Plotinus

The teaching

Taught from the Enneads, his fifty-four essays as Porphyry gathered them.

The One

At the source of all things is the One, which Plotinus also calls the Good. It is not one thing among others, nor the number one, but utter simplicity: it has no parts, no shape, and no thought or will that would divide it, and nothing can be said of it except what it is not. Even the name One only points away from the many. It needs nothing, seeks nothing and has nothing, and it is not a thing at all but the power of all things.

He gives it in images. It is like a spring that has no other source, which gives itself to all the rivers and is not used up by them but stays at rest in itself; or like the life of a great tree, which runs through the whole of it while its origin stays settled in the root.

The overflowing

Because the One is perfect, needing and seeking nothing, it overflows, and its overflowing makes something other. It does not choose to create or move in order to create; it stays as it is, and what comes from it comes as light from the sun, which shines round it continually while the sun is unchanged, or as heat from fire, cold from snow and fragrance from a perfume. What has come forth turns back towards its source to look at it, and in that looking it becomes Intellect. All of reality has this double movement: going forth from what is above, and turning back to it.

Intellect

Intellect is the second level: thought that is one with what it thinks. In it are all the forms, not as dead patterns but as living minds, each holding all the others. There everything is transparent and nothing is dark or resisting; light passes through light, and each sees all in itself and itself in all. Its life is eternity, whole and present at once, with nothing past and nothing still to come.

Soul, and the part that never came down

Soul is the third level. It comes from Intellect as Intellect from the One; it makes and orders the visible world and lives through time, which is the life of Soul passing from one state to the next. All souls are one Soul and also each its own, as a science is whole in each of its theorems. The individual soul came down into a body, and Plotinus names the cause of its fall: daring, the wish to belong to itself. Delighting in its own freedom, it ran far from its source and forgot its father, like children taken from home early and raised far away, who know neither who they are nor whose they are; admiring the things here, it came to despise itself.

But not all of it came down. Against the common opinion, Plotinus holds that something of every soul remains always above, in Intellect, untouched; we are simply not aware of it, because we know only what reaches perception. So the way back is not a long journey but a waking to what we already are. He writes of it in the first person: often, he says, he woke up out of the body into himself, saw a marvellous beauty and felt sure that he belonged to the better part; and afterwards, coming down from it into reasoning, he wondered how he had ever come down.

Matter, evil, and the stars as signs

Matter is the last thing, the bare receiver at the end of the going forth: it has no form of its own, and in it, as in a mirror, images appear that are not really in it. Evil is not a power set against the Good but sheer lack, and matter, which has nothing of its own, is that lack; the soul becomes evil only as it turns from what is above to what is below.

The world is nonetheless beautiful, an image of the world above, and one sympathy runs through it. The stars do not cause what happens below, as though they willed our misfortunes; they signify it, like letters always being written on the sky. All things are full of signs, and wise is the one who can learn one thing from another.

Working on one's own statue

Beauty in bodies is the presence of form, and the soul is made beautiful by the virtues. To see it, Plotinus says, go back into yourself and look, and if you do not yet see yourself beautiful, do as a sculptor does with a statue that is to be beautiful: cut away here, smooth there, clean one line and brighten another, until a beautiful face appears. Cut away what is excess, straighten what is crooked, bring light to what is dark, and never stop working on your own statue until the godlike splendour of virtue shines out. No eye ever saw the sun without becoming like the sun, and no soul sees beauty without becoming beautiful.

Three who make the ascent

Three kinds of people are fit for the way up: the musician, the lover and the philosopher. The musician, stirred by rhythm and melody, is led from the harmonies of sound to the harmony grasped by mind. The lover, moved by one beautiful body, is taught to see beauty in all bodies, then in ways of life and laws, in the arts and sciences and in the virtues. The philosopher is winged already by nature and needs only to be shown the road. Mathematics trains them all to think beyond the senses, and dialectic, the most precious part of philosophy, brings them to the forms.

The virtues that make one like god

Plotinus takes up Plato's word, that the flight from evil is to become like god. The civic virtues, wisdom, courage, self-control and justice in the life of the city, set measure on the passions and give the soul order. Higher than these are the virtues that purify: wisdom that thinks without the body's opinions, self-control that does not share its pleasures, courage that does not fear leaving it, and justice that lets reason rule unhindered. The good person keeps the lower virtues but does not stop at them, for the aim, Plotinus says, is not to be free of fault but to be god.

Take away everything

The last step is not a thought. The One cannot be chased; one must wait quietly until it appears, making oneself ready to see, as the eye waits for the sun to rise over the horizon. Purified, the soul lets go of every form and every image, for the One has none: take away everything, he says. Then the seer and the seen are no longer two, as the centres of two circles coincide; there is no seeing of something, only a presence greater than knowledge.

This is the life of gods and of godlike and blessed people: a release from the things here, a life that takes no delight in them, the flight of the alone to the alone. With those words the Enneads end.