THE BOOK WAS DRENCHED ~~ C0>; 5j f 60672 >m PLOT IN US The Ennefids PLOTINUS The Enneads TRANSLATED BY STEPHEN AL\cKENNA SECOND EDITION REVISED BY B. S. PAGE VVIIH A FORI WORD BY PROFESSOR K. R. DODDS AND AN INTRODUCTION BY PROFESSOR PAUL HENRY, S J. FABER AND FABER LIMITED 24 Russell Square London First published by the Medici Society Published in this new revised edition nicnilvi by Faber and Faber Limited 24 Russell Square, London w.c. Printed in Great Britain at the University Press, Oxford by (Charles Batev Printer to the University All rights reserved t)o (Him T)e *| CONTENTS Foreword: by E. R. DODDS xi Preface to the Second Edition xv Extracts from the Explanatory Matter in the First Edition xix Introduction: 'Plotinus' Place in the History of Thought': by PAUL HENRY, S.J. XXXiti Porphyry's Life of Plotinus i THE FIRST ENNEAD i. The Animate and the Man 2 1 ii. The Virtues 30 in. Dialectic 36 iv. Happiness 40 v. Happiness and Extension of Time 52 vi. Beauty 56 vn. The Primal Good and Secondary Forms of Good 64 vin. The Nature and Source of Evil 66 ix. The Reasoned Dismissal' 78 THE SECOND ENNEAD i. The Heavenly System 80 n. The Heavenly Circuit 88 in. Are the Stars Causes? 91 iv. Matter 105 v. Potentiality and Actuality iitf vi. Quality 123 vn. 'Complete Transfusion' 127 vm. Why Distant Objects Appear Small 1 30 ix. Against the Gnostics; or, Against Those that Affirm the Creator of the Cosmos and the Cosmos Itself to be Evil ' 132 vii PLOTINUS THE THIRD ENNEAD i. Fate 7 153 ii. Providence (I) 160 in. Providence (II) 178 iv. Our Tutelary Spirit ' 185 v. Love 191 Vi. The Impassivity of the Unembodied 201 vn. Time and Eternity S ^22' vni. Nature, Contemplation, and the One 239 ix. Detached Considerations 251 THE FOURTH ENNEAD i. On the Essence of the Soul (I) 255 ii. On the Essence of the Soul (II) 255 in. Problems of the Soul (I) 259 iv. Problems of the Soul (II) 288 v. Problems of the Soul (III); or, On Sight 328 vi. Perception and Memory 338 vii. The Immortality of the Soul 342 vni. The SouFs Descent into Body 357 ix. Are all Souls One? 364 THE FIFTH ENNEAD i. The Three Initial Hypostases 369 ii. The Origin and Order of the Beings following on the First 380 in. The Knowing Hypostases and the Transcendent 382 iv. How the Secondaries Rise from the First; and on the One 400 v. That the Intellectual Beings are not outside the Intellectual- Principle; and on the Nature of the Good 403 vi. That the Principle transcending Being has no Intellectual Act. What being has Intellection primally and what being has it secondarily 415 viii CONTENTS vii. Is there an Ideal Archetype of Particular Beings? 419 vni. On the Intellectual Beauty ^ 422 ix. The Intellectual-Principle, the Ideas, and the Authentic Existence 434 THE SIXTH ENNEAD i. On the Kinds of Being (I) 443 ii. On the Kinds of Being (II) 47 1 in. On the Kinds of Being (III) 491 iv. On the Integral Omnipresence of the Authentic Existent (I) 518 v. On the Integral Omnipresence of the Authentic Existent (II) 532 vi. On Numbers 541 vii. How the Multiplicity of the Ideal-Forms came into being; and on the Good 559 vin. On Free Will and the Will of the One """ 595 ix. On the Good, or the One 614 APPENDICES i. Select Bibliography 626 ii. The Chronological Order 629 in. Sources of Quotations 630 ix FOREWORD by E. R. DODDS IT is right that the reader should be told something of the author of this translation, and of the circumstances in which it was conceived and produced. Stephen MacKenna (1872-1934) is still remembered by a few people as an impassioned and quixotic Irish patriot, and by many as the most enchanting talker both of sense and of nonsense whom they have ever known. But he was also one of that great line of un- professional scholars whose labours have enriched our literature men who worked with no eye to academic preferment or financial reward, but because they thought the work important. He came to Greek scholarship by a very unusual route. His father, a soldier of fortune and unsuccessful man of letters, died when Stephen was twelve, leaving a brood of young children and a widow in straitened circumstances. The boy received something of a classical education at Ratcliffe College in Leicestershire; then he was placed in a Dublin bank. After a few years he left this uncongenial security to seek a precarious livelihood as a journalist in Paris and to fight as a volunteer with the Greek army in the Greco-Turkish war of 1897. At thirty-five he had made a considerable name in journalism, first as a special correspondent of the New York World and later as its European representative and head of its Paris office. But he had long been conscious that his true vocation lay elsewhere. While still a bank clerk he had published an English version of the bmtatio. Christi, and in 1902 he began to work on a translation of Marcus Aurelius. The latter was never completed; but in 1905, when he was reporting on the abortive 'first revolution' in Russia, he bought in St. Petersburg Creuzer's Oxford text of Plotinus, and in Moscow the Didot edition. And on his thirty-sixth birthday he confided to his private journal that to translate and interpret Plotinus seemed to him 'really worth a life'. A few months earlier he had resigned his lucrative Paris appointment; now he settled in Dublin and en- deavoured, while earning his living as a leader-writer, to fit himself for his self-imposed task not only by hard work on the Greek language and on Greek philosophy but by long and patient study of the masters of English prose style. For MacKenna believed the translation of a great work of literature or philosophy to be a sacred responsibility which demanded, and deserved, a man's utmost effort. The translator, in his view, must not rest until he had transferred every nuance of his author's meaning, emotional as well as logical, into the idiom of another language an idiom which must be rich, flexible, dignified, and, above all, XI PLOTINUS contemporary. The finished version would necessarily be 'free', but with a freedom which must be based, as he expressed it, on a rigorous ^re-servitude', and must be justified by the achievement of a cl6ser fidelity to the spirit of the original than any literal rendering could hope to attain. To translate any of the bulkier Greek writers in this fashion might well be a lif ework. But the obstacles in the way of so translating Plotinus were, and are, peculiarly great. Not only are his thought and expression exceptionally difficult, but the usual aids to understanding, on which the translator of a major classical author can normally rely, are in this case almost completely lacking. There is still no index verborwn to Plotinus, no substantial study of his style or syntax, and no philosophical commentary worthy of the name in any language. More serious still, the establishment of a trustworthy Greek text has only recently begun, with the publication of the first volume of MM. Henry and Schwyzer's monumental edition. And while translations of a sort had been attempted before MacKenna by various unqualified and partially quali- fied persons, there was none among his predecessors from whom he could hope to get any real light on obscure passages. 1 Nor could he expect much more from contemporary professional scholars. The lead- ing German authority on Plotinus was probably not far out in his estimate when he observed in 1930 that 'there are to-day perhaps only twenty or thirty men alive who can read this author after a fashion'. 2 If the last quarter of a century can show some increase in the size of this curious elite, that is largely due so far, at least, as this country is concerned to the interest aroused by MacKenna's pioneering achieve- ment. Behind his translation lies the patient and often agonized labour of more than twenty years. I le soon discovered that he could not effec- tively serve two masters, Plotinus and daily journalism; and from 1912 onwards the adventurous generosity of the late Sir Ernest Debenham made it just possible for him to choose Plotinus. But in the years that followed he had to struggle not only with increasing poverty but with almost continuous ill health and with moods of deep intellectual dis- couragement: 'I doubt if there are agonies', he wrote once, 'this side crime or perhaps cancer, more cruel than that of literary and intellec- tual effort that will not work out to achievement.' I have told this story in full elsewhere, and will not repeat it here. 3 When the final volume appeared in 1930 MacKenna was a worn-out man; he had judged the undertaking 'worth a life', and the price had been paid. 1 The English versions of Thomas Taylor (1787-1834, incomplete) and K. S. Guthrie (1918) arc worthless for this purpose. Probably MacKenna's only considerable debt is to the German of H. F. Mueller (1878-80), a painstaking literal rendering, but one which too often merely reproduces the obscurity of the original. 2 Richard Harder, in the preface to the first volume of his German translation. 3 Journal and Letters of Stephen MacKenna, edited with a Memoir by E. R. Dodds (Constable, 1936). xn FOREWORD His work must in my opinion rank as one of the very few great translations produced in our time. Even as a contribution to pure scholarship it is something of which any man of learning might well be proud: there are many places where MacKenna's intuitive sympathy with his author has enabled him to come closer to Plotinus' thought tha...
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