中文导读
《九章集》是普罗提诺的 54 篇哲学论文的总集，由其学生波菲利（Porphyry）于公元 300 年前后编辑整理。波菲利将论文按主题分为六组，每组九篇——因此得名"Ἐννεάδες"（Enneads，"九章集"）。
全书围绕三个本原（hypostases）展开：一者（the One）——超越存在、超越思维的绝对起点；理智（Nous/Intellect）——理型世界，思维与被思之物合一；灵魂（Psyche/Soul）——连接理智世界与感官世界的中间层级。从一者流溢出理智，从理智流溢出灵魂，从灵魂流溢出感性世界——但灵魂始终有能力"上升"回归其本源，最终与一者合一（ἕνωσις, henosis）。
以下收录 Stephen MacKenna 和 B.S. Page 公版英译的关键段落，选自 MIT Internet Classics Archive，涵盖全体系的核心论文。
Ennead I, Tractate 1 — The Animate and the Man
灵魂与身体的关系——情感、知觉和理性各自的座席：
Pleasure and distress, fear and courage, desire and aversion, where have these affections and experiences their seat? Clearly, either in the Soul alone, or in the Soul as employing the body, or in some third entity deriving from both.
If Soul [in man] and Essential Soul are one and the same, then the Soul will be an Ideal-Form unreceptive of all those activities which it imparts to another Kind but possessing within itself that native Act of its own which Reason manifests.
Now what could bring fear to a nature thus unreceptive of all the outer? Fear demands feeling. Nor is there place for courage: courage implies the presence of danger. And such desires as are satisfied by the filling or voiding of the body, must be proper to something very different from the Soul, to that only which admits of replenishment and voidance.
Thus assuredly Sense-Perception, Discursive-Reasoning; and all our ordinary mentation are foreign to the Soul: for sensation is a receiving—whether of an Ideal-Form or of an impassive body—and reasoning and all ordinary mental action deal with sensation.
Ennead V, Tractate 1 — The Three Initial Hypostases
体系的入口——灵魂如何遗忘了自己的本源，以及如何回归：
What can it be that has brought the souls to forget the father, God, and, though members of the Divine and entirely of that world, to ignore at once themselves and It?
The evil that has overtaken them has its source in self-will, in the entry into the sphere of process, and in the primal differentiation with the desire for self ownership. They conceived a pleasure in this freedom and largely indulged their own motion; thus they were hurried down the wrong path, and in the end, drifting further and further, they came to lose even the thought of their origin in the Divine.
A child wrenched young from home and brought up during many years at a distance will fail in knowledge of its father and of itself: the souls, in the same way, no longer discern either the divinity or their own nature; ignorance of their rank brings self-depreciation; they misplace their respect, honouring everything more than themselves.
A double discipline must be applied if human beings in this pass are to be reclaimed, and brought back to their origins, lifted once more towards the Supreme and One and First.
Ennead VI, Tractate 9 — On the Good or the One
体系的顶峰——关于与一者合一的体验描述：
The One is all things and not one of them; the fount of all things is not itself all things; and yet it is all things in a transcendental sense—all things, so to speak, having run back to it: it is not one of them, but their fount and origin. [...] In virtue of this origin, all things are present to it, not as being itself but as being, so to speak, its outgushing.
Withdraw into yourself and look. And if you do not find yourself beautiful yet, act as does the creator of a statue that is to be made beautiful: he cuts away here, he smoothes there, he makes this line lighter, this other purer, until a lovely face has grown upon his work. So do you also: cut away all that is excessive, straighten all that is crooked, bring light to all that is overcast, labour to make all one glow of beauty and never cease chiselling your statue until there shall shine out on you from it the godlike splendour of virtue, until you shall see the perfect goodness surely established in the stainless shrine.
[...] But how comes the soul not to keep that ground? Because it has not yet escaped wholly from body: let it escape, and it will be in the Intellectual. But it must escape not only from the body but from all that the body has brought with it: let it have done with all else, and it will be in the Intellectual.