MacKenna-Plotinus: soul (Enneads V)

  

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

There is the method, which we amply exhibit elsewhere, declaring the dishonour of the objects which the SOUL holds here in honour; the second teaches or recalls to the SOUL its race and worth; this latter is the leading truth, and, clearly brought out, is the evidence of the other. Enneads V,1,1

It must occupy us now for it bears closely upon our enquiry to which it is the natural preliminary: the seeker is SOUL and it must start from a true notion of the nature and quality by which SOUL may undertake the search; it must study itself in order to learn whether it has the faculty for the enquiry, the eye for the object proposed, whether in fact we ought to seek; for if the object is alien the search must be futile, while if there is relationship the solution of our problem is at once desirable and possible. Enneads V,1,1

2. Let every SOUL recall, then, at the outset the truth that SOUL is the author of all living things, that it has breathed the life into them all, whatever is nourished by earth and sea, all the creatures of the air, the divine stars in the sky; it is the maker of the sun; itself formed and ordered this vast heaven and conducts all that rhythmic motion; and it is a principle distinct from all these to which it gives law and movement and life, and it must of necessity be more honourable than they, for they gather or dissolve as SOUL brings them life or abandons them, but SOUL, since it never can abandon itself, is of eternal being. Enneads V,1,2

How life was purveyed to the universe of things and to the separate beings in it may be thus conceived: That great SOUL must stand pictured before another SOUL, one not mean, a SOUL that has become worthy to look, emancipate from the lure, from all that binds its fellows in bewitchment, holding itself in quietude. Let not merely the enveloping body be at peace, body’s turmoil stilled, but all that lies around, earth at peace, and sea at peace, and air and the very heavens. Into that heaven, all at rest, let the great SOUL be conceived to roll inward at every point, penetrating, permeating, from all sides pouring in its light. As the rays of the sun throwing their brilliance upon a lowering cloud make it gleam all gold, so the SOUL entering the material expanse of the heavens has given life, has given immortality: what was abject it has lifted up; and the heavenly system, moved now in endless motion by the SOUL that leads it in wisdom, has become a living and a blessed thing; the SOUL domiciled within, it takes worth where, before the SOUL, it was stark body clay and water or, rather, the blankness of Matter, the absence of Being, and, as an author says, “the execration of the Gods.” Enneads V,1,2

The SOUL’s nature and power will be brought out more clearly, more brilliantly, if we consider next how it envelops the heavenly system and guides all to its purposes: for it has bestowed itself upon all that huge expanse so that every interval, small and great alike, all has been ensouled. Enneads V,1,2

The material body is made up of parts, each holding its own place, some in mutual opposition and others variously interdependent; the SOUL is in no such condition; it is not whittled down so that life tells of a part of the SOUL and springs where some such separate portion impinges; each separate life lives by the SOUL entire, omnipresent in the likeness of the engendering father, entire in unity and entire in diffused variety. By the power of the SOUL the manifold and diverse heavenly system is a unit: through SOUL this universe is a God: and the sun is a God because it is ensouled; so too the stars: and whatsoever we ourselves may be, it is all in virtue of SOUL; for “dead is viler than dung.” Enneads V,1,2

This, by which the gods are divine, must be the oldest God of them all: and our own SOUL is of that same Ideal nature, so that to consider it, purified, freed from all accruement, is to recognise in ourselves that same value which we have found SOUL to be, honourable above all that is bodily. For what is body but earth, and, taking fire itself, what [but SOUL] is its burning power? So it is with all the compounds of earth and fire, even with water and air added to them? If, then, it is the presence of SOUL that brings worth, how can a man slight himself and run after other things? You honour the SOUL elsewhere; honour then yourself. Enneads V,1,2

3. The SOUL once seen to be thus precious, thus divine, you may hold the faith that by its possession you are already nearing God: in the strength of this power make upwards towards Him: at no great distance you must attain: there is not much between. Enneads V,1,3

But over this divine, there is still a diviner: grasp the upward neighbour of the SOUL, its prior and source. Enneads V,1,3

SOUL, for all the worth we have shown to belong to it, is yet a secondary, an image of the Intellectual-Principle: reason uttered is an image of the reason stored within the SOUL, and in the same way SOUL is an utterance of the Intellectual-Principle: it is even the total of its activity, the entire stream of life sent forth by that Principle to the production of further being; it is the forthgoing heat of a fire which has also heat essentially inherent. But within the Supreme we must see energy not as an overflow but in the double aspect of integral inherence with the establishment of a new being. Sprung, in other words, from the Intellectual-Principle, SOUL is intellective, but with an intellection operation by the method of reasonings: for its perfecting it must look to that Divine Mind, which may be thought of as a father watching over the development of his child born imperfect in comparison with himself. Enneads V,1,3

Thus its substantial existence comes from the Intellectual-Principle; and the Reason within it becomes Act in virtue of its contemplation of that prior; for its thought and act are its own intimate possession when it looks to the Supreme Intelligence; those only are soul-acts which are of this intellective nature and are determined by its own character; all that is less noble is foreign [traceable to Matter] and is accidental to the SOUL in the course of its peculiar task. Enneads V,1,3

In two ways, then, the Intellectual-Principle enhances the divine quality of the SOUL, as father and as immanent presence; nothing separates them but the fact that they are not one and the same, that there is succession, that over against a recipient there stands the ideal-form received; but this recipient, Matter to the Supreme Intelligence, is also noble as being at once informed by divine intellect and uncompounded. Enneads V,1,3

What the Intellectual-Principle must be is carried in the single word that SOUL, itself so great, is still inferior. Enneads V,1,3

That archetypal world is the true Golden Age, age of Kronos, who is the Intellectual-Principle as being the offspring or exuberance of God. For here is contained all that is immortal: nothing here but is Divine Mind; all is God; this is the place of every SOUL. Here is rest unbroken: for how can that seek change, in which all is well; what need that reach to, which holds all within itself; what increase can that desire, which stands utterly achieved? All its content, thus, is perfect, that itself may be perfect throughout, as holding nothing that is less than the divine, nothing that is less than intellective. Its knowing is not by search but by possession, its blessedness inherent, not acquired; for all belongs to it eternally and it holds the authentic Eternity imitated by Time which, circling round the SOUL, makes towards the new thing and passes by the old. SOUL deals with thing after thing now Socrates  ; now a horse: always some one entity from among beings but the Intellectual-Principle is all and therefore its entire content is simultaneously present in that identity: this is pure being in eternal actuality; nowhere is there any future, for every then is a now; nor is there any past, for nothing there has ever ceased to be; everything has taken its stand for ever, an identity well pleased, we might say, to be as it is; and everything, in that entire content, is Intellectual-Principle and Authentic Existence; and the total of all is Intellectual-Principle entire and Being entire. Intellectual-Principle by its intellective act establishes Being, which in turn, as the object of intellection, becomes the cause of intellection and of existence to the Intellectual-Principle though, of course, there is another cause of intellection which is also a cause to Being, both rising in a source distinct from either. Enneads V,1,4

5. As a manifold, then, this God, the Intellectual-Principle, exists within the SOUL here, the SOUL which once for all stands linked a member of the divine, unless by a deliberate apostasy. Enneads V,1,5

The Dyad is a secondary; deriving from unity, it finds in unity the determinant needed by its native indetermination: once there is any determination, there is Number, in the sense, of course, of the real [the archetypal] Number. And the SOUL is such a number or quantity. For the Primals are not masses or magnitudes; all of that gross order is later, real only to the sense-thought; even in seed the effective reality is not the moist substance but the unseen that is to say Number [as the determinant of individual being] and the Reason-Principle [of the product to be]. Enneads V,1,5

6. But how and what does the Intellectual-Principle see and, especially, how has it sprung from that which is to become the object of its vision? The mind demands the existence of these Beings, but it is still in trouble over the problem endlessly debated by the most ancient philosophers: from such a unity as we have declared The One to be, how does anything at all come into substantial existence, any multiplicity, dyad, or number? Why has the Primal not remained self-gathered so that there be none of this profusion of the manifold which we observe in existence and yet are compelled to trace to that absolute unity? In venturing an answer, we first invoke God Himself, not in loud word but in that way of prayer which is always within our power, leaning in SOUL towards Him by aspiration, alone towards the alone. But if we seek the vision of that great Being within the Inner Sanctuary self-gathered, tranquilly remote above all else we begin by considering the images stationed at the outer precincts, or, more exactly to the moment, the first image that appears. How the Divine Mind comes into being must be explained: Everything moving has necessarily an object towards which it advances; but since the Supreme can have no such object, we may not ascribe motion to it: anything that comes into being after it can be produced only as a consequence of its unfailing self-intention; and, of course, we dare not talk of generation in time, dealing as we are with eternal Beings: where we speak of origin in such reference, it is in the sense, merely, of cause and subordination: origin from the Supreme must not be taken to imply any movement in it: that would make the Being resulting from the movement not a second principle but a third: the Movement would be the second hypostasis. Enneads V,1,6

Again, all that is fully achieved engenders: therefore the eternally achieved engenders eternally an eternal being. At the same time, the offspring is always minor: what then are we to think of the All-Perfect but that it can produce nothing less than the very greatest that is later than itself. The greatest, later than the divine unity, must be the Divine Mind, and it must be the second of all existence, for it is that which sees The One on which alone it leans while the First has no need whatever of it. The offspring of the prior to Divine Mind can be no other than that Mind itself and thus is the loftiest being in the universe, all else following upon it the SOUL, for example, being an utterance and act of the Intellectual-Principle as that is an utterance and act of The One. But in SOUL the utterance is obscured, for SOUL is an image and must look to its own original: that Principle, on the contrary, looks to the First without mediation thus becoming what it is and has that vision not as from a distance but as the immediate next with nothing intervening, close to the One as SOUL to it. Enneads V,1,6

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,1,7

Yet any offspring of the Intellectual-Principle must be a Reason-Principle; the thought of the Divine Mind must be a substantial existence: such then is that [SOUL] which circles about the Divine Mind, its light, its image inseparably attached to it: on the upper level united with it, filled from it, enjoying it, participant in its nature, intellective with it, but on the lower level in contact with the realm beneath itself, or, rather, generating in turn an offspring which must lie beneath; of this lower we will treat later; so far we deal still with the Divine. Enneads V,1,7

He teaches, also, that there is an author of the Cause, that is of the Intellectual-Principle, which to him is the Creator who made the SOUL, as he tells us, in the famous mixing bowl. This author of the causing principle, of the divine mind, is to him the Good, that which transcends the Intellectual-Principle and transcends Being: often too he uses the term “The Idea” to indicate Being and the Divine Mind. Thus Plato knows the order of generation from the Good, the Intellectual-Principle; from the Intellectual-Principle, the SOUL. These teachings are, therefore, no novelties, no inventions of today, but long since stated, if not stressed; our doctrine here is the explanation of an earlier and can show the antiquity of these opinions on the testimony of Plato himself. Enneads V,1,8

10. We have shown the inevitability of certain convictions as to the scheme of things: There exists a Principle which transcends Being; this is The One, whose nature we have sought to establish in so far as such matters lend themselves to proof. Upon The One follows immediately the Principle which is at once Being and the Intellectual-Principle. Third comes the Principle, SOUL. Enneads V,1,10

Thus our SOUL, too, is a divine thing, belonging to another order than sense; such is all that holds the rank of SOUL, but [above the life-principle] there is the SOUL perfected as containing Intellectual-Principle with its double phase, reasoning and giving the power to reason. The reasoning phase of the SOUL, needing no bodily organ for its thinking but maintaining, in purity, its distinctive Act that its thought may be uncontaminated this we cannot err in placing, separate and not mingled into body, within the first Intellectual. We may not seek any point of space in which to seat it; it must be set outside of all space: its distinct quality, its separateness, its immateriality, demand that it be a thing alone, untouched by all of the bodily order. This is why we read of the universe that the Demiurge cast the SOUL around it from without understand that phase of SOUL which is permanently seated in the Intellectual and of ourselves that the charioteer’s head reaches upwards towards the heights. Enneads V,1,10

The admonition to sever SOUL from body is not, of course, to be understood spatially that separation stands made in Nature the reference is to holding our rank, to use of our thinking, to an attitude of alienation from the body in the effort to lead up and attach to the over-world, equally with the other, that phase of SOUL seated here and, alone, having to do with body, creating, moulding, spending its care upon it. Enneads V,1,10

11. Since there is a SOUL which reasons upon the right and good for reasoning is an enquiry into the rightness and goodness of this rather than that there must exist some permanent Right, the source and foundation of this reasoning in our SOUL; how, else, could any such discussion be held? Further, since the SOUL’s attention to these matters is intermittent, there must be within us an Intellectual-Principle acquainted with that Right not by momentary act but in permanent possession. Similarly there must be also the principle of this principle, its cause, God. This Highest cannot be divided and allotted, must remain intangible but not bound to space, it may be present at many points, wheresoever there is anything capable of accepting one of its manifestations; thus a centre is an independent unity; everything within the circle has its term at the centre; and to the centre the radii bring each their own. Within our nature is such a centre by which we grasp and are linked and held; and those of us are firmly in the Supreme whose collective tendency is There. Enneads V,1,11

12. Possessed of such powers, how does it happen that we do not lay hold of them, but for the most part, let these high activities go idle some, even, of us never bringing them in any degree to effect? The answer is that all the Divine Beings are unceasingly about their own act, the Intellectual-Principle and its Prior always self-intent; and so, too, the SOUL maintains its unfailing movement; for not all that passes in the SOUL is, by that fact, perceptible; we know just as much as impinges upon the faculty of sense. Any activity not transmitted to the sensitive faculty has not traversed the entire SOUL: we remain unaware because the human being includes sense-perception; man is not merely a part [the higher part] of the SOUL but the total. Enneads V,1,12

None the less every being of the order of SOUL is in continuous activity as long as life holds, continuously executing to itself its characteristic act: knowledge of the act depends upon transmission and perception. If there is to be perception of what is thus present, we must turn the perceptive faculty inward and hold it to attention there. Hoping to hear a desired voice, we let all others pass and are alert for the coming at last of that most welcome of sounds: so here, we must let the hearings of sense go by, save for sheer necessity, and keep the SOUL’s perception bright and quick to the sounds from above. Enneads V,1,12

This active power sprung from essence [from the Intellectual-Principle considered as Being] is SOUL. Enneads V,2,1

SOUL arises as the idea and act of the motionless Intellectual-Principle which itself sprang from its own motionless prior but the SOUL’s operation is not similarly motionless; its image is generated from its movement. It takes fulness by looking to its source; but it generates its image by adopting another, a downward, movement. Enneads V,2,1

This image of SOUL is Sense and Nature, the vegetal principle. Enneads V,2,1

Nothing, however, is completely severed from its prior. Thus the human SOUL appears to reach away as far down as to the vegetal order: in some sense it does, since the life of growing things is within its province; but it is not present entire; when it has reached the vegetal order it is there in the sense that having moved thus far downwards it produces by its outgoing and its tendency towards the less good another hypostasis or form of being just as its prior (the loftier phase of the SOUL) is produced from the Intellectual-Principle which yet remains in untroubled self-possession. Enneads V,2,1

In the case of SOUL entering some vegetal form, what is there is one phase, the more rebellious and less intellectual, outgone to that extreme; in a SOUL entering an animal, the faculty of sensation has been dominant and brought it there; in SOUL entering man, the movement outward has either been wholly of its reasoning part or has come from the Intellectual-Principle in the sense that the SOUL, possessing that principle as immanent to its being, has an inborn desire of intellectual activity and of movement in general. Enneads V,2,2

But, looking more minutely into the matter, when shoots or topmost boughs are lopped from some growing thing, where goes the SOUL that was present in them? Simply, whence it came: SOUL never knew spatial separation and therefore is always within the source. If you cut the root to pieces, or burn it, where is the life that was present there? In the SOUL, which never went outside of itself. Enneads V,2,2

No doubt, despite this permanence, the SOUL must have been in something if it reascends; and if it does not, it is still somewhere; it is in some other vegetal SOUL: but all this means merely that it is not crushed into some one spot; if a Soul-power reascends, it is within the Soul-power preceding it; that in turn can be only in the soul-power prior again, the phase reaching upwards to the Intellectual-Principle. Of course nothing here must be understood spatially: SOUL never was in space; and the Divine Intellect, again, is distinguished from SOUL as being still more free. Enneads V,2,2

SOUL thus is nowhere but in the Principle which has that characteristic existence at once nowhere and everywhere. Enneads V,2,2

If the SOUL on its upward path has halted midway before wholly achieving the supreme heights, it has a mid-rank life and has centred itself upon the mid-phase of its being. All in that mid-region is Intellectual-Principle not wholly itself nothing else because deriving thence [and therefore of that name and rank], yet not that because the Intellectual-Principle in giving it forth is not merged into it. Enneads V,2,2

It would be already absurd enough to deny this power to the SOUL or mind, but the very height of absurdity to deny it to the nature of the Intellectual-Principle, presented thus as knowing the rest of things but not attaining to knowledge, or even awareness, of itself. Enneads V,3,1

2. We begin with the SOUL, asking whether it is to be allowed self-knowledge and what the knowing principle in it would be and how operating. Enneads V,3,2

The reasoning-principle in the SOUL acts upon the representations standing before it as the result of sense-perception; these it judges, combining, distinguishing: or it may also observe the impressions, so to speak, rising from the Intellectual-Principle, and has the same power of handling these; and reasoning will develop to wisdom where it recognizes the new and late-coming impressions [those of sense] and adapts them, so to speak, to those it holds from long before the act which may be described as the SOUL’s Reminiscence. Enneads V,3,2

So far as this, the efficacy of the Intellectual-Principle in the SOUL certainly reaches; but is there also introversion and self-cognition or is that power to be reserved strictly for the Divine Mind? If we accord self-knowing to this phase of the SOUL we make it an Intellectual-Principle and will have to show what distinguishes it from its prior; if we refuse it self-knowing, all our thought brings us step by step to some principle which has this power, and we must discover what such self-knowing consists in. If, again, we do allow self-knowledge in the lower we must examine the question of degree; for if there is no difference of degree, then the reasoning principle in SOUL is the Intellectual-Principle unalloyed. Enneads V,3,2

We ask, then, whether the understanding principle in the SOUL has equally the power of turning inwards upon itself or whether it has no more than that of comprehending the impressions, superior and inferior, which it receives. Enneads V,3,2

But how does it thus contain the good within itself? It is, itself, of the nature of the good and it has been strengthened still towards the perception of all that is good by the irradiation of the Intellectual-Principle upon it; for this pure phase of the SOUL welcomes to itself the images implanted from its prior. Enneads V,3,3

But why may we not distinguish this understanding phase as Intellectual-Principle and take SOUL to consist of the later phases from the sensitive downwards? Because all the activities mentioned are within the scope of a reasoning faculty, and reasoning is characteristically the function of SOUL. Enneads V,3,3

Why not, however, absolve the question by assigning self-cognisance to this phase? Because we have allotted to SOUL the function of dealing in thought and in multiform action with the external, and we hold that observation of self and of the content of self must belong to Intellectual-Principle. Enneads V,3,3

If any one says, “Still; what precludes the reasoning SOUL from observing its own content by some special faculty?” he is no longer posting a principle of understanding or of reasoning but, simply, bringing in the Intellectual-Principle unalloyed. Enneads V,3,3

But what precludes the Intellectual-Principle from being present, unalloyed, within the SOUL? Nothing, we admit; but are we entitled therefore to think of it as a phase of SOUL? We cannot describe it as belonging to the SOUL though we do describe it as our Intellectual-Principle, something distinct from the understanding, advanced above it, and yet ours even though we cannot include it among soul-phases: it is ours and not ours; and therefore we use it sometimes and sometimes not, whereas we always have use of the understanding; the Intellectual-Principle is ours when we act by it, not ours when we neglect it. Enneads V,3,3

Still; we perceive by means of the perceptive faculty and are, ourselves, the percipients: may we not say the same of the intellective act? No: our reasoning is our own; we ourselves think the thoughts that occupy the understanding for this is actually the We but the operation of the Intellectual-Principle enters from above us as that of the sensitive faculty from below; the We is the SOUL at its highest, the mid-point between two powers, between the sensitive principle, inferior to us, and the intellectual principle superior. We think of the perceptive act as integral to ourselves because our sense-perception is uninterrupted; we hesitate as to the Intellectual-Principle both because we are not always occupied with it and because it exists apart, not a principle inclining to us but one to which we incline when we choose to look upwards. Enneads V,3,3

Thus the self-knower is a double person: there is the one that takes cognisance of the principle in virtue of which understanding occurs in the SOUL or mind; and there is the higher, knowing himself by the Intellectual-Principle with which he becomes identical: this latter knows the self as no longer man but as a being that has become something other through and through: he has thrown himself as one thing over into the superior order, taking with him only that better part of the SOUL which alone is winged for the Intellectual Act and gives the man, once established There, the power to appropriate what he has seen. Enneads V,3,4

This self-knowing agent, perfect in the Intellectual-Principle, is modified in the SOUL. Enneads V,3,6

The difference is that, while the SOUL knows itself as within something else, the Intellectual-Principle knows itself as self-depending, knows all its nature and character, and knows by right of its own being and by simple introversion. When it looks upon the authentic existences it is looking upon itself; its vision as its effective existence, and this efficacy is itself since the Intellectual-Principle and the Intellectual Act are one: this is an integral seeing itself by its entire being, not a part seeing by a part. Enneads V,3,6

But has our discussion issued in an Intellectual-Principle having a persuasive activity [furnishing us with probability]? No: it brings compulsion not persuasion; compulsion belongs to the Intellectual-Principle, persuasion to the SOUL or mind, and we seem to desire to be persuaded rather than to see the truth in the pure intellect. Enneads V,3,6

As long as we were Above, collected within the Intellectual nature, we were satisfied; we were held in the intellectual act; we had vision because we drew all into unity for the thinker in us was the Intellectual-Principle telling us of itself and the SOUL or mind was motionless, assenting to that act of its prior. But now that we are once more here living in the secondary, the SOUL we seek for persuasive probabilities: it is through the image we desire to know the archetype. Enneads V,3,6

Our way is to teach our SOUL how the Intellectual-Principle exercises self-vision; the phase thus to be taught is that which already touches the intellective order, that which we call the understanding or intelligent SOUL, indicating by the very name that it is already of itself in some degree an Intellectual-Principle or that it holds its peculiar power through and from that Principle. This phase must be brought to understand by what means it has knowledge of the thing it sees and warrant for what it affirms: if it became what it affirms, it would by that fact possess self-knowing. All its vision and affirmation being in the Supreme or deriving from it There where itself also is it will possess self-knowledge by its right as a Reason-Principle, claiming its kin and bringing all into accord with the divine imprint upon it. Enneads V,3,6

The SOUL therefore [to attain self-knowledge] has only to set this image [that is to say, its highest phase] alongside the veritable Intellectual-Principle which we have found to be identical with the truths constituting the objects of intellection, the world of Primals and Reality: for this Intellectual-Principle, by very definition, cannot be outside of itself, the Intellectual Reality: self-gathered and unalloyed, it is Intellectual-Principle through all the range of its being for unintelligent intelligence is not possible and thus it possesses of necessity self-knowing, as a being immanent to itself and one having for function and essence to be purely and solely Intellectual-Principle. This is no doer; the doer, not self-intent but looking outward, will have knowledge, in some kind, of the external, but, if wholly of this practical order, need have no self-knowledge; where, on the contrary, there is no action and of course the pure Intellectual-Principle cannot be straining after any absent good the intention can be only towards the self; at once self-knowing becomes not merely plausible but inevitable; what else could living signify in a being immune from action and existing in Intellect? Enneads V,3,6

Once more, then; the Intellectual-Principle is a self-intent activity, but SOUL has the double phase, one inner, intent upon the Intellectual-Principle, the other outside it and facing to the external; by the one it holds the likeness to its source; by the other, even in its unlikeness, it still comes to likeness in this sphere, too, by virtue of action and production; in its action it still contemplates, and its production produces Ideal-forms divine intellections perfectly wrought out so that all its creations are representations of the divine Intellection and of the divine Intellect, moulded upon the archetype, of which all are emanations and images, the nearer more true, the very latest preserving some faint likeness of the source. Enneads V,3,7

8. Now comes the question what sort of thing does the Intellectual-Principle see in seeing the Intellectual Realm and what in seeing itself? We are not to look for an Intellectual realm reminding us of the colour or shape to be seen on material objects: the intellectual antedates all such things; and even in our sphere the production is very different from the Reason-Principle in the seeds from which it is produced. The seed principles are invisible and the beings of the Intellectual still more characteristically so; the Intellectuals are of one same nature with the Intellectual Realm which contains them, just as the Reason-Principle in the seed is identical with the SOUL, or life-principle, containing it. Enneads V,3,8

But the SOUL (considered as apart from the Intellectual-Principle) has no vision of what it thus contains, for it is not the producer but, like the Reason-Principles also, an image of its source: that source is the brilliant, the authentic, the primarily existent, the thing self-sprung and self-intent; but its image, SOUL, is a thing which can have no permanence except by attachment, by living in that other; the very nature of an image is that, as a secondary, it shall have its being in something else, if at all it exist apart from its original. Hence this image (SOUL) has not vision, for it has not the necessary light, and, if it should see, then, as finding its completion elsewhere, it sees another, not itself. Enneads V,3,8

What, then, is there that can pronounce upon the nature of this all-unity? That which sees: and to see is the function of the Intellectual-Principle. Even in our own sphere [we have a parallel to this self-vision of a unity], our vision is light or rather becomes one with light, and it sees light for it sees colours. In the intellectual, the vision sees not through some medium but by and through itself alone, for its object is not external: by one light it sees another not through any intermediate agency; a light sees a light, that is to say a thing sees itself. This light shining within the SOUL enlightens it; that is, it makes the SOUL intellective, working it into likeness with itself, the light above. Enneads V,3,8

Think of the traces of this light upon the SOUL, then say to yourself that such, and more beautiful and broader and more radiant, is the light itself; thus you will approach to the nature of the Intellectual-Principle and the Intellectual Realm, for it is this light, itself lit from above, which gives the SOUL its brighter life. Enneads V,3,8

It is not the source of the generative life of the SOUL which, on the contrary, it draws inward, preserving it from such diffusion, holding it to the love of the splendour of its Prior. Enneads V,3,8

This means in sum that the life the SOUL takes thence is an intellective life, a trace of the life in the [divine] Intellect, in which alone the authentic exists. Enneads V,3,8

In the strength of such considerations we lead up our own SOUL to the Divine, so that it poses itself as an image of that Being, its life becoming an imprint and a likeness of the Highest, its every act of thought making it over into the Divine and the Intellectual. Enneads V,3,8

If the SOUL is questioned as to the nature of that Intellectual-Principle the perfect and all-embracing, the primal self-knower it has but to enter into that Principle, or to sink all its activity into that, and at once it shows itself to be in effective possession of those priors whose memory it never lost: thus, as an image of the Intellectual-Principle, it can make itself the medium by which to attain some vision of it; it draws upon that within itself which is most closely resemblant, as far as resemblance is possible between divine Intellect and any phase of SOUL. Enneads V,3,8

9. In order, then, to know what the Divine Mind is, we must observe SOUL and especially its most God-like phase. Enneads V,3,9

One certain way to this knowledge is to separate first, the man from the body yourself, that is, from your body next to put aside that SOUL which moulded the body, and, very earnestly, the system of sense with desires and impulses and every such futility, all setting definitely towards the mortal: what is left is the phase of the SOUL which we have declared to be an image of the Divine Intellect, retaining some light from that sun, while it pours downward upon the sphere of magnitudes [that is, of Matter] the light playing about itself which is generated from its own nature. Enneads V,3,9

Of course we do not pretend that the sun’s light [as the analogy might imply] remains a self-gathered and sun-centred thing: it is at once outrushing and indwelling; it strikes outward continuously, lap after lap, until it reaches us upon our earth: we must take it that all the light, including that which plays about the sun’s orb, has travelled; otherwise we would have a void expanse, that of the space which is material next to the sun’s orb. The SOUL, on the contrary a light springing from the Divine Mind and shining about it is in closest touch with that source; it is not in transit but remains centred there, and, in likeness to that principle, it has no place: the light of the sun is actually in the air, but the SOUL is clean of all such contact so that its immunity is patent to itself and to any other of the same order. Enneads V,3,9

And by its own characteristic act, though not without reasoning process, it knows the nature of the Intellectual-Principle which, on its side, knows itself without need of reasoning, for it is ever self-present whereas we become so by directing our SOUL towards it; our life is broken and there are many lives, but that principle needs no changings of life or of things; the lives it brings to being are for others not for itself: it cannot need the inferior; nor does it for itself produce the less when it possesses or is the all, nor the images when it possesses or is the prototype. Enneads V,3,9

Anyone not of the strength to lay hold of the first SOUL, that possessing pure intellection, must grasp that which has to do with our ordinary thinking and thence ascend: if even this prove too hard, let him turn to account the sensitive phase which carries the ideal forms of the less fine degree, that phase which, too, with its powers, is immaterial and lies just within the realm of Ideal-principles. Enneads V,3,9

One may even, if it seem necessary, begin as low as the reproductive SOUL and its very production and thence make the ascent, mounting from those ultimate ideal principles to the ultimates in the higher sense, that is to the primals. Enneads V,3,9

May we stop, content, with that? No: the SOUL is yet, and even more, in pain. Is she ripe, perhaps, to bring forth, now that in her pangs she has come so close to what she seeks? No: we must call upon yet another spell if anywhere the assuagement is to be found. Perhaps in what has already been uttered, there lies the charm if only we tell it over often? No: we need a new, a further, incantation. All our effort may well skim over every truth and through all the verities in which we have part, and yet the reality escape us when we hope to affirm, to understand: for the understanding, in order to its affirmation must possess itself of item after item; only so does it traverse all the field: but how can there be any such peregrination of that in which there is no variety? All the need is met by a contact purely intellective. At the moment of touch there is no power whatever to make any affirmation; there is no leisure; reasoning upon the vision is for afterwards. We may know we have had the vision when the SOUL has suddenly taken light. This light is from the Supreme and is the Supreme; we may believe in the Presence when, like that other God on the call of a certain man, He comes bringing light: the light is the proof of the advent. Thus, the SOUL unlit remains without that vision; lit, it possesses what it sought. And this is the true end set before the SOUL, to take that light, to see the Supreme by the Supreme and not by the light of any other principle to see the Supreme which is also the means to the vision; for that which illumines the SOUL is that which it is to see just as it is by the sun’s own light that we see the sun. Enneads V,3,17

The Supreme in its progress could never be borne forward upon some soulless vehicle nor even directly upon the SOUL: it will be heralded by some ineffable beauty: before the great King in his progress there comes first the minor train, then rank by rank the greater and more exalted, closer to the King the kinglier; next his own honoured company until, last among all these grandeurs, suddenly appears the Supreme Monarch himself, and all unless indeed for those who have contented themselves with the spectacle before his coming and gone away prostrate themselves and hail him. Enneads V,5,3

[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,5,3

Consider our universe. There is none before it and therefore it is not, itself, in a universe or in any place what place was there before the universe came to be? its linked members form and occupy the whole. But SOUL is not in the universe, on the contrary the universe is in the SOUL; bodily substance is not a place to the SOUL; SOUL is contained in Intellectual-Principle and is the container of body. The Intellectual-Principle in turn is contained in something else; but that prior principle has nothing in which to be: the First is therefore in nothing, and, therefore, nowhere. But all the rest must be somewhere; and where but in the First? This can mean only that the First is neither remote from things nor directly within them; there is nothing containing it; it contains all. It is The Good to the universe if only in this way, that towards it all things have their being, all dependent upon it, each in its mode, so that thing rises above thing in goodness according to its fuller possession of authentic being. Enneads V,5,9

But the surest way of realizing that its nature demands this combination of unity and duality is to proceed upwards from the SOUL, where the distinction can be made more dearly since the duality is exhibited more obviously. Enneads V,6,1

We can imagine the SOUL as a double light, a lesser corresponding to the SOUL proper, a purer representing its intellective phase; if now we suppose this intellective light equal to the light which is to be its object, we no longer distinguish between them; the two are recognised as one: we know, indeed, that there are two, but as we see them they have become one: this gives us the relation between the intellective subject and the object of intellection [in the duality and unity required by that primal intellection]: in our thought we have made the two into one; but on the other hand the one thing has become two, making itself into a duality at the moment of intellection, or, to be more exact, being dual by the fact of intellection and single by the fact that its intellectual object is itself. Enneads V,6,1

We may use the figure of, first, light; then, following it, the sun; as a third, the orb of the moon taking its light from the sun: SOUL carries the Intellectual-Principle as something imparted and lending the light which makes it essentially intellective; Intellectual-Principle carries the light as its own though it is not purely the light but is the being into whose very essence the light has been received; highest is That which, giving forth the light to its sequent, is no other than the pure light itself by whose power the Intellectual-Principle takes character. Enneads V,6,4

If Socrates, Socrates’ SOUL, is external then the Authentic Socrates to adapt the term must be There; that is to say, the individual SOUL has an existence in the Supreme as well as in this world. If there is no such permanent endurance and what was Socrates may with change of time become another SOUL and be Pythagoras   or someone else then the individual Socrates has not that existence in the Divine. Enneads V,7,1

But if the SOUL of the individual contains the Reason-Principles of all that it traverses, once more all men have their [archetypic] existence There: and it is our doctrine that every SOUL contains all the Reason-Principles that exist in the Kosmos: since then the Kosmos contains the Reason-Principles not merely of man, but also of all individual living things, so must the SOUL. Its content of Reason-Principles, then, must be limitless, unless there be a periodical renovation bounding the boundlessness by the return of a former series. Enneads V,7,1

Are we, then, looking to the brute realm, to hold that there are as many Reason-Principles as distinct creatures born in a litter? Why not? There is nothing alarming about such limitlessness in generative forces and in Reason-Principles, when SOUL is there to sustain all. Enneads V,7,3

As in SOUL [principle of Life] so in Divine Mind [principle of Idea] there is this infinitude of recurring generative powers; the Beings there are unfailing. Enneads V,7,3

But that the thing we are pursuing is something different and that the beauty is not in the concrete object is manifest from the beauty there is in matters of study, in conduct and custom; briefly in SOUL or mind. And it is precisely here that the greater beauty lies, perceived whenever you look to the wisdom in a man and delight in it, not wasting attention on the face, which may be hideous, but passing all appearance by and catching only at the inner comeliness, the truly personal; if you are still unmoved and cannot acknowledge beauty under such conditions, then looking to your own inner being you will find no beauty to delight you and it will be futile in that state to seek the greater vision, for you will be questing it through the ugly and impure. Enneads V,8,2

3. Thus there is in the Nature-Principle itself an Ideal archetype of the beauty that is found in material forms and, of that archetype again, the still more beautiful archetype in SOUL, source of that in Nature. In the proficient SOUL this is brighter and of more advanced loveliness: adorning the SOUL and bringing to it a light from that greater light which is beauty primally, its immediate presence sets the SOUL reflecting upon the quality of this prior, the archetype which has no such entries, and is present nowhere but remains in itself alone, and thus is not even to be called a Reason-Principle but is the creative source of the very first Reason-Principle which is the Beauty to which SOUL serves as Matter. Enneads V,8,3

We cannot therefore think that the divine Beings of that sphere, or the other supremely blessed There, need look to our apparatus of science: all of that realm, all is noble image, such images as we may conceive to lie within the SOUL of the wise but There not as inscription but as authentic existence. The ancients had this in mind when they declared the Ideas to be Beings, Essentials. Enneads V,8,5

One way, only, remains: all things must exist in something else; of that prior since there is no obstacle, all being continuous within the realm of reality there has suddenly appeared a sign, an image, whether given forth directly or through the ministry of SOUL or of some phase of SOUL, matters nothing for the moment: thus the entire aggregate of existence springs from the divine world, in greater beauty There because There unmingled but mingled here. Enneads V,8,7

To those that do not see entire, the immediate impression is alone taken into account; but those drunken with this wine, filled with the nectar, all their SOUL penetrated by this beauty, cannot remain mere gazers: no longer is there a spectator outside gazing on an outside spectacle; the clear-eyed hold the vision within themselves, though, for the most part, they have no idea that it is within but look towards it as to something beyond them and see it as an object of vision caught by a direction of the will. Enneads V,8,10

SOUL also has beauty, but is less beautiful than Intellect as being its image and therefore, though beautiful in nature, taking increase of beauty by looking to that original. Since then the All-Soul to use the more familiar term since Aphrodite herself is so beautiful, what name can we give to that other? If SOUL is so lovely in its own right, of what quality must that prior be? And since its being is derived, what must that power be from which the SOUL takes the double beauty, the borrowed and the inherent? We ourselves possess beauty when we are true to our own being; our ugliness is in going over to another order; our self-knowledge, that is to say, is our beauty; in self-ignorance we are ugly. Enneads V,8,13

Others do indeed lift themselves a little above the earth; the better in their SOUL urges them from the pleasant to the nobler, but they are not of power to see the highest and so, in despair of any surer ground, they fall back in virtue’s name, upon those actions and options of the lower from which they sought to escape. Enneads V,9,1

2. What is this other place and how it is accessible? It is to be reached by those who, born with the nature of the lover, are also authentically philosophic by inherent temper; in pain of love towards beauty but not held by material loveliness, taking refuge from that in things whose beauty is of the SOUL such things as virtue, knowledge, institutions, law and custom and thence, rising still a step, reach to the source of this loveliness of the SOUL, thence to whatever be above that again, until the uttermost is reached. The First, the Principle whose beauty is self-springing: this attained, there is an end to the pain inassuageable before. Enneads V,9,2

Now, what is this that gives grace to the corporeal? Two causes in their degree; the participation in beauty and the power of SOUL, the maker, which has imprinted that form. Enneads V,9,2

We ask then is SOUL, of itself, a thing of beauty: we find it is not since differences are manifest, one SOUL wise and lovely, another foolish and ugly: soul-beauty is constituted by wisdom. Enneads V,9,2

The question thus becomes, “What principle is the giver of wisdom to the SOUL? and the only answer is “The Intellectual-Principle,” the veritably intellectual, wise without intermission and therefore beautiful of itself. Enneads V,9,2

All that we see, and describe as having existence, we know to be compound; hand-wrought or compacted by nature, nothing is simplex. Now the hand-wrought, with its metal or stone or wood, is not realized out of these materials until the appropriate craft has produced statue, house or bed, by imparting the particular idea from its own content. Similarly with natural forms of being; those including several constituents, compound bodies as we call them, may be analysed into the materials and the Idea imposed upon the total; the human being, for example, into SOUL and body; and the human body into the four elements. Finding everything to be a compound of Matter and shaping principle since the Matter of the elements is of itself shapeless you will enquire whence this forming idea comes; and you will ask whether in the SOUL we recognise a simplex or whether this also has constituents, something representing Matter and something else the Intellectual-Principle in it representing Idea, the one corresponding to the shape actually on the statue, the other to the artist giving the shape. Enneads V,9,3

Applying the same method to the total of things, here too we discover the Intellectual-Principle and this we set down as veritably the maker and creator of the All. The underly has adopted, we see, certain shapes by which it becomes fire, water, air, earth; and these shapes have been imposed upon it by something else. This other is SOUL which, hovering over the Four [the elements], imparts the pattern of the Kosmos, the Ideas for which it has itself received from the Intellectual-Principle as the SOUL or mind of the craftsman draws upon his craft for the plan of his work. Enneads V,9,3

The Intellectual-Principle is in one phase the Form of the SOUL, its shape; in another phase it is the giver of the shape the sculptor, possessing inherently what is given imparting to SOUL nearly the authentic reality while what body receives is but image and imitation. Enneads V,9,3

4. But, SOUL reached, why need we look higher; why not make this The First? A main reason is that the Intellectual-Principle is at once something other and something more powerful than SOUL and that the more powerful is in the nature of things the prior. For it is certainly not true, as people imagine, that the SOUL, brought to perfection, produces Intellect. How could that potentiality come to actuality unless there be, first, an effective principle to induce the actualization which, left to chance, might never occur? The Firsts must be supposed to exist in actuality, looking to nothing else, self-complete. Anything incomplete must be sequent upon these, and take its completion from the principles engendering it which, like fathers, labour in the improvement of an offspring born imperfect: the produced is a Matter to the producing principle and is worked over by it into a shapely perfection. Enneads V,9,4

And if, further, SOUL is passible while something impassible there must be or by the mere passage of time all wears away, here too we are led to something above SOUL. Enneads V,9,4

Again there must be something prior to SOUL because SOUL is in the world and there must be something outside a world in which, all being corporeal and material, nothing has enduring reality: failing such a prior, neither man nor the Ideas would be eternal or have true identity. Enneads V,9,4

These and many other considerations establish the necessary existence of an Intellectual-Principle prior to SOUL. Enneads V,9,4

We may be told that Reason-Principles suffice [to the subsistence of the All]: but then these, clearly, must be eternal; and if eternal, if immune, then they must exist in an Intellectual-Principle such as we have indicated, a principle earlier than condition, than nature, than SOUL, than anything whose existence is potential for contingent]. Enneads V,9,5

6. We take it, then, that the Intellectual-Principle is the authentic existences and contains them all not as in a place but as possessing itself and being one thing with this its content. All are one there and yet are distinct: similarly the mind holds many branches and items of knowledge simultaneously, yet none of them merged into any other, each acting its own part at call quite independently, every conception coming out from the inner total and working singly. It is after this way, though in a closer unity, that the Intellectual-Principle is all Being in one total and yet not in one, since each of these beings is a distinct power which, however, the total Intellectual-Principle includes as the species in a genus, as the parts in a whole. This relation may be illustrated by the powers in seed; all lies undistinguished in the unit, the formative ideas gathered as in one kernel; yet in that unit there is eye-principle, and there is hand-principle, each of which is revealed as a separate power by its distinct material product. Thus each of the powers in the seed is a Reason-Principle one and complete yet including all the parts over which it presides: there will be something bodily, the liquid, for example, carrying mere Matter; but the principle itself is Idea and nothing else, idea identical with the generative idea belonging to the lower SOUL, image of a higher. This power is sometimes designated as Nature in the seed-life; its origin is in the divine; and, outgoing from its priors as light from fire, it converts and shapes the matter of things, not by push and pull and the lever work of which we hear so much, but by bestowal of the Ideas. Enneads V,9,6

7. Knowledge in the reasoning SOUL is on the one side concerned with objects of sense, though indeed this can scarcely be called knowledge and is better indicated as opinion or surface-knowing; it is of later origin than the objects since it is a reflection from them: but on the other hand there is the knowledge handling the intellectual objects and this is the authentic knowledge; it enters the reasoning SOUL from the Intellectual-Principle and has no dealing with anything in sense. Being true knowledge it actually is everything of which it takes cognisance; it carries as its own content the intellectual act and the intellectual object since it carries the Intellectual-Principle which actually is the primals and is always self-present and is in its nature an Act, never by any want forced to seek, never acquiring or traversing the remote for all such experience belongs to SOUL but always self-gathered, the very Being of the collective total, not an extern creating things by the act of knowing them. Enneads V,9,7

13. It remains to decide whether only what is known in sense exists There or whether, on the contrary, as Absolute-Man differs from individual man, so there is in the Supreme an Absolute-Soul differing from SOUL and an Absolute-Intellect differing from Intellectual-Principle. Enneads V,9,13

It must be stated at the outset that we cannot take all that is here to be image of archetype, or SOUL to be an image of Absolute-Soul: one SOUL, doubtless, ranks higher than another, but here too, though perhaps not as identified with this realm, is the Absolute-Soul. Enneads V,9,13

Every SOUL, authentically a SOUL, has some form of rightness and moral wisdom; in the souls within ourselves there is true knowing: and these attributes are no images or copies from the Supreme, as in the sense-world, but actually are those very originals in a mode peculiar to this sphere. For those Beings are not set apart in some defined place; wherever there is a SOUL that has risen from body, there too these are: the world of sense is one where, the Intellectual Kosmos is everywhere. Whatever the freed SOUL attains to here, that it is There. Enneads V,9,13

Thus, if by the content of the sense-world we mean simply the visible objects, then the Supreme contains not only what is in the realm of sense but more: if in the content of the kosmos we mean to include SOUL and the Soul-things, then all is here that is There. Enneads V,9,13

But on the question as to whether the repulsive and the products of putridity have also their Idea whether there is an Idea of filth and mud it is to be observed that all that the Intellectual-Principle derived from The First is of the noblest; in those Ideas the base is not included: these repulsive things point not to the Intellectual-Principle but to the SOUL which, drawing upon the Intellectual-Principle, takes from Matter certain other things, and among them these. Enneads V,9,14

The products of putrefaction are to be traced to the SOUL’s inability to bring some other thing to being something in the order of nature, which, else, it would but producing where it may. In the matter of the arts and crafts, all that are to be traced to the needs of human nature are laid up in the Absolute Man. Enneads V,9,14

And before the particular SOUL there is another SOUL, a universal, and, before that, an Absolute-Soul, which is the Life existing in the Intellectual-Principle before SOUL came to be and therefore rightly called [as the Life in the Divine] the Absolute-Soul. Enneads V,9,14