Emanation, and a Philosopher Who Was Embarrassed by His Body

What is known of Plotinus' life comes almost entirely from the memoir his student Porphyry placed at the head of the Enneads, which he edited into six sets of nine treatises after his teacher's death. It opens by reporting that Plotinus seemed ashamed of being in a body and would not sit for a portrait or name his birthday.

The system is the origin of the emanationist scheme that runs through the whole later tradition. From the One, which is beyond being and beyond description, proceeds Intellect, which contains the Forms and thinks them; from Intellect proceeds Soul, which orders and animates the sensible world. The procession is not a choice or an act of creation and involves no diminution of the source; it is more like radiance from a light. The soul can reverse the movement, turning inward and upward to union with the One, which Porphyry says Plotinus attained four times.

The structural debt of later systems to this is enormous and often unacknowledged: the sefirotic emanations of Kabbalah, the Neoplatonism running through Christian mysticism from Dionysius the Areopagite onward, and the graded cosmologies of Renaissance and modern occultism all descend from it. Plotinus himself would have disowned much of what claims him. He wrote a treatise against the Gnostics, and he was dismissive of magic and astrology as attempts to manipulate a sympathy in nature that the wise man should be rising above.