birth

Thus the Life is one thing, the Act is another and the Expiator yet another. The retreat and sundering, then, must be not from this body only, but from every alien accruement. Such accruement takes place at BIRTH; or rather BIRTH is the coming-into-being of that other (lower) phase of the Soul. For the meaning of BIRTH has been indicated elsewhere; it is brought about by a descent of the Soul, something being given off by the Soul other than that actually coming down in the declension. Enneads I,1,

But what order of beings will attain the Term? Surely, as we read, those that have already seen all or most things, those who at their first BIRTH have entered into the life-germ from which is to spring a metaphysician, a musician or a born lover, the metaphysician taking to the path by instinct, the musician and the nature peculiarly susceptible to love needing outside guidance. Enneads I,3,

This brings us to the Spindle-destiny, spun according to the ancients by the Fates. To Plato the Spindle represents the co-operation of the moving and the stable elements of the kosmic circuit: the Fates with Necessity, Mother of the Fates, manipulate it and spin at the BIRTH of every being, so that all comes into existence through Necessity. Enneads II,3,

We must admit that the Soul before entering into BIRTH presents itself bearing with it something of its own, for it could never touch body except under stress of a powerful inner impulse; we must admit some element of chance around it from its very entry, since the moment and conditions are determined by the kosmic circuit: and we must admit some effective power in that circuit itself; it is co-operative, and completes of its own act the task that belongs to the All of which everything in the circuit takes the rank and function of a part. Enneads II,3,

But what is the significance of the Lots? By the Lots we are to understand BIRTH into the conditions actually existent in the All at the particular moment of each entry into body, BIRTH into such and such a physical frame, from such and such parents, in this or that place, and generally all that in our phraseology is the External. Enneads II,3,

If men rank highly among other living Beings, much more do these, whose office in the All is not to play the tyrant but to serve towards beauty and order. The action attributed to them must be understood as a foretelling of coming events, while the causing of all the variety is due, in part to diverse destinies – for there cannot be one lot for the entire body of men – in part to the BIRTH moment, in part to wide divergencies of place, in part to states of the Souls. Enneads: II VIII.

Some further considerations will help to clarify this matter: The heavens are observed at the moment of a BIRTH and the individual fate is thence predicted in the idea that the stars are no mere indications, but active causes, of the future events. Sometimes the Astrologers tell of noble BIRTH; “the child is born of highly placed parents”; yet how is it possible to make out the stars to be causes of a condition which existed in the father and mother previously to that star pattern on which the prediction is based? And consider still further: They are really announcing the fortunes of parents from the BIRTH of children; the character and career of children are included in the predictions as to the parents – they predict for the yet unborn! – in the lot of one brother they are foretelling the death of another; a girl’s fate includes that of a future husband, a boy’s that of a wife. Enneads: III I

Now, can we think that the star-grouping over any particular BIRTH can be the cause of what stands already announced in the facts about the parents? Either the previous star-groupings were the determinants of the child’s future career or, if they were not, then neither is the immediate grouping. And notice further that physical likeness to the parents – the Astrologers hold – is of purely domestic origin: this implies that ugliness and beauty are so caused and not by astral movements. Enneads: III I

Again, there must at one and the same time be a widespread coming to BIRTH – men, and the most varied forms of animal life at the same moment – and these should all be under the one destiny since the one pattern rules at the moment; how explain that identical star-groupings give here the human form, there the animal? Enneads: III I

But in fact everything follows its own Kind; the BIRTH is a horse because it comes from the Horse Kind, a man by springing from the Human Kind; offspring answers to species. Allow the kosmic circuit its part, a very powerful influence upon the thing brought into being: allow the stars a wide material action upon the bodily part of the man, producing heat and cold and their natural resultants in the physical constitution; still does such action explain character, vocation and especially all that seems quite independent of material elements, a man taking to letters, to geometry, to gambling, and becoming an originator in any of these pursuits? And can we imagine the stars, divine beings, bestowing wickedness? And what of a doctrine that makes them wreak vengeance, as for a wrong, because they are in their decline or are being carried to a position beneath the earth – as if a decline from our point of view brought any change to themselves, as if they ever ceased to traverse the heavenly spheres and to make the same figure around the earth. Enneads: III I

In the immaterial heaven every member is unchangeably itself for ever; in the heavens of our universe, while the whole has life eternally and so too all the nobler and lordlier components, the Souls pass from body to body entering into varied forms – and, when it may, a Soul will rise outside of the realm of BIRTH and dwell with the one<one Soul of all. For the embodied lives by virtue of a Form or Idea: individual or partial things exist by virtue of Universals; from these priors they derive their life and maintenance, for life here is a thing of change; only in that prior realm is it unmoving. From that unchangingness, change had to emerge, and from that self-cloistered Life its derivative, this which breathes and stirs, the respiration of the still life of the divine. Enneads III,2,

That is to say that the dominant is the spirit which takes possession of the human being at BIRTH? No: the dominant is the Prior of the individual spirit; it presides inoperative while its secondary acts: so that if the acting force is that of men of the sense-life, the tutelary spirit is the Rational Being, while if we live by that Rational Being, our tutelary Spirit is the still higher Being, not directly operative but assenting to the working principle. The words “You shall yourselves choose” are true, then; for by our life we elect our own loftier. Enneads III,4,

But this exalts the Sage above the Intellectual Principle as possessing for presiding spirit the Prior to the Intellectual Principle: how then does it come about that he was not, from the very beginning, all that he now is? The failure is due to the disturbance caused by BIRTH – though, before all reasoning, there exists the instinctive movement reaching out towards its own. Enneads III,4,

But, meanwhile, what happens to it? From the passage (in the Phaedo) which tells how it presents the Soul to judgement we gather that after the death it resumes the form it had before the BIRTH, but that then, beginning again, it is present to the Souls in their punishment during the period of their renewed life – a time not so much of living as of expiation. Enneads III,4,

Emancipated Souls, for the whole period of their sojourn there above, have transcended the Spirit-nature and the entire fatality of BIRTH and all that belongs to this visible world, for they have taken up with them that Hypostasis of the Soul in which the desire of earthly life is vested. This Hypostasis may be described as the distributable Soul, for it is what enters bodily forms and multiplies itself by this division among them. But its distribution is not a matter of magnitudes; wherever it is present, there is the same thing present entire; its unity can always be reconstructed: when living things – animal or vegetal – produce their constant succession of new forms, they do so in virtue of the self-distribution of this phase of the Soul, for it must be as much distributed among the new forms as the propagating originals are. In some cases it communicates its force by permanent presence the life principle in plants for instance – in other cases it withdraws after imparting its virtue – for instance where from the putridity of dead animal or vegetable matter a multitudinous BIRTH is produced from one organism. Enneads III,4,

Plato does not treat of it as simply a state observed in Souls; he also makes it a Spirit-being so that we read of the BIRTH of Eros, under definite circumstances and by a certain parentage. Enneads III,5,

The existence of such a being is no demand of the ordinary man, merely; it is supported by Theologians and, over and over again, by Plato to whom Eros is child of Aphrodite, minister of beautiful children, inciter of human souls towards the supernal beauty or quickener of an already existing impulse thither. All this requires philosophical examination. A cardinal passage is that in the Symposium where we are told Eros was not a child of Aphrodite but born on the day of Aphrodite’s BIRTH, Penia, Poverty, being the mother, and Poros, Possession, the father. Enneads III,5,

But besides this purest Soul, there must be also a Soul of the All: at once there is another Love – the eye with which this second Soul looks upwards – like the supernal Eros engendered by force of desire. This Aphrodite, the secondary Soul, is of this Universe – not Soul unmingled alone, not Soul, the Absolute, giving BIRTH, therefore, to the Love concerned with the universal life; no, this is the Love presiding over marriages; but it, also, has its touch of the upward desire; and, in the degree of that striving, it stirs and leads upwards the Souls of the young and every Soul with which it is incorporated in so far as there is a natural tendency to remembrance of the divine. For every Soul is striving towards The Good, even the mingling Soul and that of particular beings, for each holds directly from the divine Soul, and is its offspring. Enneads III,5,

But what is the Nature of this Spirit – of the Supernals in general? The Spirit-Kind is treated in the Symposium where, with much about the others, we learn of Eros – Love – born to Penia – Poverty – and Poros – Possession – who is son of Metis – Resource – at Aphrodite’s BIRTH feast. Enneads III,5,

This is the significance of Plato’s account of the BIRTH of Love. Enneads III,5,

For, all that lies gathered in the Intellect is native to it: nothing enters from without; but “Poros intoxicated” is some Power deriving satisfaction outside itself: what, then, can we understand by this member of the Supreme filled with Nectar but a Reason-Principle falling from a loftier essence to a lower? This means that the Reason-Principle upon “the BIRTH of Aphrodite” left the Intellectual for the Soul, breaking into the garden of Zeus. Enneads III,5,

Thus Love is at once, in some degree a thing of Matter and at the same time a Celestial, sprung of the Soul; for Love lacks its Good but, from its very BIRTH, strives towards It. Enneads III,5,

And Nature, asked why it brings forth its works, might answer if it cared to listen and to speak: “It would have been more becoming to put no question but to learn in silence just as I myself am silent and make no habit of talking. And what is your lesson? This; that whatsoever comes into being is my is my vision, seen in my silence, the vision that belongs to my character who, sprung from vision, am vision-loving and create vision by the vision-seeing faculty within me. The mathematicians from their vision draw their figures: but I draw nothing: I gaze and the figures of the material world take being as if they fell from my contemplation. As with my Mother (the All-Soul) and the Beings that begot me so it is with me: they are born of a Contemplation and my BIRTH is from them, not by their Act but by their Being; they are the loftier Reason-Principles, they contemplate themselves and I am born.” Enneads III,8,

This discussion of Nature has shown us how the origin of things is a Contemplation: we may now take the matter up to the higher Soul; we find that the Contemplation pursued by this, its instinct towards knowing and enquiring, the BIRTH pangs set up by the knowledge it attains, its teeming fullness, have caused it – in itself, all one object of Vision – to produce another Vision (that of the Kosmos): it is just as a given science, complete in itself, becomes the source and cause of what might be called a minor science in the student who attains to some partial knowledge of all its divisions. But the visible objects and the objects of intellectual contemplation of this later creation are dim and helpless by the side of the content of the Soul. Enneads III,8,

But every living being includes the vegetal principle, that principle of growth and nourishment which maintains the organism by means of the blood; this nourishing medium is contained in the veins; the veins and blood have their origin in the liver: from observation of these facts the power concerned was assigned a place; the phase of the soul which has to do with desire was allocated to the liver. Certainly what brings to BIRTH and nourishes and gives growth must have the desire of these functions. Blood – subtle, light, swift, pure – is the vehicle most apt to animal spirit: the heart, then, its well-spring, the place where such blood is sifted into being, is taken as the fixed centre of the ebullition of the passionate nature. Enneads IV,3,

The will of any organic thing is one; but the distinct powers which go to constitute it are far from being one: yet all the several wills look to the object aimed at by the one will of the whole: for the desire which the one member entertains for another is a desire within the All: a part seeks to acquire something outside itself, but that external is another part of which it feels the need: the anger of a moment of annoyance is directed to something alien, growth draws on something outside, all BIRTH and becoming has to do with the external; but all this external is inevitably something included among fellow members of the system: through these its limbs and members, the All is bringing this activity into being while in itself it seeks – or better, contemplates – The Good. Right will, then, the will which stands above accidental experience, seeks The Good and thus acts to the same end with it. When men serve another, many of their acts are done under order, but the good servant is the one whose purpose is in union with his master’s. Enneads IV,4,

Now, a single coition and a single sperm suffice to a twin BIRTH or in the animal order to a litter; there is a splitting and diverging of the seed, every diverging part being obviously a whole: surely no honest mind can fail to gather that a thing in which part is identical with whole has a nature which transcends quantity, and must of necessity be without quantity: only so could it remain identical when quantity is filched from it, only by being indifferent to amount or extension, by being in essence something apart. Thus the Soul and the Reason-Principles are without quantity. Enneads IV,7,

(18) But how does the soul enter into body from the aloofness of the Intellectual? There is the Intellectual-Principle which remains among the intellectual beings, living the purely intellective life; and this, knowing no impulse or appetite, is for ever stationary in that Realm. But immediately following upon it, there is that which has acquired appetite and, by this accruement, has already taken a great step outward; it has the desire of elaborating order on the model of what it has seen in the Intellectual-Principle: pregnant by those Beings, and in pain to the BIRTH, it is eager to make, to create. In this new zest it strains towards the realm of sense: thus, while this primal soul in union with the Soul of the All transcends the sphere administered, it is inevitably turned outward, and has added the universe to its concern: yet in choosing to administer the partial and exiling itself to enter the place in which it finds its appropriate task, it still is not wholly and exclusively held by body: it is still in possession of the unembodied; and the Intellectual-Principle in it remains immune. As a whole it is partly in body, partly outside: it has plunged from among the primals and entered this sphere of tertiaries: the process has been an activity of the Intellectual-Principle, which thus, while itself remaining in its identity, operates throughout the soul to flood the universe with beauty and penetrant order – immortal mind, eternal in its unfailing energy, acting through immortal soul. Enneads IV,7,

If we are told that man’s soul being tripartite must as a compound entity be dissolved, our answer shall be that pure souls upon their emancipation will put away all that has fastened to them at BIRTH, all that increment which the others will long retain. Enneads IV,7,

All this is indicated by Plato, without emphasis, where he distinguishes those of the second mixing-bowl, describes them as “parts,” and goes on to say that, having in this way become partial, they must of necessity experience BIRTH. Enneads IV,8,

It is possible to reconcile all these apparent contradictions – the divine sowing to BIRTH, as opposed to a voluntary descent aiming at the completion of the universe; the judgement and the cave; necessity and free choice – in fact the necessity includes the choice-embodiment as an evil; the Empedoclean teaching of a flight from God, a wandering away, a sin bringing its punishment; the “solace by flight” of Heraclitus; in a word a voluntary descent which is also voluntary. Enneads IV,8,

In the case of twin BIRTH among human beings how can we make out the Reason-Principles to be different; and still more when we turn to the animals and especially those with litters? Where the young are precisely alike, there is one Reason-Principle. Enneads V,7,

All human beings from BIRTH onward live to the realm of sense more than to the Intellectual. Enneads V,8,

Suppose however Passion to be a different motion from Action: how then does its modification of the patient object change that patient’s character without the agent being affected by the patient? For obviously an agent cannot be passive to the operation it performs upon another. Can it be that the fact of motion existing elsewhere creates the Passion, which was not Passion in the agent? If the whiteness of the swan, produced by its Reason-Principle, is given at its BIRTH, are we to affirm Passion of the swan on its passing into being? If, on the contrary, the swan grows white after BIRTH, and if there is a cause of that growth and the corresponding result, are we to say that the growth is a Passion? Or must we confine Passion to purely qualitative change? One thing confers beauty and another takes it: is that which takes beauty to be regarded as patient? If then the source of beauty – tin, suppose – should deteriorate or actually disappear, while the recipient – copper – improves, are we to think of the copper as passive and the tin active? Take the learner: how can he be regarded as passive, seeing that the Act of the agent passes into him (and becomes his Act)? How can the Act, necessarily a simple entity, be both Act and Passion? No doubt the Act is not in itself a Passion; nonetheless, the learner coming to possess it will be a patient by the fact of his appropriation of an experience from outside: he will not, of course, be a patient in the sense of having himself performed no Act; learning – like seeing – is not analogous to being struck, since it involves the acts of apprehension and recognition. Enneads: VI I

If we are agreed that Quality and Quantity, though attributive, are real entities, and on the basis of this reality distinguishable as Quality and Quantity respectively: then, on the same principle, since Motion, though an attribute has a reality prior to its attribution, it is incumbent upon us to discover the intrinsic nature of this reality. We must never be content to regard as a relative something which exists prior to its attribution, but only that which is engendered by Relation and has no existence apart from the relation to which it owes its name: the double, strictly so called, takes BIRTH and actuality in juxtaposition with a yard’s length, and by this very process of being juxtaposed with a correlative acquires the name and exhibits the fact of being double. Enneads VI,3,

But what is the constant element in alteration, in growth and BIRTH and their opposites, in local change? What is that which makes them all motions? Surely it is the fact that in every case the object is never in the same state before and after the motion, that it cannot remain still and in complete inactivity but, so long as the motion is present, is continually urged to take a new condition, never acquiescing in Identity but always courting Difference; deprived of Difference, Motion perishes. Enneads VI,3,

Now, when the potentiality of Motion consists in an ability to walk, it may be imagined as thrusting a man forward and causing him to be continually adopting a different position; when it lies in the capacity to heat, it heats; when the potentiality takes hold of Matter and builds up the organism, we have growth; and when another potentiality demolishes the structure, the result is decay, that which has the potentiality of demolition experiencing the decay. Where the BIRTH-giving principle is active, we find BIRTH; where it is impotent and the power to destroy prevails, destruction takes place – not the destruction of what already exists, but that which intervenes upon the road to existence. Enneads VI,3,

Again, with regard to growth, alteration and BIRTH, the division may proceed from the natural and unnatural, or, speaking generally, from the characters of the moved objects. Enneads VI,3,

God, or some one of the gods, in sending the souls to their BIRTH, placed eyes in the face to catch the light and allotted to each sense the appropriate organ, providing thus for the safety which comes by seeing and hearing in time and, seeking or avoiding under guidance of touch. Enneads VI,7,

But, at this, sense-perception – even in its particular modes – is involved in the Idea by eternal necessity, in virtue of the completeness of the Idea; Intellectual-Principle, as all-inclusive, contains in itself all by which we are brought, later, to recognise this perfection in its nature; the cause, There, was one total, all-inclusive; thus Man in the Intellectual was not purely intellect, sense-perception being an addition made upon his entry into BIRTH: all this would seem to imply a tendance in that great Principle towards the lower, towards this sphere. Enneads VI,7,

The Man of the realm of BIRTH has sense-perception: the higher soul enters to bestow a brighter life, or rather does not so much enter as simply impart itself; for soul does not leave the Intellectual but, maintaining that contact, holds the lower life as pendant from it, blending with it by the natural link of Reason-Principle to Reason-Principle: and man, the dimmer, brightens under that illumination. Enneads VI,7,

That our good is There is shown by the very love inborn with the soul; hence the constant linking of the Love-God with the Psyches in story and picture; the soul, other than God but sprung of Him, must needs love. So long as it is There, it holds the heavenly love; here its love is the baser; There the soul is Aphrodite of the heavens; here, turned harlot, Aphrodite of the public ways: yet the soul is always an Aphrodite. This is the intention of the myth which tells of Aphrodite’s BIRTH and Eros born with her. Enneads VI,8,

The soul in its nature loves God and longs to be at one with Him in the noble love of a daughter for a noble father; but coming to human BIRTH and lured by the courtships of this sphere, she takes up with another love, a mortal, leaves her father and falls. Enneads VI,8,