The soul can only see and feel in general through the medium of a body: for, when it is completely separated from the body, it lives in the intelligible world.
c. 253-270 AD
Source: The Enneads (Bouillet trans.)
Plotin
Plotinus (c. 204/5 – 270) was a major Hellenistic philosopher, the founder of Neoplatonism and is considered to be one of the most influential philosophers in antiquity, after Plato and Aristotle.
Since to feel consists in perceiving, not intelligible things, but only sensible things, the soul [...] must have with them a relationship of knowledge or affection.
c. 253-270 AD
Source: The Enneads (Bouillet trans.)
If a being can by its nature be sympathetically affected by another being, it does not follow that the medium [...] shares the affection.
c. 253-270 AD
Source: The Enneads (Bouillet trans.)
If the universe is sympathetic to itself because it constitutes one animal, and if we are affected because we are contained within this one animal [...], why would continuity not be necessary for us to sense a distant object?
c. 253-270 AD
Source: The Enneads (Bouillet trans.)
That which passes through the air does not always affect it and often merely divides it.
c. 253-270 AD
Source: The Enneads (Bouillet trans.)
In the darkness one sees fire, the stars, and their shapes. No one could claim that, in this case, the forms of objects, being imprinted on the dark air, are transmitted to the eye.
c. 253-270 AD
Source: The Enneads (Bouillet trans.)
Sensation has for its general condition that the universal animal be sympathetic to itself; without this, how could one thing partake in the power of another thing from which it is very distant?
c. 253-270 AD
Source: The Enneads (Bouillet trans.)
Each part of the air contains the entire visible object: now this cannot be explained by a corporeal affection, but by higher laws, proper to the soul [...].
c. 253-270 AD
Source: The Enneads (Bouillet trans.)
Sight resembles touch: it operates in the light by transporting itself, so to speak, to the object, without the medium experiencing any affection.
c. 253-270 AD
Source: The Enneads (Bouillet trans.)
Light is not the quality of a subject; it is the act that emanates from a subject, but does not pass into another subject; only, if another subject is present, it will experience an affection.
c. 253-270 AD
Source: The Enneads (Bouillet trans.)
Every being has an act which is its image, so that as soon as the being exists, its act also exists, and as long as the being subsists, its act radiates more or less far.
c. 253-270 AD
Source: The Enneads (Bouillet trans.)
There are acts that are weak and obscure, others hidden, others powerful that radiate far.
c. 253-270 AD
Source: The Enneads (Bouillet trans.)
Light is entirely incorporeal, although it is the act of a body.
c. 253-270 AD
Source: The Enneads (Bouillet trans.)
We are active and passive because we are in the one animal and we constitute parts of it.
c. 253-270 AD
Source: The Enneads (Bouillet trans.)
Every animal is sympathetic to itself. [...] all things will experience common affections insofar as they constitute parts of the one animal.
c. 253-270 AD
Source: The Enneads (Bouillet trans.)
The world is an organized and living being, an animal, [...] and full of a great Soul in which all particular souls are contained.
c. 253-270 AD
Source: The Enneads (Bouillet trans.)
Nothing can [...] happen to one of its parts without the other parts feeling it more or less, and the world thus forms a whole sympathetic to itself.
c. 253-270 AD
Source: The Enneads (Bouillet trans.)
Each phenomenon is the sign of another phenomenon, and by virtue of this universal coordination, the stars indicate future events.
c. 253-270 AD
Source: The Enneads (Bouillet trans.)
This universe is one animal, which contains within itself all animals. There is in it one soul, which spreads throughout all its parts.
c. 253-270 AD
Source: The Enneads (Bouillet trans.)
All things have sympathy for one another through their irrational life.
c. 253-270 AD
Source: The Enneads (Bouillet trans.)
[The soul of the star] cannot therefore be harmful since its principle is an excellent nature.
c. 253-270 AD
Source: The Enneads (Bouillet trans.)
The stars do not produce [...] poverty and wealth, health and sickness, beauty and ugliness, vices and virtues.
c. 253-270 AD
Source: The Enneads (Bouillet trans.)
What then are we ourselves? We are that which is essentially us, we are the principle to which nature has given the power to triumph over the passions.
c. 253-270 AD
Source: The Enneads (Bouillet trans.)
If, because of the body, we are surrounded by evils, God has nevertheless given us virtue, which has no master.
c. 253-270 AD
Source: The Enneads (Bouillet trans.)
Virtues derive from the soul's primitive foundation; vices are born from the soul's commerce with external things.
c. 253-270 AD
Source: The Enneads (Bouillet trans.)
Man is free when he exercises the faculty of the reasonable soul [...]. He is subject to necessity [...] when he exercises the faculties of the irrational soul and the body.
c. 253-270 AD
Source: The Enneads (Bouillet trans.)
Order reigns in the universe because all things proceed from a single principle and conspire to a single end.
c. 253-270 AD
Source: The Enneads (Bouillet trans.)
The things that the celestial gods produce do not result from a free choice, but from a natural necessity, because they act, as parts of the universe, upon the other parts of the universe.
c. 253-270 AD
Source: The Enneads (Bouillet trans.)
Spirits are [...] images of the divinity itself [...], capable of knowing the system of the universe and of imitating something of it [...], each spirit being like a small divinity in its own department.
c. 253-270 AD
Source: The Enneads (Bouillet trans.)
[One] will find [...] from the supreme God down to the dregs of things, a single connection, binding itself with mutual links and nowhere interrupted; and this is Homer's golden chain.
c. 253-270 AD
Source: The Enneads (Bouillet trans.)
Above all these gods reigns the God par excellence, the absolute Good, principle of all that is divine, source of the divinity of the other gods.
c. 253-270 AD
Source: The Enneads (Bouillet trans.)
[...] a soul that seeks divine felicity in the world of the senses is like Narcissus plunging into the abyss to embrace a shadow.
c. 253-270 AD
Source: The Enneads (Bouillet trans.)
Ulysses is true wisdom, which, without being captivated by material charms [...], turns all its desires towards the heavens.
c. 253-270 AD
Source: The Enneads (Bouillet trans.)
The river Lethe is this union with the body that makes the soul forget its true nature.
c. 253-270 AD
Source: The Enneads (Bouillet trans.)
The contemplation of the One is that supreme revelation of the mysteries that the hierophant alone sees in the sanctuary and can only communicate to the initiated.
c. 253-270 AD
Source: The Enneads (Bouillet trans.)
[The ancient sages] regard sacred traditions as vague and instinctive premonitions of a higher truth [...] and attribute the obscurity that envelops them to the infancy of human thought.
c. 253-270 AD
Source: The Enneads (Bouillet trans.)
[In myths] [...] that which is by nature eternal is said to be begotten and born.
c. 253-270 AD
Source: The Enneads (Bouillet trans.)
[Love] is that insatiable and infinite desire of the soul, [...] itself moved by a perpetual and never-satiated desire.
c. 253-270 AD
Source: The Enneads (Bouillet trans.)
It is with reason that the Philosophers place Riches in intelligible things, and Poverty in sensible things.
c. 253-270 AD
Source: The Enneads (Bouillet trans.)
What is more wretched than to be able to always become less and less? What is richer than [...] to love greatly that which cannot be diminished?
c. 253-270 AD
Source: The Enneads (Bouillet trans.)
[...] the fall of souls [is compared] to the gaze cast by the young Bacchus into the mirror near which the Titans tear him apart.
c. 253-270 AD
Source: The Enneads (Bouillet trans.)
No greater affinity can be imagined than that between beauty and love.
c. 253-270 AD
Source: The Enneads (Bouillet trans.)
It is not possible [...] that evil be destroyed, for there must always be something contrary to the good; it is therefore a necessity that it circulates on this earth and around our mortal nature.
c. 253-270 AD
Source: The Enneads (Bouillet trans.)
This flight [from evil] is the resemblance to God, as much as it is in our power; and one resembles God through justice, holiness, and wisdom.
c. 253-270 AD
Source: The Enneads (Bouillet trans.)
There are in the nature of things two models, one divine and blessed, the other godless and wretched. Unjust men are unaware of this [...].
c. 253-270 AD
Source: The Enneads (Bouillet trans.)
The nature of this world is a mixture of intelligence and necessity. Its goods are what it receives from the divine; its evils come from the primordial nature.
c. 253-270 AD
Source: The Enneads (Bouillet trans.)
All that is beautiful in the world, it holds from the One who formed it, but all that happens [...] that is bad and unjust, it receives from that prior state.
c. 253-270 AD
Source: The Enneads (Bouillet trans.)
Metaphysical evil consists in simple imperfection, physical evil in suffering, and moral evil in sin.
c. 253-270 AD
Source: The Enneads (Bouillet trans.)
There is an original imperfection in the creature [...], because the creature is essentially limited, hence it cannot know everything and can be mistaken.
c. 253-270 AD
Source: The Enneads (Bouillet trans.)
[Evil] consists in privation, that is, in what the efficient cause does not do. This is why the Scholastics used to call the cause of evil deficient.
c. 253-270 AD
Source: The Enneads (Bouillet trans.)
Evil, being but a corruption of the good, could only act or work upon a good foundation; [...] only good things are capable of being corrupted.
c. 253-270 AD
Source: The Enneads (Bouillet trans.)
Each man is ordinarily such as he pleases to be, according to the inclinations to which he abandons himself and the nature of his soul.
c. 253-270 AD
Source: The Enneads (Bouillet trans.)
What are desire and joy, if not a will that consents to what pleases us? And what are fear and sadness, if not a will that turns away from what displeases us?
c. 253-270 AD
Source: The Enneads (Bouillet trans.)
He who lives according to God must [...] not hate the man for the vice, nor [...] love the vice for the man, but [...] hate the vice and love the man.
c. 253-270 AD
Source: The Enneads (Bouillet trans.)
What is not good is to abandon the Creator to live according to the created good, whether one wants to live according to the flesh, or according to the soul, or according to the whole man.
c. 253-270 AD
Source: The Enneads (Bouillet trans.)
It would be impossible for there to be any failure in the world if the principles were not excellent; [...] there could be no disorder if there were not a primary and invariable rule.
c. 253-270 AD
Source: The Enneads (Bouillet trans.)
Of Mixtion where there is total penetration.
c. 253-270 AD
Source: The Enneads (Bouillet trans.)
Of Essence and Quality.
c. 253-270 AD
Source: The Enneads (Bouillet trans.)
[...] the qualities that constitute the essence of the body.
c. 253-270 AD
Source: The Enneads (Bouillet trans.)
There is a difference between apposition, mixtion, temperation, and confusion.
c. 253-270 AD
Source: The Enneads (Bouillet trans.)
Apposition is the contact of bodies at their surfaces, as in heaps of wheat.
c. 253-270 AD
Source: The Enneads (Bouillet trans.)
Mixtion is the diffusion of two or more bodies throughout their whole, with their qualities remaining, like fire in incandescent iron.
c. 253-270 AD
Source: The Enneads (Bouillet trans.)
Temperation is the mutual and corresponding extension of two or more bodies, with their qualities also remaining.
c. 253-270 AD
Source: The Enneads (Bouillet trans.)
Confusion is the transmutation of two or more bodily qualities, such that a new thing is born from it, different from those qualities.
c. 253-270 AD
Source: The Enneads (Bouillet trans.)
[This process is seen] as in the composition of ointments and medicines.
c. 253-270 AD
Source: The Enneads (Bouillet trans.)
Chrysippus taught that mixtion is broader than temperation.
c. 253-270 AD
Source: The Enneads (Bouillet trans.)
How are compounds formed from the first elements, if there is neither contact, nor touch, nor mixtion of any kind?
c. 253-270 AD
Source: The Enneads (Bouillet trans.)
To attribute the existence and constitution of the universe to chance and fortune is to commit an absurdity and to speak as a man devoid of sense and intelligence.
c. 253-270 AD
Source: The Enneads (Bouillet trans.)
Universal Providence consists in the universe being in conformity with Intelligence, and Intelligence being anterior to the universe, [...] not in time, [...] but because Intelligence precedes by its nature the world which proceeds from it.
c. 253-270 AD
Source: The Enneads (Bouillet trans.)
The intelligible world [...] is the universal life and the universal Intelligence; it is the living and intelligent unity: for the part there reproduces the whole, and a perfect harmony reigns in the entirety.
c. 253-270 AD
Source: The Enneads (Bouillet trans.)
Such is the blessed condition of the intelligible world that in doing nothing it does great things, and in remaining within itself it produces important works.
c. 253-270 AD
Source: The Enneads (Bouillet trans.)
It is from this true and one world that the sensible world, which is not truly one, draws its existence: it is [...] multiple and divided into a plurality of parts that are separate from one another.
c. 253-270 AD
Source: The Enneads (Bouillet trans.)
The sensible world is therefore a mixture of matter and of Reason: these are the elements of which it is composed.
c. 253-270 AD
Source: The Enneads (Bouillet trans.)
One has no right to blame this world, to say that it is not beautiful, that it is not the best possible of corporeal worlds, nor to accuse the cause from which it holds its existence.
c. 253-270 AD
Source: The Enneads (Bouillet trans.)
He who blames the whole of the world by considering only its parts is therefore unjust; he should examine the parts in their relation to the whole, to see if they are in accord and in harmony with it.
c. 253-270 AD
Source: The Enneads (Bouillet trans.)
Disorder exists only because of order, lawlessness only because of the law, unreason only because of reason, because the order, law, and reason seen here below are only borrowed.
c. 253-270 AD
Source: The Enneads (Bouillet trans.)
The penalty follows the fault, and it is not unjust that the soul which has contracted such or such a nature should suffer the consequences of its disposition.
c. 253-270 AD
Source: The Enneads (Bouillet trans.)
It is the characteristic of a great power to make evils themselves serve the accomplishment of its work, to use to produce other forms things that have become formless.
c. 253-270 AD
Source: The Enneads (Bouillet trans.)
It must be admitted that evil is but a defect of good (éllipsis toû agathoû).
c. 253-270 AD
Source: The Enneads (Bouillet trans.)
God must not fight for the cowardly: for the law wills that in war one saves one's life by valor and not by prayers.
c. 253-270 AD
Source: The Enneads (Bouillet trans.)
The wicked rule only through the cowardice of those who obey them: it is more just that it be so than otherwise.
c. 253-270 AD
Source: The Enneads (Bouillet trans.)
Here below, [...] it is not the soul, the inner man, but his shadow, the outer man, who gives himself over to lamentations and groans [...]. The truly serious man is serious only about truly serious matters.
c. 253-270 AD
Source: The Enneads (Bouillet trans.)
God placed the soul in the world so that, seeing the evils of which matter is the principle, it might return to the Father and be forever freed from such contagion.
c. 253-270 AD
Source: The Enneads (Bouillet trans.)
The soul was put into the body to do good, and it would not know evil if it did not do it.
c. 253-270 AD
Source: The Enneads (Bouillet trans.)
The soul, purified of all evil and reunited with the Father, would be eternally sheltered from the evils of this world.
c. 253-270 AD
Source: The Enneads (Bouillet trans.)
This doctrine [...] of the necessary revolution which carries souls out of the world and brings them back again is an error.
c. 253-270 AD
Source: The Enneads (Bouillet trans.)
Do all souls form a single soul?
c. 253-270 AD
Source: The Enneads (Bouillet trans.)