The Fintry Trust
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There is nothing the One is not. Therefore all things unwind from it, so to speak.
This quotation from Damascius, Doubts and Solutions Concerning the First Principle, is taken from Unknowing and Unsaying, by Robert K. Clark, the first article to be published on the Fintry Trust website. It is hoped that this fine article will be the first of many to be published over time, from a range of contributors.
We are reminded of the injunction always to put God in the first place, whatever the nature of the undertaking. It is a timely reminder as this venture comes forth into daylight.
It is perhaps suitable that we should open with the subject of the ineffability of God. From the standpoint of the Unknown and Ineffable One, all human undertakings recede into utter insignificance, and the Divine Immensity casts all else by contrast with It into nothingness. Yet ‘there is nothing the One is not’, there is no other origin of worlds, and all that exists comes from It.
As Plotinus writes¹, a multiplicity of real beings are generated from the One, and the manifestation of things is produced through souls, for it is in every nature to produce what comes after it, and to unfold as does a seed. Were this not so, all would have remained hidden and shapeless within the One. The greatest beauty in the world of sense is but a manifestation of the power and goodness of the intelligible world.
As human souls we have a twofold nature, and may participate both in the intelligible world above, and also in the world of form and sense below. The soul occupies ‘a middle rank among realities’. Let the soul not be dissatisfied with this, or with itself and its own imperfection, but let it only seek amid the movement and diversity of the world, amid activity and adventure, amid the ephemeral, to keep its eyes ever on the One in devout contemplation.
¹Ennead IV. 8. 6-7., Plotinus
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