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.

Plotinus is usually called the Founder of Neo Platonism and what that means is that in this philosophical circle, he was founding a kind of renewed attempt to understand the thought of Plato which however they were combining with the thought of other philosophers, including Aristotle, the Stoics and Pythagoreans and so on.

I'm sure that Plotinus wasn't that impressed by the Christians.

Assuming there is an intellect, we're clearly not this universal intellect or we would know it. So that's one function of soul.

There's going to be this realm of Platonic forms and then there's going to be this single mind, the 'nous', which grasps them.

For Plotinus, what really exists are the Platonic forms, so the true nature or form of things like justice, beauty, maybe numbers, things like that, and these he associates with the intellect because they're the objects of intellect, they are things that intellect can think about.

Soul puts the determination or forms or images of forms, into matter.