complexity out of simplicity, plurality out of unity.
Talented people who remain quiescent often are told: “You aren’t living up to your potential.” To be fully alive, we assume, is to be lively. Yet Plotinus poses, and answers, this question:
And are we evil when we are multiplicity? For a thing is multiple when, unable to tend to itself, it pours out and is extended in scattering…. For everything seeks not another, but itself, and the journey to the exterior is foolish or compulsory. [VI-6-1]
There are two grand flows in creation, teaches Plotinus. From the One proceeds a stream of ever-increasing multiplicity as unity becomes the many. This is the downward flow of emanation: expansive, outward, centrifugal. There also is a current that leads back to the One, in the course of which parts become wholes. This is the upward flow of return: concentrated, inward, centripetal.
Both flows are entirely necessary and natural, so when Plotinus calls manyness evil he doesn’t mean that it is ungodly. After all, there is nothing apart from the One, or God. But whatever leads farther away from the Good is, obviously, not desirable.
And this is why Plotinus warns of the peril of “pouring out.” It’s not so much a moral evil as a navigational evil. Whatever takes us off-course on our return to the One is a senseless distraction. This includes being excessively preoccupied with external, rather than internal, activities and knowledge.
The One is all-powerful precisely because it is perfect unity. A self-contained plenitude of power, the One expends no energy outside of itself. How could it? It is the All, beyond which is no other. Everything that comes after the One, however, is fragmented to some degree and so possesses a lesser productive capacity.
But that true All is blessed in such a way that in not making it accomplishes great works and in remaining in itself makes no small things. [III-2-1]
If our goal is to return to the One, we must become like the One. So whenever Plotinus describes some characteristic of the highest Good, it is intended as a guide to the spiritual seeker: what the One is, we should strive to be.
Thus the One serves as the exemplar of what it means to be a true human being. Just as a person’s consciousness should become as universal and formless as possible, filled with unlimited love, so should he strive to preserve his spiritual energy within and not allow it to be drained away through excessive attention to worldly pursuits. The One creates without being affected or lessened by what it has created. So does spirit, or intellect, the initial emanation from the One.
It has been said elsewhere that there must be something [spirit] after the first [the One] , and in a general way that it is power, and overwhelming power. [V-3-16]
Even so, Plotinus goes so far as to say that it would have been better if spirit had never become differentiated from the One. We might think to ourselves, “How is it possible to second-guess the workings of God?” I believe, though, that the message Plotinus wants us to hear is that if it was unfortunate that the absolute unity of the first became the near-unity of the second, spirit, how vastly more unfortunate is it that we fragmented souls have entered into the multiplicity of the last and lowest: physical existence.
But beginning as one it [spirit] did not stay as it began, but, without noticing it, became many, as if heavy [with drunken sleep], and unrolled itself because it wanted to possess everything—how much better it would have been for it not to want this, for it became the second! … The better is the “whence,” the worse the “whither.” [III-8-8]
I’m reminded of an adage: more possessions, more possessed; less possessions, less possessed. This world of “whither” in which we live is filled with so many options. Hundreds of channels to watch on cable television. Thousands of movies to rent at the video store. Millions of
Talented people who remain quiescent often are told: “You aren’t living up to your potential.” To be fully alive, we assume, is to be lively. Yet Plotinus poses, and answers, this question:
And are we evil when we are multiplicity? For a thing is multiple when, unable to tend to itself, it pours out and is extended in scattering…. For everything seeks not another, but itself, and the journey to the exterior is foolish or compulsory. [VI-6-1]
There are two grand flows in creation, teaches Plotinus. From the One proceeds a stream of ever-increasing multiplicity as unity becomes the many. This is the downward flow of emanation: expansive, outward, centrifugal. There also is a current that leads back to the One, in the course of which parts become wholes. This is the upward flow of return: concentrated, inward, centripetal.
Both flows are entirely necessary and natural, so when Plotinus calls manyness evil he doesn’t mean that it is ungodly. After all, there is nothing apart from the One, or God. But whatever leads farther away from the Good is, obviously, not desirable.
And this is why Plotinus warns of the peril of “pouring out.” It’s not so much a moral evil as a navigational evil. Whatever takes us off-course on our return to the One is a senseless distraction. This includes being excessively preoccupied with external, rather than internal, activities and knowledge.
The One is all-powerful precisely because it is perfect unity. A self-contained plenitude of power, the One expends no energy outside of itself. How could it? It is the All, beyond which is no other. Everything that comes after the One, however, is fragmented to some degree and so possesses a lesser productive capacity.
But that true All is blessed in such a way that in not making it accomplishes great works and in remaining in itself makes no small things. [III-2-1]
If our goal is to return to the One, we must become like the One. So whenever Plotinus describes some characteristic of the highest Good, it is intended as a guide to the spiritual seeker: what the One is, we should strive to be.
Thus the One serves as the exemplar of what it means to be a true human being. Just as a person’s consciousness should become as universal and formless as possible, filled with unlimited love, so should he strive to preserve his spiritual energy within and not allow it to be drained away through excessive attention to worldly pursuits. The One creates without being affected or lessened by what it has created. So does spirit, or intellect, the initial emanation from the One.
It has been said elsewhere that there must be something [spirit] after the first [the One] , and in a general way that it is power, and overwhelming power. [V-3-16]
Even so, Plotinus goes so far as to say that it would have been better if spirit had never become differentiated from the One. We might think to ourselves, “How is it possible to second-guess the workings of God?” I believe, though, that the message Plotinus wants us to hear is that if it was unfortunate that the absolute unity of the first became the near-unity of the second, spirit, how vastly more unfortunate is it that we fragmented souls have entered into the multiplicity of the last and lowest: physical existence.
But beginning as one it [spirit] did not stay as it began, but, without noticing it, became many, as if heavy [with drunken sleep], and unrolled itself because it wanted to possess everything—how much better it would have been for it not to want this, for it became the second! … The better is the “whence,” the worse the “whither.” [III-8-8]
I’m reminded of an adage: more possessions, more possessed; less possessions, less possessed. This world of “whither” in which we live is filled with so many options. Hundreds of channels to watch on cable television. Thousands of movies to rent at the video store. Millions of
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