A serious misapprehension may be caused, to take one instance among several, by incautiously reading into terms used by Plotinus meanings or suggestions commonly conveyed by those words in the language of modern philosophy or religion ; on the other hand, there is in places almost a certainty of missing these same religious or philosophical
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implications or connotations where to the initiate the phrase of Plotinus conveys them, intensely.
Thus, it is not easy, without knowledge and the training of habit, to quiver with any very real rapture over the notion of becoming " wholly identified with the Intellectual- Principle,” : when it is understood and at each moment deeply realised that “ The In- tellectual-Principle ” is the highest accessible “ Person ” of the Godhead, is very God, is the Supreme Wisdom immanent within the human soul and yet ineffably superior to all the Universe beside, then perhaps we may feel the great call to the devotion that has such a reward.
We rqust, then, learn at the very beginning what are the main lines of the Plotinian explanation of the Heavens and the Earth and the Human-Being if we are to obtain from our author, our temporary Master, the depth of his philosophical meaning and the warmth of his religious fervour.
It is not possible to cram the Plotinian system unhurt into a confined space : to be brief is necessarily to be inaccurate : what follows is merely a rough chart intended to give the first essential orientation, to indicate the great highways in their main course and to name the commanding landmarks : it is the natural and necessary introduction to the Terminology, nothing more.
The Divine Names
The system of Plotinus is a system of necessary Emanation, Procession or Irradia- tion accompanied by necessary Aspiration or Reversion-to-Source : all the forms and phases of Existence flow from the Divinity and all strive to return Thither and to remain There.
This Divinity is a graded Triad.
Its three Hypostases — or in modern religious terminology, “ Persons ” — are, in the briefest description —
1. The One, or First Existent.
2. The Divine Mind, or First Thinker and Thought.
3. The All-Soul, or First and Only Principle of Life.
“ Of all things the governance and the existence are in these Three.”
I. the One
The First Hypostasis of the Supreme Divine Triad is variously named : often it is simply “ The First.” Envisaged logically, or dialectically, it is The One. Morally seen, it is The Good: in various other uses or aspects it is The Simple, The Absolute, The Transcendence, The Infinite, The Unconditioned: it is sometimes The Father.
It is unknowable : its nature — or its Super-Nature, its Supra-Existence — is con- veyed theoretically by the simple statement that it transcends all the knowable, prac- tically most often by negation of all Quality : thus if we call it the Good, w'e do not intend any formal affirmation of a quality within itself ; we mean only that it is the Goal or Term to which all aspires. When we affirm existence of it, we mean no more than that it does not fall within the realm of non-existents ; it transcends even the quality of Being.
Terminology: the Intellectual Realm
It is not the Creator : it is scarcely even to be rightly called the First-Cause : its lonely majesty rejects all such predication of action : in this realm of the unknowable the First-Cause is, strictly, a lower principle than The First, which is not to be spoken of in any terms of human thought.
We may utter no more of it — and then under infinite reserve, appealing always to a deep sense behind the words — than, that in an ineffable, Supra-Existence, it exists, that in an ineffable Super-Act, it acts, that it is everywhere, in the sense that without its Supra-Existence nothing could be, that it is nowhere in that it is loftily alien from all else. In so far as language and all the unconquerable force of human thought drive us to speak of it as a Cause, we must keep in mind that it is so only in that its Perfection implies an Act, a production, or, in a metaphor basic with Plotinus, a “ generation ” of something other than Itself : for Existence or Supra-Existence comports expressive Act. The most perfect form of expressive Act is Thought or Intellection : the Divine Existence, or Supra- Existence, produces, therefore, a Divine-Thought or Intellection.
2. the Intellectual-Principle
This Divine-Thought is, of course, a Real-Being, the first “ thing ” of whom existence may, if only in some vaguer sense, be affirmed : it is an Intelligence, or rather is the Universal-Intelligence. As the act, offspring and image of The First, it is a sort of media- tion to us of the Unknowable One. It is in the Greek named ho Nous, which has often, perhaps not very happily, been translated Divine-Mind, sometimes Divine Intelligence or Divine-Intellection : in the present translation it is most often conveyed by the rather clumsy term, found in practice, expressive and convenient, " The Intellectual- Principle.”
In the English, it must be noted, as in the Greek, the same term is used for the parallel Principle and Act in man : in both realms, the divine and human, the Intellectual- Principle connotes the highest really knowable : often therefore to absorb the full mystical or religious suggestion of a passage the reader will find it expedient to re-translate, i.e. to substitute temporarily for the term ‘‘ Intellectual-Principle,” the term Spirit, or despite the awkward clash, even the term " Supreme-Soul.”
With this Nous, or Divine-Mind or Divine-Intellection, or Divine-Intellectual- Principle, begins the existence of Plurality or Complexity, or Multiplicity : the Divine Mind contains, or rather is, ta Noeta=the Intellectual-Universe or Intelligible-Universe, often known as The Intelligible or The Intelligibles.
The Intellectual or Intelligible-Universe is the Totality of the Divine-Thoughts, generally known, in the phrase familiar in Platonism, as The Ideas.
The Ideas, or Divine-Thoughts, are Real-Beings, Intelligences, Powers : they are the eternal Originals, Archetypes, Intellectual-Forms of all that exists in the lower spheres. In certain aspects this sphere of the Intelligibles would be best named The Spiritual Universe : Principal Caird agrees with Whittaker in finding it closely like Dante’s con- ception of the circle of angels and blessed spirits gathered in contemplation and service round the throne of God.
The Intellectual or Intelligible Universe contains, or even in some sense is, all par- ticular minds or intelligences and these in their kinds are images, representations.
phantasms, “ shadows ” of this Universal or Divine Mind. All the phases of existence — down even to Matter, the ultimate, the lowest faintest image of Real-Being — all are “ ideally ” present from eternity in this Realm of the divine Thoughts, this Totality of the Supreme Wisdom or “ Mentation.”
The Supreme Intellectual-Principle cannot be unproductive : accompanying its Act of Thought there is what we may, coarsely, indicate as an Act of Act : the Divine-Thinking “ engenders a power apt to the realisation of its Thought,” apt that is to ‘‘ Creation ” : This engendered power is the Third Hypostasis of the Divine Triad.
3. the All-Soul
The Third Hypostasis of the Divine-Triad is, then, the All-Soul, or Universal Soul or Soul of the All : it is the eternal emanation and image of the Second Hypostasis, the Intellectual-Principle.
As the Divine-Intellectual-Principle has, to our view, two Acts — that of upward contemplation of The One and that of “ generation ” towards the lower — so the All-Soul has two Acts : it at once contemplates the Intellectual-Principle and ” generates ” in the bounty of its own perfection the lower possible. Thus we have often in the Enneads a verbal partition of the All-Soul ; we hear of the Leading-Principle of the Soul, or the Celestial Soul, concentrated in contemplation of its superior, and the Lower Soul, called also the Nature-Looking and Generative Soul, whose operation it is to generate or fashion the lower, the material Universe upon the model of the Divine-Thoughts, the " Ideas ” laid up within the Divine-Mind ; this lower principle in the Soul is sometimes called the Logos of the Universe, or the " Reason-Principle ” of the Universe. The All-Soul is the mobile cause of movement as well as of Form : more directly than the two superior or “ earlier” Hypostases of the Divine-Triad it is the eternal cause of the existence, eternal existence, of the Kosmos, or “ World,” or material, or sense-grasped Universe, which is the Soul’s Act and emanation, image and ‘‘ shadow.” It is the Creator, therefore, and the Vital-Principle of all that is lower, or “ later ” than the Divine-Triad. In a sense that need not be here minutely elaborated the All-Soul includes, and is, All-the-Souls : for the first rough practical purposes of the average reader, it may be conveniently indi- cated in a stanza, by Richard Watson Dixon : —
“ There is a soul above the soul of each,
A mightier soul which yet to each belongs :
There is a sound made of all human speech,
And numerous as the concourse of all songs ;
And in that soul lives each, in each that soul,
Tho’ all the ages are its life-time vast ;
Each soul that dies in its most sacred whole Receiveth life that shall for ever last.”
The Divine-Triad as a Unity
The Three Hypostases of the Supreme-Being are, of course, quite frequently spoken of collectively as one transcendent Being or one Divine Realm : sometimes, even, where one of the Three is definitely named, the entire context shows that the reference is not to the Hypostasis actually named but to the Triad collectively or to one of the two not
Terminology : Nature of Man
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named ; thus where the All-Soul is specified in a moral connection the reference may really be to The First, to The Good ; and where the connection is rather intellectual than moral or merely dynamic, the All-Soul may be used as a comprehensive term for the Godhead with a real reference to the Second Hypostasis, to Divine-Mind.
The Triad, it must never, under any stress, be forgotten, is The Divinity, and each Hypostasis is Divine : the All-Soul, as Jules Simon well remarks, is the expression of the outgoing energy of the Divinity as the Intellectual-Principle is the expression of the Godhead’s self-pent Thought or Vfision.
The Divinity is communicated and approached by the channel of any one of the three Hypostases. The Intellectual-Principle has its Act about The First, towards Which it “ looks ” in eternal “ contemplation,” while, of its lavdshness, it engenders the Vital- Principle or Soul ; similarly the All-Soul ceaselessly “ looks ” towards the Intellectual- Principle, while, of its lavish energy, it engenders or creates all the lower, down to the lowest form of being in the visible universe. Thus the Divinity is communicated to all things. Now this action within the Di\dne-Circle is reflected by a parallel action in the lower Kosmos. All ‘‘ Nature,” even in the lowest, is in ceaseless Contemplation and Aspir.\tion : while every being, until the ultimate possible is reached, tends to engender an image of itself, it tends also to rejoin the next highest, of which it is itself a shadow or lower manifestation : even Matter, all but outcast from the sphere of Being and unable to engender, has the power of receiving form and is, thereby, tending feebly towards Authentic-Existence, towards Soul and Mind, and so is linked, distantly, with the Divine.
The Gods and Daimones
' ‘‘ The Gods ” are frequently mentioned in the Enneads : the words are generally little more than a fossil survnval, an accident of language not a reality of thought. Where, however, Plotinus names Ouranios (Coelius) Kronos (Saturn) Zeus (Jupiter), he indicates the three Hypostases of the Divine-Being : this is part of his general assumption that all his system is contained already in the most ancient knowledge of the world.
WTiere we meet “ The Gods ” without any specification we are to understand, ac- cording to the context ; sometimes the entire Divine Order ; sometimes the Divine- Thoughts, The Ideas or Archetypes ; sometimes exalted Beings vaguely understood to exist above man as ministers of the Supreme ; sometimes the stars and earth, thought of, at least in their soul-part, as Divine-Beings : sometimes the words indicate, vaguely, the souls of lofty men ; sometimes there is some v’ague, sleepy acceptance of the popular notion of the Olympian personalities.
The Daimones are, strictly speaking, lofty powers beneath the ‘‘ Gods ” : in practice they are often confounded with the Gods : the same word is translated here, according to context and English connotation, by “ Supernals,” Celestials, Divine Spirits, Blessed Spirits.