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

Let us continue with selections from Sections 16 to 18 of “The Second Ennead: Third Tractate” in “The Six Enneads” by Plotinus, translated by Stephen MacKenna and B.S. Page, which expound on the Reason-Principles and the link between our souls and our worldly choices.

“Is everything, then, to be attributed to the act of the Reason-Principles? To their existence, no doubt, but not to their effective action; they exist, and they know; or better, the Soul, which contains the engendering Reason-Principle, knows the results of all it has brought to pass. For whensoever similar factors meet and act in relation to each other, similar consequences must inevitably ensue: the Soul adopting or foreplanning the given conditions accomplishes the due outcome and links all into a total. All, then, is antecedent and resultant, each sequent becoming in turn an antecedent once it has taken its place among things. And perhaps this is a cause of progressive deterioration: men, for instance, are not as they were of old; by dint of interval and of the inevitable law, the Reason-Principles have ceded something to the characteristics of the Matter.

But: The Soul watches the ceaselessly changing universe and follows all the fate of all its works: this is its life, and it knows no respite from this care, but is ever laboring to bring about perfection, planning to lead all to an unending state of excellence – like a farmer, first sowing and planting and then constantly setting to rights where rainstorms and long frosts and high gales have played havoc. […]

Still, by the side of the better, there exists also what is less good. Well, perhaps even the less good has its contributory value in the All. Perhaps there is no need that everything be good. Contraries may co-operate, and without opposites there could be no ordered Universe: all living beings of the partial realm include contraries. The better elements are compelled into existence and molded to their function by the Reason-Principle directly; the less good are potentially present in the Reason-Principles, actually present in the phenomena themselves; the Soul’s power had reached its limit, and failed to bring the Reason-Principles into complete actuality since, amid the clash of these antecedent Principles, Matter had already from its own stock produced the less good. […]”

“[…] But the Creator above all is the Intellectual-Principle, as giver, to the Soul that follows it, of those gifts whose traces exist in the Third Kind. Rightly, therefore, is this cosmos described as an image continuously being imaged, the First and the Second Principles immobile, the Third, too, immobile essentially, but, accidentally and in Matter, having motion. For as long as Divine Mind and Soul exist, the Divine Thought-Forms will pour forth into that phase of the Soul: as long as there is a Sun, all that streams from it will be some form of Light.”