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Plotinus particularly disliked the idea that the divine power which made the universe might change its mind and destroy it. He had already attacked it in his treatise Against the Gnostics (II 9, 4).

The treatise as it stands in the Enneads is a most powerful protest on behalf of Hellenic philosophy against the un-Hellenic heresy (as it was from the Platonist as well as the orthodox Christian point…

Short statement of the doctrine of the three hypostases, the One, Intellect and Soul ; there cannot be more or fewer than these three. Criticism of attempts to multiply the hypostases, and especially of the…

Here, and in what follows in the rest of the chapter, Plotinus is probably not only, or even primarily, concerned with explicitly Gnostic doctrines. He is attacking views which were held in the Platonic school…

The phrase is taken from Plato, Phaedrus 246C. It is clear from what follows in Plato that the reference is only to the fall of human souls. But a reading of the passage will show…

Cp. the Coptic Gnostic work edited by C. Schmidt (in Koptisch-Gnostische Schriften I, Leipzig, 1905: ed. altera ed. W. Till, Berlin 1954) and by C. A. Baynes (A Coptic Gnostic Treatise contained in the Codex…

παροίκησις, μετάνοια and ἀντίτυποι appear in the Coptic Gnostic treatise referred to in the note on ch. 5. p. 361, 35 p. 362, 3 Schmidt : p. 180 Baynes: on the extremely…

Again, it looks as if Plotinus was thinking of “Gnosticising” Platonists, who derived their ideas to some extent from Numenius, at least as much as of Gnostics properly so called ; cp. the second note…

Cp. what Porphyry says about the Gnostics in Life ch. 16, 8-9.

From this point to the end of ch. 12 Plotinus is attacking a Gnostic myth known to us best at present in the form it took in the system of Valentinus. The Mother, Sophia Achamoth,…