This treatise springs from a commentary on Plato’s Theaetetus 176A, in which Socrates urges his interlocutors to escape from this realm and, by cultivating virtue, to assimilate oneself to the divine. Reflecting on this passage leads Plotinus to an account of grades of virtue, especially a distinction between the practical and the theoretical, and an argument that the latter is in an important sense higher than the former. Although this fact could be taken to suggest the unimportance of practical ethics for Platonists, Plotinus takes pains to show that the possession of the higher virtues entails the possession of the lower, even if the practice of the lower is not an end in itself.
§1. How can the practice of virtue bring about assimilation to the divine when the gods themselves do not practise virtue?
§2. Discussion of different senses of ‘being likenesses of’.
§3. Virtues as purifications.
§4. The results of purification.
§5. The effects of purification on the soul.
§6. Purification and assimilation.
§7. Whether the higher and lower virtues imply each other.