Enneads

The Enneads are important writings by the philosopher Plotinus. His student Porphyry collected and arranged these writings around the year AD 270. Plotinus learned from a teacher named Ammonius Saccas, and together they began a way of thinking called Neoplatonism.

The Enneads influenced many important ideas later on. Through people like Augustine of Hippo, the Cappadocian Fathers, and others such as Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, these writings shaped thoughts in both Western and Near-Eastern cultures. Many later thinkers, both Christian and Muslim, used and built on Plotinus's ideas.

Porphyry organized the writings of Plotinus into fifty-four treatises, grouping them into nine sets of nine, which he called Enneads. He put these into three volumes. The first volume has the first three Enneads, the second has the Fourth and Fifth Enneads, and the last volume has the remaining Ennead. Porphyry also wrote a biography of Plotinus to introduce these works.

The Enneads are not in the order they were written but are arranged to guide learners from everyday topics to deeper ideas about the universe. The First Ennead discusses human behavior, the Second and Third focus on the cosmological world and physical reality, the Fourth talks about the Soul, the Fifth about knowledge, and the Sixth covers deep ideas about being and the One, the most important principle of all.

Citing the Enneads

When talking about the Enneads, people use special numbers to point to exact parts. They use the number of the group (called an Ennead), the number of the writing inside that group, the chapter number, and the line numbers. These numbers are separated by periods, commas, or spaces.

For example, if we want to talk about the fourth group (IV), the seventh writing (7), the second chapter (2), and lines one to five (1-5), we can write it as:

IV.7.2.1-5

Another example: the third group (III), the fifth writing (5), the ninth chapter (9), and the eighth line (8) can be written in a few ways:

III, 5, 9, 8
3,5,9,8
III 5 9 8

Some books might not use the exact line numbers from certain editions. The writings are also sometimes listed in the order they were written, with that number in brackets or parentheses.

For the first example above, since the seventh writing in the fourth group was the second one Plotinus wrote, we could write:

IV.7 (2).2.1-5

And for the second example, since the fifth writing in the third group was the fiftieth one written, we could write:

III, 5 [50], 9, 8

The names of the writings may change depending on how they are translated. The numbers in brackets show the order they were written, according to Plotinus's student Porphyry.

First Ennead

I.1 [53] - "What is the Living Being and What is Man?"
I.2 [19] - "On Virtue"
I.3 [20] - "On Dialectic [The Upward Way]."
I.4 [46] - "On True Happiness (Well Being)"
I.5 [36] - "On Whether Happiness (Well Being) Increases with Time."
I.6 [1] - "On Beauty"
I.7 [54] - "On the Primal Good and Secondary Forms of Good [Otherwise, 'On Happiness']"
I.8 [51] - "On the Nature and Source of Evil"
I.9 [16] - "On Dismissal"

Second Ennead

II.1 [40] - "On Heaven"
II.2 [14] - "On the Movement of Heaven"
II.3 [52] - "Whether the Stars are Causes"
II.4 [12] - "On Matter"
II.5 [25] - "On Potentiality and Actuality"
II.6 [17] - "On Quality or on Substance"
II.7 [37] - "On Complete Transfusion"
II.8 [35] - "On Sight or on How Distant Objects Appear Small"
II.9 [33] - "Against Those That Affirm The Creator of the Cosmos and the Cosmos Itself to be Evil" [generally quoted as "Against the Gnostics"]

Third Ennead

III.1 [3] - "On Fate"
III.2 [47] - "On Providence (1)."
III.3 [48] - "On Providence (2)."
III.4 [15] - "On our Allotted Guardian Spirit"
III.5 [50] - "On Love"
III.6 [26] - "On the Impassivity of the Unembodied"
III.7 [45] - "On Eternity and Time"
III.8 [30] - "On Nature, Contemplation and the One"
III.9 [13] - "Detached Considerations"

Fourth Ennead

IV.1 [21] - "On the Essence of the Soul (1)"
IV.2 [4] - "On the Essence of the Soul (2)"
IV.3 [27] - "On Problems of the Soul (1)"
IV.4 [28] - "On Problems of the Soul (2)"
IV.5 [29] - "On Problems of the Soul (3)” [Also known as "On Sight"].
IV.6 [41] - "On Sense-Perception and Memory"
IV.7 [2] - "On the Immortality of the Soul"
IV.8 [6] - "On the Soul's Descent into Body"
IV.9 [8] - "Are All Souls One"

Fifth Ennead

V.1 [10] - "On the Three Primary Hypostases"
V.2 [11] - "On the Origin and Order of the Beings following after the First"
V.3 [49] - "On the Knowing Hypostases and That Which is Beyond"
V.4 [7] - "How That Which is After the First Comes from the First, and on the One."
V.5 [32] - "That the Intellectual Beings are not Outside the Intellect, and on the Good"
V.6 [24] - "On the Fact that That Which is Beyond Being Does not Think, and on What is the Primary and the Secondary Thinking Principle"
V.7 [18] - "On Whether There are Ideas of Particular Beings"
V.8 [31] - "On the Intellectual Beauty"
V.9 [5] - "On Intellect, the Forms, and Being"

Sixth Ennead

VI.1 [42] - "On the Kinds of Being (1)"
VI.2 [43] - "On the Kinds of Being (2)"
VI.3 [44] - "On the Kinds of Being (3)"
VI.4 [22] - "On the Presence of Being, One and the Same, Everywhere as a Whole (1)"
VI.5 [23] - "On the Presence of Being, One and the Same, Everywhere as a Whole (2)"
VI.6 [34] - "On Numbers"
VI.7 [38] - "How the Multiplicity of Forms Came Into Being, and on the Good"
VI.8 [39] - "On Free Will and the Will of the One"
VI.9 [9] - "On the Good, or the One"

Plotinus's original chronological order

The order of the writings is listed by Porphyry. The first 21 writings (through IV.1) were already written when Porphyry met Plotinus.

I.6, IV.7, III.1, IV.2, V.9, IV.8, V.4, IV.9, VI.9
V.1, V.2, II.4, III.9, II.2, III.4, I.9, II.6, V.7
I.2, I.3, IV.1, VI.4, VI.5, V.6, II.5, III.6, IV.3
IV.4, IV.5, III.8, V.8, V.5, II.9, VI.6, II.8, I.5
II.7, VI.7, VI.8, II.1, IV.6, VI.1, VI.2, VI.3, III.7
I.4, III.2, III.3, V.3, III.5, I.8, II.3, I.1, I.7

In table format, the chronological order of Porphyry corresponding each of the Ennead treatises is:

Chronological order	Ennead treatise
1	1.6
2	4.7
3	3.1
4	4.2
5	5.9
6	4.8
7	5.4
8	4.9
9	6.9
10	5.1
11	5.2
12	2.4
13	3.9
14	2.2
15	3.4
16	1.9
17	2.6
18	5.7
19	1.2
20	1.3
21	4.1
22	6.4
23	6.5
24	5.6
25	2.5
26	3.6
27	4.3
28	4.4
29	4.5
30	3.8
31	5.8
32	5.5
33	2.9
34	6.6
35	2.8
36	1.5
37	2.7
38	6.7
39	6.8
40	2.1
41	4.6
42	6.1
43	6.2
44	6.3
45	3.7
46	1.4
47	3.2
48	3.3
49	5.3
50	3.5
51	1.8
52	2.3
53	1.1
54	1.7

Note on the Plotiniana Arabica or Arabic Plotinus

After the fall of the Western Roman Empire and during the time of the Byzantine Empire, people were unsure who wrote some of Plotinus' texts. Parts of Enneads IV-VI, now called Plotiniana Arabica, were shared by Islamic scholars like Al-Kindi, Al-Farabi, and Avicenna. They knew these writings as The Theology of Aristotle or as "Sayings of an old [wise] man". These ideas greatly influenced Islamic philosophy because of the Islamic world's interest in Aristotle. Later, a Latin version of these ideas appeared in Europe in 1519.

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