The Essential Plotinus

Intro

“Transcending essence [The One] transcends being as well because being implies essence (V, 5 [32], 6). Plotinus, it may be interesting to note, was apparently the first to make the distinction between essence and existence, for although existence in his view implies essence, it is not identical with essence. On the contrary, that is his reason for denying existence to The One, for every existing thing is a determinate thing, its existence circumscribed by essence; thus it is that we can know them.”

• Blake comes to mind: “Energy is the only life and is from the Body and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy.”

“…one of Plotinus’ most fundamental ideas [is] that of the nature of causality. The One is not essence nor existence nor intellect nor intelligible because of all of these it is the generative principle and to be thus generative it must be, in this precise regard, “other.” To the plaint of either man in the street or professional philosopher that you cannot give what you have not got, his response is regal: “It is not necessary that one have what one gives (VI, 7 [38], 17).”

• The One is not love nor essence nor existence, rather it affords all these ex nihilo, for it is nothing.

“From The One and to The One the multiple eddied and swirled within an ordered pattern that Faith (aided by Plotinus) beheld and that Reason (with his further help) did the best it could to explain. It was the “Thee, God, I come from, to Thee go” of Hopkins centuries later. Yet, to the medieval way of thinking, anything-animate or inanimate-might with equal justice voice that same cry.“

• Paul’s letters, Ibn Gabirol. Matter enraptured.

“There is at the core of every existing thing an ontic desire for what is lacking to its perfectness, and this perfectness it can find in its fullness solely within that which initially engendered it. Indigence [poverty] is at the root of this ontic desire. But not merely indigence. There is as well the drive to make up for this indigence. … It is what centuries later Pascal has God say to the Christian soul: “You would not seek Me if you had not already found Me.””

“The source whence came the human soul is the transcendent and unknowable One. The soul’s final term, its destiny, its home, is the same transcendent and unknowable One.”

“…the mystic “stands outside” (ekstasis) himself. He has gone beyond the contingency of the ego and is fixed, established upon, something immovable that intimately penetrates the ego while infinitely transcending it. His efforts have been a grasping aloft, if you will, not into a void but into plenitude, the plenitude in which all the fumbling potentialities of the ego are luminously fulfilled, because these potentialities were never anything more than

shadows of this substance, partial sharings in this plenitude.”

• Grasping at the overwhelming plenitude affording all being. All being is but a partial expression of this Great Plenitude.

“But kentron in biblical Greek, and very often too, in classical Greek, means a sharp point, or a goad or an apex. There naturally sprang from it the idea of the “apex of the soul” as its point of contact with the divine… From Plotinus there came into circulation, then, the two phases “the apex of the soul” and “the soul-center”, and both terms meant that essential Divine bestowal which links the Soul with God.” (Rufus Jones)

• Soul center popularized by Plotinus. Intersection of God and Image.
• Center: immanence; apex: transcendence. What we call it might depend on the flavour of mystical experience.

“The nature of the ultimately real, what it is and why it must be what it is, is determined by felt need; it is what desire, in search of rest, wants it to be. Therefore, it is not an essence, for every essence, every “Whatness,” attained, becomes-because limited—just another “Why?”.”

“Stable, perfective, unitive, it is called The One because there is no better name for it. Indeed, it is the best of names for it because it is the term of the escape from the multiple.”

“Man, the soul, is essentially desire. Means to the fulfillment of desire are accorded the soul by what is highest in it, the intellect. By progressive eliminations of what is multiple in the operations of intellect one ascends to the point where there remains nothing but the assimilative capacity of intellect, the being able to be absorbed into the center of the soul, where the soul as desire becomes wholly unfettered and is caught out of itself. Ecstasy, it is not knowledge, for the faculty of knowledge is stilled. It is union of soul with The One. It is, Plotinus hoped, desire fulfilled.”

• Love. The soul as love-stuff…not stuff, a center of love, an apex of love.

Beauty (I, 6, 1)

“Then again, every virtue is a beauty of The Soul-more authentically beautiful than anything mentioned so far. The Soul, it is true, is not a simple unity. Yet neither does it have quantitative numerical symmetry. What yardstick could preside over the balancing and interplay of The Soul’s potencies and purposes?” (1)

• Soul is not simple unity. Complex unity? Implying some asymmetry to that great Simple Unity that gives rise to it?

“It is impossible to talk about bodily beauty if one, like one born blind, has never seen and known bodily beauty. In the same way, it is impossible to talk about the “luster” of right living and of learning and of the like if one has never cared for such things, never beheld “the face of justice” and temperance and seen it to be “beyond the beauty of evening or morning star.” Seeing of this sort is done only with the eye of the soul. And, seeing thus, one undergoes a joy, a wonder, and a distress more deep than any other because here one touches truth.

Such emotion all beauty must induce-an astonishment, a delicious wonderment, a longing, a love, a trembling that is all delight. It may be felt for things invisible quite as for things you see, and indeed the soul does feel it. All souls, we can say, feel it, but souls that are apt for love feel it especially. It is the same here as with bodily beauty. All perceive it. Not all are stung sharply by it. Only they whom we call lovers ever are.” (4)

“What is this … longing to break away from the body and live sunken within yourselves? All true lovers experience it. But what awakens so much passion? It is not shape, or color, or size. It is the soul, itself “colorless,” and the soul’s temperance and the hueless “luster” of its virtues. In yourselves or others you see largeness of spirit, goodness of life, chasteness, the courage behind a majestic countenance, gravity, the self-respect that pervades a temperament that is calm and at peace and without passion; and above them all you see the radiance of The Intelligence diffusing itself throughout them all. They are attractive, they are lovable.“ (5)

“For what is temperance, rightly so called, but to abstain from the pleasures of the body, to reject them rather as unclean and unworthy of the clean? What else is courage but being unafraid of death, that mere parting of soul from body, an event no one can fear whose happiness lies in being his own unmingled self? What is magnanimity except scorn of earthly things? What is prudence but the kind of thinking that bends the soul away from earthly things and draws it on high?” (6)

• Virtue as purification. Temperance as abstaining from unclean bodily pleasures; courage as a deep love and understanding of the nature of one’s soul, and thus a serenity in the face of parting one’s body; generosity as a repulsion of earthly attachment, and thus a love in letting earth go, in sharing earth; prudence as bending eternal soul away from temporal body.

“Seeing, with what love and desire for union one is seized—what wondering delight! If a person who has never seen this hungers for it as for his all, one that has seen it must love and reverence it as authentic beauty, must be flooded with an awesome happiness, stricken by a salutary terror. Such a one loves with a true love, with desires that flame. All other loves than this he must despise and all that once seemed fair he must disdain.

Those who have witnessed the manifestation of divine or supernal realities can never again feel the old delight in bodily beauty. What then are we to think of those who see beauty in itself, in all its purity, unencumbered by flesh and body, so perfect is its purity that it transcends by far such things of earth and heaven? All other beauties are imports, are alloys. They are not primal. They come, all of them, from it.” (7)

• The mystical experience.

The Intelligence, The Ideas, and Being (V, 9 [5])

“The Intelligence, accordingly, is itself the authentic existents. It is not a knower that knows them as somewhere else. They are not prior to it. They are not after it. Of being it is rather the lawgiver, or — better still— the law. Thus is it true to say that “to be and to think are the same thing,” and “in beings that involve no matter, thinker and thought are identical,” and “I sought myself” as a being. The theory of reminiscence bears on this as well.

None of the beings is off in space, outside The Intelligence. They all subsist in themselves without end, undergoing no change or decay. It is for this reason that they are real. Things that come and go have only borrowed being; not they, but they on whom they draw are real. Only by such borrowing are sense objects the things we say they are, their substrate having received formation from elsewhere…” (5)

“The act of The Intelligence and the act of being are one sole act—or, better, The Intelligence and Being are one. They are the same nature. The same nature, too, are the beings as the act of The Intelligence and the act of Being. And in this sense the Ideas, too, are the same nature as the idea of Being, its form, and its act. It is only our way of thinking that splits them up. Quite different is The Intelligence that, itself undivided, does not divide up either Being or beings.” (8)

The Descent of the Soul (IV, 8 [6])

“From the one Soul proceeds a multiplicity of different souls, as from one and the same genus proceed species of various ranks, some of which are more rational and others (at least in their actual existence) less rational in form.” (3)

“When a soul remains for long in this withdrawal and estrangement from the whole, with never a glance towards the intelligible, it becomes a thing fragmented, isolated, and weak. Activity lacks concentration. Attention is tied to particulars. Severed from the whole, the soul clings to the part; to this one sole thing, buffeted about by a whole worldful of things, has it turned and given itself. Adrift now from the whole, it manages even this particular thing with dificulty, its care of it compelling attention to externals, presence to the body, the deep penetration of the body.” (4)

• Fragmented attention as a symptom of estrangement from the whole, from what is sacred, most true.

“There are two wrongs the soul commits. The first is its descent; the second, the evil done after arrival here below. The first is punished by the very conditions of its descent. Punishment for the second is passage once more into other bodies, there to remain at greater or less length according to the judgment of its deserts. (The word “judgment” indicates that this takes place as a result of divine law.) If, however, its perversity goes beyond all measure, the soul incurs an even more severe penalty administered by avenging daimons.” (5)

• Hints of vedantic rebirth.

“Every soul has a lower part directed towards the bodily and a higher part directed towards the intelligible. The Soul, effortlessly, manages the universe by that part directed towards the bodily. For The Soul governs the bodily not by discursive reasoning, as we do, but by intuition (much as is done in the arts).” (8)

The Good or The One (VI, 9 [9])

• First hypostasis: The One; Second: The Intelligence; Third: The Soul. The third issues forth from the second (?), the second, first (?). Or do both second and third issue forth from the first?

• The Soul’s unity is said to be contingent (presumably on The One’s unity, which is not contingent

”The Soul is manifold as well as one even though it is not constituted of parts—discursive reason, desire, perception—joined together in unity as by a bond.” (1)

Upon losing unity, existence is lost. We only come to know something through its unity, through its being one. The ship is known by its shipness, the tree by its treeness. It is only by consolidating process that we come to know it, that it comes to be known.

• So: is being (to exist) and unity one and the same? I presume being depends on unity, but unity not on being.

Being is multiple within its unity, holding many forms of existence: man, animal, matter, and so forth. The Intelligence is multiple, containing within it Ideas.

“In general, then, The One is the first existent. But The Intelligence, the Ideas, and Being are not the first. Every form is multiple and composite, and consequently something derived because parts precede the composite they constitute.”

“The One, then, is not The Intelligence but higher. The Intelligence is still a being, while The One is not a being because it is precedent to all being. Being has, you might say, the form of being; The One is without form, even intelligible form.” (3)

“As The One begets all things, it cannot be any of them—neither thing, nor quality, nor quantity, nor intelligence, nor soul. Not in motion, nor at rest, not in space, nor in time, it is “the in itself uniform,” or rather it is the “with-out-form” preceding form, movement, and rest, which are characteristics of Being and make Being multiple.

But if The One is not in motion, why is it not at rest? Because rest or motion, or both together, are characteristic of Being. Again, because what is at rest must be so on account of something distinct from it, rest as such. The One at rest would have the contingent attribute, “at rest,” and would be simple no longer.”

• Neti, neti. Not this, not this. Neither rest nor motion… rest is contingent on motion (lack of rest)

“The chief difficulty is this: awareness of The One comes to us neither by knowing nor by the pure thought that discovers the other intelligible things, but by a presence transcending knowledge. When the soul knows something, it loses its unity; it cannot remain simply one because knowledge implies discursive reason and discursive reason implies multiplicity. The soul then misses The One and falls into number and multiplicity.

Therefore we must go beyond knowledge and hold to unity. We must renounce knowing and knowable, every object of thought, even Beauty, because Beauty, too, is posterior to The One and is derived from it as, from the sun, the daylight. That is why Plato says of The One, “It can neither be spoken nor written about.” If nevertheless we speak of it and write about it, we do so only to give direction, to urge towards that vision beyond discourse, to point out the road to one desirous of seeing. Instruction goes only as far as showing the road and the direction. To obtain the vision is solely the work of him who desires to obtain it.” (4)

“If he does not arrive at contemplation, if his soul does not achieve awareness of that life that is beyond, if the soul does not feel a rapture within it like that of the lover come to rest in his love, if, because of his closeness to The One, he receives its true light— his whole soul made luminous-but is still weighted down and his vision frustrated, if he does not rise alone but still carries within him something alien to The One, if he is not yet sufficiently unified, if he has not yet risen far but is still at a distance either because of the obstacles of which we have just spoken or because of the lack of such instruction as would have given him direction and faith in the existence of things beyond, he has no one to blame but himself and should try to become pure by detaching himself from everything.” (4)

“The awesome existent above, The One, is not a being for then its unity would repose in another than itself. There is no name that suits it, really. It may appropriately be called “one,” however, that it is not a substance that possesses unity only as an attribute. So, the strictly nameless, it is difficult to know. The best approach is through its offspring, Being: we know it brings The Intelligence into existence, that it is the source of all that is best, the self-sufficing and unflagging begetter of every being, to be numbered among none of them since it is their prior.”

“Again, no principle needs others after it. The principle of all has no need of anything at all. Deficient being is deficient because it aspires to its principle. But if The One were to aspire to anything, it would evidently seek not to be The One, that is, it would aspire to that which destroys it.“

“This divinity, it is said, is not outside any being but, on the contrary, is present to all beings though they may not know it. They are fugitives from the divine, or rather from themselves. What they turn from they cannot reach. Themselves lost, they can find no other. A son distraught and beside himself is not likely to recognize his father. But the man who has learned to know himself will at the same time discover whence he comes.” (8)

“Self-knowledge reveals to the soul that its natural motion is not, if uninterrupted, in a straight line, but circular, as around some inner object, about a center, the point to which it owes its origin. If the soul knows this, it will move around this center from which it came, will cling to it and commune with it as indeed all souls should but only divine souls do. That is the secret of their divinity, for divinity consists in being attached to the center. One who withdraws far from it becomes an ordinary man or an animal.

Is this “center” of our souls, then, the principle we are seeking? No, we must look for some other principle upon which all centers converge and to which, only by analogy to the visible circle, the word “center” is applied…” (8)

“We are not separated from The One, not distant from it, even though bodily nature has closed about us and drawn us to itself. It is because of The One that we breathe and have our being: it does not bestow its gifts at one moment only to leave us again; its giving is without cessation so long as it remains what it is. As we turn towards The One, we exist to a higher degree, while to withdraw from it is to fall.” (6)

• It’s giving without cessation… therefore even in hell, we must be offered mercy, offered love. Whether we receive it is the difference.

“He was like one who, penetrating the innermost sanctuary of a temple, leaves temple images behind. They will be the first objects to strike his view upon coming out of the sanctuary, after his contemplation and communion there not with an image or statue but with what they represent. They are but lesser objects of contemplation.

Such experience is hardly a vision. It is a seeing of a quite different kind, a self-transcendence, a simplification, self-abandonment, a striving for union and a repose, an intentness upon conformation. This is the way one sees in the sanctuary. Anyone who tries to see in any other way will see nothing.” (11)

The Three Primal Hypostases (V, 1 [10])

“Ignorance of origin is caused by excessive valuation of sense objects and disdain of self, for to pursue something and hold it dear implies acknowledgment of inferiority to what is pursued. As soon as a soul thinks it is worth less than things subject to birth and death, considers itself least honorable and enduring of all, it can no longer grasp the nature and power of the divinity.” (1)

“A soul in such a condition can be turned about and led back to the world above and the supreme existent, The One and first, by a twofold discipline: by showing it the low value of the things it esteems at present, and by informing—reminding!—it of its nature and worth. The second discipline precedes the first and, once made clear, supports the first (which we shall treat elsewhere rather fully).” (1)

• Twofold: cloud of forgetting and cloud of unknowing. The latter affords the former, we only strive to forget our ailments in reminder of our divinity.

“Now to understand how life is imparted to the universe and to each individual, the soul must rise to the contemplation of The Soul, the soul of the world. The individual soul, though different from The Soul, is itself no slight thing. Yet it must become worthy of this contemplation: freed of the errors and seductions to which other souls are subject, it must be quiet. Let us assume that quiet too is the body that wraps it round—quiet the earth, quiet the air and the sea, quiet the high heavens. Then picture The Soul flowing into this tranquil mass from all sides, streaming into it, spreading through it until it is luminous. As the rays of the sun lighten and gild the blackest cloud, so The Soul by entering the body of the universe gives it life and immortality; the abject it lifts up. The universe, moved eternally by an intelligent Soul, becomes blessed and alive. The Soul’s presence gives value to a universe that before was no more than an inert corpse, water

no more than an inert corpse, water and earth, of rather darksome matter and nonbeing, an “object of horror to the gods,” as someone has said.

The Soul’s nature and power reveal themselves still more clearly in the way it envelops and rules the world in accordance with its will. It is present in every point of the world’s immense mass, animating all its segments, great and small. While two bodies cannot be in the same place and are separated from each other both spatially and otherwise, The Soul is not thus extended. It need not divide itself to give life to each particular individual. Although it animates particular things, it remains whole and is present in its wholeness, resembling in this indivisibility and omnipresence its begetter, The Intelligence. It is through the power of The Soul that this world of multiplicity and variety is held within the bonds of unity. It is through its presence that this world is divine: divine the sun because ensouled; so too the stars.

…

If it is soul that makes us lovable, why is it that we seek it only in others and not in ourselves? You love others because of it. Love, then, yourself.”

(2)

• Excellent.

“The Soul is no more than an image of The Intelligence. Just as the spoken word is the image of the word in the soul, The Soul itself is the image of the word in The Intelligence…

The Intelligence makes The Soul more divine because it is its begetter and grants its presence to it. Nothing separates the two but the difference of their natures. The Soul is related to The Intelligence as matter is to Idea. But this “matter” of The Intelligence is beautiful: it has an intellectual form and is partless.

How great, then, must The Intelligence be if it is greater than The Soul!” (3)

“The Soul is word and deed of The Intelligence just as The Intelligence is word and deed of The One. But in The Soul the word is obscure, for The Soul is only an image of The Intelligence. Therefore The Soul turns itself to The Intelligence, just as, to be The Intelligence, it must contemplate The One. The Intelligence contemplates The One without being separated from it because there is no other existent between the two of them, just as there is none between The Intelligence and The Soul. Begotten always longs for its begetter and loves it; especially is this so when begetter and begotten are solitaries. But when the begetter is the highest Good, the begotten must be so close to it that its only separateness is its otherness.” (7)

“We must also possess within us the source and cause of intelligence, the divinity, which is not divisible and exists not in a place but in itself. Not in a place, it is found in that multitude of beings capable of receiving it just as if it were divisible quite as the center of the circle remains in itself while each of the points of the circle contains it and each of the radii touches it. Thus we ourselves, by one of our parts, touch the supreme, unite ourselves to it, and are suspended from it. We establish ourselves in it when we turn towards it.” (11)

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The Soul (IV, 3 [27])

“Our argument is summarized thus: all souls come from one Soul as intelligences come from The Intelligence, separated and yet not separated; The Soul, which remains, is the unique “expression” of The Intelligence and from it come the partial “expressions” of the intelligible realm.”

“The perfect soul, The Soul, “going its lofty journey,” as we read, operates upon the cosmos not by sinking into its but, as it were, by brooding over it; and “every perfect soul exercises this governance. Plato distinguishes the other, the soul in this sphere, as “the soul that has shed its wings.” (7)

“The Soul acts without reflection and without pause for deliberation and examination. An action that was deliberate would not be a natural action but would imply artifice: but art is subsequent to nature; it imitates nature and produces only imitations that are dim and evil-toys they are, and worthless things, despite all the mechanisms involved in their production.” (10)

• God does not deliberate (though The Soul is not God, rather an expression of God). He acts effortlessly. To exert effort would be to belittle him, to impose restrictions upon him. This is the necessary free choice (necessary, following the appropriate order; free, following the order appropriate to its function)

“In any case, one must not believe that certain occurrences alone are subject to order while others are without any such link and are purely arbitrary. If everything ought to happen in accordance with natural cause and effect, in accordance with a unique reason and a unique order, one must then believe that this order and this interweaving extends even to the smallest details. Yes, injustice committed by another is an injustice for the one who has committed it and he is not released from his responsibility. But, considered within the universal order, it is not an injustice in the cosmos, not even for the one who has suffered it. It is a necessary occurrence. If the one who undergoes it is a good man, it will have for him a happy issue. One must not believe this cosmic order to be “not of the gods” or unjust. It distributes exactly to each what is fitting to each. But we are ignorant of the causes and that accords our ignorance the occasion for blaming it.” (16)

• Problem of evil.

“The soul is invisible and the body is visible. In seeing the body, we understand that it is animated because it moves and because it feels. We say, then, that it “has” a soul. From that it follows that we say that the soul is “in” the body itself.

But were the soul visible and sensible, if we saw it, wholly penetrated with life, going even to the limits of the body, we would no longer say that the soul is in the body. We would say that the body is the accessory in the prin-ciple, the contained in the containing, the fleeting within the perdurable.” (20)

• Body ensouled, rather than soul embodied.

“For it is beautiful, here below, to withdraw oneself from the cares of men. It is necessary consequently to withdraw oneself from the memory of such cares. In this sense one can rightly say that the good soul is the forgetful soul. It takes flight from multiplicity, reduces the multiple to The One, abandons the indeterminate. It does not take with it a mass of earthly memories; it is light, and it is wholly alone. Even in the present life when it wishes to think and to be in the intelligible realm it abandons to that end all things else. Very few memories of this earth accompany it into the intelligible realm, less indeed than when it is only in the heavens.” (32)

• Cloud of forgetting

Contemplation (III, 8 [30])

“What kind of contemplation does [Nature] have? Not the kind that results from discursive reason. (By discursive reason here I mean the deliberative process.) But why not, since it is life, reason, and productive? Because one plans only when one lacks. Nature does not lack for anything; it produces by the mere fact that it possesses; for it to be is for it to be productive.” (3)

• So, does God have a plan? For him to need to plan would be for him to have some lack that the plan attempts to resolve.

“Indeed, what man able to contemplate the true would prefer its image? There is proof of all this in the fact that the retarded children who have no capacity for scientific knowledge are reduced to practicing mechanical and manual crafts.” (4)

“What, then, is The One?

It is what makes all things possible. Without it nothing would exist, neither Being, nor The Intelligence, nor the highest life, nor anything else. What is above life is the cause of life. The activity of life, being all things, is not the first principle. It flows from it as from a spring.

Picture a spring that has no further origin, that pours itself into all rivers without becoming exhausted of what it yields, and remains what it is, undisturbed. The streams that issue from it, before flowing away each in its own direction, mingle together for a time, but each knows already where it will take its flood. Or think of the life that circulates in a great tree. The originating principle of this life remains at rest and does not spread through the tree because it has, as it were, its seat in the root. The principle gives to the plant all its life in its multiplicity but remains itself at rest. Not a plurality, it is the source of plurality.”

“Though other things act only for and by the Good, the Good has no such necessity: there is nothing for it except itself. After one has pronounced this word “Good,” one should ascribe nothing further to it because any addition, of whatever sort, will make it less than it really is. Not even thought should be attributed to it. To do that would be to introduce a difference and thus make it a duality of intellection and goodness. The Intelligence needs the Good; the Good needs not The Intelligence.“ (11)

“The Intelligence is beautiful—of all things the most beautiful. Dwelling in pure light and “stainless radiance,” it envelops everything with its own light. The realm of sense, so beautiful, is only its reflected shadow. It abides in full resplendence because it contains nothing dark to the mind or obscure or indefinite. It knows beatitude.

Wonder seizes upon him who contemplates it, who enters in and becomes one with it. Just as the view of the heavens and the splendor of the stars leads one to think of their author and to seek him out, so the contemplative who has gazed upon the intelligible realm and been struck with the wonder of it should seek out its author—should ask who has given it existence, where this author is, and how he authored it.

From whom comes such beauty as this, this procession of plenitude? Not The Intelligence, nor Being, but their prior. They come after it because they have need of both thought and fulfillment. But they are close to that which wants for nothing, which need not even think.” (11)