If you think about for example, proportionality and beauty, things like that, these seem to be some kind of representations of a kind of unity.

The world around you is some kind of distraction at best, and evil at worst, and you should be turning away from it.

The idea is that to grasp an idea like equality or justice, you can't look at the equal and just or unjust things in the world around you, you have to somehow ascend to or maybe remember some kind of idea of equality and justice and this would be a Platonic form, and it would be different from the things that partake in the form.

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.

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.

The forms in intellect are some kind of blueprint or model on which the physical world is based, and something needs to come along and shape the matter in accordance with that blueprint. What does that is soul.

Sometimes clichés are true.