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The Six Enneads

Plotinus · tr. Stephen MacKenna and B. S. Page · 1917–1930 · 309,475 words

The fountainhead of Western mysticism: the One, Intellect and Soul, the nature of beauty, and the soul’s return to its source, “the passing of solitary to solitary.”

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Opening

Porphyry: On the Life of Plotinus and the Arrangement of His Work

1. Plotinus, the philosopher our contemporary, seemed ashamed of being in the body.

So deeply rooted was this feeling that he could never be induced to tell of his ancestry, his parentage, or his birthplace.

He showed, too, an unconquerable reluctance to sit to a painter of a sculptor, and when Amelius persisted in urging him to allow of a portrait being made he asked him, 'Is it not enough to carry about this image in which nature has enclosed us? Do you really think I must also consent to leave, as a desired spectacle to posterity, an image of the image?'

In view of this determined refusal Amelius brought his friend Carterius, the best artist of the day, to the Conferences, which were open to every comer, and saw to it that by long observation of the philosopher he caught his most striking personal traits. From the impressions thus stored in mind the artist drew a first sketch; Amelius made various suggestions towards bringing our the resemblance, and in this way, without the knowledge of Plotinus, the genius of Carterius gave us a lifelike portrait.

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Contents

  1. Porphyry: On the Life of Plotinus and the Arrangement of His Work
  2. Ennead I · Tractate 1: The Animate and the Man
  3. Ennead I · Tractate 2: On Virtue
  4. Ennead I · Tractate 3: On Dialectic
  5. Ennead I · Tractate 4: On True Happiness
  6. Ennead I · Tractate 5: Happiness and Extension of Time
  7. Ennead I · Tractate 6: Beauty
  8. Ennead I · Tractate 7: On the Primal Good and Secondary Forms of Good
  9. Ennead I · Tractate 8: On the Nature and Source of Evil
  10. Ennead I · Tractate 9: The Reasoned Dismissal
  11. Ennead II · Tractate 1: On the Kosmos or on the Heavenly System
  12. Ennead II · Tractate 2: The Heavenly Circuit
  13. Ennead II · Tractate 3: Are the Stars Causes?
  14. Ennead II · Tractate 4: Matter in its Two Kinds
  15. Ennead II · Tractate 5: On Potentiality and Actuality
  16. Ennead II · Tractate 6: Quality and Form-Idea
  17. Ennead II · Tractate 7: On Complete Transfusion
  18. Ennead II · Tractate 8: Why Distant Objects Appear Small
  19. Ennead II · Tractate 9: Against Those that Affirm the Creator of the Kosmos and the Kosmos Itself to be Evil
  20. Ennead III · Tractate 1: Fate
  21. Ennead III · Tractate 2: On Providence (1)
  22. Ennead III · Tractate 3: On Providence (2)
  23. Ennead III · Tractate 4: Our Tutelary Spirit
  24. Ennead III · Tractate 5: On Love
  25. Ennead III · Tractate 6: The Impassivity of the Unembodied
  26. Ennead III · Tractate 7: Time and Eternity
  27. Ennead III · Tractate 8: Nature Contemplation and the One
  28. Ennead III · Tractate 9: Detached Considerations
  29. Ennead IV · Tractate 1: On the Essence of the Soul (1)
  30. Ennead IV · Tractate 2: On the Essence of the Soul (2)
  31. Ennead IV · Tractate 3: Problems of the Soul (1)
  32. Ennead IV · Tractate 4: Problems of the Soul (2)
  33. Ennead IV · Tractate 5: Problems of the Soul (3)
  34. Ennead IV · Tractate 6: Perception and Memory
  35. Ennead IV · Tractate 7: The Immortality of the Soul
  36. Ennead IV · Tractate 8: The Soul's Descent into Body
  37. Ennead IV · Tractate 9: Are All Souls One?
  38. Ennead V · Tractate 1: The Three Initial Hypostases
  39. Ennead V · Tractate 2: The Origin and Order of the Beings. Following on the First
  40. Ennead V · Tractate 3: The Knowing Hypostases and the Transcendent
  41. Ennead V · Tractate 4: How the Secondaries Rise from the First: And on the One
  42. Ennead V · Tractate 5: That the Intellectual Beings are not Outside the Intellectual-Principle: And on the Nature of the Good
  43. Ennead V · Tractate 6: That the Principle Transcending Being Has No Intellectual Act. What Being Has Intellection Primally and what Being Has it Secondarily
  44. Ennead V · Tractate 7: Is There an Ideal Archetype of Particular Beings?
  45. Ennead V · Tractate 8: On the Intellectual Beauty
  46. Ennead V · Tractate 9: The Intellectual-Principle, the Ideas, and the Authentic Existence
  47. Ennead VI · Tractate 1: On the Kinds of Being (1)
  48. Ennead VI · Tractate 2: On the Kinds of Being (2)
  49. Ennead VI · Tractate 3: On the Kinds of Being (3)
  50. Ennead VI · Tractate 4: On the Integral Omnipresence of the Authentic Existent (1)
  51. Ennead VI · Tractate 5: On the Integral Omnipresence of the Authentic Existent (2)
  52. Ennead VI · Tractate 6: On Numbers
  53. Ennead VI · Tractate 7: How the Multiplicity of the Ideal-Forms Came into Being: And Upon the Good
  54. Ennead VI · Tractate 8: On Free-Will and the Will of the One
  55. Ennead VI · Tractate 9: On the Good, or the One

About this edition

Source: Internet Sacred Text Archive

Public domain: Public domain in the US (the five volumes appeared 1917–1930). MacKenna died 1934; B. S. Page, who shared the last volume, died much later, so that part may still be in copyright outside the US.

What’s included: Porphyry’s Life of Plotinus and all six Enneads (fifty-four tractates), one section per tractate, with MacKenna’s numbered chapters kept in the text.

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