Following the Path of Light

30 November 2022

Following the Path of Light

“The First, then, should be compared to light, the next, to the sun, and the third, to the celestial body of the moon, which gets its light from the sun.”

(Plotinus, Ennead V.6.4, Plotinus Ennead V, translated by A. H. Armstrong, Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, 1984, ISBN: 9780674994898, page 211.)

Brian Hines glosses this quote as follows:

“The First, then, should be compared to light, the next [spirit] to the sun, and the third [soul] to the celestial body of the moon, which gets its light from the sun.”

(Brian Hines, Return to the One, Adrasteia Publishing, Salem, Oregon, 2004, ISBN: 9780977735211, page 72.)

 

1.  One of the reasons I enjoy reading Plotinus is that he frequently offers readers helpful analogies, like this one.  This keeps Plotinus’s writing from getting too abstract and gives the reader a way of accessing what Plotinus is teaching through image as well as inference.

2.  The analogy is a helpful way of accessing the idea of emanation, a central understanding of the Platonic tradition.  From immaterial light we move to the material sun, and from the material sun we move to the denser realm of the material moon. 

3.  This series also helps us to understand how the things of the world can lead us back to the One.  If we trace back light to its source, if we trace the light of the moon to the material sun, and if we then trace the material sun to the spiritual sun, we enter into the origin of all things that is, at the same time, beyond all things.