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The enneads / Plotinus ; translated by Stephen Mackenna ; abridged with an introduction and notes by John Dillon.

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London, England ; New York, N.Y., USA : Penguin, 1991.

014044520X (paperback) :

9780140445206 (paperback)

cxxix, 558 pages ; 20 cm

The first ennead -- The animate and the man -- The virtues -- Dialectic -- Happiness -- Beauty -- The nature and source of evil -- 'The reasoned dismissal' -- The second ennead -- Are the stars caused? -- Matter -- Against the Gnostics; or against those that affirm the Creator of the cosmos and the cosmos itself to be evil -- The third ennead -- Providence: first treatise -- Providence: second treatise -- Our tutelary spirit -- Love -- The impassivity of the unembodied -- Time and eternity -- Nature, contemplation, and the one -- The fourth ennead -- Problems of the soul (!) -- Problems of the soul (II) -- The soul's descent into body -- The fifth ennead -- The three initial hypostases -- The origin and order of the beings following on the first -- The knowing hypostases and the transcendent -- How the secondaries rise from the first; and on the one -- That the intellectual beings are not outside the intellectual-principle: and on the nature of the good -- Is there an ideal archetype of particular beings? -- On the intellectual beauty -- The intellectual principle, the ideas, and the authentic existence -- The sixth ennead -- On the integral omnipresence of the authentic existent (I) -- On the integral omnipresence of the authentic existent (II) -- How the multiplicity of the ideal-forms came into being; and on the good -- On free will and the will of the one -- On the good, or the one.

The Enneads bring together Platonism, mystic passion and ideas from Greek philosophy, together with striking variants of the Trinity and other central Christian doctrines, to produce a highly original synthesis. Yet despite the profundity of his thought, and his immense influence on mystics and religious writers, Plotinus (AD 204-70) remained largely inaccessible. What was desperately needed, suggest John Dillon in his Biographical Sketch, was 'an interpretative translation, which would boldly tease out all the nuances of Plotinus' crabbed and condensed language, and reproduce it in English of proper nobility'. Such is precisely the achievement of Stephen MacKenna; his book ranks with the greatest translations of the twentieth century.

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