Plotinus 



A. H. ARMSTRONG 


 
Contents 

General Introduction page 5 

Introduction 

I Life and Writings 11 
II The Philosophical and Religious 

Background of the Enneads 16 

III The Thought of Plotinus 26 

A Porphyry's Life 45 

B On the Three Hypostases 49 

C The One or Good 5^ 

D Nous 

(a) In its Relation to the One 65 

(b) As World of Forms Intellect 71 

E Soul 

(a) In its Relationship to Nous 84 

(b) In its Activity in the Sense-world 89 

F Our Selves 

(a) Their Foundation in Nous and 

Relationship to Universal Soul 113 

(b) Higher and Lower Self 116 

(c) Descent into the Visible World 121 

G The Return of the Soul 

(a) The First Stages 126 

(b) The Return to Nous 138 

(c) The Ascent to Union with the One 141 

Notes 149 

Index 157 



introduction 



I. Life and Writings 

PLOTINUS TELLS us nothing about his life in his own 
writings, and all our information about him comes from 
the biography which his disciple and editor Porphyry wrote 
as an introduction to the Enneads? Fortunately this is a re- 
liable source. Porphyry seems to have taken care to be ac- 
curate, and his account of the six years at the end of Ploti- 
nus's life when he was with him at Rome is based on close 
personal knowledge. He is inclined to be gossipy and ram- 
bling, and has a well-developed sense of his own impor- 
tance, and sets out not only to glorify his master but to 
show himself in the most favourable light and to give a 
very full explanation of his procedure as editor of Ploti- 
nus's writings: but there seems no reason to doubt his 
accuracy in matters of fact. 

Plotinus himself would never say anything about his 
family or birthplace (see our first extract) and we really 
do not know to what race or country he belonged, though 
it has generally been assumed, both in ancient and modern 
times, that he came from Egypt. (Eunapius says he was 
from "Lyco," i.e. probably Lycopolis in Upper Egypt, 
the modern Assiut; but we do not know where Eunapius 
got this information from or how reliable it is.) And even 
if we could be sure that he came of a family settled in 
Upper Egypt, this of course would tell us nothing certain 
about his race. His name seems to be Latin; the first per- 
son we know of who bore it was the Empress Plotina, the 

1 Careful examination by modern scholars seems to show that the 
information about Plotinus given by Finnicus Maternus, Eunapius, 
and Suidas has no independent value: anything dependable in it 
derives from Porphyry. See Schwyzer's article "Plotin" in Paulys 
Realenzyklopadie, Band XXI, col. 475-477. Porphyry's Life ap- 
pears at the beginning of all complete MSS. of the Enneads and 
is printed in the same place in all editions. Extracts from it are 
given at the beginning of these selections. 

11 



12 / Introduction 

wife of Trajan: but again we cannot draw any conclusions 
from this about his race or social standing. Nor have we 
any idea what he looked like. Porphyry tells us (ch. 1) 
that a good portrait of him was painted, in spite of his 
objections and without his knowledge, in his lifetime, but 
we have no evidence that any copy of it or sculpture inspired 
by it exists. It has been tentatively suggested that a very fine 
portrait of a philosopher on an ancient sarcophagus 2 repre- 
sents Plotinus, but there are really no very good reasons 
for the identification. There is, however, one thing we can 
be certain about, from Plotinus's own writings and every- 
thing else we know of him, and that is that he was fully 
and completely Greek by education and cultural back- 
ground. 

Plotinus was born in A.D. 205 and died in 270. His life, 
that is, covers one of the most turbulent, insecure, and 
unhappy periods in the history of the Roman Empire: but 
the external affairs of his time have left no trace in his 
writings. Philosophy was for the men of his period both a 
full-time professional occupation and a religious vocation 
demanding withdrawal from the world, as we can see 
from the case of the senator Rogatianus, for whom con- 
version to philosophy meant renunciation of public office. 3 
Plotinus, as we shall see, could play his part admirably in 
the affairs of this world when he thought it his duty to do 
so, but what occupied his mind, and fills his writings, was 
the by now immense and complicated tradition of the 
Greek philosophical schools, contained in a massive bulk 
of literature, and his own personal intellectual-religious 
experience. 

Our first fixed date in his life is 232, when he came to 
Alexandria to study philosophy (it is interesting to note 
that he took to the study relatively late in life). Here, so 
he told his pupils later in Rome, he could find no philo- 
sophical teacher to satisfy him until someone took him to 
Ammonius Saccas. We shall say more about the possible 
effect of this enigmatic person's teaching on Plotinus's 

2 cp. Jahrhuch des Deutschen archaologischen Lnstituts, LI (1936), 
pp. 104-105. 
9 Life, ch. 7. 



Introduction / 13 

thought in our next section. He had been brought up a 
Christian 4 but had abandoned the Christian faith. Among 
his pupils, besides Plotinus, were the two Origens, the 
heathen Neo-Platonist who appears several times in Por- 
phyry's Life and the great Christian teacher and writer. 5 
Plotinus was profoundly impressed by his first hearing of 
him, and remained in his school for eleven years. There 
can be no doubt that the teaching of Ammonius was the 
decisive influence on his mind, and determined the charac- 
ter of his philosophy. At the age of thirty-nine, in 243, he 
developed a desire to study Persian and Indian philosophy, 
and joined the Emperor Gordian's expedition to the East 
But Gordian was murdered in Mesopotamia early in 244, 
and Plotinus escaped with some difficulty to Antioch. The 
important thing about this episode, from the point of 
view of our understanding of Plotinus's thought, is that he 
never in fact established any sort of contact with Eastern 
thinkers; and there is no good evidence, internal or ex- 
ternal, to show that he ever acquired any knowledge of 
Indian philosophy. 

After this unsuccessful expedition he came to Rome, in 
the year 244 at the age of forty, and began to teach 
philosophy and, after ten years, to write. This was the 
really productive period of his life and the one which we 
know best from Porphyry's account. In it Plotinus ap- 
pears as very much the great Professor; it is in fact the 
first full-length portrait of a professor in European litera- 
ture; but he also appears, as our extracts show, as a man 
of limitless and extremely efficient practical kindliness, a 
trait not uncommon in great contemplatives. He became a 
close friend of the Emperor Gallienus and the Empress 
Salonina, and was probably in as good a position to in- 
fluence public affairs as any other philosopher in the 
ancient world. But the reform of the State was now no 

4 Porphyry in Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History, VI. 19. 7. 

5 The ancient evidence seems to me to make it absolutely clear 
that these were two different people; cp. Schwyzer, art. cit., col. 
480, for some (not to me the strongest) evidence against identi- 
fying them. Cadiou, in La Jeunesse d'Origene (Paris, 1935), is 
the main upholder of their identity. 



14 / Introduction 

longer, as it had been in the days of Plato and Aristotle, a 
prime concern of the philosopher, and his writings show 
no signs of political activity or interest. He preached and 
practised withdrawal from the affairs of the world except 
in so far as his duty to his fellow men forced him to take 
part in them. We do know, however, from Porphyry 6 that 
he nearly persuaded the Emperor to found a city of philos- 
ophers in Campania, to be called Platonopolis and gov- 
erned according to Plato's Laws: and this was perhaps 
not quite the ridiculous piece of bookish and unpractical 
archaism that it appears at first sight. The city was still in 
the 3rd century the normal unit of civilized living, and it 
might well have seemed to Gallienus as well as to Plotinus 
that a philosophically ordered city would serve a useful 
purpose as a centre of the Hellenic cultural revival which 
the Emperor had very much at heart, a strong-point of 
resistance against the barbarization of the Empire and the 
anti-Hellenic spiritual forces of Gnosticism and Christian- 
ity. The scheme came to nothing owing to opposition at 
court, and perhaps was not very likely to have been suc- 
cessful anyhow: but we need not assume that the results 
would have been as grotesque as they apear in David 
Garaett's brilliantly amusing satire. 

In 269 the illness from which Plotinus died became so 
much worse that he left Rome for the country estate of 
his friend Zethus in Campania; there he died in the first 
half of 270. The illness has been identified as a form of 
leprosy: how he bore it we can imagine from reading what 
he has to say about suffering and death in his last nine 
treatises, written in the last two years of his life. They are 
full of that noble courage, that clear-sighted refusal to re- 
gard pain and death as great evils even when suffering 
severe pain and very near to death, which all the great 
ancient philosophies, Platonist, Stoic, and Epicurean alike, 
could inspire in their best adherents. 

Plotinus only began to write in about 254, after ten 
years in Rome, at the age of fifty. His writings thus all be- 
long to the last sixteen years of his life, and we should not 

*Life, ch. 12. 



Introduction / 15 

expect to find, and do not in fact find, 7 any real develop- 
ment of thought in them: they represent a mature and 
fully formed philosophy. But they do not present it system- 
atically. Plotinus wrote his treatises to deal with particu- 
lar poults as they arose in the discussions of his school, 
and during his lifetime they circulated only among its 
members. In dealing with the particular points, of course, 
the great principles of his philosophy are always coming 
in, and we are very conscious that there is a fully worked- 
out system of thought in the background: but it is pre- 
sented to us, not step by step in an orderly exposition, but 
by a perpetual handling and rehandling of the great central 
problems, always from slightly different points of view 
and with reference to different types of objections and 
queries. In editing this mass of detached treatises Porphyry 
disregarded their chronological order, which, however, he 
left on record in chapters 4, 5, and 6 of the Life, 8 with 
some appended remarks designed to show that Plotinus 
only did his best work while he, Porphyry, was with him, 
which seem to spring from his own self-importance rather 
than any objective judgment of the merits of the treatises 
and are not generally taken seriously by modern students 
of Plotinus. He divided the treatises into three great 
groups, more or less according to subject-matter, one con- 
taining the treatises on the Categories and those of which 
the principal subject was the One (the Sixth Ennead), one 
containing the treatises dealing chiefly with Soul and Nous 
(the Fourth and Fifth Enneads), and one containing all 
the other treatises (the First, Second, and Third En- 
neads). By some very vigorous editing he succeeded in 
tidying these groups into six Enncads or sets of nine 
treatises, thereby producing that symmetry of sacred num- 
ber in which he, like others of his age, delighted. In order 
to do this he had to divide a number of long treatises into 
several parts (III. 2-3, IV. 3-5, VI. 1-3, VI. 4-5) and 

7 F. Heinemann, in his book Plotin (Leipzig, 1921), did attempt 
to trace such a development, but his conclusions have been gener- 
ally rejected by Plotinian scholars. 

8 The numbers of the treatises in this chronological order will 
be found in the table at the end of this Introduction, p. 40. 



16 / Introduction 

even to break one up altogether and put the parts into 
different Enneads (III. 8, V. 8, V. 5, II. 9 were written 
by Plotinus as a single treatise); and it is possible, though 
not certain, that it was he who collected the short notes on 
various subjects which make up III. 9 into a single treatise 
to make up his number. But though he was so high- 
handed in the arrangement of his material he seems to 
have treated the text of Plotinus with great respect, and to 
have done no more than correct his master's somewhat 
erratic spelling. 9 We can be reasonably sure that in the 
Enneads we are reading Plotinus, however oddly arranged, 
and not Porphyry. 

II. The Philosophical and Religious Background 
of the Enneads 

The immediate philosophical background of Plotinus's 
thought is of course the teaching of the Platonic school. 
Antiochus of Ascalon, who died about 68 B.C. and whose 
lectures Cicero heard at Athens, had revived positive 
philosophical teaching in Plato's school, the Academy, 
after its sceptical and negative period. His own philosophy 
seems to have been a rather unsatisfactory sort of Stoic- 
Platonic eclecticism. But from this eclecticism there de- 
veloped in the first two centuries A.D., with considerable 
influence from the revived studies of the mature works of 
Aristotle and the contemporary revival of Pythagoreanism, 
a new version of Platonism which in some ways antici- 
pates Plotinus and has been of the very greatest impor- 
tance for the later development of traditional European 
philosophy. The representatives of this Middle Platonism 
about whom we know anything are a very variegated col- 
lection. The best known is Plutarch, a thoroughly cultured 
and well-read man with wide interests and a very attrac- 
tive personality, but not a profound or original thinker. 
Then there are serious but not very inspiring professional 
philosophers like Albinus, the sort of people who must 
have contributed most to the building up of Middle Plato- 

9 See the discussion in Plotini Opera I, ed. P. Henry and H. R. 
Schwyzer, Praejatio, pp. ix-x. 



Introduction / 17 

nism: and a fringe of third-rate transcendentalist speechi- 
fiers like Apuleius and Maximus of Tyre, who represent 
the popular pseudo-philosophy of the period in its most 
repectable form: for ideas derived from this new form of 
Platonism penetrated to still lower intellectual levels, into 
the secret revelations of Gnostics and Hermetists and 
right down to the magicians and alchemists. At the very 
beginning of the Christian era we find a remarkable at- 
tempt to interpret the Jewish Scriptures with the help of a 
not very consistent or coherent understanding of Greek 
philosophy, in which ideas of a Middle Platonist type 
predominate, in the works of Philo of Alexandria. The 
thought of the Neo-Pythagoreans, in so far as they were 
really philosophers and not just theosophists and magi- 
cians, is not easy to distinguish from that of the Platonists, 
and it seems best to regard both as forming part of a single 
group. Numenius, one of the most important of the im- 
mediateTE5reHimiefsl5f TPlqtinus^can be called^ a Neo- 
Pyttegftfean, though it seems better to regard him as a 
Pythagpreanizing Platonist. 

For our present purposes it will be enough to give a 
summary account of the main tendencies and character- 
istics of this philosophical movement without going into 
differences between individuals. Like the philosophy of 
Plotinus himself it is, as far as it is serious, a learned and 
bookish philosophy. Commentary on the works of Plato 
and Aristotle is beginning to become an important part of 
philosophical activity. Doxography, too, the collection and 
systematic arrangement of the opinions of the leading 
thinkers of all schools on the principal philosophical top- 
ics, plays a very important part in the philosophical de- 
velopment of the period. This learned activity brought 
with it a certain amount of eclecticism. The Platonists re- 
mained Platonists and not Aristotelians or Stoics; but they 
did sometimes study the opinions of thinkers of other 
schools with respect and in the hope of learning something 
from them. So we find in Middle Platonism a certain 
amount of Stoic influence and a much more important 
(at least from the point of view of the development of 
Neo-Platonism) admixture of Aristotelianism. 



18 / Introduction 

The first principle of reality for the Middle Platonists is 
a transcendent Mind or God. The transcendence of this 
God is often very strongly stressed: jt 
ology^' jh descriptioi^of Ja 



rather Jlian what^ He is, so characteristic of Plotinus and 
traditional theology ever since, begins to appear: and in 
some Neo-Pythagoreans we find anticipations of Plotinus's 
doctrine of the One. 10 This supreme Divine Mind is the 
place of the Platonic Forms or Ideas. Albinus speaks of 
them as "thoughts of God." This is a new development 
whose importance for the history of philosophy and the- 
ology need hardly be stressed. Jt ensured for the Platonic 
Ideas the place in traditional Christian thinking which they 
have never lost. Plotinus's own doctrine is, as we shall see, 
rather different from but clearly dependent on the Middle 
Platonist. Below the supreme Mind in the Middle Plato- 
nists there is sometimes to be found a Second Mind or God, 
with a world -moving or world-ordering function, and below 
that again the Soul of the World. In the more popular 
versions of Middle Platonism the daemones, being inter- 
mediary between gods and men who appear in Greek be- 
lief as early as Hesiod, play an important part. The idea of 
a hierarchy of spiritual powers between the Supreme 
God and our world is always apparent. About matter and 
the origin of Evil the Middle Platonists disagreed; but 
they inclined to a dualist solution of the problem of evil, 
whether they saw its origin in an evil soul (Plutarch) or 
in matter itself (Numenius). 

This very summary and sketchy account should be 
enough to show that the philosophy of Plotinus is in ah 1 
essentials a development (though sometimes a very bold 
and original one) of the Middle Platonist school tradition. 
But there is another philosophical influence on his thought 
which must not be neglected. Plotinus demotes a fire at deal 

10 For a fuller discussion of Middle Platonist theology and its 
origins, cp. the first two chapters of my book The Architecture 
of the Intelligible Universe in the Philosophy of Plotinus (Cam- 
bridge, 1940): though much of what I say there about Plato needs 
drastic revision in the light of recent studies of the last phases 
of his thought. 



Introduction / 19 



of time and energy in his wrkmgsjto^_dealing 
with Stoicism, and in particular with the curious Stoic way 
l being in tenns gl^bgdy^ It was" 
^ 



^^ ^ 

probably the struggleTo free his own mind^anxTme minds 
of his pupils from the very pervasive influence of the Stoic 
conception of God and the soul as a sort of gas that led 
Plotinus to the very clear understanding of the difference 
between spiritual and material being which is such a valu- 
able feature of his thought. But he does none the less show 
evidence of the influence of Stoicism, to a greater degree 
than his Middle Platonist predecessors and on some very 
important aspects of his thought. One of the things which 
must strike any reader ofj^otinuj^ 

!FTie~comes to him frorn^ Plato, isjiis emphasis on_ life. 
Plalo^^S^toTTave" imagined the Tpif ttSlf^w^d^ai^ 
place of static, regular mathematical pattern and geomet- 
rical intelligence ordering all things on that pattern. Plo- 
tinus's spiritual world is a place "boiling with life," where 
infinite power wells up and surges eternally in a carefree 
spontaneity without plan or need into a splendid super- 
abundance of living forms. And both spiritual and material 
worlds are for him in their very different ways organisms, 
unities-in-diversity held together in a living whole by a 
single life. The liberation from Stoic corporeal ways of 
thinking enables Plotinus to give his own original develop- 
ments to this sense of life. But it is impossible not to see 
that it owes a very great deal to the dynamic vitalism of 
the Stoics, who saw the universe as a single living organ- 
ism held together, enlivened, and ensouled by the Divine 
Fire which was the fullness both of life and intelligence. 

Plotinus of course, like his Platonist predecessors, con- 
sidered his philosophy not, as modern historians of philos- 
ophy consider it, as a philosophy inspired by Plato and 
historically derived from Plato, but with a great many new 
and distinctive features which are certainly not to be found 
in Plato's own thought, but simply as an exposition of 
Plato's own system. It is quite clear from his writings that 
he thought that Plato had a systematic philosophy, that the 
answers to all important philosophical questions were to 
be found in the Dialogues if only they were interpreted 



20 / Introduction 

rightly, and that the duty of a Platonist philosopher was 
simply to find and proclaim the right interpretations. Uiit 
in fact the greatest difference between Plato and the Mid.- 
<n^T2^^ philosophers is just Jhqt 

^i'atol^liofa systematic^nker?Tr3oes not seem possible 
ttrffiaihtam tKaf there Ges^ehrnd even the later Dialogues 
the sort of fully worked-out system of thought which lies 
behind the Enneads. Plato's mind did not work like that. 
And we find that Plotinus arrives at his conception of 
Plato's system by taking a rather limited number of pas- 
sages from the later Dialogues out of their contexts, bring- 
ing them, sometimes with a good deal of forcing, into re- 
lation with each other, and interpreting them often in a 
very arbitrary way without reference to the sequence of 
thought in the dialogue in which they occur. This pro- 
cedure and many of the interpretations (notably that 
of the second part of the Partnenides) seem to have been 
traditional in the Platonic school. 11 This complete differ- 
ence in kind between the two philosophies makes any de- 
tailed comparison between the system of Plato and the 
system of Plotinus impossible, because any such compari- 
son must begin by making the untrue assumption that 
there is a system of Plato. But this does not of course 
mean that the two have nothing to do with each other, or 
that the observation of the similarities and differences be- 
tween the minds of the two great philosophers is not of 
the most fascinating interest. Only a few brief indications, 
which interested readers can pursue further for themselves, 
can be given here, for the topic is an enormous one. We 
can say that Plotinus is genuinely in accord with Plato in 
his sharp division of reality into an eternal, spiritual or in- 
telligible, and a temporal, material and sensible world, 
with the scheme of values and the view of human life 
which this division implies; and also in his conviction that 
the material world of the senses is good and ordered by 
divine intelligence and has its own sort of reality and im- 
portance in the scheme of things, and that though it is 
not the true home of the soul, yet the soul has its work to 

11 For a full discussion of the way in which Plotinus interprets 
Plato, see Schwyzer, art. cit., col. 550-553. 



Introduction / 21 

do in it. His view of the nature and destiny of the human 
soul is therefore in essence genuinely Platonic, except 
(and it is an important exception) in his doctrine of the 
final mystical union. His doctrine of a transcendent Prin- 
ciple of the World of Ideas and his sharp distinction be- 
tween Nous and Soul, though they are not Platonic in their 
developed form, do seem to be genuine developments of 
ideas which are already to be found in Plato. But the plac- 
ing of the Ideas in the Divine Mind, the emphasis on life 
and the organic view of reality, the doctrine that there are 
Ideas of individuals, and the doctrine of the Divine In- 
finity, all seem to belong to ways of thinking quite diiTer- 
nt from Plato's and to have come to Plotinus from other 
sources, and their appearance in his thought means a 
^radical transformation of Platonism. 

Plotinus's attitude to Aristotle, from whose philosophy, 
especially his metaphysics and psychology, he derives very 
much, is a good deal more independent and critical than 
his attitude to Plato. There was a strongly anti- Aristotelian 
group among the Middle Platonists, and Plotinus is obvi- 
ously aware of, and sometimes accepts, their views. Jtfe 
knows that Aristotlg^often^ differs from Plato, and where 
he differsjteisjqi^^ wrong. On the whole, 

^rT7esulFor?hTs greater Set^HmentT^we^an say that he 
has a much more accurate understanding of Aristotle's 
real thought than he has of Plato's. There were historical 
reasons for this, too. The Peripatetic writers, the great 
commentator Alexander and others, who were read in his 
school, kept much closer to the real thought of Aristotle 
than the Middle Platonists did to that of Plato. Aristoteli- 
anism, after the publication of the great edition of Aris- 
totle's works by Andronicus in the 1st century B.C. and 
until its final absorption by Neo-Platonism, was a matter 
of close commentary on the works of the master without 
much development of his thought, not a growing and 
changing philosophy like Platonism: a difference which is 
at least in part due to the difference between the clear-cut 
systematic philosophy of Aristotle and the thoroughly un- 
systematic and infinitely suggestive thought of Plato, which 
seems to stimulate his readers in every generation to find 



22 / Introduction 

pf make Platonic systems of their own (which they gener- 
ally attribute to Plato himself). 

The most important, but unfortunately probably un- 
answerable, question to ask about Plotinus's philosophical 
background is, What was the content of the teaching of 
Ammonius Saccas, the philosopher who undoubtedly in- 
fluenced him more than any other ancient or contempo- 
rary thinker? We have very little information about the 
teaching of Ammonius, 12 who wrote nothing, and it is by 
ino means certain how far one of the passages on which 
any attempt to reconstruct parts of his thought must be 
based (the quotation from Hierocles) really refers to him 
at all. He seems to have taught, like other Middle Plato- 
nists, that Plato and Aristotle were in fundamenal agree- 
ment. Nemesius attributes to him views about the nature 
of the soul and its relationship to the body which corre- 
spond exactly to the teaching of Plotinus. And it is possible 
that he taught the doctrine which we find in Hierocles of 
a single supreme God who made the universe, a twofold 
hierarchically ordered unity of intelligible and sensible 
worlds, out of nothing. If this is really so, it would mean, 
first that Ammonius's thought was still powerfully influ- 
enced by his Christian upbringing, in spite of his abandon- 
ment of Christianity, for creation out of no pre-existing 
matter is Judaeo-Christian, not Greek philosophical doc- 
trine. This would help to account for the striking parallels 
between Plotinus's language and Christian ways of speak- 
ing about God which have impressed his Christian readers 
since St. Augustine. It would also mean that the distinction 
between the One and Nous, which is one of the most im- 
portant things in the philosophy of Plotinus, did not go 
back to Ammonius but was original (there is some evi- 
dence that the pagan Origen, another pupil of Ammonius, 
did not believe in it) . But on the whole it is perhaps safer 

12 There are three passages which refer to his teaching, two in 
Nemesius, On The Nature of Man, 2. 29 and 3. 56, and one 
from the 5th-century Platonist Hierocles, quoted by Photius, 
Bibliotheca, cod. 251, p. 46 la, 31 ff. and in a rather fuller form 
cod. 214, p. 172a, 3 ff. For a discussion of this evidence see 
Schwyzer, art. cit., col. 477-481. 



Introduction / 23 

to say simply that we know almost nothing about the 
teaching of Ammonius, and therefore cannot be sure how 
far Plotinus simply reproduced or developed, or departed 
from, the teaching of his master. 13 

The philosophy of Plotinus is, more even than other 
philosophies of the first centuries of the Christian era, not 
only a philosophy but a religion, a way for the mind to 
ascend to God. It is therefore worth while saying some- 
thing about its relation to the non-philosophical religions 
of the time, those at least which aroused any genuine per- 
sonal devotion. The official public cults meant little to 
Plotinus, though he makes, like other late Greek philoso- 
phers, a good deal of use of allegorical interpretations of 
the traditional myths for his own purposes. The mystery- 
religions cannot have contributed any ideas to his religious 
thought because they had no ideas to contribute. They 
were religions of cult and emotion, and, in so far as their 
more thoughtful devotees had anything approaching a the- 
ology, it was derived from the more easily understandable 
forms of contemporary philosophy and not from any sort 
of independent doctrinal tradition. All that Plotinus took 
from them was a certain amount of decorative symbolism 
(the language of light applied to spiritual being which 
plays so great a part in the Enneads does not derive 
specifically from mystery-rituals of illumination. Light- 
symbolism and the belief in a close connexion between light 
and divinity is a universal feature of all the religions and re- 
ligious philosophies of the period) . There is no evidence that 
Plotinus had any direct contact with orthodox Christianity, 
though Porphyry knew a good deal about it and attacked 
it vigorously. We can assume that Plotinus knew little 
about it, and that what he knew he disliked. Any direct 
and consciously recognized influence of Jewish or Chris- 
tian ideas on his mind can be ruled out, and though we 
cannot absolutely exclude the possibility of indirect in- 
fluence, perhaps through Ammonius or other contacts at 
Alexandria, we certainly cannot prove that such influence 

13 Longinus, who had heard Ammonius, certainly considered 
Plotinus to be an original thinker, cp. the long quotation in 
Porphyry, Life, ch. 20. 



24 / Introduction 

existed. And the fact that orthodox Christians, from St. 
Augustine and the Cappadocian Fathers to our own times, 
have been able to find a very great deal in Plotinus that 
has been of value to them should not prevent us from 
realizing that his system as it stands is in many ways in- 
compatible with Christianity and belongs to a different 
type of religious thought. 

Plotinus has left us in no doubt about his own opinions 
on the strange and powerful contemporary religious move- 
ment which we know as Gnosticism. He attacks it 
vigorously in the ninth treatise of the Second Ennead as 
untraditional, departing from the true teaching of Plato, ir- 
rational and inconsistent, insanely arrogant, and immoral 
in its tendencies. The neurotic Gnostic search for a secret 
sacred knowledge, a gnosis, the possession of which would 
automatically bring salvation, which led to the production 
and circulation of a mass of fantastic compilations claiming 
to be divine revelations and repositories of ancient Orien- 
tal wisdom, was utterly repugnant to his intelligent Hellenic 
conservatism, for which the philosophy of Plato was mani- 
festly reasonable and taught the truth and showed the way 
to God to those who were able and willing to follow it by 
the exercise of intelligence and virtue. 11 And his attitude 
to the visible universe was utterly opposed to that of the 
Gnostics. For them it was an evil prison, vitiated in its 
very nature, produced as the result of the fall of a spiritual 
power, with which man (or at least the Gnostic) who had 
come into it from a higher world as a result of that fall 
had absolutely nothing in common, which he utterly re- 
jected and sought to escape from by means of the gnosis. 
For Plotinus, hi this entirely true to Plato's doctrine, the 
visible universe was good, an essenial part of the nature 
of things, not the result of any fall or error but of the 
spontaneous expansion of the divine goodness to fill all 
possible being, made by divine intelligence as the best pos- 
sible material image of the spiritual universe. Man was 
akin to and should venerate as nobler than himself the di- 

14 cp. Porphyry, Life, ch. 16, for the campaign of Plotinus and 
his disciples to expose the pseudonymous revelations of the 
Gnostics. 



Introduction / 25 

vine souls which moved the stars (in Gnostic belief evil or 
inferior, hostile powers) and the great Soul of the World. 
He certainly belonged by right to the spiritual world and 
should seek to return there and transcend the material 
even while in the body: but he should do it without resent- 
ment or impatience or denial of the goodness of the visible 
world and his own real duties there. On the other hand, 
Plotinus's doctrine of matter ("prime" matter, absolute 
formlessness, as distinct from body, which is formed mat- 
ter and good in so far as formed) as "darkness" and the 
principle of evil is in language and thought very like Gnos- 
ticism. And there are a good many other similarities of 
language and thought which a reading either of the Her- 
metic treatises, which represent a Gnosticism unaffected 
by Christianity, or of the accounts of the teaching of the 
Christianized Gnostics, 15 will show. The themes, for in- 
stance, of the transcendence and incomprehensibility of 
the Supreme Being Who is higher than Mind, and of the 
unity-in-diversity of the spiritual world recur in the Gnos- 
tic writings (many of which are earlier than, or contem- 
porary with, Plotinus). These similarities, however, are 
not to be accounted for by supposing that Plotinus bor- 
rowed from the Gnostics. Ideas of this sort were "in the 
air" and might appear in very different contexts and with 
endless adaptations and modifications in the thought of 
thinkers of very different schools, 

We may sum up the general philosophical and religious 
situation in the age of Piotinus in the words of G. Quis- 
pel, 1(i "Late antiquity appears to our mind's eye as a land 
of three rivers, traversed by canals and with bridges which 
make traffic possible; but all the same three great streams 

Neo-Piatojiism^nd Christian- 



ity." There are innumeraBIe interconnexions, but thethree 
streams remain distinct, springing from different sources 
and flowing in different directions. And even when Chris- 
tianity, after drawing into its stream a great deal of water 
from the other two rivers, flows on by itself, the result is 

15 There are some very striking ones in St. Irenaeus's account of 
the teaching of Valentinus, Adv. Haer, I. 1. 1-1. 8. 4. 
1G Gnosis als Welt-Religion, ch. 3, p. 26. 



26 / Introduction 

not a mere syncretism or fusion. Christianity assimilates 
what it takes from the other two but remains itseJL 



III. The Thought of Plotinus 

(i) 

The philosophy of Plotinus is an account of an ordered 
structure of living reality, which proceeds eternally from 
its transcendentFirst^Principle , JhgjOne ^jGoo d^ and 
descendsj^ an unbroken succession of stages from the Di- 
*vme ^ JnteUecFand tHeT^orms therem"tHrougli Soul with Its 
various levels of experience and activity to the last and 
lowest realities, the forms of bodies: and it is also a show- 
ing of the way by which the soul of man which belongs to, 
can experience and be active on every level of being, is 
able, if it will, to ascend by a progressive purification and 
simplification to that union with the Good which alone 
can satisfy it. There are two movements in JPlotinus's uni- 
verse, one.Qf/out^onig^rom unity to an ever-increasing 
multiplicity and the other of return, to unity and unifica- 
tion: and, related to his conception of these two move- 
merits but not entirely corresponding to them, there is a 
duality and tension in his own thought. On one side there 
is the attempt to give a completely objective and accurate 
account of the whole of reality, based on metaphysical re- 
flection, with plenty of hard thinking and argument, and 
owing a good deal to preceding philosophies, above all of 
course to the Platonic school tradition: and on the other 
there is the faithful transcription of his own interior spir- 
itual experience of ascent to and union with the One. 17 
If we are to arrive at a true appreciation of Plotinus's 
thought we must not separate the two sides too sharply. It 
is, of course, when he speaks of the return to unity, the 
ascent of the soul to the One, that he draws most on his 
own experience; and when he is describing the eternal pat- 

17 These two aspects of Plotinus's thought are labelled by modern 
German-speaking scholars "gegenstandlich" and "aktuell," terms 
first used in this connexion by P. O. Kristeller in Der Begriff 
der Seele in der Ethik des Plotins (1929). 



Introduction / 27 

tern of reality as it spreads out in increasing multiplicity 
on its successive levels in the movement of descent his 
thought takes on more the character of objective meta- 
physical reflection, and he argues more and appeals less 
to experience; it is on this side of his thought, too, that the 
influence of the school tradition is most marked. But it is 
quite impossible to separate his metaphysics neatly from 
his mysticism. His whole description of the nature of re- 
ality is coloured and brought to life by his own spiritual 
experience: and his account of that experience, of the 
ascent of the soul and the mystical union, is kept firmly in 
accordance with the structure of his metaphysics. Of 
course the three great Hypostases, the One, Nous or the 
Divine Intellect, and Soul look rather difBcult when seen 
from different points of view. And Plotinus does not, any 
more than any other great philosopher, attain complete 
coherence and consistency in his thought. To many ques- 
tions he gives answers which vary, though always within 
well-defined limits, according to the point of view. There 
is a notable fluctuation in his thought about the precise 
degree of goodness or badness to be attributed to the 
body, and more generally in the evaluation of the descent 
into multiplicity, which appears both as a good and neces- 
sary self-expansion and as evil and a fall due to self-will 
and self-assertion. This 



garded to some extenT^TiluenEo a tension between th^ 
metap^^ic^t^ai^ystTcarsIfe of his thouglit^tHough it 
alscT derives, as Plotinus was very wBfrttware, from a sim- 
ilar tension hi the thought of Plato: and hi his effort to 
present Plato's thought as perfectly reasonable and con- 
sistent he tries hard, if not altogether successfully, to re- 
solve it. 18 And there are other fluctuations and tensions 
besides this major one. There are elements in his experi- 
ence which do not fit into his system, elements in the tra- 
dition he inherited which are not fully assimilated, and 
lines of thought suggested which if they had been followed 
up might have led to a radical revision of his philosophy. 
But his thought cannot be simply resolved into a mere 

18 cp. IV. 8. 5 (F (c), p. 123), in these selections. 



28 / Introduction 

jumble of conflicting elements. He is at once metaphysi- 
cian and mystic, a hard and honest thinker who enjoyed 
intense spiritual experience and could describe it in the 
language of a great poet, an ascetic who affirmed the good- 
ness of the world of the senses, a traditionalist who could 
think for himself and encouraged free discussion in others. 



Plotinus insists repeatedly that the transcendent First 
Principle which he recognizes, the One or Good, is beyond 
the reach of human thought or language; and, though he 
does in fact say a great deal about It, it is very difficult to 
summarize what he says in any other language but his own 
without giving an impression of his teaching which is in 
some ways inadequate and misleading. There are, how- 
ever, a few things that can be said which may perhaps be 
helpful to an understanding of the passages translated in 
these selections. First of all there is an interesting peculi- 
arity about the language which he uses. The names which 
he normally employs for the First Principle, the One and . 
the Good, to hen and to agathon, are both neuter in 
Greek. But even in passages where these neuter terms are 
used Plotinus frequently passes over, in a way which he 
apparently found quite natural, from neuter to masculine 
pronouns and adjectives. 19 This usage I have done my 
best, for the sake of accuracy, to preserve in the transla- 
tion, in spite of the oddity of the effect in English. And in 
view of it I shall feel myself free in the rest of what I have 
to say here about the One to use the masculine pronoun, 
which is more natural in talking about a Principle Who 
corresponds more closely than anything else in Greek phi- 
losophy to what we mean by God. (Plotinus himself very 
rarely uses the word theos in speaking of the One; but he 
does do so occasionally, and there is no reason to suppose 
that he found it any more inappropriate and undesirable 
than any other positive term. In any case, of course, the 
pagan and Judaeo-Christian meanings of theos or deus 
are very different. Plotinus also sometimes calls the One 

19 cp. Schwyzer, art. cit., col. 515 Schwyzer says well "die Vor- 
stellung theos noch mitschwingt." 



Introduction / 29 

the Father, but without any Christian implications.) The 
important point which drawing attention to this peculiarity 
of language may help to make clear (it is not by itself suf- 
ficient to establish it) is that the One, for all the extreme 
negativity partly inherited of the language which Ploti- 
nus sometimes uses about Him is not, as people sometimes 
suggest, conceived as a mere negation, an ultimate Void, 
a great Blank behind the universe in attaining to which the 
human personality disintegrates into conscious nothing- 
ness. He is a very positive Reality, of infinite power and 
content and superabundant excellence. The language of 
negation as Plotinus uses it is designed either to stress the 
inadequacy of all our ways of thinking and speaking about 
Him or to make clear the implications of saying that He is 
absolutely One and Infinite and the Source of all defined 
and limited realities. Building upon a famous remark of 
Plato's in the Republic' 20 Plotinus insists repeatedly that 
the Good is "beyond being," that He cannot properly be 
even said to exist surely the extreme of negation. But it 
is perfectly clear from all that Plotinus says about Him, in 
the very passages where His existence is denied, that He is 
existent in some sense, and the supreme Existent. What 
Plotinus is saying is that the unity of the Good is so ab- 
solute, He is so completely One, Single and Simple, that 
no predicates at all can be applied to Him, not even that 
of existence; and that as the Source of being to all things 
He is not a thing Himself. For Plotinus, who is true here 
to Plato's thought, "being" is always "being something," 
some one particular defined and limited thing, or the total- 
ity of such things, 21 and the One is not a thing, nor yet 
the sum of particular realities, i.e. the totality of being in 
the Plotinian sense (we shall see that the whole of real 
being, Absolute Being, containing all definite realities in 
their archetypal form, is Nous, the Second Hypostasis). 
Again, Plotinus insists that the One does not think, be- 
cause thought for him always implies a certain duality, a 
distinction of thought and object of thought, and it is this 
that he is concerned to exclude in speaking of the One, 

20 VI. 509/>. 

21 V. 5. 6 (C, p. 56): cp. my note on this passage (C, 4, p. 151). 



30 / Introduction 

and to relegate, again, to the second level of reality, that 
of Nous. But he is so anxious to make clear that this does 
not mean that the life of the One is mere unconsciousness, 
to show that He is more, not less, than Mind at the high- 
est level at which we can conceive it, that he attributes to 
the One a "super-intellection," 22 a simple self-intuition, 23 
an immediate self-consciousness 24 higher than the thought 
of Nous. And when he calls the One "formless" he does so 
because He is Infinite, without limits, and because, pre- 
cisely as One (here Piotinus follows the Pythagorean- 
Platonic tradition very closely) He is the Principle of 
form, of number, measure, order, and limit; and a source 
or principle for Piotinus is always other and more than 
that which it produces. 

Piotinus by his use of negative language stresses the 
transcendence of the One to an extreme degree. But he is 
very careful to exclude all ideas of a quasi-spatial sort 
about this transcendence. The One is not a God "outside" 
the world (an idea very fashionable in the early centuries 
of our era, as in many later periods). Nor is He remote 
from us, but intimately present in the centre of our souls; 
or rather we are in Him, for Piotinus prefers to speak of 
the lower as in the higher rather than the other way round; 
body is in soul and soul in Nous and Nous in the One (he 
is quite aware that, whichever way we put it, we are using 
an inadequate spatial metaphor). The hierarchical order of 
levels of being docs not imply the remoteness of the One, 
because they are not spatially separate or cut off from each 
other; aUjarejDTesent togeth^uij^eiywhgr^^Ajid just be- 
cause the__One_is_not any particular thing He is present to 
all thmgs^accordiiiglg their oapaclty to receive HujaJ 

From the One proceeds the first "great derived reality, 
Nous, the Divine Mind which is also the World of Forms 
or Ideas, and so the totality of true being in the Platonic 
sense. Its procession from the One is necessary and eternal, 
as in their turn are the procession of Soul from Nous and 
the forming and ordering of the material universe by Soul. 

22 VI. 8. 16 (C, p. 60). 
as VI. 7. 38-39 (C, p. 59). 
2 *V. 4. 2 (C, p. 59). 



Introduction / 31 

In the thought of Plotinus, as in Greek philosophical 
thought (except Epicurean) in general, the universe as a 
whole in all its levels, spiritual and material, is eternal and 
it is impossible to conceive of any part of it not existing or 
existing otherwise than as it is. The way in which Nous 
proceeds from the One and Soul in its turn from Nous is 
rather loosely and inadequately described as "emanation." 
The background of Plotinus's thought at this point is cer- 
tainly a late Stoic doctrine of the emanation of intellect 
from a divinity conceived as material light or lire, and his 
favourite metaphor to describe the process is that of the 
radiation of light or heat from sun or fire (he also uses 
others of the same sort, the diffusion of cold from snow or 
perfume from something scented). But he is not content 
merely to use this traditional analogy and leave it at that, 
to allow the generation of spiritual beings to be thought of 
in terms of a materialistically conceived automatism. Nous 
proceeds from the One (and Soul from Nous) without in 
any way affecting its Source. There is no activity on the 
part of the One, still less any willing or planning or choice 
(planning and choice are excluded by Plotinus even on a 
much lower level, when he comes to consider the forming 
and ruling of the material universe by Soul). There is 
simply a giving-out which leaves the Source unchanged 
and undiminished. But though this giving-out is necessary, 
in the sense that it cannot be conceived as not happening 
or as happening otherwise, it is also entirely spontaneous: 
there is no room for any sort of binding or constraint, in- 
ternal or external, in Plotinus's thought about the One. 
for thgjTfnrpgsinni of aJLthings 



tive and creatfvie.TTere his tEoughl isfcertainly 
^B^TPTato's refectfon^oT the^oI^TGreek doctfmcF of divine 
ei^Jfrj^ is slated by Plato as a 

necessary consequence of supreme moral goodness be- 
comes in Plotinus a law of all being. Here we touch an 
element of his thought which is of great importance, the 

2*29e.: cp. V. 4. 1 (C, p. 63). 



32 Introduction 

enighasis^on life, on the dynamic, vital character of spir- 
itual being. Perfection for him Is not merely static. It is a 
fullness of living and, productive power. The One for hinj 
E'Tife and Power, an infinite spring of power, an un- 
bounded life, and "therefore necessarily productive. And as 
it is one of the axioms which Plotinus assumes without 
discussion that the product must always be less than, in- 
ferior to the producer, what the One produces must be 
that which is next to. Him in excellence, namely Notts. 

Plotinus, when he gives a more precise account of how 
Nous proceeds from the One, introduces a psychological 
element into the process which goes beyond his light- 
metaphor. He distinguishes two "moments" in this time- 
less generation; the first in which Nous is radiated as an 
unformed potentiality and the second in which it turns 
back to content and becomes the totality of real existence. 
Here we meet another of the great principles of the phi- 
losophy of Plotinus; that all derived beings depend for 
their existence, their activity, and their power to produce 
in their turn, on their contemplation of their source. Con- 
templation always precedes and generates activity and 
production. 26 

Plotinus's conception of Nous is, as the selections in 
Section D will show, an extremely rich and complex one. 
It is because of this complexity and richness of content, 
which makes the use of any single English word for it in- 
adequate and misleading, that I have, in accordance with 
the principles of this series, kept the transliterated Greek 
word in my translation where it refers to the Second Hy- 
postasis and does not simply mean "intellect" in general. 
>JThe only other Greek word which I have found it neces- 
s*ary to keep is logos in its special Neo-Platonic sense of 
"a formative force proceeding from a higher principle 
which expresses and represents that principle on a lower 
plane of being." TJUI& jVgMgjg a logos of the On^jind^oul 
otNou$. 27 It is an important term because it expresses the 
unity and continuity of the different levels of being in 
Plotinus's system. 

26 C p. III. 8, 4 and 5 (E (b), pp. 94-95). 
27V. 1. 6 (D (a), p. 65). 



Introduction / 33 

Nous is for Plotinus both thought and object of thought, 
both the Divine Intellect and the Platonic World of Forms, 
the totality of real beings. This unity of thought and 
Forms in a single reality is, to judge from the opposition 
which it aroused from Porphyry on his first entrance into 
the school and, apparently, from Longinus, 28 one of the 
most original features of Plotinus's thought. The Middle 
Platonists had already taught 



- 

"thoughts of God"j( though the opposition to Plotinus sug- 
gests that this doctrine was not universally accepted in the 
school), but Plotinus goes a good deal beyond this in his 
assertion of the absolute co-equality and unity-in-diversity 
of thought, life, and being. The result is a complete trans- 
formation of the Platonic World of Forms. It is no longer 
a structure, logically or mathematically conceived, of 
static universal norms, but an organic living community of 
interpenetrating beings which are at once Forms and in- 
telligences, all "awake and alive," in which every part 
thinks and therefore in a real sense is the whole; so that 
the relationship of whole and part in this spiritual world is 
quite different from that in the material world, and in- 
volves no sort of separation or exclusion. This unity-in- 
diversity is the most perfect image possible on the level of 
being (in the Platonic sense of formed, defined "thisness") 
of the absolute Unity of the One, Whom Nous in its or- 
dinary contemplation cannot apprehend as He is in His 
absolute simplicity; so it represents His Infinity as best it 
can in the plurality of Forms. Nous itself is infinite in 
power and immeasurable, because it has no extension and 
there is no external standard by which it could be meas- 
ured, but finite because it is a complete whole composed 
of an actually existing number (all that can possibly exist) 
of Forms, which are themselves definite, limited realities. 
Looked at from the point of view of our own human 
nature and experience, Nous is the level of intuitive 
thought, a thought which grasps its object immediately 
and is always perfectly united with it, and does not have 
to seek it outside itself by discursive reasoning: and we at 
our highest are Nous, or Soul perfectly formed to the like- 

** Life, eh. 18,20. 



34 / Introduction 

ness of Nous (this is a point on which there is some varia- 
tion in Plotinus's thought). Plotinus in some passages at 
least admits the existence of Forms of individuals, and 
this enables him to give our particular personalities their 
place in the world of Nous, with the eternal value and 
status which this implies. And this means that in that 
world, where the laws of space and time do not apply and 
the part is the whole, we are Being and the All. This is the 
explanation of a number of so-called pantheistic passages 
in Plotinus. 29 In order to understand them correctly we 
must remember (i) that they refer to Nous (Being or the 
All) not to the One; (ii) that to become Nous does not 
involve the destruction or absorption of the particular in- 
dividual personality but its return to its perfect archetypal 
reality, distinguished in unity from all other archetypal 
realities, individual and universal. 

Soul in Plotinus is very much what it is in Plato, the 
great intermediary between the worlds of intellect and 
sense and the representative of the former in the latter. It 
proceeds from Nous and returns upon it and is formed by 
it in contemplation as Nous proceeds from and returns 
upon the One: but the relationship of Soul to Nous is a 
much more intimate one. Soul at its highest belongs to 
the world of Nous: and Plotinus hesitates a good deal over 
the question of whether its going out from that world to 
form and order the material universe is a fall, an act of 
illegitimate self-will and self-assertion, or a good and nec- 
essary part of the universal order. He tries hard to recon- 
cile the two points of view and bring his thought into con- 
sistency, but he does not quite succeed. On the whole, 
however, the positive way of looking at the situation pre- 
dominates in the Enneads. The activity of Universal Soul 
in forming and ruling the material universe is regarded as 
wholly good and divine. It is an activity which is, like pro- 
duction on higher levels, at once necessary and spontane- 
ous, the overflowing of contemplation into action, and it 
takes place altogether without effort, deliberate choice, or 
planning. 

Universal Soul has two levels, the higher where it acts 
29 Notably VI. 5. 12 (G (6), p. 140). 



Introduction / 35 

andjntelligent 



direction, and the lower where it operates 
principle of life and growth. This lower is in fact (though 
Plotinus is reluctant to admit it) a fourth distinct hypos- 
tasis, and has its special name, Nature. It is related to the 
higher soul as the higher soul is to Nous and, like it, acts 
or produces as a necessary result of contemplation; but be- 
cause its contemplation is the last and lowest sort of con- 
templation, a sort of dream, 30 it is too weak to produce 
anything which is itself productive. So what it produces is 
the immanent forms in body, the ultimate level of spiritual 
being, which are noncontemplative and so spiritually ster- 
ile and below which lies only the darkness of matter. 

The characteristic of the life of Soul is movement from 
one thing to another; unlike Nous it does not possess being 
as a whole, but only one part at a time, and must always 
be moving from one to the other; it is the level of discur- 
sive thought, which does not hold its object in immediate 
possession but has to seek it by a process of reasoning; 
and its continual movement from one thing to another 
produces time, which is "the life of the soul in move- 
ment," 31 and is the cause of all physical movement in 
space and time. 

Our individual souls are "Plotinian parts" of Universal 
Soul, parts, that is, which in the manner proper to spiritual 
being have the whole in a certain sense present in them 
and can if they wish expand themselves by contemplation 
into universality and be the whole because they completely 
share Universal Soul's detachment from the body it rules. 
The individual soul's descent into body is for Plotinus both 
a fall and a necessary compliance with the universe and 
the plan of Universal Soul 32 (Plotinus here is very con- 
scious of a tension in Plato's thought as well as in his 
own). The spiritual state of the soul in body depends on 
its attitude. If it devotes itself selfishly to the interests of 
the particular body to which it is attached it becomes en- 
trapped in the atomistic particularity of the material world 

s III. 8.4 (E (b),p. 94). 
si III. 7. 11 (E (6), p. 106). 
*2 IV. 8. 5 (F (c),p. 123). 



36 / Introduction 

and isolated from the whole. TTiejpot_^in__rfj!^^ 
setfjgolation, j>y. which 4t~ i& imp]isQnd4aJ2Qdy and cut 
offf ronf its ETgh destiny. But the mere fact of being in 
body d^e^ not Tniply imprisonment in body. That only 
comes if the soul surrenders to the body; it is the inward 
attitude which makes the difference. It is always possible 
for a man in the body to rise beyond the particularism and 
narrowness of the cares of earthly life to the universality 
of transcendent Soul and to the world of Nous. Universal 
Soul is in no way hampered by the body of the universe 
which it contains and administers: and the celestial bodies 
of the star-gods in no way interfere with their spiritual 
life. 33 It is not embodiment as such but embodiment in an 
earthly, animal body which the Platonist regards as an evil 
and a handicap. 

The material universe for Plotinus is a living, organic 
whole, the best possible image of the living unity-in- 
diversityofjhe World of Forms in Nous. It is held to- 
gether in every part by a universal sympathy and har- 
mony, in which external evil and suffering take their place 
as necessary elements in the great pattern, the great dance 
of the universe. As the work of Soul, that is as a living 
structure of forms, it is wholly good, and everlasting as a 
whole though the parts are perishable (the universe of 
Nous is of course eternal as a whole and in every part). 
All in it that is life and form is good; but the matter which 
is its substratum is evil and the principle of evil. Matter 
according to Plotinus never really unites with form; it re- 
mains a formless darkness on which form is merely super- 
imposed. It is non-being in the sense not of a "zero" but 
a "minus," a force or principle of negation (in the Aris- 
totelian language which he sometimes uses, Plotinus iden- 
tifies hule with steresis). Matter then is responsible for the 
evil and imperfection of the material world: but that world 
is good and necessary, the best possible image of the world 
of spirit on the material level where it is necessary that it 
should express itself for the completion of the whole. It 
has not the goodness of its archetype but it has the good- 
ness of the best possible image. 

*11.9. 8(E (6), p. 98). 



Introduction / 37 

(iii) 

The return of the soul to the One has nothing to do for 
Plotinus with movement in space and the final union can 
be attained while still in the body (though, for the human 
soul at least, he thinks that permanent union is only at- 
tainable when the soul has finally left the body). The 
process is one of interiorization, of turning away from the 
external world, of concentrating one's powers inwardly in- 
stead of dissipating them outwardly, of rediscovering one's 
true self by the most vigorous intellectual and moral disci- 
pline, and then waiting so prepared for the One to declare 
His presence, for the final illumination and union. The re- 
discovery of one's true self is a return to Nous] for, as we 
have seen, Plotinus teaches that we are more than soul, 
we are Nous\ and "we do not altogether come down"; the 
highest part of our selves remains in the world of Nous 
even when we are embodied (it is our archetypal original, 
the individual Form of which our soul is a Logos). And, 
when we are Nous, we can share in its self-transcendence 
and contemplate the One with that in our Nous which is 
not Nous, 34 though our experience of this highest state can 
only be a rare and fleeting one as long as we are handi- 
capped by the body. 

OfjftgJ^ to leave Plotinus himself to 

speak. But there are two tfiin^s^^oaaTirwRich shoiild"Be 
saidlo avoid misunderstanding. The first is that Plotinus 
insists that there is no short cut, no mysticism which does 
not demand moral and intellectual perfection. We must 
ascend to Nous first, and it is only as Nous, as a being per- 
fect in wisdom and goodness, that union with the One is 
possible. This union transcends our intellectual and moral 
life because in it we ascend to the Source of intellect and 
goodness which is more than they are, but it is only pos- 
sible because our intellectual and moral life has reached 
its perfection. We are "carried out by the very surge of the 
wave of Nous/' 35 It is the completion and confirmation, 
not the negation and destruction of all that we have done 

34 v, 5< 7 _ 8 (D ( fl ), p. 66). 
ss VI. 7. 36 (G (c),p. 146). 



38 / Introduction 

ourselves (as Plotinus would say; a Christian would say, 
that God has done in us) to bring our selves to perfection, 
to the fullest consciousness and activity. And, again, be- 
cause it is as Nous that we attain to union, it would seem 
that it is not Plotinus' s thought that our individual person- 
alities are finally absorbed and disappear. It is true that in 
the union we rise above Nous to a state in which there is 
no consciousness of difference from the One, in which 
there is no longer Seer and Seen, but only unity. But uni- 
versal Nous, of which we are then a part, exists continu- 
ally in that state of union without prejudice to its proper 
life of intuitive thought and unity-in-diversity. There is 
never any suggestion in Plotinus that all things except the 
One are illusions or fleeting appearances. 

(iv) 

The modern literature on Plotinus is very extensive: a 
complete survey of everything published up to 1949 will 
be found in B. Marien's Bibliografia Critica degli Studi 
Plotiniani (Bari, Laterza, 1949, published with the last 
volume of Cilcnto's translation). The first satisfactory 
critical edition of the text of the Enneads, by P. Henry 
and H. R. Schwyzer, is now in course of publication (vol. 
I, containing the first three Enneads was published in 1951 
by Desclee de Brouwer, Paris, and L'fidition Universelle, 
Brussels). The texts of the Teubner (R. Volkmann) and 
Bude (6. Brehier) editions are not at all satisfactory, 
though Brehier's translation and introductions and notes to 
the several treatises in the Bude edition are of great value. 
The text of the old edition of Creuzer and Moser (re- 
printed with Ficino's Latin translation, Didot, 1855) is 
preferable to that of Volkmann and Brehier. The great 
German and Italian translations of R. Harder (Leipzig, 
1930-1937) and V. Cilento (Bari, 1947-1949) are most 
important contributions to our understanding of Plotinus. 
The English translation by Stephen Mackenna and B. S. 
Page (Medici Society, 1926-1930) is a noble and attrac- 
tive piece of work, to which I am indebted for many happy 
renderings of particular phrases, though 1 have tried on 
the whole to give a plainer version and one closer to the 



Introduction / 39 

Greek. (I have used the Henry-Schwyzer text for the first 
three Enneads, and the Bude (Brehier's) text, with a few, 
as it seems to me necessary, deviations, for the others.) 
The English titles for the treatises in the table on pages 
40-44 are taken from Mackenna. 

The most thorough and scholarly introduction to Ploti- 
nus is H. R. Schwyzer's article in Paulys Realenzyklo- 
pddie d. klassischen Altertumswissenschajt (Band XXI, 
1951, col. 471-592). . Brehier's La Philosophic de 
Plotin (Paris, 1928) and Dr. Inge's Gifford Lectures (The 
Philosophy of Plotinus, 2 vols., 3rd edition, Longmans, 
1929) are still well worth reading. Another good short in- 
troduction is M. de Gandillac's La Sagesse de Plotin 
(Paris, 1952). 



Table 



PASSAGES 
NUMBER IN TRANSLA1ED 
PORPHYRY'S IN THESE 
CFIRONO- SELECTIONS 
LOGICAL (chapter 

ORDER ENNEADS REFERENCE AND TITLE reference) 


PAGE 


53 


I. 1. 


On the Animate and the Man 


10 


119 


19 


I. 2. 


On the Virtues 


2-3 


130 


20 


I. 3. 


On Dialectic 


1-3 

4-5 


127 
128 


46 


I. 4. 


On Happiness 


14 
16 


131 
132 


36 


L 5. 


Whether Happiness depends 
upon Extension of Time 








1 


1. 6. 


On Beauty 


2 
7-8 


136 
126 


54 


I. 7. 


On the First Good 


_ 


_ 


51 


L 8. 


On Evil 


3 
7 
15 


109 
110 
112 


16 


I. 9. 


On the Reasoned Dismissal 





_ 


40 


II. 1. 


On the World 








15 


II. 2. 


The Heavenly Circuit 





_ 


52 


II. 3. 


Are the Stars Causes? 


7 
17-18 


99 

92 


12 
40 


H. 4. 


Matter in its Two Kinds 


5 
16 


111 
112 



Table / 41 



NUMBER IN 
PORPHYRY'S 

CHRONO- 
LOGICAL 
ORDER 



25 

17 

37 
35 

33 



3 
47 

48 
15 
50 
26 

45 
30 

13 

21 



ENNEADS REFERENCE AND TITLE 



II. 5. Existence, Potential and 
Actual 



II. 6. On Quality 

II. 7. On Coalescence 



II. 8. *F/ry Distant Objects Appear 
Small 



II. 9. Against the Gnostics 



PASSAGES 
TRANSLATED 

IN THESE 
SELECTIONS 

(chapter 
reference) PAGE 



III. 1. On Fate 

III. 2. On Providence I 

III. 3. OH Providence II 

III. 4. 0/i 0#r Tutelary Spirit 

III. 5. On Love 

III. 6. T/z<? Impassibility of the 
Bodiless 

III. 7. On Eternity and Time 

III. 8. On Contemplation 

III. 9. Diverse Questions 

IV. 1. 0/x the Essence of the Soul I 



1 

2 
3 
8 

16 
18 



2 

9 

17 



11 

4 
5 



49 

119 

49 

98 

133 

134 

120 

103 
104 
104 



108 



106 

94 
95 



84 



42 / Table 



NUMBER TN 
PORPHYRY'S 

CHRONO- 
LOGICAL 
ORDER 



ENNEADS REFERENCE AND TITLE 



PASSAGES 
TRANSLATED 

IN THESE 
SELECTIONS 

(chapter 
reference) PAGE 



4 
27 

28 



29 

41 

2 



8 
10 

11 

49 



IV. 2. On the Essence of the Soul II 
IV.. 3. On the Soul I 

IV. 4. On the Soul H 



4 

5 

9 

12-13 

11 

14 
18 
20 
33 
36 
40 



114 

113 

89 

121 

91 
97 
1J7 
117 
100 
101 
102 



IV. 5. On the Soul HI or How We 

See 

IV. 6. On Sensation and Memory 

IV. 7. On the Immortality of the 

Soul 



IV. 8. On the Descent of the Soul 
into the Body 

IV. 9. Are All Souls One? 

V. 1. On the Three First Hypostases 



V. 2. On the Origin and Order of 
the Beings following on the 
First 



V. 3. On the Knowing Hypostases 
and the Transcendent 



1 


121 


5 


123 


4 


79 


6 


65 


11 


50 


1 


51 


3-4 


85 


7 


87 


8 


87 


10-11 


68 


17 


141 



Table / 43 

PASSAGES 

NUMBER IN TRANSLATED 

PORPHYRY'S IN THESE 

CHRONO- SELECTIONS 

LOGICAL (chapter 

ORDER ENNEADS REFERENCE AND TITLE reference) PAGE 

7 V. 4. How the Secondaries arise 1 63 

from the First; and on the One 2 59 

32 V. 5. That the Intelligibles are not 1 77 

outside the Intellectual-Prin- 6 56 

ciple 7-8 66 

9 54 

12 62 

24 V. 6. That the Principle Transcend- 
ing Being has no Intellectual 
Act 

18 V. 7. Whether there Exist Ideas of I 76 
Particulars 

31 V. 8. On the Intellectual Beauty 1 136 

3-4 72 

7 97 

11 138 

5 V. 9. On the Intellectual Principles, 4 84 

the Ideas, and the Authentic 6 71 

Existent 8 71 

42 VI. 1. On the Kinds of Being / 

43 VI. 2. On the Kinds of Being II 8 80 

21 82 

44 VI. 3. On the Kinds of Being HI 

22 VI. 4. On The Integral Omnipres- 3 88 

ence of the Authentic Exist- 14 114 

ent I 14-15 116 

16 124 

23 VI. 5. On The Integral Omnipres- 12 140 

ence of the Authentic Exist- 
ent II 

34 VI. 6. On Numbers 



44 / Table 

PASSAGES 
NUMBER IN TRANSLATED 

PORPHYRY'S IN THESE 

CHRONO SELECTIONS 

LOGICAL (chapter 

ORDER ENNEADS REFERENCE AND TITLE reference) PAGE 

38 VI. 7. How the Multitude of Ideas 9 74 

Came into Being and on the 12 75 

Good 15 68 

22 70 

33 138 

34_36 143 

37-38 58 

38-39 59 

39 VI. 8. On Free Will 11 53 

13 53 

14 60 

15 146 

16 60 

9 VI. 9. On the Good or the One I 55 

3 55 

6 56 

11 147 



Porphyry's Life 



PLOTINUS, the philosopher of our times, seemed ashamed 
of being in the body. As a result of this state of mind he 
could never bear to talk about his race or his parents or 
his native country. And he objected so strongly to sitting 
to a painter or sculptor that he said to Amelius, 1 * who 
was urging him to allow a portrait of himself to be made, 
"Why, really, is it not enough to have to carry the image 
in which nature has encased us, without your requesting 
me to agree to leave behind me a longer-lasting image of 
the image, as if it was something genuinely worth look- 
ing at?" 2 

8 

When Plotinus had written anything he could never 
bear to go over it twice; even to read it through once was 
too much for him, as his eyesight was not strong enough. 
In writing he did not form the letters with any regard to 
appearance or divide his syllables correctly, and he paid 
no attention to spelling. He was wholly concerned with the 
thought; and, which surprised us all, he went on in this 
way right up to the end. He worked out his train of 
thought from beginning to end in his own mind, and then, 
when he wrote it down, since he had set it all in order in 
his mind, he wrote as continuously as if he was copying 
from a book. Even if he was talking to someone, engaged 
in continuous conversation, he kept to his train of thought. 
He could take his necessary part in the conversation to the 
full and at the same time keep his mind fixed without a 
break on what he was considering. When the person he 
had been talking to was gone he did not go over what he 
had written, because his sight, as I have said, did not suf- 
* Notes may be found at the back of the book. 

45 



46 / Plotinus 

fice for revision. He went straight on with what came next, 
keeping the connexion, just as if there had been no inter- 
val of conversation between. In this way he was present at 
once to himself and to others, and he never relaxed his 
self -turned attention except in sleep: even sleep he re- 
duced by taking very little food; often not even a piece of 
bread, and by his continuous turning in contemplation to 
his Nous. 



Many men and women of the highest rank, on the ap- 
proach of death, brought him their children, both boys and 
girls, and entrusted them to him along with all their prop- 
erty, considering that he would be a holy and godlike 
guardian. So his house was full of young lads and maidens, 
including Potamon, to whose education he gave serious 
thought and often even listened to his revision exercises. 
He patiently attended to those who submitted accounts of 
the children's property and took care that they should be 
accurate; he used to say that as long as they did not take 
to philosophy their properties and incomes must be kept 
safe and untouched for them. Yet though he shielded so 
many from the worries and cares of ordinary life, he never, 
while awake, relaxed his intent concentration upon Nous. 
He was gentle, too, and at the disposal of all who had any 
sort of acquaintance with him. Though he spent twenty-six 
whole years in Rome and acted as arbitrator in very many 
people's disputes, he never made an enemy of any of the 
people of the city [or officials], 

10 (end) 

When Amelius grew ritualistic and took to going round 
visiting the temples at the New Moon and the feasts of the 
gods and once asked Plotinus to come with him, Plotinus 
said, "They ought to come to me, not I to them." 8 What 
he meant by this exalted utterance we could not under- 
stand and did not dare to ask. 

11 (end) 

He once noticed that I, Porphyry, was thinking of re- 
moving myself from this life. He came to me unexpectedly 



Porphyry's Life / 47 

while I was staying indoors in my house and told me that 
this lust for death did not come from a settled rational de- 
cision but from a bilious indisposition, and ordered me to 
go away for a holiday. I obeyed him and went to Sicily. 

13-14 

13. In the meetings of the school he showed an ade- 
quate command of language and the greatest power of dis- 
covering and considering what was relevant to the subject 
in hand, but he made mistakes in certain words: he did 
not say anamimnesketai, but anamnemisketai, and made 
other slips which he also committed in his writing. When 
he was speaking his intellect visibly lit up his face: there 
was always a charm about his appearance, but at these 
times he was still more attractive to look at: he sweated 
gently, and kindliness shone out from him, and in answer- 
ing questions he made clear both his benevolence to the 
questioner and his intellectual power. Once I, Porphyry, 
went on asking him for three days about the soul's con- 
nexion with the body, and he kept on explaining to me. A 
man called Thaumasius came in who was interested in 
general statements and said that he wanted to hear Ploti- 
nus speaking in the manner of a set treatise, but could not 
stand Porphyry's questions and answers. Plotinus said, 
"But if when Porphyry asks questions we do not solve his 
difficulties we shall not be able to say anything at all in 
your set speech." 

14. In writing he is concise and full of thought. He puts 
things shortly and abounds more in ideas than words; he 
generally expresses himself in a tone of rapt inspiration, 
and is guided by his own experience rather than by tra- 
dition. His writings, however, are full of concealed Stoic 
and Peripatetic doctrines. 4 Aristotle's Metaphysics, hi 
particular, is concentrated in them. ... In the meetings 
of the school he used to have the commentaries read, per- 
haps of Severus, perhaps of Cronius or Numenius or 
Gaius or Atticus, 5 and among the Peripatetics of Aspasius, 
Alexander, Adrastus, 6 and others that were available. But 
he did not just speak straight out of these books but took 
a distinctive personal line in his consideration, and brought 



48 / Plotinus 

the mind of Ammonius to bear on the investigations in 
hand. 

23 

So to this godlike man, who often raised himself in 
thought, according to the ways Plato teaches in the Ban- 
quet, 7 to the First and Transcendent God, that God ap- 
peared Who has neither shape nor any intelligible form, 
but is throned above intellect and all the intelligible. I, 
Porphyry, declare that once, in my sixty-eighth year, I 
drew near and was united to Him. To Plotinus "the term 
ever near was shown": 8 for his end and term was to be 
united to, to approach the God above all things. Four 
times while I was with him he attained that term, in an un- 
speakable actuality and not in potency only. 



B 
On the Three Hypostases 

II. 9. 1 

[The names One and Good refer to the same transcend- 
ent First Principle, which we cannot really label and define, 
but must speak of as best we can. It is primary, transcend- 
ent, and indescribable because of its absolute simplicity. 
On it depend Nous and Soul, and there is no room for any 
other Principles besides these.] 

Now it has been made clear to us that the nature of the 
Good is simple and primary (for everything which is not 
primary is not simple either), and contains nothing in it- 
self, but is a unity: the same nature belongs to what we 
call the One. It is not something else, and then as a result 
of that One, nor is the Good something else and then as a 
result Good. When we speak of the One and when we 
speak of the Good we must think and speak of It as one 
and the same Nature, not applying any predicates to It, 
but explaining It to ourselves as best we can. We call It 
the First because It is the simplest, and the Self-Sufficing 
because It is not a compound (which would make It de- 
pendent on its constituent parts); we speak of It as That 
which is in nothing else, because everything which is in 
something else is derived from something else. If then It is 
neither derived from nor in something else, nor any sort of 
compound, there cannot be anything above It. We need 
not then go looking for other Principles. We set This first, 
then Nous, the primal Intelligence, then Soul after Nous. 
This is the order according to the nature of things. We 
must not assume more or fewer than these in the intelli- 
gible realm. 

H. 9 .3 

[The law of necessary production: each Principle must 
eternally produce the level of being immediately below it 

49 



50 / Plotinus 

as a necessary consequence of its own existence: and the 
whole order of things is eternal: the lower world of be- 
coming was not created at a particular moment but is 
eternally being generated: it is always there as a whole, 
and particular things in it only perish so that others may 
come into being.] 

Each must give of its own being to something else. The 
Good will not be the Good, or Nous, Nous; Soul will not be 
itself, unless after the primal life some secondary life lives 
as long as the primal exists. All things must exist for ever 
in ordered dependence upon each other: those other than 
the First have come into being only in the sense of being 
derived and dependent. Things that are said to have come 
into being did not just come into being [at a particular 
moment] but always were and always will be in process 
of becoming: nor does anything perish except what can be 
transformed into something else; that which has nothing 
into which it can be transformed does not perish. 

V. 1. 11 

[The way within ourselves from Soul to Nous and the 
One. Our discursive reasoning about the right and good 
requires as its base something in us which is in intuitive 
possession of absolute rightness; this is Nous. And from 
Nous we can reach its source, the One or God. He is not, 
as Nous is, part of our individual personalities (or, rather, 
they are parts of Nous) . He is absolutely One, immanent 
by His very transcendence, present to each and all accord- 
ing to their capacity to receive Him.] 

Since there exists soul which reasons about what is right 
and good, and discursive reasoning which inquires about 
the rightness and goodness of this or that particular thing, 
there must be some further permanent rightness from 
which arises the discursive reasoning in the realm of soul. 
How else would soul manage to reason? And if soul some- 
times reasons about the right and good and sometimes 
does not, there must be in us Nous t which does not reason 
discursively but always holds the absolute right. There 
must be, too, the Source and Cause and God of Nous. He 
is not divided, but abides: and as He does not abide in 



On the Three Hypostases / 51 

place, He is contemplated in many things, according to 
the capacity of each to receive Him, as if He was now one 
thing and now another. It is just as the centre of a circle 
exists by itself, but every point of the circle contains the 
centre in it, and the radii bring to the centre each its own 
particular property. 1 By this sort of disposition in our- 
selves we are in contact with God and are with Him and 
depend upon Him: those of us who converge towards Him 
are firmly established in Him. 

V. 2. 1 

[The One transcends being because it is its source. 
Nous proceeds from the One, and Soul from Nous, by a 
double movement of outgoing and return in contempla- 
tion, the higher in each case remaining in itself, unaffected 
by the production of the lower. Soul in its turn produces 
another level of being or hypostasis, Nature, the Life- 
Principle.] 

The One is all things and not a single one of them: for 
the Source of all is not all things; yet It is all things, for 
they all, so to speak, run back to It: or, rather, hi It they 
are not yet, but will be. How then do all things come from 
the One, Which is simple and has in It no diverse variety, 
or any sort of doubleness? It is because there is nothing in 
It that all things come from It: in order that being may 
exist, the One is not being but the Generator of being. 
This, we may say, is the first act of generation. The One, 
perfect because It seeks nothing, has nothing, and needs 
nothing overflows, as it were, and Its superabundance 
makes something other than Itself. This, when it has come 
into being, turns back upon the One and is filled, and so 
becomes Its contemplator, Nous. Its halt and turning to- 
wards the One constitutes being, its gaze upon the One, 
Nous. Since it halts and turns towards the One that it may 
see, it becomes at once Nous and being. Resembling the 
One thus, Nous produces in the same way, pouring forth 
a multiple power. Just as That, Which was before it, 
poured forth its likeness, so what Nous produces is a like- 
ness of itself. This activity springing from being is Soul, 
which comes into being while Nous abides unchanged: for 



52 / Plotinus 

Nous too comes into being while That which is before it 
abides unchanged. 

But Soul does not abide unchanged when it produces: it 
is moved and so brings forth an image. It looks to its 
source and is filled, and going forth to another opposed 
movement generates its own image, which is Sensation and 
the Principle of growth in plants. 2 

Nothing is separated, cut off from that which is before 
it. For this reason Soul seems to reach as far as plants; 
and in a way it does reach so far, for the life-principle in 
plants belongs to Soul. Soul is not all in plants, but it has 
come to be in plants in the sense that it has extended itself 
down to their level, and produced another degree of being 
by that extension, in desire of its inferior. Its higher part 
which is immediately dependent on Nous leaves Nous un- 
troubled, abiding in itself [and in the same way is un- 
affected by producing the lower degree of being]. 



c 

The One or Good 

VI. 8. 13 

[Inadequacy of human language in speaking about the 
One.] 

But if we must introduce these names for what we are 
seeking, though it is not accurate to do so, let us say again 
that, speaking accurately, we must not admit even a logical 
duality in the One but we are using this present language 
in order to persuade our opponents, though it involves 
some deviation from accurate thought. 1 . . . We must be 
forgiven for the terms we use, if in speaking about Him in 
order to explain what we mean, we have to use language 
which we, in strict accuracy, do not admit to be appli- 
cable. As if must be understood with every term. 

VI. 8. 11 

[The absolute transcendence of the One as uncondi- 
tioned, unlimited, Principle of all things: particular neces- 
sity of eliminating all spatial ideas from our thought about 
Him.] 

But what is This which does not exist? We must go 
away silent, involved by our thought in utter perplexity, 
and seek no further: for what could anyone look for when 
there is nothing to which he can still go on? Every search 
moves to a first principle and stops when it has reached it. 

Besides, we must consider that every inquiry is either 
about what a thing essentially is, or its quality, or its 
cause, or the fact of its existence. But the existence of 
That, in the sense in which we say that It exists, is known 
from the things which come after It; inquiry into Its cause 
is looking for another principle beyond It, and there is no 
principle of the Universal Principle. To seek Its quality is 
to seek what are Its incidental attributes, and It has none. 
To seek Its essential nature makes still more clear that we 

53 



54 / Plotinus 

should make no inquiry about It, but only grasp It, if we 
can, in our intellect and learn that it is a profanation to 
apply any terms to It. 

We seem in general to conceive these difficulties about 
This Nature if we start by conceiving space and place, a 
sort of primal abyss, and then introduce This Nature when 
space already exists into the place which we imagine as 
having come into being or existing: when we have brought 
Him into this sort of place we inquire how and from where 
He came there. We investigate His presence and His exist- 
ence as if He was a stranger, projected into our imaginary 
place from some depth or height. So we must get rid of 
the cause of our difficulties by expelling from the move- 
ment of our thought towards Him all consideration of 
place. We must not set Him in any place whatever, either 
as eternally resting and established in it or as an incomer. 
We must think of Him only as existing (the necessity of 
discussion compels us to attribute existence to Him), and 
of place and everything else as later than Him place lat- 
est and last of all. Conceiving this Placeless Existence as 
we do, we shall not set other things round Him in a sort 
of circle or be able to circumscribe Him and measure His 
dimensions; we shall not attribute quantity to Him at all, 
or quality either; for He has no form, not even intelligible 
form: nor is He related to anything else, for He exists in 
and by Himself before any other thing. 

V. 5. 9 

[All things are in the One and the One is not in any- 
thing, but all things depend upon It.] 

Look at the universe. There is no universe before it, so 
it is not itself in a universe or in place at all. For what 
place is there that exists before the universe? The parts of 
the universe depend upon it and are in it. Soul is not in the 
universe, but the universe in it; for body is not a place for 
soul. Soul is in Nous, body hi soul, and Nous in Some- 
thing Else. And This has nothing else to be in; so It is in 
nothing at ah", and therefore in this sense nowhere. Where 
then are the other things? In It. It is therefore not far from 
the others, or in them, and there is nothing which con- 



The One or Good / 55 

tains It, but It contains all things. It is in this way the 
Good of all things, because It exists and all things depend 
upon It, each in their own way. For this reason some are 
better than others, because they are more real than others. 

VI. 9. 1 

[The One cause of existence to all other things; for 
things only exist in so far as they are unities.] 

It is by the One that all beings are beings, both those 
which are primarily beings and those which are in some 
way classed among beings. For what could exist if it was 
not one? If beings are deprived of what we call unity they 
do not exist. An army, a choir, or a flock do not exist if 
they are not one: and even a house or a ship does not 
exist if it has not unity, for a house is one and so is a ship, 
and if it loses its unity the house is no longer a house or 
the ship a ship. 2 

VI. 9. 3 

[The One is other than all the things of which It is 
cause, transcending even being and beyond the reach of 
thought or speech. ] 

Since the nature of the One produces all things It is 
none of them. It is not a tiling or quality or quantity or 
intellect or soul; It is not in motion or at rest, in place or 
in time, a but exists in Itself, a unique Form; or rather It 
is formless, existing before all form, before motion, before 
rest; for these belong to being and make it multiple. 

Why, then, if It is not in motion, is It not at rest? Be- 
cause in being one or both must be present and it is at 
rest by participation in the Absolute Rest and is not iden- 
tical with that Rest; so Rest is present to it as an attribute 
and it no longer remains simple. Even when we call the 
One the Cause we are not predicating any attribute of It 
but of ourselves, because we receive something from It 
while It exists in Itself. Strictly speaking, we ought not to 
apply any terms at all to It; but we should, so to speak, 
run round the outside of It trying to interpret our own 
feelings about It, sometimes drawing near and sometimes 
falling away hi our perplexities about It. 



56 / Plotinus 



V. 5. 6 



[The One is not form, or any particular, definable 
thing; so in this sense It is said to be "beyond being." But 
to call It "beyond being" is not to give any sort of defini- 
tion of It, but simply to indicate that It is indefinable.] 

The essence 4 which is generated from the One is Form 
(one could not say that what is generated from That 
Source is anything else), not the form of some one thing 
but of everything, so that no other form is left outside it. 
The One therefore must be without form, and if It is with- 
out form is not an essence: for an essence must be some 
one particular thing, something, that is, defined and lim- 
ited. But it is impossible to apprehend the One as a par- 
ticular thing; for then It would not be the Principle but 
only that particular thing which you said it was. But if 
all things are in that which is generated from the One, 
which of the things in it are you going to say that the One 
is? Since It is none of them, it can only be said to be be- 
yond them. Now these things are beings, and being: so It 
is "beyond being." This phrase "beyond being" does not 
mean that It is a particular thing for it makes no positive 
statement about It. "Beyond being" is not Its name; all it 
implies is that It is "not this." 

VI. 9. 6 

[Meaning of the term One when applied to the Su- 
preme; it denotes absence of all limitation and absolute 
self-sufficiency. The One in Its self-sufficiency transcends 
place, movement, and the activity of thought, which im- 
plies a duality of subject and object.] 

What then do we mean by "One," and how do we fit 
this Unity into our thought? "One" is used in more senses 
than that of the unity of a numerical unit or a point: in 
this sense the soul, taking away magnitude and numerical 
plurality, arrives at the smallest possible and rests on 
something which is certainly without parts, but belongs to 
the divisible and exists in something else. But the One is 
not in something else or in the divisible, nor is It without 
parts in the sense of the smallest possible. For It is the 



The One or Good / 57 

greatest of all things, not in size but in power that which 
is without magnitude can be great in power, for the things 
which come after It 5 are indivisible and without parts in 
their powers, not in their bulk. It must be considered as 
infinite, not by unlimited extension of size or number but 
by the unboundedness of Its power. 

When you think of Him as Mind or God, He is still 
more: and when you unify Him in your thought, the de- 
gree of unity by which He transcends your thought is still 
greater than you imagine it to be. For He exists in and by 
Himself without any attributes. One might conceive of 
His unity in terms of His self-sufficiency. For He must be 
the most sufficient of all things, the most independent, and 
the most without wants. Everything which is multiple and 
not one is defective, since it is composed of many parts. 
Substance needs Him in order to be one: but He does not 
need Himself; for He is Himself. A thing which is multiple 
needs its full number of parts and each of its parts, since 
it exists with the others and not independently, is in need 
of the others; so a thing of this kind shows itself defective 
as a whole and in each individual part. If then, as is in 
fact true, there must be something supremely self-sufficing, 
it must be the One, Which is the only Thing of such a 
kind as not to be defective either in relation to Itself or to 
anything else. 

It seeks nothing towards Its being or Its well-being or 
Its establishment in Its place. It does not derive Its being 
from others, for It is the Cause of the others; and what 
from outside Itself could conduce to Its well-being? To be 
in a good state is not something accidental to It, for It is 
the Good. And It has no place: It needs no establishing as 
if It could not support Itself; thaMvMch Jiasjo^be estab- 
lished is a lifeless mass whichfaUs till it is set, in_j3laoe. 
All offiSfTMngT are "esHEDihT^hrough It. Through It 
they at once exist and receive the place ordained for each. 
That which seeks place is defective. But a principle has no 
need of what comes after it; and the Principle of all things 
needs none of them; for that which is defective is defective 
because it is in quest of a principle. Then again, if the One 
is defective, it is clear that It is seeking not to be one; that 



58 / Plotinus 

is, It is in need of something to destroy It. But everything 
which is said to be in need is in need of well-being and 
something to preserve it: so there is nothing which is good 
for the One, nor does It wish for anything. 

It transcends good, and is Good not for Itself, but for 
the others, if any of them can participate in It. It is not 
thought, for there is no otherness in It. It is not movement, 
but prior to movement and thought. For what would It 
think about? Itself? But then It would be ignorant before 
Its thought, and would need thought to know Itself, It 
which is self-sufficient! There is no ignorance in It because 
It does not know or think Itself, because ignorance is al- 
ways of something else, when one of two things does not 
know the other. But That Which is One Alone neither 
knows nor has anything of which to be ignorant; being 
One, present to Itself, It needs no thought of Itself. We 
ought not in fact even to speak of "self-presence," in order 
to preserve the unity. We should leave out thought and 
self-presence, and thinking about Itself and other things. 
We ought not to class It as a thinking being but rather as 
thought; for thought does not think, but is cause of think- 
ing to something else; and the cause is not the same as its 
effect. So the Cause of all things is none of them. We should 
not even speak of It as Good, in the sense of the good which 
It gives to others. It is the Good in a different sense, tran- 
scending all other goods. 

VI. 7. 37 (end)-38 (beginning) 

[The Good is not unintelligent, though He does not 
think, because in His absolute self-sufficiency He does not 
need to have any function or activity, even the highest, the 
intellectual activity of Nous. Even to say "He is 7 ' or "He 
is good" does not express adequately his self-sufficiency, 
which is beyond being as we know it.] 

An intelligence without intellection would be unintelli- 
gent; for when a thing's nature impBes knowing, it is un- 
intelligent if it does not know. But when a thing has no 
function, why should one attribute a function to it and 
then describe it in terms of defect because it does not per- 
form it? You might as well call the Good unmedical [as 



The One or Good / 59 

unintelligent]. But He has no function, because there is 
nothing which it is incumbent on Him to do. He suffices, 
and need seek nothing beyond Himself since He tran- 
scends all things. He suffices to Himself and to the others, 
being what He is. 

But even to say "He is" is not really adequate; for He 
does not need even this. Nor does "He is good" apply to 
Him, but only to a being of which we can say "He is." 
"He is" can only be applied to Him, not as we say one 
thing about another, but as indicating what He is. And we 
say "The Good" about Him not as applying a predicate to 
Him, saying that the Good is an attribute of His, but as 
saying that the Good is He Himself. 

VI. 7. 38 (end) -39 (beginning) 

[The Good exists before any thought of Him, and so 
does not need to think of Himself. He only has a simple 
intuition of Himself, and this is identical with Himself and 
does not imply any duality of subject and object, thinker 
and thought.] 

If the thought of the Good is other than the Good, then 
the Good exists already before the thought of It. But if the 
Good exists before the thought of It, then It will suffice to 
Itself for being the Good and will have no need of the 
thought about Itself; so that It does not think Itself as 
Good. As what then? There is nothing other present to It: 
It will have only a kind of simple intuition directed to It- 
self. But since It is in no way distant or different from 
Itself, what can this intuitive regard of Itself be other than 
Itself? 

V. 4. 2 

[The One (here, exceptionally, called the Intelligible) 
does not think like Nous but has, nevertheless, a thought 
and consciousness of Its own.] 

The Intelligible remains by Itself, and is not deficient 
like that which sees and thinks (I call that which thinks 
[i.e. Nous] deficient as compared with the Intelligible), 
but It is not like something senseless; all things belong to It 
and are in It and with It. It is completely able to discern 
Itself; It has life in Itself and all things in Itself. Its think- 



60 / Plotinus 

ing of Itself is Itself, and exists by a kind of immediate 
self-consciousness, in everlasting rest and in a manner of 
thinking different from that of Nous. 

VI. 8. 14 (end)-15 (beginning) 

[The One or Good is beyond chance or contingency, 
the self-caused transcendent Absolute. He loves Himself, 
and His love of Himself is one with His being.] 

The Father of reason, of cause, and of the substance 
which causes, all of which are far removed from chance, 
would be the Principle and something like the Exemplar 
of all things which have no share in chance. 6 He would be 
really and primarily clear of chance happenings and the 
casual and accidental, the cause of Himself, Himself from 
Himself and through Himself: for He is primarily and be- 
yond all being Himself. 

He is at once Lovable and Love and Love of Himself, 
since He is only beautiful from Himself and in Himself. 
For He could not be united with Himself unless that which 
unites were one and the same with that to which it is 
united. But if the two are one and the same and what we 
may call the desiring is one with the desired (by the de- 
sired is meant the substance, something like the underlying 
reality), again it is clear to us that the desire and the es- 
sential being are the same. And if this is so, again we see 
that it is He who makes Himself and is Master of Him- 
self, and has not come to be what something else willed, 
but is as He wills Himself. 

VI. 8. 16 

[Meaning of the statement "The Good is everywhere 
and nowhere." All things are in Him. How the Good eter- 
nally and without change or process gives Himself being 
by an eternal activity of living and willing Himself and a 
mysterious awareness of Himself which transcends even 
the highest intellectual knowledge, that of Nous.] 

We maintain, and it appears to be true, that the Good 
is everywhere and nowhere. We must consider this care- 
fully and see how it bears upon our present inquiry. If 
He is nowhere, He has not just happened anywhere, and if 



The One or Good / 61 

He is everywhere, then "everywhere" is the same size as 
He is: so He is the "everywhere" and "in every way" 
Himself and not in the "everywhere." He is that every- 
where Himself and gives other things their being, neigh- 
bouring each other in the everywhere. He holds the su- 
preme place or rather does not hold it but is Himself 
Supreme and has all things subject to Him. He is not a 
contingent attribute of other things but they of Him, or 
rather they stand around Him, looking to Him, not He to 
them. He is borne, so to speak, to His own interior as if 
in love of the clear light which is Himself: and He is what 
He loves. That is, He gives Himself being, since He is a 
self-dwelling activity and His supreme object of love is like 
art intellect: now intellect is an act; therefore He is an act, 
but not the act of another. So He is His own act, and is 
what He is not by chance but according to His own 
activity. 

Again, if He pre-eminently is because in a kind of way 
He holds firmly towards Himself and looks towards Him- 
self, and what we call His being is this look towards Him- 
self, He in a way might be said to make Himself. So He is 
not "as He happened to be," but as He Himself wills. His 
will is not arbitrary or just as it happened: the will which 
wills the best is not arbitrary. 

That this self-directed inclination of His, which is as it 
were His activity and abiding in Himself, makes His being 
what It is is shown by assuming the contrary. For if He 
inclines to what is outside Himself, He will lose His es- 
sential being; so His essential being is His self-directed ac- 
tivity; and this is one with Himself. So He gives Himself 
being, for His activity continually accompanies Him. If 
then His activity never came to be, but always was, and is 
a kind of wakening (the wakener being no other than 
Himself), an eternal wakening of super-intellection, then 
He is as He waked Himself to be. The wakening is beyond 
being and Nous and conscious life: that is, it is Himself. He 
is then an activity transcending Nous and reasoning 
thought and life: these come from Him and not from an- 
other. His being then is self-caused, self-originated. He is 
not "as he happened to be" but as He wills. 



62 / Plotinus 



V. 5. 12 



[The Good, and the unconscious, innate, desire of the 
Good are prior to Beauty, even the Absolute Beauty of the 
world of Nous and the conscious, disturbing desire which 
it arouses. The Good is present to all and has produced all 
things, Beauty included, but needs none of them and is 
absolutely unaffected by them.] 

One must perceive each thing by the appropriate organ, 
some things with the eyes, others with the ears, and so on. 
One must believe, too, that one sees other things with the 
intellect, and not think that intellectual perception is see- 
ing or hearing, which would be like insisting that the ears 
should see and that sounds do not exist because they are 
not visible. And we must consider that men have forgotten 
That which from the beginning, and now still, they want 
and long for. For everything reaches out to That and longs 
for It by necessity of nature, as if divining by instinct that 
it cannot exist without It. 

The grasp of the Beautiful 7 and the wonder and the 
waking of love for it come to those who in a way already 
know it and are awake to it. But the Good was there long 
before, arousing an innate desire. It is present even to 
those asleep and does not astonish those who at any time 
see It, because It is always there and there is never recol- 
lection of It: but people do not see It, because It is pres- 
ent to them in their sleep. The passionate love of Beauty, 
when it comes, causes pain, because one must have seen it 
to desire it. Beauty is shown to be secondary because this 
passionate love for it is secondary and is felt by those who 
are already conscious. But the more ancient, unperceived 
desire of the Good proclaims that the Good Itself is more 
ancient and prior to Beauty. 

All men think that when they have attained the Good it 
is sufficient for them: they have reached their end. But not 
all see Beauty, and they think it exists for itself and not for 
them: this applies too to beauty here; it belongs exclu- 
sively to the beautiful person. And it is enough for people 
to seem to be beautiful, even if they are not so really; but 
they do not want to have the Good in seeming only. Then 



The One or Good / 63 

they dispute the first place with Beauty and wrangle con- 
tentiously with it, considering that it has come into being 
like themselves. It is as if someone who holds the lowest 
rank at court were to want to attain equal honour with the 
man who stands next to the king, on the ground that they 
both derive from one and the same source; he does not 
realize that though he too depends on the king the other 
takes rank before him. The cause of the error is that both 
participate in the Same and the One is before both, and 
that There too the Good Itself does not need Beauty, 
though Beauty needs It. 

The Good is gentle and kindly and gracious and present 
to anyone when he wishes. Beauty brings wonder and 
shock and pleasure mingled with pain, and even draws 
those who do not know what is happening away from the 
Good, as the beloved draws a child away from its father: 
for Beauty is younger. But the Good is older, not in time 
but in truth, and has the prior power; 'for It has all power. 
That which comes after It has not all power, but as much 
as can come after It and derive from It. The Good then is 
Master of this derived power. He does not need the things 
which have come into being from Him, but leaves them all 
altogether alone, because He needs none of them, but is 
the same as He was before He brought them into being. 
He would not have cared if they had not come into being; 
and if anything else could be derived from Him He would 
not grudge it existence. But as it is, it is not possible for 
anything else to come into being; all things have come into 
being, and there is nothing left. He is not all things; if 
He were He would need them: but since He transcends all 
things He can make them and let them exist by them- 
selves while He remains above them. 

V. 4. 1 (end) 

[How the One produces other things; the principle of 
necessary emanation or radiation.] 

If the First is perfect, the most perfect of all, and the 
primal Power, It must be the most powerful of beings and 
the other powers must imitate It as far as they are able. 
Now when anything else comes to perfection we see that it 



64 / Plotinus 

produces, and does not endure to remain by itself, but 
makes something else. This is true not only of things which 
have choice but of things which grow and produce with- 
out choosing to do so, and even lifeless things, which im- 
part themselves to others as far as they can. So fire warms, 
snow cools, drugs act on other things; everything seems to 
imitate the Principle as far as it is able by tending to ever- 
lastingness and generosity. How then could the Most Per- 
fect, the First Good, the Power of all things, remain in 
Itself as if It grudged Itself or was unable to produce? 
How would it then still be the Principle? 



D 
Nous 

(fl) In its Relation to the One 

V. 1. 6 

[The One produces Nous without any movement or 
change in Itself by a sort of emanation or radiation. The 
product is necessarily less than the producer; but since the 
One is the most perfect of all things, its product is neces- 
sarily that which is next in order of perfection, namely 
Nous.] 

How then does Nous see, and what does it see? How 
did it come into existence at all and arise from the One so 
as to be able to see? The soul now knows that these things 
must be, but longs to answer the question repeatedly dis- 
cussed, even by the ancient philosophers, how from the 
One, if It is such as we say It is, a multiplicity or a duality 
or a number come into existence. Why did It not remain 
by Itself? How did so great a multitude flow from It as 
that which we see to exist in beings but think it right to 
refer back to the One? 

Let us speak of it in this way, first invoking God Him- 
self, not in spoken words, but reaching out with our soul 
into prayer to Him; for in this way we can pray alone to 
Him Alone. The man who contemplates Him, as if inside 
the temple, 1 existing by Himself, remaining quiet beyond 
all things, must contemplate what correspond to the im- 
ages already standing outside the temple, or rather that 
one image which appeared first; and this is the way in 
which it appeared. Everything which is moved must have 
some end to which it moves. The One has no such end, so 
we must not consider that It moves. If anything comes into 
being after It, we must think that it necessarily does so 
while the One remains continually turned towards Itself. 
(When we are discussing eternal realities we must not let 
coming into being hi time be an obstacle to our thought; 

65 



66 / Plotinus 

in the discussion we speak of them coming into being to 
indicate their causal connexion and their order.) We must 
admit then that what comes into being from the One does 
so without the One being moved: for if anything came into 
being as a result of the One's being moved, it would be the 
third starting from the One, not the second, since it would 
come after the movement. So if there is a second after the 
One it must have come to be without the One moving at 
all, without any inclination or act of will or any sort of 
activity on Its part. 

How did it come to be then? And what are we to think 
of as surrounding the One in Its repose? It must be a radi- 
ation from It while It remains unchanged, just like the 
bright light which surrounds the sun, which remains un- 
changed though the light springs from it continually. 
Everything that exists, as long as it remains in being, 
necessarily produces from its own substance, in depend- 
ence on its present power, a surrounding reality directed 
towards the external world, a kind of image of the arche- 
type from which it was produced. Thus fire produces its 
heat: snow does not only keep its cold inside itself. Per- 
fumed things show this particularly clearly. As long as 
they exist they diffuse something from themselves around 
them which everything near them enjoys. Again, all things 
when they come to perfection produce. The One is always 
perfect and therefore produces everlastingly; and Its prod- 
uct is less than Itself. 2 What then must we say about the 
Most Perfect? Nothing can come from It except that which 
is next greatest after It. Nous is next to It in greatness and 
second to It; for Nous sees It and needs It alone; but It 
has no need of Nous. That which derives from something 
greater than Nous is Nous itself, which is greater than all 
things, because other things come after it. So Soul is a 
Logos and a kind of activity of Nous, as Nous is of the 
One. 

V. 5. 7-8 

[Nous sees the One in a contemplation higher than its 
normal activity of intelligence, as when the eye looks at 



Nous / 67 

light, not at the objects illuminated. In this contemplation 
it, so to speak, stands still, but has to return from it to its 
normal activity of intelligence, which is a sort of move- 
ment though not in space; it has a twofold life, of intelli- 
gence and of contemplation of the One with that in it 
which is higher than Intelligence.] 

So Nous, veiling itself from other things and drawing 
itself inward, when it is not looking at anything will see a 
Light, not illuminating something else different from It, 
but suddenly appearing, alone by Itself in independent 
purity. Nous is at a loss to know whence it has appeared, 
whether It has come from outside or is within, and after 
going away from It will say, "It was within, and yet It 
was not within." But one should not inquire whence It 
comes, for there is no "whence," and It does not really 
come or go away anywhere, but appears or does not ap- 
pear. So one must not chase after It, but wait quietly till It 
appears, preparing oneself to contemplate It, as the eye 
awaits the rising of the sun: and the sun rising over the 
horizon (from Ocean, the poets say), gives itself to the 
eyes to see. But from where does He of Whom the sun is 
an image rise? What is the horizon which He mounts 
above when He appears? He is above Nous which con- 
templates Him. Nous stands turned to its contemplation, 
looking to nothing but the Beautiful, all turned and giving 
itself up to Him: motionless and filled with strength, it 
sees first of all itself become more beautiful, all glittering, 
because He is near. But He does not come as one ex- 
pected; his coming is without approach. He appears not as 
having come but as being there before aU things, and even 
before Nous came. It is Nous which comes and goes, be- 
cause it does not know where to stay and where He stays, 
for He is in nothing. If it was possible for Nous to abide 
in that nowhere I do not mean that Nous is in place; it 
is no more in place than He is, but in that sense absolutely 
nowhere it would always behold Him or ? rather, not be- 
hold Him but be one with Him, not two. But as it is, be- 
cause it is Nous, it contemplates Him, when it does con- 
template, with that in it which is not Nous. 



68 / Plotinus 



V. 3. 10-11 



[The One does not need to think; It possesses Itself 
perfectly without any need of thought. Knowledge is al- 
ways a process of completion, the fulfilling of a want. 
Nous eternally seeks to know the One, but cannot grasp 
It in Its absolute Unity and Simplicity, and so thinks It in 
a multitude of images, which are the Forms.] 

The One will not need to be inquisitive about Itself; for 
what will It learn by thinking? Its being belongs to It be- 
fore there is any thought. Knowledge is a kind of wanting, 
and a finding by one who has been seeking. That which is 
absolutely simple remains turned towards Itself and does 
not seek to know anything about Itself: but that which 
unfolds itself must be multiple. 

So Nous is multiple, when it wants to think That which 
transcends it. For it does think It, but when it wants to ap- 
prehend It in Its simplicity it comes out grasping a suc- 
cession of different things which it has multiplied in itself. 
It tends towards the One not as Nous but as sight which 
does yet see, and it comes away holding a multiplicity 
which it has made itself. So it desires one thing of which 
it has in itself an indefinite representation and comes away 
holding another in itself which it has made multiple. It has 
an impression of That which is the object of its vision, or 
it would not have admitted its presence in itself; but the 
impression becomes multiple instead of one, and it sees it 
by this way of knowing, and so becomes sight which sees. 
At this stage it is really Nous, when it grasps its object, 
and grasps it as Nous. Before this it is only desire and un- 
formed vision. 

VI. 7. 15 

[The rich pure life of Nous, 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 Nous 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 



Nous / 69 

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 noth- 
ing which does not live, and live in purity with no evil in 
it. Evil is here, where life and Nous only leave their im- 
prints. 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 Nous 
is good because its life consists in contemplation. The ob- 
jects 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 tran- 
scendence, but as Nous received Him. For the Good is the 
principle of the beings in Nous, and their existence in 
Nous derives from Him, and Nous draws power to make 
them from Hun. For it was not in the nature of things for 
Nous 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 pos- 
sess. From Him, Who is One, comes a multiplicity to 
Nous. For Nous 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 Nous 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 to- 
gether, with no defect but complete hi all their parts, and 
universal Nous 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. 



70 / Plotinus 



VI. 7. 22 



[The beauty of the Forms in Nous cannot move the 
soul to love by itself; it must be illumined, coloured, wak- 
ened to life by the Good.] 

When anyone sees this light [from the Good], then he 
is really moved to the Forms and longs for the light which 
plays upon them and delights in it; just as with the bodies 
here below our desire is not for the material things them- 
selves but for the beauty mirrored in them. Each thing has 
its own particular nature, but it only becomes desirable 
when the Good colours it, giving a kind of grace to the 
things desired and inspiring passion in those who desire 
them. Then the soul, receiving into itself an outflow from 
Thence, is moved and dances wildly and is all stung with 
longing and becomes love. 3 Before this it is not moved 
even towards Nous, for all its beauty: the beauty of Nous 
is ineffective till it catches a light from the Good, and the 
soul by itself lies flat and is completely ineffective and is 
not stirred by the presence of Nous. But when a kind of 
warmth from Thence comes upon it, it gains strength and 
wakes and is truly winged; and though it is moved with 
passion for that which lies close by it, yet all the same it 
rises higher, to something greater which it seems to re- 
member. And as long as there is anything higher than that 
which is present to it, it naturally goes on upwards, lifted 
by the Giver of its love. It rises above Nous, but cannot 
go on above the Good, for there is nothing above. If it re- 
mains in Nous it sees fair and noble things, but has not 
yet quite grasped what it is seeking. It is as if it was in 
the presence of a face which is certainly beautiful, but can- 
not catch the eye because it has no grace playing upon its 
beauty. So here below, too, beauty, that which is really 
lovely, is what illuminates good proportions rather than the 
good proportions themselves. For why is there more light 
of beauty on a living face, and only a trace of it on a dead 
one, even if its flesh and its proportions are not yet wasted 
away? And are not statues more beautiful if they are more 
lifelike, even if others are better proportioned; and is not 
an ugly living man more beautiful than a beautiful 



Nous / 71 

statue? 4 Yes, because the living is more desirable; and it 
is more desirable because it has soul; and it has soul be- 
cause it has more the form of Good; and this means that 
it is somehow coloured by the light of the Good, and so 
wakes and rises up and lifts up that which belongs to it, 
and as far as it can wakes it and makes it good. 

(b) As World of Forms Intellect 
V. 9. 6 and beginning of 8 

[The unity of the Forms (the real beings) in Nous de- 
scribed by analogy with unities-in-diversity on the lower 
planes of Soul and Nature.] 

Let Nous then be the real beings, and let all of them be 
in it, not as if it held them in place, but as holding itself 
and being one with them. They are all together There, and 
none the less are distinct. We can understand this by con- 
sidering that the soul too contains in itself many different 
items of knowledge, but they are not at all confused and 
each when required performs its own function, and does 
not bring the others along with it; each thought acts clear 
of all the others which remain latent in the mind. In this 
way, but to a much greater degree, Nous is all things to- 
gether, and yet not all together, in the sense that each is a 
particular power. Nous as a whole includes all things as 
a genus does the species or a whole the parts. The powers 
of seeds provide a likeness of what we are talking about: 
for all the parts are present undistinguished in the whole, 
and the logoi 1 are there as if in a single centre. One is the 
logos of an eye, another of the hands; they are known to 
be different by reason of the perceptible things which are 
brought into being by them. 

If the intellection of Nous is of something internal to it, 
then this something internal is the internal Form, and this 
is the Idea. What then precisely is this? Nous and intelli- 
gent substance; each individual idea is not something 
other than Nous f but is Nous. Nous as a whole is all the 
Forms and each individual Form is an individual Nous, as 
a whole science is all its theorems and each theorem is a 
part of the whole science, not spatially separated from the 



72 / Plotinus 

whole but with its particular efficacy in the whole. This 
Nous is, in itself and possessing itself, an everlasting full- 
ness. 

V. 8. 3-4 

[The unity-in-multiplicity of the world of Nous, where 
each part is the whole. Contemplation in Nous, without 
satiety or weariness. The wisdom of Nous, which is its be- 

iflg-] 

The gods who are in heaven, since they are free for con- 
templation, continually contemplate, as if at a distance, the 
things in that higher heaven of Nous into which they raise 
their heads: but the gods in that higher heaven, all those 
who dwell upon it and in it, contemplate through their 
abiding in the whole of that heaven. For all things There 
are heaven; earth and sea and animals and plants and men 
are heaven; everything which belongs to that higher 
heaven is heavenly. The gods in it do not reject as un- 
worthy of contemplation men or anything else that is 
There; it is worthy because it is There: they travel, always 
at rest, through all that higher country and region. The 
"easy life" is There. Truth is their mother and nurse and 
being and food. They see all things, not those which come 
to be but those which really are, and they see themselves 
in them: for all things There are transparent, and there is 
nothing dark or opaque; everything is clear, altogether 
and to its inmost part, to everything, for light is trans- 
parent to light. Each There has everything in itself and 
sees all things in every other, for all are everywhere and 
each and every one is all, and the glory is unbounded: for 
each of them is great, because even the small is great: the 
sun There is all the stars, and each star is the sun and all 
the others. One particular kind of being stands out in 
each, but in each all are manifest. 

Movement There is pure; for the mover does not 
trouble it in its going by being different from it. Rest is 
not disturbed, for it is not mingled with that which is not 
at rest. Beauty is just beauty, since it does not exist in that 
which is not beautiful. Each walks not as if on alien soil, 
but each one's place is its very self, and when it goes on 



Nous / 73 

the place where it came from goes with it; it is not one 
thing itself and its place another. The thing itself is Nous 
and its ground is Nous. It is as if one were to imagine that 
this visible heaven of ours which is luminous produced the 
light which conies from it; but here different lights come 
from different parts, and each is only a part; There each 
comes always from the whole and is part and whole at 
once; it has the appearance of a part, but a penetrating 
look sees the whole in it, supposing that someone had the 
sort of sight which the story goes that Lynceus had, who 
saw into the inside of the earth, a story which symbolizes 
the sight they have There. They do not grow weary of 
contemplation There, or so filled with it as to cease con- 
templating: for there is no emptiness which would result 
in their being satisfied when they had filled it and reached 
their end: and things are not different from each other so 
as to make what belongs to one displeasing to another 
with different characteristics: and nothing There wears out 
or wearies. There is a lack of satisfaction There in the 
sense that fullness does not cause contempt for that which 
has produced it: for that which sees goes on seeing still 
more, and, perceiving its own infinity and that of what it 
sees, follows its own nature. There is no weariness in life 
There, since it is pure; for how should that which lives the 
best life grow weary? This life is wisdom, wisdom not 
acquired by reasonings, but always all present, without 
any failing which would make it need to be searched for. 
It is the first, not derived from any other wisdom; the very 
being of Nous is wisdom; it does not exist first and then 
become wise. For this reason there is no greater wisdom: 
absolute knowledge has its throne beside Nous in their 
common revelation, as they say symbolically Justice is 
throned beside Zeus. All things of this kind There are like 
images seen by their own light, to be beheld by exceed- 
ingly blessed spectators. The greatness and the power of 
this wisdom can be imagined if we consider that it has 
with it and has made all beings. All things follow it, and 
it is the beings which came to be along with it. Both are 
one, and reality is wisdom There. We do not arrive at 
understanding this because we consider that the different 



74 / Plotinus 

branches of knowledge are made up of theorems and a 
collection of propositions, which is not true even of the 
sciences here below. 

VI. 7. 9 

[In the world of Nous are the Forms of all things that 
exist in the world of the senses, even irrational animals 
(and non-living things), but they are all alive and intelli- 
gent There, living thought-realities in the Divine Intellect, 
and each is in a sense the whole and the whole is in every 
part.] 

But, someone will say, granted that the noble forms of 
life are there, how can the base and irrational exist in 
Nous? It is clear that the base is the irrational, since the 
noble is the rational; if it is intelligence which makes 
things noble, it is lack of intelligence which makes them 
the opposite. Yet how can anything be unintelligent or 
irrational when they all exist in and come from Nous? Be- 
fore we speak about this and answer these questions, let 
us consider that just as man here is not the same as man 
in Nous, so the other living creatures are not the same 
here and There; one must consider those There in a 
larger way. Besides, there are no rational beings There; 
man here perhaps is rational, but the man There is before 
and above reasoning. Why then does man reason here, but 
other things do not? It is because there is a difference 
There in the intellection of man and of the other living 
creatures, and consequently a difference in their ration- 
ality here; and there are in a way many rational activities 
in the other living creatures. But why are they not just as 
rational as man? And why are some men less rational than 
others? One must consider that, as there are many lives 
There a kind of movements and many thoughts, they 
could not be the same; they must be different lives and 
thoughts. There must be degrees of brightness and clear- 
ness, first, second, and third, according to their nearness to 
the first principles. So some thoughts are gods, others of a 
second kind, to which belongs what we call rationality 
here, and below these comes what is called the irrational. 
But There what we speak of as irrational is reason, and 



Nous / 75 

the unthinking as Nous, for what thinks a horse is Nous, 
and the thought of a horse is Nous. If it was only a 
thought, there would be nothing absurd in its being really a 
thought of something unthinking. But if thought and thing 
are the same, how can the thought be a thought and the 
thing be unthinking? That would mean that Nous would 
make itself unthinking. But it is not an unthinking thing 
but a particular Nous f since it is a particular life. For just 
as a particular life does not cease to be life, so a particular 
Nous does not cease to be Nous. The Nous which thinks 
a particular living thing does not cease to be the Nous of 
everything (including, for instance, man), since every 
part, whichever one you take, is all things, though in a 
different way from the way in which it is a part. It is ac- 
tually that particular part but potentially all things. What 
we grasp in each particular is what it is actually; but what 
it is actually is the last and lowest point in its develop- 
ment; so the last phase of this particular Nous is horse; 
horse is where it stopped in its continuous going forth to- 
wards a lesser life; another Nous will stop at something 
lower still. As the powers unfold they always leave some- 
thing behind above. They lose something continually as they 
go forth; and, as they lose one thing after another, they see 
the defectiveness of the living being which has appeared as 
the result of the loss, and find something else to add to it. 
For instance, if it has not still sufficient means to preserve 
life, nails or talons or fangs or horns appear: so exactly 
where Nous descends it rises again by attaining natural self- 
sufficiency and finds ready in itself the cure for the defect. 

VL 7. 12 

[The world of Nous is the pattern of the material uni- 
verse here below, and everything that is here is also There, 
but all alive, united in a rich fullness of eternal life.] 

Or, again, let us put it this way. Since we say that this 
universe here is modelled on the world of Nous, every 
living thing must be There first; if the being of Nous is 
complete it must be everything. Heaven There must be a 
living thing, and so not bare of stars (it is they which are 
really called heaven here, and the essence of heaven is 



76 / Plotinus 

starriness). There too, clearly, is earth, not barren but far 
fuller of life, and in it are all living beings which are called 
land animals here, and all plants clearly too, rooted in life. 
Sea too is There, and all water, in a flow and life which 
abides, and all the living beings in water; the nature of 
air is part of the universe There, and the creatures of air 
are There correspondingly. Must not the things in a living 
medium be alive, in which there are living things even 
here? How could it be possible for any living creature not 
to be There? For just as each of the great parts of the 
universe is There, so it must be with the nature of the 
living beings in them. In just the same way in which 
heaven is There, the living beings in heaven are There; 
and it is impossible for them not to be, or the heaven itself 
would not be There. So he who inquires whence the liv- 
ing things come, is inquiring whence the heaven There 
comes; and this amounts to asking the origin of living 
reality There; and this is the same as asking whence comes 
life, and universal life and universal Soul and universal 
Nous, in that world There where there is no poverty or 
impotence, but every thing is filled full of life, boiling with 
life. Things There flow in a way from a single source, not 
like one particular breath or warmth, but as if there were 
a single quality containing in itself and preserving all 
qualities, sweet taste and smell and the quality of wine 
with all other flavours, visions of colours and all that 
touch perceives, all too that hearing hears, all tunes and 
every rhythm. 

V. 7. 1 

[There are Forms of individuals; our personalities have 
eternal principles in the intelligible world. Arguments 
drawn from reincarnation and the Stoic doctrine of eternal 
recurrence do not serve to disprove this. We are made 
individuals by form, not matter. We must not be afraid of 
the infinity which this introduces into the intelligible world, 
as it is an infinity of power in an indivisible unity.] 

Is there an Idea of each individual? Yes, if I and each 
one of us have a way of ascent and return to the intelli- 
gible, the principle of each of us is There. If Socrates and 



Nous / 77 

the soul of Socrates always exists, there will be an absolute 
Socrates, as we say, There, according to which his soul 
will have individuality There as well as here. 

But suppose Socrates does not always exist, but the soul 
which was formerly Socrates becomes different people at 
different times, like Pythagoras or someone else, then 
there will not be a particular Socrates in the intelligible 
world. Yes, but if the soul of each individual possesses the 
logoi of all the individuals which it animates in succession, 
then all will exist There: and we do say that each soul 
possesses all the logoi in the whole universe. If then the 
universe possesses the logoi not only of man but of all 
individual animals, so does the soul. Then the number of 
logoi in it will be infinite, unless the universe returns on 
itself in regular periods: this will put a limit to the infinity 
of logoi, because the same things in this case recur. Well, 
then, if in this way the things which come into being are in 
all the periods together more numerous than their models, 
why should there have to be logoi and models of all the 
things which come into being in one period? One man as 
model would do for all men, just as souls limited in num- 
ber produce an infinity of men (in successive periods). 
No, there cannot be the same logos for different indi- 
viduals, and one man will not serve as model for several 
men differing from each other not only by reason of their 
matter but with a vast number of differences of form. Men 
are not related to their Form as portraits of Socrates are 
to their original; their different structures must result from 
different logoi. The whole revolution of the universe con- 
tains all the logoi, and when it repeats itself it produces 
the same things again according to the same logoi. We 
ought not to be afraid of the infinity which this introduces 
into the intelligible world; for it is all in an indivisible unity 
and, we may say, comes forth when it acts. 

V. 5. 1 

[If the objects of the thought of Nous (the Platonic 
Forms) are alive and intelligent (as Plotinus maintains) 
then they and Nous form a unity of some sort: if they are 
not, they must be either mere verbal expressions, or some 



78 / Plotinus 

sort of material realities, which leads to absurd conse- 
quences. And if they are not in Nous there is no truth 
in Nous, which means that truth does not exist at all.] 
Either the objects of thought are without perception, 
and without any share of life or intelligence, or they have 
intelligence. If they have intelligence, then they have in 
them truth and the primary Nous both at once, and we 
shall proceed to investigate how truth and the intelligible 
and Nous are related in this unity-in-duality; are they to- 
gether in one and the same reality, but also two and di- 
verse, or how are they related? But if they are without 
intelligence and life, why are they real at all? Premises or 
axioms or expressions are not real. They are used in 
speaking about other things and are not real things them- 
selves, as when one says "Justice is beautiful," though 
Justice and Beauty are different from the words used. But 
if our opponents say that the objects of thought are simple 
realities, Justice by itself and Beauty by itself, then first 
of all (if they are outside Nous) the intelligible will not be 
a unity or in a unity, but each object of thought will be cut 
off from the others. Well, then, where will they be? What 
distances separate them? How will Nous find them when 
it runs round looking for them? And how will it stay in 
its place? How will it remain identical with itself? What- 
ever sort of shape or imprint will it receive from them? 
Unless we assume that they are like images set up, made 
of gold or some other material by a sculptor or engraver. 
But if this is so, then Nous which contemplates them will 
be sense-perception. And why should one of things like 
these be Righteousness, and another some other virtue? 
But the greatest objection of all is this. If one admits that 
the objects of thought are as completely as possible out- 
side Nous, and that Nous contemplates them as absolutely 
outside it, then it cannot possess the truth of them and 
must be deceived in everything which it contemplates. 
They are the true realities; and on this supposition it will 
contemplate them without possessing them; it will only 
get images of them in a knowledge of this sort. If then it 
does not possess the true reality, but only receives in itself 
images of the truth, it will have falsities and nothing true. 



Nous / 79 

If it knows that what it has is false, it will admit that it 
has no part in truth: but if it does not know even this, and 
thinks it has the truth when it has not, the falsehood in it 
will be doubled and will set it far away from the truth. 
(This is the reason, I think, why there is no truth in the 
senses, only opinion; opinion is opinion because it re- 
ceives something, and what it receives is different from 
that from which it receives it.) So if there is not truth in 
Nous, then a Nous without truth will not be truth, or 
truly Nous, or Nous at all. But then truth will not be any- 
where else either. 

V. 1.4 

[The world of Nous contrasted with the world of time 
and change here below; its eternal perfection and self- 
sufficiency; its unity-in-diversity of thought and object of 
thought; the Categories of the world of Nous.] 

One might come to see it also in the following way. If 
you admire the size and beauty of this visible world of 
ours, as you gaze upon the order of its everlasting move- 
ment, and the gods in it, both visible and invisible and the 
daemons and all the animals and plants; then rise up to its 
pattern, to the truer reality. There look upon all the intelli- 
gible things which exist eternally in it with their own 
intimate consciousness and life, and Nous in its purity 
presiding over them, and irresistible wisdom, and the true 
life of the age of Cronos, of the god who is fullness and 
Nous. For he includes in himself all the immortals, every 
particular Nous, every god, every soul, all at rest for ever. 
For why should he seek change when all is well with him? 
Where could he move to, when he has all things in him- 
self? And he does not seek enlargement, since he is most 
perfect. Therefore all things in him are perfect, that he 
may be altogether perfect with nothing imperfect in him; 
he has nothing in his world which does not think; and his 
thought is not seeking but possession. His blessedness is 
not something acquired from an outside source. It is all 
things eternally, in the true eternity which time imitates, 
circling round Soul, abandoning one thing to attend to an- 
other. In Soul there are always different things, now 



80 / Plotinus 

Socrates, now a horse, always some one particular being; 
but Nous is all things. It has in itself all things at rest in 
the same place; it simply is, and always is, and there is no 
room in it for any future, for it is in the future too. Nor 
has it any past, for nothing There passes away, but all 
things remain, always the same because they are, we may 
say, well pleased to be as they are. Each of them is Nous 
and being, and the totality of them is universal Nous and 
universal being. Nous makes being exist by thinking it, and 
being as object of thought gives thinking and existence to 
Nous. (But there is another cause of thinking, which is also 
cause of being; so both together have another cause.) For 
being and Nous exist together and never leave each other, 
but the two of them make this unity which is at once Nous 
and being, thought and object of thought; it is Nous as 
thought, being as object of thought. There could be no 
thought without Otherness and Sameness. So the primary 
things are Nous, Being, Otherness, and Sameness; and we 
must add Motion and Rest. 2 There must be movement if 
there is thought, and rest to keep it the same. Then if you 
take away otherness it will pass into the silence of unity; 
and the objects of thought, too, must have otherness in re- 
lation to each other. And there must be sameness, since it is 
one in itself, and all the objects of thought have something in 
common; and the distinctive quality of each is otherness. 
The fact that there are several of these primaries makes 
number and quantity; and the particularity of each makes 
quality; and from these as principles all other things come. 

VI. 2. 8 

[How we discover the five categories applicable to the 
intelligible world, Being, Motion, Rest, Sameness, and 
Otherness. Plotinus explains what we mean when we ap- 
ply these predicates to Nous.] 

Observe Nous in its purity. Look upon it with concen- 
trated gaze, not with these bodily eyes. You see the hearth 
of being and a sleepless light on it; you see how beings 
rest in it and are distinct and all together; you see abiding 
life and a thought whose activity is not directed towards 
the future but towards the present, or rather the perpetual 



Nous / 81 

present, the everlasting now, a thought thinking in itself 
and not outside. In its thinking there is activity and mo- 
tion, in its thinking itself, substance and being. Existing, 
it thinks itself as existent and the being on which it is, so 
to speak, founded. Its self-directed activity is not sub- 
stance, but being is that to which the activity is directed 
and from which it comes. That which it looks at is being, 
not its look: but the look too possesses being, because it 
comes from and is directed to being. And since it is an 
act, not in potency, it gathers the two [being and thought] 
together again and does not separate them, but makes it- 
self being and being itself. Being is the most firmly set of 
all things and that about which all other things have estab- 
lished their rest; it has a rest which does not come to it 
from outside but is from itself and in itself. It is that in 
which thought comes to a stop, though thought is a rest 
which has no beginning, and from which it starts, though 
thought is a rest which never started: for movement does 
not begin from or end in movement. Again, the Form at 
rest is the defining limit of intelligence, and intelligence is 
the motion of the Form, so that all are one; movement 
and rest are one, and are all-pervading kinds; and each 
subsequent thing is a particular being, a particular rest, 
and a particular motion. 

Now when anyone sees these three, having come into 
intuitive contact with the nature of being, he sees being by 
the being in himself and the others, motion and rest, by 
the motion and rest, in himself, and fits his own being, 
motion, and rest to those in Nous: they come to him to- 
gether in a sort of confusion and he mingles them without 
distinguishing them; then as it were separating them a 
little and holding them away from him and distinguishing 
them he perceives being, motion, and rest, three and each 
of them one. Does he not then say that they are different 
from each other and distinguish them in otherness, and see 
the otherness in being when he posits three terms, each 
of them one? Again, when he brings them back to unity 
and sees them in a unity, all one, does he not collect them 
into sameness and, as he looks at them, see that sameness 
has come to be and is? So we must add these two, the 



82 / Plotinus 

same and the other, to those first three, so that there will 
be in all five kinds: the last two give to subsequent things 
the characters of being other and same; for each indi- 
vidual thing is a particular "same" and a particular 
"other"; ("same" and "other" without the "particular" 
apply to the universal kinds). These are primary kinds, 
because you cannot apply any predicate to them which 
forms part of the definition of their essence. You will cer- 
tainly predicate being of them, for they exist, but not as 
their genus or kind, for they are not particular beings; nor 
can you predicate being as the genus of motion and rest, 
for they are not species of being. (Some things exist as 
species of being, others as participating in being.) Nor 
does being participate in these other primary kinds as if 
they were genera of which it was a species, for they do 
not rise to the level of being and are not prior to it. 

VI. 2. 21 

[How Nous is many as well as one: we find number in 
the infinite extent of its powers, quality in its glorious 
beauty, quantity in the continuity of its activity; and from 
these with the help of the great Categories of Sameness 
and Otherness (see VI. 2. 8) all the multiplicity of intelli- 
gible beings can be derived.] 

How then does Nous, remaining one in its essential 
structure, produce particular beings? This is the same as 
asking how from those four primary kinds (Motion, Rest, 
Sameness, and Otherness) the things which we call sub- 
sequent proceed. Well, then, see how in this great, this 
tremendous Nous, not full of talk but full of thought, 
which is all things and a whole, not a particular individual 
mind, all things which come from it are present. It cer- 
tainly has number in the things which it sees; it is one and 
many, and the many are its powers, wonderful powers, not 
weak, but because they are pure the greatest of powers, 
fresh and full of life and truly powers, without any limit 
to their action; so there we see the infinite, infinity and 
greatness. Then when you see existing in it in the way 
proper to Nous this greatness, along with the beauty which 
there is in it of its essence and the glory and the light 



Nous / 83 

around it, you see quality already in bloom on it; and 
with the continuity of its activity you see extension, quietly 
at rest, appearing to your gaze. This gives you one, two, 
three things, extension and universal quantity being the 
third. And when you see quantity and quality in it, both 
tending to one and in a way becoming one, then observe 
figure appearing. Then otherness comes in and separates 
quantity and quality, and you have differences of figures 
and other qualities: and sameness, which is there as well, 
makes equality exist, otherness inequality in quantity, 
number, and size, and from these derive circles and 
squares and figures with unequal sides, and like and unlike 
numbers, odd and even. For since Nous is intelligent lii'e 
and activity without imperfection, it leaves out none of 
the things which we now find to be works of intelligence; 
it contains all things in its power, possessing them as 
realities and in the manner proper to Notts. Nous posses- 
ses them as hi thought, but not in discursive thought. 



Soul 

(a) In its Relationship to Nous 
V. 9. 4 

[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 Nous.] 

Why must we go higher than soul, instead of consider- 
ing 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 corne 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 mat- 
ter, nothing remains the same: so [if that was all that ex- 
isted] man and all the logoi would not be eternal or con- 
tinue the same. One can see from these and many other 
arguments that Nous must exist before souL 

IV. 1 

[Souls exist in the world of Nous, in the state of unity 
proper to that world: but they have the capacity to de- 

84 



Soul / 85 

scend 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 Nous.] 

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 hi 
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 divi- 
sion. Nous then is always without separation and un- 
divided. 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 un- 
divided 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 pre- 
serves 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 

[We are not strictly speaking Nous, but soul, which is 
midway between Nous and sense-perception; hi our nor- 
mal life we are more closely connected with sense-per- 
ception; 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; 1 we are conformed to it by our pri- 
mary reasoning power which receives it. Still, we perceive 



86 / Plotinus 

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 be- 
low. 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 Notts, 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 inscrip- 
tion, 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 him- 
self 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 him- 
self off to the heights, bringing along with him only the 
better part of the soul, which alone can take wing to in- 
tuitive intellect, so that he can establish There what he 
saw. Does not the discursive reason know that it is dis- 
cursive reason, that it gains understanding of things out- 
side, and makes its judgments by the rules in itself which 
it has from Nous f 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 



Soul / 87 

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 con- 
tinues 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 it- 
self. A man becomes a Nous when he puts away all the 
rest of himself and sees only this by means of this, him- 
self by means of himself. Then he sees himself as Nous 
sees itself. 

V. 3. 7 

[Soul is directed to and is like Nous in its inward part; 
but even in that part of it which is directed to the outside 
world, and in its external activities, it keeps a sort of like- 
ness to Nous.] 

Once again, then, Nous is a self-contained activity, but 
soul has what we may call an inward part, which is that 
of it which is directed to Nous, and a part outside Nous 
which is directed to the outside world. By the one it is 
made like that from which it came, by the other, even 
though it has been made unlike, it becomes like, here be- 
low too, both in its action and its production. For even 
while it is active it contemplates, and when it produces it 
produces Forms (a kind of completed acts of intellect). So 
all things are traces of thought and Nous; they proceed 
according to their original pattern; those which are near 
imitate Nous better, and the remotest keep an obscure 
image of it. 

V. 3. 8 

[The soul is illuminated by Nous; and, being so illumi- 
nated, is raised to its level and becomes an image of it.] 

This light [of Nous] shines in the soul and illumines it: 
that is, it makes it intelligent: that is, it makes it like itself, 
the light above. You will come near to the nature of Nous 
and its content if you think of something like the trace of 



88 / Plotinus 

this light which is present in the soul, but still fairer and 
greater. For it is this illumination which gives the soul a 
clearer life, not, however, a generative life; on the con- 
trary, it turns the soul to itself and does not allow it to 
scatter itself abroad, but makes it love the glory in Nous. 
It is not the life of sense-perception either, for this looks 
outwards, to the external world where its particular ac- 
tivity lies. But one who has received that light from true 
being looks, we may say, not particularly at visible things 
but just the opposite. It remains, then, that he must have 
received an intellectual life, a trace of the life of Nous: for 
true being is There. 

The life in Nous is also activity, the first light which 
lightens itself first of all and shines turned towards itself, at 
once enlightening and enlightened, the truly intelligible, 
thinking and thought, seen by itself and needing no other to 
enable it to see, sufficing to itself for seeing; for it is itself 
what it sees. It is known to us too by its very self; through 
itself the knowledge of it comes to us. Otherwise, from 
where should we get the means to speak of it? It is of 
such a nature that it grasps itself more clearly, and our 
apprehension is by means of it. By reasonings of this kind 
our soul is led back to it, by considering itself to be an 
image of Nous and its life a trace and likeness of Nous, 
and that whenever it thinks it becomes godlike and Nous~ 
like. If anyone asks it what sort of thing is that perfect 
and universal Nous f the primary self-knower, the soul first 
of all enters into Nous or makes room for its activity; 
then it shows itself to be in possession of the things in 
Nous of which it holds in itself the memory, and, by 
means of its own likeness to Nous is able somehow to see 
it, being brought to a more exact resemblance as far as 
any part of the soul can come to resemble Nous. 

VI. 4. 3 

[Nous is fully immanent and transcendent: the (com- 
mon Hellenistic) idea of "presence by powers" does not 
really apply to spiritual being: where the "power" is 
present, the being is present as a whole, but the recipient 



Soul / 89 

only receives as much as it is able; the soul is present in 
the body in the same sort of way.] 

Shall we say that it [the All, or Real Being, i.e. Nous] 
is present, or that it remains by itself, but powers go out 
from it to all things, and so it is present everywhere? In 
this way they say that souls are a sort of rays; the All re- 
mains established in itself, and the souls are sent out, 
each to a corresponding living being. Now in things which 
do not preserve the whole nature of the One Being as it is 
in itself, only a power of it is present where it is present; 
yet this certainly does not mean that it is not wholly pres- 
ent, since even in this case it is not cut off from the power 
which it gave to the other thing: but the recipient was only 
able to take a certain limited amount, though all was 
there. Where all its powers are present, it is clearly present 
itself, though at the same time separate: for if it became 
the form of a particular thing it would cease to be all and 
to exist everywhere in itself (though being incidentally the 
form of something else too). But since it belongs to no 
one particular thing, when something wants to belong to 
it, if it wishes it draws near to it, as much as is possible, 
but does not become the property of that or any other 
thing but remains the object of its desire. There is noth- 
ing surprising in it thus being present in all things, because 
it is in none of them in such a way as to belong to them. 
So perhaps it is not unreasonable to say that the soul has 
the same sort of relationship of accidental sympathy with 
the body, if we say that it remains by itself and does not 
become the property of matter or body, but the whole 
body is illumined by it in every one of its parts. 

(b) In its Activity in the Sense-world 
IV. 3. 9 

[Soul's "entry" into body. Universal Soul does not 
really enter body, but tunelessly illuminates and informs 
it, remaining itself unchanged and unmoved, at once im- 
manent and transcendent. Body is really in Soul, not Soul 
in body.] 



90 / Plotinus 

But we must inquire how soul comes to be in body, 
how and in what way. This too is a subject worth won- 
dering about and inquiring into. There are two ways of 
soul entering body; one is when a soul is already in a 
body and changes bodies, or passes from a body of air 
or fire to one of earth (people do not call this change of 
body metensomatosis because the body from which 
entry is made is not apparent) ; and the other passage from 
bodilessness to any kind of body, which is the first com- 
munication of soul with body. About this last it will be 
proper to investigate what it is that happens when a soul 
which is altogether pure and free from body takes upon 
itself a bodily nature. We should perhaps, or rather must, 
begin with the Soul of the All: and when talking about the 
Soul of the All we must consider that the terms "entry" 
and "ensoulment" are used in the discussion for the sake 
of clear explanation. For there never was a time when this 
universe did not have a soul, or when body existed in the 
absence of soul, or when matter was not set in order: * but 
in discussing these things one can consider them apart 
from each other. When one is reasoning about any kind 
of composite thing it is always legitimate to analyse it in 
thought into its parts. 

The truth is as follows. If body did not exist, soul would 
not go forth, since there is no place other than body where 
it is natural for it to be. But if it intends to go forth it will 
produce a place for itself, and so a body. Soul's rest is, we 
may say, confirmed in Absolute Rest; a great light shines 
from it, and at the outermost edge of this firelight there is 
a darkness. Soul sees this darkness and informs it, since it 
is there as a substrate for form. For it was not lawful for 
that which borders on soul to be without its share of logos, 
as far as that was capable of receiving it, of which the 
phrase was used "dimly in dimness." It is as if a fair and 
richly various house was built, which is not cut off from 
its architect, but he has not given it a share in himself 
either; he has considered it all, everywhere, worth a care 
which conduces to its very being and its excellence (as far 
as it can participate in being) but does him no harm in his 
presiding over it, for he rules it while abiding above. It is 



Soul / 91 

in this sort of way that it is ensouled; it has a soul which 
does not belong to it but is present to it; it is mastered, 
not the master, possessed, not possessor. The universe lies 
in soul which bears it up, and nothing is without a share 
of soul. It is like a net in the waters, immersed in life, un- 
able to make its own that in which it is. The sea is already 
spread out and the net spreads with it, as far as it can; for 
no one of its parts can be anywhere else than where it 
lies. And soul's nature is so great, just because it has no 
size, as to contain the whole of body in one and the same 
grasp; wherever body extends, there soul is. If body did 
not exist, it would make no difference to soul as regards 
size; for it is what it is. The universe extends as far as soul 
goes; its limit of extension is the point to which in going 
forth it has soul to keep it in being. The shadow is as 
large as the logos which comes from soul: and the logos 
is of such a kind as to make a size as large as the Form 
from which it derives wants to make. 

IV. 4. 11 

[The universe is a single living being, and soul rules it 
from within, not from outside, like nature in the process 
of healing, not like a doctor. Its wise guidance of the 
whole is a single, simple immanent activity, without rea- 
soning or calculation.] 

The administration of the universe is like that of a 
single living being, where there is one kind which works 
from outside and deals with it part by part and another 
kind which works from inside, from the principle of its 
life. So a doctor begins from outside and deals with par- 
ticular parts, and is often baffled, and considers what to 
do, but nature begins from the principle of life and has 
no need of consideration. The administration and the ad- 
ministrator of the All must rule it, not after the manner of 
the doctor but like nature. The administration of the uni- 
verse is much simpler, in that all things with which it 
deals are included as parts of a single living being. One 
nature rules all the natures; they come after it, depending 
on and from it, growing out of it, as the natures in 
branches grow out of that of the whole plant. What reason- 



92 / Plotinus 

ing, then, can there be or reckoning or memory when wis- 
dom is always present, active and ruling, ordering things 
always in the same way? One should not think that, be- 
cause a great variety of different tilings comes to pass, 
that which produces them conforms to the changes of 
the product. The unchanging stability of the producer is 
in proportion to the variety of the products. For the things 
which happen according to nature in one single living be- 
ing are many, and they do not all happen at once; there 
are the different ages and the growths which occur at 
particular times, for instance, of the horns or the beard; 
there is the prime of life and procreation; the previous 
logoi are not destroyed, but others come into operation as 
well. The underlying unity is clear, too, from the fact that 
the same logos which is in the parent, and the whole of it, 
is also in the offspring. So it is right to think that the same 
wisdom embraces both, and that this is the whole, abiding 
wisdom of the universe, manifold and varied and yet at 
the same time simple, belonging to a single mighty living 
being, not subject to change because of the multiplicity of 
things, but a single logos, everything at once: for if it was 
not everything, the wisdom would not be the wisdom of 
the universe but of later and partial things. 

II. 3. 17-18 

[Tt is the lowest phase of soul which makes material 
things; this it does without conscious thought, receiving 
the forms which it imprints from Nous. Nous is thus the 
ultimate creative principle of the material universe, which 
is the last and lowest of existences, but necessary to the 
perfection of the whole: even the evil in it is part of the 
pattern, and contributes to that perfection.] 

Are these logoi which are in soul thoughts? But then 
how will it make tilings in accordance with these thoughts? 
For it is in matter that the logos makes things, and that 
which makes on the level of nature is not thought or 
vision, but a power which manipulates matter, which does 
not know but only acts, like an impression or a figure in 
water, a circle, say; another gives it what is required for 
this activity of making in the sphere of growth and gen- 



Soul / 93 

eration. If this is so, the ruling principle of the soul will 
make by nourishing the generative soul in matter. Will it 
then nourish it as the result of having reasoned? If it rea- 
sons, it will first refer to something else, or to what it 
has in itself. But if it refers to what it has in itself, there is no 
need of reasoning. For it is not reasoning that nour- 
ishes, but the part of soul which possesses the logoi: for 
this is more powerful and able to make in soul. It makes, 
then, according to Forms: that is, it must give what it re- 
ceives from Nous. Nous gives to the Soul of the All, and 
Soul (the one which comes next after Nous) gives to the 
soul next after it, 2 enlightening and informing it, and this 
last soul immediately makes, as if under orders. It makes 
some things without hindrance, but in others, the worse 
ones, it meets obstruction. Since its power to make is 
derived, and it is filled with logoi which are not the origi- 
nal ones, it does not simply make according to the Forms 
which it has received, but contributes something of its 
own, and this is obviously worse. Its product is a living 
being, but a very imperfect one, which makes its own 
life difficult since it is the worst of living things, ill-con- 
ditioned and savage, made of inferior matter, a sort of 
sediment of the prior realities, bitter and embittering. This 
is the lowest soul's contribution to the universal Whole. 
Then are the evils in the All necessary, because they 
follow on the prior realities? Rather because if they did 
not exist the All would be imperfect. Most of them, even 
all of them, contribute something useful to the Whole 
poisonous snakes do, for instance though generally the 
reason why they exist is obscure. Even moral evil itself 
has many advantages and is productive of much excel- 
lence, for example, all the beauty of art, and rouses us to 
serious thought about our way of living, not allowing us 
to slumber complacently. If this is correct, it must be that 
the Soul of the All contemplates perfection, always as- 
piring to the intelligible nature and to God, and that when 
it is full, filled right up to the brim, its trace, its last and 
lowest expression, is this productive principle that we are 
discussing. This then is the ultimate maker; over it is that 
part of soul which is primarily filled from Nous; over all 



94 / Plotinus 

is Nous the Craftsman, 8 who gives to the Soul which 
comes next those gifts whose traces are in the third. This 
visible universe, then, is properly called an image always 
in process of making; its first and second principles are 
at rest, the third at rest too, but also in motion, inci- 
dentally and in matter. As long as Nous and Soul exist, the 
logoi will flow into this lower form of Soul, just as, as 
long as the sun exists, all its rays will shine from it. 

III. 8. 4 

[The dream-like contemplation of Nature (the Lower 
Soul), which produces the material universe: all action 
springs from contemplation.] 

If anyone asked Nature why it makes, if it cared to 
hear and answer the questioner it would say, "You ought 
not to ask, but to understand in silence, you too, just as I 
am silent and not in the habit of talking. And what are 
you to understand? That what comes into being is what I 
see, a silent contemplation, the vision proper to my nature, 
and that I, originating from this sort of contemplation 
have a contemplative nature, and my act of contemplation 
makes what it sees, as the geometers draw their figures 
while they contemplate. But I do not draw, but as I con- 
template the lines which bound bodies come to be as if 
they fell from my contemplation. What happens to me is 
the same as what happens to my mother and the beings 
that begot me. They too derive from contemplation, and it 
is no action of theirs which brings about my birth: they 
are greater logoi, and as they contemplate themselves I 
come to be." 

What does this mean? That what is called Nature is a 
soul, the offspring of a prior soul with a stronger life; that 
it quietly holds contemplation in itself, not directed up- 
wards or even downwards, but at rest in what it is, in its 
own repose and a kind of self-perception, and in this con- 
sciousness and self-perception it sees what comes after it, 
as far as it can, and seeks no longer, but has accomplished 
a vision of splendour and delight. If anyone wants to at- 
tribute to it understanding or perception, it will not be the 
understanding or perception we speak of in other beings; 



Soul / 95 

it will be like comparing consciousness in dreams to wak- 
ing consciousness. 

Nature is at rest in contemplation of the vision of itself, 
a vision which comes to it from its abiding in and with it- 
self and being itself vision. Its contemplation is silent but 
somewhat blurred. There is another contemplation clearer 
for sight, and of this Nature is the image. For this reason 
what is produced by it is weak in every way, because a 
weak contemplation produces a weak object. Men too, 
when their power of contemplation weakens, make action 
a shadow of contemplation and reasoning. Because con- 
templation is not enough for them, since their souls are 
weak and they are not able to grasp the vision sufficiently, 
and therefore are not filled with it, but still long to see it, 
they are carried into action so as to see what they cannot 
see with their intellect. When they make something, then, 
it is because they want to see their object themselves and 
also because they want others to be aware of it and con- 
template it, when their project is realized in practice as 
well as possible. Everywhere we shall find that making and 
action are either a weakening or a consequence of contem- 
plation; a weakening if the doer or maker had nothing in 
view beyond the thing done; a consequence, if he had 
another prior object of contemplation better than what he 
made. For who, when he is able to contemplate that which 
is truly real, deliberately goes after its image? Dull chil- 
dren, too, are evidence of this, who are incapable of learn- 
ing and contemplative studies and turn to crafts and 
manual work. 

III. 8. 5 

[The activity of the higher Soul and the emanation of 
Nature from it. Unity of contemplation and action in every 
phase of the soul's activity.] 

In speaking of Nature we have seen in what way its 
generative activity is contemplation. Now, going on to the 
Soul prior to Nature, we should say how its contemplation, 
its love of learning and spirit of inquiry, its birth-pangs 
from the knowledge it attains and its fullness make it, 
when it has itself become all a vision, produce another 



96 / Plotimis 

vision: just as when a particular art is complete it pro- 
duces a kind of another little art in a child who is being 
taught it, who possesses a trace of everything in it. But 
all the same, the visions, the objects of contemplation of 
this lower world are dim and helpless sorts of things at 
first. 

The rational part of soul then, that which is above and 
filled and illuminated from the reality above remains 
There; but that which participates in it in virtue of the first 
participation [of Soul in Nous] goes forth continually, life 
from life. The activity of soul reaches everywhere, and 
there is no point where it fails. But in going forth it lets 
the prior part of itself remain where it left it; for if it 
abandoned its former position it would no longer be every- 
where, but only at the last point it reached. But what goes 
forth is not equal to what remains. If then it must come 
to be everywhere, and there must be nowhere without its 
activity; and if the prior must always be different from 
that which comes after; and if the activity of soul origi- 
nates from contemplation or action, and action does not 
exist at this stage (for it cannot come before contempla- 
tion) ; then all activity of soul must be contemplation, but 
one stage weaker than another. So what appears to be ac- 
tion according to contemplation is really the weakest form 
of contemplation: for that which is produced must always 
be of the same kind as its producer, but weaker through 
losing its virtue as it comes down. 

All goes on quietly, for there is no need of any obvious 
and external contemplation or action; it is Soul which 
contemplates, and makes that which comes after it, that 
which contemplates in a more external way and not like 
that which precedes it; contemplation makes contempla- 
tion. Contemplation and vision have no limits; this is why 
soul makes, and makes everywhere (where does it not?) 
since the same vision is in every soul. For it is not spatially 
limited. It is of course not present in exactly the same 
way in every soul, since it is not even the same in every 
part of the soul. That is why "the charioteer gives the 
horses what he sees," 4 and they in taking it made clear 
that they longed for what they saw; for they did not get it 



Soul / 97 

all. And if in their longing they act, they act for the sake 
of what they long for: and that is vision and contempla- 
tion. 

IV. 4. 14 

[The forms in body, which make bodily things what 
they are, are distinct from Nature, a kind of external ir- 
radiation or warming proceeding from it; they mark the 
very last stage in the evolution of reality.] 

As for the bodies which are said to be produced by 
Nature, the elements are just precisely products of Na- 
ture: but are the animals and plants so disposed as to 
have Nature present in them? Their relationship to Nature 
is like that of air to light; when light goes away air holds 
nothing of it; light is separate from air and air from light, 
and they do not mingle. Or it is like that of fire and the 
warmed body, when if fire goes away a warmth remains 
which is distinct from the warmth in the fire and is an 
affection of the warmed body. In the same way the shape 
which Nature gives to the formed body must be consid- 
ered as another form, distinct from Nature itself. 

The order and unity of the visible universe 
V. 8. 7 

[The visible universe comes into being as a whole; it is 
not planned and then made part by part but proceeds 
without thought or effort from the world of Nous.] 

As for this All, if we agree that its being and its being 
what it is come to it from another, are we to think that its 
maker conceived earth in his own mind, with its neces- 
sary place in the centre, and then water and its place upon 
earth, and then the other elements in their order up to 
heaven, then all living things, each with the sort of shapes 
which they have now, and their particular internal organs 
and outward parts, and then when he had them all ar- 
ranged in his mind proceeded to his work? Planning of 
this sort is quite impossible. For where could the ideas of 
all these things come from to one who had never seen 
them? And if he received them from someone else he 



98 / Plotinus 

could not carry them out as craftsmen do now, using their 
hands and tools; for hands and feet come later. The only 
possibility that remains, then, is that all things exist in 
something else, and, since there is nothing between be- 
cause of their closeness to something else in the realm of 
real being, an imprint and image of that other suddenly 
appears, either by its direct action or through the assist- 
ance of soul (this makes no difference for the present dis- 
cussion), or of a particular soul. All that is here below 
comes from There, and exists in greater beauty There: for 
here it is adulterated, but There it is pure. All this universe 
is occupied by forms from beginning to end; matter first of 
all by the forms of the elements, and then other forms 
upon these, and then again others; so that it is difficult to 
find the matter hidden under so many forms. Then matter 
too is a sort of ultimate form; 5 so this universe is all form, 
and all the things in it are forms: for its archetype is form: 
the making is done without noise and fuss, since that 
which makes is all real being and form. So this is another 
reason why the visible universe is fashioned without toil 
and trouble: and it is an All that makes, so an All is made. 
There is nothing to hinder the making; even now it has the 
mastery, and, though one thing obstructs another, nothing 
obstructs it: for it abides as an All. 

II. 9. 8 

[The visible universe is not, as the Gnostics think, evil, 
an unfortunate mistake, the product of some sinful affec- 
tion or arbitrary whim of a spiritual being; it is the perfect 
image of the Intelligible World of Nous, and it is necessary 
that it should exist; and within it, as against both Gnostic 
and Orthodox Christian beliefs, the star-gods are more 
perfect and closer to the world of Nous than human 
beings.] 

For if this All has come into life in such a way that its 
life is not a disjointed one like the smaller things in it 
which by its fullness of life it produces continually night 
and day but coherent and vigorous, a great universal life 
showing infinite wisdom, how should one not call it a clear 
and fine image of the intelligible gods? If, being an image, 



Soul / 99 

it is not that intelligible world, this is precisely what is 
natural to it; if it was the intelligible world it would not be 
an image of it. But it is false to say that it is an image un- 
like the original; nothing has been left out which it was 
possible for a fine image in the order of nature to have. 
The image has to exist, necessarily, not as the result of 
thought and contrivance: the intelligible could not be the 
last, for it has to have a double activity, one in itself and 
one directed to something else. There must then be some- 
thing after it, for only that which is the most powerless of 
all things has nothing below it. But There a wonderful 
power runs, and so besides its inward activity it produces. 

If there is another universe better than this one, then 
what is this one? But if there must be a universe which 
preserves the image of the intelligible world, and there is 
no other, then this is that universe. 

The whole earth is full of varied living creatures and 
immortal beings; everything up to the sky is full of them. 
Why, then, are not the stars, both those in the lower 
spheres and those in the highest, gods moving in order, 
circling the universe? Why should not they possess virtue? 
What hindrance prevents them from acquiring it? The 
causes are not present there which make people bad here 
below, and there is no badness of body, disturbed and dis- 
turbing. And why should they not have understanding, in 
their everlasting peace, and comprehend with their intellect 
God and the intelligible gods? Shall our wisdom be greater 
than theirs? Who, if he has not gone mad, could tolerate 
the idea? 

II. 3. 7 

[Why do the stars, and omens in general, announce the 
future? Why is divination possible? Because the whole uni- 
verse is a single living being, with a unified organic struc- 
ture; and so from signs appearing in one member we can 
divine what is going to happen to another.] 

But if these heavenly powers give signs of things to 
come as we maintain that many other things also do 
what might the cause be? How does the order work? There 
would be no signifying if particular things did not happen 



100 / Plotinus 

according to some order. Let us suppose that the stars are 
like characters always being written on the heavens, or 
written once for all and moving as they perform other 
tasks as well as their principal one: and let us assume that 
their significance results from this, just as because of the 
one principle in a single living being, by studying one 
member we can learn something else about a different one. 
For instance, we can come to conclusions about someone's 
character, and also about the dangers that beset him and 
the precautions to be taken, by looking at his eyes or 
some other part of his body. Yes, they are members and 
so are we, different things in different ways. All things are 
filled full of signs, and it is a wise man who can learn 
about one thing from another. Yet, all the same, many 
processes of learning in this way are customary and known 
to all. 

Then what is the single linked order? If there is one, our 
auguries from birds and other living creatures, by which 
we predict particular events, are reasonable. All things 
must be joined to one another; not only must there be in 
each individual thing what has well been termed "a single, 
united breath of life," but before them, and still more, in 
the All. One principle must make the universe a single 
complex living creature, one from all; and just as in in- 
dividual organisms each member undertakes its own par- 
ticular task, so the members of the All, each individual 
one of them have their individual work to do; this applies 
even more to the All than to particular organisms, in so 
far as the members of it are not merely members, but 
wholes and more important than the members of particular 
things. Each one goes forth from one single principle and 
does its own work, but they also co-operate one with an- 
other; for they are not cut off from the whole. They act on 
and are affected by others; one comes up to another, 
bringing it pain or pleasure. The process has nothing ran- 
dom or casual about it. 

IV. 4. 33 

[The great dance of the universe.] 

The movement of the universe is not casual, but goes 



Soul / 101 

according to the logos of its living organism; there must 
therefore be a harmony of action arid experience, and an 
order which arranges things together, adapting them and 
bringing them into due relation with each other, so that 
according to every figure of the universal movement there 
is a different disposition of the things which it governs, as 
if they were performing a single ballet in a rich variety of 
dance-movements. In our ballets, too, there is no need to 
mention, since they are obvious, the external elements 
which play their part in the performance, the way in which 
piping and singing and everything else which joins in con- 
tributing to the total effect, change variously at every 
movement. But the parts of the dancer's body, too, cannot 
possibly keep the same position in every figure; his limbs 
bend as they follow the pattern; one is borne down, an- 
other up, one works hard and painfully, another is given 
rest as the figuring changes. The dancer's intention looks 
elsewhere; his limbs are affected in accordance with the 
dance and serve the dance, and help to make it perfect 
and complete: and the connoisseur of ballet can say that 
to fit a particular figure one limb is raised, another bent 
together, one is hidden, another degraded; the dancer does 
not choose to make these movements for no reason, but 
each part of him as he performs the dance has its neces- 
sary position in the dancing of the whole body. 

IV. 4. 36 

[The immense variety of the visible universe, which is a 
living whole made up of parts all of which have life in 
them, even if we do not perceive it. ] 

The All is full of the richest variety; all logoi are present 
in it and an unbounded store of varied powers. It is like 
what they say about man, that the eye and each of the 
bones has its own distinctive power, the bones of the hand 
one power and the toe-bone another; there is no part 
which has not a power, and one different from every other 
but we know nothing about it, unless we have studied 
this sort of subject. The All is like this, but even more so, 
because the parts of our bodies with their powers are only 
traces of the parts and powers of the universe. In the All 



102 / Plotinus 

there is an indescribably wonderful variety of powers, es- 
pecially in the bodies which move through the heavens. 
For it did not have to come to be an ordered universe like 
a soulless house, even if a large and complex one, made of 
materials easy to reckon up according to kind, stones and 
timber, perhaps, and other things of the sort; but it exists, 
all awake and alive differently in different parts, and noth- 
ing can exist which does not belong to it. This then solves 
the difficulty of how there can be anything without soul in 
an ensouled living being: for this account explains that 
different things in the Whole live in different ways, but we 
do not say that anything is alive which does not move it- 
self perceptibly: but each thing of this sort has a hidden 
life; and the thing which is perceptibly alive is composed 
of parts which are not perceptibly alive but contribute 
wonderful powers to the life of a living thing of this kind. 
Man would not have been moved to such great achieve- 
ments if the powers in himself from which he started had 
been without soul, nor would the All live as it does if each 
particular thing in it did not live its own life even if the 
All does not exercise deliberate choice. For it acts without 
need of deliberate choice; it is of older birth than choice. 

IV. 4. 40 

[Magic is possible because of the universal sympathy 
which binds all parts of the cosmos together; prayer too to 
the star-gods and other powers which rule the universe 
attains its effect magically and automatically through this 
sympathy.] 

How do magic spells work? By sympathy, and by the 
natural concord of things that are alike and opposition of 
things that are different, and by the rich variety of the 
many powers which go to make up the life of the one Liv- 
ing Creature. For many things are drawn and enchanted 
without any other contrivance. The true magic is the "Love 
and Strife" 7 in the All. This is the primary wizard and en- 
chanter, from observing whom men come to use philtres 
and spells on each other. For because desire is natural and 
things that cause desire attract each other, there has grown 



Soul / 103 

up an art of attraction by desire through magic, used by 
those who add by magic touches various natures designed 
to draw different people together and with a force of de- 
sire implanted in them: they join one soul to another, as 
if they were training together plants that grow in different 
places. They use as well figures with power in them, and 
by putting themselves into the right postures they quietly 
bring powers upon their patients through their participa- 
tion in the unity of the universe. For if anyone put a 
magician outside the All, he could not draw or bring down 
by attractive or binding spells. But now, because he does 
not operate as if he were somewhere else, he can work 
with a knowledge of where one thing is drawn to another 
in the Living Creature. And the soul too is naturally drawn 
by the tune of a magic chant or a particular intonation or 
posture of the magician for these things attract, as piti- 
able figures and voices attract: for it is not the will or rea- 
son which is charmed by music, but the irrational soul, 
and this kind of magic causes no surprise; people even like 
being enchanted, if this is not actually what they demand 
from the musicians. And we must not think that other 
kinds of prayers either arc freely and deliberately an- 
swered. For people charmed by spells do not act with free 
deliberation, nor, when a snake fascinates a man, does the 
man understand or perceive what is happening, but he 
knows only afterwards that he has had the experience; his 
ruling intellect, however, remains unaffected. When a man 
prays to anything, some influence comes from it upon him 
or upon another: the sun, or another star, does not hear 
his prayer. 

in. 2. 2 

[From the unity of Nous proceeds the conflicting di- 
versity of the visible universe, in which the principle of 
unity manifests itself by bringing about a harmony of 
contending opposiles.J 

It is like the logos in a seed, in which all the parts are 
together in identity; no one part lights another or differs 
from it or gets in its way; then it acquires mass and differ- 



104 / Plotinus 

ent parts come to be in different places, and they get in 
each other's way, and one consumes another: in the same 
way this universe has arisen and developed in separation 
of parts from one Nous and the Logos 8 which proceeds 
from it; and of necessity some parts develop friendly and 
kind, others hostile and inimical; willingly or unwillingly 
they injure each other, and they bring each other's birth 
by their own destruction: yet all the same parts like this, 
in their action on and experience of each other, bring into 
being a single concord, as each utters its own notes; and 
the Logos over them makes a concord, a single order for 
the whole* 

III. 2. 9 

[Our own part in the universal order; we remain free 
and responsible, and the wicked cannot expect gods or 
good men to help them escape the consequences of their 
actions.] 

Providence cannot exist in such a way as to make us 
nothing. If everything was Providence and nothing but 
Providence, then Providence would not exist; for what 
would It have to provide for? There would be nothing but 
the Divine. The Divine exists as things are, and comes 
forth to something other than Itself, not to destroy that 
other, but to preside over it. With man, for instance, It 
sees to it that he is man, that is, that he lives by the law 
of Providence, which means doing everything that that 
law says. And it says that those who become good shall 
have a good life, now, and laid up in store for them here- 
after as well, and the wicked the opposite. It is not lawful 
for those who have become wicked to demand others to 
be their saviours and to sacrifice themselves in answer to 
their prayers; 9 or to require gods to direct their affairs in 
detail, laying aside their own life, or good men, who live 
another life better than human rule, to become their rulers. 

III. 2. 17 

[The imperfect unity of the visible world means that 
there must necessarily be a place in it for moral evil. But 



Soul / 105 

this does not excuse the wicked, for they are souls who 
exist before they came into this world, and they bring their 
own characters and dispositions to the play of life. The 
Logos only allots them appropriate parts.] 

The nature of the Logos corresponds to its whole pro- 
ductive activity, and, therefore, the more it is dispersed 
the more opposed will its products be: so the universe of 
sense is less a unity than its Logos; it is more of a mani- 
fold and there is more opposition in it: and each individual 
in it will be urged by a greater desire to live and a greater 
passion for unity. 

But passionate desires often destroy their objects, if they 
are perishable, in the pursuit of their own good: and the 
part straining towards the whole draws to itself what it 
can. 

So we have good and wicked men, like the opposed 
movements of a dancer inspired by one and the same art: 
we shall call one part of his performance "good" and one 
"wicked" and say that its excellence lies in the opposition. 

But then the wicked are no longer wicked? 

No: they remain wicked, only their being like that does 
not originate with themselves. 

But surely this excuses them? 

No; excuse depends on the Logos, and the Logos does 
not make us disposed to excuse this sort of people. But if 
one part of the Logos is a good man, another a bad and 
the bad are the larger class it is like the production of a 
play: the author gives each actor a part, but also makes 
use of the characters which they have already. He does not 
himself rank them as leading actor or second or third, but 
gives each one suitable words and by that assignment fixes 
his proper rank. 10 

So every man has his place, a place to fit the good man 
and one to fit the bad. Each kind of man, then, goes ac- 
cording to nature, and the Logos to the place that suits 
him, and holds the position he has chosen. There one 
speaks blasphemies and does crimes, the other speaks and 
acts in all goodness: for the actors existed before this play 
and bring their own proper selves to it. 



106 / Plotinus 

Time and eternity 
III. 7. 11 

[Time is the life of the soul in movement, when it goes 
out from its rest in the world of Nous to form the restless 
succession of the universe in which we live: eternity is the 
unmoving unbounded life of the world of Nous.] 

We must return to the disposition which we said existed 
in eternity, to that quiet life, all a single whole, unbounded, 
altogether without divergence, resting in and directed to- 
wards unity. Time did not yet exist, not at any rate for the 
beings of that world; we shall produce time by means of 
the form and nature of what comes later. If, then, these 
beings were at rest in themselves, "how did time first come 
out?" We could hardly, perhaps, call on the Muses, who 
did not then yet exist, to tell us this; but we might perhaps 
(even if the Muses did exist then after all) ask time when 
it has come into being to tell us how it did come into be- 
ing and appear. It might say something like this about it- 
self: that before, when it had not yet in fact produced this 
"before" or felt the need of what comes after, it was at 
rest with it in real being; it was not yet time, but itself, 
too, kept quiet in the reality [of Nous]. But since there 
was a restlessly active nature which wanted to control it- 
self and be on its own, and chose to seek for more than its 
present state, this moved and time moved with it: and so, 
always moving on to what comes after and is not the same, 
but one thing after another, we made a long stretch of our 
journey and constructed time as an image of eternity. For 
because Soul had an unquiet power, which wanted to keep 
on transferring what it saw There to somewhere else, it 
did not want the whole to be present to it all together; and 
as from a quiet seed the logos, unfolding itself, advances, 
as it thinks, to largeness, but does away with the largeness 
by division and, instead of keeping its unity in itself, 
squanders it outside itself and so goes forward to a weaker 
extension; in the same way Soul, making the world of 
sense in imitation of that other world, moved with a mo- 
tion which was not that which exists There, but like it, and 



Soul / 107 

intending to be an image of it, first of all put itself into 
time, which it made instead of eternity, and then handed 
over that which came into being as a slave to time, by 
making the whole of it exist in time and encompassing all 
its ways with time. For since the world of sense moves in 
Soul this universe has no other place than Soul it 
moves also in the time of Soul. For as Soul presents one 
activity after another, and then again another in ordered 
succession, it produces the succession along with the ac- 
tivity, and goes on with another thought coming after that 
which it had before, to that which did not previously exist 
because discursive thought was not in action and Soul's 
present life is not like that which came before it. For a 
different kind of life goes with having a different kind of 
time. So the spreading out of life involves time; life's con- 
tinual progress involves continuity of time, and life which 
is past involves past time. So would it be sense to say that 
time is the life of soul in a movement of passage from one 
way of life to another? Yes, for if eternity is life at rest, 
unchanging and identical and already unbounded, and 
time must exist as an image of eternity 11 (in the same re- 
lation as that in which this universe stands to the world of 
Nous) , then we must say that there is another life having, 
in a way of speaking, the same name as this power of the 
soul, and, instead of the motion of Nous, that there is the 
motion of a part of Soul; and, instead of sameness and 
self-identity and abiding, that which does not abide in the 
same but does one act after another; and, instead of that 
which is one without distance or separation, an image of 
unity, one by continuity; and, instead of a complete un- 
bounded whole, a continuous unbounded succession and, 
instead of a whole all together, a whole which is and al- 
ways will be going to come into being part by part. For 
this is the way in which it will imitate that which is already 
a whole, already all together and unbounded, by intending 
to be always making an increase in its being: for this is 
how its being will imitate the being of Nous. But one must 
not conceive time as outside Soul, any more than eternity 
There as outside Real Being. It is not a consequence of 
Soul, something that comes after (any more than eternity 



108 / Plotimis 

There) but something which is seen along with it and 
exists in it and with it, as eternity does There with Real 
Being. 

Matter and evil 
III. 6. 7 

[Matter, Plotinus has just said, is not body or soul or 
mind or life or form or limit or potency. He proceeds to 
describe its essential falseness and unreality, its phantasmal 
character, and that of the material things which are 
formed in it.] 

Matter falls outside ah 1 these categories, and cannot even 
rightly be spoken of as being. It could appropriately be 
called non-being; not in the sense in which movement or 
rest are not being, but truly non-being. It is a ghostly 
image of bulk, a tendency towards substantial existence; it 
is at rest, but not in any resting-place; it is invisible in it- 
self and escapes any attempt to see it, and appears when 
one is not looking; even if you look closely you cannot see 
it. It always has opposite appearances in itself, small and 
great, less and more, deficient and superabundant, a phan- 
tom which does not remain, and cannot get away either: 
for it has no strength even for this, since it has not re- 
ceived strength from Nous but is lacking in all being. 
Whatever announcement it makes, therefore, is a lie. If it 
appears great, it is small, if more, it is less: its apparent 
being is not real, but a sort of fleeting frivolity. Hence the 
things which seem to come into being in it are frivolities, 
nothing but phantoms in a phantom, like something in a 
mirror which really exists in one place but is reflected in 
another. It seems to be filled but holds nothing; it is all 
seeming. "Imitations of real beings pass into and out of 
it," ghosts into a formless ghost, visible because of its 
formlessness. They seem to act on it, but do nothing, for 
they are wraith-like and feeble and have no thrust; nor 
does matter thrust against them, but they go through with- 
out making a cut, as if through water, or as if someone hi 
a way projected shapes in the void people talk about. 12 



Soul / 109 



I. 8. 3 



[The principle of evil is absolute formlessness as op- 
posed to form, non-being as opposed to being, i.e. Matter.] 

If being is of this kind, and also That beyond being, evil 
can be neither in being nor That beyond being, for they 
are good. It remains then that, granted that there is evil, it 
must be in the class of non-beings, existing as a sort of 
form of non-existence, and it must be found in one of the 
things which are mingled with non-being or have some sort 
of share in it. "Non-being" here of course does not mean 
"that which is absolutely non-existent" but only that which 
is other than being; not, however, non-being in the sense 
of a movement or position with regard to being, but in the 
sense of an image of being or even something still less real. 
This is either the world of sense as a whole and all that is 
experienced in it or something which comes later than this 
and is in a way incidental to it, or else its source or one of 
the things which help to complete its distinctive nature. 

One might arrive at a conception of it by considering it 
as measurelessness opposed to measure, the unlimited as 
opposed to limit, formlessness as opposed to a forming 
principle, that which is always in need as opposed to self- 
sufficiency; as something always indefinite, nowhere at 
rest, affected by everything, insatiable, utter poverty: and 
by thinking that all this is not incidental to it but in a sort 
of way its substance, and that any part of it you see is by 
itself all this; and any other things which participate in it 
and are made like it become evil, though not essentially 
evil. What existence, then, has these characteristics, not as 
something distinct from it but as its very self? For if evil 
occurs incidentally in something else, it must first have 
some independent existence, even if it is not any sort of 
substance. For just as there is Absolute Good and good as 
a quality, there must be absolute evil and evil which oc- 
curs incidentally hi something else as the result of the 
existence of absolute evil. But then how can measureless- 
ness exist except in something unmeasured? Or measure 
except in something measured? But just as there does exist 



110 / Plotinus 

a measure which is not in something measured, so there 
exists too a measurelessness which is not in the unmeas- 
ured. For if it exists in something else it must be in some- 
thing unmeasured but this will not need measurelessness 
if it is itself unmeasured or in something measured: but 
that which is measured, in so far as it is measured, can- 
not contain measurelessness. So there must be something 
absolutely unlimited in itself, and formless, and with all 
the other distinguishing marks of the nature of evil men- 
tioned before: and if there is anything evil besides this, 
either it has some of this in it or it is evil by regarding this 
or is a cause of evil. So that which underlies figures and 
forms and shapes and measures and limits and is deco- 
rated with ornaments that do not belong to it and has 
nothing good of its own, but is a phantasm as compared 
with reality and the substance of evil, if there really can be 
a substance of evil, has been discovered by our argument 
to be primal and absolute evil. 

I. 8.7 

f A comment on some Platonic texts from the Theaetetus 
and Tirnaeus: 13 evil must necessarily exist (i) because 
matter is necessary to the existence of the visible universe; 
(ii) because the process of outgoing or down-going from 
the Good must have a limit, and this limit is Matter, which 
has no good in it at all.] 

But how then is it necessary that if the Good exists, so 
should the Bad? Is it because there must be matter in the 
All? This All [the visible universe] must certainly be com- 
posed of opposite principles: it would not exist at all if 
matter did not exist. "For the generation of this universe 
was a mixed result of the combination of intellect and 
necessity." What comes into it from God is good; the evil 
comes from the "ancient nature" (Plato means the under- 
lying matter not yet set in order). But what does he mean 
by "moral nature," granted that "this place" refers to the 
All? The answer is given where he says, "Since you have 
come into being, you are not immortal, but you shall by 
no means be dissolved through me." If this is so, the state- 
ment is correct that "evils will never be done away with." 



Soul / 111 

How then is one to escape? Not by movement in place, 
Plato says, but by winning virtue and separating oneself 
from the body: for in this way one separates oneself from 
matter as well, since the man who lives in close connexion 
with the body is also closely connected with matter. Plato 
himself explains somewhere about separating or not sepa- 
rating oneself: but being "among the gods" means "among 
the beings of the world of Nous"; for these are the im- 
mortals. 

One can grasp the necessity of evil in this way too. 
Since not only the Good exists, there must be an ultimate 
limit to the process of going out past it, or, if one prefers 
to put it like this, going down or going away: and this 
last, after which nothing else can come into being, is the 
Bad. Now it is necessary that what comes after the First 
should exist, and therefore that the Last should exist; and 
this is matter, which possesses nothing at all of the Good. 
And in this way too the Bad is necessary. 

II. 4. 5 

[The difference between matter in the Intelligible World 
(the unformed living potency of Soul or Nous, turning in a 
timeless process to that which is above it to receive form) 
and the dead matter of the world of the senses.] 

The bottom of each and every thing is matter; so all 
matter is dark, because light is the logos (and the intellect 
is logos). So intellect sees the logos in each thing, and 
considers that what is under it is dark because it lies be- 
low the light; just as the eye, which has the form of light, 
directs its gaze at the light and at colours (which are 
lights), and reports that what lies below the colours is dark 
and material, hidden by the colours. The darkness, how- 
ever, in the Intelligible World differs from that in the 
world of sense, and so does the matter, just as much as the 
form superimposed on both is different. The divine matter 
when it receives that which defines it has a defined and in- 
telligent life, but the matter of our world becomes some- 
thing defined, but not alive or thinking, a decorated 
corpse. Shape here is only an image; so that which under- 
lies it is also only an image. But There the shape is true 



112 / Plotinus 

shape, and what underlies it is true too. So those who say 
that matter is substance must be considered to be speaking 
correctly if they are speaking of matter in the intelligible 
world. For that which underlies form There is substance, 
or rather, considered along with the form imposed upon 
it, makes a whole which is illuminated substance. 

II. 4. 16 (end) 

[Matter is absolutely evil because it is an absolute de- 
ficiency of good.] 

Is matter then evil because it participates in good? 
Rather, because it lacks it; for this means that it does not 
have it. Anything which lacks something but has some- 
thing else might perhaps hold a middle position between 
good and evil, if its lack and its having more or less bal- 
ance: but that which has nothing because it is in want, or 
rather is want, must necessarily be evil. For it is not want 
of wealth but want of thought, want of virtue, of beauty, 
strength, shape, form, quality. Must it not then be ugly, 
utterly vile, utterly evil? But the matter There is some- 
thing real, for That which is before it is beyond being. 
Here, however, that which is before matter is real, and so 
matter itself is not real; it is something else over against 
the excellence of real being. 

I. 8. 15 (end) 

[Matter, absolute Evil, never presents itself to us alone; 
it is always bound in, overlaid with Form, which is good.] 

Because of the power and nature of Good, the Bad is 
not only bad; for it appears necessarily bound in a sort of 
beautiful fetters, as some prisoners are in chains of gold; 
and so it is hidden by them, in order that, though it exists, 
it may not be seen by the gods, and that men may be able 
not only to look at the Bad, but, even when they do look 
at it, may be in company with images of Beauty to remind 
them [of the true beauty of the Forms in the world of 
Nous.] 



F 
Our Selves 



(a) Their Foundation in Nous and Relationship to 
Universal Soul 

IV. 3. 5 

[We remain ourselves in the world of Nous; our par- 
ticular personalities at their highest are Intellect-Forms in 
Nous, distinct without separation and united without los- 
ing their individuality; on these our souls depend, being 
expressions of them on a lower and more divided level of 
being.] 

But how will there still be one particular soul which is 
yours, one which is the soul of this particular man, and 
one which is another's? Are they the souls of particular in- 
dividuals in the lower order, but belong in the higher order 
to that higher unity? But this will mean that Socrates will 
exist as long as Socrates' soul is in the body; but he will 
cease to be precisely when he attains to the very best. Now 
no real being ever ceases to be. The intellects There do 
not cease to be because they are not corporeally divided, 
but each remains distinct in otherness, having the same es- 
sential being. 

So, too, souls depend in order on the several intellects. 
They are logoi of intellects, of which they are the further 
unfolding, having passed, we may say, from brevity to 
multiplicity. They are linked to the brevity of intellect by 
that in each of them which is least divided. They have al- 
ready willed to be divided but cannot reach complete di- 
vision; they keep identity and difference; each soul re- 
mains one, and all are one together. So we have given the 
sum of the discussion; the souls spring from one, and the 
many souls springing from one, like the intellects in Nous, 
are divided and not divided in the same way as these; the 
Soul which abides is a single Logos of Nous, and from it 

113 



114 / Plotinus 

spring partial logoi, which are immaterial, just as in the 
world of Nous. 

VI. 4. 14 

[Universal Soul is one-in-many; the individual souls in 
it are distinct but not separate, all springing from and re- 
maining in a single principle.] 

But if the same soul is everywhere, how can there be a 
particular soul of each individual? And how is one good 
and another bad? The one soul is sufficient to provide for 
individuals as well [as the whole], and contains all souls 
and all intellects. It is one and also unbounded, and con- 
tains all things together and each individual thing, distinct 
but not so distinguished as to be separate: otherwise how 
could it be unbounded? We speak of it as unbounded just 
because it contains all things together, every life and every 
soul and every intellect. Each one of them is not marked 
off from the others by boundaries; so in this way it is also 
one. It was not to have a single, but an unbounded life, 
and yet a single one too, single in this way, that all souls 
are together, not collected into a unity but springing from 
a unity and remaining in that from which they sprang; or 
rather they never did spring from it, but always were in 
this state, for nothing There conies into being, and so 
nothing is divided into parts; it is only the recipient who 
thinks that it is divided. 

IV. 3. 4 

[The problem of the unity of soul in connexion with the 
different kinds of relationship of soul to body; in the last 
resort it is the attitude, the degree and kind of concern 
with body, which determines, within the universal order, 
how far a soul is universal or limited, body-bound or 
transcending body.] 

If the soul is one in this way, what are we to say in an- 
swer when anyone inquires about the consequences? The 
first difficulty he will raise will be, if a unity in this way 
simultaneously present in all things is possible; the next, 
what happens when Soul is in body, but a particular soul 
not? Perhaps the consequence will be that all soul is al- 



Our Selves / 115 

ways in body, especially the Soul of the All: for it is not 
said to abandon the body, as ours is though some 
people say that our soul will leave this particular body, but 
will never be completely out of body. 1 But, assuming that 
it is going to be completely out of body, how will one soul 
leave the body and another soul not, when they are the 
same? No such difficulty can hinder us where Nous is con- 
cerned, which is separated by differentiation into distinct 
parts which nevertheless remain together for its sub- 
stance is undivided. But with soul, which we speak of as 
divided among bodies, this unity of all souls presents many 
difficulties. Perhaps one might establish the unity as some- 
thing existing independently, which does not fall into body, 
and then all the others, the Soul of the All and the rest, 
depending on it; they might be, in a way, united up to a 
point, one soul through not belonging to any particular 
thing, connected with the higher unity by their edges, 
united in their upper parts and striking out in different di- 
rections, like light on the earth dividing itself among the 
houses and not being split up, but remaining one just the 
same. The Soul of the All would always remain transcend- 
ent because it would have nothing to do with descent or 
the lower or a tendency towards the things here below, but 
our souls would come down because they would have their 
part marked off for them in this sphere, and by the turn- 
ing to them of that which needs their care. The Soul of the 
All (that is, its lowest part) would be like the soul in a 
great growing plant, which directs the plant without effort 
or noise; our lower state would be as if there were maggots 
in a rotten part of the plant for that is what the ensouled 
body is like in the All. The rest of our soul, which is of the 
same nature as the higher parts of Universal Soul, would 
be like a gardener concerned about the maggots in the 
plant and anxiously caring for it. Or it is as one might 
speak of a healthy man living with other healthy men as 
being at the service of his neighbours either in his action 
or his contemplation: and of a sick man, concerned with 
the care of his body, as being at the service of his body 
and belonging to it. 



116 / Plotinus 

(b) Higher and Lower Self 
VI. 4. 14-15 

[The union of soul and body comes about through a 
drive of body towards ensoulment; there is a pre-established 
harmony between them.] 

But we who are we? Are we that higher self or that 
which drew near to it and came to be in time? Before this 
birth came to be we existed There as men different from 
those we are now, some of us even as gods, pure souls, 
intellect united with the whole of reality, parts of the world 
of Nous, not separated or cut off, belonging to the whole; 
and indeed we are not cut off even now. But now there has 
come to that higher man another man, wishing to exist and 
finding us; for we were not outside the universe. He wound 
himself round us and fastened himself to that man that 
each one of us was then (as if there was one voice and one 
word, and someone else came up from elsewhere, and his 
ear heard and received the sound and became an actual 
hearing, keeping that which made it actual present to it) 
and we became a couple, not just the one member of it we 
were before; and sometimes we become even the other 
member which we had fastened to us, when the first man 
is not active and in a different sense not present. 

But how did that which came to us come? It had a cer- 
tain fitness, and held to that which fitted it. It came into 
being capable of receiving soul; but what comes into being 
incapable of receiving all soul (though all soul is there, but 
not for it), like animals and plants, holds as much as it 
can take; so when a voice speaks a word with meaning, 
some hearers receive the meaning with the sound of the 
voice, others only the impact of the voice upon their ears. 
When a living creature is born, it has a soul present to it 
which comes from real being, by which it is attached to 
reality as a whole, and it has a body which is not empty, 
without a soul, and which was not placed, even before it 
came to life, in a soulless region; this body draws still 
nearer by its fitness for soul, and becomes, no longer 
merely a body, but a living body, and by a sort of prox- 



Our Selves / 117 

imity acquires a trace of soul, not a piece of soul but a 
kind of warming or enlightenment coming from it; this 
causes the growth of desires and pleasures and pains. The 
body was certainly not something alien to the living crea- 
ture which came into being. 

IV. 4. 20 
IjJesire^begins intihgbo^^ature (.foe 



^ . 

takes iFcf^Sjifl^^ but the 

the desire 



got "fretongTto the 



But why are there two desires? Why is it not only that 
qualified body which we have been discussing that desires? 
Because, if nature is one thing and the qualified body an- 
other which has come into being from nature (for nature 
exists before the qualified body comes into being, since it 
makes the qualified body, shaping and forming it), then 
nature cannot begin desire: the qualified body has particu- 
lar experiences and feels pain in desiring the opposite of 
what it experiences, pleasure when it is suffering and suffi- 
ciency when it is in want: nature is like a mother, trying to 
make out the wishes of the sufferer and attempting to set 
it right and bring it back to herself; and, searching for the 
remedy, she attaches herself by her search to the desire of 
the sufferer, and the consummation of the desire passes 
from it to her. So one might say that the qualified body 
desires of its own accord, but nature desires as a result of, 
and because of, something else. And it is another soul 
which grants or withholds what is desired. 

IV. 4. 18 

[Body has a principle of life of its own, distinct both 
from the higher soul and the lower soul, or "nature," a 
"shadow" or "trace" of soul (the immanent form). This, 
in its aspiration to communion with soul, is the source of 
physical pain and pleasure.] 

Then there is the question whether the body has any- 
thing of its own, any special characteristic which it pos- 
sesses already when it lives by the presence of the soul, or 
whether what it has is nature, and this is what forms an 



118 / Plotinus 

association with the body. The body which has soul and 
nature in it cannot be of the same kind as a lifeless thing; 
it must be like warmed air, not like illuminated air; it is 
the body of an animal or plant which has a sort of shadow 
of soul, and pain and the feeling of bodily pleasures are 
situated in the body qualified in this way: but the body's 
pain and this sort of pleasure result for us in dispassionate 
knowledge. When I say "for us," I am referring to the 
other soul. The qualified body does not belong to someone 
else, but is ours, and so we are concerned with it because 
it belongs to us. We are not it, nor are we clear of it; it 
depends upon and is attached to us. "We" means that 
which rules in us; the body is in a different way "ours," 
but ours all the same. So we are concerned with its pains 
and pleasures, more in proportion as we are weaker and 
do not separate ourselves, but consider the body the most 
honourable part of ourselves and the real man and, so to 
speak, sink ourselves in it. We must say that these sort of 
experiences of pain and pleasures do not belong to the 
soul at all, but to the qualified body and something inter- 
mediate and joint. For when something is one it is suffi- 
cient to itself; for example, what could body suffer if it was 
lifeless? Division would not affect it, but the unity in it. 
And soul by itself is not subject even to division, and when 
it is in this state [of separation] escapes everything. But 
when two things aspire to unity, since the unity which they 
have is an extraneous one, because their origin will not 
permit of their being really one, it is reasonable to expect 
that they will suffer pain. I do not mean "two" as if there 
were two bodies, for two bodies would have one and the 
same nature; but when one nature aspires to unite with an- 
other of a different kind, and the worse takes something 
from the better and cannot take it itself but only a trace 
of it, and so there come to be two things and one between 
what it is and what it cannot grasp, this makes difficulties 
for itself by acquiring a communion with the other which 
is hazardous and insecure, always borne from one extreme 
to the other. It is carried up and down, and as it comes 
down it proclaims its pain, as it goes up its longing for 
communion. 



Our Selves / 119 



I. 1. 10 



[When we speak of ourselves, we may mean by "we" 
either our souls alone or the joint entity made up of body 
and soul: the former is our true self.] 

But if we are the soul, and we undergo these experi- 
ences, then it would be the soul that undergoes these ex- 
periences, and again it will be the soul which does what we 
do. Yes, but we said that what belongs to both [body and 
soul] is part of our selves, especially when we have not 
yet been separated from body: for we say that we experi- 
ence what our body experiences. So "we" is used in two 
senses, either including the beast or referring to that which 
even in our present life transcends it. The beast is the 
body which has been given life. But the true man is differ- 
ent, clear of these experiences; he has the virtues which 
belong to the sphere of Nous and have their seat actually 
in the separate soul, separate and separable even while it 
is still here below. (For when it withdraws altogether, the 
lower soul which is illumined by it goes away too in its 
train.) But the virtues which result not from thought but 
from habit and training belong to that which is common to 
body and soul; for the vices belong to this, since envy and 
jealousy and emotional sympathy are located there. But 
which man does affection belong to? Some to the lower, 
some to the man within. 

II. 9. 2 

[There are three parts of our soul, one directed to the 
contemplation of Nous and the One, one concerned with 
body, and one intermediate; and our spiritual state depends 
on whether the intermediate part is attracted upwards or 
downwards.] 

One part of our soul is always directed to Nous and the 
Father, another is concerned with the things of this world, 
and there is another between them. For the soul is one 
nature in a number of powers, and sometimes the whole of 
it is in harmony with the best part of itself (which is a 
part of Real Being), but sometimes the worse part of it is 
drawn down and draws the middle part with it: for it is 



120 / Plotinus 

not lawful for the whole of it to be drawn down. This is its 
misfortune, not to remain in the noblest, where the soul 
remains which is not a part and at that stage we too are 
not a part of it * and grants to the whole of body to hold 
whatever it can hold of it, but abides itself untroubled, not 
thinking out its government or direction but setting things 
in order with a wonderful power by its contemplation of 
That which is before it. The more it is directed to that 
contemplation, the fairer and more powerful it is. It re- 
ceives from There and gives to what comes after it, always 
illuminated and illuminating. 

III. 1. 8 

fPlotinus has just rejected the absolute determinism of 
the Stoics. For him the individual soul is to some extent 
the free and responsible cause of its own actions. In its 
higher life, out of the body, it is altogether free, but in so 
far as it is involved with the body it is subject to the neces- 
sity which controls the visible universe. And the degree of 
its freedom or involvement depends very much on itself.] 

What other cause, then, is there which will intervene 
besides these and leave nothing uncaused, which will pre- 
serve order and sequence and allow us really to be some- 
thing, and will not do away with prophecy and divination? 
We must introduce soul into reality as another originative 
principle, not only the Soul of the All but the individual 
soul along with it as an important cause, to weave all 
things together; for the individual soul too has not come 
into being like the rest of things from seed-principles, 2 but 
is primary in its causal action. When it is without body it 
is in fullest control of itself and free and outside the uni- 
versal chain of causation: but when it is brought into body 
it is no longer altogether in control, as it forms part of an 
order with other members. Most of the sum of things in 
the circuit of the universe, among which it falls when it 
enters into this world, are directed by chance causes, so 
that some of its acts are caused by these other things, but 
sometimes it masters them and directs them according to 
its will. The better soul masters more, the worse less. The 
soul which surrenders at all to its union with the body is 



Our Selves / 121 

compelled to feel passions of desire or anger, and is de- 
pressed by poverty, made conceited by riches, or tyran- 
nical by power: but the other kind of soul, that which is 
good by nature, holds out in these very same circum- 
stances, and changes them rather than is changed by 
them, so that it alters some of them and conforms to 
others without vice or weakness. 

(c) Descent into the Visible World 
IV. 8. 1 

[Plotinus's own experience.] 

Often I have woken up out of the body to myself and 
have entered into myself, going out from all other things. 
I have seen a beauty wonderfully great and felt assurance 
that then most of all I belonged to the better part. I have 
lived to the full the best life and come to identity with the 
Divine. 1 Set firm in It I have come to That Supreme Ac- 
tuality, setting myself above all else in the realm of Nous. 
Then after that rest in the Divine, when I have come down 
from Nous to discursive reasoning, I am puzzled how I 
ever came down, and how my soul has come to be in the 
body when it is what it has shown itself to be by itself, 
even when it is in the body. 

IV. 3. 12-13 

[The descent of souls is not complete; their highest 
part, their Nous, does not come down. It is brought about 
by an overwhelming natural impulse, a desire pre-ordained 
by universal law for embodiment in the body which it has 
assigned to them.] 

The souls of men see their images as if in the mirror of 
Dionysus, and come down to that level with a leap from 
above: but even they are not cut off from their principle 
and their Nous. For they do not come down with their 
Nous: they have gone on ahead of it down to earth, but 
their tops are firmly set above in heaven. They have had 
to come down farther because their middle part is com- 
pelled to care for that to which they have gone on, which 
needs their care. . . . 



122 / Plotinus 

The inescapable rule of right [which governs their de- 
scent] is thus set in a natural principle which compels 
each to go in its proper order to that to which it individu- 
ally tends, the image of its original choice and disposition: 
each form of soul is close to that to which it has an in- 
ternal disposition: there is no need of anyone to send it or 
bring it into body at a particular time, or into this or that 
particular body: when its moment comes to it, it descends 
and enters where it must as if of its own accord. Each has 
its own time, and when it comes, like a herald summoning 
it, the soul comes down and goes into the appropriate 
body; the process is like a stirring and carrying away by 
magic powers and mighty attractions. It is like the way in 
which the ordered development of the individual living 
thing comes to its fulfilment, stirring and producing every- 
thing in its time sprouting of beard and horn, special im- 
pulses, new flowerings, the ordered growth of trees spring- 
ing up at their appointed time. 

The souls go neither of their own free will nor because 
they are sent; or at least their free will is not like deliberate 
choice but the leap of natural impulse, passionate natural 
desire of sexual union or an unreasoned stirring to noble 
deeds. Each special kind has its special destiny and mo- 
ment, one now and one at another time. Nous which is be- 
fore the universe has its destiny too, to remain There in 
alJ its greatness and send out: and the individual, which is 
subordinated to the universal, is sent according to law. 
For the universal bears heavily upon the particular, and 
the law does not derive from outside the strength for its 
accomplishment, but is given in those who are to be sub- 
ject to it, and they bear it about with them. If the time 
comes, what it wills to happen is brought about by the be- 
ings themselves in whom it is present; they accomplish it 
themselves because they bear it about and it is strong by 
its firm establishment in them: it makes itself a sort of 
weight in them and brings about a longing, a birth-pang of 
desire to come there where the law within them tells them 
to come. 



Our Selves / 123 



IV. 8. 5 



[Solution of the difficulty caused by the apparent incon- 
sistency in the teaching of Plato, who represents the de- 
scent of the soul sometimes as a voluntary fall and some- 
times as caused by universal law and necessary for the 
good of the universe. Plotinus explains that both accounts 
are true, and the descent of the soul is both necessary and 
voluntary.] 

So there is no inconsistency between the sowing to birth 
and the coming down for the perfection of the whole, and 
justice and the Cave, and necessity and free choice, if 
necessity includes free choice and being in the body, which 
is evil: nor is the teaching of Empedocles inconsistent with 
this, the flight from God and the wandering and the sin 
which is justly punished, nor that of Heraclitus, the finding 
refreshment in the flight, 2 nor altogether the willing de- 
scent which is also unwilling. For everything which goes 
to the worse does so unwillingly, yet, if it goes of its own 
motion, when it suffers that worse fate it is said to be 
justly punished for what it has done. When, however, it 
must act and suffer this way by an everlasting law of its 
nature, and its descent from That which is above it is to 
meet the approach and help the need of something else, if 
anyone said that a god sent it down, he would not be out 
of accord with the truth or with himself. For final results 
are referred to the principle from which they spring, even 
if there are many intervening stages. And since the "sin of 
the soul" can refer to two things, either to the cause of the 
descent or to doing evil when the soul has arrived here be- 
low, [the punishment of] the first is the very experience 
of descent, and of the lesser degree of the second the swift 
entrance into other bodies according to the judgment 
passed on its deserts the word "judgment" indicates what 
happens by divine decree but the excessive kind of 
wickedness is judged to deserve greater punishment in 
charge of chastising spirits. 

So then the soul, though it is divine and comes from 
above, enters into body and, though it is a god of the low- 
est ranks, comes to this world by a spontaneous inclina- 



124 / Plotinus 

tion, its own power and the setting in order of what comes 
after it being the cause of its descent. If it escapes quickly 
it takes no harm by acquiring a knowledge of evil and 
coming to know the nature of wickedness, and manifesting 
its powers, making apparent works and activities which if 
they had remained quiescent in the spiritual world would 
have been of no use because they would never have come 
into actuality; and the soul itself would not have known 
the powers it had if they had not come out and been re- 
vealed. Actuality everywhere reveals completely hidden 
potency, in a way obliterated and non-existent because it 
does not yet truly exist. As things are, everyone wonders 
at what is within because of the varied splendour of the 
outside and admires the greatness of soul because of these 
fine things which it does. 

VI. 4. 16 

[The descent of soul into body does not mean that a 
soul literally moves down into a body, but that a body 
comes to share in the life of a soul. This is an evil for the 
soul, because it means that its activity is no longer uni- 
versal, but is confined to the sphere of its particular body: 
in the spiritual world a soul is still an individual, but with 
its individuality completely absorbed in universal activity.] 

Since the participation [of body] in the nature of soul 
does not mean that soul departs from itself and comes to 
this world, but that bodily nature comes to be in soul and 
participates in it, it is obvious that the "coming" of which 
the ancient philosophers speak must refer to the presence 
there of bodily nature and its sharing in life and soul; 
"coming" is not at all to be taken in the sense of move- 
ment from one place to another; it means this kind of 
communion of body and soul, whatever its precise nature. 
So "descent" means coming to be in body, in the sense in 
which we speak of soul's being in body, that is, by giving 
body something of itself, not by coming to belong to it; 
and "departure" means that body has no kind of share in 
it. There is an order in the way in which the parts of the 
visible universe share in soul, and soul, since it occupies 
the lowest place in the intelligible world, often gives some- 



Our Selves / 125 

thing of itself to body because it is closer to it by its power 
and less widely separated from it by the law which governs 
its nature. But this communion with body is an evil, and 
its deliverance from body a good. Why? Because, even if 
it does not belong to a particular body, when it is de- 
scribed as the soul of a particular body it has in some way 
become partial instead of universal. Its activity, though it 
still belongs to the whole, is no longer directed to the 
whole: it is as if someone who possessed a complete sci- 
ence concentrated his activity on one particular subject of 
investigation; though the good for him lies not in one par- 
ticular part of his science but in the whole science which 
he possesses. So this soul, which belongs to the whole in- 
telligible world and conceals its being a part in the whole, 
leaps out, one might say, from the whole to a part, and 
confines its activity to that part, as if fire which could burn 
everything was compelled to burn some small thing, al- 
though keeping all its power of burning. When the soul is 
altogether separate from body, it is individual without be- 
ing individual, but when it becomes distinct from Uni- 
versal Soul, not by movement in place but by becoming an 
individual in its activity, it is a part, not universal yet it 
is still universal in a different way: but when it is not in 
charge of a particular body it is altogether universal, and 
a part then only potentially. 



G 
The Return of the Soul 

(a) The First Stages 
I. 6. 7-8 

[The first stage in rising to the vision of the Good, the 
true Beauty, our Father, is to turn from the outward senses 
to the inner vision of the mind.] 

Here the greatest, the ultimate contest is set before our 
souls; all our toil and trouble is for this, not to be left 
without a share in the best of visions. The man who at- 
tains this is blessed in seeing that blessed sight, and he who 
fails to attain it has failed utterly. A man has not failed if 
he fails to win beauty of colours or bodies, or power or 
office or kingship even, if he fails to win this and only this. 
For this he should give up the attainment of kingship and 
rule over all earth and sea and sky, if only by leaving and 
overlooking them he can turn to That and see. 

But how shall we find the way? What method can we 
devise? How can one see the inconceivable Beauty Which 
stays within hi the holy sanctuary and does not come out 
where the profane may see It? Let him who can follow 
and come within, and leave outside the sight of his eyes 
and not turn back to the bodily splendours which he saw 
before. When he sees the beauty in bodies he must not run 
after them; we must know that they are images, traces, 
shadows, and hurry away to That which they image. For if 
a man runs to the image and wants to seize it as if it was 
the reality (like a beautiful reflection playing on the water, 
which some story somewhere, I think, said riddlingly a 
man wanted to catch and sank down into the stream and 
disappeared) then this man who clings to beautiful bodies 
and will not let them go, will, like the man in the story, but 
in soul, not in body, sink down into the dark depths where 
Nous has no delight, and stay blind in Hades, consorting 

126 



The Return of the Soul / 127 

with shadows there and here. This would be truer advice, 
"Let us fly to our dear country." * Where then is our way 
of escape? How shall we put out to sea? (Odysseus, I 
think, speaks symbolically when he says he must fly from 
the witch Circe, or Calypso, and is not content to stay 
though he has delights of the eyes and lives among much 
beauty of sense.) Our country from which we came is 
There, our Father is There. How shall we travel to it, 
where is our way of escape? We cannot get there on foot; 
for our feet only carry us everywhere in this world, from 
one country to another. You must not get ready a car- 
riage, either, or a boat. Let all these things go, and do not 
look. Shut your eyes and change to and wake ano-l/er way 
of seeing, which everyone has but few use. 

I. 3. 1-3 

[The three types of men most fitted for the ascent and 
their different ways of rising to the level of Nous.] 

First of all we must define the characteristics of these 
men: we will begin by describing the nature of the musi- 
cian. We must consider him as easily moved and excited 
by beauty, but not quite capable of being moved by ab- 
solute beauty; he is, however, quick to respond to its 
images when he comes upon them, and just as nervous 
people react readily to noises, so does he to articulate 
sounds and the beauty in them; and he always avoids what 
is inharmonious and not a unity in songs and verses and 
seeks eagerly after what is rhythmical and shapely. So in 
leading him on these sounds and rhythms and forms per- 
ceived by the senses must be made the starting-point. He 
must be led and taught to make abstraction of the ma- 
terial element in them and come to the principles from 
which their proportions and ordering forces derive and to 
the beauty which is in these principles, and learn that this 
was what excited him, the intelligible harmony and the 
beauty in it, and beauty universal, not just a particular 
beauty, and he must have the doctrines of philosophy im- 
planted in him; by these he must be brought to firm confi- 
dence in what he possesses without knowing it. We shall 
explain later what these doctrines are. 



128 / Plotinus 

The lover (into whom the musician may turn, and then 
either stay at that stage or go on farther), has a kind of 
memory of beauty. But he cannot grasp it in its separate- 
ness, but he is overwhelmingly amazed and excited by 
visible beauties. So he must be taught not to cling round 
one body and be excited by that, but must be led by the 
course of reasoning to consider all bodies and shown the 
beauty that is the same in all of them, and that it is some- 
thing other than the bodies and must be said to come from 
elsewhere, and that it is better manifested in other things, 
by showing him, for instance, the beauty of ways of life 
and of laws this will accustom him to loveliness in things 
which are not bodies and that there is beauty in arts and 
sciences and virtues. 2 Then all these beauties must be re- 
duced to unity, and he must be shown their origin. But 
from virtues he can at once ascend to Nous, to Being: and 
There he must go the higher way. 

The philosopher is naturally ready to respond and 
"winged," 8 we may say, and in no need of separation like 
the others. He has begun to move to the higher world, and 
is only at a loss for someone to show him the way. So he 
must be shown and set free, with his own good will, he 
who has long been free by nature. He must be given math- 
ematical studies to train him in philosophical thought and 
accustom him to firm confidence in the existence of the 
immaterial he will take to them easily, being naturally 
disposed to learning: he is by nature virtuous, and must 
be brought to perfect his virtue, and after his mathematical 
studies instructed in dialectic, and made a complete di- 
alectician. 

I. 3. 4-5 

[A description of the Platonic method of dialectic, fol- 
lowed by an insistence that it is not a mere science of 
propositions, but brings the mind into immediate contact 
with the highest realities.] 

What then is dialectic, which the other kinds of men as 
well as philosophers must be given? It is the science which 
can speak about everything in a reasoned and orderly way, 



The Return of the Soul / 129 

and say what it is and how it differs from other things and 
what it has in common with them; in what class each thing 
is and where it stands in that class, and if it really is what 
it is, and how many really existing things there are, and 
again how many non-existing things, different from real 
beings. It discusses good and not good, and the things that 
are classed under good and its opposite, and what is the 
eternal and what not eternal, with certain knowledge about 
everything and not mere opinion. It stops wandering about 
the world of sense and settles down in the world of Nous, 
and there it occupies itself, casting off falsehood and feeding 
the soul in what Plato calls "the plain of truth," using his 
method of division to distinguish the Forms, and tr. deter- 
mine the essential nature of each thing, and to find the 
primary kinds, and weaving together by the Intellect all 
that issues from these primary kinds, till it has traversed 
the whole intelligible world; then it resolves again the 
structure of that world into its parts, and comes back to 
its starting-point, and busies itself no more, but contem- 
plates, having arrived at unity. It leaves what is called 
logical activity, 4 about premises and syllogisms, to another 
art, as it might leave knowing how to write. Some of the 
natter of logic it considers necessary, as a preliminary, but 
t makes itself the judge of this, as of everything else, and 
:onsiders some of it useful and some superfluous, and be- 
onging to the discipline which wants it. 

But from where does this science derive its principles? 
Vous gives clear principles to any soul which can receive 
hem: and then it combines and interweaves and distin- 
guishes their consequences, till it arrives at perfect intelli- 
gence. For, Plato says, dialectic is "the purest part of in- 
elligence and wisdom." So, since it is the most valuable 
)f our mental abilities, it must be concerned with real be- 
ng and what is most valuable; as wisdom it is concerned 
vith real being, as intelligence with That which is beyond 
)eing. But surely philosophy is the most valuable thing? 
\re dialectic and philosophy the same? It is the valuable 
)art of philosophy. For it must not be thought to be a tool 
he philosopher uses. It is not just bare theories and rules; 



130 / Plotinus 

it deals with things and has real beings as a kind of ma- 
terial for its activity; it approaches them methodically and 
possesses real things along with its theories. 

I. 2. 2-3 

[The two kinds of virtue, "civic" and "purifying."] 
The civic virtues, which we mentioned above, do genu- 
inely set us in order and make us better by giving limit and 
measure to our desires, and putting measure into all our 
experience; and they abolish false opinions, by what is al- 
together better and by the fact of limitation, and by the 
exclusion of the unlimited and indefinite and the existence 
of the measured; and they are themselves limited and 
clearly defined. And by acting as a measure which forms 
the matter of the soul, they are made like the measure 
There and have a trace in them of the Best There. That 
which is altogether unmeasured is matter, and so alto- 
gether unlike: but in so far as it participates in form it be- 
comes like That Good, Which is formless. Things which 
are near participate more. Soul is near and more akin to It 
than body; so it participates more, to the point of deceiv- 
ing us into imagining that it is a god, and that all divinity 
is comprised in this likeness. 

But since this mode of likeness indicates another, of a 
greater degree of virtue, we must speak of that other. In 
this discussion the real nature of civic virtue will become 
clear, and we shall also understand what is the virtue 
which is greater than it in its real nature, and that it is 
different from civic vitue. Plato, when he speaks of "like- 
ness" as a "flight to God" 5 from existence here below, and 
does not call the virtues which come into play in civic life 
just "virtues," but adds the qualification "civic," and else- 
where calls all the virtues "purifications," makes clear that 
he postulates two kinds of virtues and does not regard the 
civic ones as producing likeness. What then do we mean 
when we call these other virtues "purifications," and how 
are we made really like by being purified? Since the soul 
is evil when it is thoroughly mixed with the body 6 and 
shares its experiences and has all the same opinions, it will 
be good and possess virtue when it no longer has the same 



The Return of the Soul / 131 

opinions but acts alone this is intelligence and wisdom 
and does not share the body's experiences this is temper- 
ance and is not afraid of departing from the body this 
is courage and is ruled by reason and Nous, without op- 
position and this is justice. One would not be wrong in 
calling this state of the soul likeness to God, in which its 
activity is intellectual, and it is free in this way from bodily 
affections. For the Divine too is pure, and its activity is of 
such a kind that that which imitates it has wisdom. Well, 
then, why is the Divine itself not in this state? It has no 
states at all; states belong to the soul. The soul's intellectual 
activity is different: some of the realities There it thinks 
differently, and some it docs not think at all. Another 
question then: is "intellectual activity" just a common 
term covering two different things? Not at all It is used 
primarily of the Divine, and secondarily of that which de- 
rives from it. As the spoken word (logos) is an imitation 
of that in the soul, so the word in the soul is an imitation 
of that in something else: as the uttered word, then, is 
broken up into parts as compared with that in the soul, so 
is that in the soul as compared with that before, which it 
interprets. And virtue belongs to the soul, but not to Nous 
or That which is beyond it. 

I. 4. 14 

[Man's well-being is an affair of the soul, not of soul 
and body together (as against Aristotle) : too much bodily 
well-being endangers the well-being of soul, and the wise 
man will not want it, and if he has it will seek to re- 
duce it.] 

Man, and especially the good man, is not the composite 
of soul and body; separation from the body and despising 
of its so-called goods make this plain. It is absurd to 
maintain that well-being extends only as far as the living 
body, since well-being is the good life, which is concerned 
with soul and is an activity of soul, and not of all of it 
for it is not an activity of the growth-soul, which would 
bring it into connexion with body. This state of well-being 
is certainly not the body's size or health, nor again does 
it consist in the excellence of the senses, for too much of 



132 / Plotinus 

these advantages is liable to weigh man down and bring 
him to their level. There must be a sort of counterpoise on 
the other side, towards the best, to reduce the body and 
make it worse, so that it may be made clear that the real 
man is other than his outward parts. The man who belongs 
to this world may be handsome and tall and rich and the 
ruler of all mankind (since he is essentially of this region), 
and we ought not to envy him since he is cheated by things 
like these. The wise man will perhaps not have them at 
all, and if he has them will himself reduce them, if he 
cares for his tine self. He will reduce and gradually ex- 
tinguish his bodily advantages by neglect, and will put 
away authority and office. He will take care of his bodily 
health, but will not wish to be altogether without experi- 
ence of illness, and still less of pain. If these do not come 
to him when he is young he will want to learn them, but 
when he is old he will not want either pains or pleasures 
to hinder him, or any earthly thing, pleasant or the re- 
verse, so that he may not have to consider the body. When 
he finds himself in pain he will oppose to it the power 
which he has been given for the purpose; he will find no 
help to his well-being in pleasure and health and freedom 
from pain and trouble, nor will their opposites take it 
away or diminish it. For if one thing adds nothing to a 
state, how can its opposite take anything away? 

I. 4. 16 

[The good man's independence of and care for his body 
and bodily life.] 

If anyone does not set the good man up on high in this 
world of Nous, but brings him down to chance events and 
fears their happening to him, he is not keeping his mind 
on the good man as we consider he must be, but assuming 
an ordinary man, a mixture of good and bad, and assign- 
ing to him a life which is also a mixture of good and bad 
and of a kind which cannot easily occur. Even if a person 
of this sort did exist, he would not be worth calling happy; 
he would have no greatness in him, either of the dignity of 
wisdom or the purity of good. The common life of body 
and soul cannot possibly be the life of well-being. Plato 



The Return of the Soul / 133 

was right in maintaining that the man who intends to be 
wise and happy must take his good from There, from 
above, and look to that Good and be made like it and 
live by it. He must hold on to this only as his goal, and 
change his other circumstances as he changes his dwell- 
ing-place, not because he derives any advantage in the 
point of well-being from one dwelling-place or another, 
but considering how the rest of his environment will be 
affected if he lives here or there. He must give to this 
bodily life as much as it needs and he can, but he is him- 
self other than it and free to abandon it, and he will aban- 
don it in nature's good time, and always plans for it with 
independent authority. So some of his activities will tend 
towards well-being; others will not be directed to ihe goal 
and will really not belong to him but to that which is 
joined to him, which he will care for and bear with as 
much as he can, like a musician with his lyre, as long as 
he can use it; if he cannot use it he will change to another, 
or give up using the lyre and abandon the activities di- 
rected to it. Then he will have something else to do which 
does not need the lyre, and will let it lie unregarded be- 
side him while he sings without an instrument. Yet the in- 
strument was not given to him at the beginning without 
good reason. He has used it often up till now. 

II. 9. 16 

[To despise the visible universe and to be insensitive to 
its beauty is proof that one has no real knowledge of the 
intelligible universe, the realm of Nous.] 

No intelligent man would even inquire about this [about 
whether the visible universe is good, intelligent, and provi- 
dentially directed], but only someone who is blind, with- 
out perception or intelligence and far from the sight of 
the universe of Nous, since he does not even see this uni- 
verse here. For how could there be a musician who sees 
the melody in the realm of Nous and is not stirred when he 
hears the melody of sensible sounds? Or how could there 
be anyone skilled in geometry and the science of numbers 
who is not pleased when he sees right relation, proportion, 
and order with his bodily eyes? Of course, people do not 



134 / Plotinus 

look at the same things in the same way; some, when they 
are looking at pictures, see the works of art with their 
eyes but recognize in them an imitation in the world of 
sense of the reality existing in Nous, and are excited by it 
and come to a recollection of the truth: this is the ex- 
perience from which passionate loves arise. But if some- 
one who sees beauty excellently represented in a face is 
carried to that higher world, will anyone be so sluggish in 
mind and so immovable that, when he sees all the beauties 
of the world of sense, all its good proportion and the 
mighty excellence of its order, and the splendour of form 
which the stars, for all their remoteness, make manifest, 
he will not be seized with reverence and think, "What 
wonders, and from what a source"? If he does not, he 
neither understands the world of sense nor sees that 
higher world. 

II. 9. 18 

[To revile the visible universe and deny its goodness, 
and to refuse to admit kinship with the cosmic Soul and 
the souls of the stars, is no way to attain spiritual freedom, 
which we gain by practising virtue while remaining in the 
body and fully accepting our embodied condition as long 
as it endures.] 

But perhaps they [the Gnostics] will maintain that their 
teaching makes men escape right away from the body in 
their hatred of it, but ours holds the soul down to it. This 
is like two people living in the same fine house, one of 
whom criticizes the building and the architect but stays 
there all the same; the other does not criticize, but says 
the architect has built it with the utmost skill, and waits 
for the time to come when he will go away and not need 
a house any longer. The first might think he was wiser and 
readier to depart, because he knows how to say that the 
walls are built of soulless stones and timber and are far 
inferior to the true dwelling-place, and does not know that 
he is only distinguished by not being able to bear what he 
must unless he is just making a pretence of discontent, 
and has a secret affection for the beauty of the stones. As 
long as we have bodies we must stay in our houses, which 



The Return of the Soul / 135 

have been built for us by a good sister soul which has 
great power to work without any toil or trouble. Or do 
these people think it right to call the lowest of men 
brothers, but refuse, in their Sibylline ravings, 1 to call the 
sun and the stars of heaven brothers and the Soul of the 
universe sister? It is not right to bind oneself in brother- 
hood to the bad, but only to those who have become good 
and are not bodies, but souls in bodies, able to live in 
them in such a way that they are very close to the dwell- 
ing of the Soul of the All in the body of the universe. This 
means no clashing with or paying attention to the pleas- 
ures and sights which rush upon us from outside, and not 
being disturbed by any hardship. The Soul of ihe All is 
not troubled; it has nothing that can trouble it. We, while 
we are here, can repel our troubles by virtue and make 
some of them become less by greatness of mind and others 
not even troubles because of our strength. As we draw 
near to the completely untroubled state we can imitate the 
Soul of the universe and the souls of the stars and, coming 
to a close likeness to them, hasten on to the same goal and 
have the same objects of contemplation, being ourselves, 
too, well prepared for them by nature and training (but 
they have their contemplation from the beginning). Even 
if the Gnostics do say that they alone can contemplate, 
that does not make them any more contemplative, nor 
does it if they claim to go out of the universe when they 
die while the stars do not, but adorn heaven for ever. They 
say this through complete lack of understanding of what 
"being outside" really means, and how '"Universal Soul 
governs all that is soulless." So one can be without affec- 
tion for the body and pure, and despise death, and know 
what is better and pursue it, and not show ill-feeling 
against others who can and do always pursue it, as if 
they did not: there is no need to be like the people who 
think the stars do not move because their senses tell them 
they stand still. In the same way these people do not 
think that the natures of the stars see what is outside 
the material universe because they do not see that their 
souls come from outside. 



136 / Plotinus 



1.6.2 



[Beauty in material things is the result of the action on 
them of Form and logos, which unifies, and so makes 
beautiful, things of diverse parts and informs natural uni- 
ties as a whole.] 

We maintain that the things in this world are beautiful 
by participating in Form; for every shapeless thing which 
is naturally capable of receiving shape and form is ugly 
and outside the divine logos as long as it has no share in 
logos and form. This is absolute ugliness. But a thing is 
also ugly when it is not completely dominated by shape 
and logos, since its matter has not submitted to be com- 
pletely shaped according to the form. The form, then, ap- 
proaches and composes that which is to come into being 
from many parts into a single ordered whole; it brings it 
into a completed unity and makes it one by agreement of 
its parts; for since it is one itself that which is shaped by 
it must also be one as far as a thing can be which is com- 
posed of many parts. So beauty rests upon the material 
thing when it has been brought into unity, and gives itself 
to parts and wholes alike. When it comes upon something 
that is one and composed of like parts it gives the same 
gift to the whole; as sometimes art gives beauty to a whole 
house with its parts, and sometimes nature gives beauty 
to a single stone. So then the beautiful body comes into 
being by sharing in a logos which comes from the divine 
Forms. 

V. 8. 1 

[The artist imitates the beauty of the world of Nous, to 
which he has access directly, and not necessarily through 
the medium of nature.] 

Since we maintain that the man who has attained to 
contemplation of the beauty of the world of Nous, and 
understood the beauty of the true Nous, will be able also 
to bring into his mind its Father, Who is beyond Nous, let 
us try to see and explain to ourselves how we can say 
things like this, how it is possible for anyone to contem- 
plate the beauty of Nous and of that higher world. Let 



The Return of the Soul / 137 

us suppose, if you like, a couple of great lumps of stone 
lying side by side, one shapeless and untouched by art, the 
other which has been already mastered by art and turned 
into a statue of a god or of a man, of a Grace or one of 
the Muses if of a god, and if of a man not just of any man 
but of one whom art has made up out of every sort of 
beauty. The stone which has been brought to beauty of 
form by art will appear beautiful not because it is a stone 
(for then the other would be just as beautiful) but as a 
result of the form which art has put into it. Now the 
material did not have this form: it was in the man who 
thought it before it came into the stone. It was in the 
workman, not in so far as he had hands and eyes but be- 
cause he had some art in him. So this beauty was in the 
art, and it was far better there; for the beautv in the art 
did not come into the stone: it stays in the art, and an- 
other comes from it into the stone which is derived from it 
and less than it. And even this does not stay pure and as 
it wants to be in the stone, but is only there as far as the 
stone has submitted to the art. If art makes its work like 
what it is and has (and it makes it beautiful according to 
the form of what it is making) it is itself more, and more 
truly, beautiful since it has the beauty of art which is 
greater and more beautiful than anything in the external 
object. For a thing is weaker than that which abides in 
unity in proportion as it expands in its advance towards 
matter. Everything which is extended departs from itself; 
if it is bodily strength it grows less strong, if heat, less hot, 
if power in general, less powerful, if beauty, less beautiful. 
Every original maker must be in itself stronger than that 
which it makes. It is not lack of music which makes a 
man musical, but music; and music in the world of sense 
is made by the music prior to that world. 

But if anyone despises the arts because they produce 
their works by imitating nature, we must tell him, first, 
that natural things are imitations too: and then he must 
know that the arts do not simply imitate what they see; 
they go back to the logoi from which nature derives; and 
also that they do a great deal by themselves: since they 
possess beauty they make up what is defective in things. 



138 / Plotinus 

Phidias did not make his Zeus from any model perceived 
by the senses; he understood what Zeus would look like 
if he wanted to make himself visible. 8 

VI. 7. 33 

[The pursuit of beauty leads the soul eventually beyond 
form, shape, and proportion to the Formless Source of 
form, the One or Good.] 

The Primary, the First, is without form; beauty There is 
the nature of good in Nous. The experience of lovers is 
evidence of this; as long as the lover is on the level of the 
impression made on his senses, he is not yet in love. It is 
only when he produces from this, by his own inward 
action, an impression which is not on his senses but in his 
undivided soul, that love is born. Then he seeks to look 
at the loved object in order to freshen that impression in 
his soul when it begins to fade. But if he understood that 
he must go on to that which has less form, it is that 
which he would desire. His first experience was love of 
a great light from a dim gleam of it. For shape is a trace 
of Something without shape, which produces shape, not 
shape It. It produces shape when matter comes to It. 
Matter is necessarily farthest away from It, since it has 
no shape derived from itself, not even of the lowest kind. 
So then, if it is not matter that is lovable, but the being 
which is informed by form, and the form in matter conies 
from soul, and soul is more form and more lovable, and 
Nous is more form than soul and more lovable still, we 
must assume that the Primary Nature of beauty is without 
form. 

(fo) The Return to Nous 
V. 8. 11 

[The return to Nous is a return to our true selves; in 
them we are so completely united to Nous 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, 1 brings his contemplation to the 
point of vision, he presents himself to his own mind and 



The Return of the Soul / 139 

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 (he 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 con- 
templation to another who sees him as he comes from the 
world of Nous 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 differ- 
ent 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. Ill- 
ness strikes our consciousness harder, but the quiet com- 
panionship 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 our- 
selves best when we have made our sejf-knowledge one 
with ourselves. There, then, when our knowledge is most 
perfectly conformed to Nous, we think we are ignorant 



140 / Plotinus 

because we are waiting for the experience of sense-per- 
ception, 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. 

VI. 5. 12 

[The All, Real Being, or Nous, is infinite, not spatially, 
but because it is entirely without quantity, pure spirit. We, 
in our higher selves, are truly that All, but we do not un- 
derstand it and so effectively become it till we radically 
simplify ourselves and turn away from all considerations 
of space and quantity and from our lower selves and their 
concerns in the material world.] 

How then is it present? As one life; for life in a living 
thing does not only extend to a particular point beyond 
which it cannot advance to the whole, but is everywhere. 
If anyone again wants to know how, he should remember 
its power; it is not just so much, but if you go on dividing 
it mentally to infinity it has always the same power, funda- 
mentally infinite; for it has no matter in itself to make it 
diminish along with the size of the body's bulk. If then you 
understand its ever-ilowing spring of infinity, its nature, 
unwearying and unwearing and nowhere failing, boiling 
over with life in itself, wherever you look or on whatever 
you fix your gaze, you will not find it there. In fact, you 
will have the opposite experience; you will not be able to 
pass it and go beyond it nor bring it to a stop at a degree 
of smallness where it has nothing more to give because it 
has so diminished: but if you are able to go along with it, 
or, better, are in the All, you will seek nothing more; or 
else you will give up and turn aside to something else and 
fall, not seeing it when it is present because you are look- 
ing at something else. But if you are not looking for any- 
thing any more, how will you experience it? Because you 
have come to the All, and not stayed in a part of it, and 



The Return of the Soul / 141 

have not said even about yourself, "I am just so much." 
By rejecting the "so much" you have become all yet you 
were all before; but because something else other than the 
All added itself to you, you became less by the addition; 
for the addition did not come from real being (you can- 
not add anything to that) but from that which is not. 
When you have become a particular person by the addi- 
tion of non-being you are not all till you reject the non- 
being. You will increase yourself then by rejecting the 
rest, and by that rejection the All is with you. While you 
are with other things the All does not appear; it does not 
come in order to be present but you go away when it is 
absent. But you do not really go away from it (for it is 
there); you do not go anywhere, but remain present to it 
and turn your back on it. So the other gods too often ap- 
pear to one when many are present, because only that one 
can see them. These are the gods who "in many forms 
travel through our cities," 2 but to that god the cities turn, 
and all the earth and sky; everywhere they abide with 
him and in him and hold from him being and the true 
beings, down to soul and life, which depend upon him and 
move to unity in his infinity without size. 

(c) The Ascent to Union with the One 
V. 3, 17 

[The One transcends even Nous, and our soul is not 
satisfied till it reaches It; the attainment described as an 
illumination.] 

What then is better than this wisest life, without fault 
or mistake, and than Nous which contains everything, than 
universal life and universal Nous? If we say, "That which 
made them," how did it make them? If nothing better ap- 
pears, our train of thought will not go on to something 
else, but will stop at Nous. But there are many reasons 
for going higher, particularly the fact that the self-suffi- 
ciency of Nous which results from its being composed of 
all things is something which comes to it from outside; 
each of the things of which it is composed is obviously 



142 / Plotinus 

insufficient; and because each of them participates in the 
same One, Nous too participates in One and is not the 
One Itself. What then is That in which it participates, 
Which makes it exist and all things along with it? If It 
makes each individual thing exist, and it is by the presence 
of the One that the multitude of individual things in Nous, 
and Nous itself, is self-sufficient, it is clear that It, since 
It is the Cause of being and self-sufficiency, is not being 
but beyond it and beyond self-sufficiency. 

Is that enough? Can we end the discussion by saying 
this? No, my soul is still in even stronger labour; perhaps 
she has still something which she must bring forth; she 
is filled with birth-pangs in her eager longing for the One. 
But we must sing another charm to her, if we can find one 
anywhere to allay her pangs. Perhaps there might be one 
in what we have said already, if we sang it over and over 
again. What other new charm can we find? The soul runs 
over all truths, and all the same shuns the truths we know 
if someone tries to express them in words and discursive 
thought: for discursive thought, in order to express any- 
thing, has to consider one thing after another; this is the 
method of description; but how can one describe the Ab- 
solutely Simple? It is enough if the intellect comes into 
contact with It: but when it has done so, while the con- 
tact lasts it is absolutely impossible, nor has it time, to 
speak; reasoning about It comes afterwards. One must 
believe one has seen, when the soul suddenly takes light; 
for this light is from Him, and He is it. We must think 
that He is present, when, like another god whom some- 
one called to his house, He comes and brings light to us; 
for if He had not come, He would not have brought the 
light. So the soul which does not see Him is without light: 
but when it is enlightened it has what it sought, and this is 
the soul's true end, to touch that Light and see It by It- 
self, not by another light, by Itself, Which gives it sight 
as well. It must see That Light by which it is enlightened; 
for we do not see the sun by another light than his own. 
How then can this happen? Take away everything! 



The Return of the Soul / 143 

VI. 7. 34-36 

[The happy state of the soul which enjoys the vision of 
the Good; how Nous, in itself and in the soul, transcends 
its normal knowing to reach that vision.] 

We shall no longer be surprised if we find that the 
Object which causes these tremendous longings is alto- 
gether free from even intelligible shape; for the soul too, 
when it conceives an intense desire for It, puts away all 
the shape it has and anything intelligible there is in it. For 
no one who possesses anything else and is actively con- 
cerned with it can see the Good or be conformed to Him. 
The soul must not keep by it good or evil or anything else, 
that it may alone receive Him, the Only One. When UK? 
soul has good fortune with Him and He comes to it, or 
rather when His presence becomes manifest, when it turns 
away from the things present to it and prepares itself, 
making itself as beautiful as possible, and comes to like- 
ness with Him (those who practise this preparation and 
adorning know clearly what they are); then it sees Him 
suddenly appearing in itself (for there is nothing between, 
nor are they still two, but both are one; while He is 
present, you could not distinguish them; lovers and those 
they love here imitate this state in their longing to unite); 
it is not conscious of being in its body any more, nor does 
it call itself anything else, man or living being, or being, 
or all; to contemplate these things does not suit its present 
state; it has no time for them and does not want them; it 
seeks the Good and meets It when It is present and looks 
at It instead of itself; and it has no time to sec who it is 
who looks. There it would not exchange anything in the 
world for This, not even if you gave it the mastery over 
the whole heaven, since there is nothing better, no greater 
good; for it cannot go higher, and everything else, how- 
ever exalted, only belongs to it when it comes down. So 
then it can judge rightly and know that This is what it 
desired, and say with certainty that nothing is better than 
This; for there is no deceit There; where could it find 
anything truer than the Truth? It is That which it speaks 



144 / Plotinus 

of, and it speaks of It afterwards, silently and happily and 
without making any mistake about its happiness. It does 
not speak when its bodily senses are tickled but when it 
becomes again That which it was before, when it was 
happy. 1 As for all the other things in which it took delight 
before, position, power, wealth, beauty, knowledge, it 
despises them all and says so, and it would not say so if 
it had not found better things than these. It is not afraid 
of any misfortune while it is with This and while it has the 
full vision; if everything else belonging to it is destroyed, 
it is with its full approval, so that it may be only with 
This; to so great happiness has it attained. 

It is so disposed then that it thinks little of the activity 
of Nous, which it welcomed at other times, because the 
activity of Nous is a kind of movement, and it does not 
want to move; for it says that He Whom it sees does not 
move either. All the same, it does become Nous and con- 
templates by being intellectualized and entering into the 
intelligible region; when it has entered there and is sur- 
rounded by the intelligible it thinks; but when it sees Him 
it at once puts away everything. It is as if someone went 
into a richly decorated house and looked at and admired 
all the beauties of its interior, before he saw the master of 
the house; but when he saw him, not the same kind of 
thing as a statue but requiring real contemplation, he 
would abandon the decorations and look only at him in 
future; and then, looking at him and not taking his eyes 
off him, by the continuity of his gaze he would no longer 
see a sight but blend his vision with its object, so that what 
he saw before became sight in him, and he forgot all other 
objects. The image would give a better comparison if it 
was not a man who presented himself to the visitor con- 
templating the beauties of the house, but a god, and one 
who did not appear to the eyes but filled the soul of the 
beholder. 

Nous has one power for thinking, by which it looks at 
its own contents, and one by which it sees That Which is 
above it by a kind of intuitive reception, by which it first 
simply saw and afterwards, as it saw, acquired intellect, 
and is one. The first is the contemplation of Nous in its 



The Return of the Soul / 145 

right mind, the second that of Nous in love. When it goes 
out of its mind, being drunk with the nectar, it falls hi love 
and is simplified into a happy fullness; and drunkenness 
like this is better for it than sobriety. But is its vision 
partial, now of one thing and now of another? No; the 
course of the exposition presents these visions as [succes- 
sive] happenings, but Nous always has thought and al- 
ways has this state which is not thought but looking at 
Him in a different way. 2 In seeing Him it possesses the 
things which it produces and is conscious at the same time 
both of their production and their presence within it. See- 
ing them is what is called thinking, but it sees Him at the 
same time by the power which makes it able to thins:. 

The soul sees Him by a kind of blurring together the 
Nous abiding in it and making it disappear, or rather its 
Nous sees first, and the contemplation passes to it and the 
two become one. The Good is spread out upon them and 
united with the combination of both, and runs over the 
two and rests upon them, uniting them and giving them a 
blessed sense and sight; It raises them so high that they 
are not in place, nor in anything else, though they are 
things whose nature is to be one in another; for He is not 
anywhere; the intelligible place is in Him, and He is not in 
any other. So the soul does not move then, because the 
Good does not; and it is not soul, because the Good does 
not live, but is above life; nor is it Nous, because the 
Good does not think; for the soul must be like It. (It does 
not think, because It is not an object of thought.) 

Everything else is clear, and we have said something 
about the point which follows. But all the same we ought 
to say a little about it here too, beginning from the point 
we have reached, and going on by a process of reasoning. 
The greatest thing is knowledge of or contact with the 
Good. Plato says that it "is the greatest study," 3 meaning 
by "study" not the actual vision but learning something 
about It beforehand. We learn about It by comparisons 
and negations and knowledge of the things which proceed 
from It and intellectual progress by ascending degrees; but 
we advance towards It by purifications and virtues and 
adornings of the soul and by gaining a foothold in the 



146 / Plotinus 

world of Nous and settling ourselves firmly There and 
feasting on its contents; anyone who attains to this at once 
contemplates himself and everything else and is the object 
of his contemplation; he becomes real being and Nous 
and the Perfect Living Creature and does not look at it 
any more from outside. When he becomes this he is near; 
the Good is next above him, close to him, already shining 
over the whole intelligible world. Then letting all study go, 
led by his instruction to Nous and firmly established in 
beauty, he raises his thought to that in which he is, but 
is carried out of it by the very surge of the wave of Nous 
and, lifted high by its swell, suddenly sees without know- 
ing how; the Sight fills his eyes with light but does not 
make him see something else by it, but the Light is That 
Which he sees. There is not in It one thing which is seen 
and another which is Its light, or Nous and that which it 
thinks, but a Radiance which produces these at a later 
stage and lets them exist beside it. The Good is a Radiance 
which simply produces Nous without extinguishing Itself 
in the production. The Radiance remains, and Nous comes 
to be by reason of the Good's existence. 

VI. 8. 15 

[We know that the One is altogether outside the realm 
of chance because we are aware of something in ourselves 
which transcends chance by the power of Its light; and 
when we attain to that and become it and put away all 
else we are more than free, more than masters of our- 
selves.] 

When we say that He does not receive anything into 
Himself and that nothing else receives Him, in this way 
too we are putting Him outside the class of beings which 
are what they are by chance, not only by setting Him 
alone and pure of everything, but for another reason: we 
may possibly ourselves perceive in ourselves a nature of 
this kind, which has none of the other things which are 
attached to us and by reason of which we are subject to 
the accidents of chance. Everything else which we have 
is in servitude, and exposed to chance, and came to us by 
chance. By this alone we have effective power over our- 



The Return of the Soul / 147 

selves and independence, by the act of a light which is 
like the Good, and good itself, greater than the activity of 
Nous, which it transcends in its own right. When we as- 
cend to this and become this alone and put away every- 
thing else, what can we say about it except that we are 
more than free, more than independent? Who then could 
bind us to chance or hazard or accident, when we have come 
to be the true Life, or to be in It, the Life which has nothing 
else but is Itself alone? 

VI. 9. 11 

[The experience of the mystic union described.] 
This is what the command given in those mysteries in- 
tends to proclaim, "Do not reveal to the uninitiated." 
Because the Divine is not to be revealed it forbids us to 
declare It to anyone else who has not himself had the good 
fortune to see. Since there were not two, but the seer him- 
self was one with the Seen (for It was not really seen, but 
united to him), if he remembers who he became when he 
was united to That, he will have Its image in himself. He 
was one himself then, with no distinction in him either in 
relation to himself or anything else; for there was no 
movement in him, and he had no emotion, no desire for 
anything else when he had made the ascent, no reason or 
thought; his own self was not there for him, if we should 
say even this. He was as if carried away or possessed by a 
god, in a quiet solitude, in the stillness of his being turning 
away to nothing and not busy about himself, altogether at 
rest and having become a kind of rest. He did not belong 
to the realm of beauties, but had already passed beyond 
Beauty and gone higher than the choir of the virtues, like 
a man who enters into the sanctuary and leaves behind the 
statues in the outer shrine. 4 They are the first things he 
looks at when he comes out of the sanctuary, after his 
contemplation within and his converse There, not with 
a statue or image but with the Divine Itself; they are sec- 
ondary objects of contemplation. That other, perhaps, 
was not a contemplation but another kind of seeing, a 
being out of oneself, a simplifying, a self-surrender, a 
pressing towards contact, a rest, a sustained thought di- 



148 / Plotinus 

reeled to perfect conformity, if it was a real contemplation 
of That Which was in the sanctuary: if one does not look 
in this way one finds nothing. These are only images, by 
which the wise among the soothsayers express in riddles 
how That God is seen. A wise priest reads the riddle and 
makes the contemplation of the sanctuary real by enter- 
ing it. Even if one has not been There, and thinks of the 
sanctuary as something invisible, the Source and Principle, 
one will know that one sees principle by principle and that 
like is united with like, and will not neglect any of the 
divine properties which the soul can have. Before the 
vision one seeks the rest from the vision; and the rest, 
for him who has gone higher than all, is That Which is 
before all. Soul is not of a nature to arrive at absolute 
non-existence. When it goes down it comes to evil, and so 
to non-existence, but not to absolute non-existence; and 
when it travels the opposite way it comes, not to some- 
thing else, but to itself; and so when it is not in anything 
else it is in nothing but itself. But when it is in itself alone 
and not in being, it is in That; for one becomes oneself 
not being but beyond being by that intercourse. So if one 
sees that one's self has become this, one has it as a like- 
ness of the Divine; and if one goes on from it, as image to 
original, one reaches the end of one's journey. And when 
a man falls from the vision, he wakes again the virtue in 
himself and considers himself in all his order and beauty, 
and is lightened and rises through virtue to Nous and 
through wisdom to the Divine. This is the life of gods and 
divine and blessed men, deliverance from the things of 
this world, a life which takes no delight in the things of 
this world, escape in solitude to the Solitary. 



Notes 

A. PORPHYRY'S LIFE 

1. (1) Amelius Gentilianus from Etruria was one of Plotinus's 
disciples and, as Porphyry's Life makes clear, the leading mem- 
ber of the school, in which he seems to have acted as Plotinus's 
chief assistant. He was extremely pious, with, apparently, a 
leaning towards Oriental religions and philosophies, and a diffuse 
and voluminous writer. He compiled, and eventually published, 
a hundred volumes of notes taken at Plotinus's lectures, of 
which nothing survives. For a sketch of his character and activi- 
ties see P. Henry, Plotin et L'Occident, pp. 3-5. 

2. (1) A portrait was in fact made by Carterius, a friend of 
Amelius, without the knowledge of Plotinus, but no certain copy 
of it has survived: cp. Introduction I, p. 12. 

3. (10) This famous remark was obviously intended first and 
foremost to put Amelius firmly in his place and stop him both- 
ering the Master with his well-intentioned pious fuss, and too 
much should not be built on it. If we are to connect it with 
anything in the Enneads, it should be with passages like V. 5. 8 
(D (rf), p. 66) or V. 3. 17 (G (r), p. 141) where Plotinus 
speaks of the sudden "coming" of the One to the soul, which 
must wait patiently for Him and not go chasing after Him: this 
sudden coming, appearance, or illumination of the supreme God 
is a theme which appears already in the Platonists of the 2nd 
century, cp. Apuleius, De Deo Socratis, III. 124; St. Justin 
Martyr, Dialogue IV. 

4. (14) On the Stoic and Peripatetic elements in Plotinus see 
Introduction II, pp. 18-19, 21. 

5. (14) Of these authors, Severus, Gains, and Atticus were 
learned Middle Platonists of the 2nd century A.D. Gaius was the 
leader of the important group, much influenced by Aristotle and 
the Stoics, which is best represented for us by Albinus and an 
anonymous commentary on Plato's Theaetetus. Atticus is the 
chief representative of the anti-Aristotelian group among the 
Middle Platonists. Cronius and Numenius are usually mentioned 
together and classed as Neo-Pythagoreans, though the boundary 
between Platonists and Pythagoreans was ill defined and Por- 
phyry here quite naturally groups them with the Platonists. 
Numenius (late 2nd century) was one of the most important 
philosophers of the generation before Plotinus, who was some- 
times accused of plagiarizing his thought {Life, ch. 17): there 
are certainly striking likenesses between the two, though also 
important differences. On Middle Platonism and Neo-Pythago- 
reanism in general see Introduction II, p. 16. 

149 



150 / Notes 

6. (14) Alexander of Aphrodisias (head of the Peripatetic 
school at Athens at the beginning of the 3rd century) was the 
greatest of the ancient commentators on Aristotle. Aspasius 
and Adrastus were also Aristotelian commentators, of the 2nd 
century. 

7. (23) The last part of Diotima's speech in the Banquet (210- 
212a), about the ascent from bodily to intelligible beauty is one 
of the great Platonic texts which Plotinus frequently refers to 
the ascent of the mind to God. 

8. (23) The quotation is from the oracle of Apollo about 
Plotinus, delivered after his death to Amelius, which Porphyry 
gives in full in the preceding chapter. 

B. ON THE THREE HYPOSTASES 

1. (V. 1. 11.) Plotinus is fond of this image of the centre and 
the circle to express the immanent otherness of the One and the 
intimate dependence on Him of the multiplicity of being: cp. 

in. 8. 8. 

2. (V. 2. 1.) This passage states clearly what is apparent from 
Plotinus's whole account of the Lower Soul or Nature (the 
principle of growth), that it is in fact a fourth hypostasis or 
level of being. He might possibly have squared this with his 
denial of more than three Principles "in the intelligible realm" 
(cp. II. 9. 1.) by pointing out that Nature does not really 
belong to that realm, but is entirely concerned with the material 
world. But his reason for refusing to extend the list of hypps- 
tases beyond Soul is probably faithfulness to the Platonic tradi- 
tion, according to which Soul is the intermediary between the 
intelligible and sensible worlds and the exclusive principle of life 
and movement; this would make it natural for him to think of 
any principle active in the sense-world as a species or sub- 
division of soul rather than as a distinct hypostasis in its own 
right, and he does in fact usually speak of Nature in this way: 
in any case it matters little to him for, as he goes on to say 
"nothing is separated": there is no clear line of demarcation be- 
tween the descending stages of derived being. 

C. THE ONE OR GOOD 

1. (VI. 8. 13.) The treatise VI. 8 (On Free Will and the Will of 
the One) is that in which Plotinus goes furthest in making posi- 
tive statements about the One. There is no real inconsistency 
between it and his normal doctrine. He makes clear in this pas- 
sage that he regards such positive language as inadequate; there 
is plenty of his usual sort of "negative theology" in the treatise; 
and equally positive statements about the One can be found else- 
where, as these selections show. But there is a difference of 
emphasis, which is probably to be explained by the fact that in 



Notes / 151 

this treatise Plotinus is attacking a particular set of opponents, 
who maintained (ch. 7) "that the nature of the Good is what 
it is by chance, and is not in control of being what it is, since 
it does not derive what it is from itself, and it is not free; acting 
or not acting is not in its own power, since it is compelled to 
act or not to act." Who these opponents were is not certain. 
Brehier in his introduction to the treatise makes the very prob- 
able suggestion that they were Gnostics. In answering them 
Plotinus insists very strongly on the positive side of the tran- 
scendence of the One, Whom he presents as self-caused and ab- 
solutely free, with a complete spontaneity which has nothing of 
chance or arbitrariness in it. 

2. (VI. 9. 1.) This list of unities derives from a Stoic source, 
perhaps from Posidonius: cp. Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta II, 
366. 

3. (VI. 9. 3.) Here Plotinus, as often, is applying to the One 
the arguments of the first hypothesis of Plato's Parmenides (cp. 
139b, 141d), following an interpretation of the dialogue which 
had for some time been current among Platonists but is almost 
certainly completely mistaken. 

4. (V. 5. 6.) The word here translated "essence" is ousia, the 
Aristotelian term for the substantial form, the principle which 
gives a thing its particular, definite being, which makes it this 
thing and not anything else. As what follows makes clear, Ploti- 
nus will only apply the term "being" in its strict and proper 
sense to essences (Matter for him is non-being). Plotinus recog- 
njzes, as Plato probably did not, an Absolute Being, Being 
without further qualification: but this is Nous as the totality of 
real beings, i.e. of Forms or essences. The account given by the 
mediaeval Christian philosophers of the Infinite Being of God is 
closer to what Plotinus says about the One than to what he 
says about Being, i.e. Nous, though there are elements in it de- 
rived from both descriptions. 

5. (VI. 9. 6.) The "things which come after the One" are the 
Forms in Nous. This conception of an infinity of power which 
has nothing to do with numerical infinity or unbounded quantita- 
tive extension, is an important one in the thought of Plotinus. 
Vague, indefinite endlessness is abhorrent to him as to all Greek 
philosophers, and when he asserts infinity of the One, or, in a 
certain sense, of Nous, he is careful to make clear that this is 
not at all what he means. 

6. (VI. 8. 14-15.) The insistence that there is nothing casual, ac- 
in this and the following extract is directed against the thesis of 
the (probably Gnostic) opponents with whom Plotinus is argu- 
ing in this treatise: see note 1 of this section. 

7. (V. 5. 12.) The Beautiful or Beauty in this passage is the 
form or Idea of Beauty in the realm of Nous. The Good has 
His own beauty beyond form; cp. VI. 7. 33 (G (a), p. 138); 



152 / Notes 

but Plotinus normally speaks of beauty as belonging to Nous, 
and the realities of its world. 

D. NOUS 

{a) In its Relation to the One 

1. (V. 1. 6.) This image is repeated in VI. 9. 11 (G (c), p. 
147.) It is probably a reference to the rituals of the mystery- 
religions, and perhaps in particular to the cult of Isis (though 
the ordinary public Greek or Roman temple had its crowd of 
statues outside and its inner shrine, containing the image of the 
god himself, where worshippers often genuinely felt that the 
god was present in person). But whether the reference is to 
mystery-cults or public ones, the symbol is only a symbol, and 
does not imply any assertion of the religious value of external 
cult: cp. F. Cumont, Lux Perpetua, pp. 359-360. 

2. (V. 1. 6.) That the product is always less than the producer 
is one of the axioms of Plotinus's philosophy. 

3. (VI. 7. 22.) In this and what follows Plotinus is inspired by 
Plato's famous symbolic description of how the soul of the lover 
grows its wings again, Phaedrus, 251. 

4. (VI. 7. 22.) This insistence that it is life which makes things 
beautiful rather than good proportions is a most important and 
significant departure from the classical Greek aesthetic which 
found beauty in measure and proportion, with the formulation 
of which Plato had a great deal to do. Plotinus's other impor- 
tant departure from Plato in his thought about art is his eleva- 
tion of the status of the artist, whom he puts directly in touch 
with the intelligible world instead of making him a mere copier 
of the things of sense: cp. V. 8. 1 (G (<0, p. 136) and G (), 
n. 8, p. 156. 

(&) As World of Forms Intellect 
L (V. 9. 6.) For the meaning of logos see Introduction HI, p. 

32. 

2. (V. 1. 4.) These five categories or kinds of being, which are 
discussed in the next two extracts, are taken from the discussion 
in Plato, Sophist, 248a-255e (though it is unlikely that Plotinus's 
interpretation represents anything like Plato's real thought). In 
the long treatise On the Kinds of Being, divided by Porphyry 
into three (VI. 1-3) Plotinus drastically criticizes the categories 
of Aristotle and the Stoics, and insists that these five Platonic 
categories are alone adequate for the purpose of analysing the 
realities of the world of Nous. 

E. SOUL 

(0) In its Relationship to Nous 

1. (V. 3. 3-4.) The doctrine of the very late treatise, from which 
this and the next two extracts are taken, seems to represent a 



Notes / 153 

re-thinking and an attempt to arrive at greater precision about 
the relationship between soul and Nous. Elsewhere Plotinus says 
without qualification that we at our highest are, and remain 
eternally, Nous: cp. IV. 3. 5 (F (a), p. 113) and IV. 3. 12 
(F (c), p. 121.) 

(b) In its Activity in the Sense-world 

1. (IV. 3. 9.) The general Platonic tradition, from Xenocrates, 
Plato's second successor, to the time of Plotinus (and after, for 
the great majority of pagan Platonists) was that Plato in the 
Timaeus, in his account of the making of the world by the 
Demiurge, had not meant to teach that the material world really 
had a beginning in time, and that in fact it had no such begin- 
ning and was everlasting. Only Plutarch and Atticus (see A, n. 
5, p. 149) maintained that Plato's account was to be accepted 
literally as implying a beginning in time. 

2. (II. 3. 17.) This secondary soul is the lower, immanent life- 
principle which Plotinus elsewhere calls Nature: cp. Introduc- 
tion III, p. 35 and the next extracts. 

3. (II. 3. 17.) Nous is here identified with the Demiurge, the 
Divine Craftsman who makes the world in the Timaeus. 

4. (III. 8. 5.) The reference is to Plato, Phaedrus, 247e. 

5. (V. 8. 7.) This remark is in contradiction to Plotinus's nor- 
mal doctrine that matter is absolute formlessness and so abso- 
lute evil (see the section on Matter and Evil below). Proclus 

. held that matter was directly caused by the One and so good, 
"not evil or the principle of evil: but he did not regard it as any 
sort of form. A doctrine, which looks like a development of that 
suggested here, that matter is produced by the meeting of purely 
spiritual and intelligible qualities or principles, and that there is 
no material substratum apart from these qualities appears in the 
Cappadocian Fathers, St. Basil the Great and St. Gregory of 
Nyssa: cp. Gregory of Nyssa, De horn opiftcio 44, 213C 
Migne. 

6. (IV. 4. 33.) cp. the application of the same image to the 
moral order in III 2. 17 (below, p. 104.) 

7. (IV. 4. 40.) The reference is to the two cosmic principles 
of the pre-Socratic philosopher Empedocles; but for Plotinus 
they are not two separate and opposed principles but two ways 
of looking at one and the same activity of Soul in the universe. 

8. (III. 2. 2.) In the treatise On Providence (divided by Por- 
phyry, III. 2 and 3) the part usually played by Universal Soul 
in the universe is taken over by a Logos which proceeds from 
Nous and Soul and represents Nous in the visible world. 

9. (III. 2. 9.) This looks as if it might be directed against the 
Christian doctrine of Redemption. If so, it is the only reference 
which I have detected to orthodox Christianity in the Enneads. 

10. (III. 2. 17.) The image of the drama of life is a very favour- 



154 / Notes 

ite one with the Stoics: cp. Marcus Aurelius XTI. 36. But 
Plotinus transforms it in a Platonic sense, and thereby safe- 
guards moral responsibility, by insisting on the pre-existence of 
the actors (i.e. human souls). 

11. (III. 7. 11.) This is a reference to Plato's description of 
time as "a moving image of eternity," Timaens, 37d, on which 
the whole of Plotinus's description of time is a very original 
commentary. 

12. (TIT. 6. 7.) Belief in the void, absolutely empty space, was 
confined in antiquity to the Atomists and Epicureans. Plato- 
nists, Aristotelians, and Stoics agreed in rejecting it. 

13. (I. 8. 7.) The texts on which Plotinus is commenting here are 
(i) Theaetetus, 176a. "Evils, Theodorus, can never be done 

away with, for the good must always have its contrary; nor 
have they any place in the divine world; but they must 
needs haunt this region of our mortal nature. That is why 
we should make all speed to take flight from this world to 
the other; and that means becoming like the divine so far 
as we can, and that again is to become righteous with the 
help of wisdom." 

(ii) Timaeus, 47e~48a. "For the generation of this universe 
was a mixed result of the combination of Necessity and 
Reason." 

(iii) Timaeus, 41b. (From the address of the Demiurge to the 
star-gods whom he has just made) "Therefore, though you, 
having come into being, are not immortal nor indissoluble 
altogether, nevertheless you shall not be dissolved nor 
taste of death, finding my will a bond yet stronger and 
more sovereign than those wherewith you were bound 
together when you came to be." 
The passages are quoted in Cornford's translation. 

F. OUR SELVES 

(a) Their Foundation in Nous and Relationship to Universal Soul 
1. (IV. 3. 4.) This is probably a reference to the conception of 
the "astral body," which was generally adopted by the later 
Neo-Platonists, is based on ideas of Plato and Aristotle, and 
probably took shape in the period of the early Empire: cp. 
E. R. Dodds, Appendix II to Proclus, The Elements of Theology 
(Oxford, 1933). 

(b) Higher and Lower Self 

1. (II. 9. 2.) We are "not a part," because according to 
Plotinus's constant teaching, in the higher world of Nous, or 
soul perfectly conformed to and abiding in Nous, the particular 
being, while retaining its distinct individuality, is in a real sense 
the whole. 

2. (III. 1. 8.) These "seed-principles" are the logoi spermatikoi 



Notes / 155 

of the Stoics, the "forming-forces" in the seed which are the 
principles of growth and development of individual things: in 
the system of Plotinus they are logoi in his sense, expressions 
of a higher principle on a lower level of being. 

(c) Descent into the Visible World 

1. (IV. 8. 1.) The Divine here is Nous: the next sentence 
probably refers to the ascent in Nous to union with the One. 
As always in Plotinus, there are two stages which must be 
clearly distinguished. 

2. (IV. 8. 5.) All these passages are quoted and discussed more 
fully in ch. 1 of this same treatise. The "sowing to birth" is 
from Timaeus, 42d, the Cave the famous symbol of Republic, 
VII, 514ff. The Heraclitus fragment (probably really quite 
irrelevant to the present discussion, but we do not know its 
precise context) is printed by Diels, 22B, 84a. The Empedocles 
reference is to the poem Purifications, of which the fragments 
are printed at Diels, 3 IB, 112ff.: this reference is to fr. 115. 
It is really relevant here, as the poem expounds the doctrine 
of the fall, wandering through successive incarnations and 
return of the soul. 

G. THE RETURN OF THE SOUL 

(a) The First Stages 

1. (I. 6. 8.) The quotation is from Iliad, II. 140 (of course from 
a. quite irrelevant context). But Plotinus's mind turns immedi- 
afely to reminiscences of Odyssey, 9. 29ff, and 10. 483-484, 
where Odysseus tells Alcinous how Calypso and Circe had loved 
him and tried to detain him on his journey home. Odysseus 
became in the late-Hellenistic world, for Christians as well as 
pagans, the type of the soul journeying to its true home and 
overcoming all difficulties and temptations on the way. 

2. (I. 3. 2.) This description of the ascent of the lover follows 
closely that given by Plato in the Banquet, 21 Ob ff. 

3. (I. 3. 3.) Again a reference to the great myth of the 
Phaedrus, 246 cl. 

4. (I. 3. 4.) This of course is Aristotle's logic, which Plotinus 
treats with much less respect than do Porphyry and the later 
Neo-Platonists (though they too maintain the distinction 
between logic, the preliminary study, and dialectic, the highest 
part of philosophy). 

5. (I. 2. 3.) The reference is to the passage of the Theaetetus 
quoted above (E (/>), n. 13, p. 154). Plato applies the epithet 
"civic" to virtues at Republic, TV, 430c, but without any impli- 
cation of the sort of distinction made here. They are called 
"purifications" at Phaedo, 69 b-c. 

6. (I. 2. 3.) The phrase "mixed with the body," with the same 
dualistic implication, is used at Phaedo, 66b. 



156 / Notes 

7. (II. 9. 18.) The phrase translated "Sibylline ravings" is one 
used by Heraclitus in speaking of the Sibyl (Diels, 22B. 92), 
stomati mainomenoi. 

8. (V. 8. 1.) This very important departure from Plato's view 
of the artist is expounded in the Republic, where he is treated 
as a mere copyist of nature, goes back at least to the age of 
Cicero, who speaks in the same way of Phidias having no visible 
model for his Zeus or Athena, but imitating an ideal beauty 
perceived by the mind (Orator, II, 8-9: cp. Philostratus, Life 
of Apollonius, VI. 19. 2.) Cicero, of course, must owe the idea 
to some Greek source, from which Philostratus and Plotinus 
also ultimately derive it. 

(b) The Return to Nous 

1. (V. 8. 11.) Nous in this and the next extract is called "the 
god"; it is the being to which for Plotinus the name theos is 
most properly applied. He very occasionally uses the word of 
the One, but, like all human terms, it is inadequate to describe 
Him. See Introduction III, p. 28. 

2. (VI. 5. 12.) A quotation from the Odyssey, 17. 486. 

(c) The Ascent to Union with the One 

1. (VT. 7. 34.) Plotinus's mind slides naturally, but illogically, 
from the state after the union in which the soul may attempt to 
speak of its experience, to the return to union itself, in which 
of course, the soul cannot speak at all. 

2. (VI. 7. 35.) Man in his normal state is not conscious of 
this continual presence of the Good to the Nous in him: cp. V. 
5. 12 (C, p. 62). 

3. (VI. 7. 36.) Republic, VI, 504e. The phrase introduces the 
great discussion of the Good, in which It is compared to the 
sun, which is the foundation of the theology of Plotinus. 

4. (VI. 9. 11.) See note on V. 1. 6 (D (a), p. 152).