Changing fates of Platonism

The direction of influence in ancient philosophy went predominantly from East to West. Figures writing in Greek were commented by Latin writers, while Latin writers, even if they might have been original, were rarely considered by Greek thinkers. Indeed, Latin philosophers often seemed to be out of sync with their Greek contemporaries, following trends that had become somewhat old-fashioned in the other part of the Roman empire.

Calcidius can be taken here as a good example. His work - a translation and a commentary of Plato’s Timaeus - is itself an expression of the interest Latin culture showed in Greek philosophy. Furthermore, his commentary shows almost no indication of the ideas of Plotinus and his school - the latest step in the development of Platonism. Instead, Calcidius relies more on discussions on Plato from a time preceding Plotinus (the so-called Middle Platonism).

The aim of Calcidius is to show that Plato’s dialogue is a respectable attempt in describing the physical world. Calcidius tries to argue that some of Plato’s statements have a clear mathematical precedent. For instance, when Plato says that fire and earth as solid bodies need to have two other type of bodies (air and water) to link them, Calcidius suggests Plato is just referring to a fact of geometry that just like two similar parallelograms can be linked with one similar parallelogram, which combines length of one parallelogram with the width of the other, similarly two parallipedes can be linked with two parallipedes, one sharing two sides with first and one side with the other extreme and the second sharing one side with first and two sides with the other.

One might justifiably ask how Calcidius’s explanation fits with Plato’s idea that the four elements consist of differently shaped figures, all of which are not parallipedes. In a move cancelling his previous geometrical explanation, Calcidius explains the link as being qualitative, air resembling in its properties fire more than earth and water resembling earth more than water. He perhaps wants to connect Plato’s idea of four elements with Aristotelian notions, where the four elements were linked by such common qualitative characteristics.

Calcidius is indeed quite anxious to make Plato’s ideas compatible with later philosophical currents. While Plato describes a divinity creating the world in time, Calcidius explains this as a mere metaphor. World, he says, is eternal and eternally changing, although it is dependent on an unchanging paradigm, which the temporal world resembles. Furthermore, while Plato had not considered any further level above the divinity, Calcidius assumes a common idea of later Platonists that divinity is dependent on an indescribable primordial unity.

The world, Calcidius says, is governed by an indivisible entity, that is, a world soul, which still can be linked with the divisible world, perhaps through the mediation of lower forms of soul, more resembling material entities. Calcidius compares Plato’s account here with the Biblical story of God infusing the body made out of clay with a divine breath to control it.

Calcidius also calls the world soul fate. By this he does not mean that all things in the world would be fated to happen in a precisely determined fashion. Instead, he says, this fate is like a law determining what happens from different types of conduct. Thus, humans still have a liberty to decide how they would act, and world soul then performs the role of a judge determining whether this conduct is to be rewarded or punished. Because of these limits of determinism, Calcidius notes, divination is only partially possible and can reveal of contingent matters that they are contingent. Even the creator divinity cannot know all the future things, because some events are determined by free decisions - but the creator does know what is the destiny of a person making certain types of decisions.

Plato already had an interest in Pythagorean number theories, and he had suggested a complex account, in which world soul was like a group of numbers flowing from original unity. Pythagoreanism had continued to interest Platonists, and Calcidius continued this tradition by finding obtuse explanations for various numbers in Plato’s account of world soul. For instance, Plato chose seven numbers, Calcidius suggested, because seven is the only number smaller than 10 (excluding 1), which was both indivisible and not a divisor of other numbers smaller than 10. A more meaningful linking of Timaeus and Pythagoreanism was Calcidius’ suggestion that the numbers constituting the world soul were same as those constituting musical harmonies, making the world soul also harmonious.

In addition to arithmetic and music, Plato’s Timaeus provided Calcidius also with a clear link to astronomy. The world soul with its numerical relations moved the outermost layer of the world with a strictly regular movement, while the more inner layers of planets moved more and more irregularly. The connection with the soul, Calcidius says, makes the world alive, while the ordered and ultimately cyclical movement of the planets makes it an image of eternity.

Just like the whole world, Calcidius continues, so are the stars and planets also alive, and indeed, what the traditional polytheistic religion had called gods. While the stars and planets are, he says, living beings made of fire, there are also living beings made of air and moisture, namely, the demons or angels, who serve as intermediaries between gods and earthly living beings.

Like all these superior living beings, Calcidius notes, human beings also consist of two elements, soul and body. Human souls, he says following Plato, have their origin in the creator divinity, but they also have some affinity with some star or planet, to which they will eventually return, if they live their earthly lives well. Human bodies, on the other hand, have their origin in the celestial divinities and consist of all the four material elements. Body as such would move errantly, and while partially the soul remains untouched by concerns of the body, partially it is affected by them, thus making it difficult for the human soul to govern the body.

Calcidius considers various theories about the nature of soul. He is extremely critical of Epicurean theory that soul is just a special sort of atom, which would make soul no different than body - a mutable, mortal being. Similar deficiency Calcidius sees in Stoic idea that soul is a continuous material substance, like breath - then soul and body would never truly combine, but soul would merely lie in the holes of the body.

Aristotelian notion of soul as the activity specific to natural, living bodies Calcidius regarded more positively. This activity is not body as such, but something received by body and permeating it through and through, although it is centered around human heart as the crux of all processes of life. Yet, Calcidius is not fully satisfied with this account, because such an activity is still too closely linked to the body and dies with it. Indeed, Aristotelian soul, Calcidius suggests, is just a projection of the true soul, which can exist even without a body. This soul is, he says, immaterial and indivisible, but it does have different activities, centered around different parts of human body: reason governs head, emotions enliven the heart, while earthly desires lie in lower parts of body.

Following Plato’s account, Calcidius next turns to the question of how sense organs serve to make humans aware of world around them. He is especially interested of the question of vision - a problem widely discussed in his own time. The main point of contest was whether sensation of vision was produced by light coming out of the eye external light coming from sun or from coloured object and pinging on eye. Calcidius suggests that the truth, already known by Plato, is that all three take part in visual sensation - warmth of human body is transferred to rays of light in eyes, and when these rays are strengthened by the light radiated by warm sun and come in contact with coloured light emanating from an object, we see the colour of the object.

Calcidius also considers another pet question of ancient philosophy, namely, that of the origin of dreams. He again takes a sort of middle position and accepts no single source for dreams. Generally, he says, dreams arise from sensations, emotions, thoughts and other mental states lingering in our soul and arising again in the mind during sleep. During different phases of sleep, different faculties of the soul are more active than others, thus, some dreams are of more earthy nature, while others are more intellectual. Some - although definitely not all of them - might even be generated by the more divine levels of reality.

Although dreams can then tell us something about the divine, Calcidius thinks that vision is still our main connection to higher levels of the hierarchy of being - seeing the movement of planets and stars we come to an idea of something on the basis of this movement. The road to theology or the knowledge of divine, Calcidius says, goes then through physics or knowledge of nature. In addition to these two branches of philosophy, the knowledge of ways of reasoning, which Calcidius identifies with mathematics, is also revealed to us through vision, because we learn to measure and count through looking at the alternation of days and night. In addition to these theoretical disciplines, vision is important also for the practical branches of philosophy, teaching how to guide one’s personal life, life of a household and life of the whole society.

The harmonious order of sensible world, Calcidius notes, is the work of divine source, which imposes on the variable world stable structures, which form the content of divine mind and which we humans could also get to know through non-sensuous thinking. These two principles - God and ideas - are then required for the existence of ordered cosmos, but is that enough? Calcidius notes that many philosophers have assumed also the existence of yet another principle, that is, matter, although they are not unanimous about its properties. Perhaps farthest from the truth, Calcidius appears to imply, are the Jewish traditions that suggest matter to be just another creation of God, depriving from it the status of a true principle. Even among the philosophies which accept the uncreated nature of matter Calcidius finds quite many unsatisfactory views, such as the atomistic idea that matter is divided into distinct units: such atomic bodies are still not the ultimate matter.

Among the philosophers who believe matter to form a continuity, there are various opinions, such as the Ionian idea that all bodies consist of a single kind of moving matter with its own distinct characteristics, for instance, air of Anaximenes. Others, like Parmenides, deny that matter could move, while some, like Empedocles, suggest that matter could appear in many unrelated kinds. The problem with all these suggestions, Calcidius insists, is that they believed matter to have some characteristics of its own, while simple considerations show it could not have such. Calcidius upholds particularly a notion of matter he thinks can be found in Plato’s Timaeus - although it is not certain whether it really was what Plato thought.

Calcidius asks us to consider a process in a sense opposite to what happens when we discover divinity behind the order of cosmos. In effect, we are not combining perceived things into a regulated whole, but stripping away all their characteristics - where they are, what they do, what they are like, how big they are, how they relate to each other. Even their very substantiality or their capacity to take on various characteristics is meant to be thought away. Even after all of these things are stripped from perceptibles, we have an obscure feeling that something remains. Plato called this indefinite something place, which suggests that he was thinking about space, but Calcidius, probably following later philosophical traditions, calls it matter. In any case, it is meant to be like a featureless canvas, on which God projects his ideas or eternal paradigmatic structures of existing things. The projections of the ideas are then like active forces shaping the matter into distinct shapes or perceptible things, which come and go.

Calcidius had written his account of Timaeus at an instigation of a Christian, but his own attitude toward the religion was more ambivalent - clearly his insistence that God had not created matter contradicted the current Christian majority view. Yet, some thinkers were more willing to bridge the gap between Christianity and Platonism. A good example is Marius Victorinus, who was a teacher of rhetorics, and for instance, made commentaries on Ciceronian works on the art. Just to give an idea what his rhetorical works were like, in his book on definition, Victorinus noted how definitions were, on the one hand, based on finding the essential qualities of objects, and on the other hand, how they were the first step in delineating the world of objects that we can speak about. In addition, Victorinus discussed various types of definitions, the paradigmatic one being that where the thing to be defined is separated from a wider genus through a differentiating principle. Victorinus translated also Porphyrius’ works into Latin, being thus aware of more recent trends in Greek Platonism than Calcidius. Furthermore, he converted into Christianity and wrote some of the first Latin commentaries on Paul’s letters.

Victorinus did not compartmentalise his interests, but used his knowledge of Platonist ideas for elucidating such intricacies of Christian teaching as the relationship between the prime source of everything - Father in Christian parlance - and Logos, the only Son of this Father. Victorinus suggests that by Father Christians mean an original abundance of all possibilities, which in a sense is the primary instance of being, but in another sense is so beyond all other beings that it should not be called even being - Father is the light, or as we might say it, energy with the power to create and activate everything. The first among true beings, then, are for Victorinus ideal prototypes, which other beings can at most resemble. Material world, particularly, is for Victorinus just a shadow of these ideal prototypes, shown by the tendency of material bodies to deteriorate after a while. Human soul, then, lies between these two extremes of true, ideal being and apparent, shadowy bodies.

What is the role of Logos in this Platonic sounding hierarchy? Victorinus suggests that Logos means the process of actualising all the possibilities inherent in the primary source. Compared to source, Logos is more active than the quiet repose of Father - indeed, one might say Logos is the prime example of activity. This activity of Logos is based on the abundant source of energy or Father and its activity consists of turning the possibilities within Father into beings or of creating them - it is, as it were, the will of Father. As a source of prime activity, Father can also be called active in a sense, although it is primarily characterised by a quiet repose staying always within itself, just as Logos in all its action is in a sense always same and in repose. Indeed, what is always same in Logos is its stable substance, which is just this eternal abundance of energy or Father - active Logos and quiet primary source are in a sense just phases of the same divinity, Logos being the image or form showing what God is.

Victorinus emphasises more the underlying sameness of Father or source and Son or Logos. There are clear historical reasons for this choice - Victorinus wanted to oppose especially the Arians, who considered Logos to be just the first creation of and similar to God. Yet, there are also more essential reasons for this choice - like world of ideas in Plotinus is dominantly a unity, in which ideas are just different facets of a one self-thinking intellect, similarly God of Victorinus is dominantly a unified substance or energy flowing through different, but connected phases. In comparison, sense world is dominantly a multiplicity or just a combination of essentially separate entities. Then again, Victorinus does admit that Father and Son are in a sense different from one another. Thus, he insists, we cannot say that Father was incarnated, because incarnation belongs to the active aspect of divinity.

Victorinus concentrates his attention to the relation between Father and Son, but he does also consider the third element of the trinity or Holy Spirit. In a sense, Holy Spirit is for Victorinus just an aspect of Logos. Logos as such is the activation of divine potentialities, in other words, it makes these potentialities alive. Victorinus thus calls Logos feminine: it is the mother of all life. Yet, Logos contains also another movement, which is in a sense a return to the original unity or Father - and therefore deserves to be called masculine, Victorinus says. This returning movement is the moment of understanding, when Logos looks upon what it has made alive and finds the divine reflected in its works. This aspect of understanding or wisdom is what is usually called Holy Spirit, Victorinus concludes.

The trinitarian form of divinity, described by terms being, life and understanding, is reflected in the things Logos actualises. An important link in this regard is soul. Souls, Victorinus says, also contain the aspects of being, life and understanding. Just like Logos works as a link of potential power in the Father and created entities, similarly soul transmits divine trinity to the sense world.

If Victorinus was keen to reconcile Neo-Platonic hierarchy of beings with Christian notions, his contemporary Julian wanted to eradicate all signs of Christianity and reinstate Platonically interpreted polytheism as the official religion. Being the current emperor, he had the means to do so, but the project did not last beyond his lifetime and he was then later branded as the Apostate - a betrayer of Church. This was, undoubtedly, a one-sided view, and in Julian’s surviving personal letters, we find a thoughtful person, who worries how he can keep calm in the absence of his friends and who thinks philosophising about the affairs of state is far more rewarding and praiseworthy than actual governance.

Julian claimed that Platonic cosmology, as presented in Timaeus, was simply closer to the truth than the account of creation in Genesis. For instance, the world created and sustained by the Platonic divinity was instantly perfect, while God of Genesis had to make the world in a piecemeal fashion, one day at a time.

Even more imperfections Julian found in the behaviour of biblical God toward his human creations. Why did God want to restrict human knowledge about the difference between good and evil, and how could he condemn them for an act committed before they understood that difference? Similarly immoral was God’s commandment given to Moses that Jews should not worship other divinities, if they did not wish for retribution. Stories like these, Julian suggested, draw a picture of a jealous and petty divinity, who is unsure of his own status.

Biblical God, Julian concluded, was nothing but a divinity appointed to Jewish nation, although they had confused it with the ultimate source of all existence. In addition, Julian implied, it appeared not to be a very good divinity, since Jews had achieved nothing great in comparison with the Greeks - no great philosophers, no great poets, no great mathematicians, no great statesmen.

Christians, Julian thought, were even worse than Jews, since they had created a mongrel of Greek and Jewish cultures, choosing the bad and ignoring the best in both. Firstly, they had rejected the Hellenistic culture of their forefathers and adopted some Jewish manners instead. Then again, they had not emulated Jews in their ritualistic complexity and moral purity, which was most original and noteworthy in that culture. Christians had even ignored the command to keep no other gods and had raised their prophet, Jesus, into a status of second god.

Julian’s own sympathies lie with the whole tradition of pagan Greek philosophy, which, he insists, forms a unified whole, even if individual philosophers might have deviated from this ideal. The main principle of this single philosophy, Julian insists, has been from the start to know oneself and one’s place in the universe. Even such a philosopher like Diogenes the Cynic followed it, in his quest to live a life as close to nature as possible, although his followers had perverted his ideas into a shallow disrespect of all civilized customs. Julian was especially critical of cynics of his time, who used mythical form in their philosophising in a manner disrespectful of the traditional polytheistic religion.

Julian himself was very appreciative of traditional divinities, especially as they were incorporated in the Neoplatonic hierarchy of entities. He was particularly interested of Sol or Helios, god of sun, to whom his family had been dedicated, before turning into Christianity. For Julius, Helios held a sort of dual place in the hierarchy. The physical sun was the counterpart or manifestation of the central entity in immaterial realm, which Julian also identified with Cybele, the mother of gods: physical sun gives life to the physical world, just like its immaterial or divine analogue radiates its power to all immaterial entities. Furthermore, this immaterial Helios was an image of the primordial unity beyond all existence and thus held a mediating position also between the source of and the rest of existence.

This mother of gods, Julian notes, radiates its power to the sensible world and especially to the aetherial realm, which moves forever in a circle. Julian likens aetherial realm to Attis, the mythical beloved of Cybele. According to the myth, Cybele was enraged by Attis being wedded to a mortal and made him go mad and castrate himself. This story, Julian suggests, is a symbolic account of the imperfection of sense world, where even the relatively stable aetherial sphere is characterised by constant change and yearning.

Julian's attempt to turn the tide of history didn't have a lasting effect: Christianity had become too strong. This still did no mean the end of Platonism, since it continued its existence within Christianity.

Cicero Christianised

While Greek-speaking Christians had a long tradition of applying philosophy to religious questions, Latin-speaking Christians were slower to take advantage of it. If we ignore the rather antiphilosophical Tertullian, the first Latin Christian philosopher of note, Lactantius, discoursed especially with the Latin tradition of philosophers, such as Cicero and Seneca. Like them, Lactantius endorses the idea that world was made for a purpose. He especially extols the symmetrical, beautiful and intricate structure of human body and the materialistically insolvable wonder of life processes as proofs of the existence of a divine designer. A major point of his criticism is the Epicurean idea that gods in their perfection would have nothing to do with lesser beings. Lactantius instead notes that a truly powerful being would essentially use its power and not remain passive.

Although Lactantius sympathises with the Stoic idea that the organiser of the world cared providentially for other entities, unlike them, he believes that God would also punish those behaving against the rules of good life - in addition to love, God could also experience anger. Of course, Lactantius admits, this divine anger is not be blind rage or fury, but a will for a just retribution against subjects who ignored the commands of their superior. Thus, emperors who had persecuted Christians were eventually punished by God.

Lactantius insists that only a single designer could be behind the world around us. If there would be several creators, he argues, their creations would essentially limit one another, thus making it impossible that world would form a unified whole. Hence, he rejects the polytheism inherent in Roman religion. Supposed divinities, Lactantius speculates, had been mere mortal human beings. Statues and images were made of them, originally just to make their memory last. Due to their fame, they had finally been relegated to the status of gods, and images made of them were worshiped in hope of rewards. They were thus no true gods, and even their fame was often due to quite wrong reasons, such as their physical prowess.

The falsity of Roman gods, Lactantius believes, had been known by philosophers, but they still could not find true religion with mere human reason. Some of them, like Cicero, still followed the common rituals, out of respect for tradition. Yet, Lactantius thinks, previous generations had been not wiser than current generations, so it would have been better to cease such futile traditions altogether, since they were contrary to reason. He has no respect either for philosophers who called natural things, like planets, gods. Planets do follow regular courses, unlike earthly objects with quite fortuitous movements, Lactantius admits, but this is no sign of their divinity - it just shows that God had ordained their movements.

The ultimate source of the errors of polytheists, and indeed, the ultimate source of everything evil, Lactantius suggests, is a creature which had rebelled against God, because it was jealous of perfection it did not possess. Lactantius is somewhat ambivalent of the status of this adversary. On the one hand, he says, the choice of the adversary had been free and God had merely given it the ability to err. On the other hand, Lactantius also insists, God requires opposite forces, that is, both good and evil, for creation of the world.

Although Lactantius speaks as if God required good and evil to make the world, he does not mean that God was in need of pre-existing material for his creation, like pagan thinkers had believed. Instead, Lactantius is certain that God was able to create, in addition to conscious beings, also something that has no consciousness at all, namely, matter. Indeed, he continues, if matter had existed eternally, it must have been incapable of being changed in any fashion and so utterly unsuitable for the role of material to be shaped.

Lactantius’ account of creation shows a rather old-fashioned view of the world, even in the context of ancient philosophy. Just like good and evil are the two forces governing the world, Lactantius says, the world also contains two regions - the heavenly abode full of light and essentially dark earth underneath it. The region of earth is also characterised by the same duality - East is where sun rises and light begins, while West is where the sun sets and darkness begins. Lactantius is obviously speaking about a flat earth, and to complete the account, he notes that cold North is close to dark West and warm South to light East. The geographical duality, he continues, is linked to a temporal duality, where day is filled with a single light of Sun, while dark night is only feebly lighted by the plurality of stars.

In addition to world in general, Lactantius notes, God designed also living things, which again require duality - divine heat in them is tempered by wetness of water. Lactantius explicitly notes that animals could not have been born without the help of divinity. He especially disparages the Epicurean notion that earth would have spontaneously been filled with the first individuals of all animal species and that it would have produced milkish sustenance to all these animals. Lactantius argues that world could not have been so different in the beginning, and if it were, animals could not have survived to adulthood without divine guidance.

The duality of animals, Lactantius believes, is augmented by another duality in human beings - the human body is infused by divine breath or soul. Although these two parts are necessary components of a human being, Lactantius notes that the soul is meant to be the controlling part of this combination. A person who lets his body control his soul will then be evil.

Lactantius continues then with details taken out of Biblical stories. First human beings had lived in eastern part of the world, which symbolises the goodness of the whole world. The adversary tricked humans into breaking God’s commands, which led to them being expelled from the paradise. Humans lost their immortality, but retained long lives, until God flooded the world because of the wicked ways of humankind. After that event, the humans who had remained alive filled all the corners of the earth, and the true religion faded away from their memories.

God had created guardians for the human race, Lactantius writes, but the adversary seduced some of them to succumb to temptation of bodies and to produce children with human beings. These fallen guardians and their offspring became then henchmen of the adversary, according to Lactantius, and they spread various false teachings over the earth. God allowed them to do this, Lactantius conjectures, because he was willing to test the worth of human beings.

If pagan religions are for Lactantius just deceptions of demons, pagan philosophy as mere love of wisdom is for him no true wisdom. It consists, Lactantius says, either of an admission of human ignorance or of a collection of opinions masking itself as knowledge. The former, he notes, clearly does not deserve the name of wisdom, while the latter ignores the inevitable source of error inherent in the bodily constitution of a human being.

Lactantius is especially critical of the opinions of philosophers about ethics - physics and logic concern only frivolous issues, while ethics should guide our very behaviour. He considers particularly the supreme goals philosophers had suggested for human life and finds them all wanting: pleasure is a goal good for pigs, while knowledge and virtue are only good as means for further goals. True goal of human life, Lactantius suggests, has to be a reward for the worship of God, namely, an eternal life without the shackles of bodily restrictions.

Like many early Christian thinkers, Lactantius thinks that true wisdom is revealed to humankind through Logos, the first creation of God and in so intimate connection with him that it should be called the son of God. Logos could even be called God itself, without destroying the unity of divinity - it is the necessary manner in which God appeared and revealed itself and without it no knowledge of God was possible. Logos had taken a human form, Lactantius continues, in order to show the humankind an example of a perfect life. This perfect specimen had to be God, in order to have authority over all humans, but it had to also be a human, so that it would prove that human body was no complete obstacle for perfect life.

Pagan religion, Lactantius states, did not just block our connection to God, but it also undermined the whole society. Pagans worshiped Jupiter, who had rebelled against his father Saturn and thus destroyed the idyllic past. No wonder then, Lactantius continues, that the Roman society rewarded thugs and militaristic leaders. Christians, on the other hand, are willing to share their fortune with people of less means, and during a shipwreck they would gladly give the last plank to another person, because they know a true reward waits them in the afterlife. The injustice of pagans, Lactantius argues, can even be seen in that they will not argue for their religion, but persecute Christians, who decline to follow its rituals, while Christians force no one to convert to their religion.

The rituals of Christians, Lactantius points out, involve no animal sacrifices, but just living the life as it should be lived. This way of life is narrow and difficult one. Indeed, Lactantius goes even so far as to suggest that one could not naturally live a truly good life, unless one had the certainty given by God’s revelation that an immortal life would be its reward. Still, unlike some pagan philosophers had insisted, it is not enough just to know what one should do, if one does not really do it. Even the purging of sins by Logos is not enough, if one still continues to live a sinful life.

The life following this vision of divinity, Lactantius insists, should be a life dedicated to others and especially to those most in need. Lactantius notes that we have an innate way to recognise those needing our assistance, through the feeling of pity, and unliked Stoics insisted, we should follow this feeling, at least when done in moderation. Indeed, Lactantius notes that all feelings, even the seemingly negative ones, could be useful. We should not fear earthly pains, but we should fear divine punishments, and we should not be angered by evil works made against us, but we should use anger to control the urges of growing youngsters.

What one requires, according to Lactantius, is to control all emotions and sensations, so that their excess will not lead one away from one’s duties. Thus, Lactantius states, we should not use vision to watch brutal gladiator fights or rowdy theatricals, we should not use hearing to listen poems without moral teaching, we should not smell flowers or eat delicacies and we should not engage in sexual frivolities. While one might wonder why God then gave us the capacity to use all the senses in a manner we shouldn’t, Lactantius has a simple answer - good life requires battle against desires. Still, he does not think that one error would be enough to condemn a person, but honest repenting followed by good behaviour could still purge them.

God had made the world, Lactantius says, for the purpose of testing whether humans are capable of good life, which deserves then immortality for its prize. Human being is conjoined of good and evil - immortal soul and earthly body, with contrary desires pointing to different directions. In the state of innocence, the first human being did not yet understand the difference between the two. Lactantius suggests that fall was in a sense necessary step, because then human beings received the ability to understand the difference of good and evil in their own constitution. With this understanding, human beings became responsible for their evil nature and they were then appointed with the duty to purge themselves.

The final purification from all evil would require separation of soul from the evil of body. Lactantius suggests that this is in a sense a reason to believe in the immortality of soul - if we don’t assume it, it would make no sense to live a good life against the instigation of body. Against Epicureans, who thought that soul would instantly disperse when body collapsed, Lactantius insists that body is more like a container holding soul down. Thus, the slow collapse of the body can affect mental faculties, as long as soul is confined by the body, but when separated from the body, the soul would quickly return to its senses.

Once the purpose of the world is fulfilled, Lactantius notes, world in its current shape is not required and God as its creator has the power to undo it. For numerological reasons, Lactantius suggests that God has chosen number seven for this purpose. When world will have existed for six thousand years - something Lactantius thinks would happen in couple hundred years - Rome, which was already old, requiring the mastership of one person, will collapse in a civil war and finally its remnants will be assaulted by a king from north. Lactantius continues that the world will be in a state of upheaval, with land not bearing any fruit and all sorts of cosmological signs, like comets and eclipses, being commonplace. A final prophet will rise and do wonders, but will also be killed by an eastern tyrant, who will also have power to do all sorts of magic and who will pretend to be Logos. This state of constant warfare, Lactantius notes, will end when the real Logos returns to take up the governance of the world.

This will still not be the end of the world, Lactantius says, but it will continue existing for another thousand years. All the good people who had lived from the dawn of the world will rise from their graves and will go on to live and procreate - and some evil persons will also have survived, to be used as slaves. This millennium will be, Lactantius pictures, an era of prosperity, when world will spring honey and delicacies everywhere and the prince of evil would be chained. After thousand years, this source of all evil will be let free and he will incite nations of the world in a final assault against the fortification of Logos. This seems like a desperate attempt, since the end result, according to Lactantius, will be just God destroying the world as it is, with the remaining good persons surviving in caverns. The world will be made completely anew and the good human beings will receive new, purer bodies.

Strangely enough, Lactantius notes that all the evil people will also receive a kind of immortality, after all. They will be resurrected at this final moment and they will also receive new bodies. Yet, the purpose these bodies, Lactantius says, is just to make the evil persons suffer - they will be put to an everlasting fire, which while destroying flesh also renews it, thus making the bodily pain never-ending. And while Lactantius earlier disparaged people watching brutal fights, he somewhat inconsistently remarks that the just persons will go on watching the pain of their fellow human beings.

School of Plotinus

While Plotinus was still joined with mortal body, his philosophy was constantly going through slight alterations - although the broad details remained same, there were always uncertainties in details, which Plotinus hadn’t decided upon. When the soul of Plotinus returned to its pure state, time stopped also for the natural development of his philosophy. Instead, reinterpretation began almost instantly. Plotinus was regarded as an almost mythical figure, who had an instant line to the more divine levels of reality. One of his disciples, Porphyry, rearranged his philosophical texts, often dividing continuous essays into separate texts. His aim was apparently to systematise the philosophy of Plotinus. He put first texts dealing with ordinary human life, then through the study of corporeal world rose to the levels of soul and intellect. The final texts in Porphyry’s reordering should have concerned the primordial unity, but perhaps because there is so little to say about it, he also appended Plotinus’ discussion of categories and numbers to the final part.

Porphyry himself was a true polymath, who could both interpret Homer’s writings and follow Ptolemy’s account of musicology. In addition, he also combined all he knew into a worldview with clear Platonist origins. Thus, when reading in Homer a description of a cavern of water nymphs with two entrances, Porphyry regarded it as a symbolic representation of Platonic cavern or world, water being linked to impurities of embodied life, and two entrances marking the journey of soul both to and from world. And Ptolemian account of the study of musicology inspired Porphyry to discuss the general method for true knowledge: a reasoning being used perception (such as perceived sounds) as a tool for covering universal patterns (such as quantitative relations behind different melodies), which the reasoning being in its highest state could recognise as belonging to an immaterial realm of paradigmatic models.

Mostly just fragments of purely philosophy works of Porphyry have survived, but he was clearly influenced by Plotinus. Like Plotinus, Porphyry spoke of a hierarchy of body, soul and intellect, in which body was enlivened by and served soul and soul was enlivened by and served intellect. But whereas Plotinian intellect was something clearly removed from embodied soul - a state of pure self-reflection - with Porphyry it seems to be closely linked to soul as its controlling force.

Furthermore, Porphyry calls the highest point of his hierarchy God, thus linking his ideas more to a religious context. His God appears to be also quite active force, taking care of the physical world, yet, unlike Christian God, Porphyry’s God was not interested of punishing anybody. Now, Porphyry noted that God was helped by a real hierarchy of lower spiritual entities, such as demons and heroic souls. Some of these lower entities might be less helpful and even work against the common interest.

The connection to the spiritual entities and especially to God is the only method for stable happiness for human soul, Porphyry says. Despite the religious connotations, Porphyry notes that traditional forms of worship have little to do with establishing this link, and many religious ceremonies he considered to be even harmful. For instance, it makes no sense to sacrifice food for God, who as an incorporeal entity does not eat anything. Especially to be avoided is animal sacrifice, which at most attracts malevolent gaseous entities (that is, demons) that devour smoke rising from burning flesh. Besides, animals take part in the common rationality of living nature and should therefore not be killed vainly.

Similarly, Porphyry is mostly skeptical of conventional means for receiving messages from God. God himself would not even feel a need to contact anyone, so such messages would at most come from beneficial incorporeal entities and in worse cases from the delusions of oneself or deceptions of evil entities.

Instead, Porphyry emphasises the importance of lawful behavior. Law in question is not conventional law of some community, but, firstly, the natural law governing the affairs of physical world, and secondly, the divine law, connecting natural world with higher realms of existence, when soul gets rid of its bodily shackles.

The rule of behaviour in natural law emphasises healthy use of one’s bodily and mental faculties and its aim is to stifle unbridled passions. The divine law, on the other hand, means severing the ties between soul and body, through such practices like abstinence. The universe of material bodies is in a sense just a projection of souls, when they have lost their connection with their innermost selves - souls project these vanishing bodies into the barely existing canvas of matter, which as completely featureless cannot change into anything. Bodies governed by souls can generate other bodies, which at first lived in womb like plants, with no motion of their own and nourished by an umbilical cord. When such a body finally leaves the womb, another soul, which feels an interest on the newly born body, will voluntarily connect itself with the body and control it. While in itself an indivisible unity, in connection with body it might be said to have parts, because it attends to different parts of its body with its different capacities.

The aim of the practices severing the tie between soul and body, according to Porphyry, is to return soul to itself, to its original unity with itself. Soul cannot be said to exist in a place, except in the sense that it is inclined to something which has a place. In its earthly state, soul is interested in body and objects impinging on it. At this state, soul then directs its sensation to these objects and projects a life force to direct the body. Soul cannot change the basic character of the body, such as whether it is male or female, but it can guide the body to a healthier life. For instance, dietary choices, like abstinence from meat, weaken the link between soul and body.

Depending on the life lived, soul can choose a new life for itself and thus go through many personalities. When it turns more and more toward its own non-vanishing nature, it combines with more starry bodies. Finally, at the moment of its perfection, soul becomes intellect, which timelessly thinks perfect models of all entities, all at the same time, and in this world of perfections it also contemplates itself. Through this self-thinking intellect soul can finally unite with divinity, which for Porphyry is the truth of all existence.

Although his ideas resemble Christianity in some measure, for Porphyry it is just one sect among many others. He is quick to note that the history of Christianity had been coloured by internal strife from the start, when Peter and Paul had debated about letting uncircumcised into the church - how could single truth be found among these contentions? Porphyry is also skeptical about the various ways in which Christians had interpreted their holy writings. He is especially wary of Origen’s creative readings, which have in his eyes almost no connection with Bible itself.

Still, Porphyry is also critical of more literal readings and holds the opinion that Christians are completely wrong about the supposed high age of such biblical figures like Moses. Furthermore, Porphyry raises doubts towards the prophecies in Old Testament - for instance, he thinks that prophecies in book of Daniel were actually no tales of times to come, but histories, written in a form of prophecy to raise the credibility of the book.

Porphyry’s criticism is not restricted to questions of exegesis. He also notes that it makes no sense that God would have punished people for eating fruits that gave people knowledge - not just of evil, but also of good. Indeed, even the act of planting such a deadly tree he holds to be beneath the character of divinity.

Porphyry also criticises the Christian notion of Logos. Either this Logos is just some internal aspect of divinity - its “reason” - and then no independent entity, or it is like a literal word, that is, an expression of the power of divinity, but thus also something evanescent in comparison to the divinity, in other words, not God itself. Indeed, he thinks that Jesus, this supposed incarnation of Logos, was at most a person who because of his pure behaviour was in contact with God, but still was no God.

Porphyry also ridicules the notion that Jesus would have been born in order to save all humanity. Why, he asks, did Jesus then come to world so late, when a number of people could have had no chance of hearing about him? Because of all these contradictions Porphyry notes that Christianity is not a doctrine fit for philosophers, but suitable only for people of low intellectual talent. In a rather misogynistic fashion he implies that it is all due to women having such a big role in Christian societies.

Despite - or perhaps because of - this criticism, Christian writers commented quite a lot on Porphyry’s writings, explaining how Porphyry had understood their sacred writings completely wrong, Still, the greatest influence Porphyry had in the history of at least western Christendom occurred in the area of logic, as his Isagoge, an introduction to works of Aristotle, happened for a long time to be almost the only work on logic surviving the fall of Roman empire in the Western Christendom.

Isagoge is essentially just a clarification of some basic concepts. Just like lines can be drawn from forefathers to their ascendants, forming a sort of tree, a similar tree could be formed starting from highest genus. The lines would descend, always dividing into two, according to differences like rational and irrational, which shape the genus like material into lower genera. This tree goes all the way down to lowest species, which are just above individuals. In addition to genera, differences and species, Porphyry mention salso various characteristics, some of which (properties) characterise certain species, like capacity to laugh characterises humans, while others are accidental to the species, either because we can conceptually distinguish them (like blackness from crows) or because they really are just accidental features (like walking is something we are not always doing).

Although this simple scheme itself was important to medievals, perhaps even more important was what Porphyry left out. He specifically mentions he won’t deal with the nature of these genera and species. Are they perhaps something that exists only in our thoughts? Porphyry would probably have said that they are something more real, but are they then something material? Again, Porphyry would most likely have denied this, but might they exist only within and as completely dependent on individual things? Although he doesn’t say it, it is probable Porphyry thought that they existed independently of individuals.

Followers of Plotinus were more and more inclined to provide an alternative to Christianity. This was evidenced by an interest in Pythagoras, who is a topic of a biography with both Porphyry and his student Iamblichus and who is presented by them as a purer type of sage than Jesus. Just like Jesus, Pythagoras is told to have instructed fishermen to get a good catch - but unlike Jesus, Pythagoras apparently convinced them to release the fishes. 

Pythagoras is also viewed as an exemplar and instigator of all virtues, who was acquainted with all the divine secrets, taught wisdom to selected students, disciplined his followers to withstand all bodily temptations and act bravely in all circumstances, and created a just society which nurtured harmonious relationships between its members. Iamblichus goes even further and points out statements suggesting Pythagoras was an embodiment of some divinity like Apollo. Furthermore, Iamblichus tries to interpret obscure elements in Pythagorean cult as allegories, with profound truths hidden behind metaphors - thus, command to not urinate toward sun is seen as a reminder that divinities (metaphorical sun) do not enjoy bodily crassness.

In addition to Pythagoreanism, Plato’s dialogues were seen as a route toward higher knowledge. These dialogues, Iamblichus says, are organic wholes, where each element serves a single purpose, that is, the theme of the dialogue. Indeed, Iamblichus considers in his commentaries not just the strictly philosophical content of the dialogues, but also the external setting of the dialogue as information of hidden knowledge.

An important thing for Iamblichus is also the order in which the dialogues should be read. One should start from Alcibiades, because it urges the reader to study oneself and to raise oneself above the concerns of everyday life. The ending point is Philebus, a dialogue about what is good in all levels of being and also what is the ultimate paradigm and source of goodness. Or then one could just read Timaeus and Parmenides, two dialogues summarising the whole of Plato’s philosophy, first describing Plato’s view on temporal world and second describing things beyond temporal world.

Iamblichus is also eager to regard common religious rituals as containing important truths about reaching the divine realm, thus taking Platonism into a direction Porphyry was not willing to take it. Just like Porphyry and Plotinus, Iamblichus speaks of a hierarchy of entities, adding that rungs of this hierarchy were described by different parts of Plato’s Parmenides. Like with his predecessors, Iamblichian hierarcy begins from the Primary source or primordial unity. Just below the unity is the self-conceiving intellect or the proverbial Creator, which provides being among other things also to itself. Together with Creator, there are other immaterial entities or divinities, which are completely removed from the realm of matter and embody some abstractions, working in a similar role as Platonic ideas, for instance, the sources of sameness and difference.

Between the realm of wholly immaterial deities and sense world, Iamblichus places the realm of mathematical entities, which interested the Pythagorean school. These entities share characteristics with both the more immaterial entities (such as non-temporality) and sensuous beings (such as being divisible) and thus work for human beings as a road from the one to the other. While sensuous beings fluctuate even as we view them and the same finger might seem both a unity and a multiplicity, mathematical entities are stabler. They also are controlled by the abstractions of the more ideal realm - for instance, mathematical entities could be either similar or dissimilar with one another - and control sensuous entities, which also have their quantities.

Because of their mediating place, Iamblichus notes, mathematical entities cannot be perceived, but they have to be thought of, while this mathematical manner of thinking cannot reach ideal divinities. Still, they at least form the first stepping stone that lead us to think the ideal realm. The mathematical entities are derived from various unions of unity and multiplicity and are either combined sets of diverse units (objects of arithmetic, which have a natural lower limit, but no highest limit) or unities divisible into multiple parts (objects of geometry, which have a natural highest limit, but no lowest limit).

Below the immaterial realms in Iamblichean hierarchy is time, which is an image of eternity and which confers to temporal entities a kind of being, which is divided into what was and what is and what will be. Highest of these temporal entities are souls, which Iamblichus thinks are a sort of mix of ideal and material realms. In other words, souls as such have their own, immaterial activities, but in contact with matter they produce new activities, such as bodily memory.

Iamblichus notes that some souls are less material than others. Of the souls, the least connection with matter have divinities which rule over the most general entities of temporal world or stars. Below these is a being who fashioned the earthly realm and is thus connected with the earthly matter or ultimate lack of being, but also gazes upon the immutability of the heavens and the immaterial ideas and tries to replicate this immutability in its own works - Iamblichus compares it to a sophist, who tries to fool people with his imitations of truth.

Below gods are demons, which transform the invisible effects of divinities into visible goods to be used by lower entities. Next after demons are heroes or demigods, which appear to be human souls of the purest kind, capable of better life than ordinary humans. Some of them might be people like Pythagoras, who have been able to raise themselves permanently above the human condition through their heightened awareness, although they might occasionally have to enter the lower world because of preordained rules. In practice, Iamblichus seems to have suggested even further levels of entities between gods and human souls - archangels, angels and various archons - but it is unclear what their role in the hierarchy is.

The lowest rank in the hierarchy is held by ordinary human souls, which have took on more and more material and solid encasings, being finally encased in human bodies, which they try to control, although at the same they are completely overwhelmed by bodily urges. The human soul still have a reason or capacity to look upon the higher realms and thus a possibility to improve itself. If purified enough, at the time of death the human soul will rise again to more heavenly realms and control the sensible world with the higher entities, leaving only an irrational shadow behind it.

Unlike Plotinus and Porphyry, Iamblichus emphasises that purification of human soul is of religious nature. All the entities higher than human souls, Iamblichus notes against Porphyry, have to be beneficial, because they have been generated by the very source of goodness. All of them have to be also celebrated with proper rituals, Iamblichus says, and indeed, one could not straightaway move to the highest level of the hierarchy, before becoming tuned with its lower rungs.

Iamblichus does not completely deny the possibility of evil entities fooling people taking part in false religious rituals. Yet, with proper rituals no such deception is possible. Even if divinities contacted with such rituals might appear to act in an evil fashion and hurt people, there always is a good reason for such a behaviour. For instance, these divinities might punish humans because of crimes they have committed in previous lives. Furthermore, the seeming divine punishments might actually be beneficial, although our inferior human souls cannot comprehend this. Another possibility is that the seemingly evil actions are caused by some intermediary material cause muddying the original beneficial purpose - or they were the result of our soul turning away from the beneficial influence of gods.

Now, religious rituals seemingly speaking to highest ranks of divine hierarchy, Iamblichus insists, are not meant to command entities in these highest ranks, unlike Porphyry disparagingly suggested. Instead, they are meant to open up the soul to an occasion in which a divinity or some other higher entity has freely chosen to connect with the mundane level. Through such a connection divinities can reveal truths more important than those known by scholars of mundane matters. Thus, although someone with knowledge of the seasons could foretell the weather, this is nothing in comparison to an oracular divination.

Unlike Porphyry, Iamblichus is not critical even of animal sacrifices. Indeed, he says, higher beings might well come in contact with material things, without losing their own purity, just like some of these beings controlled stars. Of course, they do not need matter for their sustenance, which would have made divinities and demons ridiculously dependent on their worshippers. Instead, the idea of sacrifice is to purify matter with fire and thus raise it to the level of higher beings. Even the crassness of some mysteries have their purpose, Iamblichus noted. A sexual imagery is meant to be taken as a symbolism of generative forces of life, while even more radical rituals are supposed to shock and so sever soul from its material connections.

Divine knowledge revealed by religious rituals is then, according to Iamblichus, something profoundly higher than mere scholarship, which is based on mere human cognitive faculties. Just like beyond self-aware Creator is the primordial unconscious unity, Iamblichus thinks that beyond cognitive faculties is a higher activity connecting us mystically to all of existence. Indeed, innocent youth might well have a more intimate connection with divine reality, because of the purity of his soul. Some religious rituals are just supposed to purify the soul to a more divine level. With the connection to divine established, human being might have the ability to command and threaten lower powers, which would normally be above her level.

Earthly life

At the end of his life, Plotinus turned his attention from intellectual sphere to the affairs of human life, beginning with the old question of what it meant to live well. The problem Plotinus found in e.g. Aristotelian definition of good life as full actualisation of life was that it applied even to animals and even plants, which certainly actualised their own specific life goals. Plotinus’ solution was to suggest that there was a hierarchy of different types of life and only the form involving higher intellectual awareness was truly perfect. Thus, gods and even humans could be said to live well, but not mere animals or plants.

An important part of Plotinus’ understanding of good life was that it concerned only the mental side or personality of a human being. Body, he said, was no true part of human being and therefore had no effect on how good one’s life was. Thus, poverty, bad health or old age were no obstacles for good life, according to Plotinus. Even the lack of awareness was nothing to care about, since mere existence of good soul was enough for good life - after all, a good general is a good general, even when she is asleep.

A natural question is then why corporeal world is needed at all and equally natural suggestion is that it is just as mistake or even a creation of some malignant entity. Yet, Plotinus was not willing to move in that direction. Instead, he thought that the corporeal world is at least partly due to necessity - intellectual world cannot be the end of the development, but its energy is so great that it must produce something beyond itself. This product is undoubtedly lesser than its origin, Plotinus said.

Despite its imperfection, world still has beauty in itself, and it is governed by an entity, which should be an image of self-thinking intellect and non-corporeal soul. Plotinus compared this world governing entity to a dramatist, using both light and dark colours to create the drama of the world. In this drama, all persons have an important part, whether they are heroes or villains. And it is just a drama, in the sense that humans just move through it, assuming other roles at other times, which makes death and worldly sufferings nothing truly serious.

This world plan does still not take away human responsibility, Plotinus noted. Indeed, the true personality or soul of a human being belongs to a level above the plan of the world. Thus, a human soul is not completely under the world plan and is therefore accountable for her actions.

Once again, then, Plotinus emphasised the mediating role of human soul. Soul, for Plotinus, is characterised by logos, something mediating between perception, awareness of things outside oneself, in the corporeal world, and awareness of oneself. This self-awareness is actually twofold, Plotinus noted. Firstly, soul is aware of itself as logos, that is, as something directed to both outside and within itself. Secondly, it can also become aware of itself as a mere pure self-awareness. At this moment soul actually becomes one with the higher level in hierarchy, the intellect. Soul can so become aware of itself as being dependent of this pure self-awareness - as a sort of reflection of its light.

Pyrrhonists had argued that self-awareness was in a sense impossible - the self that was aware was always something different of what it was aware of and thus both of them were just parts of the whole self. Plotinus denied this and forcefully stated that pure self-awareness must be a simple unity, in which the whole intellect knows the whole intellect, even though this simple self-awareness does then have many aspects within it.

Since pure self-awareness has this aspect of differentiation and multiplicity in it, pure unity, as we should know by now, was then for Plotinus something above all self-awareness. Indeed, one could really not say anything about it, since a statement like “primordial unity is something that exists” still assumes a sort of distinction, when it distinguishes existence from this unity. Despite not being characterised by anything, it is still the source of everything - the original light, which the soul can reach only by losing everything else and merging itself with it.

Just like in the beginning of his career, Plotinus was still interested of the Platonic idea that love serves as a mediator leading individual soul to these higher levels of the hierarchy. In addition, Plotinus was interested of Plato’s mythological notion that, firstly, this love appeared in the form of a divine or daemonic entity, Eros, and secondly, that like Afrodite, Eros appeared also in two forms, as divine and earthly Eros. Plotinus suggested that Afrodite in this myth referred to soul - either the pure or embodied soul - and that there really were concrete entities serving as a connecting links between individual souls and intellectual world.

Although his gaze was always directed to what is good and what might be even more perfect than goodness, Plotinus admitted also that badness is also necessary. The primordial unity projects self-thinking intellect, intellect projects souls and souls finally project matter, which is the ultimate source of badness in the world. Matter exists in a sense, but only as a mere shadow of what properly exists. When souls become enamoured of this shadow existence, their powers diminish. Badness of souls is still not ultimate badness, because they still retain the capacity to clear themselves from the clutches of matter. Even embodied souls can find some of their powers and be able to resist the lure of matter. Still, such a virtuous life is not the ultimate perfection for soul, because it presupposes the fallen state of the soul.

Individual human being, Plotinus said, is then partly just a link in the corporeal, but also living universe. As such a link, an individual is open to the influence of corporeal objects, such as stars - and this is partly why astrology works, Plotinus thought. Yet, he also emphasised, individual is partly able to affect his own destiny and to make one’s own fate either better or worse. This duality of freedom and necessity is reflection of essential duality of what humans are. Firstly, we are pure souls, at most using bodies as tools, but secondly, we are also animals, or animated bodies. In other words, by invigorating body and making it alive, something new is created - first, perceptions, and then, organic processes.

One task of souls in Plotinian hierarchy was then to enliven the otherwise inert matter and connect it with the higher levels of the hierarchy. In this sense, embodied life was good, and there was no need to get rid of it. Indeed, Plotinus noted, true perfection on every level arose not from any striving toward some goal, but out of stillness and from mere existence as such. By this Plotinus did not want to say that e.g. dying is a bad thing. Instead, he pointed out that death was a liberation of soul from its corporeal duties and return to a pure state, from which it had descended.

Categorising being

When does a person act freely? An obvious condition appears to be that one must choose to do something without being forced by any external influences. Yet, Plotinus noted, this is not enough, since a person who had not complete understanding of the situation she was in, could not really act freely - thus, a person killing her own mother would not have done this out of free choice, if she did not recognise her mother. Indeed, Plotinus suggested, true freedom humans could experience only by becoming close to the state of intellect, that is, by becoming free from all bodily needs and having a complete understanding of what is truly good. Freedom, for Plotinus, is then not complete random choice of what to aim for - our freedom is not hindered by our aiming for true good.

When we move to the level of intellect, we notice something peculiar. Unlike soul, the intellect has nothing external that can hinder it from aiming toward goodness. Indeed, intellect just could not be otherwise, because of this lack of external influences. Still, intellect can be called free, just because it can freely strive for goodness. Even more obvious this is in case of the goodness or the goal of everything else - the primordial unity. It can be figuratively said to have made itself to what it wills, because it is perfectly good. Yet, this also means that it couldn’t really be otherwise, since it could not fail to make itself what it wants.

Similarly not able to be otherwise is the self-thinking intellect, and indeed, anything non-corporeal. Corporeal things, on the other hand, always change. This is especially true of the earthly bodies, which eventually decay and turn into other bodies. Then again, celestial spheres hold in a sense middle position between non-corporeal and earthly entities. As bodies, celestial spheres change, for instance, by moving. Yet, their movement is circular and maintained by the worldsoul, which makes their movement continuous and eternal. Furthermore, celestial bodies do not decay, Plotinus insisted - although sun is made of fire, it will never exhaust itself.

Just like celestial bodies held a middle position between non-corporeal entities and earthly bodies, souls held in Plotinus’ hierarchy a middle position between intellectual and corporeal world. Soul has the ability to view both intellectual and corporeal entities. This viewing is not something passive, in which, say, a body would imprint its image on the soul through eyes. Instead, Plotinus said, in perception soul actively grasps the object to get a vision of it. This vision, whether of an intellectual or corporeal object, remains a while in the soul, and with enough force, it can actively bring back the vision to consideration.

In its mediating position, soul can use same expressions both of corporeal and intellectual entities - for instance, it can say that there are both corporeal and intellectual substances. Thus, Plotinus noted, such theories of categorising entities, like the one of Aristotle, would have to be doubled, so that different categories would apply to corporeal and intellectual entities. For instance, corporeal and intellectual substances or beings cannot be beings in the same sense - intellectual entities were for Plotinus much more substantial than corporeal entities.

The Aristotelian category of quantities was in Plotinus’ eyes even more clearly not a truly unified class, because it contained such diverse things as numbers, areas and periods of time. Plotinus noted that in a sense, one could say that numbers were the primary example of quantities, while other quantifiable things were just secondarily quantities. Yet, problematic for Plotinus was that he thought numbers also to be substances in a quite essential manner.

Aristotelian category of relation was, according to Plotinus, even more problematic. Clearly there are many types of relations - left and right, father and son, science and its object are all very different things. Furthermore, even the related things can be very different, for instance, science of physics, an intellectual thing, is something very different from corporeal nature. In case of relations it seems then quite likely, Plotinus noted, that they belong just to our subjective outlook on things.

Aristotelian category of qualities was also a conundrum in Plotinus’ opinion, because Aristotle admitted that he included quite diverse things under that title, such as capacities and shapes. Plotinus also noted that negations of qualities provided another problem - could we say that e.g. non-whiteness is a quality in the same sense whiteness is?

Categories of time and place are also problematic, Plotinus said. Aristotle had already classified time as a general process under quantities. Plotinus replied then that specific times, as parts of time, would have to be also included under quantities. Similarly, Aristotle had classified such places as right and left under relations, so one might suggest, Plotinus implied, that no specific category for spaces was required.

Categories of action and passion were an interesting case. Of action Plotinus noted that this truly appeared to be one type of being - or more likely, he wanted to incorporate Aristotelian category of action into a broader category of processes. Plotinus also noted that compared to actions, passions seemed to require no independent category for themselves - for instance, cutting bread was always the same process, whether you regarded it as an activity of knife or a passion suffered by the bread.

Of the last two Aristotelian categories - having and being in position - Plotinus didn’t have much to say. Of having, he noted that having could be taken as a general category, since, for instance, things had qualities and quantities etc. Then again, both having and being in a position could be regarded as types of relations.

The Aristotelian theory of categories was then too haphazard for Plotinus’ taste. The much more simple Stoic theory also failed to satisfy him. For Stoics, the first and in a sense the most primary category of entities was the material substrate, of which everything else in the world was supposed to consist of. Yet, Plotinus noted, matter as such is just a material that could be potentially shaped in various forms and not a really existing entity and is thus not a good candidate for a principle of everything. What was even more condemning in Plotinus’ opinion was that for Stoics divinity was material, that is, dependent on something not really existing. Plotinus remarked that even Stoics shouldn’t accept matter as the principle, because they think perception should be the ground for stating the existence of something, but matter as such cannot be perceived.

The second Stoic category, qualities, seemed for Plotinus a good candidate for immaterial principles that would shape matter to various shapes. The problem was that Stoics talked only about qualified matter. Further Stoic categories - material things with even more accidental determinations and things in relations - don’t really solve this problem either. Furthermore, Plotinus couldn’t really accept the Stoic idea that all these four categories would be just species of one class containing all possible objects whatsoever, because especially the intellectual entities were just so far removed from corporeal entities that they couldn’t form a unified class of beings.

Plotinus then suggested that intellectual and corporeal levels required different types of categorical hierarchies - and beyond all categorisations lied the primordial unity, which was devoid all multiplicity and thus was beyond all classification. What could be classified was the self-thinking intellect, which contained in its unity several aspects. What the intellect thought was something existing, and indeed, existing in the most proper sense of the word, removed from the mere shadowy corporeal existence. As existent or being, intellect was something that could be, but as thinking it had actualised this potentiality and was now acting, which Plotinus described as life or movement of intellect. Finally, in this act of thinking intellect was always thinking itself, which gave then stability to it. These three classes or principles - being, movement and stability - were then for Plotinus aspects of intellect that could be differentiated, and this differentiation or diversity could then be taken as a fourth aspect. Finally, all these different aspects could be seen as aspects of one and the same intellect, giving us then a fifth aspect or sameness.

Plotinus’ system of intellectual categories had a clear Platonic origin. What Plato wasn’t yet forced to do was to argue that this system was complete and no other category or principle had been missed, and this task was left for Plotinus. He firstly noted that unity was no proper category. The most proper unity of them all, the primordial unity, was supposedly beyond all categorisation, while all other unities have almost nothing in common.

While primordial unity was in a sense a lot earlier than five intellectual categories, other possible candidate categories are figuratively later. Being of intellect, activity of its thinking, the stability of its thinking always itself, the difference of these aspects and the identity behind them are all just different sides in one act of self-thinking. Numbers or quantities and further qualities, on the other hand, belong to further level in Plotinian hierarchy, and similar fate is experienced by relations, times, places, having and position. The only Aristotelian categories left are action and passion, which Plotinus thought were just two sides of the category of movement.

Plotinus still had some possible categories to reject. Goodness, just like unity, is in its most proper form outside the system of categories, since the final good for Plotinus was the primordial unity all things tried to emulate. Beauty in its most proper form, on the other hand, belonged according to Plotinus to the harmonious being of the intellect, while knowledge was an aspect of its activity of thinking. Intellect as such was in a sense just a combination of the five primary categories, while virtue was for Plotinus just a particular type of embodied intellect.

Next obvious question would be how all further things follow from the five principal categories. An important mediating element here are numbers. With just few of the first numbers, it is possible to talk about simple geometrical figures, like triangles and quadrangles, and with the notions of sameness and difference, it is possible to go further and discuss circle and other complex figures.

At the level of corporeal entities, another set of categories is then required, because e.g. corporeal beings or substances are completely different from intellectual substances. Corporeal being is not a real being, in comparison with intellectual entity. In some sense, we cannot speak of multiple intellectual entities, because there is only one intellectual entity - the self-thinking intellect - which just has multiple aspects. On the other hand, there are many corporeal entities.

All of corporeal entities share something, that is, they are modifications of indeterminate matter, and they are modified by certain active forces or forms, which shape this matter into various entities. We then have three different types of entities in the corporeal world: the matter, forms shaping it and the concrete entities formed out of these. Plotinus does not at first make it clear whether all these three require a category of their own or whether they could all be grouped under one category, for instance, because they all underlie further characteristics of entities. Then again, Plotinus noted that while forms in question are somehow connected to the intellectual level and true being, matter, in comparison, is a mere weak shadow of being.

In addition to these three types of substances, corporeal world has quantities, which consist of numbers, dividing into odd and even numbers, and magnitudes, dividing into discrete and continuous magnitudes. Space and time, Plotinus said, are not among any of these classes.

Corporeal entities are not divided just by form and by quantities, but also by further qualities, which are, as it were, images of forms, just like forms are images of intellectual level. Just like forms were in Plotinus’ system kind of forces, qualities are also - for instance, green is just a power to cause a certain type of sensation in a person. Plotinus classified qualities primarily into those belonging more to the corporeal world (e.g. colours) and those belonging more to souls (e.g. characteristics of behaviour). He also remarked that further classifications of qualities should be based on the different powers these qualities are - green differs from blue, because blue causes a different type of sensation. Then again, he noted, all differentiations don’t correspond to some qualities, for example, non-white differs from white, but non-white is no individual force that would cause some type of sensation.

Corporeal world also has processes, which differ from intellectual process of self-thinking thought by consisting of truly different states, whereas the activity of self-thinking remains always same. This stability of self-thinking thought is not same as rest in the corporeal sense, which is just lack of processuality. Corporeal processes, Plotinus noted, could be divided into active and passive processes, but he still favoured the Aristotelian division into four kinds: generation/destruction of substances, change of qualities, change of quantities and movement or change of place.

The final category Plotinus admitted into his account of corporeal world was relations. Other Aristotelian categories, he said, reduced to former categories. Thus, space, Plotinus said, was just a system of certain relations between bodies.

The two sets of categories applied to different levels in Plotinian hierarchy: the eternal and the temporal. The eternity of the intellectual level, Plotinus said, is nothing arbitrarily connected with it. Instead, he noted, true being just is by definition stable and never-ending, full and conscious life without any restrictions, with the five categories as aspects that can be differentiated within it.

What then is the time that distinguishes the world of corporeal categories from the eternal? Many earlier philosophers, Plotinus noted, had connected time with the movement of celestial spheres. Yet, he remarked, time certainly couldn’t be movement, because movement was more something happening within time. Even the Aristotelian definition of time as the measure of movement Plotinus found wanting, because he thought time was instead something, parts of which could be measured, but due to its unlimitedness it couldn’t itself be a measure.

Plotinus’ own solution was to connect time with soul. In its natural state, soul would have regarded things in an eternal manner. Yet, it desired to view things originally forming a unity as clearly distinct and one after another. This process of soul viewing things one at a time or the image of eternity seen through the lens of soul’s peculiar way of regarding things then just is what time is in its essence, Plotinus suggested. The movement of the celestial spheres, the most prominent form of temporal movement, is then just something happening within soul. Why then all individual souls seem to exist in the same time, one might ask. Plotinus’s answer was that this just belied the common origin of all souls.

Numbering intellect

Like Aristotle before him, Plotinus placed observation above action. Yet, with Plotinus observation was not completely passive, but rather more active than normal action. For instance, Plotinus noted, nature does not act in the sense of mechanically moving things around and does not even consider how to achieve some end, but merely observes its own perfection and at the same time projects energy, which makes physical world move. The movements and activities of the physical world are then less active than this free letting of energy by nature, but it is the best that this world can do.

This nature was in Plotinus' hierarchy something proceeding from the level of the soul, or energy projected by the world soul. On the level of souls, the hierarchy of observation and action was also present. Thus, Plotinus noted, people who are not capable of observing things in their mind and thus engaging in abstract sciences have to perform manual labour. Furthermore, even when people performed things physically and endeavoured after some end, this end was always some type of observation (for instance, we produce something because we want to see it before our eyes). Hence, the priority of observation was evident in Plotinus’ eyes.

While observation was the highest soul could achieve, it was the very essence of intellect in Plotinus’ hierarchy to observe itself and everything within itself. Of course, Plotinus noted that this wasn’t still the highest point in the hierarchy, because the primordial unity wouldn’t even need observation to be perfect - indeed, to be perfect it couldn’t have any multiplicity required even by self-observation and in no way it could contain all that exists, like the self-observation of intellect, although this primordial unity was the final source of everything.

Although the level of self-perceiving intellect and its ideas wasn’t the highest pinnacle in Plotinus’ hierarchy, it was the pinnacle of beauty. Indeed, he noted, an artist does not make beautiful works by choosing the appropriate matter e.g. for sculpture, but by imprinting a beautiful shape, existing already in her mind, to the material of the sculpture. Similarly, Plotinus thought, nature does not make beautiful things by choosing suitable material, but by projecting a beautiful shape on the material - what material does at most is to hinder the projection and lessen the beauty.

The self-thinking intellect then contains all these beautiful prototypes in a single act of self-thinking, thus being the pinnacle of all beauty. This shows us something important about the level of intellect in Plotinus’ hierarchy. The thinking of the intellect is not what we usually call thinking, that is, silent speaking of thoughts in our mind or an argument moving from premises to conclusion, which inevitably takes some time to occur. Instead, it is more like a momentary vision revealing all that is important in a single glance. Hence, intellect does not need to think all the beautiful prototypes one by one, but it at once has them all in front of mind’s eye. Furthermore, Plotinus thought that intellect also viewed these prototypes truly. Indeed, since they were not anything truly separate from the intellect, but merely aspects of the self-observation of intellect, there could be no room for false or incorrect observation of them.

Because of its beauty and truth, Plotinus called self-thinking intellect a god. Indeed, he compared it with Chronus, who held the middle place between his son Zeus (soul) and his father Uranus (primordial unity). According to Plotinus, this middle position made intellect unique and different from both soul and unity in the sense that only intellect found its complete perfection in observation. For “Zeus” or soul mere observation wasn’t enough, but it also regulated the world around it, while “Uranus” or primordial unity did not really need this observation for being perfect.

This primordial unity was something that defied all human characterisations. It had no limits, but it was equally wrong to call it infinitely large. It wasn’t contained in anything, although it in a sense potentially contained everything that ever was actually. One clear characteristic of this unity was its perfection or goodness, which was then something higher than mere beauty. In fact, Plotinus remarked, everything in the world strives for goodness, even when they sleep, while beauty interests only those who can observe things.

Three levels above corporeal world was enough for Plotinus: primordial unity, self-thinking intellect and soul. He was especially against gnostic teaching, where the number of entities was expanded beyond any need. For instance, beyond intellect one did not need any further entity conscious of intellect, because this role in the hierarchy was filled already by intellect itself, which could observe itself.

Gnosticism was to be rejected for other reasons also, although Plotinus noted that many of his friends had been lured by the ideas of gnostics. He was especially against the idea that corporeal world had been created through a mistake and that it was clearly evil in comparison with the spiritual world. Indeed, Plotinus noted that corporeal world was the best possible image of the best possible prototype, necessarily proceeding from the energy of this prototype.

Furthermore, while gnostics regarded the souls of gnostics as the only element of goodness in the corporeal world, Plotinus stated that many things were good and beautiful in it. For instance, stars and planets were in Plotinus’ eyes divinities, which were unencumbered by their bodies and could thus always observe the spiritual prototypes of the world. Even the unconscious nature was full of purpose and goodness and was guided by soul-like unconscious activity of nature.

Plotinus finally noted that gnostic ideas gave no guidelines how a person could improve herself - one was just born as spiritual or as corporeal and there was no escape from one’s fate. Indeed, gnostic could not care less about the fate of the body his soul inhabited, because it was a prison for the soul. Plotinus himself, on the other hand, did not regard embodiment of soul in such a low esteem, but as a necessary step in the development of the soul. Thus, by living with the body soul was meant to learn indifference toward material objects and thus rise to the level of stars.

Gnostics weren’t the only school of thought Plotinus engaged with. He was also quite interested of the Pythagorean question of the status of numbers in the hierarchy of existence. Plotinus noted that one could not simply identify numbers with other things, which we would do, for instance, if we placed existent things in an order and called first thing “one”, second “two” and so on. Such an identification would fail because number like “three” could be used of many things, not just of the third thing in that ontological order. Indeed, numbers had to precede all of these existent things, because one had to have e.g. a prototype of ten that could be applied to all combinations of ten things.

If Plotinus thought numbers were independent of things, he also though they were independent of any acts of calculation. Indeed, this was just a particular application of a general principle that something was in Plotinus’ opinion always prior to thinking of this something - e.g. the existence of movement was prior to thinking about the movement. This was even true of the self-thinking intellect, which contained all ideal prototypes within its act of self-thinking. Indeed, one could distinguish within this act various levels - the self-thinking intellect was e.g. living, but more essentially it was thinking and even more essentially existing. Numbers, then, Plotinus concluded, belonged to the level of existence of intellect. In fact, while primordial unity was for Plotinus something preceding in a sense existence, numbers preceded, according to him, the multiplicity of existents - one could say that while primordial unity had created all existence, numbers divided existence into separate entities.

A problem for this Plotinian understanding was provided by the seeming endlessness of all numbers. Because the ideal world of prototypes included in the act of self-thinking intellect contained numbers, there would have to be some perfect number containing all the existent prototypes of the ideal world. How could such a number exist if the number of numbers themselves couldn’t be pinned down? Plotinus appeared to suggest that such an imperfection concerned only souls in the material world. When we counted things, we could always find further and further numbers and no proper ending in the series. Similarly, while prototype of a line would have definite boundaries, lines in the corporeal world could apparently be extended as long as one liked.

Plotinus also noted that unlike in the intellectual level, where the numbers and quantities properly belonged, in the corporeal world things might often be numbered or quantified only accidentally. For instance, while a tree or an animal is naturally a unity, something like an army is a unity only accidentally, because the persons making up the army have no intrinsic connection to one another.

This possibility of an accidental quantification provided Plotinus with a possible answer for a question important in ancient philosophy: why do things far away from us seem smaller? Plotinus suggested as one alternative solution that from a distance we can gain information only of the essence of a visible object - in other words, its colour - while more accidental information, like the proper size of the object, are not properly transmitted to us.

Another topic, in which Plotinus noted the accidentality of quantity, was happiness. If we are happy now, this happiness is not diminished if it lasted only for a day. Indeed, even if we were happy for all eternity, the intensity of this happiness would not change in any manner. Otherwise, eternally happy entities, like stars, would never be completely happy, because they would be always becoming more and more happy.

Because quantities were part of the intellectual world, matter as such could not be quantitative, Plotinus concluded. This could even be empirically verified when a piece of papyrus was moistened by water - the whole papyrus became mixed with water, but the moist papyrus still took as much space as before. Plotinus explained this through the idea of featureless matter being formed by basic forces deriving from the intellectual level, such as forces making matter into watery or paper-like. The most central of these forces was the one involved in quantifying a piece of matter and giving it a certain volume. It was only this quantifying force that divided matter into individual bodies.

The intellectual level contained then numbers, but did it contain anything resembling corporeal entities? For instance, we know that Plotinus admitted the existence of a prototype of human beings, but would such a prototypical human sense anything? Yes, indeed, Plotinus would have answered, since even in the prototypical word of intellect one could perceive what the world is like, even if this perception was completely different from perception in corporeal world. Indeed, perception was not even the lowest activity at the intellectual level. Self-thinking intellect would think all types of beings in its self-thinking - even animals and plants - although these ideas of animals and plants would differ from corporeal animals and plants by being more prototypical and harmonious, both in themselves and in their mutual relations.

The prototypical nature of intellectual ideas requires some metaphorical light to be seen, Plotinus noted. This light, giving being to self-thinking intellect itself, derived of course from the primordial unity, which was then also the ultimate source of goodness. It was higher than mere intellect and it thus required something quite different from regular thinking to see it. Indeed, all it takes, Plotinus noted, is to immediately observe the unity, without thinking about it, but more like being swallowed by this unity. Indeed, Plotinus noted, since the primordial unity does not think, it cannot even consider things like “this is good”. Thus, one could just name this primordial unity good, reflecting the actual simplicity of primordial unity.

Matter and soul

One of the most perplexing problems in Plotinus’ worldview was the relation of unity and multiplicity in the levels between the primordial unity and the material world. Corporeal world and all the bodies in it are divisible into multiple parts, still, a soul governing either an individual body or the whole world should be indivisible. Furthermore, individual souls should be somehow separate, yet, they also form a unity. In addition to soul, the intellectual level of Plotinus’ hierarchy showed a similar dilemma. Its prototypes - such as the highest prototype of being itself - has many individual instances, yet, being remains a unity in itself, even though there are many beings. Finally, the intellectual level has many prototypes and still forms a unity.

The multiplicity of souls and ideal prototypes was the least worry for Plotinus. The unity of souls, for instance, does not cancel their multiplicity, because it means more that all individual souls are modifications of one force of living and can even experience their connection with other souls. Similarly, in intellect all the different prototypes are contained in the one act of self-aware intellection.

It was thus the relationship of material world to both soul and ideal prototypes (being as such) that seemed most problematic in Plotinus’ eyes. His first solution was to present an analogy with light. A single ray could enlighten a whole transparent ball and still remain undispersed, because its power consisted of making the matter around it more lighted. Similarly, soul could instill life to all parts of body, even though it wasn’t divided by this process of making something alive. The only thing wrong with this analogy, Plotinus said, was that light can still be said to occupy a place within the transparent ball, while soul shouldn’t even be situated in space.

In a further explanation Plotinus answered how such a non-corporeal, non-divisible and non-spatial entity like soul could interact with corporeal, divisible and spatial matter. Plotinus noted that the simplest solution is to deny that soul would somehow be incorporated into a body, as we might think the connection happens - soul is not any “astral body” occupying the same place as the corporeal body. Instead, soul is this immaterial source of of energy, of which the body in a sense takes part. That is, when body becomes alive, it contacts soul and becomes alive through its continued interaction with the soul. The soul retains thus some independence of the body, although we can in a sense say that there is a “second soul”, that is, the life energy produced by the original soul in the body. While soul is connected to a body, it feels this bond as a bondage or as a loss of its own energy, and when the bond is broken, this energy produced by or the image of the original soul is returned to the unified soul.

Just like soul did not occupy body and was thus not divided into different parts of body, according to Plotinus, similarly the intellectual prototypes did not occupy the beings they characterise. For instance, being as such was for him not some passive material divided up among different beings, but more like a place, which gives existence to all things within it - or like an activity of thinking mind, giving existence to all the things that happen to enter its consciousness. Similarly, all the prototypes were activities, which mold individual things into their likeness - i.e. prototype of human would be such that makes individuals into humans, without losing its own identity in the process. Plotinus especially did not want to make the impression that intellectual level would be like a realm completely removed from the corporeal world and only reflected in it. Instead, he insisted that intellectual level had an active role in shaping the material world, although it still remained completely independent of the material world.

Despite its multiplicity, Plotinus thus said, everything in existence formed a unity, because of the common source of their existence, namely, the self-thinking intellect. All existent things formed a unity even in a stronger sense than just by being existent, because there was a common force or life going through everything and shaping effects of all intellectual prototypes into a unified whole. This unity was for Plotinus something humans could become aware of, just as long as they could regard things in their correct light and not be deceived by their apparent distinctness.

Although self-thinking intellect unified then in a sense the whole existence in his eyes, Plotinus had still not forgotten the primordial unity, which was above even the intellect. Despite all its unity, intellect still had multiplicity in it - for instance, although it thought of itself, we could still distinguish between it as the thinker and it as the object of thought. Multiplicity, on the other hand, was always dependent on unity, according to Plotinus. Thus, there had to be some ultimate unity, which then didn’t think at all. Now Plotinus even emphasised that the original unity couldn’t have any sort of consciousness and it certainly required nothing outside itself. On the contrary, it was the ultimate goal of everything, which all entities tried to emulate, even if they appeared to have various distinct goals. Indeed, Plotinus even suggested that the level just below the one - the self-thinking intellect - was in a sense awakened to existence by its desire to become like the ultimate unity.

Of earlier philosophers, Plotinus respected Plato most, but he was willing to borrow terminology from Aristotle also. Thus, he used the concepts of potential and actual and incorporated them to his hierarchy of levels, so that in the hierarchy, up to the level of self-thinking intellect, the higher levels were more actual in the sense of being more active, while lower levels were potential and required instigation of energy from the higher levels. Thus, at the level of self-thinking intellect everything was eternally actual. At the level of individual souls, there was already more room for mere potentiality - a person could become a scientist, but she still required years of training to become one, and even then she wouldn’t be constantly in the role of scientist.

In the corporeal world, the potentiality went even further. A person could not become another person, but she would always retain her identity, even if she gained some new talents or engaged in some new activities. In the corporeal level, on the other hand, Plotinus thought that a piece of stone could undergo a process, in which it would lose its nature of stoneness and become, say, a watery substance. Something remained throughout all corporeal processes, but this material substance was for Plotinus a mere shadow of existence - mere potentiality that would turn into actual entities only through some external energy.

Since matter was mere potentiality, Plotinus concluded that it was completely free of all foreign influences. In other words, only actual corporeal objects could affect one another - for instance, fire could warm water and water could quench fire. Indeed, such influences worked through opposites, Plotinus said, hotness eradicating coldness and vice versa. Matter, on the other hand, had no such opposites and indeed was without any qualities, so it would always remain as it was. Matter was for Plotinus just a canvas, on which the primordial forces projected images (the corporeal objects) - whatever happened to the images, the canvas remained unaffected.

Just like matter, soul was also free of corporeal influences, Plotinus said, but for a completely different reason - souls were some of the forces producing corporeal objects. This was somewhat difficult viewpoint from the standpoint of ethics, since in the contemporary discussion bodily influences on human personality were regarded as a possibility, and indeed, as something to be avoided in perfect human life. Plotinus noted that what was actually affected in strong emotional states was human body or the projection of human soul into the material plane. Furthermore, when one was advised to avoid affections caused by corporeal objects, what was really suggested, according to Plotinus, was that one should avoid material realm altogether.

The further Plotinus thought about the soul, the more he became convinced that individual souls were not just parts of the soul giving life to the whole corporeal universe. Instead, both the world soul and all the individual souls were modifications of one primordial prototype of soul, which could never have any direct relation to corporeal world, unlike world soul. World soul was still higher in the hierarchy of things than other individual souls, since other souls governed merely parts of the universe. World soul, on the other hand, was like a ball of energy, which eternally projected its effects on the canvas of matter, thus in a sense creating the corporeal world.

The world soul regulated the processes of the corporeal world and made it run in a never-ending and ever-returning cycle. During these immeasurable cycles, some bodies - stars and planets - existed eternally and required for their movement guidance from some souls. At times, the process of the world gave rise to individual bodies on the more material parts of the world that would require souls to govern them. At the same time as the need for a soul governing a body arose, some individual soul would have an innate urge to take control of this very body, entering in a sense the material world and lowering itself to the heavens or even to Earth. This urge was not expressed consciously, like embodied souls would do, using a kind of internal speech, but it would be just felt in a pre-linguistic manner, in which disembodied souls experienced everything.

After the life of the body ends, soul feels again an urge to continue its journey, either toward its original disembodied state or toward another body. Plotinus also suggested that this new urge was in harmony with the way in which soul had lived its previous life. Thus, one could regard the new life of a soul as a reward or punishment for the previous life.

An individual embodied human soul has then various functions governing different parts of the body, Plotinus said, yet, its primary function or thinking remains untouched by body, because corporeal world would only hinder it. Since this primary function regulates all the other functions, individual soul remains unified, although in another sense embodied soul can be divided into various faculties. As we have already seen, Plotinus did not think that a complete individual soul was located in the body. Still, its various faculties could have localised effects - e.g. perceptions occurred through brain and nerves, while more animal impulses and emotions happened through heart, liver and veins.

Between the disembodied thinking and clearly embodied perceptions, emotions and animal impulses, Plotinus conceived an intermediary level of conceiving, in which memories both from the immaterial and material world could interact. His reason for supposing the existence of such an intermediate level was that memories come to embodied souls from both directions, but they could occur neither in perceptions/impulses/emotions nor in pure thinking. Pure, disembodied thinking as such would have no memories, since it understood everything timelessly - on the other hand, memory of a perception could not be perception of a perception, but something different.

Since this intermediary level of phantasms or memories had two sources, it could be divided into two parts, depending on whether the memories concerned the higher or the lower parts of the soul. Concerning the first type, memory of the thinking of ideas or even of primordial unity is not thinking as such, Plotinus said. In higher form of thinking we essentially forget ourselves and completely immerse ourselves in the object of our thinking, as it were, becoming this object. Only when we return from this state of mystical immersion into an object, we become aware of ourselves and at most remember that we thought of e.g. primordial unity.

The second type of memory, Plotinus thought, could occur, just as long as a human soul was connected to some body. Thus, if after its death human soul acquired a new heavenly, spherical body, its memories of its former life might fade, especially if they concerned bad actions. Then again, this soul could recognise friends from its former life in their new heavenly bodies by their characters.

Now, memory of any sort is required only by souls who change their state. Souls governing stars and world soul, on the other hand, do not need memories, Plotinus emphasised. Indeed, like self-thinking intellect, these higher souls conceived everything timelessly and had no need to remember past things nor to plan for future. In other words, their own life was timeless, although they controlled and even created a temporal world. This corporeal world or nature is then in a sense image of this timeless conceiving of soul in the sense that it has no memories nor does it plan for the future, but everything in it happens effortlessly and without consideration - then again, nature is, of course, not soul and does not conceive in any sense. Human souls, at least when embodied, then, are in a sense between celestial souls and nature. They conceive of things, but temporally and therefore need memories and have to plan for the future.

When a soul takes control over a human or animal body, it in a sense projects itself on the body and so becomes aware of what happens to that body. In a sense, then, these things do not touch the soul. For instance, when a body is cut, this is something that happens to the body and the pain, which can be localised somewhere in the body, belongs to the body itself. Soul then merely has the awareness of that pain, Plotinus suggested, without itself being affected by the cutting. Of course, we still could say that the animal as the combination of soul and body has and is aware of pain.

Just like experience of pain arises only from combination soul and body, in Plotinus’ philosophy, this is true also of desires. Body as such has drives toward certain materials it requires for sustaining itself, say, toward something moist. Soul then becomes aware of such a drive as a bodily desire. Because desires are then ultimately just perceptions of some bodily conditions, these desires can change depending on the nature of the body - for instance, when a body becomes old, the sexual desires become less urgent.

While desires all derive from body, emotions, like anger, are a more complex case, because a person can be angered also e.g. by evil actions. Now, while a person is angered by bodily influences, this anger causes some disturbance in her body - perhaps in blood, Plotinus suggested - and the soul perceives this disturbance. Then again, when a person is angered by evil actions, the state of her soul projects a similar effect on blood as in the case of bodily induced anger, which the soul then perceives as a similar state.

Plotinus had come to the conclusion that plants probably would not have individual souls, but they were governed by the soul of the Earth. Yes, Earth itself was a living entity in Plotinus’ eyes and could perceive what happened on its surface, just like all celestial bodies. Thus, Earth could know what happened to its denizens and take care of them. And like celestial bodies, it wouldn’t have any memories nor would it plan for the future, but it would perceive everything timelessly.

Now, Plotinus had already considered the problem of astrology, but at this stage of his thought he returned to this question with new insights. He was convinced that astrology could work, but he didn’t want to say that celestial bodies directly affected humans. Instead, Plotinus noted that everything in the world formed a harmony and therefore the movements of the celestial bodies could correspond to certain stages in human life. Through this universal sympathy of all things could one also magically control other beings. Yet, Plotinus noted, the more a person lived in the intellectual level, the more one was separate from the corporeal world and the less one could be influenced by such magic.

Plotinus even suggested that at least seeing and perhaps even hearing was based more on the harmony between worldly objects than on mechanical use of air as a medium. True, he admitted, soul always requires a body for sensations, but air is at most just a space through which energy of light moves toward the eye and at worst hinders this movement. In order that a vision reaches us, there is no need for light to affect air, as can be seen in dark nights, when we can clearly see stars, even if the surrounding air is not lighted, Plotinus argued. Since an essential ingredient in this act of seeing was the sympathy between an object seen and the seeing soul, Plotinus suggested that anyone living outside the world could not see the world or anything it, just because this sympathy would not exist.