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The Enneads (Complete Works, Vol. 1)

Plotinus · philosophy, c. 253-270 CE·7 hrs in the original·original at Project Gutenberg
The 30‑second version7 hrs → 50 sec
  • He banned every portrait of himself. When his student Amelius begged for a painting, he asked, "Is it not enough for me to have to carry around this image, in which nature has enclosed us?" A painter secretly studied his face during lectures and painted him from memory instead.
  • He died mid-sentence about the divine. At 66, waiting for his pupil Eustochius to reach his deathbed in Campania, he said, "I am trying to unite what is divine in us to that which is divine in the universe." Porphyry records that a serpent then slipped into a hole in the wall as Plotinos breathed his last.
  • Three students swore never to write down the lessons. Plotinos, Herennius, and the pagan Origen agreed to keep secret what they learned from their teacher Ammonius. Herennius broke the pact first, Origen followed, and Plotinos held out roughly a decade before finally writing anything down.
  • He never reread a line he had written. Porphyry says his weak eyesight made rereading "very painful," so once Plotinos composed an argument in his head, he wrote it out in one pass without revision, unseparated words and defective spelling included.
  • His first treatise attacks the Stoic idea of beauty. In "Of Beauty" he asks how gold, lightning, or a single sustained musical note could be beautiful if beauty required symmetry among parts. His conclusion: proportion "is not beauty itself," it only borrows beauty from something higher.
  • The volume closes arguing the soul is both one and many. In the final treatise, Plotinos reasons that if the soul had no unity, sensation in one finger would never register anywhere else, yet if it had no manifoldness, it could inhabit only a single point of the body. He concludes the soul must be "simultaneously one and manifold, divided and undivided."
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•Why it earns a slot

Why it earns a slot: it is the founding text of Neoplatonism, the filter through which Augustine and centuries of Christian, Islamic, and Renaissance thought inherited Plato, written by a man who dictated it whole from memory and never once looked back at the page.

A man who refused to be painted, never reread his own sentences, and wrote for a decade before showing anyone, tries to prove the soul and the divine are both one thing and many things at once.

This distillation is written from the freely available original, which is always the better read when you have the time: Project Gutenberg.

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