Transgressing Boundaries: Plotinus and the Gnostics

Abstract

An examination of instances of Plotinus’s critique in the first ten chapters of Enneades ii.9, commonly called “Against the Gnostics,” regarding doctrines reflected in the Sethian Platonizing treatises and the Valentinian Tripartite Tractate insofar they may be appropriately considered as transgressions of Platonic metaphysics and of traditional principles of philosophical hermeneutics and etiquette that may or may not merit the designation “countercultural.”