Explanation of Plotinus' On the Intellectual Beauty
Plotinus discusses the nature of Intellectual Beauty and its connection to the divine Intellect . He explores how one can grasp the beauty of the Authentic Intellect and come to understand the Father and Transcendent aspects of the divine.
Original Text: Part 1 1. It is a principle with us that one who has attained to the vision of the Intellectual Beauty and grasped the beauty of the Authentic Intellect will be able also to come to understand the
Father and Transcendent of that Divine Being. It concerns us, then, to try to see and say, for
ourselves and as far as such matters may be told, how the Beauty of the divine Intellect and of
the Intellectual Kosmos may be revealed to contemplation.
Let us go to the realm of magnitudes:—Suppose two blocks of stone lying side by side: one
is unpatterned, quite untouched by art; the other has been minutely wrought by the craftsman’s
hands into some statue of god or man, a Grace or a Muse, or if a human being, not a portrait but
a cr…