Enneads II 9: [Against the Gnostics]

This tractate is much lengthier than those that came before, and I found it beautiful in two ways: first, it contains something of a summary of Plotinus' worldview, and second, because it contains some very clear and stirring analogies. These are interspersed with a long list of arguments against specific Gnostic teachings, which I have generally skipped over in my summary, but I found reading them interesting—and even funny at times! It is worth reading in the original, and I especially liked §13, §16, and §18.

II 9: Against Those that Affirm the Creator of the Kosmos and the Kosmos Itself to be Evil [Generally Quoted as "Against the Gnostics"]

In the teachings given by the ancients and proven by myriad means elsewhere, there are three transcendent principles: the One (the ineffable unity beyond all things), Beauty (the definition of form), and the World Soul (the definition of animation). The cosmos ultimately comes from the interplay of these. Of ourselves, we too possess a soul, part of which dwells with the World Soul in Beauty and part of which dwells within the body. It is true that the body weighs down the soul, but the soul can never become what it is not: the light of the Divine suffuses the entire cosmos—even, though it be dimmer, here in the material world. Therefore everything that exists partakes of the Divine and exists eternally, without beginning or end: even material forms which may be destroyed get recycled into new images of what they were!

The Gnostics reject these teachings and despise the world as an evil image of a higher world. But if this world is evil, it must be patterned on evil, all the way up to the Highest. If that's the case, it is hopeless to conceive of "escape:" why would you want to live in a purer version of the world you hate? Won't you just hate it more? In this and many other ways, their teachings are incoherent.

One doesn't find light by running away from darkness: if it is all around you, where would you run? And anyway, you would probably just trip over something. If you want light, you should light a lamp! In the same way, merely hating evil does not make one good: rather than leading you to a better world, it will just lead you in circles and trip you up. One should instead take some positive action and love the good things in this world: by doing so, one prepares themselves to love the good things in the higher world.

And with that, we conclude the second ennead and the first third of the text. My bookmark looks to only be about of fifth of the way through the book, though, so the tractates ahead are likely longer and more challenging than those we've passed already!

Plotinus on the Butterfly Effect

I'm reading Enneads III 1, and came across this amusing paragraph:

[Let us suppose the universe is strictly material, being entirely composed by atoms.] These atoms are to move, one downwards—admitting a down and an up—another slant-wise, all at haphazard, in a confused conflict. Nothing here is orderly; order has not come into being, though the outcome, this Universe, when it achieves existence, is all order; and thus prediction and divination are utterly impossible, whether by the laws of the science—what science can operate where there is no order?—or by divine possession and inspiration, which no less require that the future be something regulated.

On the one hand, here is Plotinus anticipating Edward Lorenz by nearly two millennia.

But on the other, can you imagine any modern physicist using "divination appears to work in practice" as an axiom!?