Plotinus and Neoplatonism — The One, Emanation, and the Enneads
At the turn of the third century CE, when the philosophical schools of Antiquity seemed to have exhausted their possibilities, a thinker born in Roman Egypt undertook the most ambitious metaphysical synthesis the ancient world had ever seen. Plotinus (c. 205–270 CE) did more than comment on Plato: he transformed Platonism into a complete ontological architecture centered on the idea that all of reality emanates from an absolute principle — the One — and that the destiny of the human soul is to return to that primordial unity. ...