Plotinus - The Enneads: Abridged Edition

THE ENNEADS

PLOTINUS (AD 20470) 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 OHehir, 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

TRANSLATED BY
STEPHEN MacKENNA

ABRIDGED WITH AN INTRODUCTION AND NOTES BY
JOHN DILLON

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First published by the Medici Society 19171930
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

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EISBN: 9781101491775

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 Stephens 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 English an astonishing result for one who was even then a passionate stylist, but it may have been that he displeased the examiners by being too clever, or otherwise perverse. This strange development, at any rate, ended at a stroke his chances of formal higher education, and contributed powerfully to a certain fatal diffidence, or chip on the shoulder, which manifested itself repeatedly in his later career, and which really denied MacKenna a good deal of the success as a writer he might otherwise have had.

After a brief brush with the religious life, he was next found a position by his aunts in a bank. They had by this time returned to live in Dublin, in the eminently respectable suburb of Rathmines, so it was in Dublin that he spent the next five or six years as a bank clerk, an activity for which he was profoundly ill-suited, and which made him increasingly restless. Two elements of his makeup, however, manifested themselves in this period: a sympathy with Irish nationalism, even in its most extreme forms, and a gift for translating. Even at school, a contemporary remembers his beautifully-turned renderings of Virgil and Sophocles. Now, in 1896, he produced an English version of the Imitatio Christi, and had it accepted by a Dublin publisher.

He was still only 24, but he now decided to break loose from respectability, in the form of the bank. He resolved to become a writer. His eldest brother Theobald was a journalist with the Daily Chronicle in London, and he helped Stephen to get a job on a London newspaper. He reported events such as fires and accidents for a year, while living with his family in Brixton, using up most of his money buying books, and most of his spare time reading them. He also joined a number of Irish patriotic societies, and flattered himself that he had attracted the notice of the Brixton police.