Theos-Talk Archives (March 1996 Message tl00047)

The Six Enneads

  BY PLOTINUS

   Written 250 A.D.
   Translated By Stephen Mackenna And B. S. Page
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  THE FOURTH ENNEAD - EIGHTH TRACTATE [excerpts]

     THE SOUL'S DESCENT INTO BODY.

     1. Many times it has happened: Lifted out of the body into myself;
     becoming external to all other things and self-encentered; beholding
     a marvellous beauty; then, more than ever, assured of community with
     the loftiest order; enacting the noblest life, acquiring identity
     with the divine; stationing within It by having attained that
     activity; poised above whatsoever within the Intellectual is less
     than the Supreme: yet, there comes the moment of descent from
     intellection to reasoning, and after that sojourn in the divine, I
     ask myself how it happens that I can now be descending, and how did
     the soul ever enter into my body, the soul which, even within the
     body, is the high thing it has shown itself to be.
[...]
     We have to fall back on the illustrious Plato, who uttered many
     noble sayings about the soul, and has in many places dwelt upon its
     entry into body so that we may well hope to get some light from him.

     What do we learn from this philosopher?
     We will not find him so consistent throughout that it is easy to
     discover his mind.

     Everywhere, no doubt, he expresses contempt for all that is of
     sense, blames the commerce of the soul with body as an enchainment,
     an entombment, and upholds as a great truth the saying of the
     Mysteries that the soul is here a prisoner. In the Cavern of Plato
     and in the Cave of Empedocles, I discern this universe, where the
     breaking of the fetters and the ascent from the depths are figures
     of the wayfaring toward the Intellectual Realm.

     In the Phaedrus he makes a failing of the wings the cause of the
     entry to this realm: and there are Periods which send back the soul
     after it has risen; there are judgements and lots and fates and
     necessities driving other souls down to this order.

     In all these explanations, he finds guilt in the arrival of the soul
     at body, But treating, in the Timaeus, of our universe he exalts the
     kosmos and entitles it a blessed god, and holds that the soul was
     given by the goodness of the creator to the end that the total of
     things might be possessed of intellect, for thus intellectual it was
     planned to be, and thus it cannot be except through soul. There is a
     reason, then, why the soul of this All should be sent into it from
     God: in the same way the soul of each single one of us is sent, that
     the universe may be complete; it was necessary that all beings of
     the Intellectual should be tallied by just so many forms of living
     creatures here in the realm of sense.

     2. Enquiring, then, of Plato as to our own soul, we find ourselves
     forced to enquire into the nature of soul in general- to discover
     what there can be in its character to bring it into partnership with
     body, and, again, what this kosmos must be in which, willing
     unwilling or in any way at all, soul has its activity.

     We have to face also the question as to whether the Creator has
     planned well or ill...... like our souls, which it may be, are such
     that governing their inferior, the body, they must sink deeper and
     deeper into it if they are to control it.

     No doubt the individual body- though in all cases appropriately
     placed within the universe- is of itself in a state of dissolution,
     always on the way to its natural terminus, demanding much irksome
     forethought to save it from every kind of outside assailant, always
     gripped by need, requiring every help against constant difficulty:
     but the body inhabited by the World-Soul- complete, competent,
     self-sufficing, exposed to nothing contrary to its nature- this
     needs no more than a brief word of command, while the governing soul
     is undeviatingly what its nature makes it wish to be, and, amenable
     neither to loss nor to addition, knows neither desire nor distress.

     This is how we come to read that our soul, entering into association
     with that complete soul and itself thus made perfect, walks the
     lofty ranges, administering the entire kosmos, and that as long as
     it does not secede and is neither inbound to body nor held in any
     sort of servitude, so long it tranquilly bears its part in the
     governance of the All, exactly like the world-soul itself; for in
     fact it suffers no hurt whatever by furnishing body with the power
     to existence, since not every form of care for the inferior need
     wrest the providing soul from its own sure standing in the highest.

     The soul's care for the universe takes two forms: there is the
     supervising of the entire system, brought to order by deedless
     command in a kindly presidence, and there is that over the
     individual, implying direct action, the hand to the task, one might
     say, in immediate contact: in the second kind of care the agent
     absorbs much of the nature of its object.

     Now in its comprehensive government of the heavenly system, the
     soul's method is that of an unbroken transcendence in its highest
     phases, with penetration by its lower power: at this, God can no
     longer be charged with lowering the All-Soul, which has not been
     deprived of its natural standing and from eternity possesses and
     will unchangeably possess that rank and habit which could never have
     been intruded upon it against the course of nature but must be its
     characteristic quality, neither failing ever nor ever beginning.

     Where we read that the souls or stars stand to their bodily forms as
     the All to the material forms within it- for these starry bodies are
     declared to be members of the soul's circuit- we are given to
     understand that the star-souls also enjoy the blissful condition of
     transcendence and immunity that becomes them.

     And so we might expect: commerce with the body is repudiated for two
     only reasons, as hindering the soul's intellective act and as
     filling with pleasure, desire, pain; but neither of these
     misfortunes can befall a soul which has never deeply penetrated into
     the body, is not a slave but a sovereign ruling a body of such an
     order as to have no need and no shortcoming and therefore to give
     ground for neither desire nor fear.

     There is no reason why it should be expectant of evil with regard to
     such a body nor is there any such preoccupied concern, bringing
     about a veritable descent, as to withdraw it from its noblest and
     most blessed vision; it remains always intent upon the Supreme, and
     its governance of this universe is effected by a power not calling
     upon act.
[...]
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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