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Translated by Stephen MacKenna and B. S. Page.
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» Contents of this Ennead
128 pages - You are on Page 111
19. The Ideal Principles entering into Matter as to a Mother [to be “born into the Universe”] affect it neither for better nor for worse.
Their action is not upon Matter but upon each other; these powers conflict with their opponent principles, not with their substrata — which it would be foolish to confuse with the entrant forms — Heat [the Principle] annuls Cold, and Blackness annuls Whiteness; or, the opponents blend to form an intermediate quality. Only that is affected which enters into combinations: being affected is losing something of self-identity.
In beings of soul and body, the affection occurs in the body, modified according to the qualities and powers presiding at the act of change: in all such dissolution of constituent parts, in the new combinations, in all variation from the original structure, the affection is bodily, the Soul or Mind having no more than an accompanying knowledge of the more drastic changes, or perhaps not even that. [Body is modified: Mind knows] but the Matter concerned remains unaffected; heat enters, cold leaves it, and it is unchanged because neither Principle is associated with it as friend or enemy.
So the appellation “Recipient and Nurse” is the better description: Matter is the mother only in the sense indicated; it has no begetting power. But probably the term Mother is used by those who think of a Mother as Matter to the offspring, as a container only, giving nothing to them, the entire bodily frame of the child being formed out of food. But if this Mother does give anything to the offspring it does so not in its quality as Matter but as being an Ideal-Form; for only the Idea is generative; the contrary Kind is sterile.
This, I think, is why the doctors of old, teaching through symbols and mystic representations, exhibit the ancient Hermes with the generative organ always in active posture; this is to convey that the generator of things of sense is the Intellectual Reason Principle: the sterility of Matter, eternally unmoved, is indicated by the eunuchs surrounding it in its representation as the All-Mother.
This too exalting title is conferred upon it in order to indicate that it is the source of things in the sense of being their underlie: it is an approximate name chosen for a general conception; there is no intention of suggesting a complete parallel with motherhood to those not satisfied with a surface impression but needing a precisely true presentment; by a remote symbolism, the nearest they could find, they indicate that Matter is sterile, not female to full effect, female in receptivity only, not in pregnancy: this they accomplish by exhibiting Matter as approached by what is neither female nor effectively male, but castrated of that impregnating power which belongs only to the unchangeably masculine.
Reference address : https://www.ellopos.net/elpenor/greek-texts/ancient-greece/plotinus/enneads-3.asp?pg=111
