Concept
proodos
Emanation is the Neoplatonist answer to how the many arise from the one. Plotinus describes the One as so full and perfect that it overflows, and from this overflow Intellect arises; Intellect in turn overflows into Soul, and Soul into the visible world. The favored images are the sun pouring out light, fire giving off heat, snow its cold, or a spring forever brimming over.
The doctrine is carefully distinguished from creation as a deliberate act and from any process that would change the source. The One does not plan, choose, move, or even turn toward what comes from it; it gives without diminishment, as the sun is not lessened by its light. Nor is the product equal to its source: each level is a fainter image of the one above, growing more multiple and less unified as it descends, until being thins out into matter at the edge.
Emanation is only half of the rhythm. Each level, having proceeded, turns back to contemplate its origin, and it is in that contemplation that it constitutes itself — the movement Proclus formalized as procession and return. Emanation thus describes a universe that flows outward from unity and is forever drawn home toward it, and it provided the model for accounts of creation in later religious philosophy.
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