Noûs: Unidade na Diversidade das Formas

VI. 7. 15
(Armstrong Selection and Translation from the Enneads)

[The rich pure life of Noûs, embracing many lives in one, far transcends all lives here below: but it is itself only a multiple image of the Good or One, which Noûs cannot think in Its simplicity and so images in the unity-in-diversity of the Forms.]

This life then, the manifold, the all-including, the first and one, who is there who when he sees it does not long to be in it and scorn all other life? The other lives below are darkness, little, dim, and cheap, impure and soiling the pure. If you look at these you do not see the pure lives and do not live them all at once; for in them there is nothing which does not live, and live in purity with no evil in it. Evil is here, where life and Noûs only leave their imprints. The original which makes the imprints is There. Plato calls it that which has the form of Good because it holds the Good in the Forms. There is the Good, and Noûs is good because its life consists in contemplation. The objects which it contemplates have the form of Good, those which it acquired when it contemplated the nature of the Good. The Good came to it, not as He is in His transcendence, but as Noûs received Him. For the Good is the principle of the beings in Noûs, and their existence in Noûs derives from Him, and Noûs draws power to make them from Him. For it was not in the nature of things for Noûs to look upon the Good and think nothing, nor yet for it to think the Good’s own content; for then it would have produced nothing itself. So it received from the Good power to produce and to fill itself with its own products. The Good gives what He does not Himself possess. From Him, Who is One, comes a multiplicity to Noûs. For Noûs was unable to hold the power it took from the Good and broke it up and made the one power many, so that it might be able to bear it piece by piece. So whatever it produced came from the power and has the form of the Good, and Noûs itself is good, composed of things which have the form of the Good, a variegated good. So one might compare it to a living sphere of varied colour and pattern or something all faces, shining with living faces, or imagine all the pure souls gathered together, with no defect but complete in all their parts, and universal Noûs set at their highest point, illumining the region with intellectual light. If one imagined it like this one would be seeing it from outside, as something different from oneself. But we have to become it ourselves and make ourselves that which we contemplate.