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).
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 inter- mediate 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.
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.
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.
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
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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 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 Inter- mediate 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 ?
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 under- gone 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-Prin- ciple, 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 All.”
Misunderstanding their text, they conceived one Mind passively including within itself aU that has being, another mind, a distinct existence, having vision, and a third planning the Universe — ^though often they substitute Soul for this planning Mind as the creating Prin- ciple— and they think that this third being is the Creator according to Plato.
They are in fact quite outside of the truth in their identification of the Creator.
In every way they misrepresent Plato’s theory as to the method of creation as in many other respects they dishonour his teaching : they, we are to understand, have penetrated the Intellectual Nature, while Plato and all those other illustrious teachers have failed.
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They hope to get the credit of minute and exact identification by setting up a plurality of intellectual Essences ; but in reality this multi- plication lowers the Intellectual Nature to the level of the Sense-Kind : their true course is to seek to reduce number to the least possible in the Supreme, simply referring all things to the Second Hypostasis— which is all that exists as it is Primal Intellect and Reality and is the only thing that is good except only for the first Nature — and to recognise Soul as the third Principle, accounting for the difference among souls merely by diversity of experience and character. Instead of insulting those venerable teachers they should receive their doctrine with the respect due to the older thought and honour all that noble system — an immortal soul, an Intellectual and Intelligible Realm, the Supreme God, the Soul’s need of emancipation from all intercourse with the body, the fact of separation from it, the escape from the world of process to the world of essential-being. These doctrines, all emphatically asserted by Plato, they do well to adopt : where they differ, they are at full liberty to speak their minds, but not to procure assent for their own theories by flaying and flouting the Greeks : where they have a divergent theory to maintain they must establish it by its own merits, declaring their own opinions with courtesy and with philosophical method and stating the controverted opinion fairly ; they must point their minds towards the truth and not himt fame by insult, reviling and seeking in their own persons to replace men honoured by the fine intelligences of ages past.
As a matter of fact the ancient doctrine of the Divine Essences was far the sounder and more instructed, and must be accepted by all not caught in the delusions that beset humanity : it is easy also to identify what has been conveyed in these later times from the ancients with incongruous novelties — how for example, where they must set up a contradictory doctrine, they introduce a medley of generation and destruc- tion, how they cavil at the Universe, how they make the Soul blameable for the association with body, how they revile the Administrator of this All, how they ascribe to the Creator, identified with the Soul, the character and experiences appropriate to partial beings.
That this world has neither beginning nor end but exists for ever as long as the Supreme stands is certainly no novel teaching. And before this school rose it had been urged that commerce with the body is no gain to a Soul.
But to treat the human Soul as a fair presentment of the Soul of the Universe is like picking out potters and blacksmiths and making them warrant for discrediting an entire well-ordered city.
We must recognise how different is the governance exercised by the All-Soul ; the relation is not the same : it is not in fetters. Among the very great number of differences it should not have been overlooked that the We (the human Soul) lies under fetter ; and this in a second limitation, for the Body-Kind, already fettered within the All-Soul, imprisons all that it grasps.
But the Soul of the Universe cannot be in bond to what itself has bound : it is sovereign and therefore immune of the lower things, over which we on the contrary are not masters. That in it which is directed to the Divine and Transcendent is ever unmingled, knows no encumbering ; that in it which imparts life to the body admits nothing bodily to itself. It is the general fact that an inset (as the Body), necessarily shares the conditions of its containing principle (as the Soul), and does not com- municate its own conditions where that principle has an independent life : thus a graft will die if the stock dies, but the stock will live on by its proper life though the graft wither. The fire within your own self may be quenched, but the thing, fire, will exist still ; and if fire itself were annihilated that would make no difference to the Soul, the Soul in the Supreme, but only to the plan of the material world ; and if the other elements sufficed to maintain a Kosmos, the Soul in the Supreme would be unconcerned.
The constitution of the All is very different from that of the single, separate forms of life : there, the established rule commanding to per- manence is sovereign ; here things are like deserters kept to their own place and duty by a double bond ; there is no outlet from the AU, and therefore no need of restraining or of driving errants back to
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bounds : all remains where from the beginning the Soul’s nature appointed.