Excerpts from ‘The Six Enneads’ by Plotinus (vegetarian) – The Soul, Part 1 of 2

Today it is a delight to present selections from Sections 8 to 10 in “The Second Ennead: Third Tractate” from the book “The Six Enneads” by Plotinus, translated by Stephen MacKenna and B.S. Page. These sections expound on the divinity of the soul and encourages us to work for liberation from this sphere.

The Second Ennead: Third Tractate Section 8

“[…] What of virtue and vice? That question has been amply discussed elsewhere: in a word, virtue is ours by the ancient staple of the Soul; vice is due to the commerce of a Soul with the outer world.”

Section 9

“This brings us to the Spindle-destiny, spun according to the ancients by the Fates. To Plato, the Spindle represents the co-operation of the moving and the stable elements of the cosmic circuit: the Fates with Necessity, Mother of the Fates, manipulate it and spin at the birth of every being, so that all comes into existence through Necessity.

In the Timaeus, the creating God bestows the essential of the Soul, but it is the divinities moving in the cosmos [the stars] that infuse the powerful affections holding from Necessity, our impulse and our desire, our sense of pleasure and of pain and that lower phase of the Soul in which such experiences originate. By this statement our personality is bound up with the stars, whence our Soul [as total of Principle and affections] takes shape; and we are set under necessity at our very entrance into the world: our temperament will be of the stars’ ordering, and so, therefore, the actions which derive from temperament, and all the experiences of a nature shaped to impressions.

What, after all this, remains to stand for the ‘We’?

The ‘We’ is the actual resultant of a Being whose nature includes, with certain sensibilities, the power of governing them. Cut off as we are by the nature of the body, God has yet given us, in the midst of all this evil, virtue the unconquerable, meaningless in a state of tranquil safety, but everything where its absence would be peril of fall.

Our task, then, is to work for our liberation from this sphere, severing ourselves from all that has gathered about us; the total man is to be something better than a body ensouled […]”