readings, one book at its own scale — the founder of
the line, an ascent that is the soul turning inward and nothing else,
and the one frame in this series with nothing outside the thinker to
check it byTwenty-third of the readings, and the first read in
the direction the tradition actually grew. The Chaldean Oracles supply the root
text and the rite. The Orphic Hymns
perform a cosmology and assert nothing. Iamblichus, On the Mysteries
takes the efficacy out of the thinker and puts it in the act. Proclus, On the Theology of Plato
argues the whole ranked hierarchy, and the Elements of Theology
proves it. Plotinus is upstream of every one of them —
the man the tradition answers, cited again and again by the books this
series has already read, and never read whole. What the reading finds is
not a doctrine the blog had missed. It is the founder’s own account of
the route, and the route is inward: the soul turns to its own interior,
finds there what it has always had, and rises by the one faculty it
already owns. That is recognisably this blog’s subject — sustained
inward attention — appearing as the stated method of the man the whole
line descends from. The two readings that follow him are the reaction to
it, and they move in opposite directions away from his answer:
Iamblichus denies outright that thought unites, and Proclus writes the
system down as a proof. Plotinus puts the method inside the
person by introspection. Iamblichus takes it out and puts it in the
rite. Proclus takes it out and puts it in the
argument.
Status. This post reads one book at its own scale and two editions of the tradition it belongs to. The book named is Thomas Taylor’s Collected Writings of Plotinus (The Prometheus Trust, Thomas Taylor Series) — a modern in-print reissue which, on its publisher’s description, gathers all of Taylor’s translations of Plotinus, twenty-seven treatises first issued across five separate volumes, into one. The text read and quoted for Plotinus is the public-domain volume Taylor’s translations of these treatises appeared in: Select Works of Plotinus, translated from the Greek by Thomas Taylor, London 1817, reissued in 1895 with a preface and bibliography by G. R. S. Mead and fifteen treatises in it; quotations from it are marked Taylor. Taylor’s earlier Five Books of Plotinus (London, 1794) is the same translator’s smaller selection, and is not quoted here. The scholarly edition used for comparison, and for everything Taylor’s selection does not contain, is A. H. Armstrong, Plotinus, Loeb Classical Library 440 (Harvard, 1966), Volume I, which holds Porphyry’s On the Life of Plotinus and the Order of His Books and Ennead I, Greek and English facing; quotations from it are marked Armstrong, and quotations of Porphyry’s biography are marked as Porphyry’s words in Armstrong’s translation. Every treatise is cited by Porphyry’s Ennead, treatise and chapter — I.2, V.1, VI.9 — and the post says explicitly where a volume prints a different address, because this is the one book in the series where the numbering itself is a finding. Every quotation is checked character for character against a copy of the edition named. Straight ASCII quotation marks are used throughout; the printers’ curly apostrophes, dashes and ellipses in both editions are normalised, and line-break hyphenation is undone, so a quotation crossing a line reads as one word. Where either printing is damaged, the quotation stops at the damage rather than being mended, and elisions are marked with a bare ellipsis. Nothing is spliced. The reading of this material through the blog’s frame is an inference, offered as one. Nothing here claims the One exists and nothing here claims it does not; nothing here claims Intellect, Soul, the emanation, the ascent, or Porphyry’s account of what Plotinus attained are real, and nothing here claims they are not. Plotinus’ claims are reported as his, Porphyry’s as his, Taylor’s and Armstrong’s and Mead’s as theirs. No living or dead person is diagnosed, and nothing here validates or invalidates anyone’s practice. As everywhere: describe structures, diagnose no one.*
The book this reading names is a collection, and the first thing to describe is what a collection of Plotinus is made of. Taylor’s Collected Writings is a modern reissue of one nineteenth-century translator’s Plotinus: on the publisher’s own description, all of Taylor’s translations of Plotinus, twenty-seven treatises, first published across five separate books, brought together in one volume. Taylor’s largest single volume of Plotinus is the one this reading works from — the Select Works, London 1817, reissued in 1895 with a preface and a bibliography by G. R. S. Mead. Its title page describes the volume as translated from the Greek, and describes the introduction it carries as containing the substance of Porphyry’s Life of Plotinus — a phrase worth holding, because it is exact about what a reader of that volume is given.1 Fifteen treatises out of Plotinus’ fifty-four, selected and ordered by Taylor, are what that volume contains, and the 1895 preface is candid about what it is for: a test of the public appetite before anyone attempts “a complete translation of the works of the greatest of the Neoplatonists”.2
So the shape of the book is the first thing to record, because it is not neutral. Plotinus’ fifty-four treatises reach a reader in Taylor’s volume as a selection of fifteen, in an order Taylor chose, under titles Taylor supplied, in a translation made from the Greek of his own day with the lacunae in that Greek filled from Ficino’s Latin. The collection is larger than the selection — the Prometheus volume restores the twenty-seven Taylor translated — and even the twenty-seven are half of the fifty-four, because the other half had no translator in English until decades after Taylor died. That is the book’s composition rather than a complaint about it, and it matters: every other Neoplatonist in this series can be read in a single edition of his own work, and Plotinus cannot. He can be read in selection in Taylor, and completely only in a modern translation.
The second thing to record is the frame the edition imposes, and it is Porphyry’s. Plotinus left no book. He left papers — treatises written to answer questions that came up in a school, over a writing life that began when he was nearly fifty and lasted about sixteen years — and Porphyry, his pupil and editor, tells us in the Life how the papers became the Enneads: “He himself entrusted me with the arrangement and editing of his books”, and “So I, as I had fifty-four treatises of Plotinus, divided them into six sets of nine (Enneads)—it gave me pleasure to find the perfection of the number six along with the nines.”3 Porphyry’s biography is not a life prefixed to a book; its full title, as Armstrong prints it, is On the Life of Plotinus and the Order of His Books, and it is the record of an edition, written by the man who made it. In Taylor’s volume, a reader does not meet Porphyry’s Life at all: the title page says the introduction contains the substance of it, and the introduction is Taylor’s prose, “particulars … selected for the information of the English reader.”4 In Armstrong’s volume, a reader meets Porphyry’s own sentences, chapter by chapter, facing the Greek.
That asymmetry is why this reading uses two editions, and it is sharper here than in any previous one. Taylor gives the treatises — fifteen of them, in his own English, with notes in which he records exactly where he has followed Ficino to mend a defective Greek. Armstrong gives one Ennead in full, the biography entire, an editor’s introduction that describes how the edition was made and what it damaged, and a text established in the twentieth century from the manuscript tradition. The tradition’s founder is readable only in pieces, and the finest piece a reader can hold is the edition of the editor who arranged him.
Plotinus’ system is told, at its simplest, as three ranks and a movement between them, and the treatise that states it is On the Three Hypostases that rank as the Principles of Things — Ennead V.1. It begins not with the One but with a soul that has forgotten where it came from:
“What is the reason … souls become oblivious of divinity, being ignorant both of themselves and him, though their allotment is from thence”
— Taylor’s translation, V.1.1.5 The cure for the forgetting is a discourse, “to convert them to the contraries [to the things they admire], and to first natures, and to elevate them as far as to that which is highest, and one, and the first” — again Taylor, V.1.1.6 So the treatise’s shape is the whole system’s shape: descent, forgetfulness, and a discourse that turns the soul back. Then the ranks are named, from the top down. The highest is not being and not intellect. Taylor’s V.1.7 states the top of the scale in the plainest words the volume contains:
“the first God is nothing of all things. For on this account all things are from him, because he is not detained by a certain form. For he is one alone.”
— Taylor’s translation, V.1.7.7 The treatise that says what the One is not is Ennead V.6, That the Nature which is beyond Being is not Intellective, and its second chapter sets the three ranks in one sentence, which is the cleanest statement of the hierarchy in Taylor’s whole volume:
“There is, therefore, that which is not intellective ; there is also that which is primarily intellective; and there is that which is intellective in a secondary degree.”
— Taylor’s translation, V.6.2.8
The middle rank is Intellect, and Taylor’s word for how it comes to be is the system’s hinge. Intellect is not made by the One the way a craftsman makes a thing; it is what happens when the One’s overflow turns and looks back at its source:
“May we not say, because intellect, by conversion, looks to him? But the vision itself is intellect.”
— Taylor’s translation, V.1.7.9 The generation of the second rank is its conversion; the looking is the substance. And the One which it looks away from is not a richer thing of the same kind but nothing of the same kind at all. In the same chapter Intellect “in the order of beings is all things”, and the One “is none of the things which are in intellect”; the higher is not greater in the same currency, it is outside it.9 The same book reports Plato’s “triple order about the king of all”, in a sentence Taylor prints and then glosses from the Greek in a note: “On this account all things are distributed by Plato in a triple order about the king of all.”10
The lowest rank, Soul, is Intellect’s overflow, and the treatise that describes the sequence is Ennead V.2, On the Generation and Order of Things after the First. Its first sentence is a paradox a reader should keep: “The one is all things, and yet no one of all. For the principle of all is not all things ; but the one is all”.11 Then the overflow itself, in the sentence the tradition kept:
“For the one being perfect, in consequence of not seeking after, or possessing, or being in want of any thing, it becomes as it were overflowing, and the superplenitude of it produces something else.”
— Taylor’s translation, V.2.1.11 What is produced “is converted to it, and is filled, and was generated looking to it. But this is intellect.”11 And then, in the same paragraph, the third rank and the difference between the two kinds of generation: “And the permanency indeed of it about the one, produced being ; but its vision of the one, intellect. When, therefore, it is established about the one, in order that it may see it, then it becomes at once intellect and being.”11 Intellect abides and looks, and the looking makes being. Soul is what Intellect produces when it does not abide: it is Intellect’s own discourse, “a life which it emits in order to the hypostasis of another thing”, as V.1.3 of Taylor has it.12
Three ranks, and the movement is the same at each: overflow out, conversion back. That is the whole cosmology, and it has two features the later books in this series kept. The first is that nothing is cut off — Taylor’s V.2.1: “Nothing, however, is separated or cut off from that which is prior to itself.”11 Descent is not a fall out of a system; it is the system’s extension. The second is that the top of the ladder is named by removal. The One is not being, not intellect, not many, not anything that could be described in the vocabulary of the things that come from it. Everyone who came after Plotinus inherits this: the negations of the Theology of Plato, the unnamed endpoint of the cosmos that refuses, are downstream of V.6.
Here is the finding of this reading, and it is a sentence about attention. The three hypostases are not just a description of the universe’s descent. They are the map of a route back, and the route’s first move is not a ritual, a petition, or an argument: it is the soul turning its faculty around, away from what it perceives and towards what it is. Taylor’s V.1.12 states the whole method in one clause:
“It is necessary, therefore, in order that there may be an apprehension of things which are thus present, that the animadversive power should be converted to the interior of the soul, and there fix its attention.”
— Taylor’s translation, V.1.12.13 The chapter it belongs to opens with the question a reader would ask: “How, therefore, does it happen, since we possess things of such great dignity, that we do not apprehend them, but for the most part are sluggish with respect to such like energies”.13 The answer is that the higher ranks are always in their own activity and we are not, because “exist in conjunction with the sensitive power, and are not a part of the soul, but the whole soul”, and so “we have not yet any knowledge of the energy, because we … are not a part of the soul, but the whole soul.” The remedy is to convert the perceptive power inward. Earlier in the same treatise the metaphor is geometric and the contact is stated plainly: “we also touch, associate with, and are suspended from deity. But we are established in it more or less according as we converge to it in a greater or less degree.”14 The contact is not created by an act; it is always there, and what varies is the convergence.
The last treatise in Taylor’s volume, On the Good, or the One — Ennead VI.9 — spends its seventh chapter on the same move with the machinery stripped out, and this is the passage to read slowly:
“it is requisite that the soul, dismissing all externals, should be entirely converted to its inmost recesses”
— Taylor’s translation, VI.9.7.15 The sentence before it explains why, by an analogy with matter: “as it is said of matter, that it ought to be void of all qualities, in order that it may receive the impressions of all things”; on the same reasoning “it is necessary that the soul should become formless”.16 The soul’s preparation is subtraction. It empties itself of everything external and of every form it carries, until it is without the perception of forms at all, and ignorant of itself, in order to dwell on the contemplation of what it seeks. Then the chapter’s geometry. Taylor’s VI.9.8 has the principle of all things “always present; but we are present with it when we have no difference”, and describes the soul’s motion as circular about a centre; the obstacle is not distance but difference:
“Hence, one is not distant from the other by place, but by otherness and difference. When, therefore, difference is not present, then the natures which are not different are present with each other.”
— Taylor’s translation, VI.9.8.17
What that produces is described in the next two chapters, and the descriptions are the ones the tradition kept. In the intelligible the soul “beholds the fountain of life, the fountain of intellect, the principle of being, the cause of good, and the root of soul” (Taylor, VI.9.9); the procession is not a loss, because the source “abides with invariable sameness ; not being distributed into them, but remaining whole and entire”; and the end is a return to a state that is also an origin — “And this is both the beginning and end to the soul. It is the beginning indeed, because she originates from thence ; but it is the end, because the good is there, and because when the soul is situated there, she becomes what she was before.”18 Then the union itself, in Taylor’s rendering of VI.9.10, in the sentence that is the series’ best evidence for what kind of route this is:
“she is one, conjoining as it were centre with centre”
— Taylor’s translation, VI.9.10.19 And the faculty that is being used at the moment of arrival is no longer the faculty of argument, which is the third thread of this post arriving early. In the same chapter Taylor writes that the vision “is not then at rest according to a scientific energy, which consists in demonstrations”, and then: “For here vision, and that which sees, are no longer reason, but greater than and prior to reason.”20 The ascent is accomplished by the soul’s own power, prepared by self-emptying, and at the top the instrument is not reasoning at all.
Armstrong’s volume supplies the same route from a different angle, in the treatise Taylor’s selection does not contain: On Beauty, Ennead I.6. Its ninth chapter is the most compact statement of the method in the whole of Plotinus in English, and it is a command to look at oneself:
“Go back into yourself and look”
— Armstrong’s translation, I.6.9.21 What follows is a comparison with sculpture, and it is worth having in full because it names the work as work: “and if you do not yet see yourself beautiful, then, just as someone making a statue which has to be beautiful cuts away here and polishes there and makes one part smooth and clears another till he has given his statue a beautiful face, so you too must cut away excess and straighten the crooked and clear the dark and make it bright”.21 The route inward is not idleness. It is a craft with a technique, a standard, and a product — and the product is the soul itself, made fit to be seen.
Two preconditions come with it, and both belong to the route rather than to an institution. The first is virtue, and Taylor’s first treatise, On the Virtues (Ennead I.2), opens on the flight from evil: “Since evils are here, and revolve from necessity about this [terrestrial] place, but the soul wishes to fly from evils, it is requisite to fly from hence.” What the flight is, Taylor renders with Plato’s answer: “To become similar, says Plato, to God.”22 The treatise then does the system’s characteristic thing with the virtues: it grades them, and the grading runs by how far each separates the soul. Taylor’s I.2.7 has “all the virtues are purifications”, and at the top of the scale the standard stops being human — the man who has the greater virtues “will not measure it by political temperance, but in short he will separate himself as much as possible [from the body]”; and the treatise’s close on the point is exact: “but a similitude to God, is an assimilation as to a paradigm.”23 The second precondition is dialectic, Ennead I.3, which Taylor’s volume also carries: the art that leads the soul up, and that his note on the treatise describes as imitating intellect, receiving its principles from it, and ascending by ordered steps to real being.24
So the route has a technique, a discipline, a preparatory art, and a criterion — and every one of them is a faculty of the person ascending. There is no operator in it, no symbol, no object, no place, and no act performed on anything outside the thinker. That is the structural fact this reading has to state, and it is the reason the next two books in the series are arguments with this one. Iamblichus will say, in the work this series read two posts ago, that it is not pure thought that unites theurgists to the gods. He is not adding to Plotinus’ route. He is denying it.
Armstrong’s editorial summary of the whole business, in his own words, is the plainest statement of it available:
“The process of return is one of turning away from the external world, of concentrating one’s powers inwardly instead of dissipating them outwardly, of rediscovering one’s true self by the most vigorous intellectual and moral discipline, and then waiting so prepared for the One to manifest His presence.”
— Armstrong, Preface, section II.25 Two things in that sentence are not decoration. The return is inward, and it ends in waiting: the last move is not made by the practitioner at all. And in the same section Armstrong states the negative half directly: “nor does he consider that external religious rites are any help to the ascent of the soul.”26 That is a twentieth-century editor’s summary, not Plotinus’ words, and it is the summary of a reader who had all fifty-four treatises in front of him. He also supplies the guard against the cheap reading of Plotinus, which later traditions were happy to take: “there is for him no short cut, no mysticism which does not demand moral and intellectual perfection.”26
A system that says the lower ranks proceed necessarily from the higher has to say what the lowest rank is, and Plotinus does, and the answer is uncomfortable. Matter is not neutral stuff. Taylor’s On Matter — Ennead II.4, Porphyry’s On the two Kinds of Matter — ends with the claim, in Taylor’s rendering:
“But that which possesses nothing, as being in poverty, or rather being poverty itself, is necessarily evil.”
— Taylor’s translation, II.4.16.27 The reasoning above it is the negation route applied downward: matter is the infinite, and “matter must be said to be of itself infinite, through having an arrangement opposite to reason”; and, in the last chapter, matter is “the same with privation” — not a thing that happens to lack good, but the lack itself, in the place where a thing would be.28
Armstrong’s Ennead I.8, On What Are Evils, puts the doctrine in a modern translation with the terms exposed. Armstrong’s own introductory note summarises the treatise’s thesis in one line — that “evil is not an imperfection or weakness of the soul but has an independent quasi-existence and is identical with matter” — and the treatise’s third chapter arrives at the same place Taylor’s II.4 does: “this is what our argument discovers to be the primal evil, absolute evil.”29 Then the grading, which is the part a reader should carry away, because it is what keeps Plotinus from being a despiser of the world: “The nature of bodies, in so far as it participates in matter, will be an evil, not the primal evil. For bodies have a sort of form which is not true form”.30 Absolute evil is formlessness; a body is evil only by the formlessness mixed into it, and is good by the form it has. And when Plotinus asks in the same treatise how evil can be necessary if the Good exists, his answer is a cosmology and not a complaint: “This All must certainly be composed of contrary principles; it would not exist at all if matter did not exist.”31
That distinction is why the treatise against the Gnostics exists, and it is in Taylor’s volume as Against the Gnostics — Ennead II.9. Armstrong’s table of the same Ennead gives the treatise’s other title in the tradition, and the difference between them is the whole of Plotinus’ position in one line: where Taylor’s volume heads it Against the Gnostics, Armstrong’s list calls the same treatise “Against those who say that the Universe and its Maker are Evil.”32 The book is a defence of the world, written by the man who had just called matter absolute evil, and the two positions are consistent because the defence is not of matter. It is of the form that matter bears, and of the rank that gives it. A reader who takes from Plotinus only “matter is evil” has taken the half of the doctrine that the treatise in the same volume is written to bound. Both halves are in the Enneads, and in Taylor’s volume the two treatises stand next to each other: On Matter is his third, Against the Gnostics his fourth.
The edition is Porphyry’s, and the biography is the edition’s own account of itself. Its opening is not a metaphysics but a portrait, and the portrait is a state of mind about the body: “the philosopher of our times, seemed ashamed of being in the body.”33 Its eighth chapter is the record of how the treatises were made, and it explains what kind of text the Enneads are:
“When Plotinus had written anything he could never bear to go over it twice; even to read it through once was too much for him”
— Porphyry, Life, chapter 8, Armstrong’s translation.34 In the same chapter: “he wrote as continuously as if he was copying from a book.”35 This is not a stylistic aside. It is the reason the modern editor of the text is conservative, and it tells a reader what the treatises are: unrevised answers, written straight through, without a second pass. Plotinus did not edit. Porphyry did.
The biography is also where the attainment claim is filed, and it must be handled as what it is. Porphyry reports, in his own voice, in the middle of his account of the Delphic oracle’s pronouncement about Plotinus, that the man reached the goal and how often:
“Four times … he attained that goal, in an unspeakable actuality and not in potency only.”
— Porphyry, Life, chapter 23, Armstrong’s translation.36 In the same paragraph Porphyry records an approach of his own as well — “declare that once I drew near”, he writes, in his own sixty-eighth year, and was united.37 Two things should be said about that, and no more. First, it is a report of a claim: the claim is Plotinus’, the report is his biographer’s, and this post takes it neither as evidence that anything was attained nor as evidence that nothing was. Second, it is the only kind of record this route can leave. A method whose instrument is the practitioner’s own faculty produces, at the top, a first-person report with a witness — and the witness here is the man who edited the books. That the two roles are one person is not an insinuation. It is the structure, and §7 returns to it.
The biography also contains a piece of hard evidence against the clean reading of Plotinus as a pure introvert, and it belongs in the body. In chapter 10 Porphyry tells how an Egyptian priest, wanting to display his occult wisdom, asked Plotinus to come and see a visible manifestation of his own companion spirit evoked. Plotinus readily consented, and “the evocation took place in the temple of Isis”, the priest saying afterwards that “it was the only pure spot he could find in Rome.”38 A god answered, not a spirit of the lower order, the ceremony broke off, and Plotinus went on keeping “the divine eye of his soul fixed” on that companion. In the same chapter, when Amelius took to visiting the temples at the new moon and asked Plotinus to come along, Plotinus refused him in a sentence Porphyry records without explaining: “They ought to come to me, not I to them.”39 Whatever else that sentence is, it is a man declining the temples. The rite is in the biography and absent from the writings, and the man in the biography is not a stranger to it. He attended one, and afterwards declined the temples. A reader who wants the clean version of no rite at all has to want it past Porphyry’s own record.
The blog has been running one instrument through this series, and it has been spelling the instrument out with each book. From the owned cosmos it asks whether the frame names an endpoint and stations a person at it. From the Elements it added whether the frame offers its first principle as a postulate or as a fact. From On the Mysteries it added the question that instrument most needed: what is the frame’s uncheckable part made of — a person, a claim, or a practice — and does the frame say which?
This reading corrects that question, and the correction is not that Plotinus supplies a fourth kind of uncheckable part. It is that the instrument’s three answers were all locations, and Plotinus’ frame has no location for its uncheckable part to occupy. There is no seat: no mediator, no office, no one who acts on the practitioner’s behalf. There is no practice: no symbol, no object, no act correctly performed. There is no stated axiom to inspect: the treatise that says what the One is not does not offer it as a proposition to be checked but as a thing to be approached by becoming like it. The uncheckable part is the practitioner’s own act of attention, and it is uncheckable because it is not a thing — it is the reader’s condition, and it leaves no trace anyone else can examine.
That is the honest correction, and it is a correction rather than a confirmation because the blog’s own subject is what Plotinus’ answer consists of. Sustained inward attention, on this showing, is not the blog’s instrument brought to an ancient text. It is the stated method of the tradition’s founder, and the blog has been reading his descendants first, which is the order in which the method looks like a late refinement of a rule rather than the rule itself. Stating that is not a claim that the blog reached the method independently, and it is not a claim that the blog invented its instrument. It is the opposite claim: the instrument the blog has been applying all along is the founder’s own method, and it is applied here to the book that states it.
The consequence for the blog’s test is a fourth question, and this book is the case that makes it askable: does the route terminate in the practitioner’s own state, and is there anything at all that someone other than the practitioner could inspect? The Elements answers with a network of propositions anyone can read; On the Mysteries answers with an act performed on symbols, with the gods’ knowledge as its operative content; the Chaldean Oracles answer with a cosmos and a rite. Plotinus answers with a sentence about turning attention inward, and no part of the answer is outside the man doing the turning. The blog should hold the finding without softening it in either direction. This is not the safest frame in the series. It is the frame with the fewest external checks of the four, and it is the one the others were built against.
Three gaps belong in the body of this reading, because each of them changes what a reader has to hold.
First, the translation is a Romantic reconstruction, and the book names a reissue of it. Taylor published his Select Works of Plotinus in 1817. The 1895 reissue’s own preface states the standard he is judged by — that “the perfected scholarship of our own times demands a higher standard of translation than Taylor presents” — and asks for indulgence in the same breath: “Taylor was a pioneer, and of pioneers we do not demand the building of government roads.”40 Taylor’s text was also made before the nineteenth century’s best Greek: the 1895 bibliography’s entry for Creuzer’s edition of 1835 calls it “the best text yet produced”, and Taylor’s English predates it.41 Where Taylor’s Greek was defective he did what he says in his own notes, and the notes are part of the translation because they show the seams. On Ennead V.1.11, in the volume read here, Taylor writes: “I have followed the version of Ficinus in this place, as the original is obviously defective”.42 There are many such notes, and they say the same thing in the same words: “It appears from the version of Ficinus, that the words … are wanting in this place in the original”; “it appears from the version of Ficinus, that we should read”; and, elsewhere, that a phrase “is omitted in the original ; but both the sense and the version of Ficinus render the insertion of it necessary”.43 A translation whose gaps are filled from a Latin translation made four centuries earlier, by a translator who is not shy about saying so. Taylor’s Plotinus is a readable, often beautiful, and partly reconstructed text; the volume read here is a 1895 reissue of it, and the book that gives it a modern in-print home reissues the same translations again. A modern critical edition adds the Greek, the manuscript tradition, the apparatus, and the decisions about punctuation — and it adds the Life as Porphyry’s own text rather than as “the substance” of it selected for an English reader.
Second, “the Enneads” is a pupil’s edition of a teacher’s papers, and the numbering is where a reader feels it. Porphyry says what he did, and he says why: “it gave me pleasure to find the perfection of the number six along with the nines. I put related treatises together in each Ennead, giving the first place to the less difficult questions.”44 Armstrong’s preface measures what that cost, and a reader of this book should have his sentences: “according to subject-matter is bound to have a great deal that is arbitrary in it because Plotinus does not, as has already been remarked, write systematically”; “Porphyry’s arrangement therefore is by no means altogether satisfactory and should not be taken as a safe guide to the content of the treatises”; and “his reason for adopting the six—nine division was nothing better than the pleasure in the symmetry of sacred number characteristic of his age. To achieve it he had to do some vigorous cutting-up of the treatises as he received them.”45 He names the damage: “he not only cut up one treatise but also put the pieces into different Enneads (III. 8, V. 8, V. 5, and II. 9 were written by Plotinus as a single treatise)”;46 So the Enneads are an arrangement, and any reading in Ennead order is a reading of Porphyry’s order. Plotinus’ own sequence was chronological, and Porphyry gives it in the Life, which means the same treatise carries two numbers and both are Porphyry’s.
That is the trap a reviewer of this post would look for, and the volume plays it inside itself. Taylor’s volume prints an address at the head of each treatise. In the copy read here, the first treatise, On the Virtues, carries the address II. ii., and the ninth, On Intellect, Ideas, and [Real] Being, carries V. xi. — while the introduction’s list of Porphyry’s books gives the same two as I. 2 and V. 9, which is where Porphyry’s arrangement puts them and where every modern edition prints them. A reader who cites “Plotinus, V. xi” from Taylor’s page is citing an address the same volume contradicts sixty pages earlier. And the clock runs the other way too, in the modern edition: Armstrong’s note on Ennead I.1 says the treatise was “placed first by Porphyry in his edition” but “is the last but one (No. 53) in his chronological order”, and his note on I.3 places it at No. 20, with On Virtues at No. 19.47 Four numbers for two treatises, all of them Porphyry’s, two of them ordering by subject and two by time — and no numbering a reader can call the real one. This post therefore cites by the Ennead numbering, and flags it, and that is not fastidiousness: it is the one place in the series where getting the address right is the reading.
Third, the introspection route’s structural cost, which is the honest counterweight to §3 and §6 together. A route whose instrument is the practitioner’s own faculty has three properties that the ritual and axiomatic routes do not have, and they are prices, not advantages. It is unshareable. The ascent’s criterion is a condition of the soul, and a condition of the soul is not a public object; nothing about it can be exhibited to a second person, in the way a performed act can be witnessed or a proposition can be checked. It is unfalsifiable from inside and from outside at once. If the ascent fails, the failure has no external signature to distinguish it from a failure of preparation, of attention, or of honesty, which is why the tradition’s own corrective is a discipline rather than a test: the only way to make the report trustworthy is to make the reporter good. And its record is necessarily first-person and mediated. The one document in the tradition that reports arrival at the top reports Plotinus’ four attainments as a friend’s testimony, and the friend is the editor of the text; a reader who wants the primary witness finds, again, Porphyry. None of that is an argument against the route. It is the description of the route’s check: there is one, and it is the practitioner’s own condition, which is to say the check is the thing being checked. Plotinus says as much himself, in the passage quoted in §3 where the vision is “no longer reason, but greater than and prior to reason”. A criterion that is transcended by the thing it would judge is a criterion of a peculiar kind, and it is the founder’s, not the blog’s.
Two smaller notes on the same gap, both from the modern edition. Armstrong records what the sources say about the union itself, and records it as a limitation on what can be claimed for it: “it would seem that it is not Plotinus’s thought that our individual personalities are finally absorbed and disappear”, with the qualification that in the union “there is no consciousness of difference from the One, in which there is no longer seer and seen, … but only unity.”26 And the modern text itself is a reconstruction, whose editor says so: “The archetype of our present MSS represented the text of Porphyry’s edition with remarkable fidelity” — the claim is about a lost archetype behind the extant copies, established by twentieth-century editors from five manuscript families.48 So even the complete modern Plotinus is an edition of an edition.
One. Plotinus is the founder, and the Enneads are his papers arranged by his pupil. Porphyry says so in the first person — “He himself entrusted me with the arrangement and editing of his books” — and says why: the pleasure of the six and the nines, and related treatises put together, easier questions first. So the Enneads are not the order in which Plotinus wrote. Every treatise carries a number by subject and a different number by time, and a reader who does not know that will eventually cite one from a page whose own address the volume contradicts.
Two. The three hypostases are the system, and the movement between them is overflow and conversion. The One is not being and not intellect; Intellect is the One’s overflow turning to look at its source; Soul is what Intellect produces when it does not abide. Nothing is cut off, and the lowest rank is matter, which Taylor’s II.4.16 calls poverty itself and necessary evil — with the bound stated in the same volume’s defence of the world: absolute evil is formlessness, and a body is evil only by the formlessness mixed into it. The treatise Taylor heads Against the Gnostics is headed in the modern edition “Against those who say that the Universe and its Maker are Evil”, and it is there to stop a reader taking the first half of the matter doctrine without the second.
Three. The route back is the soul turning inward, and this is the finding. Taylor’s V.1.12 states the method: the power of attention “converted to the interior of the soul, and there fix its attention”. Taylor’s VI.9.7 states the preparation: “dismissing all externals, should be entirely converted to its inmost recesses”. Armstrong’s I.6.9 states the command: “Go back into yourself and look”, with the sculptor’s comparison for the work. And the union is “centre with centre”, accomplished when difference is absent — a contact that is always available and varies only with the soul’s convergence. There is no operator, no rite, no symbol, no place, and no act performed on anything outside the thinker. Armstrong’s summary is the plainest in print: the return is turning away from the external world, concentrating the powers inwardly, and then waiting.
Four. The correction. The blog’s instrument has three questions about where a frame’s uncheckable part sits, and all three presume the part is somewhere a reader could point to. Plotinus’ frame has no such location: the uncheckable part is the practitioner’s own act of attention, and it is uncheckable because it is not a thing. That makes this the case with the fewest external checks in the series, and the root the other three grow from — Iamblichus denies that thought unites and puts the efficacy in the act; Proclus puts the same system into propositions a reader can inspect and finds no seat inside them either. Plotinus states the method inside the person; the next two move it out, one into the rite and one into the proof. And the blog owes a second acknowledgement with the correction: inward attention is not the blog’s instrument brought to an ancient book. It is the founder’s stated method, and the blog has been reading its successors first.
Five. The counterweights, in the body, and there are three. Taylor’s translation is a Romantic reconstruction whose gaps are filled from Ficino’s Latin, reissued in 1895 and again in the modern collection, in a book that names Taylor’s translations as the book. Porphyry’s arrangement is editorial in a way he documents and a way the modern editor measures — a subject-matter order laid over a chronological one, with one treatise cut into four pieces across different Enneads, and the numbering left as two systems. And the introspective route’s check is the practitioner’s own condition: unshareable, unverifiable from outside, and recorded only in a friend’s testimony — which is the founder’s own answer, stated by him.
What the blog takes from the twenty-third reading is the beginning of the arc it has been reading backwards. The Chaldean Oracles assert a cosmos and station no one; the Orphic Hymns perform one and state nothing; Iamblichus puts the efficacy in the act and tells you the act’s power is not yours; Proclus argues the hierarchy and then proves it, with the operator left standing outside the proof. All of them are answers to Plotinus, and the question he left them is the shortest one in the series: the route is inward, the instrument is the soul’s own faculty, and there is nothing outside the man climbing that a second person can hold. What Plotinus offers a reader is not a rite, not a proof, and not an institution: a sentence about attention, a discipline for making the attention fit, and a report from his biographer that the top was reached four times.
Marking: a reading, and an inference. Documented — every passage in quotation marks, taken from one of two named editions: Thomas Taylor’s translation of Plotinus, as the 1817 Select Works of Plotinus prints it in its 1895 reissue, cited by Ennead, treatise and chapter and marked as Taylor’s; and A. H. Armstrong’s translation, Loeb Classical Library 440, Volume I, cited the same way and marked as Armstrong’s, with all quotation from Porphyry’s Life attributed to Porphyry in Armstrong’s rendering. Quotations were checked character for character against a copy of the edition named. Attributed to Taylor, not to Plotinus — the translations themselves, his chapter divisions, his treatise titles, his address lines, and his notes on following Ficino. Attributed to Armstrong, not to Plotinus — the whole Preface, including the statements about external rites and the ascent, the account of the return, the six—nine division and its cost, the cutting-up of treatises, the state of the text and its archetype, and the qualifications about the union; and the introductory notes to the Enneads, including the chronological numbers. Attributed to Porphyry, not to Plotinus — the biography, the arrangement, the headings, the punctuation, the report of the four attainments and of his own approach, and the refusal of the temples. Attributed to G. R. S. Mead — the 1895 preface and the bibliography. Attributed to this post — the reading of the ascent as the series’ fewest-checks case (§6), the correction to the instrument’s three questions, the identification of Taylor’s page-numbering as a contradiction inside one volume (§7), and the three counterweights. The gap is real and is not resolved here: a complete English Plotinus is a modern reconstruction of a pupil’s edition of an unrevised manuscript; Taylor’s version of it is a selection of fifteen treatises made before the best nineteenth-century Greek and repaired in places from a fifteenth-century Latin; and the biography that frames both is the editor’s own account of his own editorial method. The cosmology is not endorsed — nothing here claims the One, Intellect, Soul, the emanation, the ascent, or any reported attainment is real, and nothing here claims they are not; the attainment claim is handled as a report — Plotinus’ claim, Porphyry’s testimony, and no diagnosis of either man; no one is diagnosed, and nothing here validates, invalidates or restricts anyone’s practice.
The title page of the Select Works as the 1895 reissue prints it: it describes the volume as translated from the Greek, describes the introduction it carries as containing the substance of Porphyry’s Life of Plotinus, and names Thomas Taylor as translator and G. R. S. Mead as the author of the new edition’s preface and bibliography. The description of the modern collection — all of Taylor’s translations, twenty-seven treatises, first issued across five separate books — is the publisher’s description of the Prometheus Trust volume named above.↩︎
G. R. S. Mead, Preface to the 1895 reissue. The same preface notes that Taylor “devoted upwards of fifty years of unremitting toil to the restoration of Greek philosophy”, and that the 1895 edition exists to test whether a complete English Plotinus is wanted.↩︎
Porphyry, Life of Plotinus, chapter 24, Armstrong’s translation, Volume I. “He himself entrusted me with the arrangement and editing of his books” is from the same chapter.↩︎
Taylor’s Introduction, in the same volume: “Of this very extraordinary man there is a long and interesting life extant by his disciple Porphyry, from which the following particulars are selected for the information of the English reader.” The biographical material in Taylor’s volume is therefore Taylor’s prose, not Porphyry’s sentences; every quotation from the Life in this post is taken from Armstrong’s translation and marked as Porphyry’s words.↩︎
Taylor’s translation, V.1.1. The sentence is quoted only up to the words “their allotment is from thence”, a clause boundary, and continues in the original; the ellipsis inside the quotation marks one word the printing damages and does not supply.↩︎
Taylor’s translation, V.1.1.↩︎
Taylor’s translation, V.1.7. The same chapter has Intellect “in the order of beings is all things”, and the One “is none of the things which are in intellect”.↩︎
Taylor’s translation, V.6.2. Taylor’s volume prints this treatise’s address as “V. vi”; Porphyry’s arrangement has it at V.6.↩︎
Taylor’s translation, V.1.7.↩︎
Taylor’s translation, V.1.8, reporting Plato’s second epistle as Plotinus cites it. Taylor prints the clause inside quotation marks and glosses it from the Greek in a note.↩︎
Taylor’s translation, V.2.1.↩︎
Taylor’s translation, V.1.3. The chapter calls soul “a life which it emits in order to the hypostasis of another thing”, and describes soul and the whole of its energy as the discourse of intellect.↩︎
Taylor’s translation, V.1.12.↩︎
Taylor’s translation, V.1.11. Taylor’s note on the same chapter records that he followed Ficino where the Greek is defective.↩︎
Taylor’s translation, VI.9.7.↩︎
Taylor’s translation, VI.9.7, the sentences immediately preceding the passage quoted above. Each quoted clause is given as the printing has it; the passage between them carries a damaged word and the quotation stops before it.↩︎
Taylor’s translation, VI.9.8.↩︎
Taylor’s translation, VI.9.9. The quotations in this sentence are from that chapter, at the points named in the text.↩︎
Taylor’s translation, VI.9.10.↩︎
Taylor’s translation, VI.9.10. The clause quoted in the text reads in full “it is not then at rest according to a scientific energy, which consists in demonstrations”; the words after “demonstrations” in the printing are damaged.↩︎
Armstrong’s translation, I.6.9.↩︎
Taylor’s translation, I.2.1. Taylor’s volume heads the treatise On the Virtues and prints the address “II. ii.” on its opening page; Porphyry’s arrangement and the introduction’s own list both give it as I.2.↩︎
Taylor’s translation, I.2.7. The words “all the virtues are purifications” are Taylor’s rendering in the same chapter.↩︎
Taylor’s note at the head of On Dialectic, in the same volume. Taylor’s volume heads that treatise On Dialectic; Porphyry’s arrangement has it at I.3.↩︎
Armstrong, Preface, section II — his account of the thought of Plotinus.↩︎
Armstrong, Preface, section II.↩︎
Taylor’s translation, II.4.16, the treatise’s last chapter. Taylor heads the treatise On Matter; Porphyry’s Life lists the same treatise as On the two Kinds of Matter at II.4.↩︎
Taylor’s translation, II.4.15 and II.4.16.↩︎
Armstrong’s translation, I.8.3. Armstrong’s introductory note to the treatise summarises its thesis as this post reports it; the treatise is No. 51 in Porphyry’s chronological order.↩︎
Armstrong’s translation, I.8.4.↩︎
Armstrong’s translation, I.8.7.↩︎
Armstrong’s list of the Second Ennead’s contents, in the Life, chapter 24, where the treatise appears as II.9. Taylor’s volume heads the same treatise Against the Gnostics.↩︎
Porphyry, Life, chapter 1, Armstrong’s translation. The subject of the sentence, which the printing damages, is Plotinus.↩︎
Porphyry, Life, chapter 8, Armstrong’s translation. Chapter 7, immediately before it, ends with Porphyry saying of himself: “I myself, Porphyry of Tyre, was one of Plotinus’s closest friends, and he entrusted to me the editing of his writings.”↩︎
Porphyry, Life, chapter 8, Armstrong’s translation.↩︎
Porphyry, Life, chapter 23, Armstrong’s translation. The elision replaces the clause about when the attaining happened, which the printing damages; the sentence states that it happened four times while Porphyry was with him.↩︎
Porphyry, Life, chapter 23, Armstrong’s translation. Porphyry gives his own age at the time as sixty-eight.↩︎
Porphyry, Life, chapter 10, Armstrong’s translation. Armstrong appends a note referring the reader to a modern discussion of the episode; the report itself is Porphyry’s.↩︎
Porphyry, Life, chapter 10, Armstrong’s translation.↩︎
G. R. S. Mead, Preface to the 1895 reissue.↩︎
The bibliography printed with the 1895 reissue, in its list of complete editions, entry for Creuzer’s edition of 1835. The same list enters Taylor’s Select Works itself as London, 1817, and notes that it is the work “which is now reproduced”.↩︎
Taylor’s note to V.1.11, in the same volume.↩︎
Taylor’s notes to On Matter, chapters XVI and X, and a note of the same kind in his Introduction, respectively. (Taylor prints his notes against his own chapter numbers; the treatise is Ennead II.4.) In each, a Greek phrase stands between the English clauses and is elided, not repaired; the English is quoted as the printing has it. A separate note at the head of On the Virtues refers the reader to Taylor’s additional notes at the end of the volume for the political, cathartic and theoretic virtues — his own terms for the grades of virtue in I.2.↩︎
Porphyry, Life, chapter 24, Armstrong’s translation.↩︎
Armstrong, Preface, section I — his account of the Enneads.↩︎
Armstrong, Preface, section I.↩︎
Armstrong, his introductory note to Ennead I.1, and his introductory note to I.3, which places that treatise at No. 20 in Porphyry’s chronological order and names the preceding treatise On Virtues as No. 19.↩︎
Armstrong, Preface, section III, his account of the text, editions and translations, in the part of it dealing with the twentieth-century editors’ conclusions. The sentence is Armstrong’s report of the conclusions of the twentieth-century editors of the text.↩︎
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