Dimensions of Beauty

19 January 2024

Dimensions of Beauty

“So the soul when it is purified becomes form and formative power, altogether bodiless and intellectual [noetic] and entirely belonging to the divine, whence beauty springs and all that is akin to it.  Soul, then, when it is raised to the level of intellect [nous] increases in beauty.  Intellect and the things of intellect are its beauty, its own beauty and not another’s, since only then is it truly soul.  For this reason it is right to say that the soul’s becoming something good and beautiful is its being made like to God, because from Him come beauty and all else which falls to the lot of real beings.  Or rather, beautifulness is reality, and the other kind of thing is the ugly, and this same is the primary evil; so for God the qualities of goodness and beauty are the same, or the realities, the good and beauty.  So we must follow the same line of enquiry to discover beauty and goodness, and ugliness and evil.  And first we must posit beauty which is also the good; from this immediately comes intellect [nous], which is beauty; and soul is given beauty by intellect.  Everything else is beautiful by the shaping of soul, the beauties in actions and in ways of life.  And soul makes beautiful the bodies which are spoken of as beautiful; for since it is a divine thing and a kind of part of beauty, it makes everything it grasps and masters beautiful, as far as they are capable of participation.

“So we must ascend again to the good, which every soul desires.  Anyone who has seen it knows what I mean when I say it is beautiful.”

(Plotinus, Ennead I.6, On Beauty, translated by A. H. Armstrong, Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1966, pages 251-253, ISBN: 9780674994843.  Note: words in brackets are mine.)

“The Soul thus cleansed is all Idea and Reason, wholly free of body, intellective, entirely of that divine order from which the wellspring of Beauty rises and all the race of Beauty.

“Hence the Soul heightened to the Intellectual-Principle is beautiful to all its power.  For Intellection and all that proceeds from Intellection are the Soul’s beauty, a graciousness native to it and not foreign, for only with these is it truly Soul.  And it is just to say that in the Soul’s becoming a good and beautiful thing is its becoming like to God, for from the Divine comes all the Beauty and all the Good in beings.

“We may even say the Beauty is the Authentic-Existents and Ugliness is the Principle contrary to Existence: and the Ugly is also the primal evil; therefore its contrary is at once good and beautiful, or is Good and Beauty: and hence the one method will discover to us the Beauty-Good and the Ugliness-Evil.

“And Beauty, this Beauty which is also The Good, must be posed as The First: directly deriving from this First is the Intellectual-Principle which is preeminently the manifestation of Beauty; through the Intellectual-Principle Soul is beautiful.  The beauty in things of a lower order – actions and pursuits for instance – comes by operation of the shaping Soul which is also the author of the beauty found in the world of sense.  For the Soul, a divine thing, a fragment as it were of the Primal Beauty, makes beautiful to the fullness of their capacity all things whatsoever that it grasps and moulds.

“Therefore we must ascend again towards the Good, the desired of every Soul.  Anyone that has seen This, knows what I intend when I say that it is beautiful.”

(Plotinus, The Enneads, Ennead I.6, Beauty, translated by Stephen MacKenna, Larson Publications, Burdett, New York, 1992, pages 69 and 70, ISBN: 9780943914558)

1.  This passage is an example of how key terms in Platonism shift in meaning and implications depending on what hypostasis the term is located in.  In this essay On Beauty the term is ‘beauty’ or ‘the beautiful’; beauty is treated in the soul, in a noetic context, and in the context of God, or the One, or ultimate reality.  The way beauty manifests in each context, and how beauty is linked from context to context, is presented with great skill.

2.  “ . . . the soul’s becoming something good and beautiful is its being made like to God, because from Him come beauty and all else which falls to the lot of real beings.”

Plotinus links the good and the beautiful in this quote.  The foundation for this way of looking at beauty is established early in the essay when Plotinus refers to the beauty of ‘virtue’; “ . . . and for those who are advancing upwards from sense-perception ways of life and actions and characters and intellectual activities are beautiful, and there is the beauty of virtue.” (Ibid, Armstrong, page 233)  I find this linking of the good and the beautiful in God, where presumably they are not separate, helpful in understanding the place of beauty in the presentation of Plotinus overall.  In some Platonic writings that I have read it is suggested that beauty is something that appears in the noetic, but in this passage Plotinus is saying that the source of beauty is the One and the Good, that beauty is ultimately at the same level as the One and the Good.  I have found it helpful to keep that in mind because in other passages where Plotinus discusses beauty, knowing that beauty ultimately resides in the fully transcendental, clarifies the nature of beauty and how it works.

3.  The One is the source for all unity in the world, including the world of the senses.  To the extent that a thing is a thing, it participates in the One.  The farther something is from the One, the less unified it is.  The same applies to the Good.  To the degree that something exhibits virtue is the degree to which something participates in the Good.  The farther something is from the Good itself, the less capacity something has for virtue based behavior and this inability to act in accordance with the virtues is what Plotinus refers to as ‘evil.’ 

And the same applies to Beauty.  To the extent that something displays beauty is the extent that it participates in Beauty.  The more distant something is from Beauty the more it manifests the ugly; from this perspective, then, ugliness is the absence of Beauty.

4.  Contemplation on Beauty is a major teaching of Plotinus.  Because the source of Beauty is, ultimately, the One, Beauty can uplift and transform us; first leading us to the noetic, and then past the noetic to the One.  This is done by shifting our attention from a sensory instance of beauty to Beauty as such.  Because the soul receives Beauty from the noetic, this contemplation on Beauty, meaning this shift of attention from sensory beauty to Beauty as such, takes us to the noetic.  From the noetic we can shift our attention from the Beauty of forms to the source of formal beauty, which is the One.

5.  In McKenna’s translation he writes, “And Beauty, this Beauty which is also the Good, must be posed as The First.”  This is what I mean when I say that ultimately Beauty and Unity and Goodness are a single transcendental reality in the first hypostasis.

6.  This way of talking about ultimate nature may have implications for the idea that Plotinus is committed to an apophatic mysticism.  There are passages, especially in Ennead V, where Plotinus speaks of the ultimate, the fully transcendental, using apophatic language.  But in an essay like this one, Plotinus seems to use a term like The Beautiful in cataphatic ways.  I think it is possible to say the same for The Good and The One.  Plotinus seems to be saying that Unity, Goodness, and Beauty are qualities of God; these qualities are not isolated in God, but they are separable in the world of sense experience. 

My feeling is that Plotinus is using terms like The Beautiful and The Good and The One as tools to lead us to God; and that ‘God’ is also such a term. 

7.  Beauty in the world of sense experience is the way that The One reminds us of its presence.  If it were not for Beauty we might not be able to access higher realities at all.  But because there is Beauty in the world we can, by following Beauty to its source which is The Good and The One, ascend to the transcendental. 

8.  The presence of Beauty in the world is the presence of the grace of The One.