MacKenna-Plotinus: Divinity

  

The system of Plotinus   is a system of necessary emanation, procession, or irradiation accompanied by necessary aspiration or reversion-to-source: all the forms and phases of Existence flow from the Divinity and all strive to return Thither and to remain There.

This Divinity is a graded Triad.

Its three Hypostases - or in modern religious terminology, ‘Persons’ - are, in the briefest description:

1 The One, or First Existent.
2 The Divine Mind, or First Thinker and Thought.
3 The All-Soul, or First and Only Principle of Life.

’Of all things the governance and the existence are in these Three.’

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The Triad, it must never under any stress be forgotten, is The Divinity, and each Hypostasis is Divine: the All-Soul, as Jules Simon well remarks, is the expression of the outgoing energy of the Divinity as the Intellectual-Principle is the expression of the Godhead’s self-pent Thought or Vision.

The Divinity is communicated and approached by the channel of any one of the three Hypostases. The Intellectual-Principle has its Act about The First, towards Which it ‘looks’ in eternal ‘contemplation’, while, of its lavishness, it engenders the Vital-Principle or Soul; similarly the All-Soul ceaselessly ‘looks’ towards the Intellectual-Principle, while, of its lavish energy, it engenders or creates all the lower, down to the lowest form of being in the visible universe. Thus the Divinity is communicated to all things. Now this action within the Divine-Circle is reflected by a parallel action in the lower Cosmos. All ‘Nature’, even in the lowest, is in ceaseless Contemplation and Aspiration: while every being, until the ultimate possible is reached, tends to engender an image of itself, it tends also to rejoin the next highest, of which it is itself a shadow or lower manifestation: even Matter, all but outcast from the sphere of Being and unable to engender, has the power of receiving form and is, thereby, tending feebly towards Authentic-Existence, towards Soul and Mind, and so is linked, distantly, with the Divine.

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And how do we possess the DIVINITY? In that the DIVINITY is contained in the Intellectual-Principle and Authentic-Existence; and We come third in order after these two, for the We is constituted by a union of the supreme, the undivided Soul we read and that Soul which is divided among [living] bodies. For, note, we inevitably think of the Soul, though one undivided in the All, as being present to bodies in division: in so far as any bodies are Animates, the Soul has given itself to each of the separate material masses; or rather it appears to be present in the bodies by the fact that it shines into them: it makes them living beings not by merging into body but by giving forth, without any change in itself, images or likenesses of itself like one face caught by many mirrors. Enneads I,1,8

And it may very well be that even in us the Spirit which dwells with the Soul does thus circle about the DIVINITY. For since God is omnipresent the Soul desiring perfect union must take the circular course: God is not stationed. Enneads II,2,2

It does not suffice to perfect virtue to have only this Spirit [equivalent in all men] as cooperator in the life: the acting force in the Sage is the Intellective Principle [the diviner phase of the human Soul] which therefore is itself his presiding spirit or is guided by a presiding spirit of its own, no other than the very DIVINITY. Enneads III,4,6

To have penetrated this idea is to know the greatness of the soul and its power, the DIVINITY and wonder of its being, as a nature transcending the sphere of Things. Enneads IV,2,1

Souls, body-bound, are apt to body-punishment; clean souls no longer drawing to themselves at any point any vestige of body are, by their very being, outside the bodily sphere; body-free, containing nothing of body there where Essence is, and Being, and the Divine within the DIVINITY, among Those, within That, such a soul must be. Enneads IV,3,24

This is so true that, if every human being were at that stage, or if a great number lived by a soul of that degree, no one would be so incredulous as to doubt that the soul in man is immortal. It is because we see everywhere the spoiled souls of the great mass that it becomes difficult to recognize their DIVINITY and immortality. Enneads IV,7,10

1. What can it be that has brought the souls to forget the father, God, and, though members of the Divine and entirely of that world, to ignore at once themselves and It? The evil that has overtaken them has its source in self-will, in the entry into the sphere of process, and in the primal differentiation with the desire for self ownership. They conceived a pleasure in this freedom and largely indulged their own motion; thus they were hurried down the wrong path, and in the end, drifting further and further, they came to lose even the thought of their origin in the Divine. A child wrenched young from home and brought up during many years at a distance will fail in knowledge of its father and of itself: the souls, in the same way, no longer discern either the DIVINITY or their own nature; ignorance of their rank brings self-depreciation; they misplace their respect, honouring everything more than themselves; all their awe and admiration is for the alien, and, clinging to this, they have broken apart, as far as a soul may, and they make light of what they have deserted; their regard for the mundane and their disregard of themselves bring about their utter ignoring of the divine. Enneads V,1,1

In that royal progress the King is of another order from those that go before him, but the King in the Supreme is no ruler over externs; he holds that most just of governances, rooted in nature, the veritable kingship, for he is King of Truth, holding sway by all reason over a dense offspring his own, a host that shares his DIVINITY, King over a king and over kings and even more justly called father of Gods. Enneads V,5,3

All that one sees as a spectacle is still external; one must bring the vision within and see no longer in that mode of separation but as we know ourselves; thus a man filled with a god possessed by Apollo or by one of the Muses need no longer look outside for his vision of the divine being; it is but finding the strength to see DIVINITY within. Enneads V,8,10