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Translated by Stephen MacKenna and B. S. Page.
Plotinus Resources OnLine and in Print
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» Contents of this Ennead
128 pages - You are on Page 68
5. But what is the Nature of this Spirit — of the Supernals in general?
The Spirit-Kind is treated in the Symposium where, with much about the others, we learn of Eros — Love — born to Penia — Poverty — and Poros — Possession — who is son of Metis — Resource — at Aphrodite’s birth feast.
But to take Plato as meaning, by Eros, this Universe — and not simply the Love native within it — involves much that is self-contradictory.
For one thing, the universe is described as a blissful god and as self-sufficing, while this “Love” is confessedly neither divine nor self-sufficing but in ceaseless need.
Again, this Kosmos is a compound of body and soul; but Aphrodite to Plato is the Soul itself, therefore Aphrodite would necessarily — he a constituent part of Eros, dominant member! A man is the man’s Soul, if the world is, similarly, the world’s Soul, then Aphrodite, the Soul, is identical with Love, the Kosmos! And why should this one spirit, Love, be the Universe to the exclusion of all the others, which certainly are sprung from the same Essential-Being? Our only escape would be to make the Kosmos a complex of Supernals.
Love, again, is called the Dispenser of beautiful children: does this apply to the Universe? Love is represented as homeless, bedless and barefooted: would not that be a shabby description of the Kosmos and quite out of the truth?
Reference address : https://ellopos.net/elpenor/greek-texts/ancient-Greece/plotinus/enneads-3.asp?pg=68
