Supreme

There
ekei

’There’ – ‘in the SUPREME’ – ‘in the Beyond’ and other similar words or phrases translate at convenience the word Ekei used by Plotinus for the Divine Sphere, the Intelligible World.

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In childhood the main activity is in the Couplement and there is but little irradiation from the higher principles of our being: but when these higher principles act but feebly or rarely upon us their action is directed towards the SUPREME; they work upon us only when they stand at the mid-point. Enneads I,1,

And the Soul is said to go down, to decline, only in that the object it illuminates lives by its life. And it lets the image fall only if there be nothing near to take it up; and it lets it fall, not as a thing cut off, but as a thing that ceases to be: the image has no further being when the whole Soul is looking toward the SUPREME. Enneads I,1,

So with us: it is from the SUPREME that we derive order and distribution and harmony, which are virtues in this sphere: the Existences There, having no need of harmony, order or distribution, have nothing to do with virtue; and, none the less, it is by our possession of virtue that we become like to Them. Enneads I,2,

Thus much to show that the principle that we attain Likeness by virtue in no way involves the existence of virtue in the SUPREME. But we have not merely to make a formal demonstration: we must persuade as well as demonstrate. Enneads I,2,

First, then, let us examine those good qualities by which we hold Likeness comes, and seek to establish what is this thing which, as we possess it, in transcription, is virtue but as the SUPREME possesses it, is in the nature of an exemplar or archetype and is not virtue. Enneads I,2,

And, further, these Civic Virtues – measured and ordered themselves and acting as a principle of measure to the Soul which is as Matter to their forming – are like to the measure reigning in the over-world, and they carry a trace of that Highest Good in the SUPREME; for, while utter measurelessness is brute Matter and wholly outside of Likeness, any participation in Ideal-Form produces some corresponding degree of Likeness to the formless Being There. And participation goes by nearness: the Soul nearer than the body, therefore closer akin, participates more fully and shows a godlike presence, almost cheating us into the delusion that in the Soul we see God entire. Enneads I,2,

But would not this make virtue a state of the Divine also? No: the Divine has no states; the state is in the Soul. The Act of Intellection in the Soul is not the same as in the Divine: of things in the SUPREME, Soul grasps some after a mode of its own, some not at all. Enneads I,2,

For, at this height, the man is the very being that came from the SUPREME. The primal excellence restored, the essential man is There: entering this sphere, he has associated himself with the reasoning phase of his nature and this he will lead up into likeness with his highest self, as far as earthly mind is capable, so that if possible it shall never be inclined to, and at the least never adopt, any course displeasing to its overlord. Enneads I,2,

And each of these has two modes or aspects: there is Wisdom as it is in the Intellectual-Principle and as in the Soul; and there is the Intellectual-Principle as it is present to itself and as it is present to the Soul: this gives what in the Soul is Virtue, in the SUPREME not Virtue. Enneads I,2,

In the SUPREME, then, what is it? Its proper Act and Its Essence. Enneads I,2,

That Act and Essence of the SUPREME, manifested in a new form, constitute the virtue of this sphere. For the SUPREME is not self-existent justice, or the Absolute of any defined virtue: it is, so to speak, an exemplar, the source of what in the soul becomes virtue: for virtue is dependent, seated in something not itself; the SUPREME is self-standing, independent. Enneads I,2,

In the SUPREME, Intellection constitutes Knowledge and Wisdom; self-concentration is Sophrosyne; Its proper Act is Its Dutifulness; Its Immateriality, by which It remains inviolate within Itself is the equivalent of Fortitude. Enneads I,2,

In the Soul, the direction of vision towards the Intellectual-Principle is Wisdom and Prudence, soul-virtues not appropriate to the SUPREME where Thinker and Thought are identical. All the other virtues have similar correspondences. Enneads I,2,

For it is to the Gods, not to the Good, that our Likeness must look: to model ourselves upon good men is to produce an image of an image: we have to fix our gaze above the image and attain Likeness to the SUPREME Exemplar. Enneads I,2,

And such a one will possess not merely the good, but the SUPREME Good if, that is to say, in the realm of existents the SUPREME Good can be no other than the authentically living, no other than Life in its greatest plenitude, life in which the good is present as something essential not as something brought from without, a life needing no foreign substance called in from a foreign realm, to establish it in good. Enneads I,4,

And the author and principle of what he is and holds is the SUPREME, which within Itself is the Good but manifests Itself within the human being after this other mode. Enneads I,4,

Adverse fortune does not shake his felicity: the life so founded is stable ever. Suppose death strikes at his household or at his friends; he knows what death is, as the victims, if they are among the wise, know too. And if death taking from him his familiars and intimates does bring grief, it is not to him, not to the true man, but to that in him which stands apart from the SUPREME, to that lower man in whose distress he takes no part. Enneads I,4,

Those that refuse to place the Sage aloft in the Intellectual Realm but drag him down to the accidental, dreading accident for him, have substituted for the Sage we have in mind another person altogether; they offer us a tolerable sort of man and they assign to him a life of mingled good and ill, a case, after all, not easy to conceive. But admitting the possibility of such a mixed state, it could not be deserved to be called a life of happiness; it misses the Great, both in the dignity of Wisdom and in the integrity of Good. The life of true happiness is not a thing of mixture. And Plato rightly taught that he who is to be wise and to possess happiness draws his good from the SUPREME, fixing his gaze on That, becoming like to That, living by That. Enneads I,4,

But, is there any such likeness between the loveliness of this world and the splendours in the SUPREME? Such a likeness in the particulars would make the two orders alike: but what is there in common between beauty here and beauty There? We hold that all the loveliness of this world comes by communion in Ideal-Form. Enneads I,6,

Therefore, first let each become godlike and each beautiful who cares to see God and Beauty. So, mounting, the Soul will come first to the Intellectual-Principle and survey all the beautiful Ideas in the SUPREME and will avow that this is Beauty, that the Ideas are Beauty. For by their efficacy comes all Beauty else, but the offspring and essence of the Intellectual-Being. What is beyond the Intellectual-Principle we affirm to be the nature of Good radiating Beauty before it. So that, treating the Intellectual-Kosmos as one, the first is the Beautiful: if we make distinction there, the Realm of Ideas constitutes the Beauty of the Intellectual Sphere; and The Good, which lies beyond, is the Fountain at once and Principle of Beauty: the Primal Good and the Primal Beauty have the one dwelling-place and, thus, always, Beauty’s seat is There. Enneads I,6,

As for that phase of the Soul in which sensation is vested, it, too, takes its good from the SUPREME above itself and moves, rejoicingly, in quest of it: and since the object of its desire is everywhere, it too ranges always through the entire scope of the universe. Enneads II,2,

And again, where could it have come from? whence did it take its being? If it is derived, it has a source: if it is eternal, then the Primal-Principles are more numerous than we thought, the Firsts are a meeting-ground. Lastly, if that Matter has been entered by Idea, the union constitutes a body; and, so, there is Body in the SUPREME. Enneads II,4,

Now Movement has Being as an accident and therefore should have Reality as an accident; or is it something serving to the completion of Reality? No: Movement is a Reality; everything in the SUPREME is a Reality. Enneads II,6,

Why, then, does not Reality reside, equally, in this sphere? In the SUPREME there is Reality because all things are one; ours is the sphere of images whose separation produces grades of difference. Thus in the spermatic unity all the human members are present undistinguishably; there is no separation of head and hand: their distinct existence begins in the life here, whose content is image, not Authentic Existence. Enneads II,6,

Then how do we assert the rising in the SUPREME of what we have called Reality from what is not Reality (i.e., from the pure Being which is above Reality)? The Reality there – possessing Authentic Being in the strictest sense, with the least admixture – is Reality by existing among the differentiations of the Authentic Being; or, better, Reality is affirmed in the sense that with the existence of the SUPREME is included its Act so that Reality seems to be a perfectionment of the Authentic Being, though in the truth it is a diminution; the produced thing is deficient by the very addition, by being less simplex, by standing one step away from the Authentic. Enneads II,6,

What, then, distinguishes Quality in the Intellectual Realm from that here, if both are Acts? The difference is that these (“Quality-Activities”) in the SUPREME do not indicate the very nature of the Reality (as do the corresponding Activities here) nor do they indicate variations of substance or of (essential) character; they merely indicate what we think of as Quality but in the Intellectual Realm must still be Activity. Enneads II,6,

To increase the Primals by making the SUPREME Mind engender the Reason-Principle, and this again engender in the Soul a distinct power to act as mediator between Soul and the SUPREME Mind, this is to deny intellection to the Soul, which would no longer derive its Reason from the Intellectual-Principle but from an intermediate: the Soul then would possess not the Reason-Principle but an image of it: the Soul could not know the Intellectual-Principle; it could have no intellection. Enneads II,8,

They hope to get the credit of minute and exact identification by setting up a plurality of intellectual Essences; but in reality this multiplication lowers the Intellectual Nature to the level of the Sense-Kind: their true course is to seek to reduce number to the least possible in the SUPREME, simply referring all things to the Second Hypostasis – which is all that exists as it is Primal Intellect and Reality and is the only thing that is good except only for the first Nature – and to recognize Soul as the third Principle, accounting for the difference among souls merely by diversity of experience and character. Instead of insulting those venerable teachers they should receive their doctrine with the respect due to the older thought and honour all that noble system – an immortal soul, an Intellectual and Intelligible Realm, the SUPREME God, the Soul’s need of emancipation from all intercourse with the body, the fact of separation from it, the escape from the world of process to the world of essential-being. These doctrines, all emphatically asserted by Plato, they do well to adopt: where they differ, they are at full liberty to speak their minds, but not to procure assent for their own theories by flaying and flouting the Greeks: where they have a divergent theory to maintain they must establish it by its own merits, declaring their own opinions with courtesy and with philosophical method and stating the controverted opinion fairly; they must point their minds towards the truth and not hunt fame by insult, reviling and seeking in their own persons to replace men honoured by the fine intelligences of ages past. Enneads II,8,

That this world has neither beginning nor end but exists for ever as long as the SUPREME stands is certainly no novel teaching. And before this school rose it had been urged that commerce with the body is no gain to a Soul. Enneads II,8,

But the Soul of the Universe cannot be in bond to what itself has bound: it is sovereign and therefore immune of the lower things, over which we on the contrary are not masters. That in it which is directed to the Divine and Transcendent is ever unmingled, knows no encumbering; that in it which imparts life to the body admits nothing bodily to itself. It is the general fact that an inset (as the Body), necessarily shares the conditions of its containing principle (as the Soul), and does not communicate its own conditions where that principle has an independent life: thus a graft will die if the stock dies, but the stock will live on by its proper life though the graft wither. The fire within your own self may be quenched, but the thing, fire, will exist still; and if fire itself were annihilated that would make no difference to the Soul, the Soul in the SUPREME, but only to the plan of the material world; and if the other elements sufficed to maintain a Kosmos, the Soul in the SUPREME would be unconcerned. Enneads II,8,

Such a reproduction there must necessarily be – though not by deliberation and contrivance – for the Intellectual could not be the last of things, but must have a double Act, one within itself and one outgoing; there must, then, be something later than the Divine; for only the thing with which all power ends fails to pass downwards something of itself. In the SUPREME there flourishes a marvellous vigour, and therefore it produces. Enneads II,8,

We must recognize that other men have attained the heights of goodness; we must admit the goodness of the celestial spirits, and above all of the gods – those whose presence is here but their contemplation in the SUPREME, and loftiest of them, the lord of this All, the most blessed Soul. Rising still higher, we hymn the divinities of the Intellectual Sphere, and, above all these, the mighty King of that dominion, whose majesty is made patent in the very multitude of the gods. Enneads II,8,

It is not by crushing the divine unto a unity but by displaying its exuberance – as the SUPREME himself has displayed it – that we show knowledge of the might of God, who, abidingly what He is, yet creates that multitude, all dependent on Him, existing by Him and from Him. Enneads II,8,

This Universe, too, exists by Him and looks to Him – the Universe as a whole and every God within it – and tells of Him to men, all alike revealing the plan and will of the SUPREME. Enneads II,8,

But they have no need of Him? The Universe has need of Him, and He knows its ordering and its indwellers and how far they belong to it and how far to the SUPREME, and which of the men upon it are friends of God, mildly acquiescing with the Kosmic dispensation when in the total course of things some pain must be brought to them – for we are to look not to the single will of any man but to the universe entire, regarding every one according to worth but not stopping for such things where all that may is hastening onward. Enneads II,8,

Another difficulty: These people come upon earth not as Soul-Images but as veritable Souls; yet, by great stress and strain, one or two of them are able to stir beyond the limits of the world, and when they do attain Reminiscence barely carry with them some slight recollection of the Sphere they once knew: on the other hand, this Image, a new-comer into being, is able, they tell us – as also is its Mother – to form at least some dim representation of the celestial world. It is an Image, stamped in Matter, yet it not merely has the conception of the SUPREME and adopts from that world the plan of this, but knows what elements serve the purpose. How, for instance, did it come to make fire before anything else? What made it judge fire a better first than some other object? Again, if it created the fire of the Universe by thinking of fire, why did it not make the Universe at a stroke by thinking of the Universe? It must have conceived the product complete from the first; the constituent elements would be embraced in that general conception. Enneads II,8,

Why should this down-shining take place unless such a process belonged to a universal law? Either the process is in the order of Nature or against that order. If it is in the nature of things, it must have taken place from eternity; if it is against the nature of things, then the breach of natural right exists in the SUPREME also; evil antedates this world; the cause of evil is not the world; on the contrary the SUPREME is the evil to us; instead of the Soul’s harm coming from this sphere, we have this Sphere harmed by the Soul. Enneads II,8,

Once more, we have no right to ask that all men shall be good, or to rush into censure because such universal virtue is not possible: this would be repeating the error of confusing our sphere with the SUPREME and treating evil as a nearly negligible failure in wisdom – as good lessened and dwindling continuously, a continuous fading out; it would be like calling the Nature-Principle evil because it is not Sense-Perception and the thing of sense evil for not being a Reason-Principle. If evil is no more than that, we will be obliged to admit evil in the SUPREME also, for there, too, Soul is less exalted than the Intellectual-Principle, and That too has its Superior. Enneads II,8,

In yet another way they infringe still more gravely upon the inviolability of the SUPREME. Enneads II,8,

In the sacred formulas they inscribe, purporting to address the Supernal Beings – not merely the Soul but even the Transcendents – they are simply uttering spells and appeasements and evocations in the idea that these Powers will obey a call and be led about by a word from any of us who is in some degree trained to use the appropriate forms in the appropriate way – certain melodies, certain sounds, specially directed breathings, sibilant cries, and all else to which is ascribed magic potency upon the SUPREME. Perhaps they would repudiate any such intention: still they must explain how these things act upon the unembodied: they do not see that the power they attribute to their own words is so much taken away from the majesty of the divine. Enneads II,8,

Besides, in this slighting of the Mundane Gods and the world, the honour they profess for the gods of the Intellectual Sphere becomes an inconsistency; Where we love, our hearts are warm also to the Kin of the beloved; we are not indifferent to the children of our friend. Now every Soul is a child of that Father; but in the heavenly bodies there are Souls, intellective, holy, much closer to the Supernal Beings than are ours; for how can this Kosmos be a thing cut off from That and how imagine the gods in it to stand apart? But of this matter we have treated elsewhere: here we urge that where there is contempt for the Kin of the SUPREME the knowledge of the SUPREME itself is merely verbal. Enneads II,8,

And we must recognize, that, even in the world of sense and part, there are things of a loveliness comparable to that of the Celestials – forms whose beauty must fill us with veneration for their creator and convince us of their origin in the divine, forms which show how ineffable is the beauty of the SUPREME since they cannot hold us but we must, though in all admiration, leave these for those. Further, wherever there is interior beauty, we may be sure that inner and outer correspond; where the interior is vile, all is brought low by that flaw in the dominants. Enneads II,8,

Then the Reason-Principle has measured things out with the set purpose of inequality? Certainly not: the inequality is inevitable by the nature of things: the Reason-Principle of this Universe follows upon a phase of the Soul; the Soul itself follows upon an Intellectual Principle, and this Intellectual Principle is not one among the things of the Universe but is all things; in all things, there is implied variety of things; where there is variety and not identity there must be primals, secondaries, tertiaries and every grade downward. Forms of life, then, there must be that are not pure Soul but the dwindling of Souls enfeebled stage by stage of the process. There is, of course, a Soul in the Reason-Principle constituting a living being, but it is another Soul (a lesser phase), not that (the SUPREME Soul) from which the Reason-Principle itself derives; and this combined vehicle of life weakens as it proceeds towards matter, and what it engenders is still more deficient. Consider how far the engendered stands from its origin and yet, what a marvel! Enneads III,3,

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

Magnitude is not, like Matter, a receptacle; it is an Ideal-Principle: it is a thing standing apart to itself, not some definite Mass. The fact is that the self-gathered content of the Intellectual Principle or of the All-Soul, desires expansion (and thereby engenders secondaries): in its images – aspiring and moving towards it and eagerly imitating its act – is vested a similar power of reproducing their states in their own derivatives. The Magnitude latent in the expansive tendency of the Image-making phase (of Intellect or All-Soul) runs forth into the Absolute Magnitude of the Universe; this in turn enlists into the process the spurious magnitude of Matter: the content of the SUPREME, thus, in virtue of its own prior extension enables Matter – which never possesses a content – to exhibit the appearance of Magnitude. It must be understood that spurious Magnitude consists in the fact that a thing (Matter) not possessing actual Magnitude strains towards it and has the extension of that straining. All that is Real Being gives forth a reflection of itself upon all else; every Reality, therefore, has Magnitude which by this process is communicated to the Universe. Enneads III,6,

Then we reconstruct; we sum all into a collected unity once more, a sole Life in the SUPREME; we concentrate Diversity and all the endless production of act: thus we know Identity, a concept or, rather, a Life never varying, not becoming what previously it was not, the thing immutably itself, broken by no interval; and knowing this, we know Eternity. Enneads III,7,

In one aspect, no doubt, Eternity resides in a partial phase of the All-Being; but in another aspect it is inherent in the All taken as a totality, since that Authentic All is not a thing patched up out of external parts, but is authentically an all because its parts are engendered by itself. It is like the truthfulness in the SUPREME which is not an agreement with some outside fact or being but is inherent in each member about which it is the truth. To an authentic All it is not enough that it be everything that exists: it must possess allness in the full sense that nothing whatever is absent from it. Then nothing is in store for it: if anything were to come, that thing must have been lacking to it, and it was, therefore, not All. And what, of a Nature contrary to its own, could enter into it when it is (the SUPREME and therefore) immune? Since nothing can accrue to it, it cannot seek change or be changed or ever have made its way into Being. Enneads III,7,

And it should be no shock that we find plurality in it; each of the Beings of the SUPREME is multiple by virtue of unlimited force; for to be limitless implies failing at no point, and Eternity is pre-eminently the limitless since (having no past or future) it spends nothing of its own substance. Enneads III,7,

But let us conceive this power of the Soul to turn back and withdraw from the life-course which it now maintains, from the continuous and unending activity of an ever-existent soul not self-contained or self-intent but concerned about doing and engendering: imagine it no longer accomplishing any Act, setting a pause to this work it has inaugurated; let this outgoing phase of the Soul become once more, equally with the rest, turned to the SUPREME, to Eternal Being, to the tranquilly stable. Enneads III,7,

What would then exist but Eternity? All would remain in unity; how could there be any diversity of things? What Earlier or Later would there be, what long-lasting or short-lasting? What ground would lie ready to the Soul’s operation but the SUPREME in which it has its Being? Or, indeed, what operative tendency could it have even to That since a prior separation is the necessary condition of tendency? The very sphere of the Universe would not exist; for it cannot antedate Time: it, too, has its Being and its Movement in Time; and if it ceased to move, the Soul-Act (which is the essence of Time) continuing, we could measure the period of its Repose by that standard outside it. Enneads III,7,

The primal phase of the Soul – inhabitant of the SUPREME and, by its participation in the SUPREME, filled and illuminated – remains unchangeably There; but in virtue of that first participation, that of the primal participant, a secondary phase also participates in the SUPREME, and this secondary goes forth ceaselessly as Life streaming from Life; for energy runs through the Universe and there is no extremity at which it dwindles out. But, travel as far as it may, it never draws that first part of itself from the place whence the outgoing began: if it did, it would no longer be everywhere (its continuous Being would be broken and) it would be present at the end, only, of its course. Enneads III,8,

The SUPREME must be an entity in which the two are one; it will, therefore, be a Seeing that lives, not an object of vision like things existing in something other than themselves: what exists in an outside element is some mode of living-thing; it is not the Self-Living. Enneads III,8,

This, then, is the Being which planned to create in the lower Universe what it saw existing in the SUPREME, the four orders of living beings. Enneads III,8,

…. For in any one science the reduction of the total of knowledge into its separate propositions does not shatter its unity, chipping it into unrelated fragments; in each distinct item is talent the entire body of the science, an integral thing in its highest Principle and its last detail: and similarly a man must so discipline himself that the first Principles of his Being are also his completions, are totals, that all be pointed towards the loftiest phase of the Nature: when a man has become this unity in the best, he is in that other realm; for it is by this highest within himself, made his own, that he holds to the SUPREME. Enneads III,8,

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

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

In the SUPREME, the Intellectual-Principles are not annulled, for in their differentiation there is no bodily partition, no passing of each separate phase into a distinct unity; every such phase remains in full possession of that identical being. It is exactly so with the souls. Enneads IV,3,

Thus the gist of the matter is established: one soul the source of all; those others, as a many founded in that one, are, on the analogy of the Intellectual-Principle, at once divided and undivided; that Soul which abides in the SUPREME is the one expression or Logos of the Intellectual-Principle, and from it spring other Reason-Principles, partial but immaterial, exactly as in the differentiation of the SUPREME. Enneads IV,3,

But it is safer to account for the creative act by nearer connection with the over-world; the souls whose tendency is exercised within the SUPREME have the greater power; immune in that pure seat they create securely; for the greater power takes the least hurt from the material within which it operates; and this power remains enduringly attached to the over-world: it creates, therefore, self gathered and the created things gather round it; the other souls, on the contrary, themselves go forth; that can mean only that they have deserted towards the abyss; a main phase in them is drawn downward and pulls them with it in the desire towards the lower. Enneads IV,3,

The “secondary and tertiary souls,” of which we hear, must be understood in the sense of closer or remoter position: it is much as in ourselves the relation to the SUPREME is not identical from soul to soul; some of us are capable of becoming Uniate, others of striving and almost attaining, while a third rank is much less apt; it is a matter of the degree or powers of the soul by which our expression is determined – the first degree dominant in the one person, the second, the third (the merely animal life) in others while, still, all of us contain all the powers. Enneads IV,3,

But what becomes of the soul’s infinity if it is thus fixed? The infinity is a matter of power: there is question, not of the soul’s being divisible into an infinite number of parts, but of an infinite possible effectiveness: it is infinity in the sense in which the SUPREME God, also, is free of all bound. Enneads IV,3,

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. Enneads IV,3,

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

It belongs to the nature of the All to make its entire content reproduce, most felicitously, the Reason-Principles in which it participates; every particular thing is the image within matter of a Reason-Principle which itself images a pre-material Reason-Principle: thus every particular entity is linked to that Divine Being in whose likeness it is made, the divine principle which the soul contemplated and contained in the act of each creation. Such mediation and representation there must have been since it was equally impossible for the created to be without share in the SUPREME, and for the SUPREME to descend into the created. Enneads IV,3,

The Intellectual-Principle in the SUPREME has ever been the sun of that sphere – let us accept that as the type of the creative Logos – and immediately upon it follows the Soul depending from it, stationary Soul from stationary Intelligence. But the Soul borders also upon the sun of this sphere, and it becomes the medium by which all is linked to the overworld; it plays the part of an interpreter between what emanates from that sphere down to this lower universe, and what rises – as far as, through soul, anything can – from the lower to the highest. Enneads IV,3,

These Beings (the Reason-Principles of this sphere) are divine in virtue of cleaving to the SUPREME, because, by the medium of the Soul thought of as descending they remain linked with the Primal Soul, and through it are veritably what they are called and possess the vision of the Intellectual Principle, the single object of contemplation to that soul in which they have their being. Enneads IV,3,

The souls of men, seeing their images in the mirror of Dionysus as it were, have entered into that realm in a leap downward from the SUPREME: yet even they are not cut off from their origin, from the divine Intellect; it is not that they have come bringing the Intellectual Principle down in their fall; it is that though they have descended even to earth, yet their higher part holds for ever above the heavens. Enneads IV,3,

For the container of the total of things must be a self-sufficing entity and remain so: in its periods it is wrought out to purpose under its Reason-Principles which are perdurably valid; by these periods it reverts unfailingly, in the measured stages of defined life-duration, to its established character; it is leading the things of this realm to be of one voice and plan with the SUPREME. And thus the kosmic content is carried forward to its purpose, everything in its co-ordinate place, under one only Reason-Principle operating alike in the descent and return of souls and to every purpose of the system. Enneads IV,3,

Such a consonance can have been procured in one only way: The All must, in every detail of act and experience, be an expression of the SUPREME, which must dominate alike its periods and its stable ordering and the life-careers varying with the movement of the souls as they are sometimes absorbed in that highest, sometimes in the heavens, sometimes turned to the things and places of our earth. All that is Divine Intellect will rest eternally above, and could never fall from its sphere but, poised entire in its own high place, will communicate to things here through the channel of Soul. Soul in virtue of neighbourhood is more closely modelled upon the Idea uttered by the Divine Intellect, and thus is able to produce order in the movement of the lower realm, one phase (the World-Soul) maintaining the unvarying march (of the kosmic circuit) the other (the soul of the Individual) adopting itself to times and season. Enneads IV,3,

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

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

If every living being were of the character of the All-perfect, self-sufficing, in peril from no outside influence the soul now spoken of as indwelling would not occupy the body; it would infuse life while clinging, entire, within the SUPREME. Enneads IV,3,

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

The loftier, on the contrary, must desire to come to a happy forgetfulness of all that has reached it through the lower: for one reason, there is always the possibility that the very excellence of the lower prove detrimental to the higher, tending to keep it down by sheer force of vitality. In any case the more urgent the intention towards the SUPREME, the more extensive will be the soul’s forgetfulness, unless indeed, when the entire living has, even here, been such that memory has nothing but the noblest to deal with: in this world itself, all is best when human interests have been held aloof; so, therefore, it must be with the memory of them. In this sense we may truly say that the good soul is the forgetful. It flees multiplicity; it seeks to escape the unbounded by drawing all to unity, for only thus is it free from entanglement, light-footed, self-conducted. Thus it is that even in this world the soul which has the desire of the other is putting away, amid its actual life, all that is foreign to that order. It brings there very little of what it has gathered here; as long as it is in the heavenly regions only, it will have more than it can retain. Enneads IV,3,

What, then, will be the Soul’s discourse, what its memories in the Intellectual Realm, when at last it has won its way to that Essence? Obviously from what we have been saying, it will be in contemplation of that order, and have its Act upon the things among which it now is; failing such Contemplation and Act, its being is not there. Of things of earth it will know nothing; it will not, for example, remember an act of philosophic virtue, or even that in its earthly career it had contemplation of the SUPREME. Enneads IV,4,

This, however, does not alter the fact that distinction exists in that realm – downwards from the SUPREME to the Ideas, upward from the Ideas to the Universal and to the SUPREME. Admitting that the Highest, as a self-contained unity, has no outgoing effect, that does not prevent the soul which has attained to the SUPREME from exerting its own characteristic Act: it certainly may have the intuition, not by stages and parts, of that Being which is without stage and part. Enneads IV,4,

For with the Intellectual or SUPREME – considered as distinct from the One – there is already the power of harbouring that Principle of Multiplicity, the source of things not previously existent in its superior. Enneads IV,4,

None the less the soul, even in the Intellectual Realm, is under the dispensation of a variety confronting it and a content of its own? No: once pure in the Intellectual, it too possesses that same unchangeableness: for it possesses identity of essence; when it is in that region it must of necessity enter into oneness with the Intellectual-Principle by the sheer fact of its self-orientation, for by that intention all interval disappears; the soul advances and is taken into unison, and in that association becomes one with the Intellectual-Principle – but not to its own destruction: the two are one, and two. In such a state there is no question of stage and change: the soul, without motion (but by right of its essential being) would be intent upon its intellectual act, and in possession, simultaneously, of its self-awareness; for it has become one simultaneous existence with the SUPREME. Enneads IV,4,

If the soul, on abandoning its place in the SUPREME, revives its memories of the lower, it must have in some form possessed them even there though the activity of the beings in that realm kept them in abeyance: they could not be in the nature of impressions permanently adopted – a notion which would entail absurdities – but were no more than a potentiality realized after return. When that energy of the Intellectual world ceases to tell upon the soul, it sees what it saw in the earlier state before it revisited the SUPREME. Enneads IV,4,

But this power which determines memory is it also the principle by which the SUPREME becomes effective in us? At any time when we have not been in direct vision of that sphere, memory is the source of its activity within us; when we have possessed that vision, its presence is due to the principle by which we enjoyed it: this principle awakens where it wakens; and it alone has vision in that order; for this is no matter to be brought to us by way of analogy, or by the syllogistic reasoning whose grounds lie elsewhere; the power which, even here, we possess of discoursing upon the Intellectual Beings is vested, as we show, in that principle which alone is capable of their contemplation. That, we must awaken, so to speak, and thus attain the vision of the SUPREME, as one, standing on some lofty height and lifting his eyes, sees what to those that have not mounted with him is invisible. Enneads IV,4,

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

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

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

Thus he will often feel the beauty of that word “Farewell: I am to you an immortal God,” for he has ascended to the SUPREME, and is all one strain to enter into likeness with it. Enneads IV,7,

Many times it has happened: Lifted out of the body into myself; becoming external to all other things and self-encentered; beholding a marvellous beauty; then, more than ever, assured of community with the loftiest order; enacting the noblest life, acquiring identity with the divine; stationing within It by having attained that activity; poised above whatsoever within the Intellectual is less than the SUPREME: yet, there comes the moment of descent from intellection to reasoning, and after that sojourn in the divine, I ask myself how it happens that I can now be descending, and how did the soul ever enter into my body, the soul which, even within the body, is the high thing it has shown itself to be. Enneads IV,8,

There is no reason why it should be expectant of evil with regard to such a body nor is there any such preoccupied concern, bringing about a veritable descent, as to withdraw it from its noblest and most blessed vision; it remains always intent upon the SUPREME, and its governance of this universe is effected by a power not calling upon act. Enneads IV,8,

In the same way the outgoing process could not end with the souls, their issue stifled: every Kind must produce its next; it must unfold from some concentrated central principle as from a seed, and so advance to its term in the varied forms of sense. The prior in its being will remain unalterably in the native seat; but there is the lower phase, begotten to it by an ineffable faculty of its being, native to soul as it exists in the SUPREME. Enneads IV,8,

The Kind, then, with which we are dealing is twofold, the Intellectual against the sensible: better for the soul to dwell in the Intellectual, but, given its proper nature, it is under compulsion to participate in the sense-realm also. There is no grievance in its not being, through and through, the highest; it holds mid-rank among the authentic existences, being of divine station but at the lowest extreme of the Intellectual and skirting the sense-known nature; thus, while it communicates to this realm something of its own store, it absorbs in turn whenever – instead of employing in its government only its safeguarded phase – it plunges in an excessive zeal to the very midst of its chosen sphere; then it abandons its status as whole soul with whole soul, though even thus it is always able to recover itself by turning to account the experience of what it has seen and suffered here, learning, so, the greatness of rest in the SUPREME, and more clearly discerning the finer things by comparison with what is almost their direct antithesis. Where the faculty is incapable of knowing without contact, the experience of evil brings the dearer perception of Good. Enneads IV,8,

We are not asserting the unity of soul in the sense of a complete negation of multiplicity – only of the SUPREME can that be affirmed – we are thinking of soul as simultaneously one and many, participant in the nature divided in body, but at the same time a unity by virtue of belonging to that Order which suffers no division. Enneads IV,8,

A double discipline must be applied if human beings in this pass are to be reclaimed, and brought back to their origins, lifted once more towards the SUPREME and One and First. Enneads: V I

Soul, for all the worth we have shown to belong to it, is yet a secondary, an image of the Intellectual-Principle: reason uttered is an image of the reason stored within the soul, and in the same way soul is an utterance of the Intellectual-Principle: it is even the total of its activity, the entire stream of life sent forth by that Principle to the production of further being; it is the forthgoing heat of a fire which has also heat essentially inherent. But within the SUPREME we must see energy not as an overflow but in the double aspect of integral inherence with the establishment of a new being. Sprung, in other words, from the Intellectual-Principle, Soul is intellective, but with an intellection operation by the method of reasonings: for its perfecting it must look to that Divine Mind, which may be thought of as a father watching over the development of his child born imperfect in comparison with himself. Enneads: V I

Thus its substantial existence comes from the Intellectual-Principle; and the Reason within it becomes Act in virtue of its contemplation of that prior; for its thought and act are its own intimate possession when it looks to the SUPREME Intelligence; those only are soul-acts which are of this intellective nature and are determined by its own character; all that is less noble is foreign (traceable to Matter) and is accidental to the soul in the course of its peculiar task. Enneads: V I

In two ways, then, the Intellectual-Principle enhances the divine quality of the soul, as father and as immanent presence; nothing separates them but the fact that they are not one and the same, that there is succession, that over against a recipient there stands the ideal-form received; but this recipient, Matter to the SUPREME Intelligence, is also noble as being at once informed by divine intellect and uncompounded. Enneads: V I

But how and what does the Intellectual-Principle see and, especially, how has it sprung from that which is to become the object of its vision? The mind demands the existence of these Beings, but it is still in trouble over the problem endlessly debated by the most ancient philosophers: from such a unity as we have declared The One to be, how does anything at all come into substantial existence, any multiplicity, dyad, or number? Why has the Primal not remained self-gathered so that there be none of this profusion of the manifold which we observe in existence and yet are compelled to trace to that absolute unity? In venturing an answer, we first invoke God Himself, not in loud word but in that way of prayer which is always within our power, leaning in soul towards Him by aspiration, alone towards the alone. But if we seek the vision of that great Being within the Inner Sanctuary – self-gathered, tranquilly remote above all else – we begin by considering the images stationed at the outer precincts, or, more exactly to the moment, the first image that appears. How the Divine Mind comes into being must be explained: Everything moving has necessarily an object towards which it advances; but since the SUPREME can have no such object, we may not ascribe motion to it: anything that comes into being after it can be produced only as a consequence of its unfailing self-intention; and, of course, we dare not talk of generation in time, dealing as we are with eternal Beings: where we speak of origin in such reference, it is in the sense, merely, of cause and subordination: origin from the SUPREME must not be taken to imply any movement in it: that would make the Being resulting from the movement not a second principle but a third: the Movement would be the second hypostasis. Enneads: V I

Given this immobility in the SUPREME, it can neither have yielded assent nor uttered decree nor stirred in any way towards the existence of a secondary. Enneads: V I

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. Enneads: V I

Since there is a Soul which reasons upon the right and good – for reasoning is an enquiry into the rightness and goodness of this rather than that – there must exist some permanent Right, the source and foundation of this reasoning in our soul; how, else, could any such discussion be held? Further, since the soul’s attention to these matters is intermittent, there must be within us an Intellectual-Principle acquainted with that Right not by momentary act but in permanent possession. Similarly there must be also the principle of this principle, its cause, God. This Highest cannot be divided and allotted, must remain intangible but not bound to space, it may be present at many points, wheresoever there is anything capable of accepting one of its manifestations; thus a centre is an independent unity; everything within the circle has its term at the centre; and to the centre the radii bring each their own. Within our nature is such a centre by which we grasp and are linked and held; and those of us are firmly in the SUPREME whose collective tendency is There. Enneads: V I

Our way is to teach our soul how the Intellectual-Principle exercises self-vision; the phase thus to be taught is that which already touches the intellective order, that which we call the understanding or intelligent soul, indicating by the very name that it is already of itself in some degree an Intellectual-Principle or that it holds its peculiar power through and from that Principle. This phase must be brought to understand by what means it has knowledge of the thing it sees and warrant for what it affirms: if it became what it affirms, it would by that fact possess self-knowing. All its vision and affirmation being in the SUPREME or deriving from it – There where itself also is – it will possess self-knowledge by its right as a Reason-Principle, claiming its kin and bringing all into accord with the divine imprint upon it. Enneads V,3,

This matter need not be elaborated at present: it suffices to say that if the created were all, these ultimates (the higher) need not exist: but the SUPREME does include primals, the primals because the producers. In other words, there must be, with the made, the making source; and, unless these are to be identical, there will be need of some link between them. Similarly, this link which is the Intellectual-Principle demands yet a Transcendent. If we are asked why this Transcendent also should not have self-vision, our answer is that it has no need of vision; but this we will discuss later: for the moment we go back, since the question at issue is gravely important. Enneads V,3,

Those divinely possessed and inspired have at least the knowledge that they hold some greater thing within them though they cannot tell what it is; from the movements that stir them and the utterances that come from them they perceive the power, not themselves, that moves them: in the same way, it must be, we stand towards the SUPREME when we hold the Intellectual-Principle pure; we know the divine Mind within, that which gives Being and all else of that order: but we know, too, that other, know that it is none of these, but a nobler principle than any-thing we know as Being; fuller and greater; above reason, mind and feeling; conferring these powers, not to be confounded with them. Enneads V,3,

The explanation is that what comes from the SUPREME cannot be identical with it and assuredly cannot be better than it – what could be better than The One or the utterly transcendent? The emanation, then, must be less good, that is to say, less self-sufficing: now what must that be which is less self-sufficing than The One? Obviously the Not-One, that is to say, multiplicity, but a multiplicity striving towards unity; that is to say, a One-that-is-many. Enneads V,3,

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. Enneads V,3,

Thus we have here one identical Principle, the Intellect, which is the universe of authentic beings, the Truth: as such it is a great god or, better, not a god among gods but the Godhead entire. It is a god, a secondary god manifesting before there is any vision of that other, the SUPREME which rests over all, enthroned in transcendence upon that splendid pediment, the Nature following close upon it. Enneads V,5,

The SUPREME in its progress could never be borne forward upon some soulless vehicle nor even directly upon the soul: it will be heralded by some ineffable beauty: before the great King in his progress there comes first the minor train, then rank by rank the greater and more exalted, closer to the King the kinglier; next his own honoured company until, last among all these grandeurs, suddenly appears the SUPREME Monarch himself, and all – unless indeed for those who have contented themselves with the spectacle before his coming and gone away – prostrate themselves and hail him. Enneads V,5,

In that royal progress the King is of another order from those that go before him, but the King in the SUPREME is no ruler over externs; he holds that most just of governances, rooted in nature, the veritable kingship, for he is King of Truth, holding sway by all reason over a dense offspring his own, a host that shares his divinity, King over a king and over kings and even more justly called father of Gods. Enneads V,5,

All this, however, we may leave to individual judgement: to proceed: This produced reality is an Ideal form – for certainly nothing springing from the SUPREME can be less – and it is not a particular form but the form of all, beside which there is no other; it follows that The First must be without form, and, if without form, then it is no Being; Being must have some definition and therefore be limited; but the First cannot be thought of as having definition and limit, for thus it would be not the Source but the particular item indicated by the definition assigned to it. If all things belong to the produced, which of them can be thought of as the SUPREME? Not included among them, this can be described only as transcending them: but they are Being and the Beings; it therefore transcends Being. Enneads V,5,

That Source, having no prior, cannot be contained: uncontained by any of those other forms of being, each held within the series of priors, it is orbed round all, but so as not to be pointed off to hold them part for part; it possesses but is not possessed. Holding all – though itself nowhere held – it is omnipresent, for where its presence failed something would elude its hold. At the same time, in the sense that it is nowhere held, it is not present: thus it is both present and not present; not present as not being circumscribed by anything; yet, as being utterly unattached, not inhibited from presence at any point. That inhibition would mean that the First was determined by some other being; the later series, then, would be without part in the SUPREME; God has His limit and is no longer self-governed but mastered by inferiors. Enneads V,5,

Knowing demands the organ fitted to the object; eyes for one kind, ears for another: similarly some things, we must believe, are to be known by the Intellectual-Principle in us. We must not confuse intellection with hearing or seeing; this would be trying to look with the ears or denying sound because it is not seen. Certain people, we must keep in mind, have forgotten that to which, from the beginning onwards, their longing and effort are pointed: for all that exists desires and aspires towards the SUPREME by a compulsion of nature, as if all had received the oracle that without it they cannot be. Enneads V,5,

The source of the error is that while both The Good and The Beautiful participate in the common source, The One precedes both; and that, in the SUPREME also, The Good has no need of The Beautiful, while the Beautiful does need The Good. Enneads V,5,

The SUPREME, as the Absolute Good and not merely a good being or thing, can contain nothing, since there is nothing that could be its good. Enneads V,5,

If the rest of being either is good – without being the absolute good – or is not good, while on the other hand the SUPREME contains neither what is good nor what is not good, then, containing nothing, it is The Good by that very absence of content. Enneads V,5,

Thus we rob it of its very being as The Absolute Good if we ascribe anything to it, existence or intellect or goodness. The only way is to make every denial and no assertion, to feign no quality or content there but to permit only the “It is” in which we pretend to no affirmation of non-existent attribute: there is an ignorant praise which, missing the true description, drags in qualities beneath the real worth and so abases; philosophy must guard against attaching to the SUPREME what is later and lower: moving above all that order, it is the cause and source of all these, and is none of them. Enneads V,5,

If Socrates, Socrates’ soul, is external then the Authentic Socrates – to adapt the term – must be There; that is to say, the individual soul has an existence in the SUPREME as well as in this world. If there is no such permanent endurance and what was Socrates may with change of time become another soul and be Pythagoras or someone else – then the individual Socrates has not that existence in the Divine. Enneads V,7,

(Perfect wisdom) for all the Principles of this order, dwelling There, are as it were visible images protected from themselves, so that all becomes an object of contemplation to contemplators immeasurably blessed. The greatness and power of the wisdom There we may know from this, that is embraces all the real Beings, and has made all, and all follow it, and yet that it is itself those beings, which sprang into being with it, so that all is one, and the essence There is wisdom. If we have failed to understand, it is that we have thought of knowledge as a mass of theorems and an accumulation of propositions, though that is false even for our sciences of the sense-realm. But in case this should be questioned, we may leave our own sciences for the present, and deal with the knowing in the SUPREME at which Plato glances where he speaks of “that knowledge which is not a stranger in something strange to it” – though in what sense, he leaves us to examine and declare, if we boast ourselves worthy of the discussion. This is probably our best starting-point. Enneads V,8,

Similarly, as it seems to me, the wise of Egypt – whether in precise knowledge or by a prompting of nature – indicated the truth where, in their effort towards philosophical statement, they left aside the writing-forms that take in the detail of words and sentences – those characters that represent sounds and convey the propositions of reasoning – and drew pictures instead, engraving in the temple – inscriptions a separate image for every separate item: thus they exhibited the mode in which the SUPREME goes forth. Enneads V,8,

That teaching shirks the penetration of such a making as is here involved: it fails to see that as long as the SUPREME is radiant there can be no failing of its sequel but, that existing, all exists. And – since the necessity of conveying our meaning compels such terms – the SUPREME has existed for ever and for ever will exist. Enneads V,8,

But does even this suffice for our First? No; we must look still inward beyond the Intellectual, which, from our point of approach, stands before the SUPREME Beginning, in whose forecourt, as it were, it announces in its own being the entire content of the Good, that prior of all, locked in unity, of which this is the expression already touched by multiplicity. Enneads V,8,

All, then, that is present in the sense realm as Idea comes from the SUPREME. But what is not present as Idea, does not. Thus of things conflicting with nature, none is There: the inartistic is not contained in the arts; lameness is not in the seed; for a lame leg is either inborn through some thwarting of the Reason-principle or is a marring of the achieved form by accident. To that Intellectual Kosmos belong qualities, accordant with Nature, and quantities; number and mass; origins and conditions; all actions and experiences not against nature; movement and repose, both the universals and the particulars: but There time is replaced by eternity and space by its intellectual equivalent, mutual inclusiveness. Enneads V,8,

It should however be added that if the Idea of man exists in the SUPREME, there must exist the Idea of reasoning man and of man with his arts and crafts; such arts as are the offspring of intellect Must be There. Enneads V,8,

It remains to decide whether only what is known in sense exists There or whether, on the contrary, as Absolute-Man differs from individual man, so there is in the SUPREME an Absolute-Soul differing from Soul and an Absolute-Intellect differing from Intellectual-Principle. Enneads V,8,

Every soul, authentically a soul, has some form of rightness and moral wisdom; in the souls within ourselves there is true knowing: and these attributes are no images or copies from the SUPREME, as in the sense-world, but actually are those very originals in a mode peculiar to this sphere. For those Beings are not set apart in some defined place; wherever there is a soul that has risen from body, there too these are: the world of sense is one – where, the Intellectual Kosmos is everywhere. Whatever the freed soul attains to here, that it is There. Enneads V,8,

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

These thinkers are however not considering the Intellectual realm in their division, which was not intended to cover all the Existents; the SUPREME they overlooked. Enneads: VI I

The Being of the Sensible resembles the white in not originating in itself. It must therefore be regarded as dependent for its being upon the Authentic Being, as white is dependent upon the Authentic Whiteness, and the Authentic Whiteness dependent for its whiteness upon participation in that SUPREME Being whose existence is underived. Enneads VI,3,

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. Enneads VI,7,

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. Enneads VI,7,

Thus Intellectual-Principle is a vestige of the SUPREME; but since the vestige is a Form going out into extension, into plurality, that Prior, as the source of Form, must be itself without shape and Form: if the Prior were a Form, the Intellectual-Principle itself could be only a Reason-Principle. It was necessary that The First be utterly without multiplicity, for otherwise it must be again referred to a prior. Enneads VI,7,

But in what way is the content of Intellectual-Principle participant in good? Is it because each member of it is an Idea or because of their beauty or how? Anything coming from The Good carries the image and type belonging to that original or deriving from it, as anything going back to warmth or sweetness carries the memory of those originals: Life entered into Intellectual-Principle from The SUPREME, for its origin is in the Activity streaming Thence; Intellectual-Principle springs from the SUPREME, and with it the beauty of the Ideas; at once all these, Life, Intellectual-Principle, Idea, must inevitably have goodness. Enneads VI,7,

Thus it is established that the particular Idea contains in its essence something of good and thereby becomes a good thing; for Life we found to be good not in the bare being but in its derivation from the Authentic, the SUPREME whence it sprung: and the same is true of Intellectual-Principle: we are forced therefore admit a certain identity. Enneads VI,7,

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. Enneads VI,7,

In the realm of process anything coming to be must come to be something; to every thing its distinctive shape: but what shape can that have which no one has shaped? It can be none of existing things; yet it is all: none, in that beings are later; all, as the wellspring from which they flow. That which can make all can have, itself, no extension; it must be limitless and so without magnitude; magnitude itself is of the Later and cannot be an element in that which is to bring it into being. The greatness of the Authentic cannot be a greatness of quantity; all extension must belong to the subsequent: the SUPREME is great in the sense only that there can be nothing mightier, nothing to equal it, nothing with anything in common with it: how then could anything be equal to any part of its content? Its eternity and universal reach entail neither measure nor measurelessness; given either, how could it be the measure of things? So with shape: granted beauty, the absence of shape or form to be grasped is but enhancement of desire and love; the love will be limitless as the object is, an infinite love. Enneads VI,7,

The Intellectual-Principle is the less for seeing things as distinct even in its act of grasping in unity the multiple content of its Intellectual realm; in its knowing of the particular it possesses itself of one Intellectual shape; but, even thus, in this dealing with variety as unity, it leaves us still with the question how we are to envisage that which stands beyond this all-lovely, beyond this principle at once multiple and above multiplicity, the SUPREME for which the soul hungers though unable to tell why such a being should stir its longing-reason, however, urging that This at last is the Authentic Term because the Nature best and most to be loved may be found there only where there is no least touch of Form. Bring something under Form and present it so before the mind; immediately we ask what Beyond imposed that shape; reason answers that while there exists the giver having shape to give – a giver that is shape, idea, an entirely measured thing – yet this is not alone, is not adequate in itself, is not beautiful in its own right but is a mingled thing. Shape and idea and measure will always be beautiful, but the Authentic Beauty and the Beyond-Beauty cannot be under measure and therefore cannot have admitted shape or be Idea: the primal existent, The First, must be without Form; the beauty in it must be, simply, the Nature of the Intellectual Good. Enneads VI,7,

But is its vision parcelwise, thing here and thing there? No: reason unravelling gives process; Intellectual-Principle has unbroken knowledge and has, moreover, an Act unattended by knowing, a vision by another approach. In this seeing of the SUPREME it becomes pregnant and at once knows what has come to be within it; its knowledge of its content is what is designated by its Intellection; its knowing of the SUPREME is the virtue of that power within it by which, in a later (lower) stage it is to become “Intellective.” Enneads VI,7,

The soul now knows no movement since the SUPREME knows none; it is now not even soul since the SUPREME is not in life but above life; it is no longer Intellectual-Principle, for the SUPREME has not Intellection and the likeness must be perfect; this grasping is not even by Intellection, for the SUPREME is not known Intellectively. Enneads VI,7,

Knowledge of The Good or contact with it, is the all-important: this – we read – is the grand learning, the learning we are to understand, not of looking towards it but attaining, first, some knowledge of it. We come to this learning by analogies, by abstractions, by our understanding of its subsequents, of all that is derived from The Good, by the upward steps towards it. Purification has The Good for goal; so the virtues, all right ordering, ascent within the Intellectual, settlement therein, banqueting upon the divine – by these methods one becomes, to self and to all else, at once seen and seer; identical with Being and Intellectual-Principle and the entire living all, we no longer see the SUPREME as an external; we are near now, the next is That and it is close at hand, radiant above the Intellectual. Enneads VI,7,

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. Enneads VI,7,

An Intelligence not exercising Intellection would be unintelligent; where the nature demands knowing, not to know is to fail of intelligence; but where there is no function, why import one and declare a defect because it is not performed? We might as well complain because the SUPREME does not act as a physician. He has no task, we hold, because nothing can present itself to him to be done; he is sufficient; he need seek nothing beyond himself, he who is over all; to himself and to all he suffices by simply being what he is. Enneads VI,7,

And yet this “He Is” does not truly apply: the SUPREME has no need of Being: even “He is good” does not apply since it indicates Being: the “is” should not suggest something predicated of another thing; it is to state identity. The word “good” used of him is not a predicate asserting his possession of goodness; it conveys an identification. It is not that we think it exact to call him either good or The Good: it is that sheer negation does not indicate; we use the term The Good to assert identity without the affirmation of Being. Enneads VI,7,

If that intellection were the Good, then the intellection would not be self-intellection but intellection of the Good; not the SUPREME but that intellection would be the Good: if on the contrary that intellection of the Good is distinct from the Good, at once the Good exists before its knowing; all-sufficiently good in itself, it needs none of that knowing of its own nature. Enneads VI,7,

Thus the SUPREME does not know itself as Good. Enneads VI,7,

Since the SUPREME has no interval, no self-differentiation what can have this intuitional approach to it but itself? Therefore it quite naturally assumes difference at the point where Intellectual-Principle and Being are differentiated. Enneads VI,7,

Again, if the SUPREME is to have intellection it cannot know only itself; that would not be intellection, for, if it did know itself, nothing could prevent it knowing all things; but this is impossible. With self-intellection it would no longer be simplex; any intellection, even in the SUPREME, must be aware of something distinct; as we have been saying, the inability to see the self as external is the negation of intellection. That act requires a manifold-agent, object, movement and all the other conditions of a thinking principle. Further we must remember what has been indicated elsewhere that, since every intellectual act in order to be what it must be requires variety, every movement simple and the same throughout, though it may comport some form of contact, is devoid of the intellective. Enneads VI,7,

It follows that the SUPREME will know neither itself nor anything else but will hold an august repose. All the rest is later; before them all, This was what This was; any awareness of that other would be acquired, the shifting knowledge of the instable. Even in knowing the stable he would be manifold, for it is not possible that, while in the act of knowing the laters possess themselves of their object, the SUPREME should know only in some unpossessing observation. Enneads VI,7,

What could it do with intellection? What could even intellection need and add to itself for the purpose of its act? It has no self-awareness; there is no need. It is no duality but, rather, a manifold, consisting of itself, its intellective act, distinct from itself, and the inevitable third, the object of intellection. No doubt since knower, knowing, and known, are identical, all merges into a unity: but the distinction has existed and, once more, such a unity cannot be the First; we must put away all otherness from the SUPREME which can need no such support; anything we add is so much lessening of what lacks nothing. Enneads VI,7,

Soul dependent upon Intellectual-Principle and Intellectual-Principle upon the Good, all is linked to the SUPREME by intermediaries, some close, some nearing those of the closer attachment, while the order of sense stands remotest, dependent upon soul. Enneads VI,7,

If we cannot but speak of Happening we must not halt at the word but look to the intention. And what is that? That the SUPREME by possession of a certain nature and power is the Principle. Obviously if its nature were other it would be that other and if the difference were for the worse it would manifest itself as that lesser being. But we must add in correction that, as Principle of All, it could not be some chance product; it is not enough to say that it could not be inferior; it could not even be in some way good, for instance in some less perfect degree; the Principle of All must be of higher quality than anything that follows it. It is therefore in a sense determined – determined, I mean, by its uniqueness and not in any sense of being under compulsion; compulsion did not co-exist with the SUPREME but has place only among secondaries and even there can exercise no tyranny; this uniqueness is not from outside. Enneads VI,8,

But perhaps, never having come to be but being as He is, He is still not master of his own essence: not master of his essence but being as He is, not self-originating but acting out of his nature as He finds it, must He not be of necessity what He is, inhibited from being otherwise? No: What He is, He is not because He could not be otherwise but because so is best. Not everything has power to move towards the better though nothing is prevented by any external from moving towards the worse. But that the SUPREME has not so moved is its own doing: there has been no inhibition; it has not moved simply because it is That which does not move; in this stability the inability to degenerate is not powerlessness; here permanence is very Act, a self-determination. This absence of declination comports the fulness of power; it is not the yielding of a being held and controlled but the Act of one who is necessity, law, to all. Enneads VI,8,

Even if there be Act in the SUPREME – an Act with which it is to be identified – this is not enough to set up a duality within it and prevent it being entirely master of that self from which the Act springs; for the Act is not distinct from that self. If we utterly deny Act in it – holding that Act begins with others moving about it – we are all the less able to allow either self-mastery or subjection in it: even self-mastery is absent here, not that anything else is master over it but that self-mastery begins with Being while the SUPREME is to be set in a higher order. Enneads VI,8,

Our enquiry obliges us to use terms not strictly applicable: we insist, once more, that not even for the purpose of forming the concept of the SUPREME may we make it a duality; if now we do, it is merely for the sake of conveying conviction, at the cost of verbal accuracy. Enneads VI,8,

If, then, we are to allow Activities in the SUPREME and make them depend upon will – and certainly Act cannot There be will-less and these Activities are to be the very essence, then will and essence in the SUPREME must be identical. This admitted, as He willed to be so He is; it is no more true to say that He wills and acts as His nature determines than that His essence is as He wills and acts. Thus He is wholly master of Himself and holds His very being at His will. Enneads VI,8,

Once more, we must be patient with language; we are forced to apply to the SUPREME terms which strictly are ruled out; everywhere we must read “So to speak.” The Good, then, exists; it holds its existence through choice and will, conditions of its very being: yet it cannot be a manifold; therefore the will and the essential being must be taken as one identity; the act of the will must be self-determined and the being self-caused; thus reason shows the SUPREME to be its own Author. For if the act of will springs from God Himself and is as it were His operation and the same will is identical with His essence, He must be self-established. He is not, therefore, “what He has happened to be” but what He has willed to be. Enneads VI,8,

Of things carrying their causes within, none arises at hazard or without purpose; this “So it happened to be” is applicable to none. All that they have comes from The Good; the SUPREME itself, then, as author of reason, of causation, and of causing essence – all certainly lying far outside of chance – must be the Principle and as it were the examplar of things, thus independent of hazard: it is, the First, the Authentic, immune from chance, from blind effect and happening: God is cause of Himself; for Himself and of Himself He is what He is, the first self, transcendently The Self. Enneads VI,8,

Lovable, very love, the SUPREME is also self-love in that He is lovely no otherwise than from Himself and in Himself. Self-presence can hold only in the identity of associated with associating; since, in the SUPREME, associated and associating are one, seeker and sought one the sought serving as Hypostasis and substrate of the seeker – once more God’s being and his seeking are identical: once more, then, the SUPREME is the self-producing, sovereign of Himself, not happening to be as some extern willed but existing as He wills it. Enneads VI,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. Enneads VI,8,

The SUPREME is the Term of all; it is like the principle and ground of some vast tree of rational life; itself unchanging, it gives reasoned being to the growth into which it enters. Enneads VI,8,

We maintain, and it is evident truth, that the SUPREME is everywhere and yet nowhere; keeping this constantly in mind let us see how it bears on our present enquiry. Enneads VI,8,

If God is nowhere, then not anywhere has He “happened to be”; as also everywhere, He is everywhere in entirety: at once, He is that everywhere and everywise: He is not in the everywhere but is the everywhere as well as the giver to the rest of things of their being in that everywhere. Holding the supreme place – or rather no holder but Himself the SUPREME – all lies subject to Him; they have not brought Him to be but happen, all, to Him – or rather they stand there before Him looking upon Him, not He upon them. He is borne, so to speak, to the inmost of Himself in love of that pure radiance which He is, He Himself being that which He. loves. That is to say, as self-dwelling Act and Intellectual-Principle, the most to be loved, He has given Himself existence. Intellectual-Principle is the issue of Act: God therefore is issue of Act, but, since no other has generated Him, He is what He made Himself: He is not, therefore, “as He happened to be” but as He acted Himself into being. Enneads VI,8,

Now if there is thus an Intellectual-Principle before all things, their founding principle, this cannot be a thing lying subject to chance – multiple, no doubt, but a concordance, ordered so to speak into oneness. Such a multiple – the co-ordination of all particulars and consisting of all the Reason-Principles of the universe gathered into the closest union – this cannot be a thing of chance, a thing “happening so to be.” It must be of a very different nature, of the very contrary nature, separated from the other by all the difference between reason and reasonless chance. And if the Source is precedent even to this, it must be continuous with this reasoned secondary so that the two be correspondent; the secondary must participate in the prior, be an expression of its will, be a power of it: that higher therefore (as above the ordering of reason) is without part or interval (implied by reasoned arrangement), is a one – all Reason-Principle, one number, a One greater than its product, more powerful, having no higher or better. Thus the SUPREME can derive neither its being nor the quality of its being. God Himself, therefore, is what He is, self-related, self-tending; otherwise He becomes outward-tending, other-seeking – who cannot but be wholly self-poised. Enneads VI,8,

In the same way we are to take Intellectual-Principle and Being. This combined power springs from the SUPREME, an outflow and as it were development from That and remaining dependent upon that Intellective nature, showing forth That which, in the purity of its oneness, is not Intellectual-Principle since it is no duality. No more than in the circle are the lines or circumference to be identified with that Centre which is the source of both: radii and circle are images given forth by indwelling power and, as products of a certain vigour in it, not cut off from it. Enneads VI,8,

Thus the Intellective power circles in its multiple unity around the SUPREME which stands to it as archetype to image; the image in its movement round about its prior has produced the multiplicity by which it is constituted Intellectual-Principle: that prior has no movement; it generates Intellectual-Principle by its sheer wealth. Enneads VI,8,

The SUPREME is cause of the cause: it is cause preeminently, cause as containing cause in the deepest and truest mode; for in it lie the Intellective causes which are to be unfolded from it, author as it is not of the chance – made but of what the divine willed: and this willing was not apart from reason, was not in the realm of hazard and of what happened to present itself. Enneads VI,8,

Stirred to the SUPREME by what has been told, a man must strive to possess it directly; then he too will see, though still unable to tell it as he would wish. Enneads VI,8,

As for his “self-containing,” this rightly understood can mean only that all the rest is maintained in virtue of Him by means of a certain participation; all traces back to the SUPREME; God Himself, self-existing always, needs no containing, no participating; all in Him belongs to Him or rather He needs nothing from them in order to being Himself. Enneads VI,8,

From none is that Principle absent and yet from all: present, it remains absent save to those fit to receive, disciplined into some accordance, able to touch it closely by their likeness and by that kindred power within themselves through which, remaining as it was when it came to them from the SUPREME, they are enabled to see in so far as God may at all be seen. Enneads VI,8,

In sum, we must withdraw from all the extern, pointed wholly inwards; no leaning to the outer; the total of things ignored, first in their relation to us and later in the very idea; the self put out of mind in the contemplation of the SUPREME; all the commerce so closely There that, if report were possible, one might become to others reporter of that communion. Enneads VI,8,

Every soul that knows its history is aware, also, that its movement, unthwarted, is not that of an outgoing line; its natural course may be likened to that in which a circle turns not upon some external but on its own centre, the point to which it owes its rise. The soul’s movement will be about its source; to this it will hold, poised intent towards that unity to which all souls should move and the divine souls always move, divine in virtue of that movement; for to be a god is to be integral with the SUPREME; what stands away is man still multiple, or beast. Enneads VI,8,

If these circles were material and not spiritual, the link with the centres would be local; they would lie round it where it lay at some distant point: since the souls are of the Intellectual, and the SUPREME still loftier, we understand that contact is otherwise procured, that is by those powers which connect Intellectual agent with Intellectual Object; this all the more, since the Intellect grasps the Intellectual object by the way of similarity, identity, in the sure link of kindred. Material mass cannot blend into other material mass: unbodied beings are not under this bodily limitation; their separation is solely that of otherness, of differentiation; in the absence of otherness, it is similars mutually present. Enneads VI,8,

Thus the SUPREME as containing no otherness is ever present with us; we with it when we put otherness away. It is not that the SUPREME reaches out to us seeking our communion: we reach towards the SUPREME; it is we that become present. We are always before it: but we do not always look: thus a choir, singing set in due order about the conductor, may turn away from that centre to which all should attend: let it but face aright and it sings with beauty, present effectively. We are ever before the SUPREME – cut off is utter dissolution; we can no longer be – but we do not always attend: when we look, our Term is attained; this is rest; this is the end of singing ill; effectively before Him, we lift a choral song full of God. Enneads VI,8,

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. Enneads VI,8,

We have not been cut away; we are not separate, what though the body-nature has closed about us to press us to itself; we breathe and hold our ground because the SUPREME does not give and pass but gives on for ever, so long as it remains what it is. Enneads VI,8,

Our being is the fuller for our turning Thither; this is our prosperity; to hold aloof is loneliness and lessening. Here is the soul’s peace, outside of evil, refuge taken in the place clean of wrong; here it has its Act, its true knowing; here it is immune. Here is living, the true; that of to-day, all living apart from Him, is but a shadow, a mimicry. Life in the SUPREME is the native activity of Intellect; in virtue of that converse it brings forth gods, brings forth beauty, brings forth righteousness, brings forth all moral good; for of all these the soul is pregnant when it has been filled with God. This state is its first and its final, because from God it comes, its good lies There, and, once turned to God again, it is what it was. Life here, with the things of earth, is a sinking, a defeat, a failing of the wing. Enneads VI,8,

In our self-seeing There, the self is seen as belonging to that order, or rather we are merged into that self in us which has the quality of that order. It is a knowing of the self restored to its purity. No doubt we should not speak of seeing; but we cannot help talking in dualities, seen and seer, instead of, boldly, the achievement of unity. In this seeing, we neither hold an object nor trace distinction; there is no two. The man is changed, no longer himself nor self-belonging; he is merged with the SUPREME, sunken into it, one with it: centre coincides with centre, for on this higher plane things that touch at all are one; only in separation is there duality; by our holding away, the SUPREME is set outside. This is why the vision baffles telling; we cannot detach the SUPREME to state it; if we have seen something thus detached we have failed of the SUPREME which is to be known only as one with ourselves. Enneads VI,8,

This is the purport of that rule of our Mysteries: Nothing Divulged to the Uninitiate: the SUPREME is not to be made a common story, the holy things may not be uncovered to the stranger, to any that has not himself attained to see. There were not two; beholder was one with beheld; it was not a vision compassed but a unity apprehended. The man formed by this mingling with the SUPREME must – if he only remember – carry its image impressed upon him: he is become the Unity, nothing within him or without inducing any diversity; no movement now, no passion, no outlooking desire, once this ascent is achieved; reasoning is in abeyance and all Intellection and even, to dare the word, the very self; caught away, filled with God, he has in perfect stillness attained isolation; all the being calmed, he turns neither to this side nor to that, not even inwards to himself; utterly resting he has become very rest. He belongs no longer to the order of the beautiful; he has risen beyond beauty; he has overpassed even the choir of the virtues; he is like one who, having penetrated the inner sanctuary, leaves the temple images behind him – though these become once more first objects of regard when he leaves the holies; for There his converse was not with image, not with trace, but with the very Truth in the view of which all the rest is but of secondary concern. Enneads VI,8,

It is not in the soul’s nature to touch utter nothingness; the lowest descent is into evil and, so far, into non-being: but to utter nothing, never. When the soul begins again to mount, it comes not to something alien but to its very self; thus detached, it is not in nothingness but in itself; self-gathered it is no longer in the order of being; it is in the SUPREME. Enneads VI,8,

There is thus a converse in virtue of which the essential man outgrows Being, becomes identical with the Transcendent of Being. The self thus lifted, we are in the likeness of the SUPREME: if from that heightened self we pass still higher – image to archetype – we have won the Term of all our journeying. Fallen back again, we awaken the virtue within until we know ourselves all order once more; once more we are lightened of the burden and move by virtue towards Intellectual-Principle and through the Wisdom in That to the SUPREME. Enneads VI,8,