Plotinus insists repeatedly that the transcendent First Principle which he recognizes, the One or Good, is beyond the reach of human thought or language; and, though he does in fact say a great deal about It, it is very difficult to summarize what he says in any other language but his own without giving an impression of his teaching which is in some ways inadequate and misleading. There are, however, a few things that can be said which may perhaps be helpful to an understanding of the passages translated in these selections. First of all there is an interesting peculiarity about the language which he uses. The names which he normally employs for the First Principle, the One and the Good, to hen and to agathon, are both neuter in Greek. But even in passages where these neuter terms are used Plotinus frequently passes over, in a way which he apparently found quite natural, from neuter to masculine pronouns and adjectives. [NA: cp. Schwyzcr, art. cit., col. 515. Schwyzer says well ‘die Vorstellung theos noch mitschwingt’.] This usage I have done my best, for the sake of accuracy, to preserve in the translation, in spite of the oddity of the effect in English. And in view of it I shall feel myself free in the rest of what I have to say here about the One to use the masculine pronoun, which is more natural in talking about a Principle Who corresponds more closely than anything else in Greek philosophy to what we mean by God. (Plotinus himself very rarely uses the word theos in speaking of the One; but he does do so occasionally, and there is no reason to suppose that he found it any more inappropriate and undesirable than any other positive term. In any case, of course, the pagan and Judaeo-Christian meanings of theos or deus are very different. Plotinus also sometimes calls the One the Father, but without any Christian implications.)
The important point which drawing attention to this peculiarity of language may help to make clear (it is not by itself sufficient to establish it) is that the One, for all the extreme negativity — partly inherited — of the language which Ploti-nus sometimes uses about Him is not, as people sometimes suggest, conceived as a mere negation, an ultimate Void, a great Blank behind the universe in attaining to which the human personality disintegrates into unconscious nothingness. He is a very positive Reality, of infinite power and content and superabundant excellence. The language of negation as Plotinus uses it is designed either to stress the inadequacy of all our ways of thinking and speaking about Him or to make clear the implications of saying that He is absolutely One and Infinite and the Source of all defined and limited realities. Building upon a famous remark of Plato’s in the Republic (VI. 509b.) Plotinus insists repeatedly that the Good is ‘beyond being’, that He cannot properly be even said to exist — surely the extreme of negation. But it is perfectly clear from all that Plotinus says about Him, in the very passages where His existence is denied, that He is existent in some sense, and the supreme Existent. What Plotinus is saying is that the unity of the Good is so absolute, He is so completely One, Single and Simple, that no predicates at all can be applied to Him, not even that of existence; and that as the Source of being to all things He is not a thing Himself. For Plotinus, who is true here to Plato’s thought, ‘being’ is always ‘being something’, some one particular defined and limited thing, or the totality of such things, [V. 5.6 (C, p. 59): cp. my note on this passage (C, 4, p. 164)] and the One is not a thing, nor yet the sum of particular realities, i.e. the totality of being in the Plotinian sense (we shall see that the whole of real being, Absolute Being, containing all definite realities in their archetypal form, is Nous, the Second Hypostasis). Again, Plotinus insists that the One does not think, because thought for him always implies a certain duality, a distinction of thought and object of thought, and it is this that he is concerned to exclude in speaking of the One, and to relegate, again, to the second level of reality, that of Nous. But he is so anxious to make clear that this does not mean that the life of the One is mere unconsciousness, to show that He is more, not less, than Mind at the highest level at which we can conceive it, that he attributes to the One a ‘super-intellection’, [VI. 8. 16 (G, p. 64).] a simple self-intuition, [VI. 7. 38-39 (G, p. 63).] an immediate self-consciousness [V. 4. 2 (G, p. 63).] higher than the thought of Nous. And when he calls the One ‘formless’ he does so because He is Infinite, without limits, and because, precisely as One (here Plotinus follows the Pythagorean-Platonic tradition very closely) He is the Principle of form, of number, measure, order, and limit; and a source or principle for Plotinus is always other and more than that which it produces.
Plotinus by his use of negative language stresses the transcendence of the One to an extreme degree. But he is very careful to exclude all ideas of a quasi-spatial sort about this transcendence. The One is not a God ‘outside’ the world (an idea very fashionable in the early centuries of our era, as in many later periods). Nor is He remote from us, but intimately present in the centre of our souls; or rather we are in Him, for Plotinus prefers to speak of the lower as in the higher rather than the other way round; body is in soul and soul in Nous and Nous in the One (he is quite aware that, whichever way we put it, we are using an inadequate spatial metaphor). The hierarchical order of levels of being does not imply the remoteness of the One, because they are not spatially separate or cut off from each other; all are present together everywhere. And just because the One is not any particular thing He is present to all things according to their capacity to receive Him.
From the One proceeds the first great derived reality, Nous, the Divine Mind which is also the World of Forms or Ideas, and so the totality of true being in the Platonic sense. Its procession from the One is necessary and eternal, as in their turn are the procession of Soul from Nous and the forming and ordering of the material universe by Soul. In the thought of Plotinus, as in Greek philosophical thought (except Epicurean) in general, the universe as a whole in all its levels, spiritual and material, is eternal and it is impossible to conceive of any part of it not existing or existing otherwise than as it is. The way in which Nous proceeds from the One and Soul in its turn from Nous is rather loosely and inadequately described as ’emanation’. The background of Plotinus’s thought at this point is certainly a late Stoic doctrine of the emanation of intellect from a divinity conceived as material light or fire, and his favourite metaphor to describe the process is that of the radiation of light or heat from sun or fire (he also uses others of the same sort, the diffusion of cold from snow or perfume from something scented). But he is not content merely to use this traditional analogy and leave it at that, to allow the generation of spiritual beings to be thought of in terms of a materialistically conceived automatism. Nous proceeds from the One (and Soul from Nous) without in any way affecting its Source. There is no activity on the part of the One, still less any willing or planning or choice (planning and choice are excluded by Plotinus even on a much lower level, when he comes to consider the forming and ruling of the material universe by Soul). There is simply a giving-out which leaves the Source unchanged and undiminished. But though this giving-out is necessary, in the sense that it cannot be conceived as not happening or as happening otherwise, it is also entirely spontaneous: there is no room for any sort of binding or constraint, internal or external, in Plotinus’s thought about the One. The reason for the procession of all things from the One is, Plotinus says, simply that everything which is perfect produces something else. Perfection is necessarily productive and creative. Here his thought is certainly influenced by Plato’s rejection of the old Greek doctrine of divine envy in the Timaeus [29e.: cp. V. 4. 1 (C, p. 68)]. But what is stated by Plato as a necessary consequence of supreme moral goodness becomes in Plotinus a law of all being. Here we touch an element of his thought which is of great importance, the emphasis on life, on the dynamic, vital character of spiritual being. Perfection for him is not merely static. It is a fullness of living and productive power. The One for him is Life and Power, an infinite spring of power, an unbounded life, and therefore necessarily productive. And as it is one of the axioms which Plotinus assumes without discussion that the product must always be less than, inferior to the producer, what the One produces must be that which is next to Him in excellence, namely Nous.
Plotinus, when he gives a more precise account of how Nous proceeds from the One, introduces a psychological element into the process which goes beyond his light-metaphor. He distinguishes two ‘moments’ in this timeless generation; the first in which Nous is radiated as an unformed potentiality and the second in which it turns back to the One in contemplation and so is informed and filled with content and becomes the totality of real existence. Here we meet another of the great principles of the philosophy of Plotinus; that all derived beings depend for their existence, their activity, and their power to produce in their turn, on their contemplation of their source. Contemplation always precedes and generates activity and production. [cp. III. 8. 4 and 5 (E (6), pp. 101-102)]
Plotinus’s conception of Nous is, as the selections in Section D will show, an extremely rich and complex one. It is because of this complexity and richness of content, which makes the use of any single English word for it inadequate and misleading, that I have, in accordance with the principles of this series, kept the transliterated Greek word in my translation where it refers to the Second Hypostasis and does not simply mean ‘intellect’ in general. The only other Greek word which I have found it necessary to keep is logos in its special Neo-Platonic sense of’ a formative force proceeding from a higher principle which expresses and represents that principle on a lower plane of being’. Thus Nous is a logos of the One and Soul of Nous. [V. i. 6 (D (a), p. 69).] It is an important term because it expresses the unity and continuity of the different levels of being in Plotinus’s system.
Nous is for Plotinus both thought and object of thought, both the Divine Intellect and the Platonic World of Forms, the totality of real beings. This unity of thought and Forms in a single reality is, to judge from the opposition which it aroused from Porphyry on his first entrance into the school and, apparently, from Longinus, [Life, ch. 18, 20.] one of the most original features of Plotinus’s thought. The Middle Platonists had already taught that the Forms were the ‘ thoughts of God’ (though the opposition to Plotinus suggests that this doctrine was not universally accepted in the school), but Plotinus goes a good deal beyond this in his assertion of the absolute co-equality and unity-in-diversity of thought, life, and being. The result is a complete transformation of the Platonic World of Forms. It is no longer a structure, logically or mathematically conceived, of static universal norms, but an organic living community of interpenetrating beings which are at once Forms and intelligences, all ‘awake and alive’, in which every part thinks and therefore in a real sense is the whole; so that the relationship of whole and part in this spiritual world is quite different from that in the material world, and involves no sort of separation or exclusion. This unity-in-diversity is the most perfect image possible on the level of being (in the Platonic sense of formed, denned ‘ this-ness5) of the absolute Unity of the One, Whom Nous in its ordinary contemplation cannot apprehend as He is in His absolute simplicity; so it represents His Infinity as best it can in the plurality of Forms. Nous itself is infinite in power and immeasurable, because it has no extension and there is no external standard by which it could be measured, but finite because it is a complete whole composed of an actually existing number (all that can possibly exist) of Forms, which are themselves definite, limited realities.
Looked at from the point of view of our own human nature and experience, Nous is the level of intuitive thought, a thought which grasps its object immediately and is always perfectly united with it, and does not have to seek it outside itself by discursive reasoning: and we at our highest are Nous, or Soul perfecdy formed to the likeness of Nous (this is a point on which there is some variation in Plotinus’s thought). Plotinus in some passages at least admits the existence of Forms of individuals, and this enables him to give our particular personalities their place in the world of Nous, with the eternal value and status which this implies. And this means that in that world, where the laws of space and time do not apply and the part is the whole, we are Being and the All. This is the explanation of a number of so-called pantheistic passages in Plotinus. [Notably VI. 5. 12 (G (b)t p. 151).] In order to understand them correcdy we must remember (i) that they refer to Nous (Being or the All) not to the One; (ii) that to become Nous does not involve the destruction or absorption of the particular individual personality but its return to its perfect archetypal reality, distinguished in unity from all other archetypal realities, individual and universal.
Soul in Plotinus is very much what it is in Plato, the great intermediary between the worlds of intellect and sense and the representative of the former in the latter. It proceeds from Nous and returns upon it and is formed by it in contemplation as Nous proceeds from and returns upon the One: but the relationship of Soul to Nous is a much more intimate one. Soul at its highest belongs to the world of Nous: and Plotinus hesitates a good deal over the question of whether its going out from that world to form and order the material universe is a fall, an act of illegitimate self-will and self-assertion, or a good and necessary part of the universal order. He tries hard to reconcile the two points of view and bring his thought into consistency, but he does not quite succeed. On the whole, however, the positive way of looking at the situation predominates in the Enneads. The activity of Universal Soul in forming and ruling the material universe is regarded as wholly good and divine. It is an activity which is, like production on higher levels, at once necessary and spontaneous, the overflowing of contemplation into action, and it takes place altogether without effort, deliberate choice, or planning.
Universal Soul has two levels, the higher where it acts as a transcendent principle of form, order, and intelligent direction, and the lower where it operates as an immanent principle of life and growth. This lower is in fact (though Plotinus is reluctant to admit it) a fourth distinct hypostasis, and has its special name, Nature. It is related to the higher soul as the higher soul is to Nous and, like it, acts or produces as a necessary result of contemplation; but because its contemplation is the last and lowest sort of contemplation, a sort of dream, [III. 8. 4 (E (b), p. 101).] it is too weak to produce anything which is itself productive. So what it produces is the immanent forms in body, the ultimate level of spiritual being, which are non-contemplative and so spiritually sterile and below which lies only the darkness of matter.
The characteristic of the life of Soul is movement from one thing to another; unlike Nous it does not possess being as a whole, but only one part at a time, and must always be moving from one to the other; it is the level of discursive thought, which does not hold its object in immediate possession but has to seek it by a process of reasoning; and its continual movement from one thing to another produces time, which is ‘ the life of the soul in movement’, [III. 7. 11 (E (b), p. 114).] and is the cause of all physical movement in space and time.
Our individual souls are ‘Plotinian parts’ of Universal Soul, parts, that is, which in the manner proper to spiritual being have the whole in a certain sense present in them and can if they wish expand themselves by contemplation into universality and be the whole because they completely share Universal Soul’s detachment from the body it rules. The individual soul’s descent into body is for Plotinus both a fall and a necessary compliance with the law of the universe and the plan of Universal Soul [IV. 8. 5 (F (c), p. 133)] (Plotinus here is very conscious of a tension in Plato’s thought as well as in his own). The spiritual state of the soul in body depends on its attitude. If it devotes itself selfishly to the interests of the particular body to which it is attached it becomes entrapped in the atomistic particularity of the material world and isolated from the whole. The root sin of the soul is self-isolation, by which it is imprisoned in body and cut off from its high destiny. But the mere fact of being in body does not imply imprisonment in body. That only comes if the soul surrenders to the body; it is the inward attitude which makes the difference. It is always possible for a man in the body to rise beyond the particularism and narrowness of the cares of earthly life to the universality of transcendent Soul and to the world of Nous. Universal Soul is in no way hampered by the body of the universe which it contains and administers: and the celestial bodies of the star-gods in no way interfere with their spiritual life. [II. 9. 8 (E (A), p. 106)] It is not embodiment as such but embodiment in an earthly, animal body which the Platonist regards as an evil and a handicap.
The material universe for Plotinus is a living, organic whole, the best possible image of the living unity-in-diversity of the World of Forms in Nous. It is held together in every part by a universal sympathy and harmony, in which external evil and suffering take their place as necessary elements in the great pattern, the great dance of the universe. As the work of Soul, that is as a living structure of forms, it is wholly good, and everlasting as a whole though the parts are perishable (the universe of Nous is of course eternal as a whole and in every part). All in it that is life and form is good; but the matter which is its substratum is evil and the principle of evil. Matter according to Plotinus never really unites with form; it remains a formless darkness on which form is merely superimposed. It is non-being in the sense not of a ‘zero’ but a ‘minus’ force or principle of negation (in the Aristotelian language which he sometimes uses, Plotinus identifies hule with steresis). Matter then is responsible for the evil and imperfection of the material world: but that world is good and necessary, the best possible image of the world of spirit on the material level where it is necessary that it should express itself for the completion of the whole. It has not the goodness of its archetype but it has the goodness of the best possible image.