The Enneads — trans. Stephen MacKenna

, however exalted, august, are later than This : It is the source of all, though in some sense It is no source : we must keep all things apart from It . . . even freedom of action. ... It can enter into no relation with the realm of Existence.”

VI. g, 3. ” When we call it a Cause we are not making an assertion about It but about ourselves ; we speak of what w'e derive from It while It remains steadfastly within Itself.”

Plotinus is insistent that this name, The One, is a poor shift towards indicating a Nature which can never be expressed, of which no knowledge is possible : —

VI. 9, 5. ” This Wonder, this One, to which in verity no name may be given

. . . but since we must treat of It we may thus name It, but on condition of bearing in mind the special sense and guarding against confusing It with any form that may be suggested by the numerical designation.”

V. 3, 13. “ Hence It can not be truly designated ; any name employed makes

It some thing ; but That which is above all things — above that most august of

THE SUPREME A TRIAD

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Existents, the Intellectual-Principle — This alone of all is authentic ; It is no thing among things ; It is nameless, for It falls under no class ; we can attempt no more than to use words which will in some helpful way indicate It for the purposes of discussion.”

VI. 8, 8. “ Language fails even for the adequate discussion of the Transcendent, much more for defining it.”

VII

Why The Supreme is a Triad

II. 9, I. ... It follows that we need have recourse to no other Principles than these Three : we have first The One, then, following upon The One, the Divine Mind and the Primal Intellectual-Principle ; after this, the Soul. This is the order ruling in the nature of things and we may not assign either fewer or more Principles than these to the Supreme. If we affirm less than Three, we must bring together either Soul and Intellectual-Principle or Intellectual-Principle and The First : but we have abundantly shown that these are separate. It remains, then, to consider whether there can be more than Three.

Now what Divine Hypostasis could exist outside of these Three ?

The First Principle of the All, as we have indicated it, is at once the most simplex and the most exaltedly transcendent that can be discovered : it is unsound to double the Persons by distinguishing between potentiality and act in an immaterial Existence whose Act is its Essence.

Similarly we cannot pose two Intellectual-Principles, one in rest and one in movement. . . .

nscendent that can be discovered : it is unsound to double the Persons by distinguishing between potentiality and act in an immaterial Existence whose Act is its Essence.

Similarly we cannot pose two Intellectual-Principles, one in rest and one in movement. . . . The Divine Mind has its eternal, immobile Act towards The One ; the Reason which descends from It to the Soul and makes the Soul intellective cannot constitute a distinct Hypostasis. . . . Nor may we conceive two Divine Minds, one knowing and the other knowing that It knows ; thinking may be distinguished, no doubt, from thinking that one is thinking ; but in the entire process there is really only one consciousness aware of its activity ; it would be absurd to suppose that the Authentic Intelligence could ever be thus unconscious of its act. ... No ; the Intellectual-Principle has Intellection of Itself ; and the Intellectual and Intelligible Kosmos which is its Thought is also Itself : therefore the Intellectual- Principle in Its Intellection has self-consciousness ; It necessarily knows Itself. (Plotinus urges, further, that if we are to suppose, with certain Gnostics, a second Intellectual-Principle conscious of the action of an unconscious first, we open the list of an unending series of Divine Minds.)

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PLOTINUS

So, too, the supposition that a first Intellectual-Principle engenders in the Soul-of-the-All a second Intellectual-Principle intermediate between Divine Mind and Soul, takes away from the Soul its intellective-nature (n) . . . on this hypothesis the Soul would possess not the Divine Intellectual Principle but merely an image of it. . . . We can, therefore, admit only these Three Hypostases in the Supreme ; one Transcendent ; one Intellectual-Principle, self-identical, unswerving ever, imitating the Father as nearly as may be (n) ; then Soul, with the reserve that the Soul in us, while in part always dwelling with the Intellectual Existences, is in part fallen to the realm of sense and in part again occupies an intermediate region.”

Notes

"The Soul’s Intellective-Nature” ; — This refers to the Plotinian doctrine that the Soul is a Logos, a Reason-Principle or Idea or Thought of the Divine Mind : —

III. 2, 2. " For what emanates from the Intellectual-Principle is a Reason-

Principle, a Logos.”

III. 6, i8.

ul’s Intellective-Nature” ; — This refers to the Plotinian doctrine that the Soul is a Logos, a Reason-Principle or Idea or Thought of the Divine Mind : —

III. 2, 2. " For what emanates from the Intellectual-Principle is a Reason-

Principle, a Logos.”

III. 6, i8. " The Soul, itself a Divine Thought and possessing the Divine

Thoughts, or Ideas, of all things, contains all things concentred within it.”

If the Soul is one of many Ideas in the Intellectual-Principle it is hard to see why there should be only one All-Soul ; but Plotinus is concerned in opposing, not so much the " superfluous multiplication.” of lower forms of Being as the multiplication of grades in the Intellectual-Realm ; the ninth tractate of the Second Ennead, " Against the Gnostics,” contains an elaborate refutation of such needless subdivision of the Divine.

" One Intellectual-Principle ” : — The one Divine Intellectual-Principle is, as we have seen. Intelligent no less than Intelligible (is at once the subject and object of True- Knowing). The Ideas which it contains are understood, in Philo’s sense, as Intellectual Powers : —

V. 9, 8. " No Idea is anything other than the Intellectual-Principle : each is the Intellectual-Principle ; and the entire Intellectual-Principle is the entirety of the Ideas ... as a science entire is the entirety of the truths it sums.”

IV. 8, 3. " Every Intelligence dwells in that Place of Intellection, and there, too, dwell the Intellectual-Forces, the Ideas, with ail particular Intelligences ; for Divine Mind is not a pure Unity but a Unity in Multiplicity.”

Hence it is that there comes to exist in the Divdne a Kosmos which contains all the Ideas of things existing in the world of sense : in that Divine Realm the Divine Thoughts, imperfectly manifested below, are consummately beautiful, perfect and veritably one ; —

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V. 9, 9. “ This sense-grasped universe is a living being including the entirety of life, but it derives its existence and the specific mode of its existence from a Power (the Soul) which is ever being led back towards the Divine Mind from which it emerged : therefore the entire exemplar of this universe must be in that Intellectual-Principle which must be, thus, a Kosmos, an ordered collectivity.”

The Three Supreme Principles are most closely linked ; each of the lower derives from its prior and the entire lower uni.erse derives from The First, but through the mediation of the Intellectual-Principle and the Soul.

The Intellectual-Principle has its intellection by virtue of the self-contemplation of the One : —

V.