Select Works of Plotinus · 204 of 752 · tr. Thomas Taylor
Select Works, Section 207
Section 1 1. What is our answer? All events and things, good and evil alike, are included under the Universal Reason-Principle of which they are parts- strictly "included" for this Universal Idea does not engender them but encompasses them. The Reason-Principles are acts or expressions of a Universal Soul; its parts [i.e., events good and evil] are expressions of these Soulparts. This unity, Soul, has different parts; the Reason-Principles, correspondingly, will also have their parts, and so, too, will the ultimates of the system, all that they bring into being. The Souls are in harmony with each other and so, too, are their acts and effects; but it is harmony in the sense of a resultant unity built out of contraries. All things, as they rise from a unity, come back to unity by a sheer need of nature; differences unfold themselves, contraries are produced, but all is drawn into one organized system by the unity at the source. The principle may be illustrated from the different classes of animal life: there is one genus, horse, though horses among themselves fight and bite and show malice and angry envy: so all the others within the unity of their Kind; and so humanity. All these types, again, can be ranged under the one Kind, that of living things; objects without life can be thought of under their specific types and then be resumed under the one Kind of the "non-living"; if we choose to go further yet, living and non-living may be included under the one Kind, "Beings," and, further still, under the Source of Being. Having attached all to this source, we turn to move down again in continuous division: we see the Unity fissuring, as it reaches out into Universality, and yet embracing all in one system so that with all its differentiation it is one multiple living thing- an organism in which each member executes the function of its own nature while it still has its being in that One Whole; fire burns; horse does horse work; men give, each the appropriate act of the peculiar personal quality- and upon the several particular Kinds to which each belongs follow the acts, and the good or evil of the life.
Themes
◆Anthropomorphismtheology
Attributing human characteristics, emotions, or form to the divine; embodied divine imagery.
The passage uses the metaphor of a Poet and Actors to describe the divine Reason-Principle's relationship with souls.
The felt condition of exile from one's divine origin — Rumi's reed flute torn from its bed, Plotinus's 'we have forgotten,' the Gnostic forgetfulness; the affective wound that complements return_to_source and gives the return its motive.
It states that souls vary in worth due to an initial inequality caused by becoming separate from the Reason-Principle.
Pronoia — the doctrine that the divine actively orders the unfolding of the cosmos and human affairs toward intelligible ends, against pure chance or blind necessity.
[auto] The text describes how the Reason-Principle foreknows and binds all sequences, including wickedness, into a single coherent story.
A chain of divine beings or principles flowing downward from a single transcendent source (the One or the Father), each level less perfect than the one above.
[auto] It outlines souls standing to the Reason-Principle as parts with varying worth and grades due to separation from the source.
The divine reason, word, or ordering principle through which the universe was created; mediates between the transcendent God and the material world.
[auto] The text explicitly references the 'Reason-Principle' as the ordering force to which souls stand as parts and through which sequences become right reason.