Basically the problem is that if the intellect is looking at or beholding the forms, what it will get is some kind of representation or image of the forms, but it won't actually have the forms, it won't touch them as it were, or it won't incorporate them.

Before the 3rd century you're having several philosophical schools still as a going concern. You have not only the Platonists and the Aristotelians but you have Scepticism, you have Stoicism, you even have a little bit of Epicureanism. And what happens after Plotinus is that everybody becomes a Neo-Platonist. So if we then go forward to the Islamic world for example, Plotinus is immensely influential, and Neo-Platonism becomes at least one major component of mainstream Islamic philosophy as well.

Unlike later Neo-Platonists, Plotinus says that our souls are always connected to the universal intellect and that we never really fall away.

Once you're in a kind of revealed religious tradition, you wind up having to explain how the things said about God in the Bible or the Qur'an or whatever religious text you're dealing with, why these statements are true.

In fact Plotinus does believe in divine providence, though when he talks about divine providence, he talks about that providence being exercised by the intellect and the soul of the world, rather than the One.

The body distracts your soul.

The body is some kind of image of you, it's kind of something that's just attached to your soul, some kind of outside principle, which doesn't really represent who you really are.