When we study Platonism, we are studying the history of the realization of an ideal. This ideal is the virtuous human being; and the history of this ideal is a salvation history. Philosophy did not begin with Platonism, but it did attain a self-knowledge, a reflective understanding of what it means to love wisdom, through the influence of the doctrines and problems (mostly through the problems) introduced by Plato. The Pre-Socratic philosophers were called phusikoi, which means that they were concerned primarily with the natural world. Aristotle, in Book A of the Metaphysics, tells us that this concern with the natural world was born of a certain awe or wonderment experienced by the observant, thinking human being, and that this awe is the cause or origin of philosophy.[2] However, it is my view that the guiding spirit of the philosophical enterprise, from the very beginning (and even, perhaps, before what we call philosophy came upon the scene of history) was a concern with and an anxiety over the status of the human being in this ‘wondrous’ world. Nature is only awesome because it affects a being that is, at base, capable of being affected – and of knowing that it is thus affected. It is the reflective experience of the awe-struck natural being that concerns Plato. ‘What is it like to stand before the Good in rapt contemplation?’ he brings us to ask. ‘And how can the human being attain likeness to this divine goodness?’ Immediately the concern and the driving force of philosophy is shifted from an objective consideration of naturally existing entities and the problems arising from their study (such as Parmenides’ struggle with the problem of the ‘One and the Many,’ for example), to a more subjective struggle with the meaning of human existence. Since the human being is struck with awe by the phenomena of Nature, and all too often placed at the mercy of both natural events and bodily impulses, it occurs to Plato that the desire to understand the reason for such things may lie not in a simple affective ‘awe,’ but rather in a more ‘spiritual’ desire to transcend the clouding influence of these things, and to see reality in its pure, truthful light. Furthermore, that the human mind does not desire the phenomena it seeks to understand, but the reasons for the being of such phenomena, implies that the human mind is allied to the source of these things, and is not a mere effect of a primal cause. This is why Plato can say that knowledge consists in “likeness to God as far as possible” (homoiōsis theōi kata to dunaton) (Theaetetus 176b).
Knowledge, then, for Plato, becomes a means – in fact the only means – for salvation, sōtēria: a return to a place of unchangeable and authentic existence. Unlike Aristotle, for whom knowledge is a type of telos or ‘goal’ of human existence, Plato sees knowledge as a recollection or a return to a state of being that was lost through a fall; and so knowledge, which is the recognition of this primal state, becomes the salvific event par excellence. This idea, first introduced into philosophy by Plato, became the guiding ideal of that branch of Greek thought, that paideia, which found its end or telos in the Christian doctrine of apokatastasis or ‘restoration of all beings,’ exemplified in Origen, and mapped out ‘metaphysically’ in the system of Plotinus. I believe that the Christian doctrine owes its development to a more general Greek ideal of humanity, which rested upon the observation that the human being is essentially divided into two parts – a divine part and a merely ‘animated’ one. The tension between the two is what engenders temporal existence, as it were; and it is the philosophical and salvific struggle between these two parts that leads one to an unsullied vision of truth and goodness. An ‘archetypical’ expression of this problematical human ideal is found in Book XI of the Odyssey where Homer puts the following words into the mouth of Odysseus, concerning the departed demigod Hercules:
And next I caught a glimpse of the powerful Hercules –
his ghost, I mean: the man himself delights
in the grand feasts of the deathless gods on high ...[3]
It is the “man himself” that concerns Plato and the expositors of his philosophy, especially Plotinus and Origen. For these three thinkers believed that the true man is the divine man, and that the merely physical or natural man is the result of an unfortunate entanglement with time and matter; an entanglement, however, that permits the glorious becoming that produces personality or the true self – in short, the self that achieves salvation.
It is my purpose here to trace, in a brief space, the development of this idea, from the seed planted by Plato, through the grand schema provided by Plotinus, to the full flowering of the ideal that we witness in the Christian philosophy of Origen.
Plato recognizes the tension that persists within the human being between the ‘best’ part of the soul – the divine part – and that which has “nothing of God in it.” These are the “two patterns set up in reality” mentioned in the Theaetetus (176e).[4] Plato never denies that it is the lot or destiny of the human being to remain for a time within the material realm – yet he is quick to declare that matter or the “bodily element” (sōmatoeides) is inherently corrupt or disorderly;[5] and that since the cosmos has a share in the “bodily element” it is not altogether perfect, even though it is often referred to as divine.
Remaining permanently in the same state and condition, and being permanently the same, belongs only to the most divine things of all, and by its nature body is not of this order. Now the thing to which we have given the name of ‘heavens’ and ‘cosmos’ certainly has a portion of many blessed things from its progenitor, but on the other hand it also has its share of body (Statesman 269d-e, tr. C. J. Rowe).
Salvation, for Plato, does not consist in a mere ‘rescuing’ or redemption of the human being from the cosmos; rather, salvation is understood in terms of a divine ‘injection’ of unchangeable – that is, purely divine – knowledge into the material cosmos by way of a soul that has seen the ‘invisible reality,’ and has succeeded in carrying with it the memory or knowledge of this reality, in the form or ‘virtue,’ through the course of a life lived.[6] Such a divine ‘injection’ may be understood in terms of a reflective, paideutic, history – a history in which the tension between the two parts of the soul results in a unique personality or self (egō) that becomes the object and the agent of salvation.[7]
However, since every soul must, after an initial viewing of the Good, “sink back inside heaven,”[8] it is necessary for each soul to remain in existence with a share or portion of the “bodily element in its mixture” (sōmatoeides tēs sunkraseōs).[9] In this sense, we may see how the soul is akin to the cosmos, for both the soul and the cosmos, after completing a full ‘circuit’ or measure of time[10] receives once again “a restored immortality from its craftsman.”[11] For the cosmos, this ‘restoration’ is accomplished by the intelligent intervention of the ‘craftsman’ or dēmiourgos, who turns the cosmos back from its reverse or ‘irrational’ rotation, toward its proper, ‘rational’ rotation, thereby preserving its derived divinity.[12] For the soul, this ‘restoration’ is accomplished by and through the soul’s own innate desire for the Good! It is important to note here that the fact that the soul’s own action, and not any external intervention, leads to its restoration, makes of the soul a sort of superior being – insofar as it is capable of willfully attaining a ‘spiritual’ or noetic state of divine reflection and guidance, whereas the ‘cosmic animal’ must rely solely upon the governance of the dēmiourgos. Such an observation was made later in the Hellenistic era by an anonymous writer of the Corpus Hermeticum, who stated that:
Man is a divine being (zōon theion), to be compared not with the other earthly beings, but with those who are called gods, up in the heavens. Rather, if one must dare to speak the truth, the true Man is above even the gods, or at least fully their equal. After all, none of the celestial gods will leave the heavenly frontiers and descend to earth; yet Man ascends even into the heavens, and measures them, and knows their heights and depths, and everything else about them he learns with exactitude. What is even more remarkable, he establishes himself on high without even leaving the earth, so far does his power extend.[13]
Yet, according to Plato, a full and complete salvation – a “likeness to God” – cannot occur in a soul that is still mingled with the “bodily element.” The most that an embodied soul can hope for is the attainment of an unmediated vision of the divine Forms,[14] which will permit the soul to carry with it an ‘unforgettable knowledge’ (alēthēs gnōsis) of the Good during the course of its cosmic or somatic existence.
The philosopher, according to Plato, is the one who has attained to such a vision.
[T]he philosopher always uses reasoning to stay near the form, being. He isn’t at all easy to see because that area is so bright and the eyes of most people’s souls can’t bear to look at what’s divine (Sophist 254b, tr. Nicholas P. White).
It is also the philosopher for whom salvation becomes more than just an enlightened state of being. For after three successive ‘circuits’ or ‘measures of time’ have been completed, in which the philosophical soul retains its knowledge of the Good, this soul will be transferred to the “place beyond heaven,” of which “none of our earthly poets has ever sung or ever will sing.”[15] Ultimate salvation then, for Plato, consists in a contemplative relation vis-à-vis a human soul and the divine Good – a relation unmediated by language, discursive knowledge, opinion, etc.[16] True or ‘salvific’ knowledge, for Plato, may be understood as a knowledge based on pure contemplative proximity – a knowledge that is not simply a retaining of an intuited or conceptual ‘truth,’ but a type of noetic state brought about by the constant reference back toward this truth, as a source, origin, arkhē. The ghost of Hercules that remains in Hades, even though the man himself is with the gods, would be, for Plato, the “bodily element” – the element of irrationality, chaos, lust – which the soul must shed if it is to attain the Good. The soul is only able to reach this purified state because the tension between its two parts – the rational and the irrational – has produced in it desire.[17] And even though a philosophical soul may in some measure possess the Good through the memory it has attained of it, such a soul will still experience the desire of an unmediated vision of this Good,[18] for this vision implies a unity of the seer and the thing seen. The desire for such a unity produces in the soul what Plato refers to poetically as “the pains of childbirth, from which [the soul] must be delivered, or she will never really attain truth.”[19] Furthermore, when the philosophical soul has been redeemed from the realm of discursive knowledge and opinion, such a soul “will no longer be affected by a multitude of perceptions as he is now but will participate in a destiny of unity.”[20] Even in this state of salvation (as understood and expressed by Plato) we still witness a tension between the contemplating individual soul and the object of contemplation – the Good. The relationship of the soul to its divine arkhē remains one of seer and seen, for both the soul and the Good (or the Forms) preserve their identity and difference from one another, even in unity.[21]
Let us now turn to Plotinus, who developed this idea to the point where the Platonic notion of salvation becomes a recollection of one’s true (and forgotten) Nature, in which the individual soul is seen as identical to the object of its contemplation and desire.
We have seen how Plato preserves the tension between the Good and the soul that contemplates it. This is especially marked in Book VII of the Republic, where Plato tells us that even the philosopher, who has made the ascent and seen the realm of the Forms, can and must be compelled to take an active part in the governing of the polis.[22] Whereas for Plato there remains, even in salvation, a sort of ‘civic duty’ or exigency which the soul cannot rightfully ignore, for Plotinus, considerations of politics and right government play little or no role in the philosophical quest for salvation and self-knowledge. Plotinus is concerned solely with what he calls the ‘authentic existence’ of the soul – and this consists in a self-identity that is untainted by the divisive nature of discursivity and the tekhnē of politics: a tekhnē that can only be based on opinion, or what we may call ‘pragmatic judgment’.[23] This is not to say that Plotinus is not concerned with governing – he is; but it is the government of the cosmos by the Soul that concerns him, and not the petty demands of the polis, or the province.
In Plotinus’ system, the soul’s act of governing the cosmos is a type – albeit the lowest ‘type’ – of contemplation (theōria), which is the unifying principle that binds together the Plotinian plērōma.[24] Contemplation, for Plotinus, is a two-fold act: it is, at the highest level, concerned with the knowledge – on the part of a unique existent – of that existent’s source or vivifying origin; secondarily, contemplation effortlessly produces another being.[25] For example, Plotinus tells us that the contemplation of the One by the Intelligence (nous) at one and the same time ‘maintains’ the Intelligence and produces the Soul (psukhē), which in turn contemplates the Intelligence and produces the cosmos.[26] Ideally, the soul’s production of the cosmos is effortless – as befits a contemplative entity. Yet Plotinus is quick to insist that in order for there to be a degree of perfection in the cosmos, a limit must be imposed.[27] This limit, of course, is matter (hulē) or pure passivity.[28] Since this matter is totally alien to the Soul, which itself is pure intellective power (energeia), and therefore cannot be brought into the ‘sphere of divinity’ (if you will) by pure contemplation, the Soul must relinquish something of its autonomous power and take on a bit of the nature of matter.[29] This means that the Soul must produce – out of itself, as it were – a principle of passivity capable of becoming allied to or aligned with matter, for the purpose of constructing or ‘creating’ an image of the immovable realm of Mind – to which the soul ‘rightfully’ belongs. This image is Nature or temporal being (as opposed to the authentic existence of the noetic realm).
The Soul does not remain unchanged in begetting its image, but is altered. Contemplating its source it is filled and ‘goes out’ (a motion different in kind and in direction) and begets its own image: Sense and, the vegetal principle, Nature (Ennead V.2.1).[30]
Now this more active or productive contemplation is still divine, meaning: the soul, which produces Nature or the material cosmos in the manner of Plato’s dēmiourgos does not necessarily have to ‘fall into’ or become entrapped by – or simply enamored of – the “bodily element” (sense, the ‘vegetal principle,’ etc.). In fact, when Plotinus states that the soul must take on certain characteristics of matter, “and submit itself to the very contradiction of its being,”[31] he is referring only to the ability of matter (imitated, in this instance, by the soul) to become divided. And of course, the soul must become divided within itself if it is to ‘create’ or produce Time – for time implies a discursive understanding of the Intelligible Realm: an understanding in which the Forms are contemplated individually and in succession, rather than as a divine fullness (plērōma). This discursive ability the Soul produces out of itself, as a divine action; and this action, according to Plotinus, is more than enough to constitute and govern a cosmos.
All the souls shine down upon the heavens and spend there the main of themselves and the best. Some souls descend further in order to lighten the lower regions, but it is not good for them to go so far (Ennead IV.3.17, tr. O’Brien).
The soul is only said to have fallen into ‘sin’ when it has ceased to know itself as ‘lord over creation,’ and comes to identify with its creation to the point of forgetting its identity as Nature’s begetter.
By nature divine [the Soul] is located at the nethermost limit of the intelligible realm, bordering on the realm of sense, and there gives to the realm of sense something of its own. In turn it is itself affected when, instead of controlling the body without endangering its own security, it lets itself be carried away by an excessive zeal and plunges deep into the body and ceases to be wholly united to The Soul (Ennead IV.8.7, tr. O’Brien).
The soul will then fall into the grave error of seeking to know itself by understanding its creation – all the while forgetting that the objects of ‘empirical’ knowledge are really the result of the soul’s own action (energeia)! So Plotinian salvation consists in the knowledge or recollection of the soul’s ontological status as the creator or begetter of the cosmos.[32] When the soul arrives at this realization, it ‘returns’ to its prior unity with/in itself, and the cosmos remains intact, as a noble work (hergon) of the Soul.
As he developed his ideas concerning the soul and salvation, Plotinus was certainly spurred on by the radical dualism of the Gnostics (in which this realm was seen as hopelessly corrupt, and the plērōma viewed as the true salvific home of humankind) to develop a grand synthesis of Gnostic mythico-metaphysical speculation and traditional Platonic cosmological views.[33] However, while Plotinus’ elegant dialectical system is a grand achievement – and perhaps even the culmination – of ‘pagan’ Classical Platonism, it represents a fundamental departure from the more ‘historical’ or humanity-centered ideas about salvation and knowledge presented by Plato in the Dialogues. For Plotinus is concerned with establishing (once and for all) the divinity and unity of the cosmos; and for that reason he is only marginally concerned – if at all – with the tension between discursive (historical) or material existence and divine contemplative repose – a tension that can be said to constitute the individual human being qua being. What is so impressive about Plotinus’ accomplishment in philosophy is his unapologetic identification of the human soul with the most divine of realities. For Plato, salvation consisted in a human being’s attaining “likeness to God as far as possible.” For Plotinus, salvation, as we have seen, is the recollection of the soul’s inherent or essential divinity. What’s more, Plotinus was able to develop and defend such a seemingly ‘hubristic’ notion of human essence in a manner that was, for its time, the very height of rational exposition and dialectical argument. Unfortunately, the cool, clear rigor of Plotinus’ system prevented him from adequately accounting for the dialectical and ontological tension present within the human soul between ‘good’ and ‘evil,’ ‘light’ and ‘darkness,’ etc. – a tension constitutive of the being of humanity qua humanity! This task was reserved for the Christian Platonist and greatest theologian of the East, Origen of Alexandria.
At first glance, Origen seems to set himself radically apart from the ‘pagan’ philosophers Plato and Plotinus – not least in his radical and insistent fidelity to the biblical text in all matters of speculative thought. A closer look, however, will reveal that Origen’s theological ideas were completely informed by a Platonistic view of things – a view that combined the dialectical or ‘historical’ tension of Plato with the ‘transcendentalist’ conviction regarding the essential divinity of the human soul expressed by Plotinus. The first matter of which we must treat here is Origen’s notion of humanity’s two natures.
According to Origen, humanity and
the cosmos are both products of God’s creative power. It is for this reason that humanity and the cosmos are both
somehow less than divine. Hearkening
back to Plato, Origen declares that the cosmos itself possesses a bodily
nature, which varies in degrees according to the level of divinity attained by
the beings dwelling in the various spheres or ‘heavens’ of the cosmos.[34] Each of these ‘spheres’ represents a
different stage in the progress of the created, individual soul toward the
perfection of its divine image. This
means that no soul is in and of itself divine, except insofar as it is
capable of actualizing the potential of the divine image in which it was
created at the beginning of time (following the creation narrative in Genesis,
of course).
So what is this ‘material’, for Origen, this hulē or hupokeimenon upon which the human subject acts? It is at one and the same time the limit or ‘articulative structure’ of created beings, and the rational thoughts implanted as seeds within each mind by God. Origen does indeed recognize the division that persists within humankind between the rational and irrational elements: between the divine part (logos, pneuma) – the part that is the result of a gift from God Himself – and the natural or ‘fallen’ part of the human being (phusis). However, for Origen, this division does not become the occasion or the excuse for the positing of a radical dualism between the ‘bodily’ and the ‘divine,’ as it is for Plato, or between the ‘passive’ and the ‘active,’ as it is for Plotinus; rather, Origen presents us with a view of the human soul as a thinking, feeling entity torn between allegiance to a God ‘known’ only by revelation or insight (gnōsis), and familiarity with and even affection for a nature known by intimate union and affective similarity. But what this seeming ‘duality’ amounts to, for Origen, is not an abandonment or ‘sublimation’ of one of the essential parts, but a reconciliation on a higher plane, in which the two parts become united elements of a nature whose authentic existence involves an eternal instruction in the mysteries of the divine source. Let us now examine briefly two passages, one from Plotinus, and the other from Origen, which will serve as an example of both the similarity between these two thinkers and traditions, and the subtle yet profound differences that separate them.
Plotinus, describing the result of the soul’s fascination with material nature – its ‘fall’ or forgetting of the higher, noetic realm – and its eventual salvation, writes:
When a soul remains for long in this withdrawal and estrangement from the whole, with never a glance towards the intelligible, it becomes a thing fragmented, isolated, and weak. … Yet its higher part remains. Let the soul, taking its lead from memory, merely ‘think on essential being’ and its shackles are loosed and it soars (Ennead IV.8.4, tr. O’Brien).
What Plotinus is describing in this passage, quite simply, is a sort of ‘instant salvation,’ enacted and experienced by the individual soul itself, apart from any temporal process or ‘history’. Indeed, as I have already pointed out, the soul’s salvific ‘abandonment’ of the material realm does not mean, for Plotinus, the end or dissolution of the cosmos; for the cosmos persists through the soul’s disinterested presence, as it were, and not by its direct involvement. However, Plotinus’ theory of ‘instant salvation’ basically renders the experience of the soul in the material realm superfluous, for nothing of material, sensible nature is able to permanently affect or change the soul in its essence, which is inherently divine.[37] Since the soul is itself the divine craftsman of the universe, it can only be responsible for its own descent and salvation. Origen believes that the soul is responsible for the state of ‘sin’ or ‘fallenness’ in which it finds itself, for he believes that each soul was originally created by God in a purely spiritual state, and only later became incarnated in the material realm, through the faulty exercise of its free will.[38] The goal of the fallen soul, then, is not to recollect its temporarily forgotten divinity, but to remember that it has been created in the image and likeness of God, and to begin the long journey to salvation by perfecting and shaping the flawed image into as perfect a reflection of God’s nature as possible. Such is the major difference between Plotinus and Origen: the former is convinced of the soul’s own divinity, as if it were a possession, while the latter is convinced that the soul owes whatever divine elements it may possess to the goodness and foresight of its creator. Here is Origen:
[I]f even through neglect the mind fall away from a pure and complete reception of God, it nevertheless contains within it certain seeds of restoration and renewal to a better understanding, seeing the ‘inner,’ which is also called the ‘rational’ man, is renewed after ‘the image and likeness of God, who created him’ (De Principiis IV.I. 36).
It is important to note here Origen’s use of a biological or ‘organic’ metaphor for the process of restoration – “seeds.” This implies, of course, that for Origen salvation is not to be understood as an instantaneous event dependent only upon the soul’s own power for remembering or recollecting its true nature, but rather as a drawn-out process of growth and – most of all – instruction in the divine nature. “[T]o those who possess in this life a kind of outline of truth and knowledge,” Origen writes, “shall be added the beauty of a perfect image in the future.”[39] This “perfect image,” however, is not something added immediately to the soul by God, but is something to be attained through a long process of instruction in the divine mind – an instruction which consists in the passage through the several spheres of the cosmos (where the soul is instructed by the angels or ‘heavenly powers’ that dwell in each), until one arrives finally at that realm “which is invisible and eternal,”[40] and where the soul will then have “problems and the understanding of things, and the causes of events, as the food upon which it may feast.”[41] It is at this point that Origen believes the human soul to have attained salvation.
This view of salvation, as involving an eternal study of or instruction in the wisdom and mind of God, may at first glance seem like a bit of a cheat. Why, one may ask, should we attempt to perfect our souls through diligent study and the exercise of the intellect, if the most that we can hope for is a new and eternal set of problems upon which to meditate for eternity? Such an objection misses the point of Origen’s salvation theory. For it was his intent to express, in the course of a philosophical ‘system,’ a view of human salvation that is worthy of – or at least endemic to – humanity qua humanity. Origen stresses time and again, throughout his text, that humankind is an essentially created nature, that only God is eternal and uncreated. Humanity, according to Origen, owes its existence and persistence in being to the presence and wisdom of God. This persistence in being is characterized by intellectual pursuit; and this pursuit is the eternal study of or instruction in the infinite mind of God.
And in all things this food [objects of divine understanding] is to be understood as the contemplation and understanding of God, which is of a measure appropriate and suitable to this nature, which was made and created (De Principiis II.XI. 7, my emphasis).
Perfection, then, which is also salvation, is to contemplate and understand God. However, this does not mean that we are able to comprehend God, for only God can comprehend his own mind.[42] Salvation for Origen can be said to consist in a sharing in God’s mind, on the part of the soul, insofar as the soul is capable of knowing and understanding God through his works. And since we, as souls, are works of God, to know ourselves is to perfect ourselves, and through this knowledge and perfection to attain likeness to God as far as possible – in this consists our salvation.
The impression may easily be received that in Origen the idea or ideal of salvation, as philosophy’s guiding force – which had its beginning in Plato, and was developed into a sophisticated system by Plotinus – had finally come full circle. And since Origen himself reiterated the ancient doctrine that “the end is always like the beginning,”[43] we may say that his view of salvation was at once the culmination of and the return to the ideal that animated the philosophical enterprise of Plato himself. Yet what we find in Origen is the human being given a dignity and even an autonomy that it did not really possess in Plato’s strictly dialectical philosophy. For Plato was concerned with the journey, and not with the final end, the apokatastasis.[44] Origen, on the other hand, was concerned with nothing but the end. The fact that this ‘end,’ for Origen, turned out to be the beginning of an eternal divine instruction, shows that the human spirit is not satisfied with passive, ‘reposeful’ viewings of forms like the Good, Justice, even Beauty, but with the understanding and contemplation of what lies within and beyond these forms, and makes of them the proper subject of philosophy.
© 2000
Edward Moore
[1] This is the full text of a paper I presented at the First Annual Independent Meeting of the Ancient Philosophy Society, held at Villanova University, April 6-8. 2001. – E.M.
[2] Aristotle, Metaphysics 982b 10-25. In this section Aristotle explicitly states that this wonder (merely) gives rise to “a science that investigates the first principles and causes” (tr. McKeon; The Basic Works of Aristotle: Random House 1941). It must be noted that Plato, also, in the Theaetetus 155d, tells us that wondering is “where philosophy begins and nowhere else.” Yet he is quick to add the seemingly off-hand remark that “the man who made Iris the child of Thaumas was perhaps no bad genealogist” (tr. Levett, rev. Burnyeat). According to the Theogony of Hesiod (265) Thaumas is “wonder,” while Iris, his offspring, is said to be the messenger of the gods, and also the rainbow – the mediator, as it were, between heaven and earth, or the principle which first awakens humankind to the possibility of the homoiōsis theōi, or “likeness to God” (Theaetetus 176b).
[3] Odyssey XI. 602-604, tr. Robert Fagles (1996, Penguin Books), p. 269.
[4] Tr. M. J. Levett, rev. Myles Burnyeat, in Plato: Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper (Hackett Publishing 1997). All quotations of Plato are from this volume.
[5] Statesman 273b-c.
[6] See Phaedrus 247c-248c, 249c-250b.
[7] See Phaedo 80a-81a. Not only does the ‘injection’ of soul into body (so to speak) produce life for or within that body, but this event also provides the soul itself with an opportunity, an ‘arena,’ in which to exercise its governing and paideutic powers, not only over the body and material nature in general, but also over its own divine nature, which, through forgetfulness, is lying dormant. The “practice for death” which is philosophy, is the method by which the soul gradually educates itself, through dialectical engagement and virtue, to become worthy of re-attaining the divine state from whence it temporarily fell.
[8] Phaedrus 247e.
[9] Statesman 273b, tr. Rowe.
[10] Phaedrus 248c.
[11] Statesman 270a.
[12] See Statesman 270a-b.
[13] Corpus Hermeticum X., in Garth Fowden, The Egyptian Hermes: A Historical Approach to the Late Pagan Mind (Cambridge 1986), p. 111.
[14] See Phaedrus 247d-e.
[15] Phaedrus 247c, tr. A. Nehamas and P. Woodruff.
[16] See Plato, Letter VII. 342-345.
[17] See Symposium 196a-b, 204d-e. Agathon, in the course of his speech on Love, tells us that “between ugliness and Love there is unceasing war,” and in the next line that Love “never settles in anything, be it a body or a soul, that cannot flower or has lost its bloom” (tr. Nehamas and Woodruff). That which “cannot flower” refers, I believe, to a soul that is incapable of experiencing desire, which is what Love inspires – that is, desire for the Good. Moreover, when there is a “war” or tension in the soul between reason (the capacity to love) and irrationality (“ugliness”), this soul may be described as youthful, and capable of attaining “bloom” or the ‘ripeness’ of a well-educated mind, so to speak. That the soul should come to desire only what is good, it is the task of the soul, as philosopher or lover of wisdom, to achieve.
[18] See Symposium 200b.
[19] Letter II. 313a-b, tr. Glenn R. Morrow.
[20] Epinomis 992b, tr. Richard D. McKirahan.
[21] The relation of the individual soul to the Forms (esp. the Good) is to be understood as more than a simple experiential or ‘existential’ stance arrived at via contemplation. For Plato, the distinction between the human soul and its greatest Good is, in the final analysis, based upon a grounding metaphysical principle. In the Parmenides 134d, Plato tells us that “forms do not have their power in relation to things in our world [i.e., the sensible realm of everyday experience], and things in our world do not have theirs in relation to forms, but that things in each group have their power in relation to themselves” (tr. M.L. Gill and P. Ryan). A comparison of this passage with the Theaetetus 176e, where Plato discusses the “two patterns set up in reality” will yield the question of how the soul, as a purely divine being, comes to relate itself to a cosmos that is eternally partaking of the “bodily element,” and to achieve that ‘divine injection’ of supra-cosmic reason into the “well-rounded sphere” of/that is the ‘cosmic animal’ (Timaeus 33b ff.). Now Plato never provides us with a concrete definition of humankind qua humanity, except to tell us, explicitly, what humankind can hope to attain – i.e., the homoiōsis theōi. If we are to begin to think the problem of how the soul relates to the Forms, it may, perhaps, not be amiss to invoke, across the span of ages, as it were, the idea of Pico della Mirandola, that the soul is, essentially, “a creature of indeterminate nature” who is free to ascend or descend on the scale of Being, in accordance with the exercise of its autonomous intellect (cf. Pico della Mirandola, Oration on the Dignity of Man, tr. E.L. Forbes in The Renaissance Philosophy of Man: University of Chicago Press 1948, p. 224). Indeed, the fact that the soul which has risen to the Good can be compelled, according to Plato, to re-descend and take part in the governing of the polis shows that there remains, even in the ‘saved’ soul, a lingering autonomy of will (cf. Republic 519c-e).
[22] Republic 519d-520a.
[23] See Enneads VI.9.7, IV.3.30.
[24] See Ennead IV.8.7.
[25] Ennead III.8.4-6.
[26] See Ennead V.2.1.
[27] Enneads IV.8.3, V.1.7.
[28] See Ennead II.4.4, where matter is referred to as the ‘substratum’ or foundation (hupokeimenon) of the cosmos.
[29] See Ennead I.8.8-9.
[30] Tr. Elmer O’Brien (1964) in The Essential Plotinus (Hackett Publishing).
[31] Ennead I.8.9, tr. Stephen MacKenna (1991, Penguin Books).
[32] See Enneads IV.3.9, IV.8.4-7.
[33] Unfortunately, I do not have the space available here to examine the role that Gnosticism had to play in the development of these ideas. I will leave that task, necessarily, to a future revision and expansion of the present text.
[35] Tr. Rev. Frederick Crombie, in The Ante-Nicene Fathers, volume IV, ed. Roberts, Donaldson (Eerdmans Publishing 1979, reprint).
[36] This ability to ‘change oneself’ has for Origen a meaning quite different than it did for Plotinus, as we will see below.
[37] See Ennead IV.8.5-7.
[38] See De Principiis II.VIII. 3-4, II.IX. 2.
[39] De Principiis II.XI. 4.
[40] De Principiis I.VI. 3.
[41] De Principiis II.XI. 7.
[42] See De Principiis IV.1. 35
[43] De Principiis I.VI. 2.
[44] That the clearest expression of something like a doctrine of apokatastasis occurs in the Epinomis, which most scholars believe to be from the pen of Philip of Opus (the transcriber of the Laws), and not in the accepted Dialogues of Plato, I believe lends weight to this assessment.