Plotinos · Plotinus
EMPEDOCLES, AS A POET, TELLS OF PYTHAGOREAN MYTHS.
Empedocles teaches that "it is a law for souls that have sinned to fall down here below;" and that "he himself, having withdrawn from the divinity, came down to the earth to become the slave of furious discord." It would seem that he limited himself to advancing the ideas that Pythagoras and his followers generally expressed by symbols, both on this and other subjects. Besides Empedocles is obscure because he uses the language of poetry. PLATO SAYS MANY CONTRADICTORY THINGS THAT ARE BEAUTIFUL AND TRUE. Last, we have the divine Plato, who has said so many beautiful things about the soul. In his dialogues he often spoke of the descent of the soul into the body, so that we have the right to expect from him something clearer. Unfortunately, he is not always sufficiently in agreement with himself to enable one to follow his thought. In general, he depreciates corporeal things; he deplores the dealings between the soul and the body; insists[150] that the soul is chained down to it, and that she is buried in it as in a tomb. He attaches much importance to the maxim taught in the mysteries that the soul here below is as in a prison.[151] What Plato calls the "cavern"[152] and Empedocles calls the "grotto," means no doubt the sense-world.[153] To break her chains, and to issue from the cavern, means the soul's[154] rising to the intelligible world. In the Phaedrus,[155] Plato asserts that the cause of the fall of the soul is the loss of her wings; that after having once more ascended on high, she is brought back here below by the periods;[156] that there are souls sent down into this world by judgments, fates, conditions, and necessity; still, at the same time, he finds fault with the "descent" of the soul into the body. But, speaking of the universe in the Timaeus,[157] he praises the world, and calls it a blissful divinity. He states that the demiurgic creator, being good, gave it a soul to make it intelligent, because without the soul, the universe could not have been as intelligent as it ought to have been.[158] Consequently, the purpose of the introduction of the universal Soul into the world, and similarly of each of our souls was only to achieve the perfection of the world; for it was necessary for the sense-world to contain animals equal in kind and numbers to those contained in the intelligible world.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.