By: Plotinus, Translator MacKenna, Stephen
Editor Dillon, John
Publication Date: 1991/11
Publisher: 
Format: Paper
ISBN: 014044520X 
Our Price: $14.95

Related Books: The Greeks,  Prophets, Saints, Sages and Teachers

The Reader's Catalog
The famous MacKenna translation of the great mystical philosopher, now available in an inexpensive edition. The Neo-Platonic thought of Plotinus is of incomparable importance in the development of Western philosophy; he also wrote with great beauty and concision. MacKenna's version has been described by George Steiner as "one of the masterpieces of modern English prose and formal sensibility"

Publisher
Plotinus is the last great philosopher of antiquity, although in more than one respect he is a precursor of modern times. TheEnneadsbring together Platonism, mystic passion and ideas from Greek philosophy, together with striking variants of the Trinity and other central Christian doctrines, to produce a higly original synthesis. Yet despite the porfundity of his thought, and his immense influence on mystics and religious writers, Plotinus remained largely inaccessible

Excerpt from The Reader's Catalog
Many times it has happened: lifted out of the body into myself; becoming external to all other things and self-centered; beholding a marvelous beauty; then, more-than ever, assured of community with the loftiest order; enacting the noblest life, acquiring identity with the divine, stationing within it by having attained that activity; poised above whatsover within the intellectual is less than the supreme; yet, there comes the moment of descent from intellection to reasoning, and after that sojourn in the divine, I ask myself how it happens that I can now be descending, and how did the soul ever enter into my body, the soul which, even within the body, is the high thing it has shown itself to be.