light

And this very examining principle, which investigates and decides in these matters, must be brought to LIGHT. 12 Enneads: I. I. 1

Next for the suggestion that the Soul is interwoven through the body: such a relation would not give woof and warp community of sensation: the interwoven element might very well suffer no change: the permeating soul might remain entirely untouched by what affects the body – as LIGHT goes always free of all it floods – and all the more so, since, precisely, we are asked to consider it as diffused throughout the entire frame. 31 Enneads: I. I. 4

No; from the organized body and something else, let us say a LIGHT, which the Soul gives forth from itself, it forms a distinct Principle, the Animate; and in this Principle are vested Sense-Perception and all the other experiences found to belong to the Animate. 53 Enneads: I. I. 7

Then the Soul has let this image fall? And this declension is it not certainly sin? If the declension is no more than the illuminating of an object beneath, it constitutes no sin: the shadow is to be attributed not to the luminary but to the object illuminated; if the object were not there, the LIGHT could cause no shadow. 83 Enneads: I. I. 12

But was not the Soul possessed of all this always, or had it forgotten? What it now sees, it certainly always possessed, but as lying away in the dark, not as acting within it: to dispel the darkness, and thus come to knowledge of its inner content, it must thrust towards the LIGHT. 126 Enneads: I. II. 4

All this accomplished, it gives up its touring of the realm of sense and settles down in the Intellectual Kosmos and there plies its own peculiar Act: it has abandoned all the realm of deceit and falsity, and pastures the Soul in the “Meadows of Truth”: it employs the Platonic division to the discernment of the Ideal-Forms, of the Authentic-Existence and of the First-Kinds (or Categories of Being): it establishes, in the LIGHT of Intellection, the unity there is in all that issues from these Firsts, until it has traversed the entire Intellectual Realm: then, resolving the unity into the particulars once more, it returns to the point from which it starts. 168 Enneads: I. III. 4

Until these people LIGHT upon some nobler principle than any at which they still halt, they must be left where they are and where they choose to be, never understanding what the Good of Life is to those that can make it theirs, never knowing to what kind of beings it is accessible. 202 Enneads: I. IV. 2

And so in all his pain he asks no pity: there is always the radiance in the inner soul of the man, untroubled like the LIGHT in a lantern when fierce gusts beat about it in a wild turmoil of wind and tempest. 241 Enneads: I. IV. 8

Beauty addresses itself chiefly to sight; but there is a beauty for the hearing too, as in certain combinations of words and in all kinds of music, for melodies and cadences are beautiful; and minds that lift themselves above the realm of sense to a higher order are aware of beauty in the conduct of life, in actions, in character, in the pursuits of the intellect; and there is the beauty of the virtues. What loftier beauty there may be, yet, our argument will bring to LIGHT. 318 Enneads: I. VI. 1

All the loveliness of colour and even the LIGHT of the sun, being devoid of parts and so not beautiful by symmetry, must be ruled out of the realm of beauty. And how comes gold to be a beautiful thing? And LIGHTning by night, and the stars, why are these so fair? In sounds also the simple must be proscribed, though often in a whole noble composition each several tone is delicious in itself. 326 Enneads: I. VI. 1

The beauty of colour is also the outcome of a unification: it derives from shape, from the conquest of the darkness inherent in Matter by the pouring-in of LIGHT, the unembodied, which is a Rational-Principle and an Ideal-Form. 341 Enneads: I. VI. 3

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. 342 Enneads: I. VI. 3

But what is it that awakens all this passion? No shape, no colour, no grandeur of mass: all is for a Soul, something whose beauty rests upon no colour, for the moral wisdom the Soul enshrines and all the other hueless splendour of the virtues. It is that you find in yourself, or admire in another, loftiness of spirit; righteousness of life; disciplined purity; courage of the majestic face; gravity; modesty that goes fearless and tranquil and passionless; and, shining down upon all, the LIGHT of god-like Intellection. 351 Enneads: I. VI. 5

But how are you to see into a virtuous soul and know its loveliness? Withdraw into yourself and look. And if you do not find yourself beautiful yet, act as does the creator of a statue that is to be made beautiful: he cuts away here, he smoothes there, he makes this line LIGHTer, this other purer, until a lovely face has grown upon his work. So do you also: cut away all that is excessive, straighten all that is crooked, bring LIGHT to all that is overcast, labour to make all one glow of beauty and never cease chiselling your statue, until there shall shine out on you from it the godlike splendour of virtue, until you shall see the perfect goodness surely established in the stainless shrine. 374 Enneads: I. VI. 9

For, again, that only can be named the Good to which all is bound and itself to none: for only thus is it veritably the object of all aspiration. It must be unmoved, while all circles around it, as a circumference around a centre from which all the radii proceed. Another example would be the sun, central to the LIGHT which streams from it and is yet linked to it, or at least is always about it, irremoveably; try all you will to separate the LIGHT from the sun, or the sun from its LIGHT, for ever the LIGHT is in the sun. 390 Enneads: I. VII. 1

If this be so, how do we explain the teaching that evils can never pass away but “exist of necessity,” that “while evil has no place in the divine order, it haunts mortal nature and this place for ever”? Does this mean that heaven is clear of evil, ever moving its orderly way, spinning on the appointed path, no injustice There or any flaw, no wrong done by any power to any other but all true to the settled plan, while injustice and disorder prevail on earth, designated as “the Mortal Kind and this Place”? Not quite so: for the precept to “flee hence” does not refer to earth and earthly life. The fLIGHT we read of consists not in quitting earth but in living our earth-life “with justice and piety in the LIGHT of philosophy”; it is vice we are to flee, so that clearly to the writer Evil is simply vice with the sequels of vice. And when the disputant in that dialogue says that, if men could be convinced of the doctrine advanced, there would be an end of Evil, he is answered, “That can never be: Evil is of necessity, for there must be a contrary to good.” 442 Enneads: I. VIII. 6

To see darkness the eye withdraws from the LIGHT; it is striving to cease from seeing, therefore it abandons the LIGHT which would make the darkness invisible; away from the LIGHT its power is rather that of not-seeing than of seeing and this not-seeing is its nearest approach to seeing Darkness. So the Intellectual-Principle, in order to see its contrary (Matter), must leave its own LIGHT locked up within itself, and as it were go forth from itself into an outside realm, it must ignore its native brightness and submit itself to the very contradition of its being. 475 Enneads: I. VIII. 9

But the faculties of the Soul are many, and it has its beginning, its intermediate phases, its final fringe. Matter appears, importunes, raises disorders, seeks to force its way within; but all the ground is holy, nothing there without part in Soul. Matter therefore submits, and takes LIGHT: but the source of its illumination it cannot attain to, for the Soul cannot lift up this foreign thing close by, since the evil of it makes it invisible. On the contrary the illumination, the LIGHT streaming from the Soul, is dulled, is weakened, as it mixes with Matter which offers Birth to the Soul, providing the means by which it enters into generation, impossible to it if no recipient were at hand. 494 Enneads: I. VIII. 11

Thus we are told that earth cannot have concrete existence without the help of some moist element – the moisture in water being the necessary adhesive – but admitting that we so find it, there is still a contradiction in pretending that any one element has a being of its own and in the same breath denying its self-coherence, making its subsistence depend upon others, and so, in reality, reducing the specific element to nothing. How can we talk of the existence of the definite Kind, earth – earth essential – if there exists no single particle of earth which actually is earth without any need of water to secure its self-cohesion? What has such an adhesive to act upon if there is absolutely no given magnitude of real earth to which it may bind particle after particle in its business of producing the continuous mass? If there is any such given magnitude, large or small, of pure earth, then earth can exist in its own nature, independently of water: if there is no such primary particle of pure earth, then there is nothing whatever for the water to bind. As for air – air unchanged, retaining its distinctive quality – how could it conduce to the subsistence of a dense material like earth? Similarly with fire. No doubt Timaeus speaks of it as necessary not to the existence but to the visibility of earth and the other elements; and certainly LIGHT is essential to all visibility – we cannot say that we see darkness, which implies, precisely, that nothing is seen, as silence means nothing being heard. 559 Enneads: II I. 6

But all this does not assure us that the earth to be visible must contain fire: LIGHT is sufficient: snow, for example, and other extremely cold substances gleam without the presence of fire – though of course it might be said that fire was once there and communicated colour before disappearing. 560 Enneads: II I. 6

We have authority for this where we read: “At the second circuit from the earth, God kindled a LIGHT”: he is speaking of the sun which, elsewhere, he calls the all-glowing and, again, the all-gleaming: thus he prevents us imagining it to be anything else but fire, though of a peculiar kind; in other words it is LIGHT, which he distinguishes from flame as being only modestly warm: this LIGHT is a corporeal substance but from it there shines forth that other “LIGHT” which, though it carries the same name, we pronounce incorporeal, given forth from the first as its flower and radiance, the veritable “incandescent body.” Plato’s word earthy is commonly taken in too depreciatory a sense: he is thinking of earth as the principle of solidity; we are apt to ignore his distinctions and think of the concrete clay. 567 Enneads: II I. 7

Fire of this order, giving forth this purest LIGHT, belongs to the upper realm, and there its seat is fixed by nature; but we must not, on that account, suppose the flame of earth to be associated with the beings of that higher sphere. 568 Enneads: II I. 7

No: the flame of this world, once it has attained a certain height, is extinguished by the currents of air opposed to it. Moreover, as it carries an earthy element on its upward path, it is weighed downwards and cannot reach those loftier regions. It comes to a stand somewhere below the moon – making the air at that point subtler – and its flame, if any flame can persist, is subdued and softened, and no longer retains its first intensity, but gives out only what radiance it reflects from the LIGHT above. 569 Enneads: II I. 7

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. 570 Enneads: II I. 7

Now: given a LIGHT of this degree, remaining in the upper sphere at its appointed station, pure LIGHT in purest place, what mode of outflow from it can be conceived possible? Such a Kind is not so constituted as to flow downwards of its own accord; and there exists in those regions no power to force it down. Again, body in contact with soul must always be very different from body left to itself; the bodily substance of the heavens has that contact and will show that difference. 571 Enneads: II I. 8

And we are asked to believe that one of them is happy by day and grows kindly under the warmth, while another, of a fiery nature, is most cheerful by night – as if it were not always day to them, LIGHT to them, and as if the first one could be darkened by night at that great distance above the earth’s shadow. 634 Enneads: II III. 5

Then there is the notion that the moon, in conjunction with a certain star, is softened at her full but is malignant in the same conjunction when her LIGHT has waned; yet, if anything of this order could be admitted, the very opposite would be the case. For when she is full to us she must be dark on the further hemisphere, that is to that star which stands above her; and when dark to us she is full to that other star, upon which only then, on the contrary, does she look with her LIGHT. To the moon itself, in fact, it can make no difference in what aspect she stands, for she is always lit on the upper or on the under half: to the other star, the warmth from the moon, of which they speak, might make a difference; but that warmth would reach it precisely when the moon is without LIGHT to us; at its darkest to us it is full to that other, and therefore beneficent. The darkness of the moon to us is of moment to the earth, but brings no trouble to the planet above. That planet, it is alleged, can give no help on account of its remoteness and therefore seems less well disposed; but the moon at its full suffices to the lower realm so that the distance of the other is of no importance. When the moon, though dark to us, is in aspect with the Fiery Star she is held to be favourable: the reason alleged is that the force of Mars is all-sufficient since it contains more fire than it needs. 635 Enneads: II III. 5

But that argument would equally cancel the Matter present in the bodily forms of this realm: body without shape has never existed, always body achieved and yet always the two constituents. We discover these two – Matter and Idea – by sheer force of our reasoning which distinguishes continually in pursuit of the simplex, the irreducible, working on, until it can go no further, towards the ultimate in the subject of enquiry. And the ultimate of every partial-thing is its Matter, which, therefore, must be all darkness since LIGHT is a Reason-Principle. The Mind, too, as also a Reason-Principle, sees only in each particular object the Reason-Principle lodging there; anything lying below that it declares to lie below the LIGHT, to be therefore a thing of darkness, just as the eye, a thing of LIGHT, seeks LIGHT and colours which are modes of LIGHT, and dismisses all that is below the colours and hidden by them, as belonging to the order of the darkness, which is the order of Matter. 729 Enneads: II IV. 5

Both are engendered, in the sense that they have had a beginning, but unengendered in that this beginning is not in Time: they have a derived being but by an eternal derivation: they are not, like the Kosmos, always in process but, in the character of the Supernal, have their Being permanently. For that differentiation within the Intelligible which produces Matter has always existed and it is this cleavage which produces the Matter there: it is the first movement; and movement and differentiation are convertible terms since the two things arose as one: this motion, this cleavage, away from the first is indetermination (= Matter), needing The First to its determination which it achieves by its Return, remaining, until then, an Alienism, still lacking good; unlit by the Supernal. It is from the Divine that all LIGHT comes, and, until this be absorbed, no LIGHT in any recipient of LIGHT can be authentic; any LIGHT from elsewhere is of another order than the true. 732 Enneads: II IV. 5

What, then, is this indetermination in the Soul? Does it amount to an utter absence of Knowledge, as if the Soul or Mind had withdrawn? No: the indeterminate has some footing in the sphere of affirmation. The eye is aware of darkness as a base capable of receiving any colour not yet seen against it: so the Mind, putting aside all attributes perceptible to sense – all that corresponds to LIGHT – comes upon a residuum which it cannot bring under determination: it is thus in the state of the eye which, when directed towards darkness, has become in some way identical with the object of its spurious vision. 761 Enneads: II IV. 10

Distant objects show in this reduction because they must be drawn together for vision and the LIGHT must be concentrated to suit the size of the pupil; besides, as we are placed farther and farther away from the material mass under observation, it is more and more the bare form that reaches us, stripped, so to speak, of magnitude as of all other quality. 933 Enneads: II VIII. 1

Ever illuminated, receiving LIGHT unfailing, the All-Soul imparts it to the entire series of later Being which by this LIGHT is sustained and fostered and endowed with the fullest measure of life that each can absorb. It may be compared with a central fire warming every receptive body within range. 968 Enneads: II IX. 3

With Matter left aside as wholly isolated, the Divine Beings are not everywhere but in some bounded place, walled off, so to speak; if that is not possible, Matter itself must receive the Divine LIGHT (and so cannot be annihilated). 972 Enneads: II IX. 3

Now, in the first place, if the Soul has not actually come down but has illuminated the darkness, how can it truly be said to have declined? The outflow from it of something in the nature of LIGHT does not justify the assertion of its decline; for that, it must make an actual movement towards the object lying in the lower realm and illuminate it by contact. 1027 Enneads: II IX. 11

If, on the other hand, the Soul keeps to its own place and illuminates the lower without directing any act towards that end, why should it alone be the illuminant? Why should not the Kosmos draw LIGHT also from the yet greater powers contained in the total of existence? Again, if the Soul possesses the plan of a Universe, and by virtue of this plan illuminates it, why do not that illumination and the creating of the world take place simultaneously? Why must the Soul wait till the representations of the plan be made actual? Then again this Plan – the “Far Country” of their terminology – brought into being, as they hold, by the greater powers, could not have been the occasion of decline to the creators. 1028 Enneads: II IX. 11

In the action of our Souls all that is done of their own motion in the LIGHT of sound reason is the Soul’s work, while what is done where they are hindered from their own action is not so much done as suffered. Unwisdom, then, is not due to the Soul, and, in general – if we mean by Fate a compulsion outside ourselves – an act is fated when it is contrary to wisdom. 1135 Enneads: III I. 10

These, then, are presented as mingled both by their initial nature and by the continuous process of their existence; and the Seer is not able to make a perfect discrimination setting on the one side Providence with all that happens under Providence and on the other side what the substrate communicates to its product. Such discrimination is not for a man, not for a wise man or a divine man: one may say it is the prerogative of a god. Not causes but facts lie in the Seer’s province; his art is the reading of the scriptures of Nature which tell of the ordered and never condescend to the disorderly; the movement of the Universe utters its testimony to him and, before men and things reveal themselves, brings to LIGHT what severally and collectively they are. 1292 Enneads: III III. 6

And the Soul of the All – are we to think that when it turns from this sphere its lower phase similarly withdraws? No: for it never accompanied that lower phase of itself; it never knew any coming, and therefore never came down; it remains unmoved above, and the material frame of the Universe draws close to it, and, as it were, takes LIGHT from it, no hindrance to it, in no way troubling it, simply lying unmoved before it. 1319 Enneads: III IV. 4

Soul then could never fall from its sphere; it is closer held to the divine Mind than the very sun could hold the LIGHT it gives forth to radiate about it, an outpouring from itself held firmly to it, still. 1357 Enneads: III V. 2

Once that Soul which is the primal source of LIGHT to the heavens is recognized as an Hypostasis standing distinct and aloof it must be admitted that Love too is distinct and aloof though not, perhaps, so loftily celestial a being as the Soul. Our own best we conceive as inside ourselves and yet something apart; so, we must think of this Love – as essentially resident where the unmingling Soul inhabits. 1361 Enneads: III V. 3

But what can be meant by the purification of a Soul that has never been stained and by the separation of the Soul from a body to which it is essentially a stranger? The purification of the Soul is simply to allow it to be alone; it is pure when it keeps no company; when it looks to nothing without itself; when it entertains no alien thoughts – be the mode or origin of such notions or affections what they may, a subject on which we have already touched – when it no longer sees in the world of image, much less elaborates images into veritable affections. Is it not a true purification to turn away towards the exact contrary of earthly things? Separation, in the same way, is the condition of a soul no longer entering into the body to lie at its mercy; it is to stand as a LIGHT, set in the midst of trouble but unperturbed through all. 1442 Enneads: III VI. 5

Here the mirror itself is seen, for it is itself an Ideal-Form of a Kind (has some degree of Real Being); but bare Matter, which is no Idea, is not a visible thing; if it were, it would have been visible in its own character before anything else appeared upon it. The condition of Matter may be illustrated by that of air penetrated by LIGHT and remaining, even so, unseen because it is invisible whatever happens. 1498 Enneads: III VI. 13

Where an entrant force can effect modification it will inevitably leave some trace upon its withdrawal; but where there can be no modification, nothing can be retained; LIGHT comes and goes, and the air is as it always was. 1516 Enneads: III VI. 16

Supposing we played a little before entering upon our serious concern and maintained that all things are striving after Contemplation, looking to Vision as their one end – and this, not merely beings endowed with reason but even the unreasoning animals, the Principle that rules in growing things, and the Earth that produces these – and that all achieve their purpose in the measure possible to their kind, each attaining Vision and possessing itself of the End in its own way and degree, some things in entire reality, others in mimicry and in image – we would scarcely find anyone to endure so strange a thesis. But in a discussion entirely among ourselves there is no risk in a LIGHT handling of our own ideas. 1661 Enneads: III VIII. 1

Yet: The Intellectual-Principle; beautiful; the most beautiful of all; lying lapped in pure LIGHT and in clear radiance; circumscribing the Nature of the Authentic Existents; the original of which this beautiful world is a shadow and an image; tranquil in the fullness of glory since in it there is nothing devoid of intellect, nothing dark or out of rule; a living thing in a life of blessedness: this, too, must overwhelm with awe any that has seen it, and penetrated it, to become a unit of its Being. 1744 Enneads: III VIII. 10

A possible solution may be offered: The unit soul holds aloof, not actually falling into body; the differentiated souls – the All-Soul, with the others – issue from the unity while still constituting, within certain limits, an association. They are one soul by the fact that they do not belong unreservedly to any particular being; they meet, so to speak, fringe to fringe; they strike out here and there, but are held together at the source much as LIGHT is a divided thing upon earth, shining in this house, and that, and yet remains uninterruptedly one identical substance. 1857 Enneads: IV III. 4

While the Soul (as an eternal, a Divine Being) is at rest – in rest firmly based on Repose, the Absolute – yet, as we may put it, that huge illumination of the Supreme pouring outwards comes at last to the extreme bourne of its LIGHT and dwindles to darkness; this darkness, now lying there beneath, the soul sees and by seeing brings to shape; for in the law of things this ultimate depth, neighbouring with soul, may not go void of whatsoever degree of that Reason-Principle it can absorb, the dimmed reason of reality at its faintest. 1891 Enneads: IV III. 9

We ascend from air, LIGHT, sun – or, moon and LIGHT and sun – in detail, to these things as constituting a total – though a total of degrees, primary, secondary, tertiary. Thence we come to the (kosmic) Soul, always the one undiscriminated entity. At this point in our survey we have before us the over-world and all that follows upon it. That suite (the lower and material world) we take to be the very last effect that has penetrated to its furthest reach. 1895 Enneads: IV III. 10

Our knowledge of the first is gained from the ultimate of all, from the very shadow cast by the fire, because this ultimate (the material world) itself receives its share of the general LIGHT, something of the nature of the Forming-Idea hovering over the outcast that at first lay in blank obscurity. It is brought under the scheme of reason by the efficacy of soul whose entire extension latently holds this rationalizing power. As we know, the Reason-Principles carried in animal seed fashion and shape living beings into so many universes in the small. For whatsoever touches soul is moulded to the nature of soul’s own Real-Being. 1896 Enneads: IV III. 10

All the souls, then, shine down upon the heavens and spend there the main of themselves and the best; only their lower phases illuminate the lower realms; and those souls which descend deepest show their LIGHT furthest down – not themselves the better for the depth to which they have penetrated. 1927 Enneads: IV III. 17

There is, we may put it, something that is centre; about it, a circle of LIGHT shed from it; round centre and first circle alike, another circle, LIGHT from LIGHT; outside that again, not another circle of LIGHT but one which, lacking LIGHT of its own, must borrow. 1928 Enneads: IV III. 17

The last we may figure to ourselves as a revolving circle, or rather a sphere, of a nature to receive LIGHT from that third realm, its next higher, in proportion to the LIGHT which that itself receives. Thus all begins with the great LIGHT, shining self-centred; in accordance with the reigning plan (that of emanation) this gives forth its brilliance; the later (divine) existents (souls) add their radiation – some of them remaining above, while there are some that are drawn further downward, attracted by the splendour of the object they illuminate. These last find that their charges need more and more care: the steersman of a storm-tossed ship is so intent on saving it that he forgets his own interest and never thinks that he is recurrently in peril of being dragged down with the vessel; similarly the souls are intent upon contriving for their charges and finally come to be pulled down by them; they are fettered in bonds of sorcery, gripped and held by their concern for the realm of Nature. 1929 Enneads: IV III. 17

May we think that the mode of the soul’s presence to body is that of the presence of LIGHT to the air? This certainly is presence with distinction: the LIGHT penetrates through and through, but nowhere coalesces; the LIGHT is the stable thing, the air flows in and out; when the air passes beyond the lit area it is dark; under the LIGHT it is lit: we have a true parallel to what we have been saying of body and soul, for the air is in the LIGHT quite as much as the LIGHT in the air. 1956 Enneads: IV III. 22

But every living being includes the vegetal principle, that principle of growth and nourishment which maintains the organism by means of the blood; this nourishing medium is contained in the veins; the veins and blood have their origin in the liver: from observation of these facts the power concerned was assigned a place; the phase of the soul which has to do with desire was allocated to the liver. Certainly what brings to birth and nourishes and gives growth must have the desire of these functions. Blood – subtle, LIGHT, swift, pure – is the vehicle most apt to animal spirit: the heart, then, its well-spring, the place where such blood is sifted into being, is taken as the fixed centre of the ebullition of the passionate nature. 1965 Enneads: IV III. 23

And if both orders of image act upon both orders of soul, what difference is there in the souls; and how does the fact escape our knowledge? The answer is that, when the two souls chime each with each, the two imaging faculties no longer stand apart; the union is dominated by the more powerful of the faculties of the soul, and thus the image perceived is as one: the less powerful is like a shadow attending upon the dominant, like a minor LIGHT merging into a greater: when they are in conflict, in discord, the minor is distinctly apart, a self-standing thing – though its isolation is not perceived, for the simple reason that the separate being of the two souls escapes observation. 2004 Enneads: IV III. 31

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. 2046 Enneads: IV IV. 8

Of the corporeal thus brought into being by Nature the elemental materials of things are its very produce, but how do animal and vegetable forms stand to it? Are we to think of them as containers of Nature present within them? Light goes away and the air contains no trace of it, for LIGHT and air remain each itself, never coalescing: is this the relation of Nature to the formed object? It is rather that existing between fire and the object it has warmed: the fire withdrawn, there remains a certain warmth, distinct from that in the fire, a property, so to speak, of the object warmed. For the shape which Nature imparts to what it has moulded must be recognized as a form quite distinct from Nature itself, though it remains a question to be examined whether besides this (specific) form there is also an intermediary, a link connecting it with Nature, the general principle. 2065 Enneads: IV IV. 14

Certainly the body, container of soul and of nature, cannot even in itself be as a soulless form would be: it cannot even be like air traversed by LIGHT; it must be like air storing heat: the body holding animal or vegetive life must hold also some shadow of soul; and it is body thus modified that is the seat of corporeal pains and pleasures which appear before us, the true human being, in such a way as to produce knowledge without emotion. By “us, the true human being” I mean the higher soul for, in spite of all, the modified body is not alien but attached to our nature and is a concern to us for that reason: “attached,” for this is not ourselves nor yet are we free of it; it is an accessory and dependent of the human being; “we” means the master-principle; the conjoint, similarly is in its own way an “ours”; and it is because of this that we care for its pain and pleasure, in proportion as we are weak rather than strong, gripped rather than working towards detachment. 2079 Enneads: IV IV. 18

For sight it would not need eyes – though if LIGHT is indispensable how can it see? That the earth contains the principle of growth must be admitted; it is difficult not to allow in consequence that, since this vegetal principle is a member of spirit, the earth is primarily of the spiritual order; and how can we doubt that in a spirit all is lucid? This becomes all the more evident when we reflect that, besides being as a spirit LIGHTsome, it is physically illuminated moving in the LIGHT of kosmic revolution. 2124 Enneads: IV IV. 26

Besides, simultaneous withdrawal would not prove the identity of the higher and lower phases: when the sun withdraws there goes with it not merely the LIGHT emanating from it, guided by it, attached to it, but also at once that LIGHT seen upon obliquely situated objects, a LIGHT secondary to the sun’s and cast upon things outside of its path (reflected LIGHT showing as colour); the two are not identical and yet they disappear together. 2142 Enneads: IV IV. 29

But is this simultaneous withdrawal or frank obliteration? The question applies equally to this secondary LIGHT and to the corporeal life, that life which we think of as being completely sunk into body. 2143 Enneads: IV IV. 29

No LIGHT whatever remains in the objects once illuminated; that much is certain; but we have to ask whether it has sunk back into its source or is simply no longer in existence. 2144 Enneads: IV IV. 29

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. 2145 Enneads: IV IV. 29

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. 2147 Enneads: IV IV. 29

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. 2149 Enneads: IV IV. 29

Here we have to enquire into the nature and being of that vestige of the soul actually present in the living body: if there is truly a soul, then, as a thing never cut off from its total, it will go with soul as soul must: if it is rather to be thought of as belonging to the body, as the life of the body, we have the same question that rose in the case of the vestige of LIGHT; we must examine whether life can exist without the presence of soul, except of course in the sense of soul living above and acting upon the remote object. 2151 Enneads: IV IV. 29

The signification which exists is not a first intention; it arises incidentally by the fact that in a given collocation the members will tell something of each other: all is unity sprung of unity and therefore one thing is known by way of another other, a cause in the LIGHT of the caused, the sequent as rising from its precedent, the compound from the constituents which must make themselves known in the linked total. 2204 Enneads: IV IV. 39

If sight depends upon the linking of the LIGHT of vision with the LIGHT leading progressively to the illumined object, then, by the very hypothesis, one intervening substance, the LIGHT, is indispensable: but if the illuminated body, which is the object of vision, serves as an agent operating certain changes, some such change might very well impinge immediately upon the eye, requiring no medium; this all the more, since as things are the intervening substance, which actually does exist, is in some degree changed at the point of contact with the eye (and so cannot be in itself a requisite to vision). 2245 Enneads: IV V. 2

Those who have made vision a forth-going act (and not an in-coming from the object) need not postulate an intervening substance – unless, indeed, to provide against the ray from the eye failing on its path – but this is a ray of LIGHT and LIGHT flies straight. Those who make vision depend upon resistance are obliged to postulate an intervening substance. 2246 Enneads: IV V. 2

If our perception is to depend upon previous impressions made upon the air, then we have no direct knowledge of the object of vision, but know it only as through an intermediary, in the same way as we are aware of warmth where it is not the distant fire itself that warms us, but the warmed intervening air. That is a matter of contact; but sight is not produced by contact: the application of an object to the eye would not produce sight; what is required is the illumination of the intervening medium; for the air in itself is a dark substance: If it were not for this dark substance there would probably be no reason for the existence of LIGHT: the dark intervening matter is a barrier, and vision requires that it be overcome by LIGHT. Perhaps also the reason why an object brought close to the eye cannot be seen is that it confronts us with a double obscuration, its own and that of the air. 2252 Enneads: IV V. 2

No one will pretend that these forms are reproduced upon the darkness and come to us in linked progression; if the fire thus rayed out its own form, there would be an end to the darkness. In the blackest night, when the very stars are hidden and show no gleam of their LIGHT, we can see the fire of the beacon-stations and of maritime signal-towers. 2254 Enneads: IV V. 3

Now if, in defiance of all that the senses tell us, we are to believe that in these examples the fire (as LIGHT) traverses the air, then, in so far as anything is visible, it must be that dimmed reproduction in the air, not the fire itself. But if an object can be seen on the other side of some intervening darkness, much more would it be visible with nothing intervening. 2255 Enneads: IV V. 3

But there is the question of the linked LIGHT that must relate the visual organ to its object. 2260 Enneads: IV V. 4

Now, firstly: since the intervening air is not necessary – unless in the purely accidental sense that air may be necessary to LIGHT – the LIGHT that acts as intermediate in vision will be unmodified: vision depends upon no modification whatever. This one intermediate, LIGHT, would seem to be necessary, but, unless LIGHT is corporeal, no intervening body is requisite: and we must remember that intervenient and borrowed LIGHT is essential not to seeing in general but to distant vision; the question whether LIGHT absolutely requires the presence of air we will discuss later. For the present one matter must occupy us: If, in the act of vision, that linked LIGHT becomes ensouled, if the soul or mind permeates it and enters into union with it, as it does in its more inward acts such as understanding – which is what vision really is – then the intervening LIGHT is not a necessity: the process of seeing will be like that of touch; the visual faculty of the soul will perceive by the fact of having entered into the LIGHT; all that intervenes remains unaffected, serving simply as the field over which the vision ranges. 2261 Enneads: IV V. 4

Or, again, consider the Dawn: there is no need that the LIGHT first flood the air and then come to us; the event is simultaneous to both: often, in fact, we see (in the distance) when the LIGHT is not as yet round our eyes at all but very far off, before, that is, the air has been acted upon: here we have vision without any modified intervenient, vision before the organ has received the LIGHT with which it is to be linked. 2266 Enneads: IV V. 4

If (as by the theory of an intervenient) the percipient mind or soul remains within itself and needs the LIGHT only as one might need a stick in the hand to touch something at a distance, then the perception will be a sort of tussle: the LIGHT must be conceived as something thrusting, something aimed at a mark, and similarly, the object, considered as an illuminated thing, must be conceived to be resistant; for this is the normal process in the case of contact by the agency of an intervenient. 2268 Enneads: IV V. 4

Finally, we may be told that the impinging LIGHT is modified by the thing to be seen and so becomes able to present something perceptible before the visual organ; but this simply brings us back to the theory of an intervenient changed midway by the object, an explanation whose difficulties we have already indicated. 2270 Enneads: IV V. 4

We return, then, to the question whether there could be LIGHT if there were no air, the sun illuminating corporeal surfaces across an intermediate void which, as things are, takes the LIGHT accidentally by the mere fact of being in the path. Supposing air to be the cause of the rest of things being thus affected, the substantial existence of LIGHT is due to the air; LIGHT becomes a modification of the air, and of course if the thing to be modified did not exist neither could be modification. 2278 Enneads: IV V. 6

The fact is that primarily LIGHT is no appanage of air, and does not depend upon the existence of air: it belongs to every fiery and shining body, it constitutes even the gleaming surface of certain stones. 2279 Enneads: IV V. 6

Now if, thus, it enters into other substances from something gleaming, could it exist in the absence of its container? There is a distinction to be made: if it is a quality, some quality of some substance, then LIGHT, equally with other qualities, will need a body in which to lodge: if, on the contrary, it is an activity rising from something else, we can surely conceive it existing, though there be no neighbouring body but, if that is possible, a blank void which it will overleap and so appear on the further side: it is powerful, and may very well pass over unhelped. If it were of a nature to fall, nothing would keep it up, certainly not the air or anything that takes its LIGHT; there is no reason why they should draw the LIGHT from its source and speed it onwards. 2280 Enneads: IV V. 6

But movement, where? Is space, pure and simple, all that is necessary? With unchecked motion of the LIGHT outward, the material sun will be losing its energy, for the LIGHT is its expression. 2282 Enneads: IV V. 6

Perhaps; and (from this untenable consequence) we may gather that the LIGHT never was an appanage of anything, but is the expressive Act proceeding from a base (the sun) but not seeking to enter into a base, though having some operation upon any base that may be present. 2283 Enneads: IV V. 6

Life is also an Act, the Act of the soul, and it remains so when anything – the human body, for instance – comes in its path to be affected by it; and it is equally an Act though there be nothing for it to modify: surely this may be true of LIGHT, one of the Acts of whatever luminary source there be (i.e., LIGHT, affecting things, may be quite independent of them and require no medium, air or other). Certainly LIGHT is not brought into being by the dark thing, air, which on the contrary tends to gloom it over with some touch of earth so that it is no longer the brilliant reality: as reasonable to talk of some substance being sweet because it is mixed with something bitter. 2284 Enneads: IV V. 6

If we are told that LIGHT is a mode of the air, we answer that this would necessarily imply that the air itself is changed to produce the new mode; in other words, its characteristic darkness must change into non-darkness; but we know that the air maintains its character, in no wise affected: the modification of a thing is an experience within that thing itself: LIGHT therefore is not a modification of the air, but a self-existent in whose path the air happens to be present. 2285 Enneads: IV V. 6

Our investigation may be furthered by enquiring: Whether LIGHT finally perishes or simply returns to its source. 2287 Enneads: IV V. 7

If it be a thing requiring to be caught and kept, domiciled within a recipient, we might think of it finally passing out of existence: if it be an Act not flowing out and away – but in circuit, with more of it within than is in outward progress from the luminary of which it is the Act – then it will not cease to exist as long as that centre is in being. And as the luminary moves, the LIGHT will reach new points – not in virtue of any change of course in or out or around, but simply because the act of the luminary exists and where there is no impediment is effective. Even if the distance of the sun from us were far greater than it is, the LIGHT would be continuous all that further way, as long as nothing checked or blocked it in the interval. 2288 Enneads: IV V. 7

We distinguish two forms of activity; one is gathered within the luminary and is comparable to the life of the shining body; this is the vaster and is, as it were, the foundation or wellspring of all the act; the other lies next to the surface, the outer image of the inner content, a secondary activity though inseparable from the former. For every existent has an Act which is in its likeness: as long as the one exists, so does the other; yet while the original is stationary the activity reaches forth, in some things over a wide range, in others less far. There are weak and faint activities, and there are some, even, that do not appear; but there are also things whose activities are great and far-going; in the case of these the activity must be thought of as being lodged, both in the active and powerful source and in the point at which it settles. This may be observed in the case of an animal’s eyes where the pupils gleam: they have a LIGHT which shows outside the orbs. Again there are living things which have an inner fire that in darkness shines out when they expand themselves and ceases to ray outward when they contract: the fire has not perished; it is a mere matter of it being rayed out or not. 2289 Enneads: IV V. 7

But has the LIGHT gone inward? No: it is simply no longer on the outside because the fire (of which it is the activity) is no longer outward going but has withdrawn towards the centre. 2290 Enneads: IV V. 7

But surely the LIGHT has gone inward too? No: only the fire, and when that goes inward the surface consists only of the non-luminous body; the fire can no longer act towards the outer. 2291 Enneads: IV V. 7

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. 2292 Enneads: IV V. 7

And LIGHT is incorporeal even when it is the LIGHT of a body; there is therefore no question, strictly speaking, of its withdrawal or of its being present – these terms do not apply to its modes – and its essential existence is to be an activity. As an example: the image upon a mirror may be described as an activity exercised by the reflected object upon the potential recipient: there is no outgoing from the object (or ingoing into the reflecting body); it is simply that, as long as the object stands there, the image also is visible, in the form of colour shaped to a certain pattern, and when the object is not there, the reflecting surface no longer holds what it held when the conditions were favourable. 2293 Enneads: IV V. 7

But what of a soul which is not an activity but the derivative of an activity – as we maintained the life-principle domiciled in the body to be – is its presence similar to that of the LIGHT caught and held in material things? No; for in those things the colour is due to an actual intermixture of the active element (the LIGHT being alloyed with Matter); whereas the life-principle of the body is something that holds from another soul closely present to it. 2295 Enneads: IV V. 7

Obviously, if the sympathetic relationship depends upon the fact that percipients and things perceived are all members of one living being, no acts of perception could take place: that far body could be known only if it were a member of this living universe of ours – which condition being met, it certainly would be. But what if, without being thus in membership, it were a corporeal entity, exhibiting LIGHT and colour and the qualities by which we perceive things, and belonging to the same ideal category as the organ of vision? If our supposition (of perception by sympathy) is true, there would still be no perception – though we may be told that the hypothesis is clearly untenable since there is absurdity in supposing that sight can fail in grasping an illuminated object lying before it, and that the other senses in the presence of their particular objects remain unresponsive. 2298 Enneads: IV V. 8

Body is either warm or cold, hard or soft, liquid or solid, black or white, and so on through all the qualities by which one is different from another; and, again, if a body is warm it diffuses only warmth, if cold it can only chill, if LIGHT its presence tells against the total weight which if heavy it increases; black, it darkens; white, it LIGHTens; fire has not the property of chilling or a cold body that of warming. 2369 Enneads: IV VII. 4

Soul, on the contrary, operates diversely in different living beings, and has quite contrary effects in any one: its productions contain the solid and the soft, the dense and the sparse, bright and dark, heavy and LIGHT. If it were material, its quality – and the colour it must have – would produce one invariable effect and not the variety actually observed. 2370 Enneads: IV VII. 4

We have to fall back on the illustrious Plato, who uttered many noble sayings about the soul, and has in many places dwelt upon its entry into body so that we may well hope to get some LIGHT from him. 2457 Enneads: IV VIII. 1

So it is with the individual souls; the appetite for the divine Intellect urges them to return to their source, but they have, too, a power apt to administration in this lower sphere; they may be compared to the LIGHT attached upwards to the sun, but not grudging its presidency to what lies beneath it. In the Intellectual, then, they remain with soul-entire, and are immune from care and trouble; in the heavenly sphere, absorbed in the soul-entire, they are administrators with it just as kings, associated with the supreme ruler and governing with him, do not descend from their kingly stations: the souls indeed (as distinguished from the kosmos) are thus far in the one place with their overlord; but there comes a stage at which they descend from the universal to become partial and self-centred; in a weary desire of standing apart they find their way, each to a place of its very own. This state long maintained, the soul is a deserter from the All; its differentiation has severed it; its vision is no longer set in the Intellectual; it is a partial thing, isolated, weakened, full of care, intent upon the fragment; severed from the whole, it nestles in one form of being; for this, it abandons all else, entering into and caring for only the one, for a thing buffeted about by a worldful of things: thus it has drifted away from the universal and, by an actual presence, it administers the particular; it is caught into contact now, and tends to the outer to which it has become present and into whose inner depths it henceforth sinks far. 2479 Enneads: IV VIII. 4

What can it be that has brought the souls to forget the father, God, and, though members of the Divine and entirely of that world, to ignore at once themselves and It? The evil that has overtaken them has its source in self-will, in the entry into the sphere of process, and in the primal differentiation with the desire for self ownership. They conceived a pleasure in this freedom and largely indulged their own motion; thus they were hurried down the wrong path, and in the end, drifting further and further, they came to lose even the thought of their origin in the Divine. A child wrenched young from home and brought up during many years at a distance will fail in knowledge of its father and of itself: the souls, in the same way, no longer discern either the divinity or their own nature; ignorance of their rank brings self-depreciation; they misplace their respect, honouring everything more than themselves; all their awe and admiration is for the alien, and, clinging to this, they have broken apart, as far as a soul may, and they make LIGHT of what they have deserted; their regard for the mundane and their disregard of themselves bring about their utter ignoring of the divine. 2546 Enneads: V I. 1

How life was purveyed to the universe of things and to the separate beings in it may be thus conceived: That great soul must stand pictured before another soul, one not mean, a soul that has become worthy to look, emancipate from the lure, from all that binds its fellows in bewitchment, holding itself in quietude. Let not merely the enveloping body be at peace, body’s turmoil stilled, but all that lies around, earth at peace, and sea at peace, and air and the very heavens. Into that heaven, all at rest, let the great soul be conceived to roll inward at every point, penetrating, permeating, from all sides pouring in its LIGHT. As the rays of the sun throwing their brilliance upon a lowering cloud make it gleam all gold, so the soul entering the material expanse of the heavens has given life, has given immortality: what was abject it has lifted up; and the heavenly system, moved now in endless motion by the soul that leads it in wisdom, has become a living and a blessed thing; the soul domiciled within, it takes worth where, before the soul, it was stark body – clay and water – or, rather, the blankness of Matter, the absence of Being, and, as an author says, “the execration of the Gods.” 2552 Enneads: V I. 2

What happened then? What are we to conceive as rising in the neighbourhood of that immobility? It must be a circumradiation – produced from the Supreme but from the Supreme unaltering – and may be compared to the brilliant LIGHT encircling the sun and ceaselessly generated from that unchanging substance. 2575 Enneads: V I. 6

Yet any offspring of the Intellectual-Principle must be a Reason-Principle; the thought of the Divine Mind must be a substantial existence: such then is that (Soul) which circles about the Divine Mind, its LIGHT, its image inseparably attached to it: on the upper level united with it, filled from it, enjoying it, participant in its nature, intellective with it, but on the lower level in contact with the realm beneath itself, or, rather, generating in turn an offspring which must lie beneath; of this lower we will treat later; so far we deal still with the Divine. 2587 Enneads: V I. 7

But the Soul (considered as apart from the Intellectual-Principle) has no vision of what it thus contains, for it is not the producer but, like the Reason-Principles also, an image of its source: that source is the brilliant, the authentic, the primarily existent, the thing self-sprung and self-intent; but its image, soul, is a thing which can have no permanence except by attachment, by living in that other; the very nature of an image is that, as a secondary, it shall have its being in something else, if at all it exist apart from its original. Hence this image (soul) has not vision, for it has not the necessary LIGHT, and, if it should see, then, as finding its completion elsewhere, it sees another, not itself. 2677 Enneads: V III. 8

What, then, is there that can pronounce upon the nature of this all-unity? That which sees: and to see is the function of the Intellectual-Principle. Even in our own sphere (we have a parallel to this self-vision of a unity), our vision is LIGHT or rather becomes one with LIGHT, and it sees LIGHT for it sees colours. In the intellectual, the vision sees not through some medium but by and through itself alone, for its object is not external: by one LIGHT it sees another not through any intermediate agency; a LIGHT sees a LIGHT, that is to say a thing sees itself. This LIGHT shining within the soul enLIGHTens it; that is, it makes the soul intellective, working it into likeness with itself, the LIGHT above. 2679 Enneads: V III. 8

Think of the traces of this LIGHT upon the soul, then say to yourself that such, and more beautiful and broader and more radiant, is the LIGHT itself; thus you will approach to the nature of the Intellectual-Principle and the Intellectual Realm, for it is this LIGHT, itself lit from above, which gives the soul its brighter life. 2680 Enneads: V III. 8

Nor does it give the life of perception and sensation, for that looks to the external and to what acts most vigorously upon the senses whereas one accepting that LIGHT of truth may be said no longer to see the visible, but the very contrary. 2682 Enneads: V III. 8

The life in the Divine Intellect is also an Act: it is the primal LIGHT outlamping to itself primarily, its own torch; LIGHT-giver and lit at once; the authentic intellectual object, knowing at once and known, seen to itself and needing no other than itself to see by, self-sufficing to the vision, since what it sees it is; known to us by that very same LIGHT, our knowledge of it attained through itself, for from nowhere else could we find the means of telling of it. By its nature, its self-vision is the clearer but, using it as our medium, we too may come to see by it. 2684 Enneads: V III. 8

One certain way to this knowledge is to separate first, the man from the body – yourself, that is, from your body – next to put aside that soul which moulded the body, and, very earnestly, the system of sense with desires and impulses and every such futility, all setting definitely towards the mortal: what is left is the phase of the soul which we have declared to be an image of the Divine Intellect, retaining some LIGHT from that sun, while it pours downward upon the sphere of magnitudes (that is, of Matter) the LIGHT playing about itself which is generated from its own nature. 2688 Enneads: V III. 9

Of course we do not pretend that the sun’s LIGHT (as the analogy might imply) remains a self-gathered and sun-centred thing: it is at once outrushing and indwelling; it strikes outward continuously, lap after lap, until it reaches us upon our earth: we must take it that all the LIGHT, including that which plays about the sun’s orb, has travelled; otherwise we would have a void expanse, that of the space – which is material – next to the sun’s orb. The Soul, on the contrary – a LIGHT springing from the Divine Mind and shining about it – is in closest touch with that source; it is not in transit but remains centred there, and, in likeness to that principle, it has no place: the LIGHT of the sun is actually in the air, but the soul is clean of all such contact so that its immunity is patent to itself and to any other of the same order. 2689 Enneads: V III. 9

Now if these activities arise from some unexplained first activity in that principle, then it too contains the manifold: if, on the contrary, they are the very earliest activities and the source and cause of any multiple product and the means by which that Principle is able, before any activity occurs, to remain self-centred, then they are allocated to the product of which they are the cause; for this principle is one thing, the activities going forth from it are another, since it is not, itself, in act. If this be not so, the first act cannot be the Intellectual-Principle: the One does not provide for the existence of an Intellectual-Principle which thereupon appears; that provision would be something (an Hypostasis) intervening between the One and the Intellectual-Principle, its offspring. There could, in fact, be no such providing in The One, for it was never incomplete; and such provision could name nothing that ought to be provided. It cannot be thought to possess only some part of its content, and not the whole; nor did anything exist to which it could turn in desire. Clearly anything that comes into being after it, arises without shaking to its permanence in its own habit. It is essential to the existence of any new entity that the First remain in self-gathered repose throughout: otherwise, it moved before there was motion and had intellectual act before any intellection – unless, indeed, that first act (as motionless and without intelligence) was incomplete, nothing more than a tendency. And what can we imagine it LIGHTs upon to become the object of such a tendency? The only reasonable explanation of act flowing from it lies in the analogy of LIGHT from a sun. The entire intellectual order may be figured as a kind of LIGHT with the One in repose at its summit as its King: but this manifestation is not cast out from it: we may think, rather, of the One as a LIGHT before the LIGHT, an eternal irradiation resting upon the Intellectual Realm; this, not identical with its source, is yet not severed from it nor of so remote a nature as to be less than Real-Being; it is no blind thing, but is seeing and knowing, the primal knower. 2711 Enneads: V III. 12

But in what sense do we even deal with it when we have no hold upon it? We do not, it is true, grasp it by knowledge, but that does not mean that we are utterly void of it; we hold it not so as to state it, but so as to be able to speak about it. And we can and do state what it is not, while we are silent as to what it is: we are, in fact, speaking of it in the LIGHT of its sequels; unable to state it, we may still possess it. 2721 Enneads: V III. 14

May we stop, content, with that? No: the Soul is yet, and even more, in pain. Is she ripe, perhaps, to bring forth, now that in her pangs she has come so close to what she seeks? No: we must call upon yet another spell if anywhere the assuagement is to be found. Perhaps in what has already been uttered, there lies the charm if only we tell it over often? No: we need a new, a further, incantation. All our effort may well skim over every truth and through all the verities in which we have part, and yet the reality escape us when we hope to affirm, to understand: for the understanding, in order to its affirmation must possess itself of item after item; only so does it traverse all the field: but how can there be any such peregrination of that in which there is no variety? All the need is met by a contact purely intellective. At the moment of touch there is no power whatever to make any affirmation; there is no leisure; reasoning upon the vision is for afterwards. We may know we have had the vision when the Soul has suddenly taken LIGHT. This LIGHT is from the Supreme and is the Supreme; we may believe in the Presence when, like that other God on the call of a certain man, He comes bringing LIGHT: the LIGHT is the proof of the advent. Thus, the Soul unlit remains without that vision; lit, it possesses what it sought. And this is the true end set before the Soul, to take that LIGHT, to see the Supreme by the Supreme and not by the LIGHT of any other principle – to see the Supreme which is also the means to the vision; for that which illumines the Soul is that which it is to see just as it is by the sun’s own LIGHT that we see the sun. 2745 Enneads: V III. 17

Consider the act of ocular vision: There are two elements here; there is the form perceptible to the sense and there is the medium by which the eye sees that form. This medium is itself perceptible to the eye, distinct from the form to be seen, but the cause of the seeing; it is perceived at the one stroke in that form and on it and, hence, is not distinguished from it, the eye being held entirely by the illuminated object. When on the contrary this medium presents itself alone it is seen directly – though even then actual sight demands some solid base; there must be something besides the medium which, unless embracing some object, eludes perception; thus the LIGHT inherent to the sun would not be perceived but for the solidity of the mass. If it is objected that the sun is LIGHT entire, this would only be a proof of our assertion: no other visible form will contain LIGHT which must, then, have no other property than that of visibility, and in fact all other visible objects are something more than LIGHT alone. 2803 Enneads: V V. 7

This vision sees, by another LIGHT, the objects illuminated by the FirsFirst Principle: setting itself among them, it sees veritably; declining towards the lower Nature, that upon which the LIGHT from above rests, it has less of that vision. Passing over the visible and looking to the medium by which it sees, then it holds the Light and the source of Light. 2805 Enneads: V V. 7

But since the Intellectual-Principle is not to see this LIGHT as something external we return to our analogy; the eye is not wholly dependent upon an outside and alien LIGHT; there is an earlier LIGHT within itself, a more brilliant, which it sees sometimes in a momentary flash. At night in the darkness a gleam leaps from within the eye: or again we make no effort to see anything; the eyelids close; yet a LIGHT flashes before us; or we rub the eye and it sees the LIGHT it contains. This is sight without the act, but it is the truest seeing, for it sees LIGHT whereas its other objects were the lit not the LIGHT. 2806 Enneads: V V. 7

It is certainly thus that the Intellectual-Principle, hiding itself from all the outer, withdrawing to the inmost, seeing nothing, must have its vision – not of some other LIGHT in some other thing but of the LIGHT within itself, unmingled, pure, suddenly gleaming before it; 2807 Enneads: V V. 7

This Principle, of which the sun is an image, where has it its dawning, what horizon does it surmount to appear? It stands immediately above the contemplating Intellect which has held itself at rest towards the vision, looking to nothing else than the good and beautiful, setting its entire being to that in a perfect surrender, and now tranquilly filled with power and taking a new beauty to itself, gleaming in the LIGHT of that presence. 2809 Enneads: V V. 8

We can imagine the Soul as a double LIGHT, a lesser corresponding to the soul proper, a purer representing its intellective phase; if now we suppose this intellective LIGHT equal to the LIGHT which is to be its object, we no longer distinguish between them; the two are recognised as one: we know, indeed, that there are two, but as we see them they have become one: this gives us the relation between the intellective subject and the object of intellection (in the duality and unity required by that primal intellection): in our thought we have made the two into one; but on the other hand the one thing has become two, making itself into a duality at the moment of intellection, or, to be more exact, being dual by the fact of intellection and single by the fact that its intellectual object is itself. 2851 Enneads: V VI. 1

We may use the figure of, first, LIGHT; then, following it, the sun; as a third, the orb of the moon taking its LIGHT from the sun: Soul carries the Intellectual-Principle as something imparted and lending the LIGHT which makes it essentially intellective; Intellectual-Principle carries the LIGHT as its own though it is not purely the LIGHT but is the being into whose very essence the LIGHT has been received; highest is That which, giving forth the LIGHT to its sequent, is no other than the pure LIGHT itself by whose power the Intellectual-Principle takes character. 2865 Enneads: V VI. 4

Thus there is in the Nature-Principle itself an Ideal archetype of the beauty that is found in material forms and, of that archetype again, the still more beautiful archetype in Soul, source of that in Nature. In the proficient soul this is brighter and of more advanced loveliness: adorning the soul and bringing to it a LIGHT from that greater LIGHT which is beauty primally, its immediate presence sets the soul reflecting upon the quality of this prior, the archetype which has no such entries, and is present nowhere but remains in itself alone, and thus is not even to be called a Reason-Principle but is the creative source of the very first Reason-Principle which is the Beauty to which Soul serves as Matter. 2913 Enneads: V VIII. 3

To “live at ease” is There; and, to these divine beings, verity is mother and nurse, existence and sustenance; all that is not of process but of authentic being they see, and themselves in all: for all is transparent, nothing dark, nothing resistant; every being is lucid to every other, in breadth and depth; LIGHT runs through LIGHT. And each of them contains all within itself, and at the same time sees all in every other, so that everywhere there is all, and all is all and each all, and infinite the glory. Each of them is great; the small is great; the sun, There, is all the stars; and every star, again, is all the stars and sun. While some one manner of being is dominant in each, all are mirrored in every other. 2916 Enneads: V VIII. 4

So, too, Repose is not troubled, for there is no admixture of the unstable; and the Beauty is all beauty since it is not merely resident (as an attribute or addition) in some beautiful object. Each There walks upon no alien soil; its place is its essential self; and, as each moves, so to speak, towards what is Above, it is attended by the very ground from which it starts: there is no distinguishing between the Being and the Place; all is Intellect, the Principle and the ground on which it stands, alike. Thus we might think that our visible sky (the ground or place of the stars), lit, as it is, produces the LIGHT which reaches us from it, though of course this is really produced by the stars (as it were, by the Principles of LIGHT alone, not also by the ground as the analogy would require). 2918 Enneads: V VIII. 4

This is why Zeus, although the oldest of the gods and their sovereign, advances first (in the Phaidros myth) towards that vision, followed by gods and demigods and such souls as are of strength to see. That Being appears before them from some unseen place and rising loftily over them pours its LIGHT upon all things, so that all gleams in its radiance; it upholds some beings, and they see; the lower are dazzled and turn away, unfit to gaze upon that sun, the trouble falling the more heavily on those most remote. 2946 Enneads: V VIII. 10

This vision Zeus takes, and it is for such of us, also, as share his love and appropriate our part in the Beauty There, the final object of all seeing, the entire beauty upon all things; for all There sheds radiance, and floods those that have found their way thither so that they too become beautiful; thus it will often happen that men climbing heights where the soil has taken a yellow glow will themselves appear so, borrowing colour from the place on which they move. The colour flowering on that other height we speak of is Beauty; or rather all There is LIGHT and beauty, through and through, for the beauty is no mere bloom upon the surface. 2949 Enneads: V VIII. 10

The novice must hold himself constantly under some image of the Divine Being and seek in the LIGHT of a clear conception; knowing thus, in a deep conviction, whither he is going – into what a sublimity he penetrates – he must give himself forthwith to the inner and, radiant with the Divine Intellections (with which he is now one), be no longer the seer but, as that place has made him, the seen. 2954 Enneads: V VIII. 11

We take it, then, that the Intellectual-Principle is the authentic existences and contains them all – not as in a place but as possessing itself and being one thing with this its content. All are one there and yet are distinct: similarly the mind holds many branches and items of knowledge simultaneously, yet none of them merged into any other, each acting its own part at call quite independently, every conception coming out from the inner total and working singly. It is after this way, though in a closer unity, that the Intellectual-Principle is all Being in one total – and yet not in one, since each of these beings is a distinct power which, however, the total Intellectual-Principle includes as the species in a genus, as the parts in a whole. This relation may be illustrated by the powers in seed; all lies undistinguished in the unit, the formative ideas gathered as in one kernel; yet in that unit there is eye-principle, and there is hand-principle, each of which is revealed as a separate power by its distinct material product. Thus each of the powers in the seed is a Reason-Principle one and complete yet including all the parts over which it presides: there will be something bodily, the liquid, for example, carrying mere Matter; but the principle itself is Idea and nothing else, idea identical with the generative idea belonging to the lower soul, image of a higher. This power is sometimes designated as Nature in the seed-life; its origin is in the divine; and, outgoing from its priors as LIGHT from fire, it converts and shapes the matter of things, not by push and pull and the lever work of which we hear so much, but by bestowal of the Ideas. 3004 Enneads: V IX. 6

The properties adduced may indeed be allowed to distinguish Substance from the other Existents. They afford a means of grouping substances together and calling them by a common name. They do not however establish the unity of a genus, and they do not bring to LIGHT the concept and the nature of Substance. 3055 Enneads: VI I. 3

What then will be the common ground in habit, disposition, passive quality, figure, shape? In LIGHT, thick and lean? If we hold this common ground to be a power adapting itself to the forms of habits, dispositions and physical capacities, a power which gives the possessor whatever capacities he has, we have no plausible explanation of incapacities. Besides, how are figure and the shape of a given thing to be regarded as a power? Moreover, at this, Being will have no power qua Being but only when Quality has been added to it; and the activities of those substances which are activities in the highest degree, will be traceable to Quality, although they are autonomous and owe their essential character to powers wholly their own! 3100 Enneads: VI I. 10

Knowledge of the meaning of “LIGHT” and “heavy” will reveal their place in the classification. An ambiguity will however be latent in the term “LIGHT,” unless it be determined by comparative weight: it would then implicate leanness and fineness, and involve another species distinct from the four (of Aristotle). 3120 Enneads: VI I. 11

All this will become clearer in the LIGHT of further consideration – when, that is to say, we have ascertained the number of the genera; for thus we shall also discover their causes. It is not enough to deny; we must advance by dint of thought and comprehension. The way is clear: 3253 Enneads: VI II. 3

We are in the presence of Intellect undefiled. Fix it firmly, but not with the eyes of the body. You are looking upon the hearth of Reality, within it a sleepless LIGHT: you see how it holds to itself, and how it puts apart things that were together, how it lives a life that endures and keeps a thought acting not upon any future but upon that which already is, upon an eternal present – a thought self-centred, bearing on nothing outside of itself. 3278 Enneads: VI II. 8

As we survey this Magnitude with the beauty of Being within it and the glory and LIGHT around it, all contained in Intellect, we see, simultaneously, Quality already in bloom, and along with the continuity of its Act we catch a glimpse of Magnitude at Rest. Then, with one, two and three in Intellect, Magnitude appears as of three dimensions, with Quantity entire. Quantity thus given and Quality, both merging into one and, we may almost say, becoming one, there is at once shape. Difference slips in to divide both Quantity and Quality, and so we have variations in shape and differences of Quality. Identity, coming in with Difference, creates equality, Difference meanwhile introducing into Quantity inequality, whether in number or in magnitude: thus are produced circles and squares, and irregular figures, with number like and unlike, odd and even. 3354 Enneads: VI II. 21

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. 3435 Enneads: VI III. 9

A hand may very well control an entire mass, a long plank, or anything of that sort; the control is effective throughout and yet is not distributed, unit for unit, over the object of control: the power is felt to reach over the whole area, though the hand is only hand-long, not taking the extension of the mass it wields; lengthen the object and, provided that the total is within the strength, the power handles the new load with no need of distributing itself over the increased area. Now let us eliminate the corporeal mass of the hand, retaining the power it exerted: is not that power, the impartible, present integrally over the entire area of control? Or imagine a small luminous mass serving as centre to a transparent sphere, so that the LIGHT from within shows upon the entire outer surface, otherwise unlit: we surely agree that the inner core of LIGHT, intact and immobile, reaches over the entire outer extension; the single LIGHT of that small centre illuminates the whole field. The diffused LIGHT is not due to any bodily magnitude of that central point which illuminates not as body but as body lit, that is by another kind of power than corporeal quality: let us then abstract the corporeal mass, retaining the LIGHT as power: we can no longer speak of the LIGHT in any particular spot; it is equally diffused within and throughout the entire sphere. We can no longer even name the spot it occupied so as to say whence it came or how it is present; we can but seek and wonder as the search shows us the LIGHT simultaneously present at each and every point in the sphere. So with the sunLIGHT: looking to the corporeal mass you are able to name the source of the LIGHT shining through all the air, but what you see is one identical LIGHT in integral omnipresence. Consider too the refraction of LIGHT by which it is thrown away from the line of incidence; yet, direct or refracted, it is one and the same LIGHT. And supposing, as before, that the sun were simply an unembodied illuminant, the LIGHT would no longer be fixed to any one definite spot: having no starting point, no centre of origin, it would be an integral unity omnipresent. 3625 Enneads: VI IV. 7

The LIGHT of our world can be allocated because it springs from a corporeal mass of known position, but conceive an immaterial entity, independent of body as being of earlier nature than all body, a nature firmly self-based or, better, without need of base: such a principle, incorporeal, autonomous, having no source for its rising, coming from no place, attached to no material mass, this cannot be allotted part here and part there: that would be to give it both a previous position and a present attachment. Finally, anything participating in such a principle can participate only as entirety with entirety; there can be no allotment and no partition. 3626 Enneads: VI IV. 8

Or, again, suppose the powers coming Thence are other than their source – lesser, fainter, as a bright LIGHT dwindles to a dim – but each attached to its essence as a power must always be: such secondary powers would be perfectly uniform and at once we are forced to admit the omnipresence of the one same power or at the least the presence – as in one and the same body – of some undivided identity integral at every point. 3632 Enneads: VI IV. 9

Further, a vestigial cut off from its source disappears – for example, a reflected LIGHT – and in general an emanant loses its quality once it is severed from the original which it reproduces: just so the powers derived from that source must vanish if they do not remain attached to it. 3634 Enneads: VI IV. 9

If we are told that these powers fade out similarly, we are left with only one imperishable: the souls, the Intellectual-Principle, become perishable; then since Being (identical with the Intellectual-Principle) becomes transitory, so also must the Beings, its productions. Yet the sun, so long as it holds its station in the universe, will pour the same LIGHT upon the same places; to think its LIGHT may be lessened is to hold its mass perishable. But it has been abundantly stated that the emanants of the First are not perishable, that the souls, and the Intellectual-Principle with all its content, cannot perish. 3639 Enneads: VI IV. 10

Still, this integral omnipresence admitted, why do not all things participate in the Intellectual Order in its entirety? Why has it a first participant, a second, and so on? We can but see that presence is determined by the fitness of the participant so that, while Being is omnipresent to the realm of Being, never falling short of itself, yet only the competent possess themselves of that presence which depends not upon situation but upon adequacy; the transparent object and the opaque answer very differently to the LIGHT. These firsts, seconds, thirds, of participance are determined by rank, by power, not by place but by differentiation; and difference is no bar to coexistence, witness soul and Intellectual-Principle: similarly our own knowledge, the trivial next the gravest; one and the same object yields colour to our sight, fragrance to smell, to every sense a particular experience, all presented simultaneously. 3640 Enneads: VI IV. 11

Let the image-offspring of the individuality – fare as it may, the true soul when it turns its LIGHT upon itself, chooses the higher and by that choice blends into the All, neither acting now nor extinct. 3667 Enneads: VI IV. 16

In every entity the essential nature is the governing principle and, as we are told, a sound definition brings to LIGHT many even of the concomitants: where the essential nature is the entire being, we must be all the more careful to keep to that, to look to that, to refer all to that. 3680 Enneads: VI V. 2

Note, however, that when we sometimes speak of the Ideas illuminating Matter this is not to suggest the mode in which material LIGHT pours down on a material object; we use the phrase in the sense only that, the material being image while the Ideas are archetypes, the two orders are distinguished somewhat in the manner of illuminant and illuminated. But it is time to be more exact. 3696 Enneads: VI V. 8

We take it, then, that the Idea, say of Fire – for we had best deal with Matter as underlying the elements – is not in the Matter. The Ideal Fire, then, remaining apart, produces the form of fire throughout the entire enfired mass. Now let us suppose – and the same method will apply to all the so-called elements – that this Fire in its first material manifestation is a multiple mass. That single Fire is seen producing an image of itself in all the sensible fires; yet it is not spatially separate; it does not, then, produce that image in the manner of our visible LIGHT; for in that case all this sensible fire, supposing that it were a whole of parts (as the analogy would necessitate), must have generated spatial positions out of itself, since the Idea or Form remains in a non-spatial world; for a principle thus pluralized must first have departed from its own character in order to be present in that many and participate many times in the one same Form. 3698 Enneads: VI V. 8

These then are the primal numbers; they are numerable; the numbers of the other order are of a double character; as derived from the first numbers they are themselves numerable but as acting for those first they are measures of the rest of things, numbering numbers and numerables. For how could they declare a Decad save in the LIGHT of numbers within themselves? 3804 Enneads: VI VI. 15

It appears then that Number in that realm is definite; it is we that can conceive the “More than is present”; the infinity lies in our counting: in the Real is no conceiving more than has been conceived; all stands entire; no number has been or could be omitted to make addition possible. It might be described as infinite in the sense that it has not been measured – who is there to measure it? – but it is solely its own, a concentrated unit, entire, not ringed round by any boundary; its manner of being is settled for it by itself alone. None of the Real-Beings is under limit; what is limited, measured, is what needs measure to prevent it running away into the unbounded. There every being is Measure; and therefore it is that all is beautiful. Because that is a living thing it is beautiful, holding the highest life, the complete, a life not tainted towards death, nothing mortal there, nothing dying. Nor is the life of that Absolute Living-Form some feeble flickering; it is primal, the brightest, holding all that life has of radiance; it is that first LIGHT which the souls There draw upon for their life and bring with them when they come here. It knows for what purpose it lives, towards What it lives, from Whence it lives; for the Whence of its life is the Whither… and close above it stands the wisdom of all, the collective Intellectual-Principle, knit into it, one with it, colouring it to a higher goodness, by kneading wisdom into it, making its beauty still more august. Even here the august and veritably beautiful life is the life in wisdom, here dimly seen, There purely. For There wisdom gives sight to the seer and power for the fuller living and in that tenser life both to see and to become what is seen. 3820 Enneads: VI VI. 18

God, or some one of the gods, in sending the souls to their birth, placed eyes in the face to catch the LIGHT and allotted to each sense the appropriate organ, providing thus for the safety which comes by seeing and hearing in time and, seeking or avoiding under guidance of touch. 3828 Enneads: VI VII. 1

Why, then, are water and air not ensouled as earth is? Now, it is quite certain that these are equally within the living total, parts of the living all; life does not appear visibly in them; but neither does it in the case of the earth where its presence is inferred by what earth produces: but there are living things in fire and still more manifestly in water and there are systems of life in the air. The particular fire, rising only to be quenched, eludes the soul animating the universe; it slips away from the magnitude which would manifest the soul within it; so with air and water. If these Kinds could somehow be fastened down to magnitude they would exhibit the soul within them, now concealed by the fact that their function requires them to be loose or flowing. It is much as in the case of the fluids within ourselves; the flesh and all that is formed out of the blood into flesh show the soul within, but the blood itself, not bringing us any sensation, seems not to have soul; yet it must; the blood is not subject to blind force; its nature obliges it to abstain from the soul which nonetheless is indwelling in it. This must be the case with the three elements; it is the fact that the living beings formed from the close conglomeration of air (the stars) are not susceptible to suffering. But just as air, so long as it remains itself, eludes the LIGHT which is and remains unyielding, so too, by the effect of its circular movement, it eludes soul – and, in another sense, does not. And so with fire and water. 3879 Enneads: VI VII. 11

The Intellectual-Principle is the Intellectual Act; its movement is complete, filling Being complete; And the entire of Being is the Intellectual Act entire, comprehending all life and the unfailing succession of things. Because this Principle contains Identity and Difference its division is ceaselessly bringing the different things to LIGHT. Its entire movement is through life and among living things. To a traveller over land, all is earth but earth abounding in difference: so in this journey the life through which Intellectual-Principle passes is one life but, in its ceaseless changing, a varied life. 3890 Enneads: VI VII. 13

On the nature of the Intellectual-Principle we get LIGHT from its manifestations; they show that it demands such diversity as is compatible with its being a monad. Take what principle you will, that of plant or animal: if this principle were a pure unity and not a specifically varied thing, it could not so serve as principle; its product would be Matter, the principle not having taken all those forms necessary if Matter is to be permeated and utterly transformed. A face is not one mass; there are nose and eyes; and the nose is not a unity but has the differences which make it a nose; as bare unity it would be mere mass. 3892 Enneads: VI VII. 14

No: that would not be Intellection looking upon the Good; it would be a looking void of Intellection. We must think of it not as looking but as living; dependent upon That, it kept itself turned Thither; all the tendance taking place There and upon That must be a movement teeming with life and must so fill the looking Principle; there is no longer bare Act, there is a filling to saturation. Forthwith Intellectual-Principle becomes all things, knows that fact in virtue of its self-knowing and at once becomes Intellectual-Principle, filled so as to hold within itself that object of its vision, seeing all by the LIGHT from the Giver and bearing that Giver with it. 3899 Enneads: VI VII. 16

In this way the Supreme may be understood to be the cause at once of essential reality and of the knowing of reality. The sun, cause of the existence of sense-things and of their being seen, is indirectly the cause of sight, without being either the faculty or the object: similarly this Principle, The Good, cause of Being and Intellectual-Principle, is a LIGHT appropriate to what is to be seen There and to their seer; neither the Beings nor the Intellectual-Principle, it is their source and by the LIGHT it sheds upon both makes them objects of Intellection. This filling procures the existence; after the filling, the being; the existence achieved, the seeing followed: the beginning is that state of not yet having been filled, though there is, also, the beginning which means that the Filling Principle was outside and by that act of filling gave shape to the filled. 3900 Enneads: VI VII. 16

Thus the Life in the Supreme was the collectivity of power; the vision taking place There was the potentiality of all; Intellectual-Principle, thus arising, is manifested as this universe of Being. It stands over the Beings not as itself requiring base but that it may serve as base to the Form of the Firsts, the Formless Form. And it takes position towards the soul, becoming a LIGHT to the soul as itself finds its LIGHT in the First; whenever Intellectual-Principle becomes the determinant of soul it shapes it into Reasoning Soul, by communicating a trace of what itself has come to possess. 3907 Enneads: VI VII. 17

Are we to determine the good by the respective values of things? This is to make Idea and Reason-Principle the test: all very well; but arrived at these, what explanation have we to give as to why Idea and Reason-Principle themselves are good? In the lower, we recognise goodness – in its less perfect form – by comparison with what is poorer still; we are without a standard There where no evil exists, the Bests holding the field alone. Reason demands to know what constitutes goodness; those principles are good in their own nature and we are left in perplexity because cause and fact are identical: and even though we should state a cause, the doubt still remains until our reason claims its rights There. But we need not abandon the search; another path may lead to the LIGHT. 3919 Enneads: VI VII. 19

Material forms, containing LIGHT incorporated in them, need still a LIGHT apart from them that their own LIGHT may be manifest; just so the Beings of that sphere, all LIGHTsome, need another and a lordlier LIGHT or even they would not be visible to themselves and beyond. 3927 Enneads: VI VII. 21

That LIGHT known, then indeed we are stirred towards those Beings in longing and rejoicing over the radiance about them, just as earthly love is not for the material form but for the Beauty manifested upon it. Every one of those Beings exists for itself but becomes an object of desire by the colour cast upon it from The Good, source of those graces and of the love they evoke. The soul taking that outflow from the divine is stirred; seized with a Bacchic passion, goaded by these goads, it becomes Love. Before that, even Intellectual-Principle with all its loveliness did not stir the soul; for that beauty is dead until it take the LIGHT of The Good, and the soul lies supine, cold to all, unquickened even to Intellectual-Principle there before it. But when there enters into it a glow from the divine, it gathers strength, awakens, spreads true wings, and however urged by its nearer environing, speeds its buoyant way elsewhere, to something greater to its memory: so long as there exists anything loftier than the near, its very nature bears it upwards, lifted by the giver of that love. Beyond Intellectual-Principle it passes but beyond The Good it cannot, for nothing stands above That. Let it remain in Intellectual-Principle and it sees the lovely and august, but it is not there possessed of all it sought; the face it sees is beautiful no doubt but not of power to hold its gaze because lacking in the radiant grace which is the bloom upon beauty. 3928 Enneads: VI VII. 22

Why else is there more of the glory of beauty upon the living and only some faint trace of it upon the dead, though the face yet retains all its fulness and symmetry? Why are the most living portraits the most beautiful, even though the others happen to be more symmetric? Why is the living ugly more attractive than the sculptured handsome? It is that the one is more nearly what we are looking for, and this because there is soul there, because there is more of the Idea of The Good, because there is some glow of the LIGHT of The Good and this illumination awakens and lifts the soul and all that goes with it so that the whole man is won over to goodness, and in the fullest measure stirred to life. 3930 Enneads: VI VII. 22

That which soul must quest, that which sheds its LIGHT upon Intellectual-Principle, leaving its mark wherever it falls, surely we need not wonder that it be of power to draw to itself, calling back from every wandering to rest before it. From it came all, and so there is nothing mightier; all is feeble before it. Of all things the best, must it not be The Good? If by The Good we mean the principle most wholly self-sufficing, utterly without need of any other, what can it be but this? Before all the rest, it was what it was, when evil had yet no place in things. 3931 Enneads: VI VII. 23

But ourselves – how does it touch us? We may recall what we have said of the nature of the LIGHT shining from it into Intellectual-Principle and so by participation into the soul. But for the moment let us leave that aside and put another question: Does The Good hold that nature and name because some outside thing finds it desirable? May we put it that a thing desirable to one is good to that one and that what is desirable to all is to be recognised as The Good? No doubt this universal questing would make the goodness evident but still there must be in the nature something to earn that name. 3936 Enneads: VI VII. 24

Matter would have Forming-Idea for its good, since, were it conscious, it would welcome that; body would look to soul, without which it could not be or endure; soul must look to virtue; still higher stands Intellectual-Principle; above that again is the principle we call the Primal. Each of these progressive priors must have act upon those minors to which they are, respectively, the good: some will confer order and place, others life, others wisdom and the good life: Intellectual-Principle will draw upon the Authentic Good which we hold to be coterminous with it, both as being an Activity put forth from it and as even now taking LIGHT from it. This good we will define later. 3944 Enneads: VI VII. 25

The answer is that even in his disregard of the good proposed he is with us in setting a good before him but fails to see how the good we define fits into his own conception. It is impossible to say “Not that” if one is utterly without experience or conception of the “That”; there will generally have been, even, some inkling of the good beyond Intellection. Besides, one attaining or approaching the good, but not recognising it, may assure himself in the LIGHT of its contraries; otherwise he will not even hold ignorance an evil though everyone prefers to know and is proud of knowing so that our very sensations seek to ripen into knowledge. 3961 Enneads: VI VII. 29

But since Thence come the beauty and LIGHT in all, it is Thence that Intellectual-Principle took the brilliance of the Intellectual Energy which flashed Nature into being; Thence soul took power towards life, in virtue of that fuller life streaming into it. Intellectual-Principle was raised thus to that Supreme and remains with it, happy in that presence. Soul too, that soul which as possessing knowledge and vision was capable, clung to what it saw; and as its vision so its rapture; it saw and was stricken; but having in itself something of that principle it felt its kinship and was moved to longing like those stirred by the image of the beloved to desire of the veritable presence. Lovers here mould themselves to the beloved; they seek to increase their attraction of person and their likeness of mind; they are unwilling to fall short in moral quality or in other graces lest they be distasteful to those possessing such merit – and only among such can true love be. In the same way the soul loves the Supreme Good, from its very beginnings stirred by it to love. The soul which has never strayed from this love waits for no reminding from the beauty of our world: holding that love – perhaps unawares – it is ever in quest, and, in its longing to be borne Thither, passes over what is lovely here and with one glance at the beauty of the universe dismisses all; for it sees that all is put together of flesh and Matter, befouled by its housing, made fragmentary by corporal extension, not the Authentic Beauty which could never venture into the mud of body to be soiled, annulled. 3967 Enneads: VI VII. 31

Here, we put aside all the learning; disciplined to this pitch, established in beauty, the quester holds knowledge still of the ground he rests on but, suddenly, swept beyond it all by the very crest of the wave of Intellect surging beneath, he is lifted and sees, never knowing how; the vision floods the eyes with LIGHT, but it is not a LIGHT showing some other object, the LIGHT is itself the vision. No longer is there thing seen and LIGHT to show it, no longer Intellect and object of Intellection; this is the very radiance that brought both Intellect and Intellectual object into being for the later use and allowed them to occupy the quester’s mind. With This he himself becomes identical, with that radiance whose Act is to engender Intellectual-Principle, not losing in that engendering but for ever unchanged, the engendered coming to be simply because that Supreme exists. If there were no such principle above change, no derivative could rise. 3987 Enneads: VI VII. 36

Intellection seems to have been given as an aid to the diviner but weaker beings, an eye to the blind. But the eye itself need not see Being since it is itself the LIGHT; what must take the LIGHT through the eye needs the LIGHT because of its darkness. If, then, intellection is the LIGHT and LIGHT does not need the LIGHT, surely that brilliance (The First) which does not need LIGHT can have no need of intellection, will not add this to its nature. 4015 Enneads: VI VII. 41

But it is not, in our view, as an attribute that this freedom is present in the First. In the LIGHT of free acts, from which we eliminate the contraries, we recognise There self-determination, self-directed and, failing more suitable terms, we apply to it the lesser terms brought over from lesser things and so tell it as best we may: no words could ever be adequate or even applicable to that from which all else – the noble, the august – is derived. For This is principle of all, or, more strictly, unrelated to all and, in this consideration, cannot be made to possess such laters as even freedom and self-disposal, which in fact indicate manifestation upon the extern – unhindered but implying the existence of other beings whose opposition proves ineffective. 4060 Enneads: VI VIII. 8

And when we say that neither does He absorb anything nor anything absorb Him, thus again we are setting Him outside of all happening – not only because we declare Him unique and untouched by all but in another way also. Suppose we found such a nature in ourselves; we are untouched by all that has gathered round us subjecting us to happening and chance; all that accruement was of the servile and lay exposed to chance: by this new state alone we acquire self-disposal and free act, the freedom of that LIGHT which belongs to the order of the good and is good in actuality, greater than anything Intellectual-Principle has to give, an actuality whose advantage over Intellection is no adventitious superiority. When we attain to this state and become This alone, what can we say but that we are more than free, more than self-disposing? And who then could link us to chance, hazard, happening, when thus we are become veritable Life, entered into That which contains no alloy but is purely itself? Isolate anything else and the being is inadequate; the Supreme in isolation is still what it was. The First cannot be in the soulless or in an unreasoning life; such a life is too feeble in being; it is reason dissipated, it is indetermination; only in the measure of approach towards reason is there liberation from happening; the rational is above chance. Ascending we come upon the Supreme, not as reason but as reason’s better: thus God is far removed from all happening: the root of reason is self-springing. 4093 Enneads: VI VIII. 15

Such a power, author of Intellectual-Principle, author of being – how does it lend itself to chance, to hazard, to any “So it happened”? What is present in Intellectual-Principle is present, though in a far transcendent mode, in the One: so in a LIGHT diffused afar from one LIGHT shining within itself, the diffused is vestige, the source is the true LIGHT; but Intellectual-Principle, the diffused and image LIGHT, is not different in kind from its prior; and it is not a thing of chance but at every point is reason and cause. 4105 Enneads: VI VIII. 18

Our way then takes us beyond knowing; there may be no wandering from unity; knowing and knowable must all be left aside; every object of thought, even the highest, we must pass by, for all that is good is later than This and derives from This as from the sun all the LIGHT of the day. 4154 Enneads: VI IX. 4

There are those that have not attained to see. The soul has not come to know the splendour There; it has not felt and clutched to itself that love-passion of vision known to lover come to rest where he loves. Or struck perhaps by that authentic LIGHT, all the soul lit by the nearness gained, we have gone weighted from beneath; the vision is frustrate; we should go without burden and we go carrying that which can but keep us back; we are not yet made over into unity. 4156 Enneads: VI IX. 4

In this choiring, the soul looks upon the wellspring of Life, wellspring also of Intellect, beginning of Being, fount of Good, root of Soul. It is not that these are poured out from the Supreme lessening it as if it were a thing of mass. At that the emanants would be perishable; but they are eternal; they spring from an eternal principle, which produces them not by its fragmentation but in virtue of its intact identity: therefore they too hold firm; so long as the sun shines, so long there will be LIGHT. 4183 Enneads: VI IX. 9

Thus we have all the vision that may be of Him and of ourselves; but it is of a self-wrought to splendour, brimmed with the Intellectual LIGHT, become that very LIGHT, pure, buoyant, unburdened, raised to Godhood or, better, knowing its Godhood, all aflame then – but crushed out once more if it should take up the discarded burden. 4190 Enneads: VI IX. 9