Plotinus

“ If your soul does not succeed in enjoying this spectacle, if she does not have the intuition of the divine light, if she remains cold and does not, within herself, feel a rapture such as that of a lover who sees the beloved object, and who rests within it, a rapture felt by him who has seen the true light, and whose soul has been overwhelmed with brilliance on approaching this light, then you have tried to rise to the divinity without having freed yourself from the hindrances which arrest your progress, and hinder your contemplation. ”

“ Everything that the soul advances towards what is formless, not being able to understand it because it is indeterminate, and so to speak has not received the impression of a distinctive type, the soul withdraws therefrom, fearing she will meet nonentity. That is why, in the presence of such things she grows troubled, and descends with pleasure. Then, withdrawing therefrom, she, so to speak, lets herself fall till she meets some sense-object, on which she pauses, and recovers; just as the eye which, fatigued by the contemplation of small objects, gladly turns back to large ones. ”

“ On leaving the body the soul becomes the power she had preponderatingly developed. Let us therefore flee from here below, and let us raise ourselves to the intelligible world, so as not to fall into the pure sense-life, by allowing ourselves to follow sense-images, or into the life of growth, by abandoning ourselves to the pleasures of physical love, and to gormandizing; rather, let us rise to the intelligible world, to the intelligence, to the divinity! ”

“ Intelligence contemplates Unity, and needs none but Him; but the Unity has no need of Intelligence. That which is begotten by the Principle superior to Intelligence can be nothing if not Intelligence; for it is the best after the One, since it is superior to all other beings. The Soul, indeed, is the word and actualization of Intelligence, just as Intelligence is word and actualization of the One. But the Soul is an obscure word. Being an image of Intelligence, she must contemplate Intelligence, just as the latter, to subsist, must contemplate the One. ”

“ He will rise to the principle that he possesses within himself. From the manifold that he was he will again become one. Only under these conditions will he contemplate the supreme principle, Unity. Thus having become intelligence, having trusted his soul to intelligence, educating and establishing her therein, so that with vigilant attention she may grasp all that intelligence sees, he will, by intelligence, contemplate unity, without the use of any senses, without mingling any of their perceptions with the flashes of intelligence. ”

“ What explanation could they give of the soul's resistance to the impulsions of the body? By what concourse of atoms will one man become a geometrician, another become a mathematician and astronomer, and the other a philosopher? For, according to that doctrine we no longer produce any act for which we are responsible, we are even no longer living beings, since we undergo the impulsion of bodies that affect us just as they do inanimate things. ”

“ The archetypes (or models) of qualities are the actualizations of the beings, which are the principles of these qualities. It is impossible for the same thing at one time to be, and at another not to be a quality. What can be separated from being is quality; what remains united to being is being, form, and actualization. In fact, nothing can be the same in itself, and in some other condition where it has ceased to be form and an actualization. What, instead of being the form of a being, is always its accident, is purely and exclusively a quality. ”

“ The soul fallen into this state of impurity, seized with an irresistible inclination towards the things of sense, absorbed by her intercourse with the body, sunk into matter, and having even received it within herself, has changed form by her admixture with an inferior nature. Not otherwise would be a man fallen into slimy mud, who no longer would present to view his primitive beauty, and would exhibit only the appearance of the mud that had defiled him; his ugliness would be derived from something foreign ”

“ Why do the heavens move in a circle? Because they imitate Intelligence. But to what does this movement belong? To the Soul, or to the body? Does it occur because the Soul is within the celestial sphere, which tends to revolve about her? Is the Soul within this sphere without being touched thereby? Does she cause this sphere to move by her own motion? Perhaps the Soul which moves this sphere should not move it in the future, although she did so in the past; that is, the soul made it remain immovable, instead of ceaselessly imparting to it a circular movement. ”

“ What shall we answer to those who insist that the soul is a body? Will they say that, in the same body, each part possesses the same quality as the total soul, and that the case is similar with the part of a part? Then quantity is no longer essential to the nature of the soul; which contradicts the hypothesis that the soul needed to possess a definite magnitude. Besides the soul is everywhere entire; now it is impossible for a body to be entire in several places simultaneously, or have parts identical to the whole. ”

“ Why does the soul which has risen on high not stay there? Because she has not yet entirely detached herself from things here below. But a time will come when she will uninterruptedly enjoy the vision of the divinity, that is, when she will no longer be troubled by the passions of the body. The part of the soul that sees the divinity is not the one that is troubled (the irrational soul) , but the other part (the rational soul) . Now she loses the sight of the divinity when she does not lose this knowledge which consists in demonstratings, conjectures and reasonings. ”

“ The Principle of all things has no need of any of them. Every non-self-sufficient being is not self-sufficient chiefly because it aspires to its principle. If the One aspired to anything, His aspiration would evidently tend to destroy His unity, that is, to annihilate Himself. Anything that aspires evidently aspires to happiness and preservation. Thus, since for the One there is no good outside of Himself, there is nothing that He could wish. He is the super-good; He is the good, not for Himself, but for other beings, for those that can participate therein. ”

“ The intercourse of the soul with the body is usually blamed for two things: because it hinders the soul from busying herself with the conceptions of intelligence, and then because it exposes her to agreeable or painful sensations which fill her with desires. Now neither of these two results affect the soul that has not entered into a body, and which does not depend thereon by belonging to some particular individual. Then, on the contrary, she possesses the body of the universe, which has no fault, no need, which can cause her neither fears nor desires, because she has nothing to fear. ”

“ The Intelligence that deserves to be called the purest intelligence, therefore, cannot have been born from any source, other than the first Principle. It must, from its birth, have begotten all beings, all the beauty of ideas, all the intelligible deities ”

“ On being divided by losing their unity, they simultaneously lose their nature. Consider farther the bodies of plants and animals, of which each is a unity. On losing their unity by being broken up into several parts, they simultaneously lose their nature. They are no more what they were, they have become new beings, which themselves exist only so long as they are one. What effects health in us, is that the parts of our bodies are co-ordinated in unity. Beauty is formed by the unity of our members. Virtue is our soul's tendency to unity, and becoming one through the harmony of her faculties. ”

“ That is why in all kinds of beings, quantity is determined only along with form; for the quantity (the magnitude) of man is not the quantity of the bird. It would be absurd to insist on the difference between giving to matter the quantity of a bird, and impressing its quality on it, that quality is a reason, while quantity is not a form; for quantity is both measure and number. ”

“ Considered in itself, Intelligence is not divided, but is genuinely present to itself. It does not dismember itself because it is next to the One, though it dared to withdraw therefrom. What is above Intelligence is Unity itself, an incomprehensible miracle, of which it cannot even be said that it is essence, lest we make of it the attribute of something else, and to whom no name is really suitable. If however He must be named, we may indeed call Him in general Unity, but only on the preliminary understanding that He was not first something else, and then only later became unity. ”