Theos-Talk Archives (March 1996 Message tl00015)

The Six Enneads [excerpts]

  BY PLOTINUS

   Written 250 A.D.
   Translated By Stephen Mackenna And B. S. Page

  THE FIRST ENNEAD - SIXTH TRACTATE

     BEAUTY.
[...]
     2. Let us, then, go back to the source, and indicate at once the
     Principle that bestows beauty on material things.

     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.

     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.

     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.
[...]
     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.

     As it is not for those to speak of the graceful forms of the
     material world who have never seen them or known their grace- men
     born blind, let us suppose- in the same way those must be silent
     upon the beauty of noble conduct and of learning and all that order
     who have never cared for such things, nor may those tell of the
     splendour of virtue who have never known the face of Justice and of
     Moral-Wisdom beautiful beyond the beauty of Evening and of dawn.

     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.

     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.

     5. These Lovers, then, lovers of the beauty outside of sense, must
     be made to declare themselves.

     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.

     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.

     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.

     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.

     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.

     If a man has been immersed in filth or daubed with mud his native
     comeliness disappears and all that is seen is the foul stuff
     besmearing him: his ugly condition is due to alien matter that has
     encrusted him, and if he is to win back his grace it must be his
     business to scour and purify himself and make himself what he was.

     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.
[...]
     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...
[...]
     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.

     "Let us flee then to the beloved Fatherland": this is the soundest
     counsel. But what is this flight? How are we to gain the open sea?
     For Odysseus is surely a parable to us when he commands the flight
     from the sorceries of Circe or Calypso- not content to linger for
     all the pleasure offered to his eyes and all the delight of sense
     filling his days.

     The Fatherland to us is There whence we have come, and There is The
     Father.

     What then is our course, what the manner of our flight? This is not
     a journey for the feet; the feet bring us only from land to land;
     nor need you think of coach or ship to carry you away; all this
     order of things you must set aside and refuse to see: you must close
     the eyes and call instead upon another vision which is to be waked
     within you, a vision, the birth-right of all, which few turn to use.

     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.

     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.

     When you know that you have become this perfect work, when you are
     self-gathered in the purity of your being, nothing now remaining
     that can shatter that inner unity, nothing from without clinging to
     the authentic man, when you find yourself wholly true to your
     essential nature, wholly that only veritable Light which is not
     measured by space, not narrowed to any circumscribed form nor again
     diffused as a thing void of term, but ever unmeasurable as something
     greater than all measure and more than all quantity- when you
     perceive that you have grown to this, you are now become very
     vision: now call up all your confidence, strike forward yet a step-
     you need a guide no longer- strain, and see.

     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.

     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.
     _________________________________________________________________

--
Nicholas <> am455@lafn.org <> Los Angeles
 First of all, love truth for its own sake, for otherwise no recognition of
  it will follow.  HP Blavatsky