The Enneads: Abridged Edition PDF
Preview The Enneads: Abridged Edition
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
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