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Subject Area: Philosophy
Subject Area: Religion

The Divine Names - Plotinus, The Ethical Treatises, being the Treatises of the First Ennead [253 AD]

Edition used:

The Ethical Treatises, being the Treatises of the First Ennead, with Porphry’s Life of Plotinus, and the Preller-Ritter Extracts forming a Conspectus of the Plotinian System, translated from Greek by Stephen Mackenna (Boston: Charles T. Branford, 1918).

Part of: The Enneads, or The Ethical Treatises , 5 vols.

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The Divine Names

The system of Plotinus is a system of necessary Emanation, Procession or Irradiation accompanied by necessary Aspiration or Reversion-to-Source: all the forms and phases of Existence flow from the Divinity and all strive to return Thither and to remain There.

This Divinity is a graded Triad.

Its three Hypostases—or in modern religious terminology, “Persons”—are, in the briefest description—

  • 1. The One, or First Existent.
  • 2. The Divine Mind, or First Thinker and Thought.
  • 3. The All-Soul, or First and Only Principle of Life.

“Of all things the governance and the existence are in these Three.”