Plotinus ENNEADS - THE FIFTH ENNEAD Complete

Translated by Stephen MacKenna and B. S. Page.

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THE FIFTH ENNEAD:   1) THE THREE INITIAL HYPOSTASES,   2) THE ORIGIN AND ORDER OF THE BEINGS. FOLLOWING ON THE FIRST.,   3) THE KNOWING HYPOSTASES AND THE TRANSCENDENT,   4) HOW THE SECONDARIES RISE FROM THE FIRST: AND ON THE ONE.,   5) THAT THE INTELLECTUAL BEINGS ARE NOT OUTSIDE THE INTELLECTUAL-PRINCIPLE: AND ON THE NATURE OF THE GOOD.,   6) THAT THE PRINCIPLE TRANSCENDING BEING HAS NO INTELLECTUAL ACT. WHAT BEING HAS INTELLECTION PRIMALLY AND WHAT BEING HAS IT SECONDARILY,   7) IS THERE AN IDEAL ARCHETYPE OF PARTICULAR BEINGS?,   8) ON THE INTELLECTUAL BEAUTY,   9) THE INTELLECTUAL PRINCIPLE, THE IDEAS, AND THE AUTHENTIC EXISTENCE

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2. Let every soul recall, then, at the outset the truth that soul is the author of all living things, that it has breathed the life into them all, whatever is nourished by earth and sea, all the creatures of the air, the divine stars in the sky; it is the maker of the sun; itself formed and ordered this vast heaven and conducts all that rhythmic motion; and it is a principle distinct from all these to which it gives law and movement and life, and it must of necessity be more honourable than they, for they gather or dissolve as soul brings them life or abandons them, but soul, since it never can abandon itself, is of eternal being.

How life was purveyed to the universe of things and to the separate beings in it may be thus conceived:

That great soul must stand pictured before another soul, one not mean, a soul that has become worthy to look, emancipate from the lure, from all that binds its fellows in bewitchment, holding itself in quietude. Let not merely the enveloping body be at peace, body’s turmoil stilled, but all that lies around, earth at peace, and sea at peace, and air and the very heavens. Into that heaven, all at rest, let the great soul be conceived to roll inward at every point, penetrating, permeating, from all sides pouring in its light. As the rays of the sun throwing their brilliance upon a lowering cloud make it gleam all gold, so the soul entering the material expanse of the heavens has given life, has given immortality: what was abject it has lifted up; and the heavenly system, moved now in endless motion by the soul that leads it in wisdom, has become a living and a blessed thing; the soul domiciled within, it takes worth where, before the soul, it was stark body — clay and water — or, rather, the blankness of Matter, the absence of Being, and, as an author says, “the execration of the Gods.”

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