On the Good, or the One

It is by the One that all beings are beings, both those that are beings primarily and those that are in any way said to be among beings. For what could anything be, if it were not one? Deprived of the one that is predicated of them, those things are not what they are said to be. There will be no army unless it is one, nor chorus nor herd, if they are not one. Nor, again, a house or a ship without unity, since the house is one and the ship is one, and if the house lost this, it would no longer be a house, nor the ship a ship. Continuous magnitudes, then, would not exist if the one were not present to them; at any rate, when they are cut, to the extent that they lose their unity they change their being. So too the bodies of plants and animals, each of which is one: if they escape from unity by being shattered into a multitude, they have lost the substance they had, and are no longer what they were, but have become other things, and those others too only in so far as each is one. Health, too, exists when the body is ordered together into one; and beauty, when the nature of the one holds the parts together; and the virtue of the soul, when it is unified into one and into a single agreement. Since, then, soul brings all things into one, crafting and moulding and shaping and ordering them, should we go to soul and say that it supplies the one and that it is itself the One? Or, just as in supplying other things to bodies it is not itself what it gives, such as shape and form, which are other than it, so we must think that, if it gives unity too, it gives it as something other than itself, and that it makes each thing one by looking to the One, just as it makes a man by looking to Man, grasping together with the man the one that is in him. For of the things called one, each is one in the way that it also has what it is; so that things which have less being have less unity, and things which have more have more. And so soul, being other than the One, has more of it in proportion to its having more, and more real, being; but it is not the One itself. For soul is one, and the one is in a way an accident of it; and these are two, soul and one, just as body and one are. What is spread apart, like a chorus, is furthest from the one, and what is continuous is nearer; and soul, sharing in it still more, is itself also [only a sharer]. But if someone brings soul and the One to the same thing on the ground that without being one soul would not exist either, then, first, the other things too each exist together with being one, yet the one is nevertheless other than them; for body and one are not the same, but body participates in the one. Second, soul is many, even the single soul, even if it is not made of parts; for there are very many powers in it, reasoning, desiring, perceiving, which are held together by the one as by a bond. Soul, then, brings the one to something else, being itself one; but it too undergoes this at the hands of another.

Is it the case, then, that for each particular thing its substance and its unity are not the same, but for being as a whole, and for substance, its substance and its being and its unity are the same? Then one who had discovered being would have discovered the One too, and substance itself would be the One itself. For example, if Intellect is substance, Intellect would also be the One, being primarily being and primarily one, and giving other things a share in being, and in the same way and to the same degree a share in unity. For what could one say the One is, besides being itself? Either it is the same as being, for "man" and "one man" are the same; or it is like a kind of number of each thing: as you would say "two" of certain things, so "one" is said of some single thing. Now if number is among the things that are, clearly the one is too, and we must inquire what it is. But if it is an activity of soul going over things in counting, the one would be nothing in the things themselves. Yet our argument said that if each thing loses its unity, it will not exist at all. We must see, then, whether the one of each thing and its being are the same, and whether being taken universally and the One are the same. But if the being of each thing is a multitude, and the one cannot be a multitude, each would be other than the other. Man, at any rate, is both a rational animal 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 indeed being as a whole, holding all beings in itself, would be still more many and other than the One, having the one by participation and sharing. Being also has life and intellect, for it is certainly not dead; so being is many. And if this is Intellect, in this way too it must be many; and still more if it contains the Forms. For not even the Idea is one, but rather a number, both each Idea and all of them together, and one in the way the cosmos is one. In general, the One is first, but Intellect and the Forms and being are not first. For each Form is from many, and composite, and later; for the things from which each thing comes are prior to it. That Intellect cannot be the first will be clear from the following too. Intellect must be in the act of thinking, and the best Intellect, the one that does not look to what is outside, must think what is before it; for in turning towards itself it turns towards its principle. If it is itself both what thinks and what is thought, it will be double and not simple, and so not the One; and if it looks to something else, then certainly to what is better and before it. And if it looks both to itself and to the better, in that case too it is second. We must posit Intellect as the sort of thing that is present to the Good and the First and looks towards that, but is also with itself and thinks itself, and thinks itself as being all things. It is far, then, from being the One, since it is manifold. So the One will not be all things, for then it would no longer be one; nor Intellect, for in that case too it would be all things, since Intellect is all things; nor being, for being is all things.

What, then, would the One be, and what nature does it have? It is no wonder that it is not easy to say, when not even being is easy to say, nor Form; yet we have a knowledge that leans on Forms. But the more the soul goes towards what is formless, unable to grasp it because it is not bounded and, as it were, stamped by a variegated thing that stamps it, the more it slips away and is afraid that it may have nothing. So it grows weary in such matters and often gladly comes down, falling away from all of them, until it reaches the perceptible and rests, as it were, on solid ground; just as sight too, when it tires of small things, gladly lights on large ones. But when the soul wishes to see by itself, seeing only by being with [its object], and being one by being one with it, it does not think that it yet has what it seeks, because it is not other than what is thought. Nevertheless, this is what one must do who is going to philosophize about the One. Since, then, what we seek is one, and we are examining the principle of all things, the Good and the First, one must not go far from the things around the first by falling to the last of all things; but, reaching towards the first things, one must lead oneself back up from the perceptibles, which are last, and be freed from all evil, as one hastening towards the Good; one must have ascended to the principle within oneself and become one out of many, if one is to be a beholder of the principle and the One. One must, then, become Intellect, and entrust one's soul to Intellect and settle it beneath it, so that it may be awake to receive what Intellect sees; and by this [Intellect] one must behold the One, adding no sense-perception and receiving nothing from sense into Intellect, but beholding the purest with pure Intellect, and with what is first in Intellect. When, then, one who has set out for the vision of such a thing imagines magnitude or shape or bulk about this nature, it is not Intellect that becomes his guide to the vision, because Intellect is not of a nature to see such things; the activity belongs to sense-perception and to opinion that follows sense-perception. One must rather take from Intellect its assurance of what it can do. Intellect can see either what is before it, or what is its own, or what comes from it. The things in it are pure; purer still and simpler are the things before it, or rather what is before it. It is not Intellect, then, but before Intellect; for Intellect is one of the beings, but that is not some thing, but before each thing; nor is it being, for being has, as it were, the shape of being, but that is shapeless, even of intelligible shape. For since the nature of the One is generative of all things, it is none of them. It is not, then, a 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; but the by-itself, of a single form, or rather formless, being before all form, before motion, before rest. For these are about being, and make it many. Why, then, if it is not in motion, is it not at rest? Because about being one or both of these must hold, and what is at rest is at rest by rest and is not the same as rest; so rest would belong to it as an accident, and it would no longer remain simple. For even to call it cause is not to predicate something accidental of it, but of us, because we have something from it while it is in itself. One who speaks precisely should not even say "that" or "this" of it; rather we, running round it as it were from outside, want to interpret our own experiences, sometimes coming near, sometimes falling away because of the perplexities about it.

The perplexity arises chiefly because our understanding of it is not by way of knowledge, nor by way of thinking, as with the other intelligibles, but by way of a presence superior to knowledge. The soul suffers a departure from being one, and is not altogether one, when it takes knowledge of anything; for knowledge is reasoned discourse, and discourse is many. So the soul passes the One by, falling into number and multiplicity. One must therefore run beyond knowledge and in no way step out of being one; one must stand away from knowledge and from the things known and from everything [that is after] that and from it, as all daylight is from the sun. That is why it is, he says, neither to be spoken nor to be written. But we speak and write, sending [the reader] towards it and waking him out of discourse to the vision, as if pointing out the road to one who wishes to behold something. For teaching goes as far as the road and the journey; the vision itself is already the work of the one who has resolved to see. But suppose someone has not come to the sight, and his soul has had no understanding of the splendour there, and has not felt nor held within itself something like the experience of a lover who, from seeing, comes to rest in the one he loves; suppose he has received true light and lit up the whole soul all around because he has come nearer, but has ascended still weighed down behind by what hindered the vision; and has not ascended alone, but carries with him what separates him from it; or has not yet been gathered into one. For that is not absent from anything, and yet it is absent from all things, so that though present it is not present except to those able to receive it and prepared for it, so that they fit themselves to it and, as it were, lay hold of it and touch it by likeness and by the power in them that is akin to what comes from it; when one is in the state one was in when one came from it, one is at once able to see, in the way that is by nature to be seen. If, then, he is not yet there, but is outside because of these things, or for lack of a reasoning that would guide him and give him confidence about it, let him hold himself to blame for the former, and try to be alone by standing away from all things; and where he lacks trust in the arguments because he falls short, let him consider the following.

Whoever thinks that beings are governed by chance and the spontaneous, and held together by bodily causes, has been driven far away both from God and from the notion of the One; and the argument is not addressed to these, but to those who posit another nature besides bodies and go up to soul. These must have understood the nature of soul, both in other respects and in this: that it comes from Intellect and gains virtue by sharing in reason from it. After this they must grasp an Intellect other than what reasons and is called the reasoning part; and grasp that reasonings are already, as it were, in extension and motion, and that the sciences are such reason-principles in soul, which have already come 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, because it can be apprehended as mounted above the soul and as its father, being an intelligible cosmos, one must call it a still Intellect and an unshaken motion, holding all things in itself and being all things, a multiplicity undistinguished and yet distinguished. For it is not distinguished in the way the reason-principles are, which are thought one at a time, nor are the things in it confused; for each comes forth separately. So too in the sciences, though all of them are in something partless, each is nevertheless separate. This multiplicity-all-together, then, the intelligible cosmos, is next to the first, and the argument says that it must of necessity exist, if soul exists at all; and it is more sovereign than soul. Yet it is not first, because it is not one nor simple; but the One, the principle of all things, is simple. What is before the most honoured among beings (if there must be something before Intellect, which wishes to be one but is not one, but one-like, because Intellect is not scattered within itself but is truly with itself, not having divided itself up, since it is next after the One, though it has in some way dared to stand away from the One) — what is before this is the wonder, the One, which is not being, so that here too "one" may not be predicated of something else. No name truly belongs to it; but if one must name it, it might fittingly be called, in common speech, "one", not as something else that is then one. It is hard to know for this reason, and is known rather by what is begotten from it, substance; for it leads Intellect to substance. And its nature is such as to be the source of the best things and a power that begets beings while remaining in itself and not being diminished, nor being in the things that come to be from it, since it is before them too. We call it "one" of necessity, to indicate it to one another by the name, leading ourselves to a notion without parts and wishing to unify the soul; not calling it one and partless in the way we call a point or a unit one. For what is one in that way is a principle of quantity, which would not have come to subsist unless substance, and what is before substance, existed first. We must not, then, cast our thought there; but we should liken these things to those by analogy, in their simplicity and their flight from multiplicity and division.

How, then, do we say "one", and how are we to fit it to our thinking? By positing it as one in a fuller sense than a unit and a point are made one. For there the soul, taking away magnitude and the multiplicity of number, ends at the smallest and rests on something that is partless, but that was in what is divisible and is in something else. But this is neither in something else nor in what is divisible, nor partless in the way the smallest is; for it is the greatest of all things, not in magnitude but in power, so that its sizelessness too is a matter of power; since even the things after it are indivisible and partless in their powers, not in their bulk. It must also be taken as infinite, not in that its magnitude or number cannot be traversed, but in that its power cannot be encompassed. For when you think of it as Intellect or God, it is more; and again, when you unify it in your thought, here too it is more [one] than God, even if you imagine him more unitary than your thinking. For it is by itself, with nothing accidental to it. One might also conceive its oneness through its self-sufficiency. For it must be the most sufficient of all, the most self-sufficient and the least in need; but everything that is many and not one is in need, since it has come to be from many. Substance, then, needs it in order to be one; but it does not need itself, for it is itself. Again, what is many needs as many things as it is, and each of the things in it, being with the others and not by itself, is in need of the others; and so such a thing shows itself in need both part by part and as a whole. If, then, there must be something most self-sufficient, it must be the One, which alone is such as to be in need neither with respect to itself nor with respect to anything else. For it seeks nothing in order to be, nor in order to be well, nor in order to be settled there. Being the cause for other things, it does not have what it is from others; and what good could it have outside itself? So the good is not an accident of it; for it is that itself. Nor is there any place for it; for it does not need to be set in place, as if it could not carry itself; what is to be set in place is soulless, a mass that falls if it is not yet set in place. The other things too are set in place through this, through which they came to subsist and at the same time received the place to which they were assigned. What seeks a place is in need; but a principle is not in need of what comes after it, and the principle of all things is in need of none of them. For whatever is in need is in need because it strives for a principle. And if the One were in need, it would clearly be seeking not to be one; so it would be in need of what would destroy it. But everything that is said to be in need is in need of well-being and of what preserves it; so that for the One nothing is good. Nor, then, does it will anything; but it is beyond good, and is good not for itself but for others, if anything can partake of it. Nor does it think, so that there may be no otherness; nor does it move, for it is before motion and before thinking. For what would it think? Itself. Then before thinking it will be ignorant, and will need thinking in order to know itself, it that is sufficient to itself. Yet because it does not know or think itself, there will not be ignorance in it; for ignorance arises when 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, and with itself, it needs no thinking of itself. Indeed one must not even attach "being-with" to it, if you are to keep the One; one must take away both thinking and being-with, the thinking of itself and of the other things. For one must not rank it with what thinks, but rather with thinking; and thinking does not think, but is the cause of thinking for something else; and the cause is not the same as the caused. The cause of all things, then, is none of them. So it must not even be called good with the good it provides; it is the Good in another way, beyond the other goods.

If, because it is none of these things, your judgment is left without bounds, set yourself upon these things and behold from them; but behold without casting your thought outwards. For it does not lie somewhere, leaving the other things empty of itself; it is present to whoever is able to touch it, and to whoever is unable it is not present. Just as in other cases one cannot think something while thinking of something else and being occupied with another thing, but must attach nothing to what is thought, so that it may be the object of thought itself, so here too one must understand that it is not possible to think that while having in the soul the impression of something else, with that impression active; nor again can the soul, seized and held by other things, be stamped with the impression of the opposite. But just as is said of matter, that it must be without the qualities of all things if it is to receive the impressions of all, so, and much more, must the soul become formless, if nothing is to sit in it as a hindrance to its being filled and illumined by the first nature. If so, one must let go of all external things and turn wholly inward, not inclining towards any external thing, but being ignorant of all things, first in one's disposition and then in the forms too; and being ignorant even of oneself, one must come to be in the vision of that, and, having been with it and, as it were, conversed with it enough, come and announce to another too, if one can, the communion there. Such communion, perhaps, Minos too had, and so was famed as the familiar companion of Zeus; remembering it, he laid down laws as images of it, filled for lawgiving by the touch of the divine. Or else one may hold political affairs unworthy of oneself and, if one wishes, remain above; which would indeed be the experience of one who has seen much. It is outside of nothing, he says, but is with all without their knowing it. For they themselves flee outside it, or rather outside themselves. They cannot, then, catch what they have fled, nor, having lost themselves, seek another; nor will a child that has gone out of itself in madness know its father. But one who has learned himself will know also whence he comes.

If, then, a soul knows itself at other times too, and knows that its motion is not in a straight line, except when it suffers a break, but that its natural motion is like that in a circle, around something not outside but around a centre, and that the centre is that from which the circle is, it will move around this from which it is, and will hang upon it, bringing itself together towards that same point, towards which all souls ought to move, but the souls of gods move always; and by moving towards it they are gods. For a god is what is joined to that, while what stands far off from it is the common run of men, and beast. Is this, then, the soul's centre, as it were, what we are seeking? Or must we think it something else, in which all centres, as it were, coincide, and [call it centre] by analogy with the centre of this circle here? For the soul is not a circle in the way the figure is, but [it is called one] because the primal nature is in it and around it, and because it is from such a thing, and still more because souls, when separated, are whole. But now, since part of us is held down by the body (as if someone had his feet in water but stood out of it with the rest of his body), we lift ourselves up by the part that is not submerged in the body, and by this we join, at our own centre, with the centre, as it were, of all things, as the centres of the greatest circles join with the centre of the sphere that encloses them, and we are at rest. Now if these were bodily circles and not circles of soul, they would be joined to the centre spatially, and would lie around it where the centre lay; but since the souls themselves are intelligible, and that is beyond Intellect, one must think that the contact comes about through other powers, in the way that what thinks is naturally joined to what it thinks, and more than that: that what thinks is present by likeness and sameness, and is joined to its kin with nothing separating them. For bodies are prevented by bodies from sharing with one another, but incorporeal things are not kept apart by bodies. Nor, then, are they separated from one another by place, but by otherness and difference; so when otherness is not present, things that are not other are present to one another. That, then, having no otherness, is always present, and we are present when we have none. And that does not desire us, so as to be around us, but we desire it, so as to be around it. We are always around it, but we do not always look to it. Like a chorus singing, which, though it stands around its leader, may turn outward, away from the sight of him, but when it turns back sings well and truly stands around him, so we too are always around it (and if we were not, we would be utterly dissolved and would no longer exist), but we are not always turned to it. But when we do look to it, then there is our goal and our rest, and we no longer sing out of tune, truly dancing around it a god-inspired dance.

In this dance the soul beholds the source of life, the source of intellect, the principle of being, the cause of good, the root of soul. These do not pour out from it so as then to diminish it, for it is not a mass; otherwise the things begotten would be perishable. But in fact they are everlasting, because their principle remains in the same state, not divided up into them but remaining whole. So they too remain, as the light remains while the sun remains. For we are not cut off, nor separate, even if the nature of body has intruded and drawn us to itself; but we breathe and are preserved, not because it gave and then went away, but because it always supplies us, as long as it is what it is. We are more, however, when we incline towards it, and our well-being is there; being far away is simply being less. There too the soul rests, outside evils, having run up into the place pure of evils; and there it thinks, and there it is free of affection; and true living is there. For the present life, the life without God, is a trace of life imitating that one; but living there is the activity of Intellect, and by that activity it also begets gods in still contact with that, and begets beauty, begets justice, begets virtue. For soul conceives these when filled with God, and this is its beginning and its end: beginning, because it is from there; end, because the Good is there, and when it comes to be there it becomes itself, what it was. For being here, among these things, is a falling away, an exile, a shedding of wings. That the Good is there is shown also by the love that is innate in the soul, which is why Eros is paired with souls both in paintings and in myths. For since soul is other than God but from him, it loves him of necessity; and when it is there it has the heavenly love, but here it becomes common. For there is the heavenly Aphrodite there, but here she becomes common, as if prostituted; and every soul is an Aphrodite. This is what is hinted at by the birthday of Aphrodite and by Eros who was born with her. The soul, then, when it is in its natural state, loves God, wishing to be united with him, as a maiden loves her noble father with a noble love; but when it comes into becoming and is deceived, as it were, by wooings, it exchanges [that love] for another, mortal love, and in its father's absence it is outraged. But when it comes to hate the outrages here, and purifies itself of the things of this world, and sets out once more towards its father, it is happy. Those to whom this experience is unknown should consider it from the loves here: what it is to obtain what one most loves; and that these beloved things are mortal and harmful, and loves of images, and they change, because it was not what is truly loved, nor our good, nor what we seek. But there is the true beloved, with whom one can be, sharing in it and truly having it, not embracing it from outside with flesh. Whoever has seen knows what I mean: that the soul then has another life, as it approaches and has already arrived and shares in him, so that, being so disposed, it knows that the giver of true life is present, and it needs nothing further. On the contrary, it must put away all other things and stand in this alone, and become this alone, cutting away all the rest that we have wrapped around us; so that we are eager to go out from here, and chafe at being bound to the other side, 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: 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 if fading.

How is it, then, that one does not remain there? Because one has not yet wholly come out. But there will be a time when the vision will also be continuous, for one no longer troubled by any trouble from the body. What has seen is not what is troubled, but the other part, at the times when what has seen is idle from the vision, though not idle from the knowledge that lies in demonstrations and proofs and in the soul's discursive reasoning. But the seeing, and what has seen, are no longer reason, but greater than reason and before reason and upon reason, as is what is seen. Having seen himself, then, at the time when he sees, he will see himself as such, or rather he will be with himself as such, and will perceive himself as such, having become simple. But perhaps one should not even say "he will see". As for what is seen (if one must speak of these as two, the seer and the seen, and not of both as one; a bold thing to say): at that time the seer neither sees nor distinguishes nor imagines two, but, as if he had become another and not himself, nor belonging to himself there, he has come to belong to that and is one with it, as if joining centre to centre. For here too, when they have come together, they are one, and two when they are apart. That is how we too now speak of it as other. That is why the vision is hard to put into words. For how could one report it as something other, when one did not see it, while beholding it, as other, but as one with oneself?

This is what the injunction of the mysteries here means to make clear, the rule not to divulge them to the uninitiated: since that is not to be divulged, it forbade showing the divine to another who has not had the good fortune to see it himself. Since, then, there were not two, but the seer himself was one with the seen, as not seen but united, whoever became this when he was mingling with that would, if he remembered, have with himself an image of it. He was himself one, having no difference within himself, either in relation to himself or in relation to other things. For nothing moved within him, no anger, no desire for anything else was present to him once he had ascended; nor indeed any reason, nor any thinking, nor himself at all, if one must say even this. But as if snatched up or possessed by a god, he has come quietly into a solitary and settled state, unshaken in his own substance, turning aside nowhere, not even turning about himself, standing wholly still and, as it were, having become rest. Nor [is he among] the beautiful things; he has already run beyond even the beautiful, having already passed beyond even the chorus of the virtues, like someone who has entered the inner part of the sanctuary and left behind the statues in the temple, which for one who comes out of the sanctuary again become the first things after the vision within and the communion there, which was not with a statue or an image but with the thing itself; these then become secondary sights. But that was perhaps not a sight, but another way of seeing: standing-outside (ecstasy), simplification, a giving-over of oneself, a reaching towards contact, rest, and a thinking-around directed to fitting-together, if one is to behold what is in the sanctuary. If one looks in any other way, nothing is present to him. These things, then, are imitations, and to the wise among the prophets they hint riddlingly at how that god is seen; and a wise priest, understanding the riddle, might, by coming to be there, make his vision of the sanctuary a true one. And even if he has not come to be there, but holds this sanctuary to be something invisible, a source and a principle, he will know that he sees principle by principle, and is with it, like with like, leaving out none of the divine things that soul can hold. And before the vision it asks for what remains, [to come] from the vision; and what remains, for one who has gone beyond all things, is what is before all things. For the nature of soul will not come to what is altogether non-being; going downward it will come to evil, and in this way 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, being not in something else, it is not 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 substance, but beyond substance, in so far as one consorts with it. If, then, someone sees himself become this, he has himself as a likeness of that; and if he passes over from himself, as image to archetype, he would have the end of his journey. And when he falls from the vision, he will awaken again the virtue in himself, and, perceiving himself wholly ordered, he will be lightened again, going through virtue to Intellect and through wisdom to it. And this is the life of gods and of godlike and blessed men: release from the other things here, a life that takes no pleasure in the things here, flight of the alone to the alone.