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.

Plato in his dialogue The Phaedo says that whereas sticks and stones are both equal and unequal, (so maybe what that means is that each stick is going to be equal to some other sticks and unequal to some other sticks, so equal to the stick on the left maybe but shorter than the stick on its right) the form of equal is going to be just equal, and it won't partake of inequality at all. And it will be the cause of equality in things that are equal, for example, equal sticks and stones.

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

This is in a way the most important thing about soul is that it's a kind of principle which mediates between the universal intellect and the material world.

In fact one of the things about Plotinus is that he maybe not singlehandedly, but I think more than anyone else, killed off the variety and dissension among the philosophical schools of antiquity.

Plotinus, when he thinks about mind or intellect, the Greek word is 'nous', he thinks about something that's very different, it's much more elevated and special, more abstract, you might say more philosophical than the very broad range of mental events that we talk about in contemporary philosophy of mind.

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.