V. 8. 2
(Armstrong Selection and Translation)
(The return to Noûs is a return to our true selves; in them we are so completely united to Noûs that we no longer see it because we are it.)
If one of us is unable to see himself, and, when he is possessed by that god, brings his contemplation to the point of vision, he presents himself to his own mind and looks at a glorified image of himself; then he dismisses the image, beautiful though it is, and comes to unity with himself, and, making no more separation, is one and all together with that god silently present, and is with him as much as he wants to be and can be. If he returns again to being two, since he is pure he stays close to the god, so as to be present to him again in that other way if he turns again to him. This return to duality has the advantage that to begin with he sees himself, while he is different from the god; then he hastens inward and has everything, and leaves perception behind in his fear of being different, and is one There. If he wants to see by being different, he puts himself outside. While he is coming to know the god he must keep to an impression of him and form distinct ideas of him as he seeks him: but, as he learns in this way into what he is entering and comes to believe that it is into happiness, he must give himself up to what is within and become, instead of one who sees, an object of contemplation to another who sees him as he comes from the world of Noûs and whom he illuminates with the Forms he brings thence in his mind. How then can anyone be in beauty without seeing it? If he sees it as something different he is not yet in beauty; he is in it most perfectly when he becomes it. If sight is of something external then we must not have sight, or only that which is identical with its object. This is a sort of intimate understanding and consciousness of a self which is careful not to depart from itself by wanting to see too much. We must consider this too, that the perception of evils has a more violent impact, but produces less knowledge as a result of the impact. Illness strikes our consciousness harder, but the quiet companionship of health gives us a better understanding of it. It presides over our being as something which belongs to it, and is one with us. Illness is alien and not our own, and therefore particularly obvious because it appears so very different from us. We have no consciousness of what is our own, and since we are like this we understand ourselves best when we have made our self-knowledge one with ourselves. There, then, when our knowledge is most perfectly conformed to Noûs, we think we are ignorant because we are waiting for the experience of sense-perception, which says it has not yet seen: and it certainly has not seen, and never will see things like these. It is sense-perception which disbelieves, but it is someone else who sees; and for him to disbelieve would be to disbelieve in his own existence: for he cannot after all put himself outside and make himself visible so as to look at himself with his bodily eyes.
V. 9.4
(Armstrong Selections from the Enneads)
(There must be a principle before soul, because soul has an element of potentiality and changeability in it and needs an eternally actual cause to account for its existence; this cause is Noûs.)
Why must we go higher than soul, instead of considering it as the first principle? First of all, Nous is other and better than soul, and the better comes first by nature. For it is not true, as people think, that ‘soul when it is made perfect produces intelligence’: for what could make soul in potency come to be in act unless there was some cause to bring it to actuality? If it happened by chance, it would be possible for soul not to come to actual existence. So we must consider that the first realities are actual and self-sufficient and perfect : imperfect things are posterior to them and are perfected by their producers who, like fathers, bring to perfection what in the beginning they generated imperfect: the imperfect is matter in relation to the principle which makes it, and is perfected by receiving form. Further, if soul is passible, there must be something impassible (or everything will be destroyed by the passage of time), so there must be something before soul. And if soul is in the universe, there must be something outside the universe, and in this way too there must be something prior to soul. For since what is in the universe is in body and matter, nothing remains the same; so (if that was all that existed) man and all the logoi would not be eternal or continue the same. One can see from these and many other arguments that Nous must exist before soul.
IV. I
(Armstrong Selections from the Enneads)
(Souls exist in the world of Noûs, in the state of unity proper to that world: but they have the capacity to descend into the material world, where they are divided and separated spatially into different bodies: but even in this lower world they do not entirely lose their higher unity, but keep contact with the world of Noûs.)
In the intelligible world is true being: Nous is the best of it. But there are souls There too; for it is from There that they come here. That world contains souls without bodies; this one, the souls which have come to be in bodies and are divided by their bodies. There all and every Nous is together, not separated or divided, and all souls are together in the one world, without spatial division. Nous then is always without separation and undivided. Soul There is not separated or divided; but it has a natural capacity for division. Its division is departure from the intelligible world and embodiment. So it is reasonably said to be ‘divisible as regards body’, because it is in this way that it departs and is divided. How then is it also ‘undivided’? It does not all depart; there is something of it which does not come to this world, which is not divided. To say, then, that it consists of ‘the undivided and that which is divided in bodies’ is the same as saying that it consists of that which is above and that which depends Thence, and reaches as far as the things of this world, like a radius from a centre. When it has come here it sees with the part of itself in which it preserves the nature of the whole. Even here below it is not only divided, but undivided as well: for the divided part of it is divided without division. It gives itself to the whole body and is undivided because it gives itself as a whole to the whole, and it is divided by being present in every part.
V. 3. 3-4
(Armstrong Selections from the Enneads)
(We are not strictly speaking Nous, but soul, which is midway between Nous and sense-perception; in our normal life we are more closely connected with sense-perception; but we can become perfectly conformed to Nous by its own power, transcending our merely human nature, and then we do actually become Nous in a way.)
We are not Nous; we are conformed to it by our primary reasoning power which receives it. Still, we perceive through sense-perception, and it is we who perceive; surely we reason in the same way? It is certainly we ourselves who reason, and we ourselves who think the thoughts which are in our discursive understanding, for this is what we are. But the activities of Nous come from above, just as those proceeding from sense-perception come from below. We are the chief part of the soul, in the middle between two powers, a worse and a better, the worse being that of sense-perception and the better that of Nous. But it is generally agreed that sense-perception is continually our own possession; for we perceive continually: there is doubt about Nous, both because we are not always in touch with it and because it is separable. It is separable because it does not incline to us, but rather we to it when we look upwards. Sense-perception is our messenger: Nous is our king.
Yet we are kings too when we are conformed to it. We are conformed to it in two ways, either by a sort of inscription, as if its laws were written in us, or by being filled with it and able to see it and be aware of its presence. And we know that we ourselves come to know other things by means of this vision of Nous. We either come to know the power which knows it by that power itself, or we ourselves become that vision. So the man who knows himself is double: there is the one who knows the nature of discursive reasoning, which belongs to soul, and there is the other who transcends the first one and knows himself according to Nous by becoming it: by it he thinks himself, not as man any longer, but as having become something completely different and as having carried himself off to the heights, bringing along with him only the better part of the soul, which alone can take wing to intuitive intellect, so that he can establish There what he saw. Does not the discursive reason know that it is discursive reason, that it gains understanding of things outside, and makes its judgments by the rules in itself which it has from Nous, and that there is something better than itself, which it does not seek but altogether possesses? But is there anything which it does not know when it knows what sort of a thing it is, and what its effects are like? If then discursive reason says that it comes from Nous and is second after Nous and the image of Nous, and has in itself all the characters which Nous has written and continues to write in it, will someone who knows himself like this stop at this point? Is it by using another extra power that we have the vision of Nous which knows itself, or do we share in Nous, since it is ours and we belong to it, and so know Nous and ourselves? This last must be the way if we are to know whatever it is in Nous that knows itself. A man becomes a Nous when he puts away all the rest of himself and sees only this by means of this, himself by means of himself. Then he sees himself as Nous sees itself.