The Enneads: Abridged Edition

1300 Pages·1991·3.8 MB·English

by  Plotinus

THE ENNEADS
PLOTINUS (AD 204–70) was the main expositor of Neoplatonism, the last
great movement of Classical Greek philosophy. As well as reviving
Platonism, Plotinus’ work blended Plato, Aristotle and earlier Greek
philosophy into a new religious formulation, and his massive work of
synthesis, The Enneads, is one of the classics of western mysticism.
STEPHEN MACKENNA was born in Liverpool in 1872 and worked in Dublin as
a bank clerk before becoming a journalist in London. He then moved to
Paris, where he became friendly with the playwright, J. M. Synge, and
other political and literary Irish exiles. A visit to Greece to fight the
Turks began his lifelong love of Greek literature and philosophy. He
became European correspondent of the New York World and, while
covering the 1905 Revolution in St Petersburg, he discovered The
Enneads of Plotinus, which he resolved to translate. After giving up his
job in disgust at popular journalism and retiring first to Dublin and then,
after 1921, to England (where he lived until his death in 1935), he
devoted himself to the translation helped by the generosity of an English
businessman, Sir Ernest Debenham.
JOHN DILLON was born in 1939 and educated at Downside School and
Oriel College, Oxford. From 1966 to 1980 he taught Classics at the
University of California, Berkeley, returning from there to become
Regius Professor of Greek at Trinity College, Dublin. His publications
include The Middle Platonists (1977), A Classical Lexicon to Finnegans
Wake (with Brendan O’Hehir, 1977), Two Treatises of Philo of Alexandria
(with David Winston, 1983), a translation of Proclus’ Commentary on the
Parmenides (1987), Alcinous’ The Handbook of Platonism (1993) and two
volumes of collected essays, The Golden Chain (1991), and The Great
Tradition (1997).
PLOTINUS
THE
ENNEADS
TRANSLATED BY
STEPHEN MacKENNA
ABRIDGED WITH AN INTRODUCTION AND NOTES BY
JOHN DILLON
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA
Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia
Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2
Penguin Books India (P) Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017,
India
Penguin Books (NZ) Ltd, Cnr Rosedale and Airborne Roads, Albany, Auckland, New Zealand
Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank 2196, South Africa
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
www.penguin.com
First published by the Medici Society 1917–1930
Revised edition published by Faber & Faber 1956
This abridged edition published in Penguin Books 1991
20
This abridgement, introduction and notes copyright © John Dillon, 1991
All rights reserved The moral right of the author has been asserted
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject
to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,
re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s
prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in
which it is published and without a similar condition including this
condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser EISBN: 9781101491775

CONTENTS
Stephen MacKenna: A Biographical Sketch
Extracts from the Explanatory Matter in the First Edition
The Place of Plotinus in the History of Thought by Paul Henry, S.J.
Plotinus: An Introduction
Porphyry: On the Life of Plotinus and the Arrangement of His Work
Preface
THE FIRST ENNEAD
FIRST The Animate and the Man
SECOND The Virtues
THIRD Dialectic
FOURTH Happiness
SIXTH Beauty
EIGHTH The Nature and Source of Evil
NINTH ‘The Reasoned Dismissal’
THE SECOND ENNEAD
THIRD Are the Stars Causes?
FOURTH Matter
NINTH Against the Gnostics; or Against Those that Affirm the
Creator of the Cosmos and the Cosmos Itself to be Evil
THE THIRD ENNEAD
SECOND Providence: First Treatise
THIRD Providence: Second Treatise
FOURTH Our Tutelary Spirit
FIFTH Love
SIXTH The Impassivity of the Unembodied
SEVENTH Time and Eternity
EIGHTH Nature, Contemplation, and the One
THE FOURTH ENNEAD
THIRD Problems of the Soul (I)
FOURTH Problems of the Soul (II)
EIGHTH The Soul’s Descent into Body
THE FIFTH ENNEAD
FIRST The Three Initial Hypostases
SECOND The Origin and Order of the Beings following on the First
THIRD The Knowing Hypostases and the Transcendent
FOURTH How the Secondaries rise from The First; and on The One
FIFTH That the Intellectual Beings are not outside the
Intellectual-Principle: and on The Nature of the Good
SEVENTH Is there an Ideal Archetype of Particular Beings?
EIGHTH On the Intellectual Beauty
NINTH The Intellectual Principle, the Ideas, and the Authentic
Existence
THE SIXTH ENNEAD
FOURTH On the Integral Omnipresence of the Authentic Existent
(I)
FIFTH On the Integral Omnipresence of the Authentic Existent
(II)
SEVENTH How the Multiplicity of the Ideal-Forms came into Being;
and on The Good
EIGHTH On Free Will and the Will of The One
NINTH On the Good, or the One
Appendix I: The Chronological Order of the Tractates
Appendix II: Index of Platonic References
Select Bibliography
STEPHEN MACKENNA: A BIOGRAPHICAL
1
SKETCH
Stephen MacKenna was born on 15 January 1872, son of a flamboyant
and improvident Irish officer in the Indian Army who actually deserted
his regiment in India in the 1860s to go and fight with Garibaldi in Italy.
After many exciting adventures there, Captain Stephen Joseph
MacKenna returned to England in 1869, married a girl of mixed Irish
and English blood, Elizabeth Deane, and settled down, without any
resources to speak of, to start a family.
His adventures in India and Italy had yielded him nothing but
romantic memories, and he tried to make a living from turning these
into romantic fiction for the young. His efforts were not blessed by much
success, and some of Stephen’s earliest memories were of rejection slips
coming in the post. To make matters worse, in 1883, having by now
fathered ten children, Captain MacKenna died of malaria, leaving his
family almost entirely unprovided for. Two of the boys, Stephen and
Robert, were taken in by two maiden aunts. Stephen was sent to a small
boarding school in Leicestershire, Ratcliffe College. He was a rather
strange, quiet, child, physically awkward, but precociously interested in
both literature and politics, and specifically in the politics of Irish
nationalism. He excelled at Classics and English, but was hopeless at
mathematics – later, in his Journal for February 1908, he described
algebra in particular as ‘not only loathsome, but even in principle
unintelligible’.
It was decided, therefore, that he should take a Classical degree at
London University. However, he unexpectedly failed the examination in