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.

Traveling soul

Certain persons in philosophy of history are sort of hinge figures. After them, philosophy gets a completely different flavour and direction and their influence can be seen long after their actual lives. Plotinus is one of such hinge figures, whose effect will be felt in several different strands of philosophical history - in Christian, Islamic and Jewish philosophy.

The starting point of Plotinus’ thinking lied in another hinge figure, Plato. In his earliest treatise Plotinus began with quite a Platonic question: what makes things beautiful? Plotinus tried to avoid the notion that the experience of beauty would have something to do with the mere material constituents of a thing or their structure. Thus, symmetry of parts of a thing could not be the only beautiful aspect in things, because firstly, some beautiful things, like coloured surfaces, have no separable parts. Furthermore, a symmetrical thing made out of ugly parts would not be beautiful.

If beauty lies then not in the material parts or their structure, Plotinus said, it must be found somewhere else, for instance, in a divine force, which configures material parts into something beautiful. In case of such simple things as colours, this divine force occurred in Plotinus’ opinion in a concrete natural phenomenon of light, which made things visible to everyone.

Just like Plato, Plotinus thought that true beauty was not to be found in material things, but more in actions of human beings. Indeed, a beautiful action, Plotinus said, is beautiful just when it is done independently of material considerations. In consequence, a person is more beautiful, depending on how well she has managed to purify herself from all bodily influences.

Yet, even human activities and personality behind them are not the highest example of beauty for Plotinus. High above them lies what makes even beautiful personalities beautiful - that is, the mystical source of all that is good and beautiful. Like all talents, seeing this source of beauty requires practice, and ordinary human beings would probably not understand why it is called beautiful - indeed, they couldn’t even understand why an action of a person can be beautiful. It is just this purification of oneself from material influences - making oneself beautiful - which makes one resemble the divine source of goodness and thus able to view the source.

Because the true beauty of human things lied in Plotinus’ opinion not in matter, it is just to be expected that he would hold the essence of humanity to be found in something else than body. This something else was that which made human being alive, which gave it the power to perceive and the ability to think. This something could not be material, since no matter as such was alive - matter couldn’t even shape itself into different forms without an external force, so how could it move itself? Furthermore, mere material body could not perceive anything - perception required not just copying likenesses of things, but also combining various features perceived into a single unity, which was impossible to matter that was always divisible and never a true unity. Finally, thinking was especially something mere matter couldn’t achieve, since many things we think, such as beauty as such, were not material.

Even if this something - soul - wasn’t just matter, one might suppose that it still is something connected to matter. Thus, Plotinus considered the Pythagorean idea of soul as harmony and the Aristotelian idea of soul as an internal activity of living, perceiving and thinking humans and found them both wanting. Harmony as such could not be soul, because soul was more of an instigator and creator of harmony. Then again, it could not be just a peculiar activity in a body, because then sleep would instantly kill a human being.

If matter and all things pertaining to it were divisible and thus destructible, soul, on the contrary, was for early Plotinus indivisible and indestructible. Indeed, as the source of all life, soul could never truly be dead. Plotinus even described soul as divine and hence immortal. An individual soul had had a desire to control things and it had thus attached itself to a body, but still some aspect of this soul remained unattached to body.

In a quite Platonian manner, Plotinus divided the realm of existence into two different parts. First was the unchanging, immaterial world, in which everything depended on a unifying principle, which in turn depended on nothing else. Second was the ever-changing, material world. In the world of change, things also appeared to depend on other things, for instance, human beings depended on their parents, who had produced them.

Plotinus noted that many philosophers had tried to find the ultimate things, on which all the beings of the world of change depended on, but they had often hit on incorrect candidates. Epicurean atoms could not be behind it all, because Epicurean idea of random movements of atoms would mean that future could not be predicted - something Plotinus was convinced we surely could do. Furthermore, if all was just movement of lifeless atoms, we couldn’t be said to even live, let alone decide things for ourselves. For the latter reason, Plotinus wouldn’t also accept that the faith of all things in the material world would be decided by a world soul, using individuals as mere puppets of its great plan.

Since predictability of future events and especially the possibility to read them from e.g. movements of stars was something Plotinus accepted, one might think that he would have endorsed the idea of stars determining the events of the material world. Indeed, he did think that stars were at least signs of certain cosmological influences - season and climate had their say on how things in the world went. Yet, if one wanted to accept the idea of personal choices - and Plotinus surely wanted - he could not accept that stars, or indeed any causal factors, would completely determine the actions of human beings. Instead, Plotinus said, the human soul - this immaterial aspect of human life - was in part free to decide what to do. Indeed, like we have seen, the better a soul, the more independent it was of material influences.

Soul then lied somewhere between the world of change and the eternal world, and it was Plotinus’s next task to determine its exact position in relation to them. His suggestion was to describe it in terms of divisibility/multiplicity and indivisibility/unity. Material things were, Plotinus said, inherently divisible and multiple - nothing intrinsic kept a mere lump of matter together. Eternal world, on the other hand, depended on something indivisible and inherently unified, which could not be divided in any sense.

Soul lied in a sense between these two extremes. Yet, it wasn’t the only thing to do so. One could also say that a colour like whiteness was a unity - whiteness is whiteness, whether it is in snow or sugar. Still, despite this unity of being the same colour wherever it occurred, whiteness did not make white things into a unity, but snow and sugar remained different substances. Soul was also in a sense both multiple and unified, but it differed in Plotinus’ eyes from colours in that soul actually unified things in which it dwelled to a peculiar combination. This could be seen in the aforementioned ability of soul to unify perceptions occurring in different parts of the body into a coherent whole.

Although soul was higher than material world, Plotinus also thought that it wasn’t the highest possible thing. While souls had a tendency to meddle with the material world, there had to be something completely immaterial, which could be seen as the source of the souls. This source Plotinus called nous or intellect - it should be some type of thinking. In a quite Aristotelian manner, Plotinus said that this intellect could not be dependent on something beyond itself and could not thus think of something foreign to itself. Thus, it had to think just itself.

Plotinus did not mean that intellect could not think anything other than itself. Instead, this intellect contained in itself, like a seed, kernel or essence of everything that existed. The restriction to intellect itself, excluded only certain non-essential or imperfect features of things from the purview of intellect. Hence, it could think of stable characteristics of the world, such a geometric shapes, but not any haphazard event, and activity of soul in so far as it was harmonious and not ruled by bodily impulses, but not its disturbance by these impulses. In other words, intellect thought in Plotinus’ view the ideal prototypes of worldly things and souls. Thus, he at least in his early phase concluded, intellect could not think of individuals. Intellect didn’t so much create these prototypes by thinking them, but they were more like eternally contained in a state of intellect knowing them. Furthermore, the prototypes were prototypes of actual world and actual souls and not of any possible and non-actual world or souls.

Plotinus quite quickly came to the conclusion that the travel of soul from that immaterial world of ideal prototypes to material and less than ideal world was not just negative. Indeed, it was in a sense just a necessary process, in which ideal prototypes of the ideal world became materialised. Many souls, such as the world soul governing the movement of the whole world and the souls regulating the movement of stars, ruled their portion of the matter with complete freedom and thus their contact with matter could not break their contact with the ideal prototypes - they could think these without any effort. Human souls were in a more lowly state, because they had isolated themselves from the communion with other souls and the ideal prototypes and required then more effort to return back to their origin. Yet, this cycle of apparent fall and gradual rising was also a necessary process. Souls could learn to see even the material world as an image of the ideal world, while the experience of the uglier parts of the material world would make them appreciate the ideal prototypes even more.

Although the ideal world - or better, the intellectual process of thinking various prototypes of embodied world - was more fundamental than the material world and souls governing it, it still wasn’t the ultimate source of everything in Plotinus’ view. Thinking is still dependent, Plotinus said, because there can be no thinking without something to think. This first source of everything would then be no thinking, but at least in this phase of Plotinus’ development, pure awareness containing potentially everything, which thinking contained actually. This pure awareness or potentiality was still not completely passive, but it had a tendency to produce something, and what it produced was the act of thinking itself, which formed the ideal world of prototypes. Since only at the stage of thinking itself we can speak of things existing, the primordial pure awareness cannot be described even as existing, but only as a source of all existence.

The primordial source of everything was thus a unity without any multiplicity, while everything derived from it was also in a sense a multiplicity. Intellect thinking itself contained already many ideal prototypes in itself, while souls became pluralised in their contact with the material universe. Interestingly, Plotinus said that these many souls formed still in a sense a unity. Indeed, one could say that all individual souls were only one soul taking on different shapes, just like one seed divides into various parts of a plant and one science develops into different branches. This did not mean that all souls would e.g. have the exact same feelings, although one could experience their underlying unity, for instance, in a feeling of compassion towards other living things.

Quite quickly Plotinus started emphasising how utterly removed the original unity was from everything else, which in addition to unity always contained some multiplicity. Indeed, while existing things usually were unities made out of something multiple or at least one out of many existent things, the original unity could not be called existent. Indeed, this unity defied all description: you couldn’t measure it in any sense or place it in space or time, you couldn’t say it was good for something, because it existed for sake of nothing else and was thus beyond mere goodness, and even words like “one” were just inadequate pointers toward it.

Despite is seeming transcendence, the original unity was in Plotinus’ opinion always quite close to everyone, because it in fact was the original unity making everything what it was.The trick in getting closer to the unity was not to try to view the unity as something differing from oneself. Indeed, Plotinus advised one to return to oneself and to free oneself from all external disturbances in order to get to a state of mind in which one was completely one with itself. In this divine state of self-peace, a human being found the soul underlying all souls and in a sort of analogy experienced how great the even more undisturbed and non-multiple original unity was.

At this stage the basic levels of Plotinus’s metaphysics were clear. Above everything corporeal lies, firstly, soul, which governs the material world and the movement of bodies, combining them into a unified cosmos. Soul is already divine, because of its power over matter. Still, soul experiences everything in time, and in a sense, it is just energy flowing from a higher plane of existence to the temporal world.

This higher plane is the timeless intellect, which thinks itself eternally. In this self-thinking, intellect does at the same time many different acts. It recognises itself as an active thinker and as a passive object of thinking; it separates these two aspects, but also identifies them as aspects of same intellect; it sees itself as active, because it thinks, but still as peaceful, because it never changes to something else; it counts the number of different aspects of itself and knows their distinct qualities.

Intellect has then many sides and is therefore dependent on the highest plane of existence, the primordial unity. Plotinus had become increasingly confident that the unity was not conscious of anything, not even of itself, because such consciousness would imply multiplicity.. Although the primordial unity might be said to contain potentially everything that exists in itself, it is not the sum of everything, but everything in general and intellect in particular is more like generated out of the unity. Still, the unity has not created intellect in the Christian sense of the word, because as the ultimate perfection it has no need to do anything. Intellect is then again like uncontrollable flowing of the energy of unity, just like soul was flowing of the energy of intellect.

Plotinus tried to express this necessary flowing of unity into an intellect in a more detailed manner. This flowing of energy of unity is like an act of unity becoming conscious of and thinking itself. In other words, one could say that intellect is the original unity, when it has started to think itself. One just has to remember that temporal phrases are here inappropriate. Act of self-thinking is more like an eternal manifestation of the original unity or a state of awareness of an original power.

This aware or conscious state then, in a sense, shapes its original power into various forms or different possible existents. Although intellect is not a complete unity without any multiplicity, it still resembles the unity in necessarily dissipating its own energy to a further level of existence. The power that this eternal thinking of possibilities holds is then manifested in world soul’s temporal power over embodied existents.

The world soul produces finally all the individual souls, and while the world soul is non-spatial, individual souls can exist in space. Following Aristotle, Plotinus said that in addition to humans also animals and plants are souls, that is, living entities controlling material bodies. In animals, souls attain a level of awareness, but human beings reflect even the higher echelons of existence. That is, a human being can on occasion rise completely above its bodily frame and just think all the same perfect thoughts as the self-thinking intellect does. Finally, every human being is not just thinking, but also the object of such a perfect thinking or one modification of the primordial power.

One important element of Plotinus’ cosmology was still left untouched, namely, matter. Or actually, Plotinus said, there are two types of matter. In the intellectual level there is multiplicity of different thoughts, such as thinking, being thought, being same, being different, being multiple and being of some kind. In general, the intellectual level should contain several perfect prototypes of the corporeal world. All of these prototypes could then be seen as modifications of one matter. This intellectual matter is not, Plotinus clarified, the primordial unity, but something in the intellectual level under this unity - while original unity should be beyond everything, intellectual matter is more like something which intellect uses in producing its various thoughts. Intellectual matter is also something dependent on the original unity - it is the inexplicable capacity to differentiate various thoughts and is in a sense generated in the eternal act of self-thinking. In one intriguing passage Plotinus suggested that this intellectual matter might be nothing else than the soul, which looked upon intellect and was molded into different shapes by its activity.

Just like the existence of many thoughts required Plotinus to suppose an intellectual matter, similarly the perpetual change of corporeal things required the supposition of another type of matter, of which corporeal things were modifications. Since this corporeal matter was a basis, from which corporeal things were formed, it itself could not be a corporeal thing. Indeed, it had no distinguishing characteristics, not even shape nor size. Just like intellectual matter, corporeal matter is also just an endless capacity to form different things - here, different corporeal things. Plotinus noted that one could not really think of corporeal matter, because there was nothing to think about it - one could just picture everything determined taken away from a corporeal thing, and still something hazy would be left behind. In fact, the essence of corporeal matter was to be just such a lack of all characteristics and limits, which doesn’t even really exist, except in comparison with the intellectual prototypes which shape the matter into various forms.

The main points of Plotinus’ worldview were thus in place, but some points were still unclear. For instance, how could world soul at the same time be non-spatial and still cause movement of the whole material world? To this problem Plotinus suggested that the movement caused by the world soul - the circular movement of world around its center - was in a sense no movement at all, since it continuously returned to its point of origin. Indeed, it was the attempt of the material world to emulate the ability of the world soul to be everywhere at the same time - this does not mean that world would have intentions of emulating the soul, but more like it had to do so by its nature. Just like world soul, also souls governing stars caused their bodies to rotate around their centre point. Still, this was not true of all souls, since e.g. human souls were also moved by external impulses.

Just like there was a downward flow of energy starting from the primordial unity and leading through intellect to soul, Plotinus thought this flow continued within the level of soul - reasoning soul guiding humans at their best gave energy to perceiving soul common to animals, which in turn gave energy to the lowest type of soul, present even in plants, which controlled processes of nutrition and reproduction. And, Plotinus continued, this flow of energy did not end there, because plants finally gave energy to the inorganic objects of Earth.

This downward flow of energy, Plotinus said, was embodied as a concrete shape in the phenomenon familiar from the life story of Socrates, that is, in the idea of being from a higher level of existence guiding one’s life. The higher the person herself in the hierarchy of existence, the higher also this spiritual guide. True philosophers would be guided by their acquaintance with intelligence or even with the primordial unity.

Part of the Platonic legacy of Plotinus’ philosophy was the idea that we could journey through different levels of this hierarchy in several lives. If a person was guided by sensual desires, she would be born as an animal or even as a mere plant in next life. Then again, people practicing good life and acquainting themselves with the higher forms of existence could become souls guiding stars or even become completely unified with the harmonious community of souls forming the world soul.

Even though death does then hold a possibility of a person moving to a higher state of existence, Plotinus was far from suggesting that people should take their lives. Indeed, he insisted, if a soul is to truly become disentangled from bodily needs, the separation of soul and body should happen naturally.

Plotinus was also interested of the place of sensible qualities in his hierarchical system - what made, say, warmth of fire different from all the prototypical characteristics of the intellectual level? His suggestion was that there are actually many different types of qualities. The lowest type are the mere effects of things on other things, such as the sensation of warmth we get when we go close to a fire. Such qualities are ephemeral and vanish as soon as the arbitrary interaction stops. These accidental qualities are then based on more substantial properties of things, namely, their activities by which they cause such ephemeral qualities - for instance, warmth as an activity of fire, which produces the sensation of warmth. These activities are not accidental, but instead belong to the very essence of things, that is, they make the thing what it is. These activities, in their turn, are then just embodiment of the prototypical characteristics of the intellectual level, which should also be then described as activities.

Plotinus did not add just prototypes of substantial properties to the intellectual level of the hierarchy. In his engagement with the souls, he had become certain that all individual souls must have an intellectual prototype. This was a novel idea compared to the usual Platonic doctrine that only species, like humans in general, had ideal prototypes. Plotinus was convinced that different persons had so diverse and still so beautiful capacities and characteristics that these couldn’t be explained just by the difference in their matter, which could explain only decadent characteristics falling short of the prototype. Thus, all souls had to have ideal prototypes, Plotinus concluded. To the objection that intellectual world would then be populated by innumerably many new entities Plotinus answered, firstly, that all the multiple prototypes were contained in the single self-thinking intellect, just like we’ve seen intellect containing prototypes of various characteristics in one act. Furthermore, Plotinus noted that time of the physical cosmos moved around in a circle and thus there would be only a finite number of types of personalities arising time and again in the course of the cycles.

The inclusion of prototypes of human souls in intellect suggested the problem whether such marks of good living in a society like just behaviour toward fellow citizens and moderate following of one’s superiors could be characteristics of the self-thinking intellect. A simple answer would seem to be that such characteristics could not belong to intellect, which did not live in any society. Problem was that Plato had seemingly said that such characteristics made humans move toward higher echelons of existence and become like gods. Plotinus’ solution was that Plato had spoken of characteristics similar to these virtues of society, but of a higher nature - for instance, harmonious justice within society was analogical to harmony within human soul, so that while wise people were meant to rule other classes, soul and wisdom were meant to rule bodily impulses. These higher virtues were essentially virtues of an individual and could be followed without the society of other persons - they were habits for purging oneself of everything chaining oneself to the material world. By becoming less held back by corporeal needs, the more one resembled self-thinking intellect. Yet, a certain gap always remained, since souls always had a tendency to fall toward matter and they thus had to resist the demands of the body, while intellect was eternally in possession of perfection.

The road toward this perfection could thus be described anew. Humans were usually not forced to start their journey towards intellect from a completely clean slate, because their experiences were of some use in ascending. People who appreciated music knew already harmonies, and now they had to just hear harmonies in an intellectual level. Similarly, lovers had to learn to see beauty also somewhere beyond physical level. But the best equipped for the journey was a person acquainted with philosophy, because she was already on her way to higher echelons. All she had to do was to learn mathematics and Platonic dialectics, which give human being a map away from sensuousness and a map within world of ideas.

The role of dialectics appears to be especially important for Plotinus. For him, it is not just logic or methodology of reasoning, but more like an ontological study of the basic concepts and their ideal prototypes - it is a study by which one knows what truly exists and what is really good - and furthermore, also a study of the intellect as a thinker of these categories. It even implies that some mysterious unity lies behind the intellect. With the aid of mathematics, it can describe the general contours of physical world, and when applied to human affairs, it can be used to show how we should live. Thus, dialectics implicitly contains all the parts of philosophy in itself, Plotinus said.

Soul thus had a road away from the level of separate personalities to an intellectual level where souls are intrinsically connected. A next problem to be explained was then how all the separate souls could also form a unity and how such a unity could appear in the form of distinct souls.