Get started

WorkPlotinus

The Enneads

Everything that exists pours out of one source beyond all words, and the soul can find its way back by turning inward.

by Plotinus1,233 passages held

  • English, a translation held here, and your language
Sign in or subscribe to discuss this work See it in context
Original title
Ἐννεάδες
First published
(aged 66)
Original language
Ancient Greek

Report a rights issue

Overview

In Rome, where he had taught for ten years without writing anything down, Plotinus began in about 253 to record the arguments his seminar had already had. Their claim is that everything real flows from a single source, the One, so simple that nothing true can be said of it; that the flow passes through Intellect, a mind that thinks the patterns of all things, and through Soul, which gives life to the visible world; and that a human soul, never wholly sunk in its body, can turn and climb back to where it came from. He wrote in difficult Greek, and his eyesight was too poor for him to revise. The opponents closest to home were Gnostics — members of a religious movement which taught that a foolish or even malevolent maker had built the world — and some of them were friends he had failed to win over; against them he defended the visible world as a true image of the higher one. Porphyry, a student who joined him in 263 and found twenty-one treatises already written, published the whole around 301, three decades after his teacher's death. He cut longer works apart to make six sets of nine, ordered from the conduct of a life up to the first principle. Latin translations by Marius Victorinus, a Roman teacher of rhetoric, carried some of it to Augustine and shaped the thinking he brought to Christianity. In ninth-century Baghdad an Arabic paraphrase drawn from the last three sets circulated under Aristotle's name as his Theology. Marsilio Ficino's complete Latin translation came off a Florence press in May 1492, a month after the death of Lorenzo de' Medici, who had paid for it.

Key concepts

What are the One, Intellect and Soul in the Enneads?

They are the three levels of reality the treatises build everything on. The One is the single source, so simple that nothing true can be said of it. Intellect is a mind that thinks the patterns of all things. Soul gives life to the visible world. Each comes from the one above it, so the three form a single descending order rather than three rival powers.

What does emanation mean in Plotinus?

Emanation is his name for how the many come from the One: reality flows out of its source, rather than being made by a craftsman or chosen by a will. The current passes from the One into Intellect and from Intellect into Soul and the visible world. Because everything flows from one source, everything stays connected to it, which is what makes a return upward possible at all.

What is the intelligible world?

It is the realm Intellect contains: the patterns of all things, grasped by thought rather than by the senses. The visible world is its image, and every body, shape and life we perceive is a likeness of something there. The term matters because Plotinus locates what is most real not in what can be touched but in what can only be understood.

Why does Plotinus say the soul is never wholly sunk in its body?

Because he holds that a human soul keeps a link to its source even while it animates a body. Descent into embodiment dims its attention but does not cut the tie. That is the ground of his whole account of the return: a person does not have to become something new to climb back, only turn toward what in them never left.

Who were the Gnostics the Enneads argue against?

They were members of a religious movement that taught that a foolish or even malevolent maker had built the world, so that salvation meant escaping it. Some were friends Plotinus had failed to win over. Against them he defended the visible world as a true image of the higher one, arguing that contempt for the copy betrays a misunderstanding of the original.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

The One and Everything That Flows From It

Can everything that exists come from a single source so simple that nothing true can be said of it? The treatises stake the whole of reality on a yes.

Plotinus places at the summit not a mind or a maker but the One, prior to every property a name could fix. From it flows Intellect, a mind that thinks the patterns of all things, and from Intellect flows Soul, which gives life to the visible world. The order runs one way: each level owes what it is to the one above, and unity is what makes anything real at all. What follows is that the ground of being cannot itself be one more being among the rest.

  • the one
  • emanation
  • unity
  • the good
  • being
  • causation
  • intellect
  • intelligible world
  • forms
  • participation
  • categories
  • metaphysics

Enter a dialogue

The Soul's Way Back

If a human soul is never wholly sunk in its body, how does a person find the part that stayed behind? The answer is a turning inward, not a journey outward.

The same current that carries reality down from the One can be climbed in reverse, and the Enneads are arranged to trace that climb, from the conduct of a life up to the first principle. Plotinus holds that the soul does not lose its origin by entering a body; it forgets to look. Virtue, the love of beauty and contemplation are the stages of remembering, each drawing attention away from sensation toward what perception only reflects. Against a salvation that arrives from outside, he makes the return a work the soul performs on itself.

  • soul
  • embodiment
  • body
  • contemplation
  • virtue
  • beauty
  • life
  • knowledge
  • reason
  • perception
  • sensation

Enter a dialogue

The Visible World as a True Image

Is the world of bodies a mistake to be escaped, or a likeness of the higher world worth honouring? Against the Gnostics, Plotinus defends the likeness.

The Gnostics taught that a foolish or even malevolent maker had built the world, and some of them were friends Plotinus had failed to win over. His reply is that the cosmos is a true image of the intelligible order, flawed only as every image falls short of its original. Matter, evil, providence and time are all argued out inside that frame: to hate the copy is to misunderstand the original. The stakes are practical, since contempt for the world was the Gnostics' way of claiming to stand above it.

  • cosmology
  • matter
  • evil
  • providence
  • time
  • form
  • essence

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held
1,233
distinct concepts
604
by passages held, corpus-wide
#52

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “intellect” and “soul”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 28 pairings. 80 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
intellectsoul75
cosmologysoul52
metaphysicssoul42
intellectthe good39
intellectmetaphysics35
mattersoul32
soulthe good28
beingintellect24
causationsoul22
metaphysicsthe good20
beingmetaphysics17
beingsoul13
cosmologymetaphysics12
beingthe good11
beingmatter10
cosmologymatter10
matterthe good10
causationcosmology9
causationintellect9
causationmatter9
mattermetaphysics9
causationmetaphysics8
causationthe good8
cosmologyintellect8
beingcosmology6
intellectmatter6
cosmologythe good5
beingcausation4

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. 270 The Enneads (Ἐννεάδες) you are here EN
Sign in or subscribe to discuss this work

— or open another of their works