The Enneads — trans. Stephen MacKenna

e authentically living, no other than Life in its greatest plenitude, life in which the good is present as something essential not as something brought in from without, a life needing no foreign substance called in from a foreign realm, to establish it in good.

For what could be added to the fullest life to make it the best life ?
If anyone should answer “ The nature of Good ” (The Good, as a Divine
Hypostasis), the reply would certainly be near our thought, but we are
not seeking the Cause but the main constituent.

It has been said more than once that the perfect life and the true life, the essential life, is in the Intellectual Nature beyond this sphere, and that all other forms of life are incomplete, are phantoms of life, imperfect, not pure, not more truly life than they are its contrary : here let it be said succinctly that since all living things proceed from the one principle but possess life in different degrees, this principle must be the first life and the most complete.

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If, then, the perfect life is within human reach, the man attaining it attains happiness : if not, happiness must be made over to the gods, for the perfect life is for them alone.

But since we hold that happiness is for human beings too, we must consider what this perfect life is. The matter may be stated thus : —

It has been shown elsewhere that man when he commands not merely the life of sensation but also Reason and Authentic Intellection, has realised the perfect life.

But are we to picture this kind of life as something foreign imported into his nature ?

No : there exists no single human being that does not either potentially or effectively possess this thing which we hold to constitute happiness.

But are we to think of man as including this form of life, the perfect, after the manner of a partial constituent of his entire nature ?

We say, rather, that while in some men it is present as a mere portion of their total being — in those, namely, that have it potentially — there is.

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too, the man, already in possession of true felicity, who is this perfection realised, who has passed over into actual identification with it. All else is now mere clothing about the man, not to be called part of him since it lies about him unsought, not his because not appropriated to himself by any act of the will.

To the man in this state, what is the Good ?

He himself by what he has and is.

else is now mere clothing about the man, not to be called part of him since it lies about him unsought, not his because not appropriated to himself by any act of the will.

To the man in this state, what is the Good ?

He himself by what he has and is.

And the author and principle of what he is and holds is the Supreme, which within Itself is the Good but manifests Itself within the human being after this other mode.

The sign that this state has been achieved is that the man seeks nothing else.

What indeed could he be seeking ? Certainly none of the less worthy things ; and the Best he carries always within him.

He that has such a life as this has all he needs in life.

Once the man is a Sage, the means of happiness, the v;ay to good, are within, for nothing is good that lies outside him. Anything he desires further than this he seeks as a necessity, and not for himself but for a subordinate, for the body bound to him, to which since it has life he must minister the needs of life, not needs, however, to the true man of this degree. He knows himself to stand above all such things, and what he gives to the lower he so gives as to leave his true life undiminished.

Adverse fortune does not shake his felicity : the life so founded is stable ever. Suppose death strikes at his household or at his friends ; he knows what death is, as the victims, if they are among the wise, know too. And if death taking from him his familiars and intimates does bring grief, it is not to him, not to the true man, but to that in him which stands apart from the Supreme, to that lower man in whose distress he takes no part.

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But what of sorrows, illnesses and all else that inhibit the native activity ?

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PLOTINUS

What of the suspension of consciousness which drugs or disease may bring about ? Could either welfare or happiness be present under such conditions ? And this is to say nothing of misery and disgrace, which will certainly be urged against us, with undoubtedly also those never-failing “ Miseries of Priam.”

“The Sage,” we shall be told, “may bear such afflictions and even take them lightly but they could never be his choice, and the happy life must be one that would be chosen. The Sage, that is, cannot be thought of as simply a sage soul, no count being taken of the bodilyprinciple in the total of the being : he will, no doubt, take all bravely . . . until the body’s appeals come up before him, and longings and loathings penetrate through the body to the inner man.

of as simply a sage soul, no count being taken of the bodilyprinciple in the total of the being : he will, no doubt, take all bravely . . . until the body’s appeals come up before him, and longings and loathings penetrate through the body to the inner man. And since pleasure must be counted in towards the happy life, how can one that, thus, knows the misery of ill-fortune or pain be happy, however sage he be ? Such a state, of bhss self-contained, is for the Gods ; men, because of the less noble part subjoined in them, must needs seek happiness throughout all their being and not merely in some one part ; if the one constituent be troubled, the other, answering to its associate’s distress, must perforce suffer hindrance in its own activity. There is nothing but to cut away the body or the body’s sensitive life and so secure that self-contained unity essential to happiness.”

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Now if happiness did indeed require freedom from pain, sickness, misfortune, disaster, it would be utterly denied to anyone confronted by such trials : but if it lies in the fruition of the Authentic Good, why turn away from this Term and look to means, imagining that to be happy a man must need a variety of things none of which enter into happiness ? If, in fact, felicity were made up by heaping together all that is at once desirable and necessary we must bid for these also. But if the Term must be one and not many ; if in other words our quest is of a Term and not of Terms ; that only can be elected which is ultimate and noblest, that which calls to the tenderest longings of the soul.

The quest and will of the Soul are not pointed directly towards

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freedom from this sphere ; the reason which disciplines away our concern about this life has no fundamental quarrel with things of this order ; it merely resents their interference ; sometimes, even, it must seek them ; essentially all the aspiration is not so much away from evil as towards the Soul’s own highest and noblest : this attained, all is won and there is rest — and this is the veritably willed state of life.

There can be no such thing as “ willing ” the acquirement of necessaries, if Will is to be taken in its strict sense, and not misapplied to the mere recognition of need.

It is certain that we shrink from the unpleasant, and such shrinking is assuredly not what we should have willed ; to have no occasion for any such shrinking would be much nearer to our taste ; but the things we seek tell the story as soon as they are ours.