Plotinus

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.

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.