The Enneads — trans. Stephen MacKenna
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passions and affections. Necessary pleasures and all the activity of the senses it will employ only for medicament and assuagement lest its work be impeded. Pain it may combat, but, failing the cure, it will bear meekly and ease it by refusing assent to it. All passionate action it will check : the suppression will be complete if that be possible, but at worst the Soul will never itself take fire but will keep the involuntary and uncontrolled outside its own precincts and rare and weak at that. The Soul has nothing to dread, though no doubt the involuntary has some power here too : fear therefore must cease, except so far as it is purely monitory. What desire there may be can never be for the vile ; even the food and drink necessary for restoration will lie outside of the Soul’s attention, and not less the sexual appetite : or if such desire there must be, it will turn upon the actual needs of the nature and be entirely under control ; or if any uncontrolled motion takes place, it will reach no further than the imagination, be no more than a fleeting fancy.
The Soul itself will be inviolately free and will be working to set the irrational part of the nature above all attack, or if that may not be, then at least to preserve it from violent assault, so that any wound it takes may be slight and be healed at once by virtue of the Soul’s presence, just as a man living next door to a Sage would profit by the neighbourhood.
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PLOTINUS
either in becoming wise and good himself or, for sheer shame, never venturing any act which the nobler mind would disapprove.
There will be no battling in the Soul : the mere intervention of Reason is enough : the lower nature will stand in such awe of Reason that for any slightest movement it has made it will grieve, and censure its own weakness, in not having kept low and still in the presence of its lord.
6.
In all this there is no sin — there is only matter of discipline — but our concern is not merely to be sinless but to be God.
As long as there is any such involuntary action, the nature is twofold, God and Demi-God, or rather God in association with a nature of a lower power : when all the involuntary is suppressed, there is God unmingled, a Divine Being of those that follow upon The First.
For, at this height, the man is the very being that came from the
Supreme.
i-God, or rather God in association with a nature of a lower power : when all the involuntary is suppressed, there is God unmingled, a Divine Being of those that follow upon The First.
For, at this height, the man is the very being that came from the Supreme. The primal excellence restored, the essential man is There ; entering this sphere, he has associated himself with the reasoning phase of his nature and this he will lead up into likeness with his highest self, as far as earthly mind is capable, so that if possible it shall never be inclined to, and at the least never adopt, any course displeasing to its over-lord.
What form, then, does virtue take in one so lofty ?
It appears as Wisdom, which consists in the contemplation of all that exists in the Intellectual-Principle, and as the immediate presence of the Intellectual-Principle itself.
And each of these has two modes or aspects : there is Wisdom as it is in the Intellectual-Principle and as in the Soul ; and there is the Intellectual-Principle as it is present to itself and as it is present to the Soul : this gives what in the Soul is Virtue, in the Supreme not Virtue.
In the Supreme, then, what is it ?
Its proper Act and Its Essence.
That Act and Essence of the Supreme, manifested in a new form, constitute the virtue of this sphere. For the Supreme is not self-existent
I. 2. 7]
VIRTUE
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Justice, or the Absolute of any defined virtue : it is, so to speak, an exemplar, the source of what in the soul becomes virtue : for virtue is dependent, seated in something not itself ; the Supreme is self-standing, independent.
But taking Rectitude to be the due ordering of faculty, does it not always imply the existence of diverse parts ?
No : There is a Rectitude of Diversity appropriate to what has parts, but there is another, not less Rectitude than the former though it resides in a Unity. And the authentic Absolute-Rectitude is the Act of a Unity upon itself, of a Unity in which there is no this and that and the other.
On this principle, the supreme Rectitude of the Soul is that it direct its Act towards the Intellectual-Principle : its Restraint (Sophrosyny) is its inward bending towards the Intellectual-Principle ; its Fortitude is its being impassive in the likeness of That towards which its gaze is set. Whose nature comports an impassivity which the Soul acquires by virtue and must acquire if it is not to be at the mercy of every state arising in its less noble companion.
titude is its being impassive in the likeness of That towards which its gaze is set. Whose nature comports an impassivity which the Soul acquires by virtue and must acquire if it is not to be at the mercy of every state arising in its less noble companion.
7-
The virtues in the Soul run in a sequence correspondent to that existing in the over-world, that is among their exemplars in the Intellectual-Principle .
In the Supreme, Intellection constitutes Knowledge and Wisdom ; self-concentration is Sophrosyny ; Its proper Act is Its Dutifulness ; Its Immateriahty, by which It remains inviolate within Itself, is the equivalent of Fortitude.
In the Soul, the direction of vision towards the Intellectual-Principle is Wisdom and Prudence, soul-virtues not appropriate to the Supreme where Thinker and Thought are identical. AU the other virtues have similar correspondences.
And if the term of purification is the production of a pure being, then the purification of the Soul must produce all the virtues ; if any are lacking, then not one of them is perfect.
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PLOTINUS
And to possess the greater is potentially to possess the minor, though the minor need not carry the greater with them.
Thus we have indicated the dominant note in the life of the Sage ; but whether his possession of the minor virtues be actual as well as potential, whether even the greater are in Act in him or yield to qualities higher still, must be decided afresh in each several case.
Take, for example, Contemplative-Wisdom. If other guides of conduct must be called in to meet a given need, can this virtue hold its ground even in mere potentiality ?
And what happens when the virtues in their very nature differ in scope and province ? Where, for example, Sophrosyny would allow certain acts or emotions under due restraint and another virtue would cut them off altogether ? And is it not clear that all may have to yield, once Contemplative-Wisdom comes into action ?
The solution is in understanding the virtues and what each has to give : thus the man will learn to work with this or that as every several need demands. And as he reaches to loftier principles and other standards these in turn will define his conduct : for example. Restraint in its earlier form will no longer satisfy him ; he will work for the final Disengagement ; he will live, no longer, the human life of the good man — such as Civic Virtue commends — but, leaving this beneath him, will take up instead another life, that of the Gods.