kosmos

First tractate – On the KOSMOS or on the heavenly system. Enneads: II I

In the Timaeus, the creating God bestows the essential of the Soul, but it is the divinities moving in the KOSMOS (the stars) that infuse the powerful affections holding from Necessity our impulse and our desire, our sense of pleasure and of pain – and that lower phase of the Soul in which such experiences originate. By this statement our personality is bound up with the stars, whence our Soul (as total of Principle and affections) takes shape; and we are set under necessity at our very entrance into the world: our temperament will be of the stars’ ordering, and so, therefore, the actions which derive from temperament, and all the experiences of a nature shaped to impressions. Enneads II,3,

Ninth tractate – Against those that affirm the creator of the KOSMOS and the KOSMOS itself to be evil: (generally quoted as “Against the gnostics”). Enneads: II VIII.

By derivation from that Authentic Kosmos, one within itself, there subsists this lower KOSMOS, no longer a true unity. Enneads III,2,

There the Intellectual-Principle is a concentrated all – nothing of it distinguished or divided – and in that KOSMOS of unity all souls are concentrated also, with no spatial discrimination. Enneads: IV I

Our opponents after first admitting the unity go on to make our soul dependent on something else, something in which we have no longer the soul of this or that, even of the universe, but a soul of nowhere, a soul belonging neither to the KOSMOS, nor to anything else, and yet vested with all the function inherent to the kosmic soul and to that of every ensouled thing. 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,

As for saying of the Phaedrus. “All that is soul cares for all that is soulless,” this simply tells us that the corporeal kind cannot be controlled – fashioned, set in place or brought into being – by anything but the Soul. And we cannot think that there is one soul whose nature includes this power and another without it. “The perfect soul, that of the All,” we read, “going its lofty journey, operates upon the KOSMOS not by sinking into it, but, as it were, by brooding over it”; and “every perfect soul exercises this governance”; he distinguishes the other, the soul in this sphere as “the soul when its wing is broken.” Enneads IV,3,

As for our being begotten children of the KOSMOS, we answer that in motherhood the entrant soul is distinct, is not the mother’s. Enneads IV,3,

Imagine that a stately and varied mansion has been built; it has never been abandoned by its Architect, who, yet, is not tied down to it; he has judged it worthy in all its length and breadth of all the care that can serve to its Being – as far as it can share in Being – or to its beauty, but a care without burden to its director, who never descends, but presides over it from above: this gives the degree in which the KOSMOS is ensouled, not by a soul belonging to it, but by one present to it; it is mastered not master; not possessor but possessed. The soul bears it up, and it lies within, no fragment of it unsharing. Enneads IV,3,

The KOSMOS is like a net which takes all its life, as far as ever it stretches, from being wet in the water, and has no act of its own; the sea rolls away and the net with it, precisely to the full of its scope, for no mesh of it can strain beyond its set place: the soul is of so far-reaching a nature – a thing unbounded – as to embrace the entire body of the All in the one extension; so far as the universe extends, there soul is; and if the universe had no existence, the extent of soul would be the same; it is eternally what it is. The universe spreads as broad as the presence of soul; the bound of its expansion is the point at which, in its downward egression from the Supreme, it still has soul to bind it in one: it is a shadow as broad as the Reason-Principle proceeding from soul; and that Reason-Principle is of scope to generate a kosmic bulk as vast as lay in the purposes of the Idea (the Divine forming power) which it conveys. Enneads IV,3,

The content of the creative soul includes the Ideal shapes of gods and of all else: and hence it is that the KOSMOS contains all. Enneads IV,3,

We may know this also by the concordance of the Souls with the ordered scheme of the KOSMOS; they are not independent, but, by their descent, they have put themselves in contact, and they stand henceforth in harmonious association with kosmic circuit – to the extent that their fortunes, their life experiences, their choosing and refusing, are announced by the patterns of the stars – and out of this concordance rises as it were one musical utterance: the music, the harmony, by which all is described is the best witness to this truth. Enneads IV,3,

Even the Intellectual-Principle, which is before all the KOSMOS, has, it also, its destiny, that of abiding intact above, and of giving downwards: what it sends down is the particular whose existence is implied in the law of the universal; for the universal broods closely over the particular; it is not from without that the law derives the power by which it is executed; on the contrary the law is given in the entities upon whom it falls; these bear it about with them. Let but the moment arrive, and what it decrees will be brought to act by those beings in whom it resides; they fulfil it because they contain it; it prevails because it is within them; it becomes like a heavy burden, and sets up in them a painful longing to enter the realm to which they are bidden from within. Enneads IV,3,

Thus it comes about that this KOSMOS, lit with many lights, gleaming in its souls, receives still further graces, gifts from here and from there, from the gods of the Supreme, and from those other Intellectual-Principles whose nature it is to ensoul. This is probably the secret of the myth in which, after Prometheus had moulded woman, the other gods heaped gifts upon her, Hephaistos “blending the clay with moisture and bestowing the human voice and the form of a goddess”; Aphrodite bringing her gifts, and the Graces theirs, and other gods other gifts, and finally calling her by the name (Pandora) which tells of gift and of all giving – for all have added something to this formation brought to being by a Promethean, a fore-thinking power. As for the rejection of Prometheus’ gift by after-thought, Epimetheus, what can this signify but that the wiser choice is to remain in the Intellectual realm? Pandora’s creator is fettered, to signify that he is in some sense held by his own creation; such a fettering is external and the release by Hercules tells that there is power in Prometheus, so that he need not remain in bonds. Enneads IV,3,

Take the myth as we may, it is certainly such an account of the bestowal of gifts upon the KOSMOS as harmonizes with our explanation of the universal system. Enneads IV,3,

Then again some have fallen unreservedly into the power of the destiny ruling here: some yielding betimes are betimes too their own: there are those who, while they accept what must be borne, have the strength of self-mastery in all that is left to their own act; they have given themselves to another dispensation: they live by the code of the aggregate of beings, the code which is woven out of the Reason-Principles and all the other causes ruling in the KOSMOS, out of soul-movements and out of laws springing in the Supreme; a code, therefore, consonant with those higher existences, founded upon them, linking their sequents back to them, keeping unshakeably true all that is capable of holding itself set towards the divine nature, and leading round by all appropriate means whatsoever is less natively apt. Enneads IV,3,

But what prevents such a being (from possessing memory in the sense of) perceiving, without variation in itself, such outside changes as, for example, the kosmic periods? Simply the fact that following the changes of the revolving KOSMOS it would have perception of earlier and later: intuition and memory are distinct. Enneads IV,3,

But what way of remembering the Supreme is left if the souls have turned to the sense-known KOSMOS, and are to fall into this sphere of process? They need not fall to the ultimate depth: their downward movement may be checked at some one moment of the way; and as long as they have not touched the lowest of the region of process (the point at which non-being begins) there is nothing to prevent them rising once more. Enneads IV,4,

But Zeus – ordering all, governor, guardian and disposer, possessor for ever of the kingly soul and the kingly intellect, bringing all into being by his providence, and presiding over all things as they come, administering all under plan and system, unfolding the periods of the KOSMOS, many of which stand already accomplished – would it not seem inevitable that, in this multiplicity of concern, Zeus should have memory of all the periods, their number and their differing qualities? Contriving the future, co-ordinating, calculating for what is to be, must he not surely be the chief of all in remembering, as he is chief in producing? Even this matter of Zeus’ memory of the kosmic periods is difficult; it is a question of their being numbered, and of his knowledge of their number. A determined number would mean that the All had a beginning in time (which is not so); if the periods are unlimited, Zeus cannot know the number of his works. Enneads IV,4,

The answer is that he will know all to be one thing existing in virtue of one life for ever: it is in this sense that the All is unlimited, and thus Zeus’ knowledge of it will not be as of something seen from outside but as of something embraced in true knowledge, for this unlimited thing is an eternal indweller within himself – or, to be more accurate, eternally follows upon him – and is seen by an indwelling knowledge; Zeus knows his own unlimited life, and, in that knowledge knows the activity that flows from him to the KOSMOS; but he knows it in its unity not in its process. Enneads IV,4,

But the life in the KOSMOS, the life which carries the leading principle of the universe, still needs elucidation; does it operate without calculation, without searching into what ought to be done? Yes: for what must be stands shaped before the KOSMOS, and is ordered without any setting in order: the ordered things are merely the things that come to be; and the principle that brings them into being is Order itself; this production is an act of a soul linked with an unchangeably established wisdom whose reflection in that soul is Order. It is an unchanging wisdom, and there can therefore be no changing in the soul which mirrors it, not sometimes turned towards it, and sometimes away from it – and in doubt because it has turned away – but an unremitting soul performing an unvarying task. Enneads IV,4,

The leading principle of the universe is a unity – and one that is sovereign without break, not sometimes dominant and sometimes dominated. What source is there for any such multiplicity of leading principles as might result in contest and hesitation? And this governing unity must always desire the one thing: what could bring it to wish now for this and now for that, to its own greater perplexing? But observe: no perplexity need follow upon any development of this soul essentially a unity. The All stands a multiple thing no doubt, having parts, and parts dashing with parts, but that does not imply that it need be in doubt as to its conduct: that soul does not take its essence from its ultimates or from its parts, but from the Primals; it has its source in the First and thence, along an unhindered path, it flows into a total of things, conferring grace, and, because it remains one same thing occupied in one task, dominating. To suppose it pursuing one new object after another is to raise the question whence that novelty comes into being; the soul, besides, would be in doubt as to its action; its very work, the KOSMOS, would be the less well done by reason of the hesitancy which such calculations would entail. Enneads IV,4,

The administration of the KOSMOS is to be thought of as that of a living unit: there is the action determined by what is external, and has to do with the parts, and there is that determined by the internal and by the principle: thus a doctor basing his treatment on externals and on the parts directly affected will often be baffled and obliged to all sorts of calculation, while Nature will act on the basis of principle and need no deliberation. And in so far as the KOSMOS is a conducted thing, its administration and its administrator will follow not the way of the doctor but the way of Nature. Enneads IV,4,

What place, then, is there for reasoning, for calculation, what place for memory, where wisdom and knowledge are eternal, unfailingly present, effective, dominant, administering in an identical process? The fact that the product contains diversity and difference does not warrant the notion that the producer must be subject to corresponding variations. On the contrary, the more varied the product, the more certain the unchanging identity of the producer: even in the single animal the events produced by Nature are many and not simultaneous; there are the periods, the developments at fixed epochs – horns, beard, maturing breasts, the acme of life, procreation – but the principles which initially determined the nature of the being are not thereby annulled; there is process of growth, but no diversity in the initial principle. The identity underlying all the multiplicity is confirmed by the fact that the principle constituting the parent is exhibited unchanged, undiminished, in the offspring. We have reason, then, for thinking that one and the same wisdom envelops both, and that this is the unalterable wisdom of the KOSMOS taken as a whole; it is manifold, diverse and yet simplex, presiding over the most comprehensive of living beings, and in no wise altered within itself by this multiplicity, but stably one Reason-Principle, the concentrated totality of things: if it were not thus all things, it would be a wisdom of the later and partial, not the wisdom of the Supreme. Enneads IV,4,

At this, sense-impressions would aim at utility. They may serve also to knowledge, but that could be service only to some being not living in knowledge but stupefied as the result of a disaster, and the victim of a Lethe calling for constant reminding: they would be useless to any being free from either need or forgetfulness. This This reflection enlarges the enquiry: it is no longer a question of earth alone, but of the whole star-system, all the heavens, the KOSMOS entire. For it would follow that, in the sphere of things not exempt from modification, sense-perception would occur in every part having relation to any other part: in a whole, however – having relation only to itself, immune, universally self-directed and self-possessing – what perception could there be? Granted that the percipient must act through an organ and that this organ must be different from the object perceived, then the universe, as an All, can have (no sensation since it has) no organ distinct from object: it can have self-awareness, as we have; but sense-perception, the constant attendant of another order, it cannot have. Enneads IV,4,

Our problem embraces all act and all experience throughout the entire KOSMOS – whether due to nature, in the current phrase, or effected by art. The natural proceeds, we must hold, from the All towards its members and from the members to the All, or from member to other member: the artificial either remains, as it began, within the limit of the art – attaining finality in the artificial product alone – or is the expression of an art which calls to its aid natural forces and agencies, and so sets up act and experience within the sphere of the natural. Enneads IV,4,

Or, a better statement: the entire KOSMOS puts its entire life into act, moving its major members with its own action and unceasingly setting them in new positions; by the relations thus established, of these members to each other and to the whole, and by the different figures they make together, the minor members in turn are brought under the system as in the movements of some one living being, so that they vary according to the relations, positions, configurations: the beings thus co-ordinated are not the causes; the cause is the coordinating All; at the same time it is not to be thought of as seeking to do one thing and actually doing another, for there is nothing external to it since it is the cause by actually being all: on the one side the configurations, on the other the inevitable effects of those configurations upon a living being moving as a unit and, again, upon a living being (an All) thus by its nature conjoined and concomitant and, of necessity, at once subject and object to its own activities. Enneads IV,4,

We cannot think of the universe as a soulless habitation, however vast and varied, a thing of materials easily told off, kind by kind – wood and stone and whatever else there be, all blending into a KOSMOS: it must be alert throughout, every member living by its own life, nothing that can have existence failing to exist within it. Enneads IV,4,

For, in sum: Firstly, intentions are not to be considered as the operative causes; necessities inherent in the nature of things account for all that comes from the other realm; it is a matter of the inevitable relation of parts, and, besides, all is the sequence to the living existence of a unity. Secondly, there is the large contribution made by the individual. Thirdly, each several communication, good in itself, takes another quality in the resultant combination. Fourthly, the life in the KOSMOS does not look to the individual but to the whole. Finally, there is Matter, the underlie, which being given one thing receives it as something else, and is unable to make the best of what it takes. Enneads IV,4,

No doubt it would be worth enquiry – though we pass it for the present – what would take place if there were another KOSMOS, another living whole having no contact with this one, and the far ridges of our heavens had sight: would our sphere see that other as from a mutually present distance, or could there be no dealing at all from this to that? To return; there is a further consideration showing that sight is not brought about by this alleged modification of the intervenient. Enneads IV,5,

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,

(14) Over against that body, stands the principle which is self-caused, which is all that neither enters into being nor passes away, the principle whose dissolution would mean the end of all things never to be restored if once this had ceased to be, the sustaining principle of things individually, and of this KOSMOS, which owes its maintenance and its ordered system to the soul. Enneads IV,7,

In all these explanations, he finds guilt in the arrival of the soul at body, But treating, in the Timaeus, of our universe he exalts the KOSMOS and entitles it a blessed god, and holds that the soul was given by the goodness of the creator to the end that the total of things might be possessed of intellect, for thus intellectual it was planned to be, and thus it cannot be except through soul. There is a reason, then, why the soul of this All should be sent into it from God: in the same way the soul of each single one of us is sent, that the universe may be complete; it was necessary that all beings of the Intellectual should be tallied by just so many forms of living creatures here in the realm of sense. Enneads IV,8,

Enquiring, then, of Plato as to our own soul, we find ourselves forced to enquire into the nature of soul in general – to discover what there can be in its character to bring it into partnership with body, and, again, what this KOSMOS must be in which, willing unwilling or in any way at all, soul has its activity. Enneads IV,8,

This is how we come to read that our soul, entering into association with that complete soul and itself thus made perfect, walks the lofty ranges, administering the entire KOSMOS, and that as long as it does not secede and is neither inbound to body nor held in any sort of servitude, so long it tranquilly bears its part in the governance of the All, exactly like the world-soul itself; for in fact it suffers no hurt whatever by furnishing body with the power to existence, since not every form of care for the inferior need wrest the providing soul from its own sure standing in the highest. Enneads IV,8,

Everywhere we hear of it as in bitter and miserable durance in body, a victim to troubles and desires and fears and all forms of evil, the body its prison or its tomb, the KOSMOS its cave or cavern. Enneads IV,8,

Thus, if by the content of the sense-world we mean simply the visible objects, then the Supreme contains not only what is in the realm of sense but more: if in the content of the KOSMOS we mean to include Soul and the Soul-things, then all is here that is There. Enneads V,8,

Further, any newcoming entity achieving soul receives mysteriously that same principle which was equally in the previously ensouled; for it is not in the dispensation that a given part of soul situate at some given point should enter here and there; what is thought of as entering was always a self-enclosed entire and, for all the seeming entry, so remains; no real entry is conceivable. If, then, the soul never entered and yet is now seen to be present – present without waiting upon the participant – clearly it is present, here too, without breach of its self-inclusion. This can mean only that the participant came to soul; it lay outside the veritable reality but advanced towards it and so established itself in the KOSMOS of life. But this KOSMOS of life is a self-gathered entire, not divisible into constituent masses but prior to mass; in other words, the participation is of entire in entire. Any newcomer into that KOSMOS of life will participate in it entire. Admitting, then, that this KOSMOS of life is present entire in the universe, it must be similarly entire in each several entity; an identity numerically one, it must be an undivided entire, omnipresent. Enneads VI,4,

But how account, at this, for its extension over all the heavens and all living beings? There is no such extension. Sense-perception, by insistence upon which we doubt, tells of Here and There; but reason certifies that the Here and There do not attach to that principle; the extended has participated in that KOSMOS of life which itself has no extension. Enneads VI,4,

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,

It is in this understanding that the soul has been taken to be a numerical principle, while others think of it as in its nature a self-increasing number; this latter notion is probably designed to meet the consideration that the soul at no point fails but, retaining its distinctive character, is ample for all, so much so that were the KOSMOS vaster yet the virtue of soul would still compass it – or rather the KOSMOS still be sunk in soul entire. Enneads VI,5,

The Intellectual giving is not an act of transmission; even in the case of corporeal objects, with their local separation, the mutual giving (and taking) is of things of one order and their communication, every effect they produce, is upon their like; what is corporeal in the All acts and is acted upon within itself, nothing external impinging upon it. Now if in body, whose very nature is partition, there is no incursion of the alien, how can there be any in the order in which no partition exists? It is therefore by identification that we see the good and touch it, brought to it by becoming identical with what is of the Intellectual within ourselves. In that realm exists what is far more truly a KOSMOS of unity; otherwise there will be two sensible universes, divided into correspondent parts; the Intellectual sphere, if a unity only as this sphere is, will be undistinguishable from it – except, indeed, that it will be less worthy of respect since in the nature of things extension is appropriate in the lower while the Intellectual will have wrought out its own extension with no motive, in a departure from its very character. Enneads VI,5,

If Being is identical with Intellectual-Principle, even at that it is a manifold; all the more so when count is taken of the Ideal Forms in it; for the Idea, particular or collective, is, after all, a numerable agglomeration whose unity is that of a KOSMOS. Enneads VI,8,