The Enneads — trans. Stephen MacKenna

l their descent, they are not cut off from their Principle, from Divine Mind. The Intellectual-Principle does not descend with them but while they walk the earth their Summit is above the heavens.”

XII

The Soul atfer Death
I. I, 10. Page 38 of this volume.

Notes

The Soul liberated by death goes whither it has tended and as it has deserved — up to the heavens and among the stars, or in the Divine Mind itself, or into other human bodies, or yet deeper into Matter as into animals or plants. Cf. I. 8, 13, page 105 of this volume.

Plotinus does not allow that the authentic, the separable Soul, is in the body ; the body is in the Soul : see I. i, 7, page 35 of this work ; and

IV. 3, 20. ” The body is visible ; the Soul is not : v/e observe that the body is possessed of Soul since it moves and feels . . . hence we are led to say that there is a Soul in it. If the Soul were an object of sight or of any sense, we should

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PLOTINUS

perceive that it is wrapped about the entire living being, equally covering it from extremity to extremity ; we should judge that the Soul is in no way within the body but that the secondary is within its principal, the content within the container, the passing within the perdurable.”

IV. 3, 22. ” The Soul is in the body only as light is in the air (permeating but not enclosed).”

The Essential Constituent of man is that prior Soul which ever remains a member of the Intellectual Realm from which it sprang : cf. I. i, 7, page 36 of this volrnne.

VI. 7, 5. " The diviner Soul never leaves the Divine Mind : while it clings

There, it allow'S the lower Soul, as it were, to hang down from it while it holds itself bound by its own Reason-Principle to the Reason-Principle of the Divine sphere to which it belongs.”

It follows that the perceptions of the senses and the perturbations of the mind do not belong to the true man but to the body or to the Couplement of Soul and body, so that the Authentic Soul is not affected but is merely aware of an affection elsewhere : —

IV. 4, 18. ” Sorrow and pleasure of the sense belong to the body thus modified ; pain and joy of the body come in the form of knowledge without feeling to us, to the true man.”

The virtues not philosophic but practical, or civic, belong to this Couplement — as do vices and flaws which cannot touch the true Soul : cf. I. i, ii and 12, page 39 of this volume. The true virtue is seated only in the true essence of the man : see I. 4, 14, page 70 of this volume.

practical, or civic, belong to this Couplement — as do vices and flaws which cannot touch the true Soul : cf. I. i, ii and 12, page 39 of this volume. The true virtue is seated only in the true essence of the man : see I. 4, 14, page 70 of this volume.

For the true Soul, or true Man, is the Soul loosed from the body either by death or by the life of philosophic contemplation : cf. Porphyry, “ There are two modes of death : one, known to every one, where the body is loosed from the Soul ; the other, that of the Sages, where the Soul is released from the body : the one death may or may not be followed by the other.”

All the trouble of this life, all the vicissitudes of the earthly career touch only those that cede too much to the lower and outer : —

III. 2, 15. “ Man-made weapons directed against fellow-mortals in quaintly set-out battles, like Pyrrhic dances, show what children’s games are all our human affairs ; and they show us, too, that death is nothing very serious : to die in wars, in battles, is to grow old a little before one’s time ; it is going away suddenly, to come back again. Or suppose that you are dispossessed of your wealth ; remember that there was a time when you did not as yet possess it, and that your despoiler will either lose it in turn or find its possession a greater evil than its loss could be.

LIKENESS TO GOD

p. 155

Murders, death in all its shapes, the capture and sacking of towns, all must be considered as so much stage-show, so many shiftings of scenes, the horror and outcry of a play ; for here, too, in all the changing doom of life, it is not the true man, the inner Soul, that grieves and laments but merely the phantasm of the man, the outer man, playing his part on the boards of the world. VVho could be troubled by such griefs, except one that understands only the lower and outer life, never dreaming that all the tears and mighty business are but a sport ? ... If the Sage has to take part in the revels he will not forget that he has fallen among children and for the moment discarded his own grave truth.”

XIII

Likeness to God
I. 2, 3. Page 44 of this volume.

V. 3, 9. One that seeks to penetrate the nature of the Divine Mind must see deeply into the nature of his own Soul, into the Divinest part of himself. He must first make abstraction of the body, then of the lower soul which built up that body, then of all the faculties of sense, of all desires and emotions and every such triviality, of all that leans towards the mortal.

into the Divinest part of himself. He must first make abstraction of the body, then of the lower soul which built up that body, then of all the faculties of sense, of all desires and emotions and every such triviality, of all that leans towards the mortal. What is left after this abstraction is the part which we describe as the image of the Divine Mind, an emanation preserving some of that Divine Light.

Note

All the virtues are referred to the “ Purification ” which consists in separating the Reasonable or Intellectual Soul from the body-soul and from the body : cf. I. 6, 6, page 84 of this volume.

It is an error to seek the perfect happiness in action or in the moral (or civic) virtues, since all action belongs to the outer, to the mixed life, not to the pure Act of the prior Soul : see 1. 1, 10 and the reference to Hercules in I. i, 12, pages 38, 40, of this voliune.

Our task is not merely to expel evil but to become good, not to be without fault but to be God. Still if we expel evil, the Good comes of itself ; —

V. 3, 6. “ The Soul, brought to its purity, welcomes the indwelling imprint of the Intellectual-Principle.”

V. 3, 6. “ When we were in the Divine we rested content in the nature of the Intellectual-Principle ; we had Intellection and saw all things in The One ; for the Intellectual-Principle had the Intellection and spoke to the Soul of what

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it saw, and the Soul rested in tranquil co-operation with the activities of its prior.”

V. 3, 8. ” Light is visible by light : the Intellectual-Principle sees Itself ; and this Light shining upon the Soul enlightens it, that is makes it a member of the Intellective order.”

XIV

The Vision of the Supreme

VI. 9, 3. What, then, is The One and what Its nature ? We cannot be surprised to find It difficult to tell of since even Existence and the Ideas resist our penetration though all our knowing is based upon the Ideas.

The further the human Soul, or Mind, ventures towards the Formless (to what is either above or below Form and Idea), the more is it troubled ; it becomes itself, as it were, undefined, unshaped, in face of the shifting variety before it and so it is utterly unable to take hold ; it slips away ; it feels that it can grasp nothing. It is at pain in these alien places, and often is glad to give up all its purpose and to fall back upon the solid ground of the sense-grasped world and there take rest — much as the eye, wearied of the minute and fine, is eased when it meets the large and bold.