It follows that the perceptions of the senses and the perturbations of the mind do not belong to the true man but to the body or to the Couplement of Soul and body, so that the Authentic Soul is not affected but is merely aware of an affection elsewhere : —
IV. 4, 18. ” Sorrow and pleasure of the sense belong to the body thus modi-
fied ; pain and joy of the body come in the form of knowledge without feeling to us, to the true man.”
The virtues not philosophic but practical, or civic, belong to this Couplement — as do vices and flaws which cannot touch the true Soul : cf. I. i, ii and 12, page 39 of this volume. The true virtue is seated only in the true essence of the man : see I. 4, 14, page 70 of this volume.
For the true Soul, or true Man, is the Soul loosed from the body either by death or by the life of philosophic contemplation : cf. Porphyry, “ There are two modes of death : one, known to every one, where the body is loosed from the Soul ; the other, that of the Sages, where the Soul is released from the body : the one death may or may not be followed by the other.”
All the trouble of this life, all the vicissitudes of the earthly career touch only those that cede too much to the lower and outer : —
III. 2, 15. “ Man-made weapons directed against fellow-mortals in quaintly
set-out battles, like Pyrrhic dances, show what children’s games are all our human affairs ; and they show us, too, that death is nothing very serious : to die in wars, in battles, is to grow old a little before one’s time ; it is going away suddenly, to come back again. Or suppose that you are dispossessed of your wealth ; remember that there was a time when you did not as yet possess it, and that your despoiler will either lose it in turn or find its possession a greater evil than its loss could be.
Likeness to God
Murders, death in all its shapes, the capture and sacking of towns, all must be considered as so much stage-show, so many shiftings of scenes, the horror and outcry of a play ; for here, too, in all the changing doom of life, it is not the true man, the inner Soul, that grieves and laments but merely the phantasm of the man, the outer man, playing his part on the boards of the world. VVho could be troubled by such griefs, except one that understands only the lower and outer life, never dreaming that all the tears and mighty business are but a sport ? ... If the Sage has to take part in the revels he will not forget that he has fallen among children and for the moment discarded his own grave truth.”
Likeness to God I. 2, 3. Page 44 of this volume.
V. 3, 9. One that seeks to penetrate the nature of the Divine Mind must see deeply into the nature of his own Soul, into the Divinest part of himself. He must first make abstraction of the body, then of the lower soul which built up that body, then of all the faculties of sense, of all desires and emotions and every such triviality, of all that leans towards the mortal. What is left after this abstraction is the part which we describe as the image of the Divine Mind, an emanation preserving some of that Divine Light.
Note
All the virtues are referred to the “ Purification ” which consists in separating the Reasonable or Intellectual Soul from the body-soul and from the body : cf. I. 6, 6, page 84 of this volume.
It is an error to seek the perfect happiness in action or in the moral (or civic) virtues, since all action belongs to the outer, to the mixed life, not to the pure Act of the prior Soul : see 1. 1, 10 and the reference to Hercules in I. i, 12, pages 38, 40, of this voliune.
Our task is not merely to expel evil but to become good, not to be without fault but to be God. Still if we expel evil, the Good comes of itself ; —
V. 3, 6. “ The Soul, brought to its purity, welcomes the indwelling imprint
of the Intellectual-Principle.”
V. 3, 6. “ When we were in the Divine we rested content in the nature
of the Intellectual-Principle ; we had Intellection and saw all things in The One ; for the Intellectual-Principle had the Intellection and spoke to the Soul of what
it saw, and the Soul rested in tranquil co-operation with the activities of its prior.”
V. 3, 8. ” Light is visible by light : the Intellectual-Principle sees Itself ; and
this Light shining upon the Soul enlightens it, that is makes it a member of the Intellective order.”
The Vision of the Supreme
VI. 9, 3. What, then, is The One and what Its nature ? We cannot be surprised to find It difficult to tell of since even Existence and the Ideas resist our penetration though all our knowing is based upon the Ideas.
The further the human Soul, or Mind, ventures towards the Formless (to what is either above or below Form and Idea), the more is it troubled ; it becomes itself, as it were, undefined, unshaped, in face of the shifting variety before it and so it is utterly unable to take hold ; it slips away ; it feels that it can grasp nothing. It is at pain in these alien places, and often is glad to give up all its purpose and to fall back upon the solid ground of the sense-grasped world and there take rest — much as the eye, wearied of the minute and fine, is eased when it meets the large and bold.
Besides, the Soul when it ventures the vision unaided thinks itself baulked from the very fact that it can see only by completely possessing its object, that is by becoming one within itself and one with The One ; perfectly assimilated to the object of its contemplation, it recognises no vision. Despite all this difficulty, there is a way ; and this way must be taken by those that desire the life of Wisdom within The One. That which we seek is The One, the Principle of the Universe, The Good and the First ; therefore, the way is to keep ourselves in the close neigh- bourhood of Unity, never allowing ourselves to fall away towards the lower sphere of Multiplicity ; we must keep calling ourselves back from the sense-known world ... to the Primals, from all that is evil to the Absolute Good ; we must ascend to this Principle within ourselves, making ourselves one out of our manyness ; that is we must become Intellectual-Principle alone by throwing the entire Soul in con- fidence into the Intellectual-Principle and so establishing it There that henceforth, in the plenitude of life, it shall take to itself all that the Intellectual-Principle sees and thus shall see The One, no longer asking aid from any sense, no longer paying heed to anything that comes by sense, but with pure Intellection and the topmost Puissance of the Intellective-Principle contemplating the All-Pure.
The Supreme Vision
VI. 9, 4. Our greatest difficulty is that consciousness of The One comes not by knowledge, not even by such an intuitive Intellection as possesses us of the lower members of the Intellectual Order, but by an actusil Presence superior to any knowing. The Soul, when it deals with matters of knowledge, suffers a certain decline from its Unity, for knowing is still an act of reasoning, and reasoning is a multiple act, an act which leads the Soul down to the sphere of number and multi- plicity. The Soul, therefore, must rise above knowledge, above all its wandering from its Unity ; it must hold itself aloof from all knowing and from all the know- able and from the very contemplation of Beauty and Good, for all Beauty and Good are later than this, springing from This as the daily light springs from the sun.
Hence it is that we read of the “ Greatness, not to be spoken of, not to be written." If we here speak and write, it is but as guides to those that long to see : we send them to the Place Itself, bidding them from words to the Vision : the teaching is of the path and the plan, seeing is the work of each Soul for itself. Some there are that for all their effort have not attained the Vision : the Soul in them has come to no sense of the Splendour There ; it has not taken warmth ; it has not felt burning within itself the flame of love for What is There to know, the passion of the lover resting on the bosom of his love. They have received the Authentic Light ; all their Soul has gleamed as they have drawn near ; but, they come with a load on the shoulders which has held them back from the Place of Vision ; they have not ascended in the pure integrity of their being but are burdened with that which keeps them apart ; they are not yet all one within.
The Supreme is not absent from any one — and yet is absent from all ; present everywhere It is absent except only to those that are prepared to receive It, those that have wrought themselves to harmony with It, that have seized It and hold It by virtue of their own Likeness to It and by the power in themselves akin to the power which rays from It ; These and these only, whose Soul is again as it was when it came from out of the Divine, are free of what Vision of the Supreme Its mighty nature allows.
VI. 9, II. The Soul restored to Likeness goes to its Like and holds of the Supreme aU that Soul can hold . . . that which is before all things that are, over and apart from all the universe of Existence. This is not to say that in this plunging into the Divine the Soul reaches nothingness : it is when it is evil that it sinks towards nothingness : by this way, this that leads to the Good, it finds itself ; when it is the Divine it is truly itself, no longer a thing among things. It abandons Being to become a Beyond-Being when its converse is in the Supreme. He who knows himself to have become such, knows himself now an image of the Supreme ; and when the phantasm has returned to the Original, the journey is achieved.
Suppose him to fall again from the Vision, he will call up the virtue within him and, seeing himself all glorious again, he will take his upward flight once more, through virtue to the Divine Mind, through the V/isdom There to the Supreme. And this is the life of the Gods, and of Godlike men, a life without love of the world, a flight of the Alone to the Alone.
1 n’Oorhn4C-t)poc t)Aile-,dCA-CliAC "Com,
Scfopiin mAC-6ntiA. tlOTJldis 1916.
Lotinus
Psychic and Physical
TREATISES; COMPRISING
THE SECOND AND THIRD
ENNEADS, TRANSLATED
FROM THE GREEK BY STEPHEN MACKENNA
CHARLES T. BRANFORD COMPANY BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS
Contents
The Books of the Third Ennead
Page
I. Fate i
II. Providence : First Treatise ii
III. On Providence : Second Treatise 36
IV. Our Tutelary Spirit 46
V. On Love 53
VI. The Impassivity of the Unembodied 67
VII. Time and Eternity 96
VIII. Nature Contemplation and the One 119
IX. Detached Considerations 136
The Books of the Second Ennead
I. On the Kosmos or on the Heavenly System 143
II. The Heavenly Circuit 154
III. Are the Stars Causes ? 159
IV. Matter in its Two Kinds 178
V. On Potentiality and Actuality 196
VI. Quality and Form-Idea 203
VII. On Complete Transfusion 208
VIII. Why Distant Objects Appear Small 212
IX. Against Those that Affirm the Creator of the Kosmos and the
Kosmos Itself to be Evil: [Generally Quoted as “Against
THE Gnostics”] 215
Note on the Order of the Tractates of the Third and Second Enneads 245
Acknowledgements 246
The Third Ennead
Fate
In the two orders of things — those whose existence is that of process and those in whom it is Authentic Being — there is a variety of possible relation to Cause.