Theos-Talk Archives (March 1996 Message tl00034)

The Six Enneads

  BY PLOTINUS

   Written 250 A.D.
   Translated By Stephen Mackenna And B. S. Page
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  THE FIFTH ENNEAD - NINTH TRACTATE [extracts]

     THE INTELLECTUAL-PRINCIPLE, THE IDEAS, AND THE AUTHENTIC EXISTENCE.

     1. All human beings from birth onward live to the realm of sense
     more than to the Intellectual.

     Forced of necessity to attend first to the material, some of them
     elect to abide by that order and, their life throughout, make its
     concerns their first and their last; the sweet and the bitter of
     sense are their good and evil; they feel they have done all if they
     live along pursuing the one and barring the doors to the other. And
     those of them that pretend to reasoning have adopted this as their
     philosophy; they are like the heavier birds which have incorporated
     much from the earth and are so weighted down that they cannot fly
     high for all the wings Nature has given them.

     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.

     But there is a third order- those godlike men who, in their mightier
     power, in the keenness of their sight, have clear vision of the
     splendour above and rise to it from among the cloud and fog of earth
     and hold firmly to that other world, looking beyond all here,
     delighted in the place of reality, their native land, like a man
     returning after long wanderings to the pleasant ways of his own
     country.

     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.

     But how is the ascent to be begun? Whence comes the power? In what
     thought is this love to find its guide?

     The guiding thought is this: that the beauty perceived on material
     things is borrowed.
[...]
     This universe is a living thing capable of including every form of
     life; but its Being and its modes are derived from elsewhere; that
     source is traced back to the Intellectual-Principle: it follows that
     the all-embracing archetype is in the Intellectual-Principle, which,
     therefore, must be an intellectual Kosmos, that indicated by Plato
     in the phrase "The living existent."
[...]
     10. All, then, that is present in the sense realm as Idea comes from
     the Supreme. But what is not present as Idea, does not. Thus of
     things conflicting with nature, none is There: the inartistic is not
     contained in the arts; lameness is not in the seed; for a lame leg
     is either inborn through some thwarting of the Reason-principle or
     is a marring of the achieved form by accident. To that Intellectual
     Kosmos belong qualities, accordant with Nature, and quantities;
     number and mass; origins and conditions; all actions and experiences
     not against nature; movement and repose, both the universals and the
     particulars: but There time is replaced by eternity and space by its
     intellectual equivalent, mutual inclusiveness.
[...]
     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.

     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.
[...]
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 First of all, love truth for its own sake, for otherwise no recognition of
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