Him you may raise
to the apprehension of the one incorporeal Beauty, by teaching him to
separate beauty from the various objects in which it appears scattered
and divided. And it is even in the third class, the lowest of whom
there is hope, namely, the musical man, capable of being passively
affected by beauty, without having any active appetite for it; the
sentimentalist, in short, as we should call him nowadays.
But for the herd, Plotinus cannot say that there is anything divine in
them. And thus it gradually comes out in all Neoplatonist writings
which I have yet examined, that the Divine only exists in a man, in
proportion as he is conscious of its existence in him. From which
spring two conceptions of the Divine in man. First, is it a part of
him, if it is dependent for its existence on his consciousness of it?
Or is it, as Philo, Plutarch, Marcus Aurelius would have held, as the
Christians held, something independent of him, without him, a Logos or
Word speaking to his reason and conscience? With this question Plotinus
grapples, earnestly, shrewdly, fairly. If you wish to see how he does
it, you should read the fourth and fifth books of the sixth Ennead,
especially if you be lucky enough to light on a copy of that rare book,
Taylor's faithful though crabbed translation.
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