A STUDY IN THE HISTORY OF HELLENISM

 

3. Cosmology and Theodicy.

 

The theory of matter set forth, though turned to new metaphysical account, is fundamentally that of Aristotle. As with Aristotle, Matter is the presupposition of physics, being viewed as the indestructible "subject" of forms, enduring through all changes in potency of further change; but Plotinus is careful to point out that the world of natural things derives none of its reality from the recipient. The formal reason that makes matter appear as extended, does not "unfold" it to extension—for this was not implicit in it—but, like that also which makes it appear as colored, gives it something that was not there. In that it confers no qualities whatever on that which appears in it, matter is absolutely sterile. The forms manifested in nature are those already contained in the intellect that is before it, which acquires them by turning towards the Good. All differences of form, down to those of the elements, are the product of Reason and not of Matter.

While working out his theory from a direct consideration of the necessity that there should be something indestructible beneath the transformations of body, Plotinus tries to prove it not inconsistent with what is known as Plato's "theory of matter" in the Timaeus. The phrases in which the "recipient" is spoken of as a "room" and a "seat" are interpreted metaphorically. Here Plotinus is evidently arguing against commentators in his own time who took the "Platonic matter" to be empty space. This has now become the generally accepted interpretation; opinions differing only as to whether the space or matter in which the ideas manifest themselves is to be regarded as objective extension or as a subjective form. Plotinus himself approaches the latter view when he consents to call matter a "phantasm of mass", though still regarding it as unextended. His account of the mental process by which the nature opposed to that of the ideas is known quite agrees with Plato's.

On another point of Platonic interpretation, Plotinus and all his successors take the view which modern criticism seems now to find the most satisfactory. Plausible as was the reading of the Timaeus which would regard it as teaching an origin of the world from an absolute beginning of time, this was never, even at the earliest period, really prevalent in the school of Plato. During the Platonizing movement that preceded Plotinus, the usual interpretation had been to regard what is said about the making of the world from preexistent elements as mythological. The visible universe, said the earliest like the latest interpreters, is described by Plato as "generated" because it depends on an unchanging principle while itself perpetually subject to mutation; not because it is supposed to have been called into being at a particular moment. That this was all along the authorized interpretation may be seen even from Plutarch, who, in defending the opposite thesis, evidently feels that he is arguing against the opinion predominant among contemporary Platonists. Thus Plotinus, when he says that there never was a time when this whole was not; nor was there ever matter unformed, is not introducing a novelty. And on this point we do not hear that opposition to his doctrine arose from any quarter. His difference with Longinus was on the question whether the divine mind eternally contains the ideas in itself or contemplates them eternally as objective existences; not as to whether ideas and unordered matter once stood apart and were then brought together by an act or process of creative volition The duration of the universe without temporal beginning or end was the accepted doctrine of Hellenic Platonism.

In accordance with this general view, however, it is possible, as Plotinus recognizes, to hold either that the universe is permanent only as a whole, while all its parts perish as individual bodies and are renewed only in type, or that some of the bodies in the universe—namely, those that fill the spaces from the sphere of the moon outwards —are always numerically identical. If the former view is the true one, then the heavenly bodies differ from the rest only by lasting a longer time. About the latter view there would be no trouble if we were to accept Aristotle's doctrine that their substance is a fifth element, not subject like the rest to alteration. For those who allow that they consist of the elements of which living bodies on earth are constituted, the difficulty is that they must be by nature dissoluble. This Plato himself conceded to Heraclitus. As in his physics generally, so here, Plotinus argues in a rather tentative way. He suggests as the true solution, that the heaven with all its parts consists of a purer kind of fire, which we may call "light," moving if at all with a circular motion, losing nothing by efflux, and consequently in no need, like mortal bodies, of nourishment from without. This material light, being a kind of body, must of course be distinguished from light as an outflowing energy. Radiant light, as we have seen, is for Plotinus an activity carrying with it no loss either of substance or of efficiency; whence it furnished an analogy closer than is possible on any modern theory for the metaphysical doctrine of emanation.

For the rest, this picture of the physical universe does not essentially differ from Aristotle's. The whole forms a single system, with the fixed stars and the seven planets (including the sun and moon) revolving round the spherical earth in combinations of perfect circles. Like the stars, the earth too has a divinity of its owns. The space which the universe fills is finite. Body is not atomic in constitution but continuous. The complex movements of the whole system recur in astronomical cycles. In order to solve difficulties connected with the infinite duration of a world in constant change, Plotinus sometimes takes up the Stoical theory that in the recurrent periods the sequence of events is exactly repeated. This he does especially where the question presents itself, how that infinity in the world of sense is possible which is required by his doctrine that there are "ideas of particulars." Individual differences, he allows, must according to this, view be infinite, seeing that there is no limit to the duration of the world either in the past or in the future. The difficulty would be met by supposing that differences finite in number recur exactly in succeeding cycles. Thus, in any one cycle no two individuals are without all formal difference, and yet the number of "forms" is limited. This solution, however, seems to be offered with no great confidence. The point about which Plotinus is quite clear is that individual as well as specific differences have their rational determination in the ideal world. From this he deduces that, in any one period of the cosmos at least, there are no two individuals that differ only numerically, without a trace of inward distinction. About infinity in the ideal world or in the soul there is no difficulty. The conception of an actual quantitative infinite is not merely difficult, but impossible.

Yet, while repeatedly laying down this position, Plotinus allows that space and number as prefigured in eternal intellect have an infinitude of their own. We may say that number is infinite, though infinity is repugnant to number, as we speak of an infinite line; not that there is any such, but that we can go in thought beyond the greatest existing. This means that in intellect the rational law of linear magnitude does not carry with it the thought of a limit. Similarly, number in intellect is unmeasured. No actual number can be assigned that goes beyond what is already involved in the idea of number. Intellectual being is beyond measure because it is itself the measure. The limited and measured is that which is prevented from running to infinity in its other sense of indeterminateness. Thus limited and measured is the visible cosmos.

To time is allowed an explicit infinity that is denied to space. It is the "image of eternity," reflecting the infinite already existent whole of being by the continual going to infinity of successive realizations. Time belongs to apartness of life. The Soul of the Whole generates time and not eternity, because the things it produces are not imperishable. It is not itself in time; nor are individual souls themselves, but only their affections and deeds, which are really those of the composite nature. Thus the past which is the object of memory is in things done; in the soul itself there is nothing pasts. Of Zeus, whether regarded as Demiurgus or as Soul of the World, we must deny even the "before and after" implied in memory. That which guides the whole knows the future as present, and has therefore no need of memory and discursive reason to infer it from the past. These faculties belong to acquired intellect, and, as we shall see, are dismissed even by the individual soul when it has reascended to intuitive knowledge.

If things eternal were altogether alien to us, we could not speak of them with intelligence. We also then must participate in eternity. How the soul's essence can be in eternity while the composite nature consisting of soul and body is in time, can only be understood when the definition of time has been more strictly investigated. To define it in relation to physical movement does not express its essential character. The means by which we learn to know time is no doubt observation of motion, and especially of the revolutions of the heavenly bodies. Yet while ordered external motion more than anything else shows time forth to mental conception, it does not make time be. When the motion of the whole is measured in terms of time, which itself is fixed according to certain intervals marked out in the space through which the motions proceed, this is an "accidental" relation. The parts of time, invisible and inapprehensible in themselves, must have remained unknown till thus measured, but time itself is prior to the measurement of its parts. We must bring it back finally to a movement of the soul, though the soul could hardly have known it to any purpose without the movement of the heaven. Time is not, however, in the merely individual soul, but in all souls so far as they are one. Therefore there is one uniform time, and not a multitude of disparate times; as in another relation there is one eternity in which all participate. Thus the one soul, in which individual souls are metaphysically contained, participates in eternity and produces time, which is the form of a soul living in apparent detachment from its higher cause.

Unity in the soul of the whole, here so strongly insisted on, does not with Plotinus exclude the reality of particular souls. We have seen that he regards individuality as determined by differences in the Ideas, and not by the metaphysically unreal modes of pluralizing ascribed to Matter. What comes from matter is separateness of external manifestation, and mutability in the realizations attained; not inner diversity, which preexists in the world of being. This view he turns against the fatalism that would make the agency of the individual soul count for nothing in the sum of things. He is without the least hesitation a determinist. Within the universal order, he premises, the uncaused is not to be received, whether under the form of "empty declinations," or of a sudden movement of bodies without preceding movement, or of a capricious impulse of soul not assignable to any motive. But to say that everything in each is determined by one soul that runs through all, is, by an excess of necessity, to take away necessity itself and the causal order; for in this case it would not be true that all comes to pass by causes, but all things would be one, without distinction between that which causes and that which is caused; "so that neither we are we nor is anything our work." Each must he each, and actions and thoughts must belong to us as our own. This is the truth that physical, and especially astrological, fatalism denies. To preserve the causal order without exception while at the same time allowing that we ourselves are something, we must introduce the soul as another principle into the contexture of things—and not only the soul of the whole, but along with it the soul of each. Being in a contexture, and not by itself, it is not wholly master, and so far fate or destiny regarded as external, has a real existence. Thus all things come to pass according to causes; but some by the soul, and some through the other causes among which it is placed. Of its not thinking and acting rationally other things are the causes. Rational action has its cause within; being only not hindered from without.

Virtue therefore is free; and the more completely free the more the soul is purified from mixture. To the bad, who do most things according to the imaginations excited by bodily affections, we must assign neither a power of their own nor a proper volition. How then can punishment be just? The answer is that the composite nature, which sins, is also that which pays the penalty of sin. The involuntariness of sin does not prevent the deed being from the doer. Some men indeed come into being as if by a witch­craft of external things, and are little or nothing of themselves: others preserve the original nature of the soul's essence. For it is not to be thought that the soul alone of all things is without such a nature. In preserving or recovering this lie virtue and freedom.

 

A more elaborate treatment of the problem of theodicy here raised is contained in three books that belong to Plotinus's last periods. This problem he does not minimize. Although, in metaphysical reality, the world has not come to be by a process of contrivance resembling human art, yet, he says, if reasoning had made it, it would have no reason to be ashamed of its work. This whole, with everything in it, is as it would be if providentially ordered by the rational choice of the Maker.

If, indeed, the world had come into existence a certain time ago, and before was not, then the providence which regulates it would be like that of rational beings within the world; it would be a certain foresight and reasoning of God how this whole should come to exist, and how it should be in the best manner possible. Since, however, the world is without beginning and end, the providence that governs the whole consists in its being in accordance with mind, which is before it not in time but as its cause and model so to speak.

From mind proceeds a rational law which imposes harmony on the cosmos. This law, however, cannot be unmixed intellect like the first. The condition of there being a world below the purely intelligible order—and there must be such a world, that every possible degree of perfection may be realized—is mutual hindrance and separation of parts. The unjust dealings of men with one another arise from an aspiration after the good along with a want of power to attain it. Evil is a defection of good; and, in a universe of separated existences, absence of good in one place follows with necessity from its presence in another. Therefore evils cannot be destroyed from the world. What are commonly called evils, as poverty and disease, Plotinus continues to assert with the Stoical tradition, are nothing to those who possess true good, which is virtue; and they are not useless to the order of the whole. Yet, he proceeds, it may still be argued that the distribution of what the Stoics after all allow to be things "agreeable" and "not agreeable" to nature, is unfair. That the bad should be lords and rulers of cities, and that men of worth should be slaves, is not fitting, even though lordship and slavery are nothing as regards the possession of real good. And with a perfect providence every detail must be as it ought to be. We are not to evade the difficulty by saying that providence does not extend to earth, or that through chance and necessity it is not strong enough to sway things here. The earth too is as one of the stars. If, however, we bear in mind that we are to look for the greatest possible perfection that can belong to a world of mixture, not for that which can belong only to the intelligible order, the argument may be met in full. Among men there are higher and lower and intermediate natures—the last being the most numerous. Those that are so degenerate as to come within the neighborhood of irrational animals do violence to the intermediate natures. These are better than those that maltreat them, and yet are conquered by the worse in so far as they themselves are worse in relation to the particular kind of contest to be undergone. If they are content to be fatted sheep, they should not complain of becoming a prey to the wolves. And, Plotinus adds parenthetically, the spoilers too pay the penalty; first in being wolves and wretched men, and then in having a worse fate after death, according to their acquired character. For the complete order of justice has regard to the series of past and future lives, not to each present life by itself. But to take things as seen in one life: always the mundane order demands certain means if we are to attain the end. Those who have done nothing worthy of happiness cannot reasonably expect to be happy. The law is, for example, that out of wars we are to come safe by proving our courage, not by prayer. Were the opposite the case,—could peace be preserved amid every kind of folly and coward­ice,—then indeed would providence be neglectful. When the bad rule, it is by the unmanliness of those that are ruled; and it is just that it should be so. Yet, such as man is, holding a middle rank, providence does not suffer him to be destroyed, but he is borne up ever toward the higher; the divine element giving virtue the mastery in the long run. The human race participates, if not to the height, in wisdom and mind, and art and justice, and man is a beautiful creation so far as he can be consistently with his place in the universe. Reason made things in their different orders, not because it envied a greater good to those that are lower placed, but because the law itself of intelligential existence carries with it variety. Thus in a drama all the personages cannot be heroes. And reason does not take the souls from outside itself and fit them into the poem by constraining a portion of them from their own nature for the worse. The souls are as it were parts of reason itself, and it fits them in not by making them worse, but by bringing them to the place suitable to their nature. If then, it may be asked, we are not to explain evil by external constraint, but reason is the principle and is all, what is the rational necessity of the truceless war among animals and men? First, destructions of animals are necessary because, in a world composed of changing existences, they could not be born imperishable. Thus, if they were not destroyed by one another they would no less perish. Transference of the animating principle from body to body, which is promoted by their devouring each other, is better than that they should not have been at all. The ordered battles men fight as if dancing the Pyrrhic dance, show that what we take for the serious affairs of mankind are but child's play, and declare that death is nothing terrible. It is not the inward soul but the outward shadow of a man that groans and laments over the things of life. But how then, the philosopher proceeds, can there be any such thing as wickedness if this is the true account? The answer which he ventures is in effect that of maleficent natures the Reason in the world might say: "These too have their part in me, as I too in these." This reason is not unmixed mind. Its essence is to consist of the contraries that were in need of strife with one another so that thus a world of birth might hold together. In the universal drama the good and the bad must perform the opposite parts assigned them. But from this does it not follow that all is pardonable? No, answers Plotinus, for the reason which is the creative word of the drama fixes the place both of pardon and of its opposite; and it does not assign to men as their part that they should have nothing but forgiveness for the bad. In the consequences of evil for the whole there is nevertheless a rational order, and an order out of which good may come.

Still, that good may come of evil is not the deepest ground of its existence. Some one might argue that evil, while it is actual, was not necessary. In that case, even if good comes of it, the justification of providence must fail. The reply has been given already in outline. The necessity of evil results from matter. Matter is necessary because, the principle of things having infinite productive power, that power must manifest itself in every possible degree: there must therefore be a last term, which can produce nothing beyond itself. "This is matter, having nothing any longer of its own; and this is the necessity of evil." If it is argued that moral evil in us, coming as it does from association with the body, is to be ascribed rather to form than to matter, since bodies derive their distinctive character from form, the reply is that it is not in so far as the forms are pure that they are the source of ignorance and bad desires, but in so far as they are mixed with matter. The fall of the soul is its approach to matter, and it is made weak because its energies are impeded by the presence of matter, which does not allow all its powers to arrive at their realization. Yet without this principle of indeterminateness that vitiates the pure forms, causing them to miss their true boundary by excess or defect, there would be for us neither good nor any object of desire. There would be neither striving after one thing nor turning away from another nor yet thought. "For our striving is after good and our turning away is from evil, and thought with a purpose is of good and evil, and this is a good'."

The last sentence contains one of the two or three very slight possible allusions in the whole of the Enneads to orthodox Christianity. With Christian Gnosticism Plotinus deals expressly in a book which Porphyry has placed at the end of the second Ennead. A separate exposition of it may be given here, both because it is in some ways specially interesting, and because it brings together Plotinus's theory of the physical order of the world and of its divine government. Any obscurity that there is in it comes from the allusive mode of dealing with the Gnostic theories, of which no exposition is given apart from the refutation. The main points of the speculations opposed are, however, sufficiently clear.

After a preliminary outline of his own metaphysico-theological doctrine, in which he dwells on the sufficiency of three principles in the intelligible world, as against the long series of "aeons" introduced by the Platonizing Gnostics, Plotinus begins by asking them to assign the cause of the "fall" which they attribute to the soul of the world. When did this fall take place? If from eternity, the soul remains fallen. If the fall had a beginning, why at that particular moment and not earlier? Evidently, to undergo this lapse, the soul must have forgotten the things in the intelligible world; but if so, how did it create without ideas? To say that it created in order to be honored is a ridiculous metaphor taken from statuaries on earth. Then, as to its future destruction of the world, if it repented of its creation, what is it waiting for? If it has not yet repented, it is not likely to repent now that it has become more accustomed to that which it made, and more attached to it by length of time. Those who hold that, because there are many hardships in the world, it has therefore come into existence for ill, must think that it ought to be identical with the intelligible world, and not merely an image of it. Taken as what it is, there could be no fairer image. And why this refusal to the heavenly bodies of all participation in the intelligible,—especially by men who complain of the disorder in terrestrial things? Then they introduce another soul, which they make to be compacted of the material elements, as if that was possible for a soul. Not honoring this earth, they say that there is a "new earth" to which they are to go, made in the pattern of a world—and yet they hate "the world." Whence this pattern if not from the creative power which they say has lapsed? Much in their teaching Plotinus nevertheless acknowledges to be true. The immortality of the soul, the intelligible world, the first God, the doctrine that the soul ought to flee association with the body, the theory of its separation, the flight from the realm of birth to that of being, all these are doctrines to be found in Plato; and they do well in proclaiming them:- On the part of Plato's disciples, there is no disposition to grudge them the right to declare also the points wherein they differ. They ought, however, to try to prove what they have to say of their own on its merits, putting their opinions with good feeling and like philosophers; not with contumely towards "the Greeks," and with assertions that they themselves are better men. As a matter of fact, they have only made incongruous additions to that which was better in the form given to it by the ancients; introducing all sorts of births and destructions, and finding fault with the universe, and blaming the soul of the whole for its communion with the body, and casting reproach upon the ruler of this whole, and identifying the Demiurgus with the Soul of the World, and attributing the same affections to that which rules the whole as to particular things.

That it is not so good for our soul to be in communion with the body as to be separate, others have said before; but the case is different, with the soul of the whole, which rules the frame of the world unimpeded, whereas ours is fettered by the body. The question wherefore the creative power made a world is the same as the question wherefore there is a soul and wherefore the Demiurgus made it. It involves the error, first, of supposing a beginning of that which is for ever; in the next place, those who put it think that the cause of the creation was a turning from something to something else. The ground of that creative action which is from eternity, is not really in discursive thought and contrivance, but in the necessity that intelligible things should not be the ultimate product of the power that manifests itself in them. And if this whole is such as to permit us while we are in it to have wisdom, and being here to live in accordance with things yonder, how does it not bear witness that it has its attachment there?

In the distribution of riches and poverty and such things, the man of elevated character does not look for equality, nor does he think that the possessors of wealth and power have any real advantage. How if the things done and suffered in life are an exercise to try who will come out victorious in the struggle? Is there not a beauty in such an order? If you are treated with injustice, is that so great a matter to your immortal being? Should you be slain, you have your wish, since you escape from the world. Do you find fault with civic life? You are not compelled to take part in it. Yet in the State, over and above legal justice with its punishments, there is honor for virtue, and vice meets with its appropriate dishonor. In one life, no doubt the fulfillment is incomplete, but it is completed in the succession of lives; the gods giving to each the lot that is consequent on former existences. Good men should try to rise to such height of goodness as their nature allows, but should think that others also have their place with God, and not dream that after God they themselves are alone in their goodness, and that other men and the whole visible world are without all part in the divine. It is easy, however, to persuade unintelligent men who have no real knowledge what goodness is, that they alone are good and the sons of God.

Having remarked on some of the inconsistencies in the mythological cosmogonies of the Gnostics, Plotinus returns again to the point that the causation of natural things should not be compared to the devices of an artist, the arts being posterior to nature and the world. We must not blame the universe because all is not equally good. That is as if one were to call the power of growth evil because it is not perception, or the perceptive faculty because it is not reason. There are necessarily degrees in things.

The practice of exorcisms and incantations by the Gnostics is especially attacked. They compose charms, says Plotinus, addressed not only to the soul of the world but to still higher powers, as if incorporeal things could be acted on by the sounds of the voice modulated according to some cunningly devised rules of art. Claiming as they do to have power against diseases, they would say rightly if, with the philosophers, they said that the means of keeping clear of them is temperance and a regular mode of life. They ascribe them, however, to the entrance of demons into the body, and profess to expel them by forms of words. Thus they become of great repute with the many, who stand in awe of magical powers; but they will not persuade rational men that diseases have not their physical cause in "changes externally or internally initiated." If the demon can enter without a cause, why is the disease not always present? If there is a physical cause, that is sufficient without the demon. To say that, as soon as the cause comes to exist, the demonic agency, being ready, straightway takes up its position beside it, is ludicrous.

Next the antinomian tendency of the Gnostic sects is touched upon. This way of thinking, the philosopher proceeds, with its positive blame of providence going beyond even the Epicurean denial, and dishonoring all the laws of our mundane life, takes away temperance, and the justice implanted in moral habits and perfected by reason and practice, and in general all human excellence. For those who hold such opinions, if their own nature is not better than their teaching, nothing is left but to follow pleasure and self-interest; nothing thought excellent here being in their view good, but only some object of pursuit in the future. Those who have no part in virtue, have nothing by which they can be set in motion towards the world beyond. 'To say, "Look to God," is of no use unless you teach men how to look. This was taught in the moral discourses of the ancients, which the present doctrine entirely neglects. It is virtue carried to the end and fixed in the soul with moral wisdom that points to God. Without true virtue, God is but a name.

The concluding chapters are directed against the refusal to recognize in sensible things any resemblance to intelligible beauty. How, Plotinus asks the Gnostic pessimists, can this world be cut off from its intelligible cause? If that cause is absent from the world, then it must also be absent from you; for the providence that is over the parts must first be over the whole. What man is there who can perceive the intelligible harmony of music and is not moved when he hears that which is in sensible sounds? Or who is there that is skilled in geometry and numbers and does not take pleasure in seeing the orderly and proportionate with his eyes? And is there any one who, perceiving all the sensible beauty of the world, has no feeling of anything beyond it? Then he did not apprehend sensible things with his mind. Nothing can be really fair outside and foul within. Those who are called beautiful and internally are ugly, either have a false exterior beauty also, or their ugliness is adventitious, their nature being originally beautiful. For the hindrances here are many to arriving at the end. Since this reason of shortcoming does not apply to the whole visible world, which contains all, that must necessarily be beautiful. Nor does admiration of the beauty by which the physical universe participates in good tend to bind us more to the body. Rather, it gives us reasons for living well the life that is in the body. By taking all strokes from without as far as possible with equanimity, we can make our souls resemble, as nearly as may be, the soul of the whole and of the stars. It is therefore in our power, while not finding fault with our temporary dwelling-place, not to be too fond of the body, and to become pure, and to despise death, and to know the better and follow it, and to regard without envy those higher mundane souls that can and do pursue the same intelligible objects, and pursue them eternally.