Chapter 4, Section 1ƒ

Spenser: “He loved Himself because Himself was fair.” CE Plato’s Doctrine of ἔρως. This Yearning is eternally fulfilled in the Trinity. Cf. Dante: ”O somma luce che sofa in Te sidi / sola T’ intendi e da Te intelletta / ed intendente Te ami ed arridi.“ It is struggling towards actualization in this world. 319 i. e. The social instinct in men and animals, and the impulse of mutual attraction in the inanimate world. 320 The manifold yearnings of the spirit for Truth, Beauty, Spiritual Love, etc. 321 i.e. Of the two classes just alluded to the second is the higher; and of those yearnings which belong to this class the most transcendent are the highest. Religion is higher than secular life, and the highest element in Religion is other-worldly. The received text reads— “The Divine Yearnings in the very core,” etc., οἱ αὐτονόητοι καὶ θεῖοι τῶν ὄντως ἐκεῖ καλῶς ἐρώτων . I have ventured to amend ἐρώτων to ἔρωτες . If the MS. from which the received text is derived belonged to a family having seventeen or eighteen letters to a line then this word would probably come at the end of a line (since there are 260 letters to the end of it, from the beginning of the section), and would have the ὀν- of ὄντως just above it and the -ον- of αὐτονόητοι just above that, and ἐρώτων at the end of the line next but one above that. This would make the corruption of ἔρωτες into ἐρώτων very natural. 322 “That which is not” = formless matter. Plotinus (Enn. i. 8. 3) defines the Non-Existent as the world of sense-perception. It is, as it were, the stuff of which all things perceived by the senses are made. This stuff cannot exist without some kind of “form,” and therefore, if entirely bereft of all “form,” would simply disappear into nothingness. Thus, apart from that element of “form” which it derives from the Good, it is sheer Non-Entity. Each individual thing consists of “matter” and “form”— i. e. of this indeterminate “stuff” and of the particular qualities belonging to that thing. Remove those qualities and the thing is destroyed: e.g. remove the colours, shape, etc., of a tree, and the tree becomes nonexistent. It crumbles into dust, and thus the “stuff” takes on a new form. If, as M. Le Bon maintains, material particles sometimes lose their material qualities and are changed into energy, in such a case the “stuff” takes on yet another kind of form. The individual thing, in every case, becomes non-existent when it loses its “form,” or the sum total of its individual qualities, but the “stuff” persists because it at once assumes another “form.” Hence this “stuff,” being non-existent per se , draws its existence from the Good Which is the Source of all “form.” And thus the existence of this non-existent stuff is ultimately contained in the Good. D. tries to prove that evil is non-existent by showing that there is nothing that can have produced it.