A short life of the author
Plotinus (c. 204/5 – 270 CE) was a Roman Egyptian philosopher who founded Neoplatonism — the last great philosophical system of classical antiquity and one of the most influential intellectual traditions in the history of Western civilisation. His Enneads — fifty-four treatises arranged into six groups of nine by his student Porphyry — constitute the most systematic and most profound development of Plato’s philosophy produced in the ancient world: a metaphysical system that traces all of reality from a single transcendent principle (the One) through successive levels of emanation (Intellect, Soul, Matter) and that describes the soul’s journey of ascent from the material world back to mystical union with the source of all being. His influence on subsequent thought — Christian theology, Islamic philosophy, Renaissance humanism, German Idealism, Romantic poetry — is so pervasive that it is difficult to imagine Western intellectual history without him.
Life
What we know of Plotinus’s life comes primarily from the biography written by Porphyry, who studied with him for six years. Plotinus was born in Lycopolis (modern Asyut) in Roman Egypt. He studied philosophy in Alexandria for eleven years under the teacher Ammonius Saccas — about whom almost nothing is known, though he is the crucial link between Plato’s tradition and Plotinus’s system. At thirty-nine, Plotinus joined the military expedition of the Emperor Gordian III against Persia, apparently hoping to encounter Persian and Indian philosophy — an ambition that suggests the breadth of his intellectual curiosity.
After the expedition failed and Gordian was killed, Plotinus settled in Rome in 244 CE and established a school of philosophy that attracted a circle of devoted students, including Porphyry and Amelius. He taught in Rome for the remaining twenty-six years of his life, lecturing, writing, and advising the Emperor Gallienus, who apparently considered granting him a philosopher’s city in Campania to be governed according to Plato’s Laws.
Plotinus did not begin writing until he was forty-nine and produced all fifty-four treatises in the last seventeen years of his life. He died at sixty-six.
The System
Plotinus’s metaphysics describes a hierarchy of reality emanating from a single transcendent source:
The One (to hen) — the absolute, infinite, ineffable first principle from which all reality proceeds. The One is beyond being, beyond thought, beyond description — it can be known only through mystical experience, not through rational analysis. It generates reality not through deliberate creation but through a spontaneous overflowing of its own superabundant perfection.
Intellect (nous) — the first emanation from the One. Intellect is the realm of Plato’s Forms — the eternal, immutable ideas that constitute the structure of reality. In Intellect, thinking and being are identical: to think a Form is to be that Form.
Soul (psyche) — the second emanation, which mediates between the intelligible world of Intellect and the sensible world of Matter. The World Soul generates and governs the physical universe; individual souls are aspects of the World Soul that have descended into material bodies.
Matter — the lowest level of reality, the point at which the creative power of the One is exhausted. Matter is not evil in itself (Plotinus explicitly rejects the Gnostic view that the material world is the creation of an evil deity) but is simply the furthest remove from the source of all goodness and being.
The Ascent of the Soul
The practical dimension of Plotinus’s philosophy is the soul’s journey of return — the ascent from the material world back to union with the One. This ascent proceeds through stages: first, the practice of virtue and the ordering of the passions; then, the contemplation of beauty (the famous treatise “On Beauty,” Ennead I.6, is one of the most influential texts in the history of aesthetics); then, the philosophical contemplation of Intellect and the Forms; and finally, the mystical union with the One — an experience that Plotinus describes as “the flight of the alone to the Alone.”
Porphyry reports that Plotinus achieved this mystical union four times during the years they were together.
Influence
Plotinus’s influence operated through multiple channels. Augustine absorbed Neoplatonism through Latin translations and through the sermons of Ambrose, and his theology — particularly his doctrines of divine simplicity, evil as privation, and the soul’s interior journey to God — is deeply Plotinian. The medieval Christian mystics (Meister Eckhart, the author of The Cloud of Unknowing) drew on Neoplatonic models of mystical ascent. The Renaissance Platonists (Marsilio Ficino, who translated the Enneads into Latin in 1492) made Plotinus a central figure of Renaissance philosophy. The Romantic poets — particularly Coleridge and Shelley — found in Plotinus a philosophy of beauty, nature, and spiritual aspiration that resonated with their own concerns.
Collecting Plotinus
Marsilio Ficino’s Latin translation (1492, Florence) is a landmark of Renaissance publishing; copies are extremely rare. The standard modern edition is the Loeb Classical Library Enneads (7 volumes, translated by A.H. Armstrong, 1966–1988). Stephen MacKenna’s English translation (1917–1930, revised by B.S. Page) is the most literary. The Essential Plotinus (translated by Elmer O’Brien, 1964) is the most accessible introduction.