The Enneads

Ennead

Posted on 2013-04-05 by Logres

Iamblichus has taken us on a metaphysical tour of the Numbers; is it too much to claim that any metaphysics or religion worthy of the name ought to be measured by the yardstick he has provided? I do not think so. That is, if a supposed “philosophy of Life” or doctrine cannot provide a legitimate and profound account of how it accounts for and accomodates the spiritual value of Number which is revealed in his meditations (which are the sum of centuries of thought upon such in Greece), then it is inherently suspect, and ought to be condemned. The condemnation would rest on the fact that it does not partake of Logos, Measure, or Number. The Logos is the structure of manifested reality, the pattern of higher things: as the Scripture puts it, it is the “evidence of things not seen”. By faith, guided by Reason, we see that the Numbers are actually markers or seeds and guidelines which reflect the unmanifested One above, as well as the manifested but higher planes of existence which are not so obvious to the the untutored. A great and valid religion should be able to explain its exoteric dogmas in terms of Number(s), so that it demonstrates a correspondence with actual Creation, rather than wish-fulfillment and delusion. The same would hold true for such ad hoc philosophies as neo-paganism or Nietzsche’s philosophy of the hammer. Where, in most modern worldviews, is there any effort to harmonize with the Logos? Most often, we only see expressed the virulent hatred for other points of view, even if justifiably so in terms of pure intellect. The same would hold for a certain kind of Traditionalism that restricts itself merely to the rejection of what is Modern, thus (in a weird way), acknowledging its opponent to be an anti-Monad which it is rejecting in a Dyadic rebellion.
Corrollaries to this are obvious. Obviously, the Stoical tradition is superior (for instance) to the Epicurean philosophy (a fact acknowledged in the epistles of Saint Paul, who doesn’t mind quoting certain philosophers as against others). In our own day, a similar form of sifting might occur with the many Thoughts we encounter in the “Marketplace of Ideas”. That is, some men are more sane, balanced, and normative than others, and can be taken as sound guides on certain subjects. Isn’t this what Gornahoor has undertaken?

In regards to the Ennead, it is so short, that I simply recommend readers to peruse it. Iamblichus makes the point that Nine is the last of the numbers, since Ten is simply a Monad once Nine is taken away, and so on and so forth. Nine is the cube of 3 (in the sense of 3+3+3), and so is a kind of natural completion, or ending point, which Iamblichus again compares to a goal post that is raced up to and turned around to head home. Even its name is a play on words resembling Henad (Hen means One, so a Monad). It is Oceanus, or “horizon”: moderns might say, Event Horizon. It is also called Hyperion, because it is the supremely last manifested Number before the repetition begins (strictly speaking) with the Decad. It also contains all harmonic ratios, as 4+3+2 = 9 (sesquialter, double, and sesquitertian).

But the chapter is very short, and if you are going to read a chapter of this work, this is a good place to dive in.

I hope it is not necessary to point out that Plotinus wrote The Enneads, to readers of Gornahoor.

Metaphysics & Metaphysicians

Nothing can be conceived more hard than the heart of a thoroughbred metaphysician. It comes nearer to the cold malignity of a wicked spirit than to the frailty and passion of a man. It is like that of the principle of evil himself, incorporeal, pure, unmixed, dephlegmated, defecated evil. It is no easy operation to eradicate humanity from the human breast. What Shakespeare calls ‘the compunctious visitings of nature’ will sometimes knock at their hearts, and protest against their murderous speculations. But they have a means of compounding with their nature. Their humanity is not dissolved. They only give it a long prorogation. They are ready to declare, that they do not think two thousand years too long a period for the good that they pursue. It is remarkable, that they never see any way to their projected good but by the road of some evil. Their imagination is not fatigued with the contemplation of human suffering through the wild waste of centuries added to centuries of misery and desolation. Their humanity is at the horizon—and, like the horizon, it always flies before them. The geometricians, and the chemists, bring, the one from the dry bones of their diagrams, and the other from the soot of their furnaces, dispositions that make them worse than indifferent about those feelings and habitudes, which are the support of the moral world. Ambition is come upon them suddenly; they are intoxicated with it, and it has rendered them fearless of the danger, which may from thence arise to others or to themselves. These philosophers consider men in their experiments, no more than they do mice in an air pump, or in a recipient of mephitic gas. - Edmund Burke

Let us praise as a living thing the continuity of our history, and praise the whigs who taught us that we must nurse this blessing—reconciling continuity with change, discovering meditations between past and present, and showing what can be achieved by man’s reconciling mind. Perhaps it is not even the whigs that we should praise, but rather something in our traditions which captured the party at the moment when it seemed ready to drift into unmeasurable waters. Perhaps we owe most in fact to the solid body of Englishmen, who throughout the centuries have resisted the wildest aberrations, determined never for the sake of speculative ends to lose the good they already possessed; anxious not to destroy those virtues in their national life which need long periods of time for their development; but waiting to steal for the whole nation what they could appropriate in the traditions of monarch, aristocracy bourgeoisie and church. - Butterfield

Source, at request