"The Sage," we shall be told, "may bear such afflictions and even take them lightly but they could never be his choice, and the happy life must be one that would be chosen. The Sage, that is, cannot be thought of as simply a sage soul, no count being taken of the bodily-principle in the total of the being: he will, no doubt, take all bravely... until the body’s appeals come up before him, and longings and loathings penetrate through the body to the inner man. And since pleasure must be (…)
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MacKenna / Stephen MacKenna
Matérias
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MacKenna-Plotinus: self-contained unity
1º de fevereiro, por Cardoso de Castro -
MacKenna-Plotinus: Enneads VI,6
1º de fevereiro, por Cardoso de CastroTractate 34 Sixth Ennead. Sixth tractate. On numbers.
1. It is suggested that multiplicity is a falling away from The Unity, infinity being the complete departure, an innumerable multiplicity, and that this is why unlimit is an evil and we evil at the stage of multiplicity.
A thing, in fact, becomes a manifold when, unable to remain self-centred, it flows outward and by that dissipation takes extension: utterly losing unity it becomes a manifold since there is nothing to bind part to (…) -
MacKenna-Plotinus: unidade absoluta
1º de fevereiro, por Cardoso de CastroWe must not muddle together Being and Non-Being, time and eternity, not even everlasting time with the eternal; we cannot make laps and stages of an absolute unity; all must be taken together, wheresoever and howsoever we handle it; and it must be taken at that, not even as an undivided block of time but as the Life of Eternity, a stretch not made up of periods but completely rounded, outside of all notion of time. Enneads I,5,
But how and what does the Intellectual-Principle see and, (…) -
MacKenna-Plotinus: Enneads VI,7
1º de fevereiro, por Cardoso de CastroTractate 38 Sixth Ennead. Seventh tractate. How the multiplicity of the ideal-forms came into being: and upon the Good.
1. God, or some one of the gods, in sending the souls to their birth, placed eyes in the face to catch the light and allotted to each sense the appropriate organ, providing thus for the safety which comes by seeing and hearing in time and, seeking or avoiding under guidance of touch.
But what led to this provision?
It cannot be that other forms of being were produced (…) -
MacKenna-Plotinus: degree of unity
1º de fevereiro, por Cardoso de CastroEverything has something of the Good, by virtue of possessing a certain degree of unity and a certain degree of Existence and by participation in Ideal-Form: to the extent of the Unity, Being, and Form which are present, there is a sharing in an image, for the Unity and Existence in which there is participation are no more than images of the Ideal-Form. Enneads I,7,
All that is not One is conserved by virtue of the One, and from the One derives its characteristic nature: if it had not (…) -
MacKenna-Plotinus: Enneads VI,8
1º de fevereiro, por Cardoso de CastroTractate 39 Sixth Ennead. Eighth tractate. On free-will and the will of the One.
1. Can there be question as to whether the gods have voluntary action? Or are we to take it that, while we may well enquire in the case of men with their combination of powerlessness and hesitating power, the gods must be declared omnipotent, not merely some things but all lying at their nod? Or is power entire, freedom of action in all things, to be reserved to one alone, of the rest some being powerful, (…) -
MacKenna-Plotinus: perfect unity
1º de fevereiro, por Cardoso de CastroIt may be objected that the Intellectual-Principle possesses its content in an eternal conjunction so that the two make a perfect unity, and that thus there is no Matter there. Enneads II,4,
Suppose that Life, then, to revert – an impossibility – to perfect unity: Time, whose existence is in that Life, and the Heavens, no longer maintained by that Life, would end at once. Enneads III,7,
This vision achieved, the acting instinct pauses; the mind is satisfied and seeks nothing further; the (…) -
MacKenna-Plotinus: Enneads VI,9
1º de fevereiro, por Cardoso de CastroTractate 9 Sixth Ennead. Ninth tractate. On the Good, or the One.
1. It is in virtue of unity that beings are beings.
This is equally true of things whose existence is primal and of all that are in any degree to be numbered among beings. What could exist at all except as one thing? Deprived of unity, a thing ceases to be what it is called: no army unless as a unity: a chorus, a flock, must be one thing. Even house and ship demand unity, one house, one ship; unity gone, neither remains (…) -
MacKenna-Plotinus: principle of measure
1º de fevereiro, por Cardoso de CastroAnd, further, these Civic Virtues – measured and ordered themselves and acting as a principle of measure to the Soul which is as Matter to their forming – are like to the measure reigning in the over-world, and they carry a trace of that Highest Good in the Supreme; for, while utter measurelessness is brute Matter and wholly outside of Likeness, any participation in Ideal-Form produces some corresponding degree of Likeness to the formless Being There. And participation goes by nearness: the (…)
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MacKenna-Plotinus: Divinity
1º de fevereiro, por Cardoso de CastroThe 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 (…) -
MacKenna-Plotinus: nobler principle
1º de fevereiro, por Cardoso de CastroUntil these people light upon some nobler principle than any at which they still halt, they must be left where they are and where they choose to be, never understanding what the Good of Life is to those that can make it theirs, never knowing to what kind of beings it is accessible. Enneads I,4,
Now it may be observed, first of all, that we cannot hold utterly cheap either the indeterminate, or even a Kind whose very idea implies absence of form, provided only that it offer itself to its (…) -
MacKenna-Plotinus: Hypostases
1º de fevereiro, por Cardoso de CastroThe 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 (…) -
MacKenna-Plotinus: one principle
1º de fevereiro, por Cardoso de CastroThe born lover, to whose degree the musician also may attain – and then either come to a stand or pass beyond – has a certain memory of beauty but, severed from it now, he no longer comprehends it: spellbound by visible loveliness he clings amazed about that. His lesson must be to fall down no longer in bewildered delight before some, one embodied form; he must be led, under a system of mental discipline, to beauty everywhere and made to discern the One Principle underlying all, a Principle (…)
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MacKenna-Plotinus: One
1º de fevereiro, por Cardoso de CastroThe First Hypostasis of the Supreme Divine Triad is variously named: often it is simply ‘The First’. Envisaged logically, or dialectically, it is The One. Morally seen, it is The Good; in various other uses or aspects it is The Simple,
The Absolute, The Transcendence, The Infinite, The Unconditioned; it is sometimes The Father.
It is unknowable: its nature - or its Super-Nature, its Supra-Existence - is conveyed theoretically by the simple statement that it transcends all the knowable, (…) -
MacKenna-Plotinus: principle of motion
1º de fevereiro, por Cardoso de CastroAnd why not our very bodies, also? Because the forward path is characteristic of body and because all the body’s impulses are to other ends and because what in us is of this circling nature is hampered in its motion by the clay it bears with it, while in the higher realm everything flows on its course, lightly and easily, with nothing to check it, once there is any principle of motion in it at all. Enneads II,2,
Each is a principle of motion, each is self-living, each touches the same (…) -
MacKenna-Plotinus: Contemplação
1º de fevereiro, por Cardoso de Castrotheoria contemplation
It is not difficult to explain this distinction. Hercules was a hero of practical virtue. By his noble serviceableness he was worthy to be a God. On the other hand, his merit was action and not the Contemplation which would place him unreservedly in the higher realm. Therefore while he has place above, something of him remains below. Enneads I,1,. 12
Supposing we played a little before entering upon our serious concern and maintained that all things are striving (…) -
MacKenna-Plotinus: principle of order
1º de fevereiro, por Cardoso de CastroBut, if the stars announce the future – as we hold of many other things also – what explanation of the cause have we to offer? What explains the purposeful arrangement thus implied? Obviously, unless the particular is included under some general principle of order, there can be no signification. Enneads II,3,
We cannot but recognize from what we observe in this universe that some such principle of order prevails throughout the entire of existence – the minutest of things a tributary to the (…) -
MacKenna-Plotinus: Daimones
1º de fevereiro, por Cardoso de CastroThe Daimones are, strictly speaking, lofty powers beneath the ‘Gods’: in practice they are often confounded with the Gods: the same word is translated here, according to context and English connotation, by ‘Supernals’, Celestials, Divine Spirits, Blessed Spirits.
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MacKenna-Plotinus: principle of identity
1º de fevereiro, por Cardoso de CastroIf the Alienism is to be understood as meaning only that Matter is differentiated, then it is different not by itself [since it is certainly not an absolute] but by this Difference, just as all identical objects are so by virtue of Identicalness [the Absolute principle of Identity]. Enneads II,4,
It may be suggested that its existence takes substantial form only by its being resident among outside things: but, at this, it is itself no longer simplex nor could any coherence of manifolds (…) -
MacKenna-Plotinus: Supernals
1º de fevereiro, por Cardoso de CastroDaimones