The Enneads — trans. Stephen MacKenna

something quite different. If then Vice is an impediment to the Soul, Vice is an occasion of evil but not Evil- Absolute. Virtue is not the Absolute Good, but a co-operator with it ; and if Virtue is not the Absolute Good neither is Vice the Absolute Evil. Virtue is not the Absolute Beauty or the Absolute Good ; neither, therefore, is Vice the Essential Ugliness or the Essential Evil.

We teach that Virtue is not the Absolute Good and Beauty, because we know that These are earlier than Virtue and transcend it, and that it is good and beautiful by some participation in them. Now as, going upward from virtue, we come to the Beautiful and to the Good, so, going downward from Vice, we reach Essential Evil : from Vice as the startingpoint we come to vision of Evil, as far as such vision is possible, and we become evil to the extent of our participation in it. We are become dwellers in the Place of Unlikeness, where, fallen from all our resemblance to the Divine, we lie in gloom and mud : for if the Soul abandons itself unreservedly to the extreme of viciousness, it is no longer a vicious Soul merely, for mere vice is still human, still carries some trace of good : it has taken to itself another nature, the Evil, and as far as Soul can die it is dead. And the death of Soul is twofold : while still sunk in body to lie down in Matter and drench itself with it ; when it has left the body, to lie in the other world until, somehow, it stirs again and lifts its sight from the mud : and this is our “ going down to Hades and slumbering there.”

io6

PLOTINUS

II.

It may be suggested that Vice is feebleness in the Soul.

We shall be reminded that the Vicious Soul is unstable, swept along from every ill to every other, quickly stirred by appetites, headlong to anger, as hasty to compromises, yielding at once to obscure imaginations, as weak, in fact, as the weakest thing made by man or nature, blown about by every breeze, burned away by every heat.

Still the question must be faced what constitutes this weakness in the Soul, whence it comes.

For weakness in the body is not like that in the Soul : the word weakness, which covers the incapacity for work and the lack of resistance in the body, is applied to the Soul merely by analogy — unless, indeed, in the one case as in the other, the cause of the weakness is Matter.

s not like that in the Soul : the word weakness, which covers the incapacity for work and the lack of resistance in the body, is applied to the Soul merely by analogy — unless, indeed, in the one case as in the other, the cause of the weakness is Matter.

But we must go more thoroughly into the source of this weakness, as we call it, in the Soul, which is certainly not made weak as the result of any density or rarity, or by any thickening or thinning or anything like a disease, like a fever.

Now this weakness must be seated either in Souls utterly disengaged or in Souls bound to Matter or in both.

It cannot exist in those apart from Matter, for all these are pure and, as we read, winged and perfect and unimpeded in their task : there remains only that the weakness be in the fallen Souls, neither cleansed nor clean ; and in them the weakness will be, not in any privation but in some hostile presence, like that of phlegm or bile in the organs of the body.

If we form an acute and accurate notion of the cause of the fall we shall understand the weakness that comes by it.

Matter exists ; Soul exists ; and they occupy, so to speak, one place. There is not one place for Matter and another for Soul, — Matter, for instance, kept to earth. Soul in the air : the soul’s “ separate place ” is simply its not being in Matter ; that is, its not being united with it ; that is that there be no compound unit consisting of Soul and Matter ; that is that Soul be not moulded in Matter as in a matrix ; this is the Soul’s apartness.

1.8. I2j

EVIL

p. 107

But the faculties of the Soul are many, and it has its beginning, its intermediate phases, its final fringe. Matter appears, importunes, raises disorders, seeks to force its way within ; but all the ground is holy, nothing there without part in Soul. Matter therefore submits, and takes light : but the source of its illumination it cannot attain to, for the Soul cannot lift up this foreign thing close by, since the evil of it makes it invisible. On the contrary the illumination, the light streaming from the Soul, is dulled, is weakened, as it mixes with Matter which offers Birth to the Soul, providing the means by which it enters into generation, impossible to it if no recipient were at hand.

isible. On the contrary the illumination, the light streaming from the Soul, is dulled, is weakened, as it mixes with Matter which offers Birth to the Soul, providing the means by which it enters into generation, impossible to it if no recipient were at hand.

This is the fall of the Soul, this entry into Matter : thence its weakness : not all the faculties of its being retain free play, for Matter hinders their manifestation ; it encroaches upon the Soul’s territory and, as it were, crushes the Soul back ; and it turns to evil all that it has stolen, until the Soul finds strength to advance again.

Thus the cause, at once, of the weakness of Soul and of all its evil is Matter.

The evil of Matter precedes the weakness, the vice ; it is Primal Evil. Even though the Soul itself submits to Matter and engenders to it ; if it becomes evil within itself by its commerce with Matter, the cause is still the presence of Matter : the Soul would never have approached Matter but that the presence of Matter is the occasion of its earth-life.

12.

If the existence of Matter be denied, the necessity of this Principle must be demonstrated from the treatises “ On Matter ” where the question is copiously treated.

To deny Evil a place among realities is necessarily to do away with the Good as well, and even to deny the existence of anything desirable ; it is to deny desire, avoidance and all intellectual act ; for desire has Good for its object, aversion looks to Evil, all intellectual act, all Wisdom, deals with Good and Bad, and is itself one of the things that are good.

There must then be The Good — good unmixed — and the Mingled Good and Bad, and the Rather Bad than Good, this last ending with the io8

PLOTINUS

Utterly Bad we have been seeking, just as that in which Evil constitutes the lesser part tends, by that lessening, towards the Good.

What, then, must Evil be to the Soul ?

WTiat Soul could contain Evil unless by contact with the lower Kind ? There could be no desire, no sorrow, no rage, no fear ; fear touches the compounded dreading its dissolution ; pain and sorrow are the accompaniments of the dissolution ; desires spring from something troubling the grouped being or are a provision against trouble threatened ; all impression is the stroke of something unreasonable outside the Soul, accepted only because the Soul is not devoid of parts or phases ; the Soul takes up false notions through having gone outside of its own truth by ceasing to be purely itself.