The Enneads — trans. Stephen MacKenna
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eate in the ugly.
Those that desire earthly procreation are satisfied with the beauty found on earth, the beauty of image and of body ; it is because they are strangers to the Archetype, the source of even the attraction they feel towards what is lovely here. There are Souls to whom earthly beauty is a leading to the memory of that in the higher realm and these love the earthly as an image ; those that have not attained to this memory do not understand what is happening within them, and take the image for the reality. Once there is perfect self-control, it is no fault to enjoy the beauty of earth ; where appreciation degenerates into carnality, there is sin.
Pure Love seeks the beauty alone, whether there is Reminiscence or not ; but there are those that feel, also, a desire of such immortality as lies within mortal reach ; and these are seeking Beauty in their demand for perpetuity, the desire of the eternal ; Nature teaches them to sow the seed and to beget in beauty, to sow towards eternity, but in beauty through their own kinship with the beautiful. And indeed the eternal is of the one stock with the beautiful, the Eternal-Nature is the first shaping of beauty and makes beautiful all that rises from it.
The less the desire for procreation, the greater is the contentment with beauty alone, yet procreation aims at the engendering of beauty ;
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it is the expression of a lack ; the subject is conscious of insufficiency and, wishing to produce beauty, feels that the way is to beget in a beautiful form. Where the procreative desire is lawless or against the purposes of nature, the first inspiration has been natural, but they have diverged from the way, they have slipped and fallen, and they grovel ; they neither understand whither Love sought to lead them nor have they any instinct to production ; they have not mastered the right use of the images of beauty ; they do not know what the Authentic Beauty is.
Those that love beauty of person without carnal desire love for beauty’s sake ; those that have — for women, of course — the copulative love, have the further purpose of self-perpetuation : as long as they are led by these motives, both are on the right path, though the first have taken the nobler way.
carnal desire love for beauty’s sake ; those that have — for women, of course — the copulative love, have the further purpose of self-perpetuation : as long as they are led by these motives, both are on the right path, though the first have taken the nobler way. But, even in the right, there is the difference that the one set, worshipping the beauty of earth, look no further, while the others, those of recollection, venerate also the beauty of the other world while they, still, have no contempt for this in which they recognise, as it were, a last outgrowth, an attenuation of the higher. These, in sum, are innocent frequenters of beauty, not to be confused with the class to whom it becomes an occasion of fall into the ugly — for the aspiration towards a good degenerates into an evil often.
So much for love, the state.
Now we have to consider Love, the God.
2.
The existence of such a being is no demand of the ordinary man, merely ; it is supported by Theologians (Orphic teachers) and, over and over again, by Plato to whom Eros is child of Aphrodite, minister of beautiful children, inciter of human souls towards the supernal beauty or quickener of an already existing impulse thither. All this requires philosophical examination. A cardinal passage is that in The Banquet where we are told Eros was not a child of Aphrodite but bom on the day of Aphrodite’s birth, Penia, Poverty, being the mother, and Poros, Possession, the father.
The matter seems to demand some discussion of Aphrodite since in
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any case Eros is described as being either her son or in some association with her. Who then is Aphrodite, and in what sense is Love either her child or bom with her or in some way both her child and her birthfellow ?
To us Aphrodite is twofold ; there is the heavenly Aphrodite, daughter of Ouranos or Heaven : and there is the other the daughter of Zeus and Dione, this is the Aphrodite who presides over earthly unions ; the higher was not born of a mother and has no part in marriages for in Heaven there is no marrying.
The Heavenly Aphrodite, daughter of Kronos (Saturn) who is no other than the Intellectual Principle — must be the Soul at its divinest : unmingled as the immediate emanation of the immingled ; remaining ever Above, as neither desirous nor capable of descending to this sphere, never having developed the downward tendency, a divine Hypostasis essentially aloof, so imreservedly an Authentic Being as to have no part with Matter — and therefore mythically “ the unmothered ” — ^justly called not Celestial Spirit but God, as knowing no sphere, never having developed the downward tendency, a divine Hypostasis essentially aloof, so imreservedly an Authentic Being as to have no part with Matter — and therefore mythically “ the unmothered ” — ^justly called not Celestial Spirit but God, as knowing no admixture, gathered cleanly within itself.
Any Nature springing directly from the Intellectual Principle must be itself also a clean thing ; it will derive a resistance of its own from its nearness to the Highest, for all its tendency, no less than its fixity, centres upon its author whose power is certainly sufiâcient to maintain it Above.
Soul then could never fall from its sphere ; it is closer held to the divine Mind than the very sun could hold the light it gives forth to radiate about it, an outpouring from itself held firmly to it, still.
But following upon Kronos — or, if you will, upon Heaven, (Ouranos) the father of Kronos — the Soul directs its Act towards him and holds closely to him and in that love brings forth the Eros through whom it continues to look towards him. This Act of the Soul has produced an Hypostasis, a Real-Being ; and the mother and this Hypostasis — her offspring, noble Love — gaze together upon Divine Mind. Love, thus, is ever intent upon that other loveliness, and exists to be the medium between desire and that object of desire. It is the eye of the desirer ;
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by its power what loves is enabled to see the loved thing. But it is first ; before it becomes the vehicle of vision, it is itself filled with the sight ; it is first, therefore, and not even in the same order — for desire attains to vision only through the efficacy of Love, while Love, in its own Act, harvests the spectacle of beauty playing immediately above it.
3-
That Love is a Hypostasis (a “ Person ") a Real-Being sprung from a Real- Being — lower than the parent but authentically existent — is beyond doubt.
For the parent-Soul was a Real-Being sprung directly from the Act of the Hypostasis that ranks before it ; it had life ; it was a constituent in the Real-Being of all that authentically is — in the Real-Being which looks, rapt, towards the very Highest. That was the first object of its vision ; it looked towards it as towards its good, and it rejoiced in the looking ; and the quality of what it saw was such that the contemplation could not be void of effect ; in virtue of that rapture, of its position in regard to its object, of the intensity of its gaze, the Soul conceived and brought forth an offspring worthy of itself and of the vision.