The Enneads — trans. Stephen MacKenna
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ellectual-Principle, the Second Creator and the Soul — all this is taken over from the Timaeus, where we read : —
“ As many Ideal-Forms as the Divine Mind beheld dwelling within the Veritably Living Being, so many the Maker resolved should be contained in this All.”
Misunderstanding their text, they conceived one Mind passively including within itself aU that has being, another mind, a distinct existence, having vision, and a third planning the Universe — ^though often they substitute Soul for this planning Mind as the creating Principle— and they think that this third being is the Creator according to Plato.
They are in fact quite outside of the truth in their identification of the Creator.
In every way they misrepresent Plato’s theory as to the method of creation as in many other respects they dishonour his teaching : they, we are to understand, have penetrated the Intellectual Nature, while Plato and all those other illustrious teachers have failed.
II- 9. 5]
“AGAINST THE GNOSTICS”
p. 223
They hope to get the credit of minute and exact identification by setting up a plurality of intellectual Essences ; but in reality this multiplication lowers the Intellectual Nature to the level of the Sense-Kind : their true course is to seek to reduce number to the least possible in the Supreme, simply referring all things to the Second Hypostasis— which is all that exists as it is Primal Intellect and Reality and is the only thing that is good except only for the first Nature — and to recognise Soul as the third Principle, accounting for the difference among souls merely by diversity of experience and character. Instead of insulting those venerable teachers they should receive their doctrine with the respect due to the older thought and honour all that noble system — an immortal soul, an Intellectual and Intelligible Realm, the Supreme God, the Soul’s need of emancipation from all intercourse with the body, the fact of separation from it, the escape from the world of process to the world of essential-being. These doctrines, all emphatically asserted by Plato, they do well to adopt : where they differ, they are at full liberty to speak their minds, but not to procure assent for their own theories by flaying and flouting the Greeks : where they have a divergent theory to maintain they must establish it by its own merits, declaring their own opinions with courtesy and with philosophical method and stating the controverted opinion fairly ; they must point their minds towards the truth and not himt fame by insult, reviling and seeking in their own persons to replace men honoured its, declaring their own opinions with courtesy and with philosophical method and stating the controverted opinion fairly ; they must point their minds towards the truth and not himt fame by insult, reviling and seeking in their own persons to replace men honoured by the fine intelligences of ages past.
As a matter of fact the ancient doctrine of the Divine Essences was far the sounder and more instructed, and must be accepted by all not caught in the delusions that beset humanity : it is easy also to identify what has been conveyed in these later times from the ancients with incongruous novelties — how for example, where they must set up a contradictory doctrine, they introduce a medley of generation and destruction, how they cavil at the Universe, how they make the Soul blameable for the association with body, how they revile the Administrator of this All, how they ascribe to the Creator, identified with the Soul, the character and experiences appropriate to partial beings.
p. 224
PLOTINUS
7-
That this world has neither beginning nor end but exists for ever as long as the Supreme stands is certainly no novel teaching. And before this school rose it had been urged that commerce with the body is no gain to a Soul.
But to treat the human Soul as a fair presentment of the Soul of the Universe is like picking out potters and blacksmiths and making them warrant for discrediting an entire well-ordered city.
We must recognise how different is the governance exercised by the All-Soul ; the relation is not the same : it is not in fetters. Among the very great number of differences it should not have been overlooked that the We (the human Soul) lies under fetter ; and this in a second limitation, for the Body-Kind, already fettered within the All-Soul, imprisons all that it grasps.
But the Soul of the Universe cannot be in bond to what itself has bound : it is sovereign and therefore immune of the lower things, over which we on the contrary are not masters. That in it which is directed to the Divine and Transcendent is ever unmingled, knows no encumbering ; that in it which imparts life to the body admits nothing bodily to itself. It is the general fact that an inset (as the Body), necessarily shares the conditions of its containing principle (as the Soul), and does not communicate its own conditions where that principle has an independent life : thus a graft will die if the stock dies, but the stock will live on by its proper life though the graft wither.
e conditions of its containing principle (as the Soul), and does not communicate its own conditions where that principle has an independent life : thus a graft will die if the stock dies, but the stock will live on by its proper life though the graft wither. The fire within your own self may be quenched, but the thing, fire, will exist still ; and if fire itself were annihilated that would make no difference to the Soul, the Soul in the Supreme, but only to the plan of the material world ; and if the other elements sufficed to maintain a Kosmos, the Soul in the Supreme would be unconcerned.
The constitution of the All is very different from that of the single, separate forms of life : there, the established rule commanding to permanence is sovereign ; here things are like deserters kept to their own place and duty by a double bond ; there is no outlet from the AU, and therefore no need of restraining or of driving errants back to
“AGAINST THE GNOSTICS
II. 9. 8]
» tp. 225 bounds : all remains where from the beginning the Soul’s nature appointed.
The natural movement within the plan will be injurious to anything whose natural tendency it opposes : one group will sweep bravely onward with the great total to which it is adapted ; the others, not able to comply with the larger order, are destroyed. A great choral is moving to its concerted plan ; midway in the march, a tortoise is intercepted ; unable to get away from the choral line it is trampled under foot ; but if it could only range itself within the greater movement it too would suffer nothing.
8.
To ask why the Soul has created the Kosmos, is to ask why there is a Soul and why a Creator creates. The question, also, implies a beginning in the eternal and, further, represents creation as the act of a changeful Being who turns from this to that.
Those that so think must be instructed — if they would but bear with correction — in the nature of the Supemals, and brought to desist from that blasphemy of majestic powers which comes so easily to them, where all should be reverent scruple.
Even in the administration of the Universe there is no ground for such attack, for it affords manifest proof of the greatness of the Intellectual Kind.
This All that has emerged into life is no amorphous structure — like those lesser forms within it which are bom night and day out of the lavishness of its vitality — the Universe is a life organised, effective, complex, all-comprehensive, displaying an unfathomable wisdom.