyright but too free to quote as Plotinus, and the accurate versions are in copyright. Nothing is quoted.
Contested
How much of the system is Plato's and how much Plotinus' own is the central dispute, and the answer has shifted: nineteenth-century scholarship treated Neoplatonism as a distortion, while much recent work reads it as a defensible interpretation. The arrangement into six nines is Porphyry's and is numerologically motivated; it splits some treatises and joins others, and reading in Porphyry's order is not reading in the order of composition, which he also records. Whether the union described in the final treatises is a philosophical conclusion or a report of experience is argued, as is how much weight to put on Porphyry's statement that Plotinus reached it four times.