Plotinus

“Generations of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic philosophers and theologians have expressed immeasurable indebtedness to Plotinus, for whom the Cosmos is a living being, the Eternal is apprehended as Beauty, and the supreme aim of human spirituality is union with ‘the One.’ The British writer and Kenyan farmer Mary Casey loved the classic MacKenna translation of theEnneads, yet took things into a different form. She lived into the heart and soul of Plotinian life, death, thought, work, solitude, and creativity. Years later she emerged with what has been called a visionary recital of the life of the Neo-Platonic master, illumined with an innate understanding of divergent worlds, schools of thought, the redemptive acts of human interiority. Casey movingly reconciles the Plotinian sense of the microcosmic and macrocosmic, Plato and Origen, Greek and Christian, Alexandria and Egypt, classroom and altar, prayer and thought, philosophy and theology, nature and spirit, self-knowledge and avoidance, recollection and Lethe, Gaia and Cosmos, humility and dignity, binding and loosening, and ultimately, life and death. She does so with hermetic and alchemical insight, poetic nuance, and startling authority, and thus she has accomplished things for Plotinus that previous scholars have not, however much we appreciate and revere them. Casey’s canticle is both haunting and healing, and very warmly recommended.”

— THERESE SCHROEDER-SHEKER

The Chalice of Repose Project