The Enneads

The Enneads are the collected treatises of plotinus — fifty-four treatises composed in Rome between roughly 253 and 270 CE, edited after his death by his student porphyry into six groups of nine (enneas meaning nine in Greek), prefaced with Porphyry’s Life of Plotinus. The MacKenna and Page translation (1930) remains the standard English text in the Seba library. They are the governing document of Neoplatonism and, in the Lineage, the most elaborated ancient account of the soul as a metaphysical reality.

The work traces a threefold descent and return. Edinger summarizes the architecture: “an ordered structure of living reality, which proceeds eternally from its transcendent First Principle, the One or Good, and descends in an unbroken succession of stages from the Divine Intellect and the Forms therein through Soul with its various levels of experience and activity to the last and lowest realities, the forms of bodies” (Edinger 1999). From the-one — the Good, the first principle beyond being — emanates nous, the divine Intellect or kosmos noetos. From Intellect emanates psyche-plotinian, Soul, which Plotinus conceives in two aspects: an upper Soul oriented to Intellect and a lower Soul that penetrates nature and matter. The hypostases are connected by the dynamic of emanation — procession and reversion. Matter itself, the kosmos aisthetos, receives peripheral treatment.

The Enneads are not a system so much as a series of contemplative exercises. Pierre Hadot recovered them as philosophy in the ancient sense — a way of life rather than a set of propositions — and passages like “Many times it has happened, Lifted out of the body into myself… beholding a marvellous beauty” (IV.8.1.1–11) are first-person accounts of henosis, the unitive ascent, rather than abstract metaphysics (Sharpe and Ure 2021).

Jung cites the Enneads — specifically the Ninth Tractate of the Fourth Ennead — as an ancient witness to the collective-unconscious and to synchronicity; Edinger names the same passage as anticipating the unus-mundus. For the Lineage, the Enneads are the philosophical hinge between Plato and the Hermetic-alchemical middle, the document in which the Platonic soul becomes recognizably the Jungian psyche.

Concepts introduced or developed

• the-one
• nous
• psyche-plotinian
• epistrophe
• contemplation-theoria
• emanation
• henosis
• intelligible-beauty
• interior-turn
• plotinian-matter

Cited by

• carl-jung
• edward-edinger
• james-hillman
• henry-corbin
• pierre-hadot