Self-Will ; — Plotinus upholds the Freedom of the Will but denies that Free- Will can consist in the power to effect things mutually contradictory. Thus, VI. 8, 21, ” The greatest power is in keeping nearest to Unity : to be able to effect contra- dictory acts is weakness ; it is to be unable to hold to the Best.”
He says that Free-Will is shown in right action not in acts done under the driving of the senses : —
III. I, 9. ” Whensoever the soul has been wrested from its own character by the force of the Outer and so acts — rushing in a blind excitement — the act or the state is not to be called an act or state of freedom ; so, too, when in a self-induced cor- ruption it answers to impulses within itself that are not entirely right, not of its highest nature : only when our soul acts by its native pure and independent Reason-Principle can the act be described as ours and as an exercise of Free-Will.”
Plotinus often affirms that the Liberty or Free-Will by which we pursue or accomplish evil is rather the very negation of freedom : —
IV. 8, 5. “ All that descends to a lower state descends against its own Free-Will, but since it has followed an impulse of its own natmre it is said to pay the penalty, which is no other than the very fall itself. But in the sense that such act and experience was necessary from eternity by a law of nature, then one may say, . . . that this thing, descending from what was above it to the service of something else, was sent down by God.”
On this doctrine of the alienation of the soul from God and the necessity of return by purification, see III. 6, 5 : in a deeper sense he denies that we are really cut off from God : see, later. Extract X., page 148.
The Grandeur of the Soul (Human and Divine)
V. I, 2. Before all let every Soul remember that itself is the creator of every living thing, having breathed the life into them : into all that the earth nourishes and the sea ; all that are in the air and all the divine stars in the heavens ; itself has formed the sun and this vast firmament of sky : itself has given them their stately
ordering and leads them around in their ranks : and it is a Nature apart from all to which it gives the order and the movement and the life, and it must of necessity be more honourable than they ; for they are things whose being has had a beginning, and they perish when the Soul that leads the chorus-dance of life departs, but the Soul itself has ever-being since it cannot suffer change. ... As rays from the sun pour light upon a gloomy cloud and make it shine in a golden glory, so the Soul when it comes to body touches it to life, brings immortality to it, wakes it where it lies prostrate ; and the heavenly-system, taking up its everlasting movement under the leading of the wisdom of the Soul, becomes a blissful living-being, vener- able with the Soul that dwells within, a dead body before the Soul came, or rather mere darkness of Matter, Non-Being, “ hated of the gods.”
What the Soul is, and what its power, will be more manifestly, more splendidly, evident, if we think how its counsel comprehends and conducts the heavens, how it communicates itself to all this vast bulk and ensouls it through all its extension, through big and little so that every particle of the great frame, though each has its own need and function and some are closely linked and some far apart, every particle has its own place in Soul.
But the Soul itself is not thus dismembered, it does not give life parcelwise, a fragment of Soul to a fragment of matter ; every fragment lives by the Soul entire which is present everywhere, present as a unit and as an Universal, as is the Father that engendered it.
And the heavens, manifold in content and in spatial difference, become a Unity by the power and faculty of the Soul, and through Soul this world is a God. And the Sun too is a God, for it too is ensouled ; so too the stars : and if we ourselves are anything, we come to it through the Soul : ” Dead is nastier than dung.” . . .
If it is soul that gives worth, why does anyone ignore himself and follow aught else ? You reverence the Soul elsewhere ; then revere yourself.
Note
(The Compilers say, “ This passage evidently refers to the Soul-of-the-World ” ; it does, but, as they proceed to indicate, it refers also to the human Soul, as being one with the Divine All-Soul.)
The ninth treatise of the Fourth Ennead is devoted, entire, to proving That All the Souls are One Soul.
The main argument is that only bodies are separated by mass, place, limit.
IV. 9, I. " Why should the Soul in myself be One and the Soul of the All not One ? All the more why, since in the divine there is no mass, no body ? ”
Souls as Many and One
VI. 4, 4. “ The Souls are separate without being distinct ; they are present
to each other as one ; they are no more sundered by boundaries than are the mani- fold elements of a science in any one mind ; the one Soul is of such a nature as to include all, for it knows nothing of limits.”
Remark, however, that there is still a multiplicity of souls : —
IV. 9, 2. ‘‘ We do not declare the Soul to be one in the sense of entirely excluding Miiltiplicity : this absolute Unity belongs only to the prior Kind (The Transcendent) : we make it both one and manifold : it has part in the Nature which is divided among bodies ; but it has part also in the Indivisible and so we find it One again.”
Proof of the Soul’s unity is afforded by human sympathy and by the efficacy of the magic arts : —
lY. 9, 3. ” We share each others’ feelings ; if we see another in distress we
suffer with him ; we are irresistibly impelled to form friendships : incantations and other magical practices draw us together and call out sympathetic response from afar : aU this is a token to us of the unity of the Souls.”
How we are to understand the co-existence of Unity and Multiplicity in the Soul is exhibited in a neighbouring passage : —
" The Indivisible Soul (the Unity of the Soul) is seated in the Intellectual- Principle which is not divided among the bodily forms ; the divisible Soul is seated within (or around) the bodies ; it is essentially one in identity but, associated with different bodies, it brings sensation about, and may be called another faculty or power of the Soul ; so too with (the still lower) that faculty which has creative power and procures the multiplication of bodily-life. This manifoldness of faculty does not take away unity ; a seed has the power of manifold production and yet is one thing, and out of this Unity springs the unity of its produce.”
Plotinus frequently uses the simile (as above) of the Unity of knowledge to illustrate the Unity of particular Souls in the All-Soul ; thus —
lY. 9, 5. “ The particular Souls merge into one Soul which has given itself
to form the Multiplicity and yet has kept its character ; it is of a quality to remain one though it bestow itself upon all ; its potency runs to all at once ; it is present in every particular Soul and is the same in them all : no one need baulk at this doctrine if he will but think how a science, with all its detail, constitutes one whole : the whole remains a unity and yet is divisible into its parts.”
The Soul in Relation to its Prior, to The Intellectual-Principle
V. I, 3. Since your Soul is so exalted a power, so divine, be confident that in virtue of its possession you are close to God. Begin, therefore, with the help of this Principle, to make your way to Him : you have not far to go ; there is not much between. Lay hold of that which is more divine than this godlike thing, lay hold of that Summit of the Soul which borders on the Supreme from which the Soul immediately derives, the Intellectual-Principle of which the Soul, glorious Principle though we have shown it to be, is but an image.
For as the spoken thought is an image of the thought that was in the Soul, so the Soul is an image (or thought) of the Intellectual-Principle and is the entire activity by which the Intellectual-Principle sends forth life to the producing of later forms of Being : fire contains a warmth ever within itself and a warmth which it sends forth to do its work (and so Divine-Mind both has its own inner Act and sends forth a creative force, the Soul) .
We are to take the Soul now in its loftier phase, not as an emanation, merely, but as eternally a member of the Supreme, even though in part it operates, also, elsewhere.
Springing from the Intellectual-Principle (n) it is intellective, operating in the sphere of the Divine Reason : it draws its perfection from this superior Principle which is like a cherishing father who has given it Existence though not a nature as perfect as his own.
The Soul’s substantial-existence springs from the Divine Intellect, and its expression in characteristic Act is effected by virtue of its vision of this Divine Intellect, for, as its vision penetrates into This, it possesses within itself, for its very own, what it sees no less than what it effects ; nothing can be called an Act of the Soul but what it does after the mode of its intellective nature and, so, entirely in its own character : all that is lower than such act has another origin and is an accidental experience, merely.
The Soul becomes yet more divine through the Intellectual-Principle because This is at once its Father and its ever-present companion. Nothing separates the Soul and the Divine-Mind but that they are not one and identical, that the Soul is a subsequent and a recipient while the other is the Divine thing received : what serves as Matter to the Intellectual-Principle must be noble ; it is itself intellective and simplex (n).
In fine, nothing more clearly shows the grandeur of Divine-Mind than that it is nobler than so noble a being as the Soul.
Matter in Divine Mind
Notes
" Springing from the Intellectual-Principle ” : — Many metaphors are used to indicate how the universe rises from its principles — cast down like light from the sun, flowing forth like water from a well, branching out like a tree from the root. That from which the Emanation takes place remains ever complete, undiminished : —
III. 8, g. “ Imagine a spring which has no commencement, giving itself to all the rivers, never exhausted by what they take, ever tranquilly its full self.”
Such is the exuberance of the First that it gives forth its Emanations without premeditation.
V. 2, I. “ The One is not a Being but the source of Being which is its first offspring. The One is perfect, that is it has nothing, seeks nothing, needs nothing, but, as we may say, it overflows, and this overflowing is creative : the engendered entity . . . looks towards the One and becomes The Intellectual-Principle ; resting within itself, this offspring of the One is Being.”
No idea of time or of any motion or change may be admitted in reference to this Generative Act : —