The Enneads — trans. Stephen MacKenna
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k why then should not Matter itself come to nothingness. If we are told it may, then we ask why it should ever have been generated. If the answer comes that it had its necessary place as the ultimate of the series, we return that the necessity still holds.
With Matter left aside as wholly isolated, the Divine Beings are not everywhere but in some bounded place, walled off, so to speak ; if that is not possible. Matter itself must receive the Divine light (and so cannot be annihilated).
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To those who assert that creation is the work of the Soul after the failing of its wings, we answer that no such disgrace could overtake the Soul of the All. If they tell us of its falling, they must tell us also what caused the fall. And when did it take place ? If from eternity, then the Soul must be essentially a fallen thing : if at some one moment, why not before that ?
We assert its creative act to be a proof not of decline but rather of its steadfast hold. Its decline could consist only in its forgetting the Divine ; but if it forgot, how could it create ? Whence does it create but from the things it knew in the Divine ? If it creates from the memory of that vision, it never fell. Even supposing it to be in some dim intermediate state, it need not be supposed more likely to decline : any inclination would be towards its Prior, in an effort to the clearer vision. If any memory at all remained, what other desire could it have than to retrace the way ?
What could it have been planning to gain by world-creating ? Glory ? That would be absurd — a motive borrowed from the sculptors of our earth.
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PLOTINUS
Finally, if the Soul created by policy and not by sheer need of its nature, by being characteristically the creative power — how explain the making of this universe ?
And when will it destroy the work ? If it repents of its work, what is it waiting for ? If it has not yet repented, then it will never repent : it must be already accustomed to the world, must be growing more tender towards it with the passing of time.
Can it be waiting for certain souls still here ? Long since would these have ceased returning for such re-birth, having known in former life the evils of this sphere ; long since would they have forebome to come.
Nor may we grant that this world is of unhappy origin because there are many jarring things in it. Such a judgement would rate it too high, treating it as the same with the Intelligible Realm and not merely its reflection.
would they have forebome to come.
Nor may we grant that this world is of unhappy origin because there are many jarring things in it. Such a judgement would rate it too high, treating it as the same with the Intelligible Realm and not merely its reflection.
And yet — what reflection of that world could be conceived more beautiful than this of ours ? What fire could be a nobler reflection of the fire there than the fire we know here ? Or what other earth than this could have been modelled after that earth ? And what globe more minutely perfect than this, or more admirably ordered in its course could have been conceived in the image of the self-centred circling of the World of Intelligibles ? And for a sun figuring the Divine sphere, if it is to be more splendid than the sun visible to us, what a sun it must be.
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Still more unreasonably : —
There are men, bound to human bodies and subject to desire, grief, anger, who think so generously of their own faculty that they declare themselves in contact with the Intelligible World, but deny that the sun possesses a similar faculty less subject to influence, to disorder, to change ; they deny that it is any wiser than we, the late bom, hindered by so many cheats on the way towards truth.
Their own soul, the soul of the least of mankind, they declare deathless, divine ; but the entire heavens and the stars within the heavens have had no communion with the Immortal Principle, though n. 9-5]
“AGAINST THE GNOSTICS
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f f these are far purer and lovelier than their own souls — yet they are not blind to the order, the shapely pattern, the discipline prevailing in the heavens, since they are the loudest in complaint of the disorder that troubles our earth. We are to imagine the deathless Soul choosing of design the less worthy place, and preferring to abandon the nobler to the Soul that is to die.
Equally unreasonable is their introduction of that other Soul which they piece together from the elements.
How could any form or degree of life come about by a blend of the elements ? Their conjunction could produce only a warm or cold or an intermediate substance, something dry or wet or intermediate.
Besides, how could such a soul be a bond holding the four elements together when (by the hypothesis) it is a later thing and rises from them ? And this element-soul is described as possessing consciousness and will and the rest — what can we think ?
Furthermore, these teachers, in their contempt for this creation and this earth, proclaim that another earth has been made for them into which they are to nd this element-soul is described as possessing consciousness and will and the rest — what can we think ?
Furthermore, these teachers, in their contempt for this creation and this earth, proclaim that another earth has been made for them into which they are to enter when they depart. Now this new earth is the Reason-Form (the Logos) of our world. Why should they desire to live in the archetype of a world abhorrent to them ?
Then again, what is the origin of that pattern world ? It would appear, from the theory, that the Maker had already declined towards the things of this sphere before that pattern came into being.
Now let us suppose the Maker craving to construct such an Intermediate World — though what motive could He have ? — in addition to the Intellectual world which He eternally possesses. If He made the mid-world first, what end was it to serve ?
To be a dwelling-place for Souls ?
How then did they ever fall from it ? It exists in vain.
If He made it later than this world — abstracting the formal-idea of this world and leaving the Matter out — the Souls that have come to know that intermediate sphere would have experienced enough to keep them from entering this. If the meaning is simply that Souls exhibit the Ideal-Form of the Universe, what is there distinctive in the teaching ?
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PLOTINUS
6.
And, what are we to think of the new forms of being they introduce — their “ Exiles ” and “ Impressions ” and “ Repentings ” ?
If all comes to states of the Soul — “ Repentance ” when it has undergone a change of purpose ; " Impressions ” when it contemplates not the Authentic Existences but their simulacra — there is nothing here but a jargon invented to make a case for their school : all this terminology is piled up only to conceal their debt to the ancient Greek philosophy which taught, clearly and without bombast, the ascent from the cave and the gradual advance of souls to a truer and truer vision.
For, in sum, a part of their doctrine comes from Plato ; all the novelties through which they seek to establish a philosophy of their own have been picked up outside of the truth.
From Plato come their punishments, their rivers of the underworld and the changing from body to body ; as for the plurality they assert in the Intellectual Realm — the Authentic Existent, the Intellectual-Principle, the Second Creator and the Soul — all this is taken over from the Timaeus, where we read : —
“ As many Ideal-Forms as the Divine Mind beheld dwelling within the Veritably Living Being, so many the Maker resolved should be contained in this