bodies

And how do we possess the Divinity? In that the Divinity is contained in the Intellectual-Principle and Authentic-Existence; and We come third in order after these two, for the We is constituted by a union of the supreme, the undivided Soul – we read – and that Soul which is divided among (living) BODIES. For, note, we inevitably think of the Soul, though one undivided in the All, as being present to BODIES in division: in so far as any BODIES are Animates, the Soul has given itself to each of the separate material masses; or rather it appears to be present in the BODIES by the fact that it shines into them: it makes them living beings not by merging into body but by giving forth, without any change in itself, images or likenesses of itself like one face caught by many mirrors. Enneads I,1,

The same BODIES appear sometimes beautiful, sometimes not; so that there is a good deal between being body and being beautiful. Enneads I,6,

Hence it is that Fire itself is splendid beyond all material BODIES, holding the rank of Ideal-Principle to the other elements, making ever upwards, the subtlest and sprightliest of all BODIES, as very near to the unembodied; itself alone admitting no other, all the others penetrated by it: for they take warmth but this is never cold; it has colour primally; they receive the Form of colour from it: hence the splendour of its light, the splendour that belongs to the Idea. And all that has resisted and is but uncertainly held by its light remains outside of beauty, as not having absorbed the plenitude of the Form of colour. Enneads I,6,

The bodily Kind, in that it partakes of Matter is an evil thing. What form is in BODIES is an untrue-form: they are without life: by their own natural disorderly movement they make away with each other; they are hindrances to the soul in its proper Act; in their ceaseless flux they are always slipping away from Being. Enneads I,8,

Besides, the constitution determines both the desires and their violence so that there are BODIES in which the incoming idea cannot hold sway: there is a vicious constitution which chills and clogs the activity and inhibits choice; a contrary bodily habit produces frivolity, lack of balance. The same fact is indicated by our successive variations of mood: in times of stress, we are not the same either in desires or in ideas – as when we are at peace, and we differ again with every several object that brings us satisfaction. Enneads I,8,

This explanation would, no doubt, safeguard the integrity of the Whole, of the All; but our sun and the individual being of the other heavenly BODIES would not on these terms be secured in perpetuity: they are parts; no one of them is in itself the whole, the all; it would still be probable that theirs is no more than that duration in form which belongs to fire and such entities. Enneads: II I

The theory of bodily flux is held by Plato no less than by the other philosophers who have dealt with physical matters, and is applied not only to ordinary BODIES but to those, also, of the heavenly sphere. Enneads: II I

But to those who reject Aristotle’s Quintessence and hold the material mass of the heavens to consist of the elements underlying the living things of this sphere, how is individual permanence possible? And the difficulty is still greater for the parts, for the sun and the heavenly BODIES. Enneads: II I

Admitting (with Timaeus; as a logical truth) that two self-contained entities, standing as extremes to each other need for their coherence two intermediaries; we may still question whether this holds good with regard to physical BODIES. Certainly water and earth can be mixed without any such intermediate. It might seem valid to object that the intermediates are already present in the earth and the water; but a possible answer would be, “Yes, but not as agents whose meeting is necessary to the coherence of those extremes.” Enneads: II I

But, in sum, do we abandon the teaching that all the elements enter into the composition of every living thing? For this sphere, no; but to lift clay into the heavens is against nature, contrary to the laws of her ordaining: it is difficult, too, to think of that swiftest of circuits bearing along earthly BODIES in its course nor could such material conduce to the splendour and white glint of the celestial fire. Enneads: II I

And it is that loftier light – falling variously upon the stars; to each in a certain proportion – that gives them their characteristic differences, as well in magnitude as in colour; just such light constitutes also the still higher heavenly BODIES which, however, like clear air, are invisible because of the subtle texture and unresisting transparency of their material substance and also by their very distance. Enneads: II I

In sum, then, no outside body is necessary to the heavens to ensure their permanence – or to produce their circular movement, for it has never been shown that their natural path would be the straight line; on the contrary the heavens, by their nature, will either be motionless or move by circle; all other movement indicates outside compulsion. We cannot think, therefore, that the heavenly BODIES stand in need of replenishment; we must not argue from earthly frames to those of the celestial system whose sustaining soul is not the same, whose space is not the same, whose conditions are not those which make restoration necessary in this realm of composite BODIES always in flux: we must recognise that the changes that take place in BODIES here represent a slipping-away from the being (a phenomenon not incident to the celestial sphere) and take place at the dictate of a Principle not dwelling in the higher regions, one not powerful enough to ensure the permanence of the existences in which it is exhibited, one which in its coming into being and in its generative act is but an imitation of an antecedent Kind, and, as we have shown, cannot at every point possess the unchangeable identity of the Intellectual Realm. Enneads: II I

And why not our very BODIES, also? Because the forward path is characteristic of body and because all the body’s impulses are to other ends and because what in us is of this circling nature is hampered in its motion by the clay it bears with it, while in the higher realm everything flows on its course, lightly and easily, with nothing to check it, once there is any principle of motion in it at all. Enneads II,2,

The lower Soul is moved by the higher which, besides encircling and supporting it, actually resides in whatsoever part of it has thrust upwards and attained the spheres. The lower then, ringed round by the higher and answering its call, turns and tends towards it; and this upward tension communicates motion to the material frame in which it is involved: for if a single point in a spheric mass is in any degree moved, without being drawn away from the rest, it moves the whole, and the sphere is set in motion. Something of the same kind happens in the case of our BODIES: the unspatial movement of the Soul – in happiness, for instance, or at the idea of some pleasant event – sets up a spatial movement in the body: the Soul, attaining in its own region some good which increases its sense of life, moves towards what pleases it; and so, by force of the union established in the order of nature, it moves the body, in the body’s region, that is in space. Enneads II,2,

In that case they can purvey only heat or cold – if cold from the stars can be thought of – that is to say, any communication from them will affect only our bodily nature, since all they have to communicate to us is merely corporeal. This implies that no considerable change can be caused in the BODIES affected since emanations merely corporeal cannot differ greatly from star to star, and must, moreover, blend upon earth into one collective resultant: at most the differences would be such as depend upon local position, upon nearness or farness with regard to the centre of influence. This reasoning, of course, is as valid of any cold emanation there may be as of the warm. Enneads II,3,

To the remoter Soul, the pure, sun and stars communicate no baseness. In their efficacy upon the (material) All, they act as parts of it, as ensouled BODIES within it; and they act only upon what is partial; body is the agent while, at the same time, it becomes the vehicle through which is transmitted something of the star’s will and of that authentic Soul in it which is steadfastly in contemplation of the Highest. Enneads II,3,

Any such quality, modified at best from its supreme form, deteriorates again within itself: things of any kind that approach from above, altered by merely leaving their source change further still by their blending with BODIES, with Matter, with each other. Enneads II,3,

To a certain school, body-forms exclusively are the Real Beings; existence is limited to BODIES; there is one only Matter, the stuff underlying the primal-constituents of the Universe: existence is nothing but this Matter: everything is some modification of this; the elements of the Universe are simply this Matter in a certain condition. Enneads II,4,

An additional proof that BODIES must have some substratum different from themselves is found in the changing of the basic-constituents into one another. Notice that the destruction of the elements passing over is not complete – if it were we would have a Principle of Being wrecked in Non-being – nor does an engendered thing pass from utter non-being into Being: what happens is that a new form takes the place of an old. There is, then, a stable element, that which puts off one form to receive the form of the incoming entity. Enneads II,4,

But there are those who, admitting coalescence, confine it to the qualities: to them the material substances of two BODIES are in contact merely, but in this contact of the matter they find footing for the qualities of each. Enneads: II VII.

Their view is plausible because it rejects the notion of total admixture and because it recognizes that the masses of the mixing BODIES must be whittled away if there is to be mixture without any gap, if, that is to say, each substance must be divided within itself through and through for complete interpenetration with the other. Their theory is confirmed by the cases in which two mixed substances occupy a greater space than either singly, especially a space equal to the conjoined extent of each: for, as they point out, in an absolute interpenetration the infusion of the one into the other would leave the occupied space exactly what it was before and, where the space occupied is not increased by the juxtaposition, they explain that some expulsion of air has made room for the incoming substance. They ask further, how a minor quantity of one substance can be spread out so as to interpenetrate a major quantity of another. In fact they have a multitude of arguments. Enneads: II VII.

When there is an increase in the space occupied, nothing refutes the explanation – however unsatisfying – that this is a necessary consequence of two BODIES bringing to a common stock their magnitude equally with their other attributes: size is as permanent as any other property; and, exactly as from the blending of qualities there results a new form of thing, the combination of the two, so we find a new magnitude; the blending gives us a magnitude representing each of the two. But at this point the others will answer, “If you mean that substance lies side by side with substance and mass with mass, each carrying its quantum of magnitude, you are at one with us: if there were complete transfusion, one substance sinking its original magnitude in the other, we would have no longer the case of two lines joined end to end by their terminal points and thus producing an increased extension; we would have line superimposed upon line with, therefore, no increase.” Enneads: II VII.

Still more unreasonably: There are men, bound to human BODIES and subject to desire, grief, anger, who think so generously of their own faculty that they declare themselves in contact with the Intelligible World, but deny that the sun possesses a similar faculty less subject to influence, to disorder, to change; they deny that it is any wiser than we, the late born, hindered by so many cheats on the way towards truth. Enneads: II VIII.

They first maintain that the Soul and a certain “Wisdom” (Sophia) declined and entered this lower sphere though they leave us in doubt of whether the movement originated in Soul or in this Sophia of theirs, or whether the two are the same to them – then they tell us that the other Souls came down in the descent and that these members of Sophia took to themselves BODIES, human BODIES, for example. Enneads: II VIII.

And yet to conceive the vast span of the Heavens – to be great in that degree – to devise the obliquity of the Zodiac and the circling path of all the celestial BODIES beneath it, and this earth of ours – and all in such a way that reason can be given for the plan – this could never be the work of an Image; it tells of that Power (the All-Soul) next to the very Highest Beings. Enneads: II VIII.

Besides, in this slighting of the Mundane Gods and the world, the honour they profess for the gods of the Intellectual Sphere becomes an inconsistency; Where we love, our hearts are warm also to the Kin of the beloved; we are not indifferent to the children of our friend. Now every Soul is a child of that Father; but in the heavenly BODIES there are Souls, intellective, holy, much closer to the Supernal Beings than are ours; for how can this Kosmos be a thing cut off from That and how imagine the gods in it to stand apart? But of this matter we have treated elsewhere: here we urge that where there is contempt for the Kin of the Supreme the knowledge of the Supreme itself is merely verbal. Enneads: II VIII.

In other words: two people inhabit the one stately house; one of them declaims against its plan and against its Architect, but none the less maintains his residence in it; the other makes no complaint, asserts the entire competency of the Architect and waits cheerfully for the day when he may leave it, having no further need of a house: the malcontent imagines himself to be the wiser and to be the readier to leave because he has learned to repeat that the walls are of soulless stone and timber and that the place falls far short of a true home; he does not see that his only distinction is in not being able to bear with necessity assuming that his conduct, his grumbling, does not cover a secret admiration for the beauty of those same “stones.” As long as we have BODIES we must inhabit the dwellings prepared for us by our good sister the Soul in her vast power of labourless creation. Enneads: II VIII.

Attaining to something of this immunity, we begin to reproduce within ourselves the Soul of the vast All and of the heavenly BODIES: when we are come to the very closest resemblance, all the effort of our fervid pursuit will be towards that goal to which they also tend; their contemplative vision becomes ours, prepared as we are, first by natural disposition and afterwards by all this training, for that state which is theirs by the Principle of their Being. Enneads: II VIII.

As for Things of Process – or for Eternal Existents whose Act is not eternally invariable – we must hold that these are due to Cause; Causelessness is quite inadmissible; we can make no place here for unwarranted “slantings,” for sudden movement of BODIES apart from any initiating power, for precipitate spurts in a soul with nothing to drive it into the new course of action. Such causelessness would bind the Soul under an even sterner compulsion, no longer master of itself, but at the mercy of movements apart from will and cause. Something willed – within itself or without – something desired, must lead it to action; without motive it can have no motion. Enneads: III I

Material entities exposed to all this onslaught may very well be under compulsion to yield to whatsoever the atoms may bring: but would anyone pretend that the acts and states of a soul or mind could be explained by any atomic movements? How can we imagine that the onslaught of an atom, striking downwards or dashing in from any direction, could force the soul to definite and necessary reasonings or impulses or into any reasonings, impulses or thoughts at all, necessary or otherwise? And what of the soul’s resistance to bodily states? What movement of atoms could compel one man to be a geometrician, set another studying arithmetic or astronomy, lead a third to the philosophic life? In a word, if we must go, like soulless BODIES, wherever BODIES push and drive us, there is an end to our personal act and to our very existence as living beings. Enneads: III I

But perhaps the explanation of every particular act or event is rather that they are determined by the spheric movement – the Phora – and by the changing position of the heavenly BODIES as these stand at setting or rising or in mid-course and in various aspects with each other. Enneads: III I

Augury, it is urged, is able from these indications to foretell what is to happen not merely to the universe as a whole, but even to individuals, and this not merely as regards external conditions of fortune but even as to the events of the mind. We observe, too, how growth or check in other orders of beings – animals and Plants – is determined by their sympathetic relations with the heavenly BODIES and how widely they are influenced by them, how, for example, the various countries show a different produce according to their situation on the earth and especially their lie towards the sun. And the effect of place is not limited to plants and animals; it rules human beings too, determining their appearance, their height and colour, their mentality and their desires, their pursuits and their moral habit. Thus the universal circuit would seem to be the monarch of the All. Enneads: III I

Now a first answer to this theory is that its advocates have merely devised another shift to immolate to the heavenly BODIES all that is ours, our acts of will and our states, all the evil in us, our entire personality; nothing is allowed to us; we are left to be stones set rolling, not men, not beings whose nature implies a task. Enneads: III I

But the Souls that enter into brute BODIES, are they controlled by some thing less than this presiding Spirit? No: theirs is still a Spirit, but an evil or a foolish one. Enneads III,4,

And the Souls that attain to the highest? Of these higher Souls some live in the world of Sense, some above it: and those in the world of Sense inhabit the Sun or another of the planetary BODIES; the others occupy the fixed Sphere (above the planetary) holding the place they have merited through having lived here the superior life of reason. Enneads III,4,

But what participation can the Celestials have in Matter, and in what Matter? Certainly none in bodily Matter; that would make them simply living things of the order of sense. And if, even, they are to invest themselves in BODIES of air or of fire, the nature must have already been altered before they could have any contact with the corporeal. The Pure does not mix, unmediated, with body – though many think that the Celestial-Kind, of its very essence, comports a body aerial or of fire. Enneads III,5,

In fact, it appears to be precisely the most self-sufficing that bear least hardly, least painfully, on other things, while the heaviest and earthiest BODIES – deficient, falling, unable to bear themselves upward – these, by the very down-thrust due to their feebleness, offer the resistance which belongs to the falling habit and to the lack of buoyancy. It is lifeless objects that deal the severest blows; they hit hardest and hurt most; where there is life – that is to say participation in Being – there is beneficence towards the environment, all the greater as the measure of Being is fuller. Enneads III,6,

Again, Movement, which is a sort of life within BODIES, an imitation of true Life, is the more decided where there is the least of body a sign that the waning of Being makes the object affected more distinctly corporeal. Enneads III,6,

In answer: It must, first, be noted that there are a variety of modes in which an object may be said to be present to another or to exist in another. There is a “presence” which acts by changing the object – for good or for ill – as we see in the case of BODIES, especially where there is life. But there is also a “presence” which acts, towards good or ill, with no modification of the object, as we have indicated in the case of the Soul. Then there is the case represented by the stamping of a design upon wax, where the “presence” of the added pattern causes no modification in the substance nor does its obliteration diminish it. And there is the example of Light whose presence does not even bring change of pattern to the object illuminated. A stone becoming cold does not change its nature in the process; it remains the stone it was. A drawing does not cease to be a drawing for being coloured. Enneads III,6,

Holding, as he does, that it is the patterns displayed upon Matter that cause all experience in living BODIES while the Matter itself remains unaffected, he chooses this way of stating its immutability, leaving us to make out for ourselves that those very patterns impressed upon it do not comport any experience, any modification, in itself. Enneads III,6,

In the case, no doubt, of the living BODIES that take one pattern or shape after having borne another, it might be said that there was a change, the variation of shape being made verbally equivalent to a real change: but since Matter is essentially without shape or magnitude, the appearing of shape upon it can by no freedom of phrase be described as a change within it. On this point one must have “a rule for thick and thin” one may safely say that the underlying Kind contains nothing whatever in the mode commonly supposed. Enneads III,6,

In BODIES, necessarily compounds, Magnitude though not a determined Magnitude must be present as one of the constituents; it is implied in the very notion of body; but Matter – not a Body – excludes even undetermined Magnitude. Enneads III,6,

The entity, therefore, described as “consisting of the undivided soul and of the soul divided among BODIES,” contains a soul which is at once above and below, attached to the Supreme and yet reaching down to this sphere, like a radius from a centre. Enneads: IV I

So far we have the primarily indivisible – supreme among the Intellectual and Authentically Existent – and we have its contrary, the Kind definitely divisible in things of sense; but there is also another Kind, of earlier rank than the sensible yet near to it and resident within it – an order, not, like body, primarily a thing of part, but becoming so upon incorporation. The BODIES are separate, and the ideal form which enters them is correspondingly sundered while, still, it is present as one whole in each of its severed parts, since amid that multiplicity in which complete individuality has entailed complete partition, there is a permanent identity; we may think of colour, qualities of all kinds, some particular shape, which can be present in many unrelated objects at the one moment, each entire and yet with no community of experience among the various manifestations. In the case of such ideal-forms we may affirm complete partibility. Enneads IV,2,

In whatsoever BODIES it occupies – even the vastest of all, that in which the entire universe is included – it gives itself to the whole without abdicating its unity. Enneads IV,2,

Itself devoid of mass, it is present to all mass: it exists here and yet is There, and this not in distinct phases but with unsundered identity: thus it is “parted and not parted,” or, better, it has never known partition, never become a parted thing, but remains a self-gathered integral, and is “parted among BODIES” merely in the sense that BODIES, in virtue of their own sundered existence, cannot receive it unless in some partitive mode; the partition, in other words, is an occurrence in body not in soul. Enneads IV,2,

This is the deeper meaning of the profound passage (in the Timaeus), where we read “By blending the impartible, eternally unchanging essence with that in division among BODIES, he produced a third form of essence partaking of both qualities.” Enneads IV,2,

Soul, therefore, is, in this definite sense, one and many; the Ideal-Form resident in body is many and one; BODIES themselves are exclusively many; the Supreme is exclusively one. Enneads IV,2,

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,

We have already stated that the one<one soul is also multiple; and we have dealt with the different forms of relationship between part and whole: we have investigated the different degrees existing within soul; we may now add, briefly, that differences might be induced, also, by the BODIES with which the soul has to do, and, even more, by the character and mental operations carried over from the conduct of the previous lives. “The life-choice made by a soul has a correspondence” – we read – “with its former lives.” Enneads IV,3,

The souls peering forth from the Intellectual Realm descend first to the heavens and there put on a body; this becomes at once the medium by which as they reach out more and more towards magnitude (physical extension) they proceed to BODIES progressively more earthy. Some even plunge from heaven to the very lowest of corporeal forms; others pass, stage by stage, too feeble to lift towards the higher the burden they carry, weighed downwards by their heaviness and forgetfulness. Enneads IV,3,

As for the differences among them, these are due to variation in the BODIES entered, or to the accidents of life, or to upbringing, or to inherent peculiarities of temperament, or to all these influences together, or to specific combinations of them. Enneads IV,3,

But if souls in the Supreme operate without reasoning, how can they be called reasoning souls? One answer might be that they have the power of deliberating to happy issue, should occasion arise: but all is met by repudiating the particular kind of reasoning intended (the earthly and discursive type); we may represent to ourselves a reasoning that flows uninterruptedly from the Intellectual-Principle in them, an inherent state, an enduring activity, an assertion that is real; in this way they would be users of reason even when in that overworld. We certainly cannot think of them, it seems to me, as employing words when, though they may occupy BODIES in the heavenly region, they are essentially in the Intellectual: and very surely the deliberation of doubt and difficulty which they practise here must be unknown to them There; all their act must fall into place by sheer force of their nature; there can be no question of commanding or of taking counsel; they will know, each, what is to be communicated from another, by present consciousness. Even in our own case here, eyes often know what is not spoken; and There all is pure, every being is, as it were, an eye, nothing is concealed or sophisticated, there is no need of speech, everything is seen and known. As for the Celestials (the Daimones) and souls in the air, they may well use speech; for all such are simply Animate (= Beings). Enneads IV,3,

A soul that has descended from the Intellectual region to the celestial and there comes to rest, may very well be understood to recognize many other souls known in its former state supposing that, as we have said, it retains recollection of much that it knew here. This recognition would be natural if the BODIES with which those souls are vested in the celestial must reproduce the former appearance; supposing the spherical form (of the stars inhabited by souls in the mid-realm) means a change of appearance, recognition would go by character, by the distinctive quality of personality: this is not fantastic; conditions changing need not mean a change of character. If the souls have mutual conversation, this too would mean recognition. Enneads IV,4,

So it is with the stars. They pass from point to point, but they move on their own affairs and not for the sake of traversing the space they actually cover; the vision of the things that appear on the way, the journey by, nothing of this is their concern: their passing this or that is of accident not of essence, and their intention is to greater objects: moreover each of them journeys, unchangeably, the same unchanging way; and again, there is no question to them of the time they spend in any given section of the journey, even supposing time division to be possible in the case. All this granted, nothing makes it necessary that they should have any memory of places or times traversed. Besides this life of the ensouled stars is one identical thing (since they are one in the All-Soul) so that their very spatial movement is pivoted upon identity and resolves itself into a movement not spatial but vital, the movement of a single living being whose act is directed to itself, a being which to anything outside is at rest, but is in movement by dint of the inner life it possesses, the eternal life. Or we may take the comparison of the movement of the heavenly BODIES to a choral dance; if we think of it as a dance which comes to rest at some given period, the entire dance, accomplished from beginning to end, will be perfect while at each partial stage it was imperfect: but if the dance is a thing of eternity, it is in eternal perfection. And if it is in eternal perfection, it has no points of time and place at which it will achieve perfection; it will, therefore, have no concern about attaining to any such points: it will, therefore, make no measurements of time or place; it will have, therefore, no memory of time and place. Enneads IV,4,

If the stars live a blessed life in their vision of the life inherent in their souls, and if, by force of their souls’ tendency to become one, and by the light they cast from themselves upon the entire heavens, they are like the strings of a lyre which, being struck in tune, sing a melody in some natural scale… if this is the way the heavens, as one, are moved, and the component parts in their relation to the whole – the sidereal system moving as one, and each part in its own way, to the same purpose, though each, too, hold its own place – then our doctrine is all the more surely established; the life of the heavenly BODIES is the more clearly an unbroken unity. Enneads IV,4,

But when two distinct things become one in an artificial unity, there is a probable source of pain to them in the mere fact that they were inapt to partnership. This does not, of course, refer to two BODIES; that is a question of one nature; and I am speaking of two natures. When one distinct nature seeks to associate itself with another, a different, order of being – the lower participating in the higher, but unable to take more than a faint trace of it – then the essential duality becomes also a unity, but a unity standing midway between what the lower was and what it cannot absorb, and therefore a troubled unity; the association is artificial and uncertain, inclining now to this side and now to that in ceaseless vacillation; and the total hovers between high and low, telling, downward bent, of misery but, directed to the above, of longing for unison. Enneads IV,4,

Smelling, tasting flavours (and such animal perceptions) may perhaps be described as mere accessories, distractions of the soul, while seeing and hearing would belong to the sun and the other heavenly BODIES as incidentals to their being. This would not be unreasonable if seeing and hearing are means by which they apply themselves to their function. Enneads IV,4,

How could it pass out of being, a thing that once has been? But what really was it? We must remember that what we know as colour belongs to BODIES by the fact that they throw off light, yet when corruptible BODIES are transformed the colour disappears and we no more ask where the colour of a burned-out fire is than where its shape is. Enneads IV,4,

May we not think that, similarly, the light belonging to BODIES that have been dissolved remains in being while the solid total, made up of all that is characteristic, disappears? It might be said that the seeing is merely the sequel to some law (of our own nature), so that what we call qualities do not actually exist in the substances. Enneads IV,4,

But this is to make the qualities indestructible and not dependent upon the composition of the body; it would no longer be the Reason-Principles within the sperm that produce, for instance, the colours of a bird’s variegated plumage; these principles would merely blend and place them, or if they produced them would draw also on the full store of colours in the sky, producing in the sense, mainly, of showing in the formed BODIES something very different from what appears in the heavens. Enneads IV,4,

But whatever we may think on this doubtful point, if, as long as the BODIES remain unaltered, the light is constant and unsevered, then it would seem natural that, on the dissolution of the body, the light – both that in immediate contact and any other attached to that – should pass away at the same moment, unseen in the going as in the coming. Enneads IV,4,

In view of all this it is especially necessary to study the question with which we began, that of memory in the heavenly BODIES. Enneads IV,4,

We have, then, to attempt to show: firstly, how acts implying memory in the heavenly BODIES are to be reconciled with our system as distinguished from those others which allow them memory as a matter of course; secondly, what vindication of those gods of the heavenly spheres is possible in the matter of seemingly anomalous acts – a question which philosophy cannot ignore – then too, since the charge goes so far, we must ask whether credence is to be given to those who hold that the entire heavenly system can be put under spell by man’s skill and audacity: our discussion will also deal with the spirit-beings and how they may be thought to minister to these ends – unless indeed the part played by the Celestials prove to be settled by the decision upon the first questions. Enneads IV,4,

When I speak of the act and experience of the All I mean the total effect of the entire kosmic circuit upon itself and upon its members: for by its motion it sets up certain states both within itself and upon its parts, upon the BODIES that move within it and upon all that it communicates to those other parts of it, the things of our earth. Enneads IV,4,

The action of part upon part is manifest; there are the relations and operations of the sun, both towards the other spheres and towards the things of earth; and again relations among elements of the sun itself, of other heavenly BODIES, of earthly things and of things in the other stars, demand investigation. Enneads IV,4,

The changing configurations within the All could not fail to be produced as they are, since the moving BODIES are not of equal speed. Enneads IV,4,

But we must give some explanation of these powers. The matter requires a more definite handling. How can there be a difference of power between one triangular configuration and another? How can there be the exercise of power from man to man; under what law, and within what limits? The difficulty is that we are unable to attribute causation either to the BODIES of the heavenly beings or to their wills: their BODIES are excluded because the product transcends the causative power of body, their will because it would be unseemly to suppose divine beings to produce unseemliness. Enneads IV,4,

In all the efficacy of the sun and other stars upon earthly matters we can but believe that though the heavenly body is intent upon the Supreme yet – to keep to the sun – its warming of terrestrial things, and every service following upon that, all springs from itself, its own act transmitted in virtue of soul, the vastly efficacious soul of Nature. Each of the heavenly BODIES, similarly, gives forth a power, involuntary, by its mere radiation: all things become one entity, grouped by this diffusion of power, and so bring about wide changes of condition; thus the very groupings have power since their diversity produces diverse conditions; that the grouped beings themselves have also their efficiency is clear since they produce differently according to the different membership of the groups. Enneads IV,4,

The Universe is immensely varied, the container of all the Reason-Principles and of infinite and diverse efficacies. In man, we are told, the eye has its power, and the bones have their varied powers, and so with each separate part of hand and of foot; and there is no member or organ without its own definite function, some separate power of its own – a diversity of which we can have no notion unless our studies take that direction. What is true of man must be true of the universe, and much more, since all this order is but a representation of the higher: it must contain an untellably wonderful variety of powers, with which, of course, the BODIES moving through the heavens will be most richly endowed. Enneads IV,4,

Thus the stars, in so far as they are parts, can be affected and yet are immune on various counts; their will, like that of the All, is untouched, just as their BODIES and their characteristic natures are beyond all reach of harm; if they give by means of their souls, their souls lose nothing; their BODIES remain unchanged or, if there is ebb or inflow, it is of something going unfelt and coming unawares. Enneads IV,4,

Dense BODIES, such as clay, actually prevent sight; the less material the intervening substance is, the more clearly we see; the intervening substance, then, is a hindrance, or, if not that, at least not a help. Enneads IV,5,

If the severance of the air by such BODIES leaves it unaffected, why must there be any severance before the images of sight can reach us? And, further, once we reject the theory that these images reach us by way of some outstreaming from the objects seen, there is no reason to think of the air being affected and passing on to us, in a progression of impression, what has been impressed upon itself. Enneads IV,5,

Perhaps, on the other hand, the intervenient is modified only by the accident of its midway position, so that, failing any intervenient, whatsoever sound two BODIES in clash might make would impinge without medium upon our sense? Still air is necessary; there could be no sound in the absence of the air set vibrating in the first movement, however different be the case with the intervenient from that onwards to the perception point. Enneads IV,5,

The air would thus appear to be the dominant in the production of sound: two BODIES would clash without even an incipient sound, but that the air, struck in their rapid meeting and hurled outward, passes on the movement successively till it reaches the ears and the sense of hearing. Enneads IV,5,

The light, then, raying from BODIES is an outgoing activity of a luminous body; the light within luminous BODIES – understand; such as are primarily luminous – is the essential being embraced under the idea of that body. When such a body is brought into association with Matter, its activity produces colour: when there is no such association, it does not give colour – it gives merely an incipient on which colour might be formed – for it belongs to another being (primal light) with which it retains its link, unable to desert from it, or from its (inner) activity. Enneads IV,5,

And when each single constituent is taken as a thing apart, it is still not a unity; for it is divisible into shape and matter, the duality without which BODIES at their very simplest cannot cohere. Enneads IV,7,

Now: of necessity life is inherent to soul: this material entity, then, which we call soul must have life ingrained within it; but (being a composite as by hypothesis, material) it must be made up of two or more BODIES; that life, then, will be vested, either in each and all of those BODIES or in one of them to the exclusion of the other or others; if this be not so, then there is no life present anywhere. Enneads IV,7,

If any one of them contains this ingrained life, that one is the soul. But what sort of an entity have we there; what is this body which of its own nature possesses soul? Fire, air, water, earth, are in themselves soulless – whenever soul is in any of them, that life is borrowed – and there are no other forms of body than these four: even the school that believes there are has always held them to be BODIES, not souls, and to be without life. Enneads IV,7,

All BODIES are in ceaseless process of dissolution; how can the kosmos be made over to any one of them without being turned into a senseless haphazard drift? This pneuma – orderless except under soul – how can it contain order, reason, intelligence? But: given soul, all these material things become its collaborators towards the coherence of the kosmos and of every living being, all the qualities of all the separate objects converging to the purposes of the universe: failing soul in the things of the universe, they could not even exist, much less play their ordered parts. Enneads IV,7,

If sensation is apprehension by means of the soul’s employment of the body, intellection cannot be a similar use of the body or it would be identical with sensation. If then intellection is apprehension apart from body, much more must there be a distinction between the body and the intellective principle: sensation for objects of sense, intellection for the intellectual object. And even if this be rejected, it must still be admitted that there do exist intellections of intellectual objects and perceptions of objects not possessing magnitude: how, we may then ask, can a thing of magnitude know a thing that has no magnitude, or how can the partless be known by means of what has parts? We will be told “By some partless part.” But, at this, the intellective will not be body: for contact does not need a whole; one point suffices. If then it be conceded – and it cannot be denied – that the primal intellections deal with objects completely incorporeal, the principle of intellection itself must know by virtue of being, or becoming, free from body. Even if they hold that all intellection deals with the ideal forms in Matter, still it always takes place by abstraction from the BODIES (in which these forms appear) and the separating agent is the Intellectual-Principle. For assuredly the process by which we abstract circle, triangle, line or point, is not carried through by the aid of flesh or Matter of any kind; in all such acts the soul or mind must separate itself from the material: at once we see that it cannot be itself material. Similarly it will be agreed that, as beauty and justice are things without magnitude, so must be the intellective act that grasps them. Enneads IV,7,

Again: if the Soul is a body, how can we account for its virtues – moral excellence (Sophrosyne), justice, courage and so forth? All these could be only some kind of rarefied body (pneuma), or blood in some form; or we might see courage as a certain resisting power in that pneuma; moral quality would be its happy blending; beauty would lie wholly in the agreeable form of impressions received, such comeliness as leads us to describe people as attractive and beautiful from their bodily appearance. No doubt strength and grace of form go well enough with the idea of rarefied body; but what can this rarefied body want with moral excellence? On the contrary its interest would lie in being comfortable in its environments and contacts, in being warmed or pleasantly cool, in bringing everything smooth and caressing and soft around it: what could it care about a just distribution? Then consider the objects of the soul’s contemplation, virtue and the other Intellectual forms with which it is occupied; are these eternal or are we to think that virtue rises here or there, helps, then perishes? These things must have an author and a source and there, again, we are confronted by something perdurable: the soul’s contemplation, then, must be of the eternal and unchanging, like the concepts of geometry: if eternal and unchanging, these objects are not BODIES: and that which is to receive them must be of equivalent nature: it cannot therefore be body, since all body-nature lacks permanence, is a thing of flux. Enneads IV,7,

A. (sometimes appearing as 9) There are those who insist on the activities observed in BODIES – warming, chilling, thrusting, pressing – and class soul with body, as it were to assure its efficacy. This ignores the double fact that the very BODIES themselves exercise such efficiency by means of the incorporeal powers operating in them, and that these are not the powers we attribute to soul: intellection, perception, reasoning, desire, wise and effective action in all regards, these point to a very different form of being. Enneads IV,7,

In transferring to BODIES the powers of the unembodied, this school leaves nothing to that higher order. And yet that it is precisely in virtue of bodiless powers that BODIES possess their efficiency is clear from certain reflections: It will be admitted that quality and quantity are two different things, that body is always a thing of quantity but not always a thing of quality: matter is not qualified. This admitted, it will not be denied that quality, being a different thing from quantity, is a different thing from body. Obviously quality could not be body when it has not quantity as all body must; and, again, as we have said, body, any thing of mass, on being reduced to fragments, ceases to be what it was, but the quality it possessed remains intact in every particle – for instance the sweetness of honey is still sweetness in each speck – this shows that sweetness and all other qualities are not body. Enneads IV,7,

Further: if the powers in question were BODIES, then necessarily the stronger powers would be large masses and those less efficient small masses: but if there are large masses with small while not a few of the smaller masses manifest great powers, then the efficiency must be vested in something other than magnitude; efficacy, thus, belongs to non-magnitude. Again; Matter, they tell us, remains unchanged as long as it is body, but produces variety upon accepting qualities; is not this proof enough that the entrants (with whose arrival the changes happen) are Reason-Principles and not of the bodily order? They must not remind us that when pneuma and blood are no longer present, animals die: these are necessary no doubt to life, but so are many other things of which none could possibly be soul: and neither pneuma nor blood is present throughout the entire being; but soul is. Enneads IV,7,

Now: if in the admixing of BODIES neither constituent can retain its efficacy, the soul too could no longer be effective within the BODIES; it could but be latent; it will have lost that by which it is soul, just as in an admixture of sweet and bitter the sweet disappears: we have, thus, no soul. Enneads IV,7,

Two BODIES (i.e., by hypothesis, the soul and the human body) are blended, each entire through the entirety of the other; where the one is, the other is also; each occupies an equal extension and each the whole extension; no increase of size has been caused by the juncture: the one body thus inblended can have left in the other nothing undivided. This is no case of mixing in the sense of considerable portions alternating; that would be described as collocation; no; the incoming entity goes through the other to the very minutest point – an impossibility, of course; the less becoming equal to the greater; still, all is traversed throughout and divided throughout. Now if, thus, the inblending is to occur point by point, leaving no undivided material anywhere, the division of the body concerned must have been a division into (geometrical) points: an impossibility. The division is an infinite series – any material particle may be cut in two – and the infinities are not merely potential, they are actual. Enneads IV,7,

That this opinion is untenable has already been shown at length. The soul is a prior (to body), the accord is a secondary to the lyre. Soul rules, guides and often combats the body; as an accord of body it could not do these things. Soul is a real being, accord is not. That due blending (or accord) of the corporeal materials which constitute our frame would be simply health. Each separate part of the body, entering as a distinct entity into the total, would require a distinct soul (its own accord or note), so that there would be many souls to each person. Weightiest of all; before this soul there would have to be another soul to bring about the accord as, in the case of the musical instrument, there is the musician who produces the accord upon the strings by his own possession of the principle on which he tunes them: neither musical strings nor human BODIES could put themselves in tune. Enneads IV,7,

(19) As for the souls of the other living beings, fallen to the degree of entering brute BODIES, these too must be immortal. And if there is in the animal world any other phase of soul, its only possible origin, since it is the life-giver, is, still, that one principle of life: so too with the soul in the vegetal order. Enneads IV,7,

Where we read that the souls or stars stand to their bodily forms as the All to the material forms within it – for these starry BODIES are declared to be members of the soul’s circuit – we are given to understand that the star-souls also enjoy the blissful condition of transcendence and immunity that becomes them. Enneads IV,8,

In order that my feelings should of necessity be yours, the unity would have to be corporeal: only if the two recipient BODIES made one, would the souls feel as one. Enneads IV,8,

But how reconcile this unity with the existence of a reasoning soul, an unreasoning, even a vegetal soul? (It is a question of powers): the indivisible phase is classed as reasoning because it is not in division among BODIES, but there is the later phase, divided among BODIES, but still one thing and distinct only so as to secure sense-perception throughout; this is to be classed as yet another power; and there is the forming and making phase which again is a power. But a variety of powers does not conflict with unity; seed contains many powers and yet it is one thing, and from that unity rises, again, a variety which is also a unity. Enneads IV,8,

But this is simply saying that there is one identical soul dispersed among many BODIES, and that, preceding this, there is yet another not thus dispersed, the source of the soul in dispersion which may be thought of as a widely repeated image of the soul in unity – much as a multitude of seals bear the impression of one ring. By that first mode the soul is a unit broken up into a variety of points: in the second mode it is incorporeal. Similarly if the soul were a condition or modification of body, we could not wonder that this quality – this one thing from one source – should be present in many objects. The same reasoning would apply if soul were an effect (or manifestation) of the Conjoint. Enneads IV,8,

If on the contrary each is a principle, then the effective powers become a matter of chance; under what compulsion are they to hold together and act with one mind towards that work of unity, the harmony of the entire heavenly system? Again what can make it necessary that the material BODIES of the heavenly system be equal in number to the Intellectual moving principles, and how can these incorporeal Beings be numerically many when there is no Matter to serve as the basis of difference? For these reasons the ancient philosophers that ranged themselves most closely to the school of Pythagoras and of his later followers and to that of Pherekudes, have insisted upon this Nature, some developing the subject in their writings while others treated of it merely in unwritten discourses, some no doubt ignoring it entirely. Enneads: V I

All that we see, and describe as having existence, we know to be compound; hand-wrought or compacted by nature, nothing is simplex. Now the hand-wrought, with its metal or stone or wood, is not realized out of these materials until the appropriate craft has produced statue, house or bed, by imparting the particular idea from its own content. Similarly with natural forms of being; those including several constituents, compound BODIES as we call them, may be analysed into the materials and the Idea imposed upon the total; the human being, for example, into soul and body; and the human body into the four elements. Finding everything to be a compound of Matter and shaping principle – since the Matter of the elements is of itself shapeless – you will enquire whence this forming idea comes; and you will ask whether in the soul we recognise a simplex or whether this also has constituents, something representing Matter and something else – the Intellectual-Principle in it – representing Idea, the one corresponding to the shape actually on the statue, the other to the artist giving the shape. Enneads V,8,

Against this theory there is much to be urged, but particularly against this posing of a common Something and a single all-embracing genus. This Something, it may be submitted, is unintelligible to themselves, is indefinable, and does not account either for BODIES or for the bodiless. Moreover, no room is left for a differentia by which this Something may be distinguished. Besides, this common Something is either existent or non-existent: if existent, it must be one or other of its (four) species; – if non-existent, the existent is classed under the non-existent. But the objections are countless; we must leave them for the present and consider the several heads of the division. Enneads: VI I

Again, how can Matter be a first-principle, seeing that it is body? Body must necessarily be a plurality, since all BODIES are composite of Matter and Quality. If however body in this case is to be understood in some different way, then Matter is identified with body only by an equivocation. Enneads: VI I

But is it not a paradox that, while Matter, the Substrate, is to them an existence, BODIES should not have more claim to existence, the universe yet more, and not merely a claim grounded on the reality of one of its parts? It is no less paradoxical that the living form should owe existence not to its soul but to its Matter only, the soul being but an affection of Matter and posterior to it. From what source then did Matter receive ensoulment? Whence, in short, is soul’s entity derived? How does it occur that Matter sometimes turns into BODIES, while another part of it turns into Soul? Even supposing that Form might come to it from elsewhere, that accession of Quality to Matter would account not for Soul, but simply for organized body soulless. If, on the contrary, there is something which both moulds Matter and produces Soul, then prior to the produced there must be Soul the producer. Enneads: VI I

This philosophy began by identifying the Real with body; then, viewing with apprehension the transmutations of BODIES, decided that Reality was that which is permanent beneath the superficial changes – which is much as if one regarded space as having more title to Reality than the BODIES within it, on the principle that space does not perish with them. They found a permanent in space, but it was a fault to take mere permanence as in itself a sufficient definition of the Real; the right method would have been to consider what properties must characterize Reality, by the presence of which properties it has also that of unfailing permanence. Thus if a shadow had permanence, accompanying an object through every change, that would not make it more real than the object itself. The sensible universe, as including the Substrate and a multitude of attributes, will thus have more claim to be Reality entire than has any one of its component entities (such as Matter): and if the sensible were in very truth the whole of Reality, Matter, the mere base and not the total, could not be that whole. Enneads: VI I

A first point demanding consideration: Bodies – those, for example, of animals and plants – are each a multiplicity founded on colour and shape and magnitude, and on the forms and arrangement of parts: yet all these elements spring from a unity. Now this unity must be either Unity-Absolute or some unity less thorough-going and complete, but necessarily more complete than that which emerges, so to speak, from the body itself; this will be a unity having more claim to reality than the unity produced from it, for divergence from unity involves a corresponding divergence from Reality. Since, thus, BODIES take their rise from unity, but not “unity” in the sense of the complete unity or Unity-Absolute – for this could never yield discrete plurality – it remains that they be derived from a unity Pluralized. But the creative principle (in BODIES) is Soul: Soul therefore is a pluralized unity. Enneads VI,2,

Our first observations must be directed to what passes in the Sensible realm for Substance. It is, we shall agree, only by analogy that the nature manifested in BODIES is designated as Substance, and by no means because such terms as Substance or Being tally with the notion of BODIES in flux; the proper term would be Becoming. Enneads VI,3,

But Becoming is not a uniform nature; BODIES comprise under the single head simples and composites, together with accidentals or consequents, these last themselves capable of separate classification. Enneads VI,3,

But what, we may ask, have Matter and Form in common? In what sense can Matter be conceived as a genus, and what will be its species? What is the differentia of Matter? In which genus, Matter or Form, are we to rank the composite of both? It may be this very composite which constitutes the Substance manifested in BODIES, neither of the components by itself answering to the conception of Body: how, then, can we rank them in one and the same genus as the composite? How can the elements of a thing be brought within the same genus as the thing itself? Yet if we begin with BODIES, our first-principles will be compounds. Enneads VI,3,

But what are we to posit as its species? how divide this genus? The genus as a whole must be identified with body. Bodies may be divided into the characteristically material and the organic: the material BODIES comprise fire, earth, water, air; the organic the BODIES of plants and animals, these in turn admitting of formal differentiation. Enneads VI,3,

The next step is to find the species of earth and of the other elements, and in the case of organic BODIES to distinguish plants according to their forms, and the BODIES of animals either by their habitations – on the earth, in the earth, and similarly for the other elements – or else as light, heavy and intermediate. Some BODIES, we shall observe, stand in the middle of the universe, others circumscribe it from above, others occupy the middle sphere: in each case we shall find BODIES different in shape, so that the BODIES of the living beings of the heavens may be differentiated from those of the other elements. Enneads VI,3,

Once we have classified BODIES into the four species, we are ready to combine them on a different principle, at the same time intermingling their differences of place, form and constitution; the resultant combinations will be known as fiery or earthy on the basis of the excess or predominance of some one element. Enneads VI,3,

Another method of division is possible: substances may be classed as hot-dry, dry-cold, cold-moist, or however we choose to make the coupling. We may then proceed to the combination and blending of these couples, either halting at that point and going no further than the compound, or else subdividing by habitation – on the earth, in the earth – or by form and by the differences exhibited by living beings, not qua living, but in their BODIES viewed as instruments of life. Enneads VI,3,

Differentiation by form or shape is no more out of place than a division based on qualities – heat, cold and the like. If it be objected that qualities go to make BODIES what they are, then, we reply, so do blendings, colours, shapes. Since our discussion is concerned with Sensible Substance, it is not strange that it should turn upon distinctions related to sense-perception: this Substance is not Being pure and simple, but the Sensible Being which we call the Universe. Enneads VI,3,

We may be told that we have distinguished between simple and composite BODIES, even ranking them as opposites. But our distinction, we reply, was between material and organic BODIES and raised no question of the composite. In fact, there exists no means of opposing the composite to the simple; it is necessary to determine the simples in the first stage of division, and then, combining them on the basis of a distinct underlying principle, to differentiate the composites in virtue of their places and shapes, distinguishing for example the heavenly from the earthly. Enneads VI,3,

But if the Authentic Being is to be kept unattached in order to remove the difficulty of integral omnipresence, the same considerations must apply equally to the souls; we would have to admit that they cannot be integrally omnipresent in the BODIES they are described as occupying; either, soul must be distributed, part to body’s part, or it is lodged entire at some one point in the body giving forth some of its powers to the other points; and these very powers, again, present the same difficulty. Enneads VI,4,

If in such a partition of the unity, that which entered into each participant were an entire – always identical with the first – then, in the progressive severance, the firsts would become numerous, each particular becoming a first: and then what prevents these many firsts from reconstituting the collective unity? Certainly not the BODIES they have entered, for those firsts cannot be present in the material masses as their Forms if they are to remain identical with the First from which they come. On the other hand, taking the part conceived as present in the multiple to be simply a power (emanating from the First), at once such a part ceases to be the unity; we have then to ask how these powers come to be cut off, to have abandoned their origin; they certainly have not moved away with no purpose in their movement. Enneads VI,4,

The sound is the clearer illustration: the form conveyed is an entirety over all the air space, for unless the spoken word were entire at every point, for every ear to catch the whole alike, the same effect could not be made upon every listener; the sound, evidently, is not strung along the air, section to section. Why, then, need we hesitate to think of soul as a thing not extended in broken contact, part for part, but omnipresent within the range of its presence, indwelling in totality at every point throughout the All? Entered into such BODIES as are apt to it, the soul is like the spoken sound present in the air, before that entry, like the speaker about to speak – though even embodied it remains at once the speaker and the silent. Enneads VI,4,

But where does this thing lie? Is it existent only in the defining thought, so to speak? No; it is also a thing, though a thing of the Intellectual. All that belongs to that order is at once an Intellectual and in some degree the concrete thing. There is a position, as well as a manner of being, for all configurations, for surface, for solid. And certainly the configurations are not of our devising; for example, the configurations of the universe are obviously antecedent to ourselves; so it must be with all the configurations of the things of nature; before the bodily reproductions all must exist There, without configuration, primal configurations. For these primals are not shapes in something; self-belonging, they are perfect without extension; only the extended needs the external. In the sphere of Real-Being the configuration is always a unity; it becomes discrete either in the Living-Form or immediately before: I say “becomes discrete” not in the sense that it takes magnitude There but that it is broken apart for the purpose of the Living-Form and is allotted to the BODIES within that Form – for instance, to Fire There, the Intellectual Pyramid. And because the Ideal-Form is There, the fire of this sphere seeks to produce that configuration against the check of Matter: and so of all the rest as we read in the account of the realm of sense. Enneads VI,6,