Intellectual Beauty

It is a principle with us that one who has attained to the vision of the INTELLECTUAL BEAUTY and grasped the beauty of the Authentic Intellect will be able also to come to understand the Father and Transcendent of that Divine Being. It concerns us, then, to try to see and say, for ourselves and as far as such matters may be told, how the Beauty of the divine Intellect and of the Intellectual Kosmos may be revealed to contemplation. Enneads V,8,1

When each of the entities bound up with the pseudo-substance is taken apart from the rest, the name of Quality is given to that one among them, by which without pointing to essence or quantity or motion we signify the distinctive mark, the type or aspect of a thing – for example, the beauty or ugliness of a body. This beauty – need we say? – is identical in name only with INTELLECTUAL BEAUTY: it follows that the term “Quality” as applied to the Sensible and the Intellectual is necessarily equivocal; even blackness and whiteness are different in the two spheres. Enneads VI,3,16