MacKenna-Plotinus: soul (Enneads I)

  

1. Pleasure and distress, fear and courage, desire and aversion, where have these affections and experiences their seat? Clearly, either in the SOUL alone, or in the SOUL as employing the body, or in some third entity deriving from both. And for this third entity, again, there are two possible modes: it might be either a blend or a distinct form due to the blending. Enneads   I,1,1

2. This first enquiry obliges us to consider at the outset the nature of the SOUL that is whether a distinction is to be made between SOUL and Essential SOUL [between an individual SOUL and the Soul-Kind in itself]. Enneads I,1,2

If such a distinction holds, then the SOUL [in man] is some sort of a composite and at once we may agree that it is a recipient and if only reason allows that all the affections and experiences really have their seat in the SOUL, and with the affections every state and mood, good and bad alike. Enneads I,1,2

But if SOUL [in man] and Essential SOUL are one and the same, then the SOUL will be an Ideal-Form unreceptive of all those activities which it imparts to another Kind but possessing within itself that native Act of its own which Reason manifests. Enneads I,1,2

If this be so, then, indeed, we may think of the SOUL as an immortal if the immortal, the imperishable, must be impassive, giving out something of itself but itself taking nothing from without except for what it receives from the Existents prior to itself from which Existents, in that they are the nobler, it cannot be sundered. Enneads I,1,2

Now what could bring fear to a nature thus unreceptive of all the outer? Fear demands feeling. Nor is there place for courage: courage implies the presence of danger. And such desires as are satisfied by the filling or voiding of the body, must be proper to something very different from the SOUL, to that only which admits of replenishment and voidance. Enneads I,1,2

And how could the SOUL lend itself to any admixture? An essential is not mixed. Or of the intrusion of anything alien? If it did, it would be seeking the destruction of its own nature. Pain must be equally far from it. And Grief how or for what could it grieve? Whatever possesses Existence is supremely free, dwelling, unchangeable, within its own peculiar nature. And can any increase bring joy, where nothing, not even anything good, can accrue? What such an Existent is, it is unchangeably. Enneads I,1,2

Thus assuredly Sense-Perception, Discursive-Reasoning; and all our ordinary mentation are foreign to the SOUL: for sensation is a receiving whether of an Ideal-Form or of an impassive body and reasoning and all ordinary mental action deal with sensation. Enneads I,1,2

The question still remains to be examined in the matter of the intellections whether these are to be assigned to the SOUL and as to Pure-Pleasure, whether this belongs to the SOUL in its solitary state. Enneads I,1,2

3. We may treat of the SOUL as in the body whether it be set above it or actually within it since the association of the two constitutes the one thing called the living organism, the Animate. Enneads I,1,3

Now from this relation, from the SOUL using the body as an instrument, it does not follow that the SOUL must share the body’s experiences: a man does not himself feel all the experiences of the tools with which he is working. Enneads I,1,3

It may be objected that the SOUL must however, have Sense-Perception since its use of its instrument must acquaint it with the external conditions, and such knowledge comes by way of sense. Thus, it will be argued, the eyes are the instrument of seeing, and seeing may bring distress to the SOUL: hence the SOUL may feel sorrow and pain and every other affection that belongs to the body; and from this again will spring desire, the SOUL seeking the mending of its instrument. Enneads I,1,3

But, we ask, how, possibly, can these affections pass from body to SOUL? Body may communicate qualities or conditions to another body: but body to SOUL? Something happens to A; does that make it happen to B? As long as we have agent and instrument, there are two distinct entities; if the SOUL uses the body it is separate from it. Enneads I,1,3

But apart from the philosophical separation how does SOUL stand to body? Clearly there is a combination. And for this several modes are possible. There might be a complete coalescence: SOUL might be interwoven through the body: or it might be an Ideal-Form detached or an Ideal-Form in governing contact like a pilot: or there might be part of the SOUL detached and another part in contact, the disjoined part being the agent or user, the conjoined part ranking with the instrument or thing used. Enneads I,1,3

In this last case it will be the double task of philosophy to direct this lower SOUL towards the higher, the agent, and except in so far as the conjunction is absolutely necessary, to sever the agent from the instrument, the body, so that it need not forever have its Act upon or through this inferior. Enneads I,1,3

Now if there is a coalescence, the lower is ennobled, the nobler degraded; the body is raised in the scale of being as made participant in life; the SOUL, as associated with death and unreason, is brought lower. How can a lessening of the life-quality produce an increase such as Sense-Perception? No: the body has acquired life, it is the body that will acquire, with life, sensation and the affections coming by sensation. Desire, then, will belong to the body, as the objects of desire are to be enjoyed by the body. And fear, too, will belong to the body alone; for it is the body’s doom to fail of its joys and to perish. Enneads I,1,4

Next for the suggestion that the SOUL is interwoven through the body: such a relation would not give woof and warp community of sensation: the interwoven element might very well suffer no change: the permeating SOUL might remain entirely untouched by what affects the body as light goes always free of all it floods and all the more so, since, precisely, we are asked to consider it as diffused throughout the entire frame. Enneads I,1,4

Under such an interweaving, then, the SOUL would not be subjected to the body’s affections and experiences: it would be present rather as Ideal-Form in Matter. Enneads I,1,4

Let us then suppose SOUL to be in body as Ideal-Form in Matter. Now if the first possibility the SOUL is an essence, a self-existent, it can be present only as separable form and will therefore all the more decidedly be the Using-Principle [and therefore unaffected]. Enneads I,1,4

Suppose, next, the SOUL to be present like axe-form on iron: here, no doubt, the form is all important but it is still the axe, the complement of iron and form, that effects whatever is effected by the iron thus modified: on this analogy, therefore, we are even more strictly compelled to assign all the experiences of the combination to the body: their natural seat is the material member, the instrument, the potential recipient of life. Enneads I,1,4

Compare the passage where we read [NA: “we read” translates “he says” of the text, and always indicates a reference to Plato, whose name does not appear in the translation except where it was written by Plotinus] that “it is absurd to suppose that the SOUL weaves”; equally absurd to think of it as desiring, grieving. All this is rather in the province of something which we may call the Animate. Enneads I,1,4

5. Now this Animate might be merely the body as having life: it might be the Couplement of SOUL and body: it might be a third and different entity formed from both. Enneads I,1,5

The SOUL in turn apart from the nature of the Animate must be either impassive, merely causing Sense-Perception in its yoke-fellow, or sympathetic; and, if sympathetic, it may have identical experiences with its fellow or merely correspondent experiences: desire for example in the Animate may be something quite distinct from the accompanying movement or state in the desiring faculty. Enneads I,1,5

Let us take first the Couplement of body and SOUL. How could suffering, for example, be seated in this Couplement? It may be suggested that some unwelcome state of the body produces a distress which reaches to a Sensitive-Faculty which in turn merges into SOUL. But this account still leaves the origin of the sensation unexplained. Enneads I,1,5

Another suggestion might be that all is due to an opinion or judgement: some evil seems to have befallen the man or his belongings and this conviction sets up a state of trouble in the body and in the entire Animate. But this account leaves still a question as to the source and seat of the judgement: does it belong to the SOUL or to the Couplement? Besides, the judgement that evil is present does not involve the feeling of grief: the judgement might very well arise and the grief by no means follow: one may think oneself slighted and yet not be angry; and the appetite is not necessarily excited by the thought of a pleasure. We are, thus, no nearer than before to any warrant for assigning these affections to the Couplement. Enneads I,1,5

Is it any explanation to say that desire is vested in a Faculty-of-desire and anger in the Irascible-Faculty and, collectively, that all tendency is seated in the Appetitive-Faculty? Such a statement of the facts does not help towards making the affections common to the Couplement; they might still be seated either in the SOUL alone or in the body alone. On the one hand if the appetite is to be stirred, as in the carnal passion, there must be a heating of the blood and the bile, a well-defined state of the body; on the other hand, the impulse towards The Good cannot be a joint affection, but, like certain others too, it would belong necessarily to the SOUL alone. Enneads I,1,5

But if this were so, then, since the Animate is the recipient of the Causing-Principle [i e, the SOUL] which brings life to the Couplement, this Cause must itself remain unaffected, all the experiences and expressive activities of the life being vested in the recipient, the Animate. Enneads I,1,6

But this would mean that life itself belongs not to the SOUL but to the Couplement; or at least the life of the Couplement would not be the life of the SOUL; Sense-Perception would belong not to the Sensitive-Faculty but to the container of the faculty. Enneads I,1,6

But if sensation is a movement traversing the body and culminating in SOUL, how the SOUL lack sensation? The very presence of the Sensitive-Faculty must assure sensation to the SOUL. Enneads I,1,6

Yet how can the Couplement have sensation independently of action in the Sensitive-Faculty, the SOUL left out of count and the Soul-Faculty? Enneads I,1,6

7. The truth lies in the Consideration that the Couplement subsists by virtue of the SOUL’s presence. Enneads I,1,7

This, however, is not to say that the SOUL gives itself as it is in itself to form either the Couplement or the body. Enneads I,1,7

No; from the organized body and something else, let us say a light, which the SOUL gives forth from itself, it forms a distinct Principle, the Animate; and in this Principle are vested Sense-Perception and all the other experiences found to belong to the Animate. Enneads I,1,7

The faculty of perception in the SOUL cannot act by the immediate grasping of sensible objects, but only by the discerning of impressions printed upon the Animate by sensation: these impressions are already Intelligibles while the outer sensation is a mere phantom of the other [of that in the SOUL] which is nearer to Authentic-Existence as being an impassive reading of Ideal-Forms. Enneads I,1,7

And by means of these Ideal-Forms, by which the SOUL wields single lordship over the Animate, we have Discursive-Reasoning, Sense-Knowledge and Intellection. From this moment we have peculiarly the We: before this there was only the “Ours”; but at this stage stands the WE [the authentic Human-Principle] loftily presiding over the Animate. Enneads I,1,7

There is no reason why the entire compound entity should not be described as the Animate or Living-Being mingled in a lower phase, but above that point the beginning of the veritable man, distinct from all that is kin to the lion, all that is of the order of the multiple brute. And since The Man, so understood, is essentially the associate of the reasoning SOUL, in our reasoning it is this “We” that reasons, in that the use and act of reason is a characteristic Act of the SOUL. Enneads I,1,7

8. And towards the Intellectual-Principle what is our relation? By this I mean, not that faculty in the SOUL which is one of the emanations from the Intellectual-Principle, but The Intellectual-Principle itself [Divine-Mind]. Enneads I,1,8

This also we possess as the summit of our being. And we have It either as common to all or as our own immediate possession: or again we may possess It in both degrees, that is in common, since It is indivisible one, everywhere and always Its entire self and severally in that each personality possesses It entire in the First-Soul [i e in the Intellectual as distinguished from the lower phase of the SOUL]. Enneads I,1,8

Hence we possess the Ideal-Forms also after two modes: in the SOUL, as it were unrolled and separate; in the Intellectual-Principle, concentrated, one. Enneads I,1,8

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

The first of these images is Sense-Perception seated in the Couplement; and from this downwards all the successive images are to be recognized as phases of the SOUL in lessening succession from one another, until the series ends in the faculties of generation and growth and of all production of offspring offspring efficient in its turn, in contradistinction to the engendering SOUL which [has no direct action within matter but] produces by mere inclination towards what it fashions. Enneads I,1,8

9. That SOUL, then, in us, will in its nature stand apart from all that can cause any of the evils which man does or suffers; for all such evil, as we have seen, belongs only to the Animate, the Couplement. Enneads I,1,9

But there is a difficulty in understanding how the SOUL can go guiltless if our mentation and reasoning are vested in it: for all this lower kind of knowledge is delusion and is the cause of much of what is evil. Enneads I,1,9

Thus we have marked off what belongs to the Couplement from what stands by itself: the one group has the character of body and never exists apart from body, while all that has no need of body for its manifestation belongs peculiarly to SOUL: and the Understanding, as passing judgement upon Sense-Impressions, is at the point of the vision of Ideal-Forms, seeing them as it were with an answering sensation (i.e, with consciousness) this last is at any rate true of the Understanding in the Veritable SOUL. For Understanding, the true, is the Act of the Intellections: in many of its manifestations it is the assimilation and reconciliation of the outer to the inner. Enneads I,1,9

Thus in spite of all, the SOUL is at peace as to itself and within itself: all the changes and all the turmoil we experience are the issue of what is subjoined to the SOUL, and are, as have said, the states and experiences of this elusive “Couplement.” Enneads I,1,9

10. It will be objected, that if the SOUL constitutes the We [the personality] and We are subject to these states then the SOUL must be subject to them, and similarly that what We do must be done by the SOUL. Enneads I,1,10

But it has been observed that the Couplement, too especially before our emancipation is a member of this total We, and in fact what the body experiences we say We experience. This then covers two distinct notions; sometimes it includes the brute-part, sometimes it transcends the brute. The body is brute touched to life; the true man is the other, going pure of the body, natively endowed with the virtues which belong to the Intellectual-Activity, virtues whose seat is the Separate SOUL, the SOUL which even in its dwelling here may be kept apart. [This SOUL constitutes the human being] for when it has wholly withdrawn, that other SOUL which is a radiation [or emanation] from it withdraws also, drawn after it. Enneads I,1,10

And the animals, in what way or degree do they possess the Animate? If there be in them, as the opinion goes, human Souls that have sinned, then the Animating-Principle in its separable phase does not enter directly into the brute; it is there but not there to them; they are aware only of the image of the SOUL [only of the lower SOUL] and of that only by being aware of the body organised and determined by that image. Enneads I,1,11

If there be no human SOUL in them, the Animate is constituted for them by a radiation from the All-Soul. Enneads I,1,11

12. But if SOUL is sinless, how come the expiations? Here surely is a contradiction; on the one side the SOUL is above all guilt; on the other, we hear of its sin, its purification, its expiation; it is doomed to the lower world, it passes from body to body. Enneads I,1,12

When we tell of the sinless SOUL, we make SOUL and Essential-Soul one and the same: it is the simple unbroken Unity. Enneads I,1,12

By the SOUL subject to sin we indicate a groupment, we include that other, that phase of the SOUL which knows all the states and passions: the SOUL in this sense is compound, all-inclusive: it falls under the conditions of the entire living experience: this compound it is that sins; it is this, and not the other, that pays penalty. Enneads I,1,12

It is in this sense that we read of the SOUL: “We saw it as those others saw the sea-god Glaukos.” “And,” reading on, “if we mean to discern the nature of the SOUL we must strip it free of all that has gathered about it, must see into the philosophy of it, examine with what Existences it has touch and by kinship to what Existences it is what it is.” Enneads I,1,12

Thus the Life is one thing, the Act is another and the Expiator yet another. The retreat and sundering, then, must be not from this body only, but from every alien accruement. Such accruement takes place at birth; or rather birth is the coming-into-being of that other [lower] phase of the SOUL. For the meaning of birth has been indicated elsewhere; it is brought about by a descent of the SOUL, something being given off by the SOUL other than that actually coming down in the declension. Enneads I,1,12

Then the SOUL has let this image fall? And this declension is it not certainly sin? If the declension is no more than the illuminating of an object beneath, it constitutes no sin: the shadow is to be attributed not to the luminary but to the object illuminated; if the object were not there, the light could cause no shadow. Enneads I,1,12

And the SOUL is said to go down, to decline, only in that the object it illuminates lives by its life. And it lets the image fall only if there be nothing near to take it up; and it lets it fall, not as a thing cut off, but as a thing that ceases to be: the image has no further being when the whole SOUL is looking toward the Supreme. Enneads I,1,12

13. And the principle that reasons out these matters? Is it We or the SOUL? We, but by the SOUL. Enneads I,1,13

But how “by the SOUL”? Does this mean that the SOUL reasons by possession [by contact with the matters of enquiry]? No; by the fact of being SOUL. Its Act subsists without movement; or any movement that can be ascribed to it must be utterly distinct from all corporal movement and be simply the SOUL’s own life. Enneads I,1,13

And Intellection in us is twofold: since the SOUL is intellective, and Intellection is the highest phase of life, we have Intellection both by the characteristic Act of our SOUL and by the Act of the Intellectual-Principle upon us for this Intellectual-Principle is part of us no less than the SOUL, and towards it we are ever rising. Enneads I,1,13

1. Since Evil is here, “haunting this world by necessary law,” and it is the SOUL’s design to escape from Evil, we must escape hence. Enneads I,2,1

But does not Likeness by way of Virtue imply Likeness to some being that has Virtue? To what Divine Being, then, would our Likeness be? To the Being must we not think? in Which, above all, such excellence seems to inhere, that is to the SOUL of the Kosmos and to the Principle ruling within it, the Principle endowed with a wisdom most wonderful. What could be more fitting than that we, living in this world, should become Like to its ruler? But, at the beginning, we are met by the doubt whether even in this Divine-Being all the virtues find place Moral-Balance [Sophrosyne], for example; or Fortitude where there can be no danger since nothing is alien; where there can be nothing alluring whose lack could induce the desire of possession. Enneads I,2,1

But is that conceivable? When warmth comes in to make anything warm, must there needs be something to warm the source of the warmth? If a fire is to warm something else, must there be a fire to warm that fire? Against the first illustration it may be retorted that the source of the warmth does already contain warmth, not by an infusion but as an essential phase of its nature, so that, if the analogy is to hold, the argument would make Virtue something communicated to the SOUL but an essential constituent of the Principle from which the SOUL attaining Likeness absorbs it. Enneads I,2,1

The objection would be valid if what the SOUL takes in were one and the same with the source, but in fact virtue is one thing, the source of virtue quite another. The material house is not identical with the house conceived in the intellect, and yet stands in its likeness: the material house has distribution and order while the pure idea is not constituted by any such elements; distribution, order, symmetry are not parts of an idea. Enneads I,2,1

And, 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 SOUL nearer than the body, therefore closer akin, participates more fully and shows a godlike presence, almost cheating us into the delusion that in the SOUL we see God entire. Enneads I,2,2

But in what sense can we call the virtues purifications, and how does purification issue in Likeness? As the SOUL is evil by being interfused with the body, and by coming to share the body’s states and to think the body’s thoughts, so it would be good, it would be possessed of virtue, if it threw off the body’s moods and devoted itself to its own Act the state of Intellection and Wisdom never allowed the passions of the body to affect it the virtue of Sophrosyne knew no fear at the parting from the body the virtue of Fortitude and if reason and the Intellectual-Principle ruled in which state is Righteousness. Such a disposition in the SOUL, become thus intellective and immune to passion, it would not be wrong to call Likeness to God; for the Divine, too, is pure and the Divine-Act is such that Likeness to it is Wisdom. Enneads I,2,3

But would not this make virtue a state of the Divine also? No: the Divine has no states; the state is in the SOUL. The Act of Intellection in the SOUL is not the same as in the Divine: of things in the Supreme, SOUL grasps some after a mode of its own, some not at all. Enneads I,2,3

As speech is the echo of the thought in the SOUL, so thought in the SOUL is an echo from elsewhere: that is to say, as the uttered thought is an image of the soul-thought, so the soul-thought images a thought above itself and is the interpreter of the higher sphere. Enneads I,2,3

Virtue, in the same way, is a thing of the SOUL: it does not belong to the Intellectual-Principle or to the Transcendence. Enneads I,2,3

The SOUL’s true Good is in devotion to the Intellectual-Principle, its kin; evil to the SOUL lies in frequenting strangers. There is no other way for it than to purify itself and so enter into relation with its own; the new phase begins by a new orientation. Enneads I,2,4

The SOUL’s virtue, then, is this alignment? No: it is what the alignment brings about within. Enneads I,2,4

And this is...? That it sees; that, like sight affected by the thing seen, the SOUL admits the imprint, graven upon it and working within it, of the vision it has come to. Enneads I,2,4

But was not the SOUL possessed of all this always, or had it forgotten? What it now sees, it certainly always possessed, but as lying away in the dark, not as acting within it: to dispel the darkness, and thus come to knowledge of its inner content, it must thrust towards the light. Enneads I,2,4

Besides, it possessed not the originals but images, pictures; and these it must bring into closer accord with the verities they represent. And, further, if the Intellectual-Principle is said to be a possession of the SOUL, this is only in the sense that It is not alien and that the link becomes very close when the SOUL’s sight is turned towards It: otherwise, ever-present though It be, It remains foreign, just as our knowledge, if it does not determine action, is dead to us. Enneads I,2,4

Disengagement means simply that the SOUL withdraws to its own place. Enneads I,2,5

It will hold itself above all passions and affections. Necessary pleasures and all the activity of the senses it will employ only for medicament and assuagement lest its work be impeded. Pain it may combat, but, failing the cure, it will bear meekly and ease it by refusing assent to it. All passionate action it will check: the suppression will be complete if that be possible, but at worst the SOUL will never itself take fire but will keep the involuntary and uncontrolled outside its precincts and rare and weak at that. The SOUL has nothing to dread, though no doubt the involuntary has some power here too: fear therefore must cease, except so far as it is purely monitory. What desire there may be can never be for the vile; even the food and drink necessary for restoration will lie outside of the SOUL’s attention, and not less the sexual appetite: or if such desire there must be, it will turn upon the actual needs of the nature and be entirely under control; or if any uncontrolled motion takes place, it will reach no further than the imagination, be no more than a fleeting fancy. Enneads I,2,5

The SOUL itself will be inviolately free and will be working to set the irrational part of the nature above all attack, or if that may not be, then at least to preserve it from violent assault, so that any wound it takes may be slight and be healed at once by virtue of the SOUL’s presence, just as a man living next door to a Sage would profit by the neighbourhood, either in becoming wise and good himself or, for sheer shame, never venturing any act which the nobler mind would disapprove. Enneads I,2,5

There will be no battling in the SOUL: the mere intervention of Reason is enough: the lower nature will stand in such awe of Reason that for any slightest movement it has made it will grieve, and censure its own weakness, in not having kept low and still in the presence of its lord. Enneads I,2,5

And each of these has two modes or aspects: there is Wisdom as it is in the Intellectual-Principle and as in the SOUL; and there is the Intellectual-Principle as it is present to itself and as it is present to the SOUL: this gives what in the SOUL is Virtue, in the Supreme not Virtue. Enneads I,2,6

That Act and Essence of the Supreme, manifested in a new form, constitute the virtue of this sphere. For the Supreme is not self-existent justice, or the Absolute of any defined virtue: it is, so to speak, an exemplar, the source of what in the SOUL becomes virtue: for virtue is dependent, seated in something not itself; the Supreme is self-standing, independent. Enneads I,2,6

On this principle, the supreme Rectitude of the SOUL is that it direct its Act towards the Intellectual-Principle: its Restraint (Sophrosyne) is its inward bending towards the Intellectual-Principle; its Fortitude is its being impassive in the likeness of That towards which its gaze is set, Whose nature comports an impassivity which the SOUL acquires by virtue and must acquire if it is not to be at the mercy of every state arising in its less noble companion. Enneads I,2,6

7. The virtues in the SOUL run in a sequence correspondent to that existing in the over-world, that is among their exemplars in the Intellectual-Principle. Enneads I,2,7

In the SOUL, the direction of vision towards the Intellectual-Principle is Wisdom and Prudence, soul-virtues not appropriate to the Supreme where Thinker and Thought are identical. All the other virtues have similar correspondences. Enneads I,2,7

And if the term of purification is the production of a pure being, then the purification of the SOUL must produce all the virtues; if any are lacking, then not one of them is perfect. Enneads I,2,7

All this accomplished, it gives up its touring of the realm of sense and settles down in the Intellectual Kosmos and there plies its own peculiar Act: it has abandoned all the realm of deceit and falsity, and pastures the SOUL in the “Meadows of Truth”: it employs the Platonic division to the discernment of the Ideal-Forms, of the Authentic-Existence and of the First-Kinds [or Categories of Being]: it establishes, in the light of Intellection, the unity there is in all that issues from these Firsts, until it has traversed the entire Intellectual Realm: then, resolving the unity into the particulars once more, it returns to the point from which it starts. Enneads I,3,4

5. But whence does this science derive its own initial laws? The Intellectual-Principle furnishes standards, the most certain for any SOUL that is able to apply them. What else is necessary, Dialectic puts together for itself, combining and dividing, until it has reached perfect Intellection. “For,” we read, “it is the purest [perfection] of Intellection and Contemplative-Wisdom.” And, being the noblest method and science that exists it must needs deal with Authentic-Existence, The Highest there is: as Contemplative-Wisdom [or true-knowing] it deals with Being, as Intellection with what transcends Being. Enneads I,3,5

Untruth and sophism it knows, not directly, not of its own nature, but merely as something produced outside itself, something which it recognises to be foreign to the verities laid up in itself; in the falsity presented to it, it perceives a clash with its own canon of truth. Dialectic, that is to say, has no knowledge of propositions collections of words but it knows the truth, and, in that knowledge, knows what the schools call their propositions: it knows above all, the operation of the SOUL, and, by virtue of this knowing, it knows, too, what is affirmed and what is denied, whether the denial is of what was asserted or of something else, and whether propositions agree or differ; all that is submitted to it, it attacks with the directness of sense-perception and it leaves petty precisions of process to what other science may care for such exercises. Enneads I,3,5

“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 counted in towards the happy life, how can one that, thus, knows the misery of ill-fortune or pain be happy, however sage he be? Such a state, of bliss self-contained, is for the Gods; men, because of the less noble part subjoined in them, must needs seek happiness throughout all their being and not merely in some one part; if the one constituent be troubled, the other, answering to its associate’s distress, must perforce suffer hindrance in its own activity. There is nothing but to cut away the body or the body’s sensitive life and so secure that self-contained unity essential to happiness.” Enneads I,4,5

6. Now if happiness did indeed require freedom from pain, sickness, misfortune, disaster, it would be utterly denied to anyone confronted by such trials: but if it lies in the fruition of the Authentic Good, why turn away from this Term and look to means, imagining that to be happy a man must need a variety of things none of which enter into happiness? If, in fact, felicity were made up by heaping together all that is at once desirable and necessary we must bid for these also. But if the Term must be one and not many; if in other words our quest is of a Term and not of Terms; that only can be elected which is ultimate and noblest, that which calls to the tenderest longings of the SOUL. Enneads I,4,6

The quest and will of the SOUL are not pointed directly towards freedom from this sphere: the reason which disciplines away our concern about this life has no fundamental quarrel with things of this order; it merely resents their interference; sometimes, even, it must seek them; essentially all the aspiration is not so much away from evil as towards the SOUL’s own highest and noblest: this attained, all is won and there is rest and this is the veritably willed state of life. Enneads I,4,6

And so in all his pain he asks no pity: there is always the radiance in the inner SOUL of the man, untroubled like the light in a lantern when fierce gusts beat about it in a wild turmoil of wind and tempest. Enneads I,4,8

Besides we must remember that the Sage sees things very differently from the average man; neither ordinary experiences nor pains and sorrows, whether touching himself or others, pierce to the inner hold. To allow them any such passage would be a weakness in our SOUL. Enneads I,4,8

So, the Sage would have desired misfortune? It is precisely to meet the undesired when it appears that he has the virtue which gives him, to confront it, his passionless and unshakeable SOUL. Enneads I,4,8

10. Perhaps the reason this continuous activity remains unperceived is that it has no touch whatever with things of sense. No doubt action upon material things, or action dictated by them, must proceed through the sensitive faculty which exists for that use: but why should there not be an immediate activity of the Intellectual-Principle and of the SOUL that attends it, the SOUL that antedates sensation or any perception? For, if Intellection and Authentic-Existence are identical, this “Earlier-than-perception” must be a thing having Act. Enneads I,4,10

When the Intellect is in upward orientation that [lower part of it] which contains [or, corresponds to] the life of the SOUL, is, so to speak, flung down again and becomes like the reflection resting on the smooth and shining surface of a mirror; in this illustration, when the mirror is in place the image appears but, though the mirror be absent or out of gear, all that would have acted and produced an image still exists; so in the case of the SOUL; when there is peace in that within us which is capable of reflecting the images of the Rational and Intellectual-Principles these images appear. Then, side by side with the primal knowledge of the activity of the Rational and the Intellectual-Principles, we have also as it were a sense-perception of their operation. Enneads I,4,10

14. For man, and especially the Sage, is not the Couplement of SOUL and body: the proof is that man can be disengaged from the body and disdain its nominal goods. Enneads I,4,14

It would be absurd to think that happiness begins and ends with the living-body: happiness is the possession of the good of life: it is centred therefore in SOUL, is an Act of the SOUL and not of all the SOUL at that: for it certainly is not characteristic of the vegetative SOUL, the SOUL of growth; that would at once connect it with the body. Enneads I,4,14

Thus some part of his life considers exclusively the SOUL’s satisfaction; the rest is not immediately for the Term’s sake and not for his own sake, but for the thing bound up with him, the thing which he tends and bears with as the musician cares for his lyre, as long as it can serve him: when the lyre fails him, he will change it, or will give up lyre and lyring, as having another craft now, one that needs no lyre, and then he will let it rest unregarded at his side while he sings on without an instrument. But it was not idly that the instrument was given him in the beginning: he has found it useful until now, many a time. Enneads I,4,16

To put Happiness in actions is to put it in things that are outside virtue and outside the SOUL; for the SOUL’s expression is not in action but in wisdom, in a contemplative operation within itself; and this, this alone, is Happiness. Enneads I,5,10

What, then, is it that gives comeliness to material forms and draws the ear to the sweetness perceived in sounds, and what is the secret of the beauty there is in all that derives from SOUL? Is there some One Principle from which all take their grace, or is there a beauty peculiar to the embodied and another for the bodiless? Finally, one or many, what would such a Principle be? Consider that some things, material shapes for instance, are gracious not by anything inherent but by something communicated, while others are lovely of themselves, as, for example, Virtue. Enneads I,6,1

Then again, all the virtues are a beauty of the SOUL, a beauty authentic beyond any of these others; but how does symmetry enter here? The SOUL, it is true, is not a simple unity, but still its virtue cannot have the symmetry of size or of number: what standard of measurement could preside over the compromise or the coalescence of the SOUL’s faculties or purposes? Finally, how by this theory would there be beauty in the Intellectual-Principle, essentially the solitary? Enneads I,6,1

Undoubtedly this Principle exists; it is something that is perceived at the first glance, something which the SOUL names as from an ancient knowledge and, recognising, welcomes it, enters into unison with it. Enneads I,6,2

But let the SOUL fall in with the Ugly and at once it shrinks within itself, denies the thing, turns away from it, not accordant, resenting it. Enneads I,6,2

Our interpretation is that the SOUL by the very truth of its nature, by its affiliation to the noblest Existents in the hierarchy of Being when it sees anything of that kin, or any trace of that kinship, thrills with an immediate delight, takes its own to itself, and thus stirs anew to the sense of its nature and of all its affinity. Enneads I,6,2

3. And the SOUL includes a faculty peculiarly addressed to Beauty one incomparably sure in the appreciation of its own, never in doubt whenever any lovely thing presents itself for judgement. Enneads I,6,3

Or perhaps the SOUL itself acts immediately, affirming the Beautiful where it finds something accordant with the Ideal-Form within itself, using this Idea as a canon of accuracy in its decision. Enneads I,6,3

But what accordance is there between the material and that which antedates all Matter? On what principle does the architect, when he finds the house standing before him correspondent with his inner ideal of a house, pronounce it beautiful? Is it not that the house before him, the stones apart, is the inner idea stamped upon the mass of exterior matter, the indivisible exhibited in diversity? So with the perceptive faculty: discerning in certain objects the Ideal-Form which has bound and controlled shapeless matter, opposed in nature to Idea, seeing further stamped upon the common shapes some shape excellent above the common, it gathers into unity what still remains fragmentary, catches it up and carries it within, no longer a thing of parts, and presents it to the Ideal-Principle as something concordant and congenial, a natural friend: the joy here is like that of a good man who discerns in a youth the early signs of a virtue consonant with the achieved perfection within his own SOUL. Enneads I,6,3

And harmonies unheard in sound create the harmonies we hear, and wake the SOUL to the consciousness of beauty, showing it the one essence in another kind: for the measures of our sensible music are not arbitrary but are determined by the Principle whose labour is to dominate Matter and bring pattern into being. Enneads I,6,3

4. But there are earlier and loftier beauties than these. In the sense-bound life we are no longer granted to know them, but the SOUL, taking no help from the organs, sees and proclaims them. To the vision of these we must mount, leaving sense to its own low place. Enneads I,6,4

Such vision is for those only who see with the SOUL’s sight and at the vision, they will rejoice, and awe will fall upon them and a trouble deeper than all the rest could ever stir, for now they are moving in the realm of Truth. Enneads I,6,4

This is the spirit that Beauty must ever induce, wonderment and a delicious trouble, longing and love and a trembling that is all delight. For the unseen all this may be felt as for the seen; and this the Souls feel for it, every SOUL in some degree, but those the more deeply that are the more truly apt to this higher love just as all take delight in the beauty of the body but all are not stung as sharply, and those only that feel the keener wound are known as Lovers  . Enneads I,6,4

What do you feel in presence of the grace you discern in actions, in manners, in sound morality, in all the works and fruits of virtue, in the beauty of souls? When you see that you yourselves are beautiful within, what do you feel? What is this Dionysiac exultation that thrills through your being, this straining upwards of all your SOUL, this longing to break away from the body and live sunken within the veritable self? These are no other than the emotions of Souls under the spell of love. Enneads I,6,5

But what is it that awakens all this passion? No shape, no colour, no grandeur of mass: all is for a SOUL, something whose beauty rests upon no colour, for the moral wisdom the SOUL enshrines and all the other hueless splendour of the virtues. It is that you find in yourself, or admire in another, loftiness of spirit; righteousness of life; disciplined purity; courage of the majestic face; gravity; modesty that goes fearless and tranquil and passionless; and, shining down upon all, the light of god-like Intellection. Enneads I,6,5

All these noble qualities are to be reverenced and loved, no doubt, but what entitles them to be called beautiful? They exist: they manifest themselves to us: anyone that sees them must admit that they have reality of Being; and is not Real-Being, really beautiful? But we have not yet shown by what property in them they have wrought the SOUL to loveliness: what is this grace, this splendour as of Light, resting upon all the virtues? Let us take the contrary, the ugliness of the SOUL, and set that against its beauty: to understand, at once, what this ugliness is and how it comes to appear in the SOUL will certainly open our way before us. Enneads I,6,5

Let us then suppose an ugly SOUL, dissolute, unrighteous: teeming with all the lusts; torn by internal discord; beset by the fears of its cowardice and the envies of its pettiness; thinking, in the little thought it has, only of the perish able and the base; perverse in all its the friend of unclean pleasures; living the life of abandonment to bodily sensation and delighting in its deformity. Enneads I,6,5

What must we think but that all this shame is something that has gathered about the SOUL, some foreign bane outraging it, soiling it, so that, encumbered with all manner of turpitude, it has no longer a clean activity or a clean sensation, but commands only a life smouldering dully under the crust of evil; that, sunk in manifold death, it no longer sees what a SOUL should see, may no longer rest in its own being, dragged ever as it is towards the outer, the lower, the dark? An unclean thing, I dare to say; flickering hither and thither at the call of objects of sense, deeply infected with the taint of body, occupied always in Matter, and absorbing Matter into itself; in its commerce with the Ignoble it has trafficked away for an alien nature its own essential Idea. Enneads I,6,5

So, we may justly say, a SOUL becomes ugly by something foisted upon it, by sinking itself into the alien, by a fall, a descent into body, into Matter. The dishonour of the SOUL is in its ceasing to be clean and apart. Gold is degraded when it is mixed with earthy particles; if these be worked out, the gold is left and is beautiful, isolated from all that is foreign, gold with gold alone. And so the SOUL; let it be but cleared of the desires that come by its too intimate converse with the body, emancipated from all the passions, purged of all that embodiment has thrust upon it, withdrawn, a solitary, to itself again in that moment the ugliness that came only from the alien is stripped away. Enneads I,6,5

What else is Sophrosyne, rightly so-called, but to take no part in the pleasures of the body, to break away from them as unclean and unworthy of the clean? So too, Courage is but being fearless of the death which is but the parting of the SOUL from the body, an event which no one can dread whose delight is to be his unmingled self. And Magnanimity is but disregard for the lure of things here. And Wisdom is but the Act of the Intellectual-Principle withdrawn from the lower places and leading the SOUL to the Above. Enneads I,6,6

The SOUL thus cleansed is all Idea and Reason, wholly free of body, intellective, entirely of that divine order from which the wellspring of Beauty rises and all the race of Beauty. Enneads I,6,6

Hence the SOUL heightened to the Intellectual-Principle is beautiful to all its power. For Intellection and all that proceeds from Intellection are the SOUL’s beauty, a graciousness native to it and not foreign, for only with these is it truly SOUL. And it is just to say that in the SOUL’s becoming a good and beautiful thing is its becoming like to God, for from the Divine comes all the Beauty and all the Good in beings. Enneads I,6,6

And Beauty, this Beauty which is also The Good, must be posed as The First: directly deriving from this First is the Intellectual-Principle which is pre-eminently the manifestation of Beauty; through the Intellectual-Principle SOUL is beautiful. The beauty in things of a lower order-actions and pursuits for instance comes by operation of the shaping SOUL which is also the author of the beauty found in the world of sense. For the SOUL, a divine thing, a fragment as it were of the Primal Beauty, makes beautiful to the fulness of their capacity all things whatsoever that it grasps and moulds. Enneads I,6,6

7. Therefore we must ascend again towards the Good, the desired of every SOUL. Anyone that has seen This, knows what I intend when I say that it is beautiful. Even the desire of it is to be desired as a Good. To attain it is for those that will take the upward path, who will set all their forces towards it, who will divest themselves of all that we have put on in our descent: so, to those that approach the Holy Celebrations of the Mysteries, there are appointed purifications and the laying aside of the garments worn before, and the entry in nakedness until, passing, on the upward way, all that is other than the God, each in the solitude of himself shall behold that solitary-dwelling Existence, the Apart, the Unmingled, the Pure, that from Which all things depend, for Which all look and live and act and know, the Source of Life and of Intellection and of Being. Enneads I,6,7

This, indeed, is the mood even of those who, having witnessed the manifestation of Gods or Supernals, can never again feel the old delight in the comeliness of material forms: what then are we to think of one that contemplates Absolute Beauty in Its essential integrity, no accumulation of flesh and matter, no dweller on earth or in the heavens so perfect Its purity far above all such things in that they are non-essential, composite, not primal but descending from This? Beholding this Being the Choragos of all Existence, the Self-Intent that ever gives forth and never takes resting, rapt, in the vision and possession of so lofty a loveliness, growing to Its likeness, what Beauty can the SOUL yet lack? For This, the Beauty supreme, the absolute, and the primal, fashions Its lovers to Beauty and makes them also worthy of love. Enneads I,6,7

8. But what must we do? How lies the path? How come to vision of the inaccessible Beauty, dwelling as if in consecrated precincts, apart from the common ways where all may see, even the profane? He that has the strength, let him arise and withdraw into himself, foregoing all that is known by the eyes, turning away for ever from the material beauty that once made his joy. When he perceives those shapes of grace that show in body, let him not pursue: he must know them for copies, vestiges, shadows, and hasten away towards That they tell of. For if anyone follow what is like a beautiful shape playing over water is there not a myth telling in symbol of such a dupe, how he sank into the depths of the current and was swept away to nothingness? So too, one that is held by material beauty and will not break free shall be precipitated, not in body but in SOUL, down to the dark depths loathed of the Intellective-Being, where, blind even in the Lower-World, he shall have commerce only with shadows, there as here. Enneads I,6,8

9. And this inner vision, what is its operation? Newly awakened it is all too feeble to bear the ultimate splendour. Therefore the SOUL must be trained to the habit of remarking, first, all noble pursuits, then the works of beauty produced not by the labour of the arts but by the virtue of men known for their goodness: lastly, you must search the souls of those that have shaped these beautiful forms. Enneads I,6,9

But how are you to see into a virtuous SOUL and know its loveliness? Withdraw into yourself and look. And if you do not find yourself beautiful yet, act as does the creator of a statue that is to be made beautiful: he cuts away here, he smoothes there, he makes this line lighter, this other purer, until a lovely face has grown upon his work. So do you also: cut away all that is excessive, straighten all that is crooked, bring light to all that is overcast, labour to make all one glow of beauty and never cease chiselling your statue, until there shall shine out on you from it the godlike splendour of virtue, until you shall see the perfect goodness surely established in the stainless shrine. Enneads I,6,9

This is the only eye that sees the mighty Beauty. If the eye that adventures the vision be dimmed by vice, impure, or weak, and unable in its cowardly blenching to see the uttermost brightness, then it sees nothing even though another point to what lies plain to sight before it. To any vision must be brought an eye adapted to what is to be seen, and having some likeness to it. Never did eye see the sun unless it had first become sunlike, and never can the SOUL have vision of the First Beauty unless itself be beautiful. Enneads I,6,9

Therefore, first let each become godlike and each beautiful who cares to see God and Beauty. So, mounting, the SOUL will come first to the Intellectual-Principle and survey all the beautiful Ideas in the Supreme and will avow that this is Beauty, that the Ideas are Beauty. For by their efficacy comes all Beauty else, but the offspring and essence of the Intellectual-Being. What is beyond the Intellectual-Principle we affirm to be the nature of Good radiating Beauty before it. So that, treating the Intellectual-Kosmos as one, the first is the Beautiful: if we make distinction there, the Realm of Ideas constitutes the Beauty of the Intellectual Sphere; and The Good, which lies beyond, is the Fountain at once and Principle of Beauty: the Primal Good and the Primal Beauty have the one dwelling-place and, thus, always, Beauty’s seat is There. Enneads I,6,9

For the SOUL, then, the Good is its own natural Act. Enneads I,7,1

But the SOUL itself is natively a “Best”; if, further, its act be directed towards the Best, the achievement is not merely the “SOUL’s good” but “The Good” without qualification. Enneads I,7,1

2. But the Universe outside; how is it aligned towards the Good? The soulless by direction toward SOUL: SOUL towards the Good itself, through the Intellectual-Principle. Enneads I,7,2

With SOUL it is different; the First-Soul, that which follows upon the Intellectual-Principle, possesses a life nearer to the Verity and through that Principle is of the nature of good; it will actually possess the Good if it orientate itself towards the Intellectual-Principle, since this follows immediately upon the Good. Enneads I,7,2

If, on the contrary, after death life and SOUL continue, then death will be no evil but a good; SOUL, disembodied, is the freer to ply its own Act. Enneads I,7,3

If it be taken into the All-Soul what evil can reach it There? And as the Gods are possessed of Good and untouched by evil so, certainly is the SOUL that has preserved its essential character. And if it should lose its purity, the evil it experiences is not in its death but in its life. Suppose it to be under punishment in the lower world, even there the evil thing is its life and not its death; the misfortune is still life, a life of a definite character. Enneads I,7,3

Life is a partnership of a SOUL and body; death is the dissolution; in either life or death, then, the SOUL will feel itself at home. Enneads I,7,3

In a word, life in the body is of itself an evil but the SOUL enters its Good through Virtue, not living the life of the Couplement but holding itself apart, even here. Enneads I,7,3

But a difficulty arises. By what faculty in us could we possibly know Evil? All knowing comes by likeness. The Intellectual-Principle and the SOUL, being Ideal-Forms, would know Ideal-Forms and would have a natural tendency towards them; but who could imagine Evil to be an Ideal-Form, seeing that it manifests itself as the very absence of Good? If the solution is that the one act of knowing covers contraries, and that as Evil is the contrary to Good the one act would grasp Good and Evil together, then to know Evil there must be first a clear perception and understanding of Good, since the nobler existences precede the baser and are Ideal-Forms while the less good hold no such standing, are nearer to Non-Being. Enneads I,8,1

The Good is that on which all else depends, towards which all Existences aspire as to their source and their need, while Itself is without need, sufficient to Itself, aspiring to no other, the measure and Term of all, giving out from itself the Intellectual-Principle and Existence and SOUL and Life and all Intellective-Act. Enneads I,8,2

And the SOUL, outside, circles around the Intellectual-Principle, and by gazing upon it, seeing into the depths of It, through It sees God. Enneads I,8,2

4. The bodily Kind, in that it partakes of Matter is an evil thing. What form is in bodies is an untrue-form: they are without life: by their own natural disorderly movement they make away with each other; they are hindrances to the SOUL in its proper Act; in their ceaseless flux they are always slipping away from Being. Enneads I,8,4

SOUL, on the contrary, since not every SOUL is evil, is not an evil Kind. Enneads I,8,4

What, then, is the evil SOUL? It is, we read, the SOUL that has entered into the service of that in which soul-evil is implanted by nature, in whose service the unreasoning phase of the SOUL accepts evil unmeasure, excess and shortcoming, which bring forth licentiousness, cowardice and all other flaws of the SOUL, all the states, foreign to the true nature, which set up false judgements, so that the SOUL comes to name things good or evil not by their true value but by the mere test of like and dislike. Enneads I,8,4

But what is the root of this evil state? how can it be brought under the causing principle indicated? Firstly, such a SOUL is not apart from Matter, is not purely itself. That is to say, it is touched with Unmeasure, it is shut out from the Forming-Idea that orders and brings to measure, and this because it is merged into a body made of Matter. Enneads I,8,4

Then if the Reasoning-Faculty too has taken hurt, the SOUL’s seeing is baulked by the passions and by the darkening that Matter brings to it, by its decline into Matter, by its very attention no longer to Essence but to Process whose principle or source is, again, Matter, the Kind so evil as to saturate with its own pravity even that which is not in it but merely looks towards it. Enneads I,8,4

The SOUL wrought to perfection, addressed towards the Intellectual-Principle, is steadfastly pure: it has turned away from Matter; all that is undetermined, that is outside of measure, that is evil, it neither sees nor draws near; it endures in its purity, only, and wholly, determined by the Intellectual-Principle. Enneads I,8,4

The SOUL that breaks away from this source of its reality to the non-perfect and non-primal is, as it were, a secondary, an image, to the loyal SOUL. By its falling-away and to the extent of the fall it is stripped of Determination, becomes wholly indeterminate, sees darkness. Looking to what repels vision, as we look when we are said to see darkness, it has taken Matter into itself. Enneads I,8,4

5. But, it will be objected, if this seeing and frequenting of the darkness is due to the lack of good, the SOUL’s evil has its source in that very lack; the darkness will be merely a secondary cause and at once the Principle of Evil is removed from Matter, is made anterior to Matter. Enneads I,8,5

In fine we are not to think of Evil as some particular bad thing injustice, for example, or any other ugly trait but as a principle distinct from any of the particular forms in which, by the addition of certain elements, it becomes manifest. Thus there may be wickedness in the SOUL; the forms this general wickedness is to take will be determined by the environing Matter, by the faculties of the SOUL that operate and by the nature of their operation, whether seeing, acting, or merely admitting impression. Enneads I,8,5

But supposing things external to the SOUL are to be counted Evil sickness, poverty and so forth how can they be referred to the principle we have described? Well, sickness is excess or defect in the body, which as a material organism rebels against order and measure; ugliness is but matter not mastered by Ideal-Form; poverty consists in our need and lack of goods made necessary to us by our association with Matter whose very nature is to be one long want. Enneads I,8,5

If all this be true, we cannot be, ourselves, the source of Evil, we are not evil in ourselves; Evil was before we came to be; the Evil which holds men down binds them against their will; and for those that have the strength not found in all men, it is true there is a deliverance from the evils that have found lodgement in the SOUL. Enneads I,8,5

To resume: the Measureless is evil primarily; whatever, either by resemblance or participation, exists in the state of unmeasure, is evil secondarily, by force of its dealing with the Primal primarily, the darkness; secondarily, the darkened. Now, Vice, being an ignorance and a lack of measure in the SOUL, is secondarily evil, not the Essential Evil, just as Virtue is not the Primal Good but is Likeness to The Good, or participation in it. Enneads I,8,8

9. But what approach have we to the knowing of Good and Evil? And first of the Evil of SOUL: Virtue, we may know by the Intellectual-Principle and by means of the philosophic habit; but Vice? A a ruler marks off straight from crooked, so Vice is known by its divergence from the line of Virtue. Enneads I,8,9

This objection may be answered by applying the principle to the case of Evil in the SOUL; the Evil, the Vice, will be a Negation and not anything having a separate existence; we come to the doctrine which denies Matter or, admitting it, denies its Evil; we need not seek elsewhere; we may at once place Evil in the SOUL, recognising it as the mere absence of Good. But if the negation is the negation of something that ought to become present, if it is a denial of the Good by the SOUL, then the SOUL produces vice within itself by the operation of its own Nature, and is devoid of good and, therefore, SOUL though it be, devoid of life: the SOUL, if it has no life, is soulless; the SOUL is no SOUL. Enneads I,8,10

No; the SOUL has life by its own nature and therefore does not, of its own nature, contain this negation of The Good: it has much good in it; it carries a happy trace of the Intellectual-Principle and is not essentially evil: neither is it primally evil nor is that Primal Evil present in it even as an accidental, for the SOUL is not wholly apart from the Good. Enneads I,8,10

Perhaps Vice and Evil as in the SOUL should be described not as an entire, but as a partial, negation of good. Enneads I,8,10

But if this were so, part of the SOUL must possess The Good, part be without it; the SOUL will have a mingled nature and the Evil within it will not be unblended: we have not yet lighted on the Primal, Unmingled Evil. The SOUL would possess the Good as its Essence, the Evil as an Accidental. Enneads I,8,10

Perhaps Evil is merely an impediment to the SOUL like something affecting the eye and so hindering sight. Enneads I,8,10

But such an evil in the eyes is no more than an occasion of evil, the Absolute Evil is something quite different. If then Vice is an impediment to the SOUL, Vice is an occasion of evil but not Evil-Absolute. Virtue is not the Absolute Good, but a co-operator with it; and if Virtue is not the Absolute Good neither is Vice the Absolute Evil. Virtue is not the Absolute Beauty or the Absolute Good; neither, therefore, is Vice the Essential Ugliness or the Essential Evil. Enneads I,8,10

We teach that Virtue is not the Absolute Good and Beauty, because we know that These are earlier than Virtue and transcend it, and that it is good and beautiful by some participation in them. Now as, going upward from virtue, we come to the Beautiful and to the Good, so, going downward from Vice, we reach Essential Evil: from Vice as the starting-point we come to vision of Evil, as far as such vision is possible, and we become evil to the extent of our participation in it. We are become dwellers in the Place of Unlikeness, where, fallen from all our resemblance to the Divine, we lie in gloom and mud: for if the SOUL abandons itself unreservedly to the extreme of viciousness, it is no longer a vicious SOUL merely, for mere vice is still human, still carries some trace of good: it has taken to itself another nature, the Evil, and as far as SOUL can die it is dead. And the death of SOUL is twofold: while still sunk in body to lie down in Matter and drench itself with it; when it has left the body, to lie in the other world until, somehow, it stirs again and lifts its sight from the mud: and this is our “going down to Hades and slumbering there.” Enneads I,8,10

11. It may be suggested that Vice is feebleness in the SOUL. Enneads I,8,11

We shall be reminded that the Vicious SOUL is unstable, swept along from every ill to every other, quickly stirred by appetites, headlong to anger, as hasty to compromises, yielding at once to obscure imaginations, as weak, in fact, as the weakest thing made by man or nature, blown about by every breeze, burned away by every heat. Enneads I,8,11

Still the question must be faced what constitutes this weakness in the SOUL, whence it comes. Enneads I,8,11

For weakness in the body is not like that in the SOUL: the word weakness, which covers the incapacity for work and the lack of resistance in the body, is applied to the SOUL merely by analogy unless, indeed, in the one case as in the other, the cause of the weakness is Matter. Enneads I,8,11

But we must go more thoroughly into the source of this weakness, as we call it, in the SOUL, which is certainly not made weak as the result of any density or rarity, or by any thickening or thinning or anything like a disease, like a fever. Enneads I,8,11

Matter exists; SOUL exists; and they occupy, so to speak, one place. There is not one place for Matter and another for Soul-Matter, for instance, kept to earth, SOUL in the air: the SOUL’s “separate place” is simply its not being in Matter; that is, its not being united with it; that is that there be no compound unit consisting of SOUL and Matter; that is that SOUL be not moulded in Matter as in a matrix; this is the SOUL’s apartness. Enneads I,8,11

But the faculties of the SOUL are many, and it has its beginning, its intermediate phases, its final fringe. Matter appears, importunes, raises disorders, seeks to force its way within; but all the ground is holy, nothing there without part in SOUL. Matter therefore submits, and takes light: but the source of its illumination it cannot attain to, for the SOUL cannot lift up this foreign thing close by, since the evil of it makes it invisible. On the contrary the illumination, the light streaming from the SOUL, is dulled, is weakened, as it mixes with Matter which offers Birth to the SOUL, providing the means by which it enters into generation, impossible to it if no recipient were at hand. Enneads I,8,11

This is the fall of the SOUL, this entry into Matter: thence its weakness: not all the faculties of its being retain free play, for Matter hinders their manifestation; it encroaches upon the SOUL’s territory and, as it were, crushes the SOUL back; and it turns to evil all that it has stolen, until the SOUL finds strength to advance again. Enneads I,8,11

Thus the cause, at once, of the weakness of SOUL and of all its evil is Matter. Enneads I,8,11

The evil of Matter precedes the weakness, the vice; it is Primal Evil. Even though the SOUL itself submits to Matter and engenders to it; if it becomes evil within itself by its commerce with Matter, the cause is still the presence of Matter: the SOUL would never have approached Matter but that the presence of Matter is the occasion of its earth-life. Enneads I,8,11

What, then, must Evil be to the SOUL? What SOUL could contain Evil unless by contact with the lower Kind? There could be no desire, no sorrow, no rage, no fear: fear touches the compounded dreading its dissolution; pain and sorrow are the accompaniments of the dissolution; desires spring from something troubling the grouped being or are a provision against trouble threatened; all impression is the stroke of something unreasonable outside the SOUL, accepted only because the SOUL is not devoid of parts or phases; the SOUL takes up false notions through having gone outside of its own truth by ceasing to be purely itself. Enneads I,8,12

One desire or appetite there is which does not fall under this condemnation; it is the aspiration towards the Intellectual-Principle: this demands only that the SOUL dwell alone enshrined within that place of its choice, never lapsing towards the lower. Enneads I,8,12

“You will not dismiss your SOUL lest it go forth...” [taking something with it]. Enneads I,9,12

For wheresoever it go, it will be in some definite condition, and its going forth is to some new place. The SOUL will wait for the body to be completely severed from it; then it makes no departure; it simply finds itself free. Enneads I,9,12

But how does the body come to be separated? The separation takes place when nothing of SOUL remains bound up with it: the harmony within the body, by virtue of which the SOUL was retained, is broken and it can no longer hold its guest. Enneads I,9,12

But when a man contrives the dissolution of the body, it is he that has used violence and torn himself away, not the body that has let the SOUL slip from it. And in loosing the bond he has not been without passion; there has been revolt or grief or anger, movements which it is unlawful to indulge. Enneads I,9,12

But if a man feel himself to be losing his reason? That is not likely in the Sage, but if it should occur, it must be classed with the inevitable, to be welcome at the bidding of the fact though not for its own sake. To call upon drugs to the release of the SOUL seems a strange way of assisting its purposes. Enneads I,9,12