6 November 2022

 Aphele Panta

 “The soul runs over all truths, and all the same shuns the truths we know if someone tries to express them in words and discursive thought; for discursive thought, in order to express anything in words, has to consider one thing after another: this is the method of description; but how can one describe the absolutely simple?  But it is enough if the intellect comes into contact with it; but when it has done so, while the contact lasts, it is absolutely impossible, nor has it time, to speak; but it is afterwards that it is able to reason about it.  One must believe one has seen, when the soul suddenly takes light; for this is from him and he is it; we must think that he is present when, like another god whom someone called to his house, he comes and brings light to us: for if he had not come, he would not have brought the light.  So the unenlightened soul does not have him as god; but when it is enlightened it has what it sought, and this is the soul’s true end, to touch that light and see it by itself, not by another light, but by the light which is also its means of seeing.  It must see that light by which it is enlightened: for we do not see the sun by another light than his own.  How then can this happen?  Take away everything! (Aphele panta!)”

 (Plotinus, Ennead V.3.17, Ennead V, translated by A. H. Armstrong, Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, 1984, pages 133-135.)

1. Partly this quote is an analysis of why words are inadequate to express the ultimate.  From the perspective of discursive thought things happen one after another.  But from the perspective of eternity things happen ‘all at once’; in a sense from the perspective of eternity things are not things if by things we mean one after another. 

2. The soul’s true end, the culmination of the Platonic Way, is to ‘touch’ that light which is the presence of eternity.  From a discursive perspective that light is an ultimate otherness, but the light that touches this light is simultaneously this light.

3.  This passage helps me to understand the nature of Platonic Grace.  When this passage refers to the light as being ‘from him’ I think of that as an aspect of divine charity, love, or grace.

4. The closing of this passage asks how we can access this experience of the light that is both inner and outer.  Plotinus writes, “Take away everything.”  I interpret this as meaning to understand the true nature of material existence; its ephemerality, its unsatisfactory nature, and its samsaric context.  Instead we shift our attention to the source of all these sensory things, to that which lies beyond all sensory things, to that which is eternal. 

(As an aside, I think ‘aphele panta’ could be an efficacious mantra.)

5.  The sun illuminates the material world.  The spiritual sun illuminates the path to transcendence.