Four Times, by Porphyry's Count

Nearly everything personal that is known about Plotinus comes from the biography Porphyry set at the front of his edition, and its most quoted sentence is an accounting: in the six years Porphyry spent with him, Plotinus attained union with the One four times. The remark matters because it fixes what the Enneads are for. The treatises are not speculation about a distant first principle; they are directions for a return their author claimed to have made. The method is stripped of almost everything a reader of later theurgy would expect. There are no rites, no names of power, no intermediary spirits to be petitioned. The instrument is attention: withdraw from the senses, turn the soul toward Intellect, and wait, since the final step is not achieved but received.

Porphyry also records the practical shape of the life: Plotinus taught in Rome, wrote fast and untidily because his eyesight was poor, refused to sit for a portrait on the grounds that a body is already an image and a portrait would be an image of an image, and kept a house full of orphans whose estates he managed honestly. The edition itself is Porphyry's second great act. Plotinus left treatises without titles or order; Porphyry grouped them into six sets of nine, the Enneads, arranged by theme rather than by date, and the mystical architecture readers have found in that arrangement ever since is the editor's as much as the author's.