MacKenna-Plotinus: Zeus

What human thing, then, is great, so as not to be despised by one who has mounted above all we know here, and is bound now no longer to anything below? If the Sage thinks all fortunate events, however momentous, to be no great matter – kingdom and the rule over cities and peoples, colonisations and the founding of states, even though all be his own handiwork – how can he take any great account of the vacillations of power or the ruin of his fatherland? Certainly if he thought any such event a great disaster, or any disaster at all, he must be of a very strange way of thinking. One that sets great store by wood and stones, or... Zeus... by mortality among mortals cannot yet be the Sage, whose estimate of death, we hold, must be that it is better than life in the body. Enneads   I,4,

The matter seems to demand some discussion of Aphrodite, since in any case Eros is described as being either her son or in some association with her. Who then is Aphrodite, and in what sense is Love either her child or born with her or in some way both her child and her birth-fellow? To us Aphrodite is twofold; there is the heavenly Aphrodite, daughter of Ouranos or Heaven: and there is the other the daughter of Zeus and Dione, this is the Aphrodite who presides over earthly unions; the higher was not born of a mother and has no part in marriages for in Heaven there is no marrying. Enneads III,5,

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,

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

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,

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,

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,

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,

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,

The Intellectual Principle possesses Itself to satiety, but there is no "drunken" abandonment in this possession which brings nothing alien to it. But the Reason-Principle – as its offspring, a later hypostasis – is already a separate Being and established in another Realm, and so is said to lie in the garden of this Zeus who is divine Mind; and this lying in the garden takes place at the moment when, in our way of speaking, Aphrodite enters the realm of Being. Enneads III,5,

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,

Their initial descent is deepened since that mid-part of theirs is compelled to labour in care of the care-needing thing into which they have entered. But Zeus, the father, takes pity on their toils and makes the bonds in which they labour soluble by death and gives respite in due time, freeing them from the body, that they too may come to dwell there where the Universal Soul, unconcerned with earthly needs, has ever dwelt. Enneads IV,3,

Souls that descend, souls that change their state – these, then, may be said to have memory, which deals with what has come and gone; but what subjects of remembrance can there be for souls whose lot is to remain unchanged? The question touches memory in the stars in general, and also in the sun and moon and ends by dealing with the soul of the All, even by audaciously busying itself with the memories of Zeus himself. The enquiry entails the examination and identification of acts of understanding and of reasoning in these beings, if such acts take place. Enneads IV,4,

But Zeus – ordering all, governor, guardian and disposer, possessor for ever of the kingly soul and the kingly intellect, bringing all into being by his providence, and presiding over all things as they come, administering all under plan and system, unfolding the periods of the kosmos, many of which stand already accomplished – would it not seem inevitable that, in this multiplicity of concern, Zeus should have memory of all the periods, their number and their differing qualities? Contriving the future, co-ordinating, calculating for what is to be, must he not surely be the chief of all in remembering, as he is chief in producing? Even this matter of Zeus’ memory of the kosmic periods is difficult; it is a question of their being numbered, and of his knowledge of their number. A determined number would mean that the All had a beginning in time [which is not so]; if the periods are unlimited, Zeus cannot know the number of his works. Enneads IV,4,

The answer is that he will know all to be one thing existing in virtue of one life for ever: it is in this sense that the All is unlimited, and thus Zeus’ knowledge of it will not be as of something seen from outside but as of something embraced in true knowledge, for this unlimited thing is an eternal indweller within himself – or, to be more accurate, eternally follows upon him – and is seen by an indwelling knowledge; Zeus knows his own unlimited life, and, in that knowledge knows the activity that flows from him to the kosmos; but he knows it in its unity not in its process. Enneads IV,4,

When under the name of Zeus we are considering the Demiurge we must leave out all notions of stage and progress, and recognize one unchanging and timeless life. Enneads IV,4,

A being of this quality, like the Intellectual-Principle, must be felt to be worthy of the all-pure: it could not derive from any other than from the first principle of all; as it comes into existence, all other beings must be simultaneously engendered – all the beauty of the Ideas, all the Gods of the Intellectual realm. And it still remains pregnant with this offspring; for it has, so to speak, drawn all within itself again, holding them lest they fall away towards Matter to be "brought up in the House of Rhea" [in the realm of flux]. This is the meaning hidden in the Mysteries, and in the Myths of the gods: Kronos, as the wisest, exists before Zeus; he must absorb his offspring that, full within himself, he may be also an Intellectual-Principle manifest in some product of his plenty; afterwards, the myth proceeds, Kronos engenders Zeus, who already exists as the [necessary and eternal] outcome of the plenty there; in other words the offspring of the Divine Intellect, perfect within itself, is Soul [the life-principle carrying forward the Ideas in the Divine Mind]. Enneads: V I

[Interpolation: Zeus (Universal Soul) is in this a symbol of him, Zeus who is not content with the contemplation of his father (Kronos, divine Intellect) but looks to that father’s father (to Ouranos, the Transcendent) as what may be called the divine energy working to the establishment of a real being.] Enneads V,5,

Still the arts are not to be slighted on the ground that they create by imitation of natural objects; for, to begin with, these natural objects are themselves imitations; then, we must recognise that they give no bare reproduction of the thing seen but go back to the Ideas from which Nature itself derives, and, furthermore, that much of their work is all their own; they are holders of beauty and add where nature is lacking. Thus Pheidias wrought the Zeus upon no model among things of sense but by apprehending what form Zeus must take if he chose to become manifest to sight. Enneads V,8,

Life, pure, is never a burden; how then could there be weariness There where the living is most noble? That very life is wisdom, not a wisdom built up by reasonings but complete from the beginning, suffering no lack which could set it enquiring, a wisdom primal, unborrowed, not something added to the Being, but its very essence. No wisdom, thus, is greater; this is the authentic knowing, assessor to the divine Intellect as projected into manifestation simultaneously with it; thus, in the symbolic saying, Justice is assessor to Zeus. Enneads V,8,

This is why Zeus, although the oldest of the gods and their sovereign, advances first [in the Phaidros myth] towards that vision, followed by gods and demigods and such souls as are of strength to see. That Being appears before them from some unseen place and rising loftily over them pours its light upon all things, so that all gleams in its radiance; it upholds some beings, and they see; the lower are dazzled and turn away, unfit to gaze upon that sun, the trouble falling the more heavily on those most remote. Enneads V,8,

This vision Zeus takes, and it is for such of us, also, as share his love and appropriate our part in the Beauty There, the final object of all seeing, the entire beauty upon all things; for all There sheds radiance, and floods those that have found their way thither so that they too become beautiful; thus it will often happen that men climbing heights where the soil has taken a yellow glow will themselves appear so, borrowing colour from the place on which they move. The colour flowering on that other height we speak of is Beauty; or rather all There is light and beauty, through and through, for the beauty is no mere bloom upon the surface. Enneads V,8,

The God fettered [as in the Kronos Myth] to an unchanging identity leaves the ordering of this universe to his son (to Zeus), for it could not be in his character to neglect his rule within the divine sphere, and, as though sated with the Authentic-Beauty, seek a lordship too recent and too poor for his might. Ignoring this lower world, Kronos [Intellectual-Principle] claims for his own father [Ouranoo, the Absolute, or One] with all the upward-tending between them: and he counts all that tends to the inferior, beginning from his son [Zeus, the All-Soul], as ranking beneath him. Thus he holds a mid position determined on the one side by the differentiation implied in the severance from the very highest and, on the other, by that which keeps him apart from the link between himself and the lower: he stands between a greater father and an inferior son. But since that father is too lofty to be thought of under the name of Beauty, the second God remains the primally beautiful. Enneads V,8,

Such converse, we may suppose, was that of Minos  , thence known as the Familiar of Zeus; and in that memory he established the laws which report it, enlarged to that task by his vision There. Some, on the other hand, there will be to disdain such citizen service, choosing to remain in the higher: these will be those that have seen much. Enneads VI,8,