VI.9 On the Good, or the One

So too the bodies of plants and animals, each of which is one: if they escape unity by being broken up into multiplicity, they have lost the being they had, and are no longer what they were but have become other things, and these too only insofar as each is one. Health, too, comes when the body is ordered into one, and beauty when the nature of the one holds the parts together; and virtue of soul, when it is unified into one, into a single agreement. Then, since soul brings all things into one, crafting and molding and shaping and ordering them, should we go up to soul and say that it supplies unity and that it is the One?

What is spread apart, like a chorus, is furthest from the one; what is continuous is nearer. Soul shares in it still more, it too. But suppose someone identifies soul and the One on the ground that without being one soul would not exist either. First, the other things too each exist together with being one; but all the same the one is other than they are. Body and one are not the same; body participates in the one. Next, soul is many, even the single soul, even if it is not made of parts. For there are a great many powers in it—reasoning, desiring, apprehending—and these are held together by the one as by a bond. Soul, then, brings unity to something else, being itself one by something else; it too has this done to it by another.

Now if number belongs among the things that are, clearly the one does too, and we must inquire what it is. But if it is a product of soul’s activity as soul goes over things in counting, the one would be nothing in the things themselves. Yet the argument said that if each thing loses its one, it will not exist at all. So we must see whether each one and being are the same, and being in general and the One. But if the being of each thing is a multiplicity, and the one cannot be a multiplicity, each would be different from the other. A man, at any rate, is a rational living being, and many parts, and these many are bound together by a one. So man and one are different, if the one is divisible and the other without parts.

And being as a whole, holding all beings within itself, would be still more many and other than the One, having the one by sharing and participation. Being has life and intellect too, for it is surely not dead. So being is many.

And if it is itself both what thinks and what is thought, it will be double and not simple, nor the One. If it looks to something other, it looks in any case to what is better and before it. And if it looks both to itself and to what is better, in that way too it is second. We must posit Intellect as the kind of thing that is present to the Good and the First and looks toward that, but is also with itself and thinks itself as well, and thinks itself as being all things. So, being varied, it is far from being the One. Nor, then, will the One be all things, for then it would no longer be one; nor Intellect, for in that way too it would be all things, since Intellect is all things; nor being, for being is all things.

All the same, this is what anyone who is going to philosophize about the One must do. Since, then, what we seek is one, and we are examining the principle of all things, the Good and the First, one must not get far from the things around the first by falling to the last of all things. Striving toward the first, one must bring oneself back up from the things of perception, which are last, and be freed from all vice, since one is hastening toward the Good; one must have ascended to the principle within oneself and become one out of many, if one is going to behold the principle and the One.

So one must become intellect, entrust one’s soul to intellect and settle it firmly beneath it, so that it may be awake to receive what intellect sees; and with this one must contemplate the One, adding no perception and receiving nothing from perception into intellect, but with pure intellect contemplating what is purest, and with what is first in intellect. So when someone who has set out to view such a thing imagines magnitude or shape or bulk in connection with this nature, it is not intellect that is guiding him in the vision, because intellect is not of a nature to see such things; the activity is that of perception and of the opinion that follows perception.

So it is not something, nor a quality, nor a quantity, nor Intellect, nor Soul. It is not in motion, nor again at rest; not in place, not in time. It is itself by itself, single in form—or rather formless, being before all form, before motion, before rest. For these belong to being, and make it many. Why, then, if it is not in motion, is it not at rest? Because one or both of these must belong to being, and what is at rest is at rest by rest and is not the same as rest; so rest will be incidental to it, and it no longer remains simple. Indeed, even to call it “cause” is not to predicate something incidental of it, but of us: that we have something from it, while it is in itself.

Speaking precisely, one should not even say “that” or “this.” Rather we, running around it, as it were, from outside, try to interpret our own experiences, sometimes coming near, sometimes falling away because of the perplexities about it.

For the teaching goes as far as the road and the journey; the vision itself is now the work of the one who has willed to see. But suppose someone has not come to the sight, and his soul has had no awareness of the splendor There, and has not felt and held within itself something like a lover’s experience at the sight of the beloved, a lover coming to rest in what he loves. Or suppose he has received true light and lit up the whole soul all around, because he has come nearer, but has made the ascent still weighed down behind by what was hindering the vision; and has not ascended alone, but carrying what kept him apart from it; or has not yet been gathered into one—for that is absent from nothing and yet absent from all, so that though present it is not present except to those able to receive it and prepared, so as to fit themselves to it and, as it were, touch it and lay hold of it by likeness and by the power in them that is akin to what comes from it, so that, when it is in the state it was in when it came from it, it is then able to see, as that is by nature to be seen—

if, then, he is not yet There, but is outside for these reasons, or for lack of an argument to guide him like a tutor and give him assurance about it, then for the former let him lay the blame on himself and try to stand away from everything and be alone; and where, falling short in the arguments, he is not convinced, let him think it through as follows.

These people must have understood the nature of soul. Among other things, they must have understood that it comes from Intellect, and that it has virtue by sharing in reason from Intellect. After this they must grasp Intellect, which is other than what reasons, the part called the reasoning part. They must grasp that reasonings are already, as it were, in extension and motion. And they must grasp that the sciences, being rational principles in the soul, have now come out into the open, because Intellect, the cause of the sciences, has come to be in the soul. And having seen Intellect, as if it were perceptible, since it can be apprehended, mounted above soul and being its father, an intelligible world, one must call it a quiet Intellect and a motion without tremor. It has all things in itself and is all things, a multiplicity undivided and yet divided. For it is not divided as the rational principles are, which are already thought one at a time, nor are the things in it confused together.

Each comes forth separately. So too in the sciences: all of them are present in something without parts, and yet each of them is separate. This multiplicity-all-together, then, the intelligible world, is next to the First. The argument says that it must necessarily exist, if one says that soul exists too. It is of higher rank than soul. Yet it is not first, because it is not one, or simple. But the One, the principle of all things, is simple.

And [for] it brings Intellect into being. Its nature is such that it is the source of the best things. It is a power that generates the things that are while remaining in itself and not being diminished, nor is it in the things that come into being from it, since it is before them too. [This] we name “one” out of necessity, to point it out to one another by the name, leading toward an undivided notion and wanting to unify the soul. But we do not call it one and partless in the way we call a point or a unit one. What is one in that way is a principle of quantity, and quantity would not have come to exist unless being came first, and what is before being. So we must not cast our thought there. Rather, we must liken these things to those by analogy, in their simplicity and their flight from multiplicity and division.

When you think of it as intellect or god, it is more. And again, when you unify it in your thought, even then it is more than god, if you imagine him as more unified than your own thinking. For it is by itself, with nothing incidental to it. One might also conceive its oneness through its self-sufficiency. It must be the most adequate of all things, the most self-sufficient and the most free of need. But everything that is many and not one is in need, since it has come to be from many. So being needs it in order to be one. But it does not need itself, for it is itself. A thing that is many needs as many things as it is. Each of the things in it exists with the others and not by itself, and so is in need of the others. Such a thing, then, shows itself needy both in each of its parts and as a whole.

If, then, there must be something supremely self-sufficient, it must be the One, since it alone is such as to be in need neither with respect to itself nor with respect to anything else. It seeks nothing in order to be, nor in order to be well, nor in order to be set in place there. Being the cause of the others, it does not have what it is from others. And its well-being: what could that be for it outside itself?

Nor, then, does it will anything. It is beyond good, and is good not for itself but for the others, if anything can share in it. Nor does it think, so that there may be no otherness in it. Nor does it move: it is before motion and before thinking. What, after all, would it think? [Or] itself? Then before thinking it would be ignorant, and would need thinking in order to know itself—it, which is sufficient to itself! It does not follow, then, that because it does not know or think itself there will be ignorance in it. Ignorance arises where there is something other, when one thing is ignorant of another. But what is alone neither knows nor has anything of which it is ignorant. Being one, together with itself, it does not need to think itself.

Indeed, you should not even attach “being together with itself” to it, if you are to keep it one. You must take away thinking and being-together, both thinking of itself and thinking of other things. We should not rank it with what thinks, but rather with thinking. Thinking does not think. It is the cause of thinking, for something else, and the cause is not the same as what it causes. The cause of all things, then, is none of them. So it must not even be called good, the good that it provides. It is the Good in another way, beyond the other goods.

In other cases you cannot think something while you are thinking something else and attending to something else. You must attach nothing to the object of thought, so that it may be the very thing thought. So here too you must understand this: you cannot think that while you have the impression of something else in your soul and that impression is active. Nor can the soul, seized and held by other things, be stamped with the impression of the opposite. It is said of matter that it must be without the qualities of all things if it is to receive the impressions of all. In the same way, and much more so, the soul must become formless, if nothing lodged in it is to hinder it from being filled and illuminated by the first nature.

If so, one must let go of all outer things and turn wholly inward, not leaning toward any of the things outside. One must be unaware of all things, first in one’s disposition and then in one’s forms too, and unaware even of oneself, and so come to be in the vision of that. Having been with it and, as it were, kept it company enough, one must come back and report, if one can, the communion There to another as well. Such perhaps was the communion Minos had, and so he was famed as “the familiar friend of Zeus.” Remembering it, he laid down laws as images of it, filled by the touch of the divine for the making of laws. Or else, if one wishes, one may judge political affairs unworthy of oneself and remain above. That is what would happen to one who has seen much. [So god] is outside no one, he says, but is with all of them without their knowing it. For they themselves flee outside him, or rather outside themselves.note

So they cannot catch the one they have fled, nor, having lost themselves, seek another. Nor, for that matter, will a child who has gone out of himself in madness know his father. But one who has learned to know himself will also know where he comes from.

Or rather, must we think it is something else, in which all centers, as it were, coincide, and that we call it a center by analogy with the center of this circle? For the soul is not a circle in the way the figure is. It is a circle because the ancient nature is in it and around it, and because it comes from such a source, and still more so when souls are wholly separated. But as it is, a part of us is held down by the body, as if someone had his feet in water while the rest of his body stood out above it. So we raise ourselves up by the part that is not submerged in the body, and by this part we join, at our own center, what is as it were the center of all things, just as the centers of the greatest circles coincide with the center of the sphere that contains them, and we come to rest.

Yet we are more when we incline toward it, and our well-being lies There. [But] being far from it is simply being less. There the soul rests, outside evils, having run up to the place that is pure of evils. There it thinks, There it is free of affections, and There it truly lives. For our present life, the life without god, is a trace of life imitating that life. Life There is the activity of Intellect, and by that activity it begets gods too, in quiet contact with that. It begets beauty, it begets justice, it begets virtue. These are what the soul conceives when it is filled with god, and this is its beginning and its end. It is its beginning because the soul comes from There, and its end because the good is There. Coming to be There, it becomes itself, what it was. For to be here, among these things, is a falling away, an exile, a shedding of wings. That the good is There is shown also by the soul’s inborn love. This is why Love is paired with souls in paintings and in myths.

Anyone to whom this experience is unknown should consider it starting from here, from the loves of this world: what it is like to win what one loves most. He should consider that these objects of love are mortal and harmful, loves of images, and that they change, because they were not what is truly loved, nor our good, nor what we seek. There is the true beloved, with whom one can be united, having a share in it and truly possessing it, not embracing it from outside in the flesh.

Whoever has seen knows what I mean. The soul then has another life, as it approaches, as it has now come near and has a share in it, so that it is in a state to know that the giver of true life is present and that it needs nothing more. On the contrary, it must put away the other things and stand in this alone, and become this alone, cutting away everything else that we have wrapped around us. So we must hurry to get out of here, and chafe at being bound to the other things, so that we may embrace it with the whole of ourselves and have no part with which we do not touch god. There one can see both him and oneself, as it is lawful to see. One sees oneself made radiant, full of intelligible light, or rather light itself, pure, weightless, buoyant, having become a god, or rather being one: set alight then, but, if one grows heavy again, as it were dying down.

But that, perhaps, was no sight. It was another way of seeing: ecstasy, simplification, a surrender of oneself, a reaching toward contact, stillness, and a thinking-around that seeks to fit itself to it, if one is to behold what is in the sanctuary.note

For the nature of soul will not come to what is absolutely non-being. Going down, it will come to evil, and in that sense to non-being, but not to utter non-being. Running the opposite way, it will come not to something else but to itself. And so, not being in anything else, it is in nothing but in itself. And to be in itself alone, and not in being, is to be in that. For one becomes, oneself, not being but beyond being, in so far as one keeps company with it. If, then, one sees oneself become this, one has oneself as a likeness of that. And if one passes on from oneself, as an image to its archetype, one would reach the end of the journey.