Perhaps Vice and Evil as in the Soul should be described not as an entire, but as a partial, negation of good.
But if this were so, part of the Soul must possess The Good, part be without it ; the Soul will have a mingled nature and the Evil within it will not be unblended : we have not yet hghted on the Primal, Unmingled Evil. The Soul would possess the Good as its Essence, the Evil as an Accidental.
Perhaps Evil is merely an impediment to the Soul like something affecting the eye and so hindering sight.
But such an evil in the eyes is no more than an occasion of evil, the Absolute Evil is something quite different. If then Vice is an impedi- ment 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 starting- point 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
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 resist- ance 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
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.
This is the fall of the Soul, this entry into Matter : thence its weak- ness : 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.
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
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.
One desire or appetite there is which does not fall under this con- demnation ; it is the aspiration towards the Intellectual-Principle : this demands only that the Soul dwell alone enshrined within that place of its choice, never lapsing towards the lower.
Evil is not alone : by virtue of the nature of Good, the power of Good, it is not Evil only : it appears, necessarily, bound around with bonds of Beauty, like some captive bound in fetters of gold ; and beneath these it is hidden so that, while it must exist, it may not be seen by the gods, and that men need not always have evil before their eyes, but that when it comes before them they may still be not destitute of Images of the Good and Beautiful for their Remembrance.
“The Reasoned Dismissal”
“ You will not dismiss your Soul lest it go forth . . .” (taking something with it).
For wheresoever it go, it will be in some definite condition, and its going forth is to some new place. The Soul will wait for the body to be completely severed from it ; then it makes no departure ; it simply finds itself free.
Suicide
But how does the body come to be separated ?
The separation takes place when nothing of Soul remains bound up with it : the harmony within the body, by virtue of which the Soul was retained, is broken and it can no longer hold its guest.
But when a man contrives the dissolution of the body, it is he that has used violence and tom himself away, not the body that has let the Soul slip from it. And in loosing the bond he has not been without passion ; there has been revolt or grief or anger, movements which it is unlawful to indulge.
But if a man feel himself to be losing his reason ?
That is not likely in the Sage, but if it should occur, it must be classed with the inevitable, to be welcome at the bidding of the fact though not for its own sake. To call upon drugs to the release of the Soul seems a strange way of assisting its purposes.
And if there be a period allotted to all by fate, to anticipate the hour could not be a happy act, unless, as v>^e have indicated, under stern necessity.
If everyone is to hold in the other world a standing determined by the state in which he quitted this, there must be no withdrawal as long as there is any hope of progress.
Bibliography and Explanatory Matter
Notes
I. the Text
The text on which this translation has been made is that of Richard Volkmann (Teubner, Leipzig, 1883) : occasionally a reading has been adopted from the text variations or spacious commentary given in the three-volume edition of Frederick Creuzer, Oxford, 1835 : very rarely the translator has been driven to venture an emendation of his own.
Ii. Previous Translations
The present translation has been scrupulously compared, clause by clause, over and over again, with those undermentioned : —
The Latin of Ficino (in Creuzer’s edition).
The French of M. N. Bouillet (three vols., Paris, 1875, etc.).
A complete version ; often inaccurate, often only vaguely conveying the meaning ; furnished with the most copious and fascinating notes and commentary. To the elucida- tion of Plotinus’ general themes Bouillet brings illustrations from the entire range of religious and mystical thought, beginning with the earliest thinkers, minutely comparing Plato, borrowing from the Fathers of the Church, from works of the Eastern mysticism, from the Rabbalah, from the mediaeval theologians, from Malebranche, Spinoza, Leibnitz, Bossuet, Thomassin, etc. He also uses Macrobius very effectively. As Bouillet’s monu- mental work is long out of print and very rare, it would be a service to Plotinian studies to translate his notes and commentary entire, the Greek and Latin equally with the French. If this were done, with of course a summary of the passages of Plotinus under illustration, the book would have a great value of its own as a conspectus of the mystic thought that has entered into Christianity from outside or been evolved by Christianity from its own depths.
The German of Hermann Friedrich Mueller (2 vols., Berlin : Weidmann, 1878-80)'
This valuable translation is described by its author as “ literal, but scarcely palatable unless taken in conjunction with the Greek text ” ; both statements are true : in parts the version is, even, meaningless without a close study of the original.
The German of Otto Kiefer (2 vols., Diederichs ; Jena and Leipzig, 1905).
This is a book of selections, very extensive, purporting, indeed, to omit only what is judged to be out of date, futile or incomprehensible in the original : it is substantially a
Mueller made very much more readable with often improvement in sense and sometimes, it is to be feared, a deterioration.