The Enneads — trans. Stephen MacKenna
The text is shown on its own: no facing layer is held for this issue.
To Plato the Spindle represents the co-operation of the moving and the stable elements of the kosmic circuit : the Fates with Necessity, Mother of the Fates, manipulate it and spin at the birth of every being, so that all comes into existence through Necessity.
In the Timaeus, the creating God bestows the essential of the Soul, but it is the divinities moving in the kosmos (the stars) that infuse the powerful affections holding from Necessity — our impulse and our desire, our sense of pleasure and of pain — and that lower phase of the Soul in which such experiences originate. By this statement our personality is bound up with the stars, whence our Soul (as total of Principle and affections) takes shape ; and we are set under necessity at our very entrance into the world : our temperament will be of the stars’ ordering, and so, therefore, the actions which derive from temperament, and all the experiences of a nature shaped to impressions.
What, after all this, remains to stand for the “ We ” ?
The “ We ” is the actual resultant of a Being whose nature includes, with certain sensibilities, the power of governing them. Cut off as we are by the nature of the body, God has yet given us, in the midst of all this evil, virtue the imconquerable, meaningless in a state of tranquil safety but everything where its absence would be peril of fall.
Our task, then, is to work for our liberation from this sphere, severing ourselves from all that has gathered about us ; the total man is to be something better than a body ensouled— the bodily element dominant with a trace of Soul running through it and a resultant life-course mainly of the body — for in such a combination all is, in fact, bodily. There is another life, emancipated, whose quality is progression towards the higher realm, towards the good and divine, towards that Principle which no one possesses except by deliberate usage but so may approi68
PLOTINUS
priate, becoming, each personally, the higher, the beautiful, the Godlike, and living, remote, in and by It- unless one choose to go bereaved of that higher Soul and therefore, to live fate-bound, no longer profiting, merely, by the significance of the sidereal system but becoming as it were a part sunken in it and dragged along with the whole thus adopted.
by It- unless one choose to go bereaved of that higher Soul and therefore, to live fate-bound, no longer profiting, merely, by the significance of the sidereal system but becoming as it were a part sunken in it and dragged along with the whole thus adopted.
For every human Being is of twofold character ; there is that compromise-total and there is the Authentic Man : and it is so with the Kosmos as a whole ; it is in the one phase a conjunction of body with a certain form of the Soul bound up in body ; in the other phase it is the Universal Soul, that which is not itself embodied but flashes down its rays into the embodied Soul : and the same twofold quality belongs to the Sun and the other members of the heavenly system.
To the remoter Soul, the pure, sun and stars communicate no baseness. In their efficacy upon the (material) All, they act as parts of it, as ensouled bodies within it ; and they act only upon what is partial ; body is the agent while, at the same time, it becomes the vehicle through which is transmitted something of the star’s will and of that authentic Soul in it which is steadfastly in contemplation of the Highest.
But (with every allowance to the lower forces) aU follows either upon that Highest or rather upon the Beings about It — we may think of the Divine as a fire whose outgoing warmth pervades the Universe — or upon whatsoever is transmitted by the one Soul (the divine first Soul) to the other, its Kin (the Soul of any particular being) . All that is graceless is admixture. For the Universe is in truth a thing of blend, and if we separate from it that separable Soul, the residue is little. The AU is a God when the divine Soul is counted in with it ; “the rest,” we read, “ is a mighty spirit and its ways are subdivine.”
10.
If all this be true, we must at once admit signification, though, neither singly nor collectively, can we ascribe to the stars any efficacy except in what concerns the (material) All and in what is of their own function.
II. 3- 12]
ARE THE STARS CAUSES ?
p. 169
We must admit that the Soul before entering into birth presents itself bearing with it something of its own, for it could never touch body except under stress of a powerful inner impulse ; we must admit some element of chance around it from its very entry, since the moment and conditions are determined by the kosmic circuit : and we must admit some effective power in that circuit itself ; it is co-operative, and completes of its own act the task that belongs to the All of which everything in the circuit takes the rank moment and conditions are determined by the kosmic circuit : and we must admit some effective power in that circuit itself ; it is co-operative, and completes of its own act the task that belongs to the All of which everything in the circuit takes the rank and function of a part.
II.
And we must remember that what comes from the supemals does not enter into the recipients as it left the source ; fire, for instance, will be duller ; the loving instinct will degenerate and issue in ugly forms of the passion ; the vital energy in a subject not so balanced as to display the mean of manly courage, will come out as either ferocity or faintheartedness ; and ambition ... in love . . . ; and the instinct towards good sets up the pursuit of semblant beauty ; intellectual power at its lowest produces the extreme of wickedness, for wickedness is a miscalculating effort towards Intelligence (= towards the highest principle in the man).
Any such quality, modified at best from its supreme form, deteriorates again within itself : things of any kind that approach from above, altered by merely leaving their source change further still by their blending with bodies, with Matter, with each other.
12.
AH that thus proceeds from the supernal combines into a unity (in the subject concerned) and every existing entity takes something from this blended infusion so that the result is the thing itself plus some quality. The effluence does not make the horse but adds something to it ; for horse comes by horse, and man by man : the sun plays its part no doubt in the shaping, but the man has his origin in the Human- Principle. Outer things have their effect, sometimes to hurt and sometimes to help ; like a father, they often contribute to good but sometimes
p. 170
PLOTINUS
also to harm ; but they do not wrench the human being from the foundations of its nature ; though sometimes Matter is the dominant, and the human principle takes the second place so that there is a failure to achieve perfection ; the Ideal has been attenuated.
13-
Of phenomena of this sphere some derive from the Kosmic Circuit and some not : we must take them singly and mark them off, assigning to each its origin.
The gist of the whole matter lies in the consideration that Soul governs this All by the plan contained in the Reason-Principle and plays in the All exactly the part of the particular principle which in every living-thing forms the members of the organism and adjusts them to the unity of which they are portions ; the entire force of the Soul is represented in the All but, in the