Theos-Talk Archives (March 1996 Message tl00018)

 The Six Enneads

  BY PLOTINUS

   Written 250 A.D.
   Translated By Stephen Mackenna And B. S. Page
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  THE FOURTH ENNEAD - SEVENTH TRACTATE  [excerpts]

     THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL.

1. Whether every human being is immortal or we are wholly destroyed, or
whether something of us passes over to dissolution and destruction, while
something else, that which is the true man, endures for ever - this
question will be answered here for those willing to investigate our
nature.

We know that man is not a thing of one only element; he has a soul and he
has, whether instrument or adjunct in some other mode, a body: this is the
first distinction; it remains to investigate the nature and essential
being of these two constituents.  [...] The sovereign principle, the
authentic man, will be as Form to this Matter or as agent to this
instrument, and thus, whatever that relation be, the soul is the man.

2. [...] Body - not merely because it is a composite, but even were it
simplex - could not exist unless there were soul in the universe, for body
owes its being to the entrance of a Reason-Principle into Matter, and only
from soul can a Reason-Principle come.

3. Anyone who rejects this view, and holds that either atoms or some
entities void of part coming together produce soul, is refuted by the very
unity of soul and by the prevailing sympathy as much as by the very
coherence of the constituents. Bodily materials, in nature repugnant to
unification and to sensation, could never produce unity or
self-sensitiveness, and soul is self-sensitive. And, again, constituents
void of part could never produce body or bulk.

[...]
6. It is easy to show that if the Soul were a corporeal entity, there
could be no sense-perception, no mental act, no knowledge, no moral
excellence, nothing of all that is noble.

There can be no perception without a unitary percipient whose identity
enables it to grasp an object as an entirety.

[...]
The substantial existence of the soul, then, does not depend upon serving
as Form to anything: it is an Essence which does not come into being by
finding a seat in body; it exists before it becomes also the soul of some
particular, for example, of a living being, whose body would by this
doctrine be the author of its soul.

What, then, is the soul's Being? If it is neither body nor a state or
experience of body, but is act and creation: if it holds much and gives
much, and is an existence outside of body; of what order and character
must it be? Clearly it is what we describe as Veritable Essence. The other
order, the entire corporeal Kind, is process; it appears and it perishes;
in reality it never possesses Being, but is merely protected, in so far as
it has the capacity, by participating in what authentically is.

9. (14) Over against that body, stands the principle which is self-caused,
which is all that neither enters into being nor passes away, the principle
whose dissolution would mean the end of all things never to be restored if
once this had ceased to be, the sustaining principle of things
individually, and of this kosmos, which owes its maintenance and its
ordered system to the soul.

This is the starting point of motion and becomes the leader and provider
of motion to all else: it moves by its own quality, and every living
material form owes life to this principle, which of itself lives in a life
that, being essentially innate, can never fail.

Not all things can have a life merely at second hand; this would give an
infinite series: there must be some nature which, having life primally,
shall be of necessity indestructible, immortal, as the source of life to
all else that lives. This is the point at which all that is divine and
blessed must be situated, living and having being of itself, possessing
primal being and primal life, and in its own essence rejecting all change,
neither coming to be nor passing away.

[...]
If the purification puts the human into knowledge of the highest, then,
too, the science latent within becomes manifest, the only authentic
knowing. For it is not by running hither and thither outside of itself
that the soul understands morality and right conduct: it learns them of
its own nature, in its contact with itself, in its intellectual grasp of
itself, seeing deeply impressed upon it the images of its primal state;
what was one mass of rust from long neglect it has restored to purity.

Imagine living gold: it files away all that is earthy about it, all that
kept it in self-ignorance preventing it from knowing itself as gold; seen
now unalloyed it is at once filled with admiration of its worth and knows
that it has no need of any other glory than its own, triumphant if only it
be allowed to remain purely to itself.

11. (16) What intelligent mind can doubt the immortality of such a value,
one in which there is a life self-springing and therefore not to be
destroyed?

[...]
15. (20) Thus far we have offered the considerations appropriate to those
asking for demonstration: those whose need is conviction by evidence of
the more material order are best met from the abundant records relevant to
the subject: there are also the oracles of the Gods ordering the appeasing
of wronged souls and the honouring of the dead as still sentient, a
practice common to all mankind: and again, not a few souls, once among
men, have continued to serve them after quitting the body and by
revelations, practically helpful, make clear, as well, that the other
souls, too, have not ceased to be.
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