Reading Notes: Plotinus 1:2:4

 Welcome back to the Plotinus read-through! Today we'll continue to learn about virtue, and just how it is that (according to Plotinus) we're going to get out of this prison of matter. The prior post in this series is here. You can follow along with today's chapter here.

We come, so, to the question whether Purification is the whole of this human quality, virtue, or merely the forerunner upon which virtue follows? Does virtue imply the achieved state of purification or does the mere process suffice to it, Virtue being something of less perfection than the accomplished pureness which is almost the Term?

You really gotta love these translations.

Does virtue follow purification, or does virtue consist of purification? That's what the first sentence asks.

The second seems to reverse the order, suggesting that virtue is something of "less perfection" than "accomplished pureness."

I think the point is that, IF Virtue consists of the PROCESS of Purification, then the achieved state of Purity follows virtue.

On the other hand, purification might be a process which precedes the attainment of virtue.

Make sense? Let's read on.

To have been purified is to have cleansed away everything alien: but Goodness is something more.

If before the impurity entered there was Goodness, the Goodness suffices; but even so, not the act of cleansing but the cleansed thing that emerges will be The Good. And it remains to establish what this emergent is.

It can scarcely prove to be The Good: The Absolute Good cannot be thought to have taken up its abode with Evil. We can think of it only as something of the nature of good but paying a double allegiance and unable to rest in the Authentic Good.

 

We start with impurity. This, as we have seen, is the Soul's involvement with the Body, and with the passions that arise from material existence.

We must first cleans away this impurity. But, once we do so, are we left with Goodness? 

Not exactly, says Plotinus. Because The Good Itself cannot have become involved with evil-- that is, matter-- otherwise it would not be the Good! And yet, having been purified of evil, we have to be left with something LIKE the Good. Plotinus calls this "something of the nature of the good but paying a double allegiance" to both Good and Evil, Spirit and Matter.

 

The Soul's true Good is in devotion to the Intellectual-Principle, its kin; evil to the Soul lies in frequenting strangers. There is no other way for it than to purify itself and so enter into relation with its own; the new phase begins by a new orientation.

After the Purification, then, there is still this orientation to be made? No: by the purification the true alignment stands accomplished.

The Soul's virtue, then, is this alignment? No: it is what the alignment brings about within.

And this is...?

That it sees; that, like sight affected by the thing seen, the soul admits the imprint, graven upon it and working within it, of the vision it has come to.

The Soul's Good is devotion to the Intellectual-Principle.

Why is that?

The Soul is suspended between Intellect and Matter.

Intellect, remember, is not the thinking mind. Intellect is the realm of the Forms, those eternal powers which generate the world we experience. In Intellect, there is no discursive reasoning, because there is no separation. You don't have to think your way through a proof to understand something Intellectually. Instead, by Intellection, you immediately possess the object of knowledge-- becuase, in fact, there is no distinction between the subject and the object.

Does that make sense? If not, just let it be for now. Think of Intellect as the highest faculty of the soul, while the passions are the lowest. By purification we turn toward Intellect and away from Matter, toward the higher and eternal, rather than the lower and changeable, exactly as Plotinus told us to way back when.

When we turn toward Intellect, toward the highest part of our being, we are changed "like sight affected by the thing seen." Having seen it, we can't un-see it.

Plotinus asks the important question:
 

But was not the Soul possessed of all this always, or had it forgotten?

What it now sees, it certainly always possessed, but as lying away in the dark, not as acting within it: to dispel the darkness, and thus come to knowledge of its inner content, it must thrust towards the light.

In the Phaedrus, Plato suggests that we all once abided in the heavenly realms, with the Gods, but have since fallen, and forgotten. The process of spiritual awakening is, on this view, a process of REMEMBERING what we truly are. Plotinus seems to be building on this idea, suggesting that the vision of the Intellectual realm was always latent within us.

He concludes:
 

Besides, it possessed not the originals but images, pictures; and these it must bring into closer accord with the verities they represent. And, further, if the Intellectual-Principle is said to be a possession of the Soul, this is only in the sense that It is not alien and that the link becomes very close when the Soul's sight is turned towards It: otherwise, ever-present though It be, It remains foreign, just as our knowledge, if it does not determine action, is dead to us.

The Highest is always present and available to us. But it is up to us to turn towards it, and then to let it govern our actions. Otherwise, it means nothing.