Reading room

Ennead I.6 [1]: On beauty

Plotinus

The first treatise he wrote and one of the most widely read. It refutes the view that beauty consists in symmetry: the beautiful is the presence of form in matter. It rises from beautiful bodies to beautiful pursuits, to the beauty of the soul and to intelligible Beauty, and invites the reader to "chisel his own statue", since no eye ever saw the sun without becoming sunlike. It contains the exhortation "let us flee to the beloved fatherland".