/lit/ - Literature

>>18971769
Who is this nignog and why should i care?

Philosophical theology in the ancient world culminates in the system of Plotinus. It is thus summed up by Bertrand Russell: ‘The metaphysics of Plotinus begins with a Holy Trinity: The One, Spirit and Soul. These three are not equal, like the Persons of the Christian Trinity; the One is supreme, Spirit comes next, and Soul last.’8 The comparison with the Christian Trinity is inescapable; and indeed Plotinus, who died before the church councils of Nicaea and Constantinople gave a definitive statement of the relationships between the three divine persons, undoubtedly had an influence on the thought of some of the Church fathers. But for the understanding of his own thought it is more rewarding to look backwards. With some qualification it can be said that the One is a Platonic God, Intellect (a more appropriate translation for nous than ‘spirit’) is an Aristotelian God, and Soul is a Stoic God.

The One is a descendant of the One of the Parmenides and the Idea of Good in the Republic. The paradoxes of the Parmenides are taken as adumbrations of an ultimately ineffable reality, which is, like the Idea of the Good, ‘beyond being in power and dignity’. ‘The One’, it should be stressed, is not, for Plato and Plotinus, a name for the first of the natural number series: rather, it means that which is utterly simple and undivided, all of a piece, and utterly unique (Ennead 6, 9. 1 and 6). In saying that the One and the Good (Plotinus uses both names, e.g. 6. 9. 3) is beyond being he does not mean that it does not exist: on the contrary it is the most real thing there is. He means that no predicates can be applied to it: we cannot say that it is this, or it is that. The reason for this is that if any predicate was true of it,
then there would have to be a distinction within it corresponding to the distinction between the subject and the predicate of the true sentence. But that would derogate from the One’s sublime simplicity

>>16036599
Fucking based