MacKenna-Plotinus: soul (Enneads III)

  

As for Things of Process or for Eternal Existents whose Act is not eternally invariable we must hold that these are due to Cause; Causelessness is quite inadmissible; we can make no place here for unwarranted “slantings,” for sudden movement of bodies apart from any initiating power, for precipitate spurts in a SOUL with nothing to drive it into the new course of action. Such causelessness would bind the SOUL under an even sterner compulsion, no longer master of itself, but at the mercy of movements apart from will and cause. Something willed within itself or without something desired, must lead it to action; without motive it can have no motion. Enneads   III,1,1

3. “Atoms” or “elements” it is in either case an absurdity, an impossibility, to hand over the universe and its contents to material entities, and out of the disorderly swirl thus occasioned to call order, reasoning, and the governing SOUL into being; but the atomic origin is, if we may use the phrase, the most impossible. Enneads III,1,3

Material entities exposed to all this onslaught may very well be under compulsion to yield to whatsoever the atoms may bring: but would anyone pretend that the acts and states of a SOUL or mind could be explained by any atomic movements? How can we imagine that the onslaught of an atom, striking downwards or dashing in from any direction, could force the SOUL to definite and necessary reasonings or impulses or into any reasonings, impulses or thoughts at all, necessary or otherwise? And what of the SOUL’s resistance to bodily states? What movement of atoms could compel one man to be a geometrician, set another studying arithmetic or astronomy, lead a third to the philosophic life? In a word, if we must go, like soulless bodies, wherever bodies push and drive us, there is an end to our personal act and to our very existence as living beings. Enneads III,1,3

The School that erects other material forces into universal causes is met by the same reasoning: we say that while these can warm us and chill us, and destroy weaker forms of existence, they can be causes of nothing that is done in the sphere of mind or SOUL: all this must be traceable to quite another kind of Principle. Enneads III,1,3

4. Another theory: The Universe is permeated by one SOUL, Cause of all things and events; every separate phenomenon as a member of a whole moves in its place with the general movement; all the various causes spring into action from one source: therefore, it is argued, the entire descending claim of causes and all their interaction must follow inevitably and so constitute a universal determination. A plant rises from a root, and we are asked on that account to reason that not only the interconnection linking the root to all the members and every member to every other but the entire activity and experience of the plant, as well, must be one organized overruling, a “destiny” of the plant. Enneads III,1,4

The doctrine is close to that which makes the SOUL of the Universe the source and cause of all condition and of all movement whether without or supposing that we are allowed as individuals some little power towards personal act within ourselves. Enneads III,1,7

8. What can this other cause be; one standing above those treated of; one that leaves nothing causeless, that preserves sequence and order in the Universe and yet allows ourselves some reality and leaves room for prediction and augury? SOUL: we must place at the crest of the world of beings, this other Principle, not merely the SOUL of the Universe but, included in it, the SOUL of the individual: this, no mean Principle, is needed to be the bond of union in the total of things, not, itself, a thing sprung like things from life-seeds, but a first-hand Cause, bodiless and therefore supreme over itself, free, beyond the reach of kosmic Cause: for, brought into body, it would not be unrestrictedly sovereign; it would hold rank in a series. Enneads III,1,8

Now the environment into which this independent principle enters, when it comes to this midpoint, will be largely led by secondary causes [or, by chance-causes]: there will therefore be a compromise; the action of the SOUL will be in part guided by this environment while in other matters it will be sovereign, leading the way where it will. The nobler SOUL will have the greater power; the poorer SOUL, the lesser. A SOUL which defers to the bodily temperament cannot escape desire and rage and is abject in poverty, overbearing in wealth, arbitrary in power. The SOUL of nobler nature holds good against its surroundings; it is more apt to change them than to be changed, so that often it improves the environment and, where it must make concession, at least keeps its innocence. Enneads III,1,8

9. We admit, then, a Necessity in all that is brought about by this compromise between evil and accidental circumstance: what room was there for anything else than the thing that is? Given all the causes, all must happen beyond aye or nay that is, all the external and whatever may be due to the sidereal circuit therefore when the SOUL has been modified by outer forces and acts under that pressure so that what it does is no more than an unreflecting acceptance of stimulus, neither the act nor the state can be described as voluntary: so, too, when even from within itself, it falls at times below its best and ignores the true, the highest, laws of action. Enneads III,1,9

But when our SOUL holds to its Reason-Principle, to the guide, pure and detached and native to itself, only then can we speak of personal operation, of voluntary act. Things so done may truly be described as our doing, for they have no other source; they are the issue of the unmingled SOUL, a Principle that is a First, a leader, a sovereign not subject to the errors of ignorance, not to be overthrown by the tyranny of the desires which, where they can break in, drive and drag, so as to allow of no act of ours, but mere answer to stimulus. Enneads III,1,9

10. To sum the results of our argument: All things and events are foreshown and brought into being by causes; but the causation is of two Kinds; there are results originating from the SOUL and results due to other causes, those of the environment. Enneads III,1,10

In the action of our Souls all that is done of their own motion in the light of sound reason is the SOUL’s work, while what is done where they are hindered from their own action is not so much done as suffered. Unwisdom, then, is not due to the SOUL, and, in general if we mean by Fate a compulsion outside ourselves an act is fated when it is contrary to wisdom. Enneads III,1,10

The Intellectual Sphere [the Divine] alone is Reason, and there can never be another Sphere that is Reason and nothing else; so that, given some other system, it cannot be as noble as that first; it cannot be Reason: yet since such a system cannot be merely Matter, which is the utterly unordered, it must be a mixed thing. Its two extremes are Matter and the Divine Reason; its governing principle is SOUL, presiding over the conjunction of the two, and to be thought of not as labouring in the task but as administering serenely by little more than an act of presence. Enneads III,2,2

And do not think that, while earth is ornate with all its growths and with living things of every race, and while the very sea has answered to the power of SOUL, do not think that the great air and the ether and the far-spread heavens remain void of it: there it is that all good Souls dwell, infusing life into the stars and into that orderly eternal circuit of the heavens which in its conscious movement ever about the one Centre, seeking nothing beyond, is a faithful copy of the divine Mind. And all that is within me strives towards the Good; and each, to the measure of its faculty, attains. For from that Good all the heavens depend, with all my own SOUL and the Gods that dwell in my every part, and all that lives and grows, and even all in me that you may judge inanimate. Enneads III,2,3

In the immaterial heaven every member is unchangeably itself for ever; in the heavens of our universe, while the whole has life eternally and so too all the nobler and lordlier components, the Souls pass from body to body entering into varied forms and, when it may, a SOUL will rise outside of the realm of birth and dwell with the one SOUL of all. For the embodied lives by virtue of a Form or Idea: individual or partial things exist by virtue of Universals; from these priors they derive their life and maintenance, for life here is a thing of change; only in that prior realm is it unmoving. From that unchangingness, change had to emerge, and from that self-cloistered Life its derivative, this which breathes and stirs, the respiration of the still life of the divine. Enneads III,2,4

One thing perishes, and the Kosmic Reason whose control nothing anywhere eludes employs that ending to the beginning of something new; and, so, when the body suffers and the SOUL, under the affliction, loses power, all that has been bound under illness and evil is brought into a new set of relations, into another class or order. Some of these troubles are helpful to the very sufferers poverty and sickness, for example and as for vice, even this brings something to the general service: it acts as a lesson in right doing, and, in many ways even, produces good; thus, by setting men face to face with the ways and consequences of iniquity, it calls them from lethargy, stirs the deeper mind and sets the understanding to work; by the contrast of the evil under which wrong-doers labour it displays the worth of the right. Not that evil exists for this purpose; but, as we have indicated, once the wrong has come to be, the Reason of the Kosmos employs it to good ends; and, precisely, the proof of the mightiest power is to be able to use the ignoble nobly and, given formlessness, to make it the material of unknown forms. Enneads III,2,5

We are forced to ask how such things can be, under a Providence. Certainly a maker must consider his work as a whole, but none the less he should see to the due ordering of all the parts, especially when these parts have SOUL, that is, are Living and Reasoning Beings: the Providence must reach to all the details; its functioning must consist in neglecting no point. Enneads III,2,6

We begin with evil acts entirely dependent upon the Souls which perpetrate them the harm, for example, which perverted Souls do to the good and to each other. Unless the foreplanning power alone is to be charged with the vice in such Souls, we have no ground of accusation, no claim to redress: the blame lies on the SOUL exercising its choice. Even a SOUL, we have seen, must have its individual movement; it is not abstract Spirit; the first step towards animal life has been taken and the conduct will naturally be in keeping with that character. Enneads III,2,7

There remains the other phase of the question the distribution of evil to the opposite classes of men: the good go bare while the wicked are rich: all that human need demands, the least deserving have in abundance; it is they that rule; peoples and states are at their disposal. Would not all this imply that the divine power does not reach to earth? That it does is sufficiently established by the fact that Reason rules in the lower things: animals and plants have their share in Reason, SOUL and Life. Enneads III,2,7

Murders, death in all its guises, the reduction and sacking of cities, all must be to us just such a spectacle as the changing scenes of a play; all is but the varied incident of a plot, costume on and off, acted grief and lament. For on earth, in all the succession of life, it is not the SOUL within but the Shadow outside of the authentic man, that grieves and complains and acts out the plot on this world stage which men have dotted with stages of their own constructing. All this is the doing of man knowing no more than to live the lower and outer life, and never perceiving that, in his weeping and in his graver doings alike, he is but at play; to handle austere matters austerely is reserved for the thoughtful: the other kind of man is himself a futility. Those incapable of thinking gravely read gravity into frivolities which correspond to their own frivolous Nature. Anyone that joins in their trifling and so comes to look on life with their eyes must understand that by lending himself to such idleness he has laid aside his own character. If Socrates   himself takes part in the trifling, he trifles in the outer Socrates. Enneads III,2,15

This Reason-Principle, then let us dare the definition in the hope of conveying the truth this Logos is not the Intellectual Principle unmingled, not the Absolute Divine Intellect; nor does it descend from the pure SOUL alone; it is a dependent of that SOUL while, in a sense, it is a radiation from both those divine Hypostases; the Intellectual Principle and the SOUL the SOUL as conditioned by the Intellectual Principle engender this Logos which is a Life holding restfully a certain measure of Reason. Enneads III,2,16

But this Reason-Principle which emanates from the complete unity, divine Mind, and the complete unity Life [= SOUL] is neither a uniate complete Life nor a uniate complete divine Mind, nor does it give itself whole and all-including to its subject. [By an imperfect communication] it sets up a conflict of part against part: it produces imperfect things and so engenders and maintains war and attack, and thus its unity can be that only of a sum-total not of a thing undivided. At war with itself in the parts which it now exhibits, it has the unity, or harmony, of a drama torn with struggle. The drama, of course, brings the conflicting elements to one final harmony, weaving the entire story of the clashing characters into one thing; while in the Logos the conflict of the divergent elements rises within the one element, the Reason-Principle: the comparison therefore is rather with a harmony emerging directly from the conflicting elements themselves, and the question becomes what introduces clashing elements among these Reason-Principles. Enneads III,2,16

In the dramas of human art, the poet provides the words but the actors add their own quality, good or bad for they have more to do than merely repeat the author’s words in the truer drama which dramatic genius imitates in its degree, the SOUL displays itself in a part assigned by the creator of the piece. Enneads III,2,17

As the actors of our stages get their masks and their costume, robes of state or rags, so a SOUL is allotted its fortunes, and not at haphazard but always under a Reason: it adapts itself to the fortunes assigned to it, attunes itself, ranges itself rightly to the drama, to the whole Principle of the piece: then it speaks out its business, exhibiting at the same time all that a SOUL can express of its own quality, as a singer in a song. A voice, a bearing, naturally fine or vulgar, may increase the charm of a piece; on the other hand, an actor with his ugly voice may make a sorry exhibition of himself, yet the drama stands as good a work as ever: the dramatist, taking the action which a sound criticism suggests, disgraces one, taking his part from him, with perfect justice: another man he promotes to more serious roles or to any more important play he may have, while the first is cast for whatever minor work there may be. Enneads III,2,17

Just so the SOUL, entering this drama of the Universe, making itself a part of the Play, bringing to its acting its personal excellence or defect, set in a definite place at the entry and accepting from the author its entire role superimposed upon its own character and conduct just so, it receives in the end its punishment and reward. Enneads III,2,17

What is evil in the single SOUL will stand a good thing in the universal system; what in the unit offends nature will serve nature in the total event and still remains the weak and wrong tone it is, though its sounding takes nothing from the worth of the whole, just as, in another order of image, the executioner’s ugly office does not mar the well-governed state: such an officer is a civic necessity; and the corresponding moral type is often serviceable; thus, even as things are, all is well. Enneads III,2,17

We must also remember that every SOUL has its second grade and its third, and that, therefore, its expression may take any one of three main forms. But this point must be dealt with here again: the matter requires all possible elucidation. Enneads III,2,18

And, further unless all Reason-Principles are Souls why should some be souls and others exclusively Reason-Principles when the All is itself a SOUL? Enneads III,2,18

The Reason-Principles are acts or expressions of a Universal SOUL; its parts [i e, events good and evil] are expressions of these Soulparts. Enneads III,3,1

This unity, SOUL, has different parts; the Reason-Principles, correspondingly, will also have their parts, and so, too, will the ultimates of the system, all that they bring into being. Enneads III,3,1

Then the Reason-Principle has measured things out with the set purpose of inequality? Certainly not: the inequality is inevitable by the nature of things: the Reason-Principle of this Universe follows upon a phase of the SOUL; the SOUL itself follows upon an Intellectual Principle, and this Intellectual Principle is not one among the things of the Universe but is all things; in all things, there is implied variety of things; where there is variety and not identity there must be primals, secondaries, tertiaries and every grade downward. Forms of life, then, there must be that are not pure SOUL but the dwindling of Souls enfeebled stage by stage of the process. There is, of course, a SOUL in the Reason-Principle constituting a living being, but it is another SOUL [a lesser phase], not that [the Supreme SOUL] from which the Reason-Principle itself derives; and this combined vehicle of life weakens as it proceeds towards matter, and what it engenders is still more deficient. Consider how far the engendered stands from its origin and yet, what a marvel! Enneads III,3,3

For [in the case of an evil life] whether it is that the constitution of the man is such as to drive him down the troubled paths or whether [the fault is mental or spiritual in that] the desires have gained control, we are compelled to attribute the guilt to the substratum [something inferior to the highest principle in Man]. We would be naturally inclined to say that this substratum [the responsible source of evil] must be Matter and not, as our argument implies, the Reason-Principle; it would appear that not the Reason-Principle but Matter were the dominant, crude Matter at the extreme and then Matter as shaped in the realized man: but we must remember that to this free Principle in man [which is a phase of the All SOUL] the Substratum [the direct inferior to be moulded] is [not Matter but] the Reason-Principle itself with whatever that produces and moulds to its own form, so that neither crude Matter nor Matter organized in our human total is sovereign within us. Enneads III,3,4

The quality now manifested may be probably referred to the conduct of a former life; we may suppose that previous actions have made the Reason-Principle now governing within us inferior in radiance to that which ruled before; the SOUL which later will shine out again is for the present at a feebler power. Enneads III,3,4

And any Reason-Principle may be said to include within itself the Reason-Principle of Matter which therefore it is able to elaborate to its own purposes, either finding it consonant with itself or bestowing upon it the quality which makes it so. The Reason-Principle of an ox does not occur except in connection with the Matter appropriate to the ox-Kind. It must be by such a process that the transmigration, of which we read takes place; the SOUL must lose its nature, the Reason-Principle be transformed; thus there comes the ox-soul which once was Man. Enneads III,3,4

But all sums to a unity, a comprehensive Providence. From the inferior grade downwards is Fate: the upper is Providence alone: for in the Intellectual Kosmos all is Reason-Principle or its Priors-Divine Mind and unmingled Soul-and immediately upon these follows Providence which rises from Divine Mind, is the content of the Unmingled SOUL, and, through this SOUL, is communicated to the Sphere of living things. Enneads III,3,5

1. Some Existents [Absolute Unity and Intellectual-Principle] remain at rest while their Hypostases, or Expressed-Idea, come into being; but, in our view, the SOUL generates by its motion, to which is due the sensitive faculty that in any of its expression-forms Nature and all forms of life down to the vegetable order. Even as it is present in human beings the SOUL carries its Expression-form [Hypostasis] with it, but is not the dominant since it is not the whole man (humanity including the Intellectual Principal, as well): in the vegetable order it is the highest since there is nothing to rival it; but at this phase it is no longer reproductive, or, at least, what it produces is of quite another order; here life ceases; all later production is lifeless. Enneads III,4,1

What does this imply? Everything the SOUL engenders down to this point comes into being shapeless, and takes form by orientation towards its author and supporter: therefore the thing engendered on the further side can be no image of the SOUL, since it is not even alive; it must be an utter Indetermination. No doubt even in things of the nearer order there was indetermination, but within a form; they were undetermined not utterly but only in contrast with their perfect state: at this extreme point we have the utter lack of determination. Let it be raised to its highest degree and it becomes body by taking such shape as serves its scope; then it becomes the recipient of its author and sustainer: this presence in body is the only example of the boundaries of Higher Existents running into the boundary of the Lower. Enneads III,4,1

2. It is of this SOUL especially that we read “All SOUL has care for the Soulless” though the several Souls thus care in their own degree and way. The passage continues “SOUL passes through the entire heavens in forms varying with the variety of place” the sensitive form, the reasoning form, even the vegetative form and this means that in each “place” the phase of the SOUL there dominant carries out its own ends while the rest, not present there, is idle. Enneads III,4,2

For the SOUL is many things, is all, is the Above and the Beneath to the totality of life: and each of us is an Intellectual Kosmos, linked to this world by what is lowest in us, but, by what is the highest, to the Divine Intellect: by all that is intellective we are permanently in that higher realm, but at the fringe of the Intellectual we are fettered to the lower; it is as if we gave forth from it some emanation towards that lower, or, rather some Act, which however leaves our diviner part not in itself diminished. Enneads III,4,3

And the SOUL of the All are we to think that when it turns from this sphere its lower phase similarly withdraws? No: for it never accompanied that lower phase of itself; it never knew any coming, and therefore never came down; it remains unmoved above, and the material frame of the Universe draws close to it, and, as it were, takes light from it, no hindrance to it, in no way troubling it, simply lying unmoved before it. Enneads III,4,4

5. But if the presiding Spirit and the conditions of life are chosen by the SOUL in the overworld, how can anything be left to our independent action here? The answer is that very choice in the over-world is merely an allegorical statement of the SOUL’s tendency and temperament, a total character which it must express wherever it operates. Enneads III,4,5

But if the tendency of the SOUL is the master-force and, in the SOUL, the dominant is that phase which has been brought to the fore by a previous history, then the body stands acquitted of any bad influence upon it? The SOUL’s quality exists before any bodily life; it has exactly what it chose to have; and, we read, it never changes its chosen spirit; therefore neither the good man nor the bad is the product of this life? Is the solution, perhaps, that man is potentially both good and bad but becomes the one or the other by force of act? But what if a man temperamentally good happens to enter a disordered body, or if a perfect body falls to a man naturally vicious? The answer is that the SOUL, to whichever side it inclines, has in some varying degree the power of working the forms of body over to its own temper, since outlying and accidental circumstances cannot overrule the entire decision of a SOUL. Where we read that, after the casting of lots, the sample lives are exhibited with the casual circumstances attending them and that the choice is made upon vision, in accordance with the individual temperament, we are given to understand that the real determination lies with the Souls, who adapt the allotted conditions to their own particular quality. Enneads III,4,5

The Timaeus   indicates the relation of this guiding spirit to ourselves: it is not entirely outside of ourselves; is not bound up with our nature; is not the agent in our action; it belongs to us as belonging to our SOUL, but not in so far as we are particular human beings living a life to which it is superior: take the passage in this sense and it is consistent; understand this Spirit otherwise and there is contradiction. And the description of the Spirit, moreover, as “the power which consummates the chosen life,” is, also, in agreement with this interpretation; for while its presidency saves us from falling much deeper into evil, the only direct agent within us is some thing neither above it nor equal to it but under it: Man cannot cease to be characteristically Man. Enneads III,4,5

6. What, then, is the achieved Sage? One whose Act is determined by the higher phase of the SOUL. Enneads III,4,6

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

On instinct which the Sage finally rectifies in every respect? Not in every respect: the SOUL is so constituted that its life-history and its general tendency will answer not merely to its own nature but also to the conditions among which it acts. Enneads III,4,6

The presiding Spirit, as we read, conducting a SOUL to the Underworld ceases to be its guardian except when the SOUL resumes [in its later choice] the former state of life. Enneads III,4,6

But, meanwhile, what happens to it? From the passage [in the Phaedo  ] which tells how it presents the SOUL to judgement we gather that after the death it resumes the form it had before the birth, but that then, beginning again, it is present to the Souls in their punishment during the period of their renewed life a time not so much of living as of expiation. Enneads III,4,6

We must understand that, while our Souls do contain an Intellectual Kosmos they also contain a subordination of various forms like that of the Kosmic SOUL. The world SOUL is distributed so as to produce the fixed sphere and the planetary circuits corresponding to its graded powers: so with our Souls; they must have their provinces according to their different powers, parallel to those of the World SOUL: each must give out its own special act; released, each will inhabit there a star consonant with the temperament and faculty in act within and constituting the principle of the life; and this star or the next highest power will stand to them as God or more exactly as tutelary spirit. Enneads III,4,6

Emancipated Souls, for the whole period of their sojourn there above, have transcended the Spirit-nature and the entire fatality of birth and all that belongs to this visible world, for they have taken up with them that Hypostasis of the SOUL in which the desire of earthly life is vested. This Hypostasis may be described as the distributable SOUL, for it is what enters bodily forms and multiplies itself by this division among them. But its distribution is not a matter of magnitudes; wherever it is present, there is the same thing present entire; its unity can always be reconstructed: when living things animal or vegetal produce their constant succession of new forms, they do so in virtue of the self-distribution of this phase of the SOUL, for it must be as much distributed among the new forms as the propagating originals are. In some cases it communicates its force by permanent presence the life principle in plants for instance in other cases it withdraws after imparting its virtue for instance where from the putridity of dead animal or vegetable matter a multitudinous birth is produced from one organism. Enneads III,4,6

If the SOUL returns to this Sphere it finds itself under the same Spirit or a new, according to the life it is to live. With this Spirit it embarks in the skiff of the universe: the “spindle of Necessity” then takes control and appoints the seat for the voyage, the seat of the lot in life. Enneads III,4,6

It is sound, I think, to find the primal source of Love in a tendency of the SOUL towards pure beauty, in a recognition, in a kinship, in an unreasoned consciousness of friendly relation. The vile and ugly is in clash, at once, with Nature and with God: Nature produces by looking to the Good, for it looks towards Order which has its being in the consistent total of the good, while the unordered is ugly, a member of the system of evil and besides Nature itself, clearly, springs from the divine realm, from Good and Beauty; and when anything brings delight and the sense of kinship, its very image attracts. Enneads III,5,1

The Heavenly Aphrodite, daughter of Kronos who is no other than the Intellectual Principle must be the SOUL at its divinest: unmingled as the immediate emanation of the unmingled; remaining ever Above, as neither desirous nor capable of descending to this sphere, never having developed the downward tendency, a divine Hypostasis essentially aloof, so unreservedly an Authentic Being as to have no part with Matter and therefore mythically “the unmothered” justly called not Celestial Spirit but God, as knowing no admixture, gathered cleanly within itself. Enneads III,5,2

SOUL then could never fall from its sphere; it is closer held to the divine Mind than the very sun could hold the light it gives forth to radiate about it, an outpouring from itself held firmly to it, still. Enneads III,5,2

But following upon Kronos or, if you will, upon Heaven, the father of Kronos the SOUL directs its Act towards him and holds closely to him and in that love brings forth the Eros through whom it continues to look towards him. This Act of the SOUL has produced an Hypostasis, a Real-Being; and the mother and this Hypostasis her offspring, noble Love gaze together upon Divine Mind. Love, thus, is ever intent upon that other loveliness, and exists to be the medium between desire and that object of desire. It is the eye of the desirer; by its power what loves is enabled to see the loved thing. But it is first; before it becomes the vehicle of vision, it is itself filled with the sight; it is first, therefore, and not even in the same order for desire attains to vision only through the efficacy of Love, while Love, in its own Act, harvests the spectacle of beauty playing immediately above it. Enneads III,5,2

For the parent-Soul was a Real-Being sprung directly from the Act of the Hypostasis that ranks before it: it had life; it was a constituent in the Real-Being of all that authentically is in the Real-Being which looks, rapt, towards the very Highest. That was the first object of its vision; it looked towards it as towards its good, and it rejoiced in the looking; and the quality of what it saw was such that the contemplation could not be void of effect; in virtue of that rapture, of its position in regard to its object, of the intensity of its gaze, the SOUL conceived and brought forth an offspring worthy of itself and of the vision. Thus; there is a strenuous activity of contemplation in the SOUL; there is an emanation towards it from the object contemplated; and Eros is born, the Love which is an eye filled with its vision, a seeing that bears its image with it; Eros taking its name, probably, from the fact that its essential being is due to this horasis, this seeing. Of course Love, as an emotion, will take its name from Love, the Person, since a Real-Being cannot but be prior to what lacks this reality. The mental state will be designated as Love, like the Hypostasis, though it is no more than a particular act directed towards a particular object; but it must not be confused with the Absolute Love, the Divine Being. The Eros that belongs to the supernal SOUL must be of one temper with it; it must itself look aloft as being of the household of that SOUL, dependent upon that SOUL, its very offspring; and therefore caring for nothing but the contemplation of the Gods. Enneads III,5,3

Once that SOUL which is the primal source of light to the heavens is recognized as an Hypostasis standing distinct and aloof it must be admitted that Love too is distinct and aloof though not, perhaps, so loftily celestial a being as the SOUL. Our own best we conceive as inside ourselves and yet something apart; so, we must think of this Love as essentially resident where the unmingling SOUL inhabits. Enneads III,5,3

But besides this purest SOUL, there must be also a SOUL of the All: at once there is another Love the eye with which this second SOUL looks upwards like the supernal Eros engendered by force of desire. This Aphrodite, the secondary SOUL, is of this Universe not SOUL unmingled alone, not SOUL, the Absolute, giving birth, therefore, to the Love concerned with the universal life; no, this is the Love presiding over marriages; but it, also, has its touch of the upward desire; and, in the degree of that striving, it stirs and leads upwards the Souls of the young and every SOUL with which it is incorporated in so far as there is a natural tendency to remembrance of the divine. For every SOUL is striving towards The Good, even the mingling SOUL and that of particular beings, for each holds directly from the divine SOUL, and is its offspring. Enneads III,5,3

4. Does each individual SOUL, then, contain within itself such a Love in essence and substantial reality? Since not only the pure All-Soul but also that of the Universe contain such a Love, it would be difficult to explain why our personal SOUL should not. It must be so, even, with all that has life. Enneads III,5,4

This indwelling love is no other than the Spirit which, as we are told, walks with every being, the affection dominant in each several nature. It implants the characteristic desire; the particular SOUL, strained towards its own natural objects, brings forth its own Eros, the guiding spirit realizing its worth and the quality of its Being. Enneads III,5,4

As the All-Soul contains the Universal Love, so must the single SOUL be allowed its own single Love: and as closely as the single SOUL holds to the All-Soul, never cut off but embraced within it, the two together constituting one principle of life, so the single separate Love holds to the All-Love. Similarly, the individual love keeps with the individual SOUL as that other, the great Love, goes with the All-Soul; and the Love within the All permeates it throughout so that the one Love becomes many, showing itself where it chooses at any moment of the Universe, taking definite shape in these its partial phases and revealing itself at its will. Enneads III,5,4

In the same way we must conceive many Aphrodites in the All, Spirits entering it together with Love, all emanating from an Aphrodite of the All, a train of particular Aphrodites dependent upon the first, and each with the particular Love in attendance: this multiplicity cannot be denied, if SOUL be the mother of Love, and Aphrodite mean SOUL, and Love be an act of a SOUL seeking good. Enneads III,5,4

This Love, then, leader of particular Souls to The Good, is twofold: the Love in the loftier SOUL would be a god ever linking the SOUL to the divine; the Love in the mingling SOUL will be a celestial spirit. Enneads III,5,4

Again, this Kosmos is a compound of body and SOUL; but Aphrodite to Plato is the SOUL itself, therefore Aphrodite would necessarily he a constituent part of Eros, dominant member! A man is the man’s SOUL, if the world is, similarly, the world’s SOUL, then Aphrodite, the SOUL, is identical with Love, the Kosmos! And why should this one spirit, Love, be the Universe to the exclusion of all the others, which certainly are sprung from the same Essential-Being? Our only escape would be to make the Kosmos a complex of Supernals. Enneads III,5,5

What, then, are these spirits? A Celestial is the representative generated by each SOUL when it enters the Kosmos. Enneads III,5,6

And why, by a SOUL entering the Kosmos? Because SOUL pure of the Kosmos generates not a Celestial Spirit but a God; hence it is that we have spoken of Love, offspring of Aphrodite the Pure SOUL, as a God. Enneads III,5,6

But, first what prevents every one of the Celestials from being an Eros, a Love? And why are they not untouched by Matter like the Gods? On the first question: Every Celestial born in the striving of the SOUL towards the good and beautiful is an Eros; and all the Souls within the Kosmos do engender this Celestial; but other Spirit-Beings, equally born from the SOUL of the All, but by other faculties of that SOUL, have other functions: they are for the direct service of the All, and administer particular things to the purpose of the Universe entire. The SOUL of the All must be adequate to all that is and therefore must bring into being spirit powers serviceable not merely in one function but to its entire charge. Enneads III,5,6

The drunkenness of the father Poros or Possession is caused by Nectar, “wine yet not existing”; Love is born before the realm of sense has come into being: Penia had participation in the Intellectual before the lower image of that divine Realm had appeared; she dwelt in that Sphere, but as a mingled being consisting partly of Form but partly also of that indetermination which belongs to the SOUL before she attains the Good and when all her knowledge of Reality is a fore-intimation veiled by the indeterminate and unordered: in this state Poverty brings forth the Hypostasis, Love. Enneads III,5,7

This, then, is a union of Reason with something that is not Reason but a mere indeterminate striving in a being not yet illuminated: the offspring Love, therefore, is not perfect, not self-sufficient, but unfinished, bearing the signs of its parentage, the undirected striving and the self-sufficient Reason. This offspring is a Reason-Principle but not purely so; for it includes within itself an aspiration ill-defined, unreasoned, unlimited it can never be sated as long as it contains within itself that element of the Indeterminate. Love, then, clings to the SOUL, from which it sprung as from the principle of its Being, but it is lessened by including an element of the Reason-Principle which did not remain self-concentrated but blended with the indeterminate, not, it is true, by immediate contact but through its emanation. Love, therefore, is like a goad; it is without resource in itself; even winning its end, it is poor again. Enneads III,5,7

Each human being is set under his own Spirit-Guides, but this is mere blank possession when they ignore their own and live by some other spirit adopted by them as more closely attuned to the operative part of the SOUL in them. Those that go after evil are natures that have merged all the Love-Principles within them in the evil desires springing in their hearts and allowed the right reason, which belongs to our kind, to fall under the spell of false ideas from another source. Enneads III,5,7

All the natural Loves, all that serve the ends of Nature, are good; in a lesser SOUL, inferior in rank and in scope; in the greater SOUL, superior; but all belong to the order of Being. Those forms of Love that do not serve the purposes of Nature are merely accidents attending on perversion: in no sense are they Real-Beings or even manifestations of any Reality; for they are no true issue of SOUL; they are merely accompaniments of a spiritual flaw which the SOUL automatically exhibits in the total of disposition and conduct. Enneads III,5,7

In a word; all that is truly good in a SOUL acting to the purposes of nature and within its appointed order, all this is Real-Being: anything else is alien, no act of the SOUL, but merely something that happens to it: a parallel may be found in false mentation, notions behind which there is no reality as there is in the case of authentic ideas, the eternal, the strictly defined, in which there is at once an act of true knowing, a truly knowable object and authentic existence and this not merely in the Absolute, but also in the particular being that is occupied by the authentically knowable and by the Intellectual-Principle manifest in every several form. Enneads III,5,7

8. But what are we to understand by this Zeus with the garden into which, we are told, Poros or Wealth entered? And what is the garden? We have seen that the Aphrodite of the Myth is the SOUL and that Poros, Wealth, is the Reason-Principle of the Universe: we have still to explain Zeus and his garden. Enneads III,5,8

We cannot take Zeus to be the SOUL, which we have agreed is represented by Aphrodite. Enneads III,5,8

Plato, who must be our guide in this question, speaks in the Phaedrus   of this God, Zeus, as the Great Leader though elsewhere he seems to rank him as one of three but in the Philebus   he speaks more plainly when he says that there is in Zeus not only a royal SOUL, but also a royal Intellect. Enneads III,5,8

As a mighty Intellect and SOUL, he must be a principle of Cause; he must be the highest for several reasons but especially because to be King and Leader is to be the chief cause: Zeus then is the Intellectual Principle. Aphrodite, his daughter, issue of him, dwelling with him, will be SOUL, her very name Aphrodite [= the habra, delicate] indicating the beauty and gleam and innocence and delicate grace of the SOUL. Enneads III,5,8

And if we take the male gods to represent the Intellectual Powers and the female gods to be their souls to every Intellectual Principle its companion SOUL we are forced, thus also, to make Aphrodite the SOUL of Zeus; and the identification is confirmed by Priests and Theologians who consider Aphrodite and Hera one and the same and call Aphrodite’s star the star of Hera. Enneads III,5,8

9. This Poros, Possession, then, is the Reason-Principle of all that exists in the Intellectual Realm and in the supreme Intellect; but being more diffused, kneaded out as it were, it must touch SOUL, be in SOUL, [as the next lower principle]. Enneads III,5,9

For, all that lies gathered in the Intellect is native to it: nothing enters from without; but “Poros intoxicated” is some Power deriving satisfaction outside itself: what, then, can we understand by this member of the Supreme filled with Nectar but a Reason-Principle falling from a loftier essence to a lower? This means that the Reason-Principle upon “the birth of Aphrodite” left the Intellectual for the SOUL, breaking into the garden of Zeus. Enneads III,5,9

A garden is a place of beauty and a glory of wealth: all the loveliness that Zeus maintains takes its splendour from the Reason-Principle within him; for all this beauty is the radiation of the Divine Intellect upon the Divine SOUL, which it has penetrated. What could the Garden of Zeus indicate but the images of his Being and the splendours of his glory? And what could these divine splendours and beauties be but the Ideas streaming from him? These Reason-Principles this Poros who is the lavishness, the abundance of Beauty are at one and are made manifest; this is the Nectar-drunkenness. For the Nectar of the gods can be no other than what the god-nature essentially demands; and this is the Reason pouring down from the divine Mind. Enneads III,5,9

On this principle we have, here, SOUL dwelling with the divine Intelligence, breaking away from it, and yet again being filled to satiety with the divine Ideas the beautiful abounding in all plenty, so that every splendour become manifest in it with the images of whatever is lovely SOUL which, taken as one all, is Aphrodite, while in it may be distinguished the Reason-Principles summed under the names of Plenty and Possession, produced by the downflow of the Nectar of the over realm. The splendours contained in SOUL are thought of as the garden of Zeus with reference to their existing within Life; and Poros sleeps in this garden in the sense of being sated and heavy with its produce. Life is eternally manifest, an eternal existent among the existences, and the banqueting of the gods means no more than that they have their Being in that vital blessedness. And Love “born at the banquet   of the gods” has of necessity been eternally in existence, for it springs from the intention of the SOUL towards its Best, towards the Good; as long as SOUL has been, Love has been. Enneads III,5,10

It is said then to spring from Poverty and Possession in the sense that Lack and Aspiration and the Memory of the Ideal Principles, all present together in the SOUL, produce that Act towards The Good which is Love. Its Mother is Poverty, since striving is for the needy; and this Poverty is Matter, for Matter is the wholly poor: the very ambition towards the good is a sign of existing indetermination; there is a lack of shape and of Reason in that which must aspire towards the Good, and the greater degree of effort implies the lower depth of materiality. A thing aspiring towards the Good is an Ideal-principle only when the striving [with attainment] will leave it still unchanged in Kind: when it must take in something other than itself, its aspiration is the presentment of Matter to the incoming power. Enneads III,5,10

Thus Love is at once, in some degree a thing of Matter and at the same time a Celestial, sprung of the SOUL; for Love lacks its Good but, from its very birth, strives towards It. Enneads III,5,10

1. In our theory, feelings are not states; they are action upon experience, action accompanied by judgement: the states, we hold, are seated elsewhere; they may be referred to the vitalized body; the judgement resides in the SOUL, and is distinct from the state for, if it is not distinct, another judgement is demanded, one that is distinct, and, so, we may be sent back for ever. Enneads III,6,1

For ourselves, it could never be in our system or in our liking to bring the SOUL down to participation in such modes and modifications as the warmth and cold of material frames. Enneads III,6,1

What is known as the Impressionable faculty of the SOUL to pathetikon would need to be identified: we must satisfy ourselves as to whether this too, like the SOUL as a unity, is to be classed as immune or, on the contrary, as precisely the only part susceptible of being affected; this question, however, may be held over; we proceed to examine its preliminaries. Enneads III,6,1

Even in the superior phase of the SOUL that which precedes the impressionable faculty and any sensation how can we reconcile immunity with the indwelling of vice, false notions, ignorance? Inviolability; and yet likings and dislikings, the SOUL enjoying, grieving, angry, grudging, envying, desiring, never at peace but stirring and shifting with everything that confronts it! Enneads III,6,1

If the SOUL were material and had magnitude, it would be difficult, indeed quite impossible, to make it appear to be immune, unchangeable, when any of such emotions lodge in it. And even considering it as an Authentic Being, devoid of magnitude and necessarily indestructible, we must be very careful how we attribute any such experiences to it or we will find ourselves unconsciously making it subject to dissolution. If its essence is a Number or as we hold a Reason-Principle, under neither head could it be susceptible of feeling. We can think, only, that it entertains unreasoned reasons and experiences unexperienced, all transmuted from the material frames, foreign and recognized only by parallel, so that it possesses in a kind of non-possession and knows affection without being affected. How this can be demands enquiry. Enneads III,6,1

2. Let us begin with virtue and vice in the SOUL. What has really occurred when, as we say, vice is present? In speaking of extirpating evil and implanting goodness, of introducing order and beauty to replace a former ugliness, we talk in terms of real things in the SOUL. Enneads III,6,2

Now when we make virtue a harmony, and vice a breach of harmony, we accept an opinion approved by the ancients; and the theory helps us decidedly to our solution. For if virtue is simply a natural concordance among the phases of the SOUL, and vice simply a discord, then there is no further question of any foreign presence; harmony would be the result of every distinct phase or faculty joining in, true to itself; discord would mean that not all chimed in at their best and truest. Consider, for example, the performers in a choral dance; they sing together though each one has his particular part, and sometimes one voice is heard while the others are silent; and each brings to the chorus something of his own; it is not enough that all lift their voices together; each must sing, choicely, his own part to the music set for him. Exactly so in the case of the SOUL; there will be harmony when each faculty performs its appropriate part. Enneads III,6,2

Yes: but this very harmony constituting the virtue of the SOUL must depend upon a previous virtue, that of each several faculty within itself; and before there can be the vice of discord there must be the vice of the single parts, and these can be bad only by the actual presence of vice as they can be good only by the presence of virtue. It is true that no presence is affirmed when vice is identified with ignorance in the reasoning faculty of the SOUL; ignorance is not a positive thing; but in the presence of false judgements the main cause of vice must it not be admitted that something positive has entered into the SOUL, something perverting the reasoning faculty? So, the initiative faculty; is it not, itself, altered as one varies between timidity and boldness? And the desiring faculty, similarly, as it runs wild or accepts control? Our teaching is that when the particular faculty is sound it performs the reasonable act of its essential nature, obeying the reasoning faculty in it which derives from the Intellectual Principle and communicates to the rest. And this following of reason is not the acceptance of an imposed shape; it is like using the eyes; the SOUL sees by its act, that of looking towards reason. The faculty of sight in the performance of its act is essentially what it was when it lay latent; its act is not a change in it, but simply its entering into the relation that belongs to its essential character; it knows that is, sees without suffering any change: so, precisely, the reasoning phase of the SOUL stands towards the Intellectual Principle; this it sees by its very essence; this vision is its knowing faculty; it takes in no stamp, no impression; all that enters it is the object of vision possessed, once more, without possession; it possesses by the fact of knowing but “without possession” in the sense that there is no incorporation of anything left behind by the object of vision, like the impression of the seal on sealing-wax. Enneads III,6,2

But how explain the alternation of timidity and daring in the initiative faculty? Timidity would come by the failure to look towards the Reason-Principle or by looking towards some inferior phase of it or by some defect in the organs of action some lack or flaw in the bodily equipment or by outside prevention of the natural act or by the mere absence of adequate stimulus: boldness would arise from the reverse conditions: neither implies any change, or even any experience, in the SOUL. Enneads III,6,2

So with the faculty of desire: what we call loose living is caused by its acting unaccompanied; it has done all of itself; the other faculties, whose business it is to make their presence felt in control and to point the right way, have lain in abeyance; the Seer in the SOUL was occupied elsewhere, for, though not always at least sometimes, it has leisure for a certain degree of contemplation of other concerns. Enneads III,6,2

Often, moreover, the vice of the desiring faculty will be merely some ill condition of the body, and its virtue, bodily soundness; thus there would again be no question of anything imported into the SOUL. Enneads III,6,2

3. But how do we explain likings and aversions? Sorrow, too, and anger and pleasure, desire and fear are these not changes, affectings, present and stirring within the SOUL? This question cannot be ignored. To deny that changes take place and are intensely felt is in sharp contradiction to obvious facts. But, while we recognize this, we must make very sure what it is that changes. To represent the SOUL or Mind as being the seat of these emotions is not far removed from making it blush or turn pale; it is to forget that while the SOUL or Mind is the means, the effect takes place in the distinct organism, the animated body. Enneads III,6,3

At the idea of disgrace, the shame is in the SOUL; but the body is occupied by the SOUL not to trouble about words is, at any rate, close to it and very different from soulless matter; and so, is affected in the blood, mobile in its nature. Fear begins in the mind; the pallor is simply the withdrawal of the blood inwards. So in pleasure, the elation is mental, but makes itself felt in the body; the purely mental phase has not reached the point of sensation: the same is true of pain. So desire is ignored in the SOUL where the impulse takes its rise; what comes outward thence, the Sensibility knows. Enneads III,6,3

When we speak of the SOUL or Mind being moved as in desire, reasoning, judging we do not mean that it is driven into its act; these movements are its own acts. Enneads III,6,3

To bring the matter to the point: put it that life, tendency, are no changements; that memories are not forms stamped upon the mind, that notions are not of the nature of impressions on sealing-wax; we thence draw the general conclusion that in all such states and movements the SOUL, or Mind, is unchanged in substance and in essence, that virtue and vice are not something imported into the SOUL as heat and cold, blackness or whiteness are importations into body but that, in all this relation, matter and spirit are exactly and comprehensively contraries. Enneads III,6,3

4. We have, however, still to examine what is called the affective phase of the SOUL. This has, no doubt, been touched upon above where we dealt with the passions in general as grouped about the initiative phase of the SOUL and the desiring faculty in its effort to shape things to its choice: but more is required; we must begin by forming a clear idea of what is meant by this affective faculty of the SOUL. Enneads III,6,4

Now among these affections we must distinguish. Some are pivoted upon judgements; thus, a Man judging his death to be at hand may feel fear; foreseeing some fortunate turn of events, he is happy: the opinion lies in one sphere; the affection is stirred in another. Sometimes the affections take the lead and automatically bring in the notion which thus becomes present to the appropriate faculty: but as we have explained, an act of opinion does not introduce any change into the SOUL or Mind: what happens is that from the notion of some impending evil is produced the quite separate thing, fear, and this fear, in turn, becomes known in that part of the Mind which is said under such circumstances to harbour fear. Enneads III,6,4

But what is the action of this fear upon the Mind? The general answer is that it sets up trouble and confusion before an evil anticipated. It should, however, be quite clear that the SOUL or Mind is the seat of all imaginative representation both the higher representation known as opinion or judgement and the lower representation which is not so much a judgement as a vague notion unattended by discrimination, something resembling the action by which, as is believed, the “Nature” of common speech produces, unconsciously, the objects of the partial sphere. It is equally certain that in all that follows upon the mental act or state, the disturbance, confined to the body, belongs to the sense-order; trembling, pallor, inability to speak, have obviously nothing to do with the spiritual portion of the being. The SOUL, in fact, would have to be described as corporeal if it were the seat of such symptoms: besides, in that case the trouble would not even reach the body since the only transmitting principle, oppressed by sensation, jarred out of itself, would be inhibited. Enneads III,6,4

None the less, there is an affective phase of the SOUL or Mind and this is not corporeal; it can be, only, some kind of Ideal-form. Enneads III,6,4

The nature of an Ideal-form is to be, of itself, an activity; it operates by its mere presence: it is as if Melody itself plucked the strings. The affective phase of the SOUL or Mind will be the operative cause of all affection; it originates the movement either under the stimulus of some sense-presentment or independently and it is a question to be examined whether the judgement leading to the movement operates from above or not but the affective phase itself remains unmoved like Melody dictating music. The causes originating the movement may be likened to the musician; what is moved is like the strings of his instrument, and once more, the Melodic Principle itself is not affected, but only the strings, though, however much the musician desired it, he could not pluck the strings except under dictation from the principle of Melody. Enneads III,6,4

5. But why have we to call in Philosophy to make the SOUL immune if it is thus immune from the beginning? Because representations attack it at what we call the affective phase and cause a resulting experience, a disturbance, to which disturbance is joined the image of threatened evil: this amounts to an affection and Reason seeks to extinguish it, to ban it as destructive to the well-being of the SOUL which by the mere absence of such a condition is immune, the one possible cause of affection not being present. Enneads III,6,5

Take it that some such affections have engendered appearances presented before the SOUL or Mind from without but taken [for practical purposes] to be actual experiences within it then Philosophy’s task is like that of a man who wishes to throw off the shapes presented in dreams, and to this end recalls to waking condition the mind that is breeding them. Enneads III,6,5

But what can be meant by the purification of a SOUL that has never been stained and by the separation of the SOUL from a body to which it is essentially a stranger? The purification of the SOUL is simply to allow it to be alone; it is pure when it keeps no company; when it looks to nothing without itself; when it entertains no alien thoughts be the mode or origin of such notions or affections what they may, a subject on which we have already touched when it no longer sees in the world of image, much less elaborates images into veritable affections. Is it not a true purification to turn away towards the exact contrary of earthly things? Separation, in the same way, is the condition of a SOUL no longer entering into the body to lie at its mercy; it is to stand as a light, set in the midst of trouble but unperturbed through all. Enneads III,6,5

In the particular case of the affective phase of the SOUL, purification is its awakening from the baseless visions which beset it, the refusal to see them; its separation consists in limiting its descent towards the lower and accepting no picture thence, and of course in the banning for its part too of all which the higher SOUL ignores when it has arisen from the trouble storm and is no longer bound to the flesh by the chains of sensuality and of multiplicity but has subdued to itself the body and its entire surrounding so that it holds sovereignty, tranquilly, over all. Enneads III,6,5

But body, a non-existence? Matter, on which all this universe rises, a non-existence? Mountain and rock, the wide solid earth, all that resists, all that can be struck and driven, surely all proclaims the real existence of the corporeal? And how, it will be asked, can we, on the contrary, attribute Being, and the only Authentic Being, to entities like SOUL and Intellect, things having no weight or pressure, yielding to no force, offering no resistance, things not even visible? Yet even the corporeal realm witnesses for us; the resting earth has certainly a scantier share in Being than belongs to what has more motion and less solidity and less than belongs to its own most upward element, for fire begins, already, to flit up and away outside of the body-kind. Enneads III,6,6

Thus far we have been meeting those who, on the evidence of thrust and resistance, identify body with real being and find assurance of truth in the phantasms that reach us through the senses, those, in a word, who, like dreamers, take for actualities the figments of their sleeping vision. The sphere of sense, the SOUL in its slumber; for all of the SOUL that is in body is asleep and the true getting-up is not bodily but from the body: in any movement that takes the body with it there is no more than a passage from sleep to sleep, from bed to bed; the veritable waking or rising is from corporeal things; for these, belonging to the Kind directly opposed to SOUL, present to it what is directly opposed to its essential existence: their origin, their flux, and their perishing are the warning of their exclusion from the Kind whose Being is Authentic. Enneads III,6,6

Matter is no SOUL; it is not Intellect, is not Life, is no Ideal-Principle, no Reason-Principle; it is no limit or bound, for it is mere indetermination; it is not a power, for what does it produce? It lives on the farther side of all these categories and so has no tide to the name of Being. It will be more plausibly called a non-being, and this in the sense not of movement [away from Being] or station (in Not-Being) but of veritable Not-Being, so that it is no more than the image and phantasm of Mass, a bare aspiration towards substantial existence; it is stationary but not in the sense of having position, it is in itself invisible, eluding all effort to observe it, present where no one can look, unseen for all our gazing, ceaselessly presenting contraries in the things based upon it; it is large and small, more and less, deficient and excessive; a phantasm unabiding and yet unable to withdraw not even strong enough to withdraw, so utterly has it failed to accept strength from the Intellectual Principle, so absolute its lack of all Being. Enneads III,6,7

9. In answer: It must, first, be noted that there are a variety of modes in which an object may be said to be present to another or to exist in another. There is a “presence” which acts by changing the object for good or for ill as we see in the case of bodies, especially where there is life. But there is also a “presence” which acts, towards good or ill, with no modification of the object, as we have indicated in the case of the SOUL. Then there is the case represented by the stamping of a design upon wax, where the “presence” of the added pattern causes no modification in the substance nor does its obliteration diminish it. And there is the example of Light whose presence does not even bring change of pattern to the object illuminated. A stone becoming cold does not change its nature in the process; it remains the stone it was. A drawing does not cease to be a drawing for being coloured. Enneads III,6,9

In that example, no doubt, the mental representation though it seems to have a wide and unchecked control is an image, while the SOUL [Mind] is in its nature not an image [but a Reality]: none the less the SOUL or Mind certainly stands to the concept as Matter, or in some analogous relation. The representation, however, does not cover the Mind over; on the contrary it is often expelled by some activity there; however urgently it presses in, it never effects such an obliteration as to be taken for the SOUL; it is confronted there by indwelling powers, by Reason-Principles, which repel all such attack. Enneads III,6,15

Matter feebler far than the SOUL for any exercise of power, and possessing no phase of the Authentic Existents, not even in possession of its own falsity lacks the very means of manifesting itself, utter void as it is; it becomes the means by which other things appear, but it cannot announce its own presence. Penetrating thought may arrive at it, discriminating it from Authentic Existence; then, it is discerned as something abandoned by all that really is, by even the dimmest semblants of being, as a thing dragged towards every shape and property and appearing to follow yet in fact not even following. Enneads III,6,15

The [Universal] SOUL containing the Ideal Principles of Real-Beings, and itself an Ideal Principle includes all in concentration within itself, just as the Ideal Principle of each particular entity is complete and self-contained: it, therefore, sees these principles of sensible things because they are turned, as it were, towards it and advancing to it: but it cannot harbour them in their plurality, for it cannot depart from its Kind; it sees them, therefore, stripped of Mass. Matter, on the contrary, destitute of resisting power since it has no Act of its own and is a mere shadow, can but accept all that an active power may choose to send. In what is thus sent, from the Reason-Principle in the Intellectual Realm, there is already contained a degree of the partial object that is to be formed: in the image-making impulse within the Reason-Principle there is already a step [towards the lower manifestation] or we may put it that the downward movement from the Reason-Principle is a first form of the partial: utter absence of partition would mean no movement but [sterile] repose. Matter cannot be the home of all things in concentration as the SOUL is: if it were so, it would belong to the Intellective Sphere. It must be all-recipient but not in that partless mode. It is to be the Place of all things, and it must therefore extend universally, offer itself to all things, serve to all interval: thus it will be a thing unconfined to any moment [of space or time] but laid out in submission to all that is to be. Enneads III,6,18

In beings of SOUL and body, the affection occurs in the body, modified according to the qualities and powers presiding at the act of change: in all such dissolution of constituent parts, in the new combinations, in all variation from the original structure, the affection is bodily, the SOUL or Mind having no more than an accompanying knowledge of the more drastic changes, or perhaps not even that. [Body is modified: Mind knows] but the Matter concerned remains unaffected; heat enters, cold leaves it, and it is unchanged because neither Principle is associated with it as friend or enemy. Enneads III,6,19

Things and Beings in the Time order even when to all appearance complete, as a body is when fit to harbour a SOUL are still bound to sequence; they are deficient to the extent of that thing, Time, which they need: let them have it, present to them and running side by side with them, and they are by that very fact incomplete; completeness is attributed to them only by an accident of language. Enneads III,7,6

We may, therefore, very well think that it existed before the SOUL or Mind that estimates it if, indeed, it is not to be thought to take its origin from the SOUL for no measurement by anything is necessary to its existence; measured or not, it has the full extent of its being. Enneads III,7,9

And suppose it to be true that the SOUL is the appraiser, using Magnitude as the measuring standard, how does this help us to the conception of Time? Enneads III,7,9

For the SOUL contained an unquiet faculty, always desirous of translating elsewhere what it saw in the Authentic Realm, and it could not bear to retain within itself all the dense fullness of its possession. Enneads III,7,11

A Seed is at rest; the nature-principle within, uncoiling outwards, makes way towards what seems to it a large life; but by that partition it loses; it was a unity self-gathered, and now, in going forth from itself, it fritters its unity away; it advances into a weaker greatness. It is so with this faculty of the SOUL, when it produces the Kosmos known to sense the mimic of the Divine Sphere, moving not in the very movement of the Divine but in its similitude, in an effort to reproduce that of the Divine. To bring this Kosmos into being, the SOUL first laid aside its eternity and clothed itself with Time; this world of its fashioning it then gave over to be a servant to Time, making it at every point a thing of Time, setting all its progressions within the bournes of Time. For the Kosmos moves only in SOUL the only Space within the range of the All open to it to move in and therefore its Movement has always been in the Time which inheres in SOUL. Enneads III,7,11

Putting forth its energy in act after act, in a constant progress of novelty, the SOUL produces succession as well as act; taking up new purposes added to the old it brings thus into being what had not existed in that former period when its purpose was still dormant and its life was not as it since became: the life is changed and that change carries with it a change of Time. Time, then, is contained in differentiation of Life; the ceaseless forward movement of Life brings with it unending Time; and Life as it achieves its stages constitutes past Time. Enneads III,7,11

Would it, then, be sound to define Time as the Life of the SOUL in movement as it passes from one stage of act or experience to another? Yes; for Eternity, we have said, is Life in repose, unchanging, self-identical, always endlessly complete; and there is to be an image of Eternity-Time such an image as this lower All presents of the Higher Sphere. Therefore over against that higher life there must be another life, known by the same name as the more veritable life of the SOUL; over against that movement of the Intellectual SOUL there must be the movement of some partial phase; over against that identity, unchangeableness and stability there must be that which is not constant in the one hold but puts forth multitudinous acts; over against that oneness without extent or interval there must be an image of oneness, a unity of link and succession; over against the immediately infinite and all-comprehending, that which tends, yes, to infinity but by tending to a perpetual futurity; over against the Whole in concentration, there must be that which is to be a Whole by stages never final. The lesser must always be working towards the increase of its Being, this will be its imitation of what is immediately complete, self-realized, endless without stage: only thus can its Being reproduce that of the Higher. Enneads III,7,11

Time, however, is not to be conceived as outside of SOUL; Eternity is not outside of the Authentic Existent: nor is it to be taken as a sequence or succession to SOUL, any more than Eternity is to the Divine. It is a thing seen upon SOUL, inherent, coeval to it, as Eternity to the Intellectual Realm. Enneads III,7,11

12. We are brought thus to the conception of a Natural-Principle Time a certain expanse [a quantitative phase] of the Life of the SOUL, a principle moving forward by smooth and uniform changes following silently upon each other a Principle, then, whose Act is sequent. Enneads III,7,12

But let us conceive this power of the SOUL to turn back and withdraw from the life-course which it now maintains, from the continuous and unending activity of an ever-existent SOUL not self-contained or self-intent but concerned about doing and engendering: imagine it no longer accomplishing any Act, setting a pause to this work it has inaugurated; let this outgoing phase of the SOUL become once more, equally with the rest, turned to the Supreme, to Eternal Being, to the tranquilly stable. Enneads III,7,12

What would then exist but Eternity? All would remain in unity; how could there be any diversity of things? What Earlier or Later would there be, what long-lasting or short-lasting? What ground would lie ready to the SOUL’s operation but the Supreme in which it has its Being? Or, indeed, what operative tendency could it have even to That since a prior separation is the necessary condition of tendency? The very sphere of the Universe would not exist; for it cannot antedate Time: it, too, has its Being and its Movement in Time; and if it ceased to move, the Soul-Act [which is the essence of Time] continuing, we could measure the period of its Repose by that standard outside it. Enneads III,7,12

If, then, the SOUL withdrew, sinking itself again into its primal unity, Time would disappear: the origin of Time, clearly, is to be traced to the first stir of the SOUL’s tendency towards the production of the sensible universe with the consecutive act ensuing. This is how “Time” as we read “came into Being simultaneously” with this All: the SOUL begot at once the Universe and Time; in that activity of the SOUL this Universe sprang into being; the activity is Time, the Universe is a content of Time. No doubt it will be urged that we read also of the orbit of the Stars being Times”: but do not forget what follows; “the stars exist,” we are told, “for the display and delimitation of Time,” and “that there may be a manifest Measure.” No indication of Time could be derived from [observation of] the SOUL; no portion of it can be seen or handled, so it could not be measured in itself, especially when there was as yet no knowledge of counting; therefore the SOUL brings into being night and day; in their difference is given Duality from which, we read, arises the concept of Number. Enneads III,7,12

Upon the point of the means by which it is known, he remarks that the Circuit advances an infinitesimal distance for every infinitesimal segment of Time so that from that observation it is possible to estimate what the Time is, how much it amounts to: but when his purpose is to explain its essential nature he tells us that it sprang into Being simultaneously with the Heavenly system, a reproduction of Eternity, its image in motion, Time necessarily unresting as the Life with which it must keep pace: and “coeval with the Heavens” because it is this same Life [of the Divine SOUL] which brings the Heavens also into being; Time and the Heavens are the work of the one Life. Enneads III,7,13

It is the height of absurdity to fasten on the succession of earlier and later occurring in the life and movement of this sphere of ours, to declare that it must be some definite thing and to call it Time, while denying the reality of the more truly existent Movement, that of the SOUL, which has also its earlier and later: it cannot be reasonable to recognize succession in the case of the Soulless Movement and so to associate Time with that while ignoring succession and the reality of Time in the Movement from which the other takes its imitative existence; to ignore, that is, the very Movement in which succession first appears, a self-actuated movement which, engendering its own every operation, is the source of all that follows upon itself, to all which, it is the cause of existence, at once, and of every consequent. Enneads III,7,13

But: we treat the Kosmic Movement as overarched by that of the SOUL and bring it under Time; yet we do not set under Time that Soul-Movement itself with all its endless progression: what is our explanation of this paradox? Simply, that the Soul-Movement has for its Prior Eternity which knows neither its progression nor its extension. The descent towards Time begins with this Soul-Movement; it made Time and harbours Time as a concomitant to its Act. Enneads III,7,13

And this is how Time is omnipresent: that SOUL is absent from no fragment of the Kosmos just as our SOUL is absent from no particle of ourselves. As for those who pronounce Time a thing of no substantial existence, of no reality, they clearly belie God Himself whenever they say “He was” or “He will be”: for the existence indicated by the “was and will be” can have only such reality as belongs to that in which it is said to be situated: but this school demands another type of argument. Enneads III,7,13

You must relate the body, carried forward during a given period of Time, to a certain quantity of Movement causing the progress and to the Time it takes, and that again to the Movement, equal in extension, within the man’s SOUL. Enneads III,7,13

But the Movement within the SOUL to what are you to (relate) refer that? Let your choice fall where it may, from this point there is nothing but the unextended: and this is the primarily existent, the container to all else, having itself no container, brooking none. Enneads III,7,13

And, as with Man’s SOUL, so with the SOUL of the All. Enneads III,7,13

Time in every SOUL of the order of the All-Soul, present in like form in all; for all the Souls are the one SOUL. Enneads III,7,13

Now what does this tell us? It tells: that what we know as Nature is a SOUL, offspring of a yet earlier SOUL of more powerful life; that it possesses, therefore, in its repose, a vision within itself; that it has no tendency upward nor even downward but is at peace, steadfast, in its own Essence; that, in this immutability accompanied by what may be called Self-Consciousness, it possesses within the measure of its possibility a knowledge of the realm of subsequent things perceived in virtue of that understanding and consciousness; and, achieving thus a resplendent and delicious spectacle, has no further aim. Enneads III,8,4

5. This discussion of Nature has shown us how the origin of things is a Contemplation: we may now take the matter up to the higher SOUL; we find that the Contemplation pursued by this, its instinct towards knowing and enquiring, the birth pangs set up by the knowledge it attains, its teeming fullness, have caused it in itself, all one object of Vision to produce another Vision [that of the Kosmos]: it is just as a given science, complete in itself, becomes the source and cause of what might be called a minor science in the student who attains to some partial knowledge of all its divisions. But the visible objects and the objects of intellectual contemplation of this later creation are dim and helpless by the side of the content of the SOUL. Enneads III,8,5

The primal phase of the SOUL inhabitant of the Supreme and, by its participation in the Supreme, filled and illuminated remains unchangeably There; but in virtue of that first participation, that of the primal participant, a secondary phase also participates in the Supreme, and this secondary goes forth ceaselessly as Life streaming from Life; for energy runs through the Universe and there is no extremity at which it dwindles out. But, travel as far as it may, it never draws that first part of itself from the place whence the outgoing began: if it did, it would no longer be everywhere [its continuous Being would be broken and] it would be present at the end, only, of its course. Enneads III,8,5

In sum, then: The SOUL is to extend throughout the Universe, no spot void of its energy: but, a prior is always different from its secondary, and energy is a secondary, rising as it must from contemplation or act; act, however, is not at this stage existent since it depends upon contemplation: therefore the SOUL, while its phases differ, must, in all of them, remain a contemplation and what seems to be an act done under contemplation must be in reality that weakened contemplation of which we have spoken: the engendered must respect the Kind, but in weaker form, dwindled in the descent. Enneads III,8,5

All goes softly since nothing here demands the parade of thought or act upon external things: it is a SOUL in vision and, by this vision, creating its own subsequent this Principle [of Nature], itself also contemplative but in the feebler degree since it lies further away and cannot reproduce the quality or experiences of its prior a Vision creates the Vision. Enneads III,8,5

[Such creative contemplation is not inexplicable] for no limit exists either to contemplation or to its possible objects, and this explains how the SOUL is universal: where can this thing fail to be, which is one identical thing in every SOUL; Vision is not cabined within the bournes of magnitude. Enneads III,8,5

This, of course, does not mean that the SOUL is present at the same strength in each and every place and thing any more than that it is at the same strength in each of its own phases. Enneads III,8,5

The Charioteer [the Leading Principle of the SOUL, in the Phaedrus Myth] gives the two horses [its two dissonant faculties] what he has seen and they, taking that gift, showed that they were hungry for what made that vision; there was something lacking to them: if in their desire they acted, their action aimed at what they craved for and that was vision, and an object of vision. Enneads III,8,5

Further: suppose they succeed; they desired a certain thing to come about, not in order to be unaware of it but to know it, to see it present before the mind: their success is the laying up of a vision. We act for the sake of some good; this means not for something to remain outside ourselves, not in order that we possess nothing but that we may hold the good of the action. And hold it, where? Where but in the mind? Thus once more, action is brought back to contemplation: for [mind or] SOUL is a Reason-Principle and anything that one lays up in the SOUL can be no other than a Reason-Principle, a silent thing, the more certainly such a principle as the impression made is the deeper. Enneads III,8,6

As long as duality persists, the two lie apart, parallel as it were to each other; there is a pair in which the two elements remain strange to one another, as when Ideal-Principles laid up in the mind or SOUL remain idle. Enneads III,8,6

Hence the Idea must not be left to lie outside but must be made one identical thing with the SOUL of the novice so that he finds it really his own. Enneads III,8,6

The SOUL, once domiciled within that Idea and brought to likeness with it, becomes productive, active; what it always held by its primary nature it now grasps with knowledge and applies in deed, so becoming, as it were, a new thing and, informed as it now is by the purely intellectual, it sees [in its outgoing act] as a stranger looking upon a strange world. It was, no doubt, essentially a Reason-Principle, even an Intellectual Principle; but its function is to see a [lower] realm which these do not see. Enneads III,8,6

The SOUL has a greater content than Nature has and therefore it is more tranquil; it is more nearly complete and therefore more contemplative. It is, however, not perfect, and is all the more eager to penetrate the object of contemplation, and it seeks the vision that comes by observation. It leaves its native realm and busies itself elsewhere; then it returns, and it possesses its vision by means of that phase of itself from which it had parted. The self-indwelling SOUL inclines less to such experiences. Enneads III,8,6

8. From this basis we proceed: In the advancing stages of Contemplation rising from that in Nature, to that in the SOUL and thence again to that in the Intellectual-Principle itself the object contemplated becomes progressively a more and more intimate possession of the Contemplating Beings, more and more one thing with them; and in the advanced SOUL the objects of knowledge, well on the way towards the Intellectual-Principle, are close to identity with their container. Enneads III,8,8

Hence we may conclude that, in the Intellectual-Principle Itself, there is complete identity of Knower and Known, and this not by way of domiciliation, as in the case of even the highest SOUL, but by Essence, by the fact that, there, no distinction exists between Being and Knowing; we cannot stop at a principle containing separate parts; there must always be a yet higher, a principle above all such diversity. Enneads III,8,8

Now admitting the existence of a living thing that is at once a Thought and its object, it must be a Life distinct from the vegetative or sensitive life or any other life determined by SOUL. Enneads III,8,8

Now when we reach a One the stationary Principle in the tree, in the animal, in SOUL, in the All we have in every case the most powerful, the precious element: when we come to the One in the Authentically Existent Beings their Principle and source and potentiality shall we lose confidence and suspect it of being-nothing? Certainly this Absolute is none of the things of which it is the source its nature is that nothing can be affirmed of it not existence, not essence, not life since it is That which transcends all these. But possess yourself of it by the very elimination of Being and you hold a marvel. Thrusting forward to This, attaining, and resting in its content, seek to grasp it more and more understanding it by that intuitive thrust alone, but knowing its greatness by the Beings that follow upon it and exist by its power. Enneads III,8,10

The entities thus particularized from the unity are products of the Intellectual-Principle which thus would be, to that extent, the separating agent. On the other hand it remains in itself, indivisible; division begins with its offspring which, of course, means with Souls: and thus a SOUL with its particular Souls may be the separative principle. Enneads III,9,1

This is what is conveyed where we are told that the separation is the work of the third Principle and begins within the Third: for to this Third belongs the discursive reasoning which is no function of the Intellectual-Principle but characteristic of its secondary, of SOUL, to which precisely, divided by its own Kind, belongs the Act of division. Enneads III,9,1

At no point did the All-Soul come into Being: it never arrived, for it never knew place; what happens is that body, neighbouring with it, participates in it: hence Plato does not place SOUL in body but body in SOUL. The others, the secondary Souls, have a point of departure they come from the All-Soul and they have a Place into which to descend and in which to change to and fro, a place, therefore, from which to ascend: but this All-Soul is for ever Above, resting in that Being in which it holds its existence as SOUL and followed, as next, by the Universe or, at least, by all beneath the sun. Enneads III,9,2

The partial SOUL is illuminated by moving towards the SOUL above it; for on that path it meets Authentic Existence. Movement towards the lower is towards non-Being: and this is the step it takes when it is set on self; for by willing towards itself it produces its lower, an image of itself a non-Being and so is wandering, as it were, into the void, stripping itself of its own determined form. And this image, this undetermined thing, is blank darkness, for it is utterly without reason, untouched by the Intellectual-Principle, far removed from Authentic Being. Enneads III,9,2

(B) The SOUL itself must exist as Seeing with the Intellectual-Principle as the object of its vision it is undetermined before it sees but is naturally apt to see: in other words, SOUL is Matter to [its determinant] the Intellectual-Principle. Enneads III,9,3