for only the thing with which all power ends fails to pass downwards something of itself.
This is perhaps the best answer to the Gnostics that the principles of Plotinus make possible. The
problem, in slightly different language, was inherited by Christian theologians; they, also, have
found it difficult to account for the creation without allowing the blasphemous conclusion that,
before it, something was lacking to the Creator. Indeed, their difficulty is greater than that of
Plotinus, for he may say that the nature of Mind made creation inevitable, whereas, for the
Christian, the world resulted from the untrammelled exercise of God's free will.
Plotinus has a very vivid sense of a certain kind of abstract beauty. In describing the position of
Intellect as intermediate between the One and Soul, he suddenly bursts out into a passage of rare
eloquence:
The Supreme in its progress could never be borne forward upon some soulless vehicle nor even
directly upon the Soul: it will be heralded by some ineffable beauty: before the Great King in his
progress there comes first the minor train, then rank by rank the greater and more exalted, closer
to the King the kinglier; next his own honoured company until, last among all these grandeurs,
suddenly appears the Supreme Monarch himself, and all--unless indeed for those who have
contented themselves with the spectacle before his coming and gone away--prostrate themselves
and hail him ( V, 5, 3).
There is a Tractate on Intellectual Beauty, which shows the same kind of feeling ( V, 8):
Assuredly all the gods are august and beautiful in a beauty beyond our speech. And what makes
them so? Intellect; and especially Intellect operating within them (the divine sun and stars) to
visibility....
To 'live at ease' is There; and to these divine beings verity is mother and nurse, existence and
sustenance; all that is not of process but of authentic being they see, and themselves in all; for all
is transparent, nothing dark, nothing resistant; every being is lucid to every other, in breadth and
depth; light runs through light. And each of them contains all within itself, and at the same time
sees all in every other, so that everywhere there is all, and all is all and