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.

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

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.

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.

We do each have an intellect but there's a universal intellect which is the same for everybody, as it were. And this single intellect is grasping the platonic forms.

There's a stronger and more kind of controversial element of Plotinus' view of matter, which is that he actually identifies it with evil, or at least the principle of evil, and the reason for this is that he thinks that the the One, the highest principle, can also be thought of as the Good, and that's kind of surprising like, because he has this negative theology which doesn't allow us to say anything about the One. But he believes that it can be seen as the principle of goodness as well as unity, and that if you think about it, goodness and unity sort of go along with each other.

The importance of Plotinus is not only his own philosophical ideas which are quite interesting, but his historical impact as the founder of neo-Platonism which is the main philosophical tradition of late antiquity.