[The translator upon reading some of the treatises translated into English by Thomas Taylor decided, for reasons mainly literary, that the work of this devoted pioneer would not be helpful in the present undertaking ; it has, therefore, not been used in any part of this work except possibly by indirect suggestion from the quotations made occasionally in the com.mentaries of Bouillet and Creuzer.]
Iii. Method of the Present Translation
Inevitably the present translator has sometimes differed from all his predecessors, as they have sometimes differed each from all the others : he hopes it will not be thought an insolence in him to remark that his rendering of any given passage is not to be tested finally by the authority of any of these scholars, still less by any preconceived idea of Plotinus’ meaning or by any hasty memory of controversy and decisions as to the peculiar uses of words in Plato or Aristotle. The text of the Enneads may be taken to be very fairly well-established, but it would be absurd to suppose that as yet Plotinus, so little cautious or consistent in verbal expression, yields his precise meaning, or full content, as Plato, for example, may be supposed now to do after the scholarly scrutiny of generations. It may, indeed, be said with a rough truth that Plotinus’ terms, shifting at best and depending upon context and again Xipon the context of the context, are never to be more carefully examined than when they seem to be most true to the Platonic or Aristotelian uses : the confusion is a constant pitfall : Plotinus was pouring a quite new wine into very old bottles. Plotinus is often to be understood rather by swift and broad rushes of the mind — the mind trained to his methods — than by laborious word-racking investigation : we must know him through and through before we can be quite sure of his minuter mean- ings anywhere : there must be many a scholar at work yet, many an order of mind, before we can hope to have a perfectly true translation of the Enneads in any language. The present worker must have made mistakes, some perhaps that to himself will one day appear inexcusable : his one consolation is that the thing he will that day welcome from other hands has almost certainly passed through his own, and been deliberately rejected. Where he appears most surely to have sinned against the light, it is most sure that he has passed through an agony of hesitation.
People seem always anxious to know whether a work of translation is what they call literal ; the important question is rather whether it is faithful : the present work pretends to be faithful — and, if we must be precise, literary rather than literal. This is not to say that it is a paraphrase.
Probably every translator from the classic tongues sets out gaily in the firm purpose of achieving the impossible, of making a crib that shall also be a piece of sound and flowing idiomatic writing ; and certainly many critics demand the miracle. Some years ago, on the publication of a preliminary specimen of this present venture, one very highly accom- plished scholar wrote complaining with utter seriousness of an English past tense which had dared to translate a “ frequentative aorist ” of the Greek original ; he had apparently never asked himself whether an English past may not be as frequentative as any Greek
Method of This Translation 115
aorist : in any case, readers who desire their translations to serve as an unfailing treasury of illustrations to “ X. on Greek Idioms ” are not asked to like this version.
Again, various arbitrary principles, laid down by translators of a formally precise school, have been quite ignored here. For example, it has been decreed that “ one word must translate one word ” and this in a double application : —
1. That if, for example, the word Phusis is once translated Nature, Phusis must stand as Nature at every repetition, never Kind or Essence, or Being or any other word which happens, in a particular context, to be equally clear and precise or even imperative in English to the sense and connection of thought.
2. That Phusis, for example, may never be translated by such a double as “ Nature or Hypostasis,” Doxa, for example, never by such a double as " Opinion or Seeming- Knowledge,” still less, as several times here, by “Ordinary Mentation,” with or without an alternative or an addition.
All such bans have been treated here as belonging to the childish pedantry of a game of skill, not to the serious task of conveying to the reader a grave body of foreign thought. Probably in every writer — certainly in Plotinus — such a word as Phusis, such a word as Theos, or again Theios, may carry in connotation not merely two but three or four or more notions, any one of which may at a given moment be the dominant, though not necessarily to the utter exclusion of the others. Plotinus has some score of words, technical terms, which he uses in very varying applications w'here no single fixed English word or even combination of words would always carry his meaning. The translator has in this whole matter adopted the principle of using such a variety of terms, single or double or upon occasion triple, as will exactly cover or carry the idea which appears in the original ; he has arrogated to himself almost the entire freedom of a philosophic writer in English who uses his words with an absolute loyalty, of course, to his thought but with never a moment’s scruple as to the terms in which he happened to convey or indicate a given notion five pages back. In other words the present translator has not thought of his probable readers as glossary-bound pedants but as possessed of the living vision which can follow a stream of thought by the light of its own vivid movement.
Other theorists of translation desire that a version should represent the style of the original writer : this notion is tempting and may often be safely achieved but not, the present worker ventures to say, in the case of Plotinus, or perhaps in the case of any WTiter whose main preoccupation is less with artistic expression than with the enunciation of cardinal and very gravely important ideas. Longinus, as may be learned from Por- phyry’s Life-sketch of Plotinus, so little grasped Plotinus’ manner of expression as to judge ruinously erroneous the most faithful transcripts that could be : a version which should reproduce such a style as disconcerted and misled the most widely read contem- porary critic of Greek letters, would not be a translation in any useful sense of the word, or at least would not be English or would not be readable.
The present translation, therefore, has been executed on the basic ideal of carrying Plotinus’ thought — its strength and its weakness alike — to the mind of the reader of English : the first aim has been the utmost attainable clearness in the faithful, full and unalloyed expression of the meaning ; the second aim, set a long way after the first, has been the reproduction of the splendid soaring passages with all their warmth and light.
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Nothing whatever has been, consciously, added or omitted with such absurd purpose as that of heightening either the force of the thought or the beauty of the expression — except in so far as force and beauty demand a clarity which sometimes must be, courage- ously, imposed upon the most negligent, probably, of the great authors of the world.
Iv. Commentaries
The translator has necessarily been indebted for guidance, direct and indirect, to many works of metaphysic, theology and even history — but there are some which must be particularly named, books to which he has been under the deepest, constant obligations in the immediate grappling with the text, books also to which the novice in Plotinian studies may be usefully directed.
In English
The Neo-Platonists : a study in the history of Hellenism : by Thomas Whittaker (Cambridge University Press : 1901) : as a formed scientific exposition of the entire history of the school and a chart of the Plotinian system (some sixty pages summing the Enneads) this book is of the first value.
Much useful suggestion is contained in “ The Wisdom of Plotinus : a Metaphysical Study ” by Charles J. Whitby, London (William Rider and Son : 1909).
There is nothing more helpful, in its own wide sphere, towards the understanding and appreciation of Plotinus than the late Principal Cairo’s beautiful work " The Evolution of Theology in the Greek Philosophers : Gifford Lectures for 1901-2 ” (Glasgow : MacLehose : 1904) : this book, written in the loftiest spirit, contains some exquisite fragments from the Enneads : the author presumably disdained the humble work of a mere translator, but had he given us a complete rendering the world w'ould have been the richer by a classic of thought and a classic of language.
In “ Neo-Platonism ” by C. Bigg, D.D. (London : Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge : 1895), we have a good general summary, rather popular in tone, of the system and of its antecedents and results.
Another work which would serve as an adequate explanation of practically the whole system is “ The Problem of Evil in Plotinus ” : B. A. G. Fuller : 1912 : it includes translations of many cardinal passages and is written throughout in as lucid a style as has ever expounded a metaphysical system.
“ The Philosophy of Plotinus,” by David Sylvan Guthrie (Philadelphia, Dunlop Printing Co., 1896) : is a brief summary containing a helpful index to the most funda- mentally significant pcissages of the Enneads.
The valuable works of Miss Underhill, dealing with the history and methods of the schools and masters of mysticism, are too well known to need more than the naming.
The translator owes acknowledgment to G. R. S. Meade, whose great labour on the Hermes’ documents gave him much valuable suggestion.
Edward Carpenter’s work ‘‘ The Art of Creation ” (George Allen ; 1907) will be found very helpful as exhibiting, in modern terms and with the support of modern metaphysical and scientific investigation, a great deal that is either basic or implied in the Plotinian system.
Terminology
French and German
No specialist student in Plotinus can pass over Jules Simon’s “ Histoire de l’Lcole d’Alexandrie ” ; it is very full, very minute ; it is disfigured in places by a strange, a most unphilosophical scorn where Plotinus’ magnificent attempt to explain the Universe IS found to involve the contradictions or lacunae perhaps inevitable to all such efforts religious or philosophical ; Simon’s figure-references to the Enneads are not seldom faulty.
Vacherot’s volume, of the same title as Simon’s, is another work of capital import- ance : it is described by H. Guyot as intelligent, systematic, the best existing in French and still to be read with profit even after Zeller’s exposition : M. Guyot, however, finds that Vacherot’s Hegelianism somewhat mars his judgments upon the Plotinian system.
"L’iNFiNiTt Divine depuis Philon jusqu’A Plotin ” : Henri Guyot: (Paris: Alcan : 1906). This little book contains in less than one hundred of its two hundred and fifty pages some of the most original and subtlest analysis, synthesis and interpreta- tion yet presented of Plotinus’ dominant ideas : it is very lucidly written, and even pleasantly : an English translation would add to the language another valuable document of Metaphysical Mysticism.
“ Die Lehre vom Logos in der Griechischen Philosophie ” : Dr. Max Heinze : Oldenburg, 1872. A most valuable work.
“ Die Psychologie des Plotin ” : Dr. Arthur Richter : (Halle : 1867).
In all the books mentioned will be found more or less extensive bibliographies, in- cluding works, mostly in German, which the present translator either has not been able to procure or has not found very useful.
It would not be right to close this chapter of acknowledgment without some ex- pression of the translator’s deep obligation to Mr. Ernest R. Debenham, whose interest in Plotinus and friendly offices in the publishing world have resulted in the production of this version of the first Ennead.
V. Terminology
The six Enneads — six sets of Nine treatises — do not constitute or include a formal step- by-step statem.ent or demonstration of the Plotinian doctrine : the entire system is assumed in each of the separate treatises, which take the form of special developments or demonstrations of significant points, not chapters in one work of consecutive ex- position.
Hence, failing a previous knowledge of the main doctrines, almost any of the treatises must appear incomprehensible or, worse, be radically misunderstood ; the terminology, simple enough in itself, becomes dishearteningly mysterious or gravely misleading.