In any case the All is beautiful, and there can be no obstacle to its inner goodness : where the nature of a thing does not comport perfection from the beginning, there may be a failure in complete expression ; there may even be a fall to vileness, but the All never knew a childlike immaturity ; it never experienced a progress bringing novelty into it ; it never had bodily growth : there was nowhere from whence it could take such increment ; it was always the All-Container.
And even for its Soul no one could imagine any such a path of pro- cess : or, if this were conceded, certainly it could not be towards evU.
But perhaps this school will maintain that, while their teaching leads to a hate and utter abandonment of the body, ours binds the Soul down in it.
In other words : two people inhabit the one stately house ; one of them declaims against its plan and against its Architect, but none the less maintains his residence in it ; the other makes no complaint, asserts the entire competency of the Architect and waits cheerfully for the day when he may leave it, having no further need of a house : the malcontent imagines himself to be the wiser and to be the readier to leave because he has learned to repeat that the walls are of soulless stone and timber and that the place falls far short of a true home ; he
does not see that his only distinction is in not being able to bear with necessity — assuming that his conduct, his grumbling, does not cover a secret admiration for the beauty of those same “ stones.” As long as we have bodies we must inhabit the dwellings prepared for us by our good sister the Soul in her vast power of labourless creation.
Or would this school reject the word Sister ? They are willing to address the lowest of men as brothers ; are they capable of such raving as to disown the tie with the Sun and the powers of the Heavens and the very Soul of the Kosmos ? Such kinship, it is true, is not for the vile ; it may be asserted only of those that have become good and are no longer body but embodied Soul and of a quality to inhabit the body in a mode very closely resembling the indwelling of the All-Soul in the universal frame. And this means continence, self-restraint, holding staunch against outside pleasure and against outer spectacle, allowing no hardship to disturb the mind. The All-Soul is immune from shock ; there is nothing that can affect it : but we, in our passage here, must call on virtue in repelling these assaults, reduced for us from the beginning by a great conception of life, annulled by matured strength.
Attaining to something of this immunity, we begin to reproduce within ourselves the Soul of the vast All and of the heavenly bodies : when we are come to the very closest resemblance, all the effort of our fervid pursuit will be towards that goal to which they also tend ; their contemplative vision becomes ours, prepared as we are, first by natural disposition and afterwards by all this training, for that state which is theirs by the Principle of their Being.
This school may lay claim to vision as a dignity reserved to them- selves, but they are not any the nearer to vision by the claim — or by the boast that while the celestial powers, bound for ever to the ordering of the Heavens, can never stand outside the material universe, they them- selves have their freedom in their death. This is a failme to grasp the very notion of “ standing outside,” a failure to appreciate the mode in which the AU-Soul cares for the unensouled.
No ; it is possible to go free of love for the body ; to be clean-living, to disregard death ; to know the Highest and aim at that other world ;
II. 9. i8]
not to slander, as negligent in the quest, others who are able for it and faithful to it ; and not to err with those that deny vital motion to the stars because to our sense they stand still — the error which in another form leads this school to deny outer vision to the Star-Nature, only because they do not see the Star-Soul in outer manifestation.
NOTE ON THE ORDER OF THE TRACTATES OF THE THIRD AND SECOND ENNEADS
It has been pointed out by several exponents and commentators (for example Whittaker, pp. 31-32) that the logical order of the Enneads is roughly IV., V., VI.,
II., III., I. Starting from I., therefore, it is best to read in the order I., III., II.
Since it happens that the second and third tractates fall together in this volume it has been judged advisable to open with the Third as the most natural sequent to the First.
The order in which Porphyry knew the tractates of the Second and Third Enneads is as follows (see volume i.) : —
III. I. Third.
4. Fifteenth.
7. Forty-fifth.
II. I. Fortieth.
4. Twelfth.
7. Thirty-seventh.
2 and 3. Forty-seventh and Forty-eighth. 5. Fiftieth. 6. Twenty-sixth.
8. Thirtieth. 9. Thirteenth.
2. Second. 3. Forty-second.
5. Twenty-fifth. 6. Seventeenth.
8. Thirty-fifth. 9. Thirty-third.
Approximately, therefore, the chronological order of the tractates in this volume runs : —
I. (Second) II. 2.
III. (Twelfth) II. 4.
V. (Fifteenth) III. 4. VII. (Twenty-fifth) II. 5. IX. (Thirtieth) III. 8.
XI. (Thirty-fifth) II. 8. XIII. (Fortieth) II. i.
XV. (Forty-fifth) III. 7. XVII. (Forty-eighth) III. 3.
II. (Third) III. i.
IV. (Thirteenth) III. 9.
VI. (Seventeenth) II. 6. VIII. (Twenty-sixth) III. 6.
X. (Thirty-third) II. 9. XII. (Thirty-seventh) II. 7. XIV. (Forty-first) II. 3. XVI. (Forty-seventh) III. 2. XVIII. (Fiftieth) III. 5.
In simple honesty to such readers as do not consult the original, the translator feels obliged to state that he does not pretend to be perfectly satisfied that he has himself understood every passage of which he has been obliged to present a render- ing : he has in no case passed for publication any passage or phrase which does
not appear to him to carry a clear sense in English and a sense possible in view at once of the text and of Plotinus’ general thought ; he has been scrupulous in frankly committing himself ; but there are at least three or four places in which he feels himself to be as probably wrong as right, places in which either the text is disordered or Plotinus, as often, was inattentive to the normal sequence, or even — verbally at least — to the general consistency, of his thought.
For the present it appears that the best service to Plotinian studies is to dare to be tentative and to beg critics to collaborate in the clearing of dark passages : the notices the first volume of this series received were more flattering than helpful. Modifications suggested by such comment will be noted in the final volume.
Readers are reminded that “ we read ” translates “ he says ” of the text, and always indicates a reference to Plato, whose name does not appear in the translation except where it was written by Plotinus : and that all matter shown in brackets is added by the translator for clearness’ sake, and therefore is not canonical. Nothing but what is judged to be quite obviously present in the text appears without this warning sign.
Acknowledgements
The translator desires to acknowledge invaluable help derived from repeated study of “The Philosophy of Plotinus,’’ by William Ralph Inge, C.V.O., D.D., etc.. Dean of St. Paul’s (Longmans, Green and Co., 1918) — a work fascinating in detail and henceforth the necessary foundation to English speakers of all serious study of Plotinus.
In several cases of perplexity, the translator consulted Mr. E. R. Dodds, of University College, Reading, and profited greatly by his advice : in at least two cases he has adopted readings from a revised text projected by Mr. Dodds.
Dr. Kenneth Sylvan Guthrie’s translation, " Plotinus’ Complete Works ’’ (Comparative Literature Press : Alpine, N.Y., U.S.A., and George Bell, London) , came to hand too late to serve in the preparation of this second volume : it will be carefully consulted in the revision of the three Enneads remeiining to the completion of this work.
The translator finds that in his first volume he inadvertently made far too little of the kindly offices of Mr. Ernest R. Debenham, who most generously undertook the entire financial burden of the work : his deepest thanks are here offered for the service by which he is enabled to realise the dominant desire of his life.
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