The Third Hypostasis of the Divine-Triad is, then, the ALL-SOUL, or Universal Soul or Soul of The All: it is the eternal emanation and image of the Second Hypostasis, the Intellectual-Principle.
As the Divine-Intellectual-Principle has, to our own view, two Acts – that of upward contemplation of The One and that of ‘generation’ towards the lower – so the ALL-SOUL has two Acts: it at once contemplates the Intellectual-Principle and ‘generates’ in the bounty of its own perfection the lower possible. Thus we have often in the Enneads a verbal partition of the ALL-SOUL; we hear of the Leading-Principle of the Soul, or the Celestial Soul, concentrated in contemplation of its superior, and the Lower Soul, called also the Nature-Looking and Generative Soul, whose operation it is to generate or fashion the lower, the material Universe upon the model of the Divine-Thoughts, the ‘Ideas’ laid up within the Divine-Mind: this lower principle in the Soul is sometimes called the Logos of the Universe, or the ‘Reason-Principle’ of the Universe. The ALL-SOUL is the mobile cause of movement as well as of Form: more directly than the two superior or ‘earlier’ Hypostases of the Divine-Triad it is the eternal cause of the existence, eternal existence, of the Cosmos, or ‘World’, or material or sense-grasped Universe, which is the Soul’s Act and emanation, image and ‘shadow’. It is the Creator, therefore, and the Vital-Principle of all that is lower, or ‘later’ than the Divine-Triad. In a sense that need not be here minutely elaborated the ALL-SOUL includes, and is, All-the-Souls: for the first rough practical purposes of the average reader, it may be conveniently indicated in a stanza, by Richard Watson Dixon:
There is a soul above the soul of each,
A mightier soul, which yet to each belongs:
There is a sound made of all human speech,
And numerous as the concourse of all songs:
And in that soul lives each, in each that soul,
Tho’ all the ages are its life-time vast;
Each soul that dies, in its most sacred whole
Receiveth life that shall for ever last.
If there be no human Soul in them, the Animate is constituted for them by a radiation from the ALL-SOUL. Enneads I,1,
If it be taken into the ALL-SOUL – what evil can reach it There? And as the Gods are possessed of Good and untouched by evil – so, certainly is the Soul that has preserved its essential character. And if it should lose its purity, the evil it experiences is not in its death but in its life. Suppose it to be under punishment in the lower world, even there the evil thing is its life and not its death; the misfortune is still life, a life of a definite character. Enneads I,7,
If, on the other hand, the Kosmic circuit is due to the Soul, we are not to think of a painful driving (wearing it down at last); the soul does not use violence or in any way thwart nature, for “Nature” is no other than the custom the ALL-SOUL has established. Omnipresent in its entirety, incapable of division, the Soul of the universe communicates that quality of universal presence to the heavens, too, in their degree, the degree, that is, of pursuing universality and advancing towards it. Enneads II,2,
Ever illuminated, receiving light unfailing, the ALL-SOUL imparts it to the entire series of later Being which by this light is sustained and fostered and endowed with the fullest measure of life that each can absorb. It may be compared with a central fire warming every receptive body within range. Enneads II,8,
We must recognize how different is the governance exercised by the ALL-SOUL; the relation is not the same: it is not in fetters. Among the very great number of differences it should not have been overlooked that the We (the human Soul) lies under fetter; and this in a second limitation, for the Body-Kind, already fettered within the ALL-SOUL, imprisons all that it grasps. Enneads II,8,
Knowledge, too; in their unbroken peace, what hinders them from the intellectual grasp of the God-Head and the Intellectual Gods? What can be imagined to give us a wisdom higher than belongs to the Supernals? Could anyone, not fallen to utter folly, bear with such an idea? Admitting that human Souls have descended under constraint of the ALL-SOUL, are we to think the constrained the nobler? Among Souls, what commands must be higher than what obeys. And if the coming was unconstrained, why find fault with a world you have chosen and can quit if you dislike it? And further, if the order of this Universe is such that we are able, within it, to practise wisdom and to live our earthly course by the Supernal, does not that prove it a dependency of the Divine? Enneads II,8,
But, allowing that a Providence reaches to you from the world beyond – making any concession to your liking – it remains none the less certain that this world holds from the Supernal and is not deserted and will not be: a Providence watching entires is even more likely than one over fragments only; and similarly, Participation is more perfect in the case of the ALL-SOUL – as is shown, further, by the very existence of things and the wisdom manifest in their existence. Of those that advance these wild pretensions, who is so well ordered, so wise, as the Universe? The comparison is laughable, utterly out of place; to make it, except as a help towards truth, would be impiety. Enneads II,8,
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. Enneads II,8,
This school may lay claim to vision as a dignity reserved to themselves, 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 themselves have their freedom in their death. This is a failure to grasp the very notion of “standing outside,” a failure to appreciate the mode in which the ALL-SOUL cares for the unensouled. Enneads II,8,
Does each individual Soul, then, contain within itself such a Love in essence and substantial reality? Since not only the pure ALL-SOUL but also that of the Universe contain such a Love, it would be difficult to explain why our personal Soul should not. It must be so, even, with all that has life. Enneads III,5,
As the ALL-SOUL contains the Universal Love, so must the single Soul be allowed its own single Love: and as closely as the single Soul holds to the ALL-SOUL, never cut off but embraced within it, the two together constituting one principle of life, so the single separate Love holds to the All-Love. Similarly, the individual love keeps with the individual Soul as that other, the great Love, goes with the ALL-SOUL; and the Love within the All permeates it throughout so that the one Love becomes many, showing itself where it chooses at any moment of the Universe, taking definite shape in these its partial phases and revealing itself at its will. Enneads III,5,
Magnitude is not, like Matter, a receptacle; it is an Ideal-Principle: it is a thing standing apart to itself, not some definite Mass. The fact is that the self-gathered content of the Intellectual Principle or of the ALL-SOUL, desires expansion (and thereby engenders secondaries): in its images – aspiring and moving towards it and eagerly imitating its act – is vested a similar power of reproducing their states in their own derivatives. The Magnitude latent in the expansive tendency of the Image-making phase (of Intellect or ALL-SOUL) runs forth into the Absolute Magnitude of the Universe; this in turn enlists into the process the spurious magnitude of Matter: the content of the Supreme, thus, in virtue of its own prior extension enables Matter – which never possesses a content – to exhibit the appearance of Magnitude. It must be understood that spurious Magnitude consists in the fact that a thing (Matter) not possessing actual Magnitude strains towards it and has the extension of that straining. All that is Real Being gives forth a reflection of itself upon all else; every Reality, therefore, has Magnitude which by this process is communicated to the Universe. Enneads III,6,
Time in every Soul of the order of the ALL-SOUL, present in like form in all; for all the Souls are the one<one Soul. Enneads III,7,
But if this Reason-Principle (Nature) is in act – and produces by the process indicated – how can it have any part in Contemplation? To begin with, since in all its production it is stationary and intact, a Reason-Principle self-indwelling, it is in its own nature a Contemplative act. All doing must be guided by an Idea, and will therefore be distinct from that Idea: the Reason-Principle then, as accompanying and guiding the work, will be distinct from the work; not being action but Reason-Principle it is, necessarily, Contemplation. Taking the Reason-Principle, the Logos, in all its phases, the lowest and last springs from a mental act (in the higher Logos) and is itself a contemplation, though only in the sense of being contemplated, but above it stands the total Logos with its two distinguishable phases, first, that identified not as Nature but as ALL-SOUL and, next, that operating in Nature and being itself the Nature-Principle. Enneads III,8,
At no point did the ALL-SOUL come into Being: it never arrived, for it never knew place; what happens is that body, neighbouring with it, participates in it: hence Plato does not place Soul in body but body in Soul. The others, the secondary Souls, have a point of departure – they come from the ALL-SOUL – and they have a Place into which to descend and in which to change to and fro, a place, therefore, from which to ascend: but this ALL-SOUL is for ever Above, resting in that Being in which it holds its existence as Soul and followed, as next, by the Universe or, at least, by all beneath the sun. Enneads III,8,
Our opponents will probably deny the validity of our arguments against the theory that the human soul is a mere segment of the ALL-SOUL – the considerations, namely, that it is of identical scope, and that it is intellective in the same degree, supposing them, even, to admit that equality of intellection. Enneads IV,3,
The soul is not a thing of quantity; we are not to conceive of the ALL-SOUL as some standard ten with particular souls as its constituent units. Enneads IV,3,
Such a conception would entail many absurdities: The Ten could not be (essentially) a unity (the Soul would be an aggregation, not a self-standing Real-Being) and, further – unless every one of the single constituents were itself an ALL-SOUL – the ALL-SOUL would be formed of non-souls. Enneads IV,3,
Again, it is admitted that the particular soul – this “part of the ALL-SOUL – is of one ideal-form with it, but this does not entail the relation of part to whole, since in objects formed of continuous parts there is nothing inevitably making any portion uniform with the total: take, for example, the parts of a circle or square; we may divide it in different ways so as to get our part; a triangle need not be divided into triangles; all sorts of different figures are possible: yet an absolute uniformity is admitted to reign throughout soul. Enneads IV,3,
But it is admitted that all souls are alike and are entireties; clearly, soul is not subject to part in the sense in which magnitudes are: our opponents themselves would not consent to the notion of the ALL-SOUL being whittled down into fragments, yet this is what they would be doing, annulling the ALL-SOUL – if any collective soul existed at all – making it a mere piece of terminology, thinking of it like wine separated into many portions, each portion, in its jar, being described as a portion of the total thing, wine. Enneads IV,3,
Is this the appropriate parallel? No; in such a relationship the ALL-SOUL, of which the particular souls are to be a part, would not be the soul of any definite thing, but an entity standing aloof; that means that it would not even be the soul of the Kosmos; it would, in fact, be, itself, one of those partial souls; thus all alike would be partial and of one nature; and, at that, there would be no reason for making any such distinction. Enneads IV,3,
If the particular soul is a part of the ALL-SOUL only in the sense that this bestows itself upon all living things of the partial sphere, such a self-bestowal does not imply division; on the contrary, it is the identical soul that is present everywhere, the one complete thing, multi-present at the one moment: there is no longer question of a soul that is a part against a soul that is an all – especially where an identical power is present. Even difference of function, as in eyes and ears, cannot warrant the assertion of distinct parts concerned in each separate act – with other parts again making allotment of faculty – all is met by the notion of one identical thing, but a thing in which a distinct power operates in each separate function. All the powers are present either in seeing or in hearing; the difference in impression received is due to the difference in the organs concerned; all the varying impressions are our various responses to Ideal-forms that can be taken in a variety of modes. Enneads IV,3,
But again: “Everywhere, Unity”: in the variety of functions if each “part of the soul” were as distinct as are the entrant sensations, none of those parts could have knowledge; awareness would belong only to that judging faculty – or, if local, every such act of awareness would stand quite unrelated to any other. But since the soul is a rational soul, by the very same title by which it is an ALL-SOUL, and is called the rational soul, in the sense of being a whole (and so not merely “reasoning locally”), then what is thought of as a part must in reality be no part but the identity of an unparted thing. Enneads IV,3,
We might be led to think that all soul must always inhabit body; this would seem especially plausible in the case of the soul of the universe, not thought of as ever leaving its body as the human soul does: there exists, no doubt, an opinion that even the human soul, while it must leave the body, cannot become an utterly disembodied thing; but assuming its complete disembodiment, how comes it that the human soul can go free of the body but the ALL-SOUL not, though they are one and the same? There is no such difficulty in the case of the Intellectual-Principle; by the primal differentiation, this separates, no doubt, into partial things of widely varying nature, but eternal unity is secured by virtue of the eternal identity of that Essence: it is not so easy to explain how, in the case of the soul described as separate among bodies, such differentiated souls can remain one thing. Enneads IV,3,
A possible solution may be offered: The unit soul holds aloof, not actually falling into body; the differentiated souls – the ALL-SOUL, with the others – issue from the unity while still constituting, within certain limits, an association. They are one soul by the fact that they do not belong unreservedly to any particular being; they meet, so to speak, fringe to fringe; they strike out here and there, but are held together at the source much as light is a divided thing upon earth, shining in this house, and that, and yet remains uninterruptedly one identical substance. Enneads IV,3,
The ALL-SOUL would always remain above, since essentially it has nothing to do with descent or with the lower, or with any tendency towards this sphere: the other souls would become ours (become “partial,” individual in us) because their lot is cast for this sphere, and because they are solicited by a thing (the body) which invites their care. Enneads IV,3,
The one – the lowest soul in the to the ALL-SOUL – would correspond to that in some great growth, silently, unlaboriously conducting the whole; our own lowest soul might be compared to the insect life in some rotted part of the growth – for this is the ratio of the animated body to the universe – while the other soul in us, of one ideal nature with the higher parts of the ALL-SOUL, may be imaged as the gardener concerned about the insects lodged in the tree and anxiously working to amend what is wrong; or we may contrast a healthy man living with the healthy and, by his thought or by his act, lending himself to the service of those about him, with, on the other side, a sick man intent upon his own care and cure, and so living for the body, body-bound. Enneads IV,3,
But how comes it that while the ALL-SOUL has produced a kosmos, the soul of the particular has not, though it is of the one ideal Kind and contains, it too, all things in itself? We have indicated that a thing may enter and dwell at the same time in various places; this ought to be explained, and the enquiry would show how an identity resident simultaneously here and there may, in its separate appearances, act or react – or both – after distinct modes; but the matter deserves to be examined in a special discussion. Enneads IV,3,
To return, then: how and why has the ALL-SOUL produced a kosmos, while the particular souls simply administer some one part of it? In the first place, we are not surprised when men of identical knowledge differ greatly in effective power. Enneads IV,3,
The answer might be that there is an even greater difference among these souls, the one never having fallen away from the ALL-SOUL, but dwelling within it and assuming body therein, while the others received their allotted spheres when the body was already in existence, when their sister soul was already in rule and, as it were, had already prepared habitations for them. Again, the reason may be that the one (the creative ALL-SOUL) looks towards the universal Intellectual-Principle (the exemplar of all that can be), while the others are more occupied with the Intellectual within themselves, that which is already of the sphere of part; perhaps, too, these also could have created, but that they were anticipated by that originator – the work accomplished before them – an impediment inevitable whichsoever of the souls were first to operate. Enneads IV,3,
So far, so good: but what of the passage in the Philebus taken to imply that the other souls are parts of the ALL-SOUL? The statement there made does not bear the meaning read into it; it expresses only, what the author was then concerned with, that the heavens are ensouled – a teaching which he maintains in the observation that it is preposterous to make the heavens soulless when we, who contain a part of the body of the All, have a soul; how, he asks, could there be soul in the part and none in the total. Enneads IV,3,
He makes his teaching quite clear in the Timaeus, where he shows us the other souls brought into existence after the ALL-SOUL, but compounded from the same mixing bowl”; secondary and tertiary are duly marked off from the primal but every form of soul is presented as being of identical ideal-nature with the ALL-SOUL. Enneads IV,3,
We have always admitted that as members of the universe we take over something from the ALL-SOUL; we do not deny the influence of the Kosmic Circuit; but against all this we oppose another soul in us (the Intellectual as distinguished from the merely vitalizing) proven to be distinct by that power of opposition. Enneads IV,3,
Plato therefore is wise when, in treating of the All, he puts the body in its soul, and not its soul in the body, and says that, while there is a region of that soul which contains body, there is another region to which body does not enter – certain powers, that is, with which body has no concern. And what is true of the ALL-SOUL is true of the others. Enneads IV,3,
But there is a difficulty affecting this entire settlement: Eternity is characteristic of the Intellectual-Principle, time of the soul – for we hold that time has its substantial being in the activity of the soul, and springs from soul – and, since time is a thing of division and comports a past, it would seem that the activity producing it must also be a thing of division, and that its attention to that past must imply that even the ALL-SOUL has memory? We repeat, identity belongs to the eternal, time must be the medium of diversity; otherwise there is nothing to distinguish them, especially since we deny that the activities of the soul can themselves experience change. Enneads IV,4,
Our own apprehension of any bodily condition apart from the normal is the sense of something intruding from without: but besides this, we have the apprehension of one member by another; why then should not the All, by means of what is stationary in it, perceive that region of itself which is in movement, that is to say the earth and the earth’s content? Things of earth are certainly affected by what passes in other regions of the All; what, then, need prevent the All from having, in some appropriate way, the perception of those changes? In addition to that self-contemplating vision vested in its stationary part, may it not have a seeing power like that of an eye able to announce to the ALL-SOUL what has passed before it? Even granted that it is entirely unaffected by its lower, why, still, should it not see like an eye, ensouled as it is, all lightsome? Still: “eyes were not necessary to it,” we read. If this meant simply that nothing is left to be seen outside of the All, still there is the inner content, and there can be nothing to prevent it seeing what constitutes itself: if the meaning is that such self-vision could serve to no use, we may think that it has vision not as a main intention for vision’s sake but as a necessary concomitant of its characteristic nature; it is difficult to conceive why such a body should be incapable of seeing. Enneads IV,4,
If we can trace neither to material agencies (blind elements) nor to any deliberate intention the influences from without which reach to us and to the other forms of life and to the terrestrial in general, what cause satisfactory to reason remains? The secret is: firstly, that this All is one universally comprehensive living being, encircling all the living beings within it, and having a soul, one soul, which extends to all its members in the degree of participant membership held by each; secondly, that every separate thing is an integral part of this All by belonging to the total material fabric – unrestrictedly a part by bodily membership, while, in so far as it has also some participation in the All. Soul, it possesses in that degree spiritual membership as well, perfect where participation is in the ALL-SOUL alone, partial where there is also a union with a lower soul. Enneads IV,4,
Now in its comprehensive government of the heavenly system, the soul’s method is that of an unbroken transcendence in its highest phases, with penetration by its lower power: at this, God can no longer be charged with lowering the ALL-SOUL, which has not been deprived of its natural standing and from eternity possesses and will unchangeably possess that rank and habit which could never have been intruded upon it against the course of nature but must be its characteristic quality, neither failing ever nor ever beginning. Enneads IV,8,
Now this does not clash with the first theory (that of the impassivity of soul as in the All); for the descent of the human Soul has not been due to the same causes (as that of the ALL-SOUL.) Enneads IV,8,
With this comes what is known as the casting of the wings, the enchaining in body: the soul has lost that innocency of conducting the higher which it knew when it stood with the ALL-SOUL, that earlier state to which all its interest would bid it hasten back. Enneads IV,8,
The soul’s operation is similar: its next lower act is this universe: its immediate higher is the contemplation of the Authentic Existences. To individual souls such divine operation takes place only at one of their phases and by a temporal process when from the lower in which they reside they turn towards the noblest; but that soul, which we know as the ALL-SOUL, has never entered the lower activity, but, immune from evil, has the property of knowing its lower by inspection, while it still cleaves continuously to the beings above itself; thus its double task becomes possible; it takes thence and, since as soul it cannot escape touching this sphere, it gives hither. Enneads IV,8,
The nourishing faculty as dependent from the All belongs also to the ALL-SOUL: why then does it not come equally from ours? Because what is nourished by the action of this power is a member of the All, which itself has sensation passively; but the perception, which is an intellectual judgement, is individual and has no need to create what already exists, though it would have done so had the power not been previously included, of necessity, in the nature of the All. Enneads IV,8,
Soul also has beauty, but is less beautiful than Intellect as being its image and therefore, though beautiful in nature, taking increase of beauty by looking to that original. Since then the ALL-SOUL – to use the more familiar term – since Aphrodite herself is so beautiful, what name can we give to that other? If Soul is so lovely in its own right, of what quality must that prior be? And since its being is derived, what must that power be from which the Soul takes the double beauty, the borrowed and the inherent? We ourselves possess beauty when we are true to our own being; our ugliness is in going over to another order; our self-knowledge, that is to say, is our beauty; in self-ignorance we are ugly. Enneads V,8,
That One Soul – member of the Intellectual kosmos and there merging what it has of partial into the total – has broken away, so to speak, from the All to the part and to that devotes itself becoming partial with it: thus fire that might consume everything may be set to ply its all-power upon some trifle. So long as the soul remains utterly unattached it is soul not singled out; when it has accepted separation – not that of place but that of act determining individualities – it is a part, no longer the soul entire, or at least not entire in the first sense; when, on the contrary, it exercises no such outward control it is perfectly the ALL-SOUL, the partial in it latent. Enneads VI,4,
The power of the ALL-SOUL, as Reason-Principle of the universe, may be considered as laying down a pattern before the effective separate powers go forth from it: this plan would be something like a tentative illumining of Matter; the elaborating soul would give minute articulation to these representations of itself; every separate effective soul would become that towards which it tended, assuming that particular form as the choral dancer adapts himself to the action set down for him. Enneads VI,7,
To ask how those forms of life come to be There is simply asking how that heaven came to be; it is asking whence comes life, whence the All-Life, whence the ALL-SOUL, whence collective Intellect: and the answer is that There no indigence or impotence can exist but all must be teeming, seething, with life. All flows, so to speak, from one fount not to be thought of as one breath or warmth but rather as one quality englobing and safeguarding all qualities – sweetness with fragrance, wine – quality and the savours of everything that may be tasted, all colours seen, everything known to touch, all that ear may hear, all melodies, every rhythm. Enneads VI,7,