BOOK: Marsilio Ficino, "Commentary on Plotinus" (Vol. 5)

Marsilio Ficino: Commentary on Plotinus. Vol. 5: Ennead III, Books V–IX, and Ennead IV. Edited and translated by Stephen Gersh. The I Tatti Renaissance Library, Vol. 82. Harvard University Press, 2018. 9780674974999. viii + 605 pp.

[Continued from Vol. 4.]

III.5 — Love

Plotinus distinguishes between love as an emotion and Love as a deity (often called by its Greek name, Eros, or the Latin one, Amor). The former, he says (§1), is simply a tendency of the soul towards beauty, either beauty as it is found on earth or (better yet) as it is led to a recollection of beauty as it exists in a higher realm. It can also arise due to a desire to procreate, which he commendably doesn't seem to particularly object to.

As for Eros as a god, he is said to be the son of Aphrodite. But Plotinus, unsurprisingly, isn't terribly interested in traditional Greek mythology, so for him these deities are little more than aliases for various Neoplatonic concepts. His heavenly Aphrodite (§2) seems to be simply he Soul (third hypostasis), and her father Uranus (Heaven) is simply the Intellectual Principle (second hypostasis). Love is produced by the act of the Soul gazing upon the Divine Mind; it is “the medium between desire and the object of that desire”.

Similarly, an individual person's soul brings forth its individual love by its striving towards The Good (with the usual semantical shenanigans so popular with this sort of people, ‘good’ and ‘beautiful’ seem to be largely synonymous here). This “indwelling Love” is nothing else than a spirit or daimon (§4–5). (Apparently Plato wrote about these things in his Symposium, which I guess I should get around to reading at some point.)

Next Plotinus discusses the differences between such daimons or “Celestials” on the one hand and gods on the other. A soul generates such celestials “when it enters the Cosmos” (§6), which I guess means our lower world as opposed to the intellectual realm above. Different celestials correspond to different functions of the soul, and loves are just one of them.

He also spends a good deal of time (§7–10) trying to explain a story apparently told by Plato about how Love (Eros) is a child of Wealth (Poros) and Poverty (Penia): this is because it's the combination of Reason (represented by Wealth, as it comes from the intellectual realm above) with the striving towards the Good (represented by Poverty, because “striving is for the needy”). This struck me as a bit far-fetched, and overall in this treatise one can't resist the feeling that Plotinus is just trying to get away from love and to more familiar ground as quickly as possible, so that he can start entomologizing about daimons, different levels of this and that, etc.

Ficino's commentary here is a bit shorter than the ones in the previous volume were, and I didn't get the impression that it helped me understand this treatise any better. Unsurprisingly, the parts that fascinate Ficino the most are the ones about daemons, and he goes into even more detail than Plotinus did; judging by the translator's endnotes, he was mostly relying on a work by Iamblichus. “There are five kinds of rational animate beings” (¶6), of which the first four are daemons and the last are people. The four kinds of daimons differ in their elemental composition: the first kind has only fire, the second has fire and air “mixed in the best way”, the third one adds “a subtle type of water”, and the fourth one also has “a subtle type of earth”... I'm intrigued by the idea of a “subtle” type of water or earth; but if the same element can exist in multiple types, is it really fair to call it an element?

Ficino even tells us what the daemons eat! The first two kinds don't eat anything, “but are at least pleased by songs, figures, and lights”; the third kind consumes “the smell of perfumes and flowers and the exhalation of liquids”, while the fourth kind also needs “the denser smells and vapors that are sent forth from blood and flesh, especially when cooked and consumed by us” (¶7). All this makes for a pleasing fantasy story, but how these people could write such things with a straight face in a work of philosophy is beyond my understanding...

III.6 — The Impassivity of the Unembodied

This is a longish treatise that I didn't understand much. Plotinus is trying to show that two unembodied things, namely soul (§1–5) and matter (§6–19), are immune to any sort of change. Most of his arguments struck me as being mostly arguments by vigorous assertion or perhaps by definition, amounting to little more than saying, again and again and always in slightly different words, things along the lines of ‘if the soul did change it wouldn't even be soul at all (as we have defined soul)’, etc.

Thus for example he says that feelings aren't states of the soul, but actions (§1), and that virtue/vice is simply a harmony/disharmony “among the phases of the soul” (§2). When the soul exercises an action (e.g. sight), it doesn't undergo any sort of change thereby, otherwise it would eventually get worn away; but the corresponding organ of the body (e.g. eye) can undergo change (§2). Likewise, in the case of emotions and affections, it's only the body that changes (e.g. by blushing; §3–4).

Then he moves on to matter, which he clearly understands very differently than a naive reader like me would expect from the everyday sense of the word. For him, matter itself can hardly be said to have any sort of existence (§6), it is bodiless and functions more “like a mirror showing things as in itself when they are really elsewhere” (§7). It is the means by which other things appear, but is invisible itself (§14) and has no dimension or magnitude (§16), but “wears magnitude like a dress” (§18). If it could be changed or dissolved, it would eventually stop being matter (§8, 10), so it's pretty much immune to change by definition. Ideas and shapes can enter into it but do not change it, much like light can pass through air without changing it (§11–13, 16). Matter is only a “nurse”, a container, but is sterile itself (§19).

It seems to me that when you define matter like this, it's easy enough to show that it's immune to change, but what's the point of even defining a concept like that? How does it relate to anything in our real world? Anyway, for me this section was mostly interesting as a way to learn a little about what he means when he talks about matter.

Ficino's commentary is relatively short compared to some of the previous ones (and considering the length of Plotinus's treatise), and it mostly summarizes or briefly restates what Plotinus is saying. I didn't really have the impression that I understood anything much better after reading it. I was intrigued by what he says about matter in ¶12: “While it is being extended dimensionally through the entire space of the world, it is not divided into a plurality of matters, but remains unified and continuous both because it is not subject to passion and because it is not alive.” So it seems that what these people mean when they say “matter” is almost more like what we would nowadays call space.

III.7 — Time and Eternity

In this tractate, Plotinus attempts to define what time and eternity are, and describe the relationship between them. Eternity, for him, is mostly associated with the intellectual realm, though it is not the same thing as the intellectual realm itself or the things in it (§2); it is “the Life [. . .] which belongs to the Authentic Existent by its very existence” (§3). It makes no sense there to talk about the past or the future, rather the whole eternity exists all at once (§3). For something to be eternal, it must not only be perpetual but also completely unchanging (§5): it is a life that “possesses itself intact for ever” and is “instantaneously infinite”. Eternal things are “complete without sequence” (§6), while things that exist in time are “deficient” to the extent that they need time (§6).

Time, Plotinus says, is like an “image”, in our universe, of the eternity that we've just seen in the intellectual realm (§1). He addresses the opinions of some earlier philosophers about the relationship between time and movement (§7–10), and he argues that time is not the same thing as movement or as a measure of movement. Time, he says, did not exist at first, but the universal soul (3rd hypostasis) generated it as an “image of eternity” as a result of its tendency to act: this sequence of acts “carries with it a change of time” (§11). Thus time sprang from the same activity of the universal soul that also brought our (lower) universe into existence (§12). This activity or movement has eternity as its prior and time as its result; thus it's better to say that time is measured by movement rather than that it is a measure of movement (§13).

As with the previous few tractates, Ficino's commentary is relatively short and didn't really help me understand anything any better. Frankly, I mostly understand his commentaries even less than Plotinus's treatises...

III.8 — Nature, Contemplation, and the One

Plotinus starts by suggesting that we “play a little” by assuming that all things strive after contemplation, even those devoid of reason, such as nature (§1). Nature, then, is at the same time an act of contemplation, the object of contemplation, and the logos or reason-principle (§3). Any action or creation, not just in nature but also elsewhere, is an outcome of such contemplation, or a substitute for it (§4): “creative powers operate not for the sake of creation and action but in order to produce an object of vision [or contemplation]” (§7).

Somewhere halfway through §6 he says that we are now coming “to the serious treatment of the subject”, but he doesn't seem at any point to discard any of the things he earlier said while “playing”. Contemplation, unsurprisingly, goes on not only in Nature but also, and at an increasingly higher level, in the Soul (third hypostasis) and the Intellectual Principle (second hypostasis). Part of this progress is an ever closer identity between the contemplating being and the object of contemplation; in the Intellectual Principle, these are one and the same (§8). The knowing faculty becomes one with the object of knowledge in proportion to the truth with which it knows (§6).

Thus the Intellectual Principle is the union of an intellect and the object of its intellection; thus it is a duality, not a unity, and thus a unity — the One (the first hypostasis) — must exist before it (¶9). Plotinus gives two interesting metaphors for the One: it's like a spring from which many rivers flow; or like the root of a tree from which its life-force spreads through the whole organism (¶10). “Nothing can be affirmed of it” because it transcends everything else (¶10), and it is the source of the intellectual principle and the intellectual universe (¶11).

For me the interesting parts of this tractate were mostly in the second half, where Plotinus describes some characteristics of the second and first hypostases, though I can't say that I could really follow his arguments as to why the things he's saying are supposed to be true. And his idea that everything strives towards contemplation, and that even action and creation are just consequences of it, which he first proposed seemingly in play but then evidently took it quite seriously, struck me as a bit far-fetched. Ficino's commentary mostly just summarizes the treatise in a slightly more systematic fashion. I found it useful regarding the later parts of the treatise but didn't really get to understand the earlier parts any better than before reading the commentary.

III.9 — Detached Considerations

As the title suggests, this isn't really a treatise about a specific topic like some of the others are; it's more like a collection of short fragments about various subjects. Plotinus writes that the intellectual-principle (the 2nd hypostasis) and the object of its intellection (the “intellectual realm”) are one and the same thing — just the active and passive aspects of each other, so to speak (§1). He writes about the intermediate status of the individual human soul, which can either move up towards the universal soul (3rd hypostasis) and meet authentic existence, or can move down towards matter and no-being (§3). And lastly he has a few interesting things to say about the One. Its unity gives rise to multiplicity by its omnipresence, but at the same time it is also nowhere-present (§4); it is without intellection, as this would imply duality rather than unity (§7); similarly, it is without consciousness, life, etc. — saying any such thing about it would imply a deficiency on its part (§9).

Due to the short and fragmentary character of this treatise, I found Ficino's commentary a bit more useful than for the preceding few treatises. Ficino restates the same things but a bit more clearly and explicitly, and at slightly greater length than Plotinus's original text does.

The Analytical Study

This volume contains an Analytical Study, by the translator (Stephen Gersh), of Ficino's commentary on the Fourth Ennead, much like the previous volume did for the third. This one is slightly shorter (100 pages, followed by 60 pages of notes), but otherwise goes along similar lines. Much like in volume 3, a lot of this went over my head but I was impressed by how the translator managed to connect various passages, scattered all over Ficino's commentary as well as his other works, into an at least somewhat coherent presentation of Ficino's view of this or that question. Again I couldn't help wishing that Ficino himself had expounded his views more systematically, but then, maybe it's hardly fair to expect that from him considering that Plato or Plotinus didn't do so either.

There's an interesting overview of the idea that a person's soul is divided into a higher (intellectual) and a lower (animal) part (or phase or power) on p. 159: the intellectual soul consists of intellect, reason and a part of the imagination, while the lower soul consists of another part of the imagination, of exterior sense, and nature. (A more or less the same division is discussed again on pp. 191 and 199; and see pp. 180 on how this distinction took on more religious aspects in the work of Iamblichus, another late Neoplatonist by whom Ficino was influenced.)

As a consequence of this division, Ficino divides souls into celestial (where the intellectual phase predominates), daemonic (where the two phases are balanced), and human (where the lower phase predominates); p. 202.

For Ficino, the universal soul is not a third hypostasis (like it is for Plotinus) but “is identical with the Idea of soul in the divine mind” (i.e. in the 2nd hypostasis); pp. 166–7.

Again there are quite a lot of references to magic and theurgy and I'm still not quite sure to what extent people like Plotinus and Ficino were taking this sort of nonsense seriously. “Ficino reproves Plotinus for saying that a magician somehow ensnares daemons” (p. 158); Ficino also “informs us regarding the doctrine of Albumasar that it is possible to entice the daemons subject to Jupiter more effectively when that planet is in the constellation of the Dragon's Head” (ibid.), etc. :S Magical rituals “must be performed at astrologically suitable moments” to ensure proper attunement (p. 288, n. 407). Later we hear about “ritual fumigations”, and “Zoroastrian magicians [. . .] whirling a golden ball [. . .] with a sapphire set in the middle”, and “Proclus is quoted for his injunction to suspend the selenite gem in silver from the neck by a silver thread” (all from p. 208)...

On pp. 180–3 there's a very interesting discussion of theurgic ritual as described by Iamblichus. At the lower level, corresponding to the lower soul, it involved sacrifices and the like, but at the higher level, corresponding to the intellectual soul, it was mostly about prayers, chants, and “material symbols such as animals, plants, minerals and aromas” (p. 182). How exactly did they expect any of this to work? Well, it seems that they had a notion of “cosmic sympathy”, believing that “the universe is a single living thing to such an extent that it sindividual parts exercise their powers not simply as parts but also as identical with the whole” (p. 181; see also p. 220). This is starting to sound very much like that stereotypical new-ager at the hot-dog stand: ‘make me one with all’ :)))

“Ficino knew through his study of ancient and Byzantine sources that theurgy was a ritual involving the use of symolic objects, prayers, chants, lights, and fumigations that was designed to channel the divine power [. . .] down to the officiant and other participants.” (P. 216.)

For more about these things, Gersh cites an interesting-sounding book: Theurgy and the Soul: The Neoplatonism of Iamblichus, by Gregory Shaw (1995).

A prominent concept in this analytical study that I haven't heard much of before is the spirit (pneuma). Both Ficino and some ancient neoplatonists like Iamblichus (pp. 180–1) considered it necessary as yet another mediating step between the lower soul and the body, i.e. something that binds the soul to the body. The spirit “communicates life from the world's soul to its body” (p. 207). Through its mediation “soul is brought to bear on our bodily members” and “spirit survives for a short time after the physical death of the animate being” (p. 211).

This seems to be something of a general trick with the neoplatonists: when in doubt, just insert another mediating layer into whatever hierarchy you're tinkering with at the moment. I wonder how they knew when to stop; in principle, you could set up a whole continuum of levels if you carry on like this. I suspect they simply stopped when they ran out of ink (or parchment, whichever was sooner). :]

There's also an interesting discussion of Ficino's theory of how sensation works (p. 229). It seems that the main challenge for these philosophers was how to explain the fact that the sensed object, which is material, affects the perceiver, which is immaterial, and what is more, the fact that this happens at a distance. If I understood this correctly (which I quite probably didn't as the whole thing is very hairy), the idea of using the spirit as a mediating element to explain some of these steps was Ficino's innovation.

IV.1–2 — On the Essence of the Soul

These are two short treatises, #4 (short) and #21 (very short) in Porphyry's chronological numbering. Different editions differ as to which one of them should be IV.1 and which one should be IV.2 in the grouping into Enneads, so I'll just call them #4 and #21 to avoid the confusion. I really liked these two treatises, as they are clearer and more systematical than most of the ones I've read so far in the Enneads. Plotinus gives an informative account of his view of the soul, especially with regard to divisibility:

Some things, mostly in the intellectual realm — for example the Intellectual Principle (2nd hypostasis) — are completely indivisible (#21).

Some things, mostly in the sensible realm (e.g. bodies), are divisible in the sense that their parts are separate and different from each other and from the whole (#4, §1).

There is also an intermediate possibility: qualities (or “ideal forms”), such as colour, are present in their entirety in the different parts of a body at once, and yet their presence in these different parts does not form a whole (there is “no community of experience among the various manifestations”, §1).

But the soul is slightly different still. It exists in the intellectual realm when not embodied, and in the sensible realm when embodied (#21). Then it is present in its entirety in every part of a body, and it is the same soul in all these parts (#4, §1). Thus we can say at the same time that the soul is divisible and indivisible. In #4, §2, he provides some additional arguments for this: if soul was divisible like quality is, then what the soul sensed in one part of the body would be unknown to the souls of the other parts of the body; if the soul was purely indivisible, then it wouldn't be able to extend throughout the whole body.

He also distinguishes between a higher and a lower “phase” of the soul, one looking up towards unity and the intellectual realm, and one looking down towards partition in the body (#21). Ficino adds that even while the lower souls are separated amongst the various people's bodies, their higher (intellectual) souls are all in the same place within the divine mind (¶1), and “it is through this presence” that people can communicate with god (¶2).

There is a neat, if slightly cryptic, summary at the end of #4: the soul is “one and many”, qualities are “many and one”, bodies are “exclusively many” and “the Supreme is exclusively one”. Ficino has a similar summary in his ¶5, except that he also adds the divine mind (2nd hypostasis), which is “the one-many” (while the soul is “one in itself and also many”).

Obviously this is all nonsense, but it is charming, delightful nonsense, written more clearly than it is most of the time here in the Enneads. This sort of thing is what makes Neoplatonism at least slightly worth reading to me.

Ficino's commentary on these two treaties is quite short, but contains some further interesting ideas along the same lines. He connects the division of the soul in the body with the fact that the soul performs different faculties in different parts of the body (¶4), unlike e.g. the intellect, which is also present in its entirety everywhere in the body but without any such division (¶3).

IV.3 — Problems of the Soul (I)

This and the next treatise are really two parts of one long work, which Porphyry presumably split as part of his efforts to end up with six groups of nine treatises. What is even more bizarre is that he apparently made the split in the middle of a sentence, rather than at the end of a chapter or something like that.

As the title suggests, Plotinus deals with various topics mostly having to do with the soul. It made for fairly interesting reading, especially if you think about it as a very odd kind of science fiction.

First he presents various arguments as to why the soul of an individual is not merely a part of the soul of the universe (§1; which is apparently what some other philosophers claimed); he does this for various interpretations of what one might mean when saying ‘a part of’ (§2–4). He describes how an individual soul is in a certain sense divided and in a certain sense undivided (§5, 19; similar to what Plato says in the Timaeus, which I read recently). But souls can vary in power, and thus e.g. the soul of the universe created the whole cosmos (= its body, by extending into it; §9) and our individual souls haven't (§6). Anyway, the conclusion is that our souls are separate from each other and also from the soul of the universe (§7), but they are in a certain kind of sympathy due to their shared origin in the primal soul (3rd hypostasis; §8).

The highest sort of souls in the sensible realm are those of heavenly bodies, which he often calls gods (§11). Souls of people or animals descend to their bodies by a kind of natural tendency or affinity, not by compulsion or free will (§12–13); between incarnations they also spend a short time in the intelligible realm with the primal soul (§12). When descending into the sensible realm, they put on (in its highest part, §17) a temporary astral body first before descending further (§15). In the intellectual realm they communicate by a sort of intuition or telepathy; they need speech and reasoning only when they are in a body (§18).

We often think of the soul as being in the body, but Plotinus argues against this, showing several interpretations of this view and pointing out why they are insufficient (§20–21); actually, he says, it is the body that is in the soul, and there are also some parts of the soul that the body does not enter because they do not concern the body (§22). This leads into a long discussion about various “faculties” of the soul, especially about memory (which continues into the next treatise). Different parts of the body participate in different parts/faculties of the soul (e.g. eyes — seeing faculty); sensation and impulse are in the brain, passion and excitement in the heart (§23; and see also §28 of the next treatise).

Asking whether the soul remembers anything of the body after it leaves it (and returns to the intellectual realm), Plotinus starts a discussion of memory. He associates it with change through time, thus where there is no change there is no memory (e.g. in the intellectual principle (the 2nd hypostasis)); §25. In man, memory concerns only the soul, unlike e.g. sensation, which is a shared task of the body and the soul (§26). Memory is a separate faculty from desire (§28) and from perception (§29). He tries to provide some mechanics about how memory works, associating it with an “imaging faculty” of the soul (§29–30); but it is all just handwaving.

He often distinguishes between a lower and a higher part of the human soul (§27, 31), though I wasn't always quite sure what the distinction is about. The higher part retains some memories of the intellectual realm before it was incarnated, and doesn't necessarily care much about the lower part's memories of its life in the body (§32). I guess this is his attempt to explain why, if souls get reincarnated, we don't remember anything of the past life.

Ficino's commentary to this treatise starts out very extensive, considerably longer than the corresponding parts of Plotinus's text, but about half way through (¶33) he seems to have realized that the whole thing would get completely unwieldy if he kept going like this, so he switched to mostly just providing a single-paragraph summary for each chapter of Plotinus.

He sometimes provides interesting little details that weren't present in Plotinus. Thus, when Plotinus argues in §7 that the souls of individual people are distinct from each other (and from the world-soul), Ficino says (¶14): “the embryo in the womb receives a soul other than its mother's soul and has this soul from a source other than its mother” — thus telling us when exactly he thinks a person obtains his or her soul.

As we've already seen from the translator's analytical studies, Ficino is often keen on analogies from music, and an oddly poetic one of these appears in ¶28 here: “the world-soul as though a worldly Apollo sings in nature and plucks his lyre in the heaven. In nature, the unfolding and enfolding of all the reason-principles at established times is a universal harmony composed of many melodies and rhythms. Similarly in the heaven, a certain perpetual arrangement of stars and motions is the Apollonian sound established in perpetual harmony with that song.” I suspect he honestly believed he heard some of that music :))

Ficino disagrees, not for the first time, with Plotinus's idea that a man's soul can be reincarnated in an animal; apparently this idea was also controversial in ancient times: “it was not acceptable to the Platonists that a rational soul could at some point become the form of a cow's or a pig's body” (¶29). And in general, he takes care to point out that he disagrees with Plotinus where the latter's views clash with christian religion: “let these writers think whatever they like. It will be sufficient for us to have described these things, being rather prepared to accept that teaching which our theologians have primarily sanctioned.” (¶30) He similarly distances himself from Pythagorean sun worship in ¶55 of his commentary to the next part (IV.4): “let them think what they like”.

But then a few pages later he boldly wades into the most bizarre and credulous astrological wharrgarble: remarking on the story of a “boy who was the son of a king and spoke on the day he was born”, he says, on the authority of an Arabic astrologer, that “it was a Mercurial daemon, for in the horoscope of the eighth degree of Libra which is also the boundary of Mercury, Mercury itself is said to have been in conjunction with Venus, Jupiter, and Mars” (¶33). Oh well, I guess that explains it then! :)))

IV.4 — Problems of the Soul (II)

The treatise continues where the previous one left off. While the soul is in the intellectual realm, it is immersed in contemplation (§2) and has no memory, since there is no time and change there (§1). It retains its memories from the past, but they are more potential than actual, until it leaves the intellectual realm again (§4). When it descends into the celestial sphere (the highest part of the sensible realm; where the stars are), it retains a memory of the intellectual realm, but it grows fainter if it then descends further down (e.g. if it's the soul of a man or animal); §5. (I guess this is related to the idea that what we seem to ‘discover’ by thinking and contemplating is actually just the soul remembering what it knew before it got incarnated.)

Much as in the intellectual realm, memory doesn't really apply to the souls in the celestial sphere either, since nothing changes there (their regular movement in circles doesn't really count*); §6–8. Similarly, “Zeus” (by which he means either the Demiurge or the Soul of the All) knows the universe “in its unity, not in its process”, so memory doesn't apply there either (§9–10). He runs the cosmos on the basis of unchanging wisdom, so there's no reasoning or memory involved (§12).

[*Ficino has a nice explanation of this: “the circular motion of the heaven is neither alteration — since it does not change its form — nor locomotion — since it does not change its place. It is rather a vital motion — that is, the proper act of the inner life” (¶8).]

He briefly talks about something he calls Nature, but which here seems to be more like a vegetative principle; it proceeds from the cosmic soul into matter and informs the animals and plants (§13–14). He returns to this vital principle later, calling it “generative soul” and saying that the earth transmits it to plants and even its own body, so that stones grow back in the mines (§27 — apparently a widespread belief among ancient Greeks). When the higher phase of the soul leaves the body, the vegetal phase doesn't disappear immediately but slowly and gradually (§29).

He has some interesting remarks on time and eternity (§15–17; earlier we saw an entire treatise on that topic). Even though the soul is eternal, its experiences and mental acts “fall into a series” (§17), which is what we experience as time. In the primal soul, however, there is no “later in time”, only “later in order” (§17). I can't say that I found this altogether convincing.

There's a very neat geometrical metaphor for his three hypostases: the Good as the centre; the divine mind as an unmoving circle around it; and the primal soul as a moving circle (§16). Another curious metaphor appears in §17, where Plotinus compares different personalities to different modes of government (the individual citizens correspond to the different elements/faculties of the soul).

While the soul is in the body, they form a kind of “unity” or “conjoint” (§18), and Plotinus is very interested in how exactly this works. This is relevant e.g. to sensation (a painful experience takes place in the body, but perceiving it happens in the “sensitive phase of the soul”; §19) and to desires (§20–1). For sensation, organs such as eyes act as intermediaries between the body and the soul (§23). Even the earth, the stars, the universe have souls; and it doesn't take a fleshly body to have perception and sensation (§22, 24, 26).

Plotinus also writes about how the universe (stars, planets etc.) affects people: it is “one universally living being”, and its soul pervades all its parts, making them into a “sympathetic total” (§32), and things on earth can happen “in sympathy to the events” on the celestial sphere (§34); thus universe affects the people in it, and they each other. He compares this influence of the stars on the people below to the influence of a dancer over his body parts (§33). Less convincing were his efforts to explain the influence of constellations (specific arrangements of stars); he likens it to the effect that colour of beauty (which is again a specific arrangement of things) can have on a human observer (§35).

He asks if this influence of the heavens on people might make the stars into accomplices when those people commit something evil (§30–1), but rejects this since the stars don't have a will of their own (§37; in this they resemble the parts of a body, §36). Influence of the stars on human behavior is only partial, there are also other things like free will and necessity, so the stars are not to be blamed for the evil that people do (§38–9).

The notion of sympathy that we saw earlier when discussing the stars can also be used to explain how magic works (§40); it affects only “the reasonless” part of the soul and the body and works by a similar mechanism as love or music. A wise man's soul is immune to it, but his “unreasoning element” can be affected by it; and the same is true even of celestial beings (daimons); §43. Likewise, if prayers sometimes work, it's because different parts of the universe are in sympathy (§41). The stars/gods don't answer prayers by their will, it's more like an automatic process (§42). [So maybe I shouldn't blame Neoplatonists for starting a religion. By the old anthropological definitions, the mechanism of prayer being described here is magical rather than religious :))] Even reincarnation of a man's soul according to his deserts happens “under the pull of natural sources” and improves the universe much like medical treatment does the human body (§45). You can really see his strong sense of the universe as a larger whole, a living being; he calls it “a wonder of power and wisdom” (§45).

I may disagree with most of what he says, but it is rather moving anyway! I just wish he wrote in a more accessible manner...

Ficino's commentary mostly continues his practice of just summarizing each chapter of Plotinus with a paragraph of his own. There are some interesting remarks here and there. “Desire and anger are twin powers, so to speak, for in having proclivity to sensual desire these powers also have greater propensity to rage and vice versa. Therefore, not without justification have the poets made Mars cohabit with Venus.” (¶28)

His commentaries get a bit more expansive again towards the end, where Plotinus deals with magic and theurgy, topics that Ficino was clearly very interested in: “the spirit, affected through disposition, chant, fragrance, and light becomes more akin to the divinity and imbibes a more abundant emanation from that source” (¶38) — just before this passage he has a list showing which scent corresponds to which planet...

Later he has a hilarious explanation of how, although the stars and planets do not do anything evil by themselves, a magician can “render this power maleficent in a manner not dissimilar to that in which a man directs the rays of the sun collected in a concave mirror in the opposite direction and causes a fire” (¶41); so the magician can do the same with the astrological powers of Saturn, Venus, etc.

He has some interesting remarks on Neoplatonic worship practices: “They establish corporeal sacrifices for the worldly gods and dedicate a detached chastity to the superior ones and a most detached one to the primal God” (¶47).

His obsession with sympathetic magic occasionally gets completely ridiculous: “If anyone dresses one person in an amber-colored garment and another person in a chaff-colored one, he will attract the latter towards the former.” (¶48)

I *so* don't want to know how they discovered a supposed connection between garlic and magnetism: “just as sailors suspend a piece of iron and so balance it with a magnet in order to move the iron forcibly to the Great Bear and conversely by smearing the piece of iron with garlic disengage a forced motion of this kind.” (¶48)

And finally magic is revealed as a sleazy and tawdry affair: “A diligent magician or worshipper can procure the favor of these daemons for himself by flattering them, in the same manner in which a lowly actor or boy musician ensnares a noble monarch and certain animals sometimes bewitch a man.” (¶50) Oh yeah, that sheep was totally asking for it :)))

IV.5 — Problems of the Soul (III): On Sight

In this interesting short treatise, Plotinus discusses how sight works. It seems that this was quite an intriguing topic for ancient philosophers. It seems easy to explain, say, touch because you're in direct contact with the thing you're touching. But how can sight work at a distance? People came up with various ideas; maybe there needs to be a medium, such as air, between your eye and the object you're looking at, to convey the image from the object to the eye. Others suggested that light travels from your eye, bounces off the object and returns to your eye; or that the ray of light from your eye intersects with one coming from the object, and thus establishes contact. Mostly, as we can see from these theories, they were grappling with the question of how something can work at a distance in the absence of any obvious bodily contact.

Plotinus agreed that something bodily is needed in order for sight to work, as it is for other senses; the soul couldn't do it by itself because it would exist only in the intellectual realm, not in the sensible one — thus it needs the body and its sense-organs (like eyes) to see, hear etc. (§1). But he rejects most of the theories mentioned above about how sight works, insisting that it actually doesn't require a medium (such as air) between the object and the eye (§2–4). He has a pretty sensible argument there: the medium can only interfere with sight (e.g. we can see the better through air or water or glass the more clear and transparent they are), so we would see best without that medium altogether. He even goes a step further and say that hearing doesn't require a medium either, as can be seen from e.g. the fact that we can hear internal sounds (our bones creaking etc.) that are not conveyed to us by air (§5).

It's tempting to compare such speculations with what we now know of physics and point out that he was right with regard to sight but not with regard to sound; but I'm not sure if this is a fair way to put it because he and other ancient philosophers had no evidence for their theories either way, it was just speculation one way or the other. If they were right, they were right by pure lucky chance, and if they were wrong it was likewise purely by bad luck. In any case, I shouldn't pretend to have a decent understanding of modern physics on these topics either. On the one hand, things seem simple: Newton tells you that e.g. gravity simply works at a distance and that's just the way things are; and the same could be said of the electrical force and so on. But then more modern physics start talking about fields and interactions and particles, and one starts wondering if ‘well, these forces work at a distance’ is still a reasonable summary of what these people are saying.

Anyway, Plotinus's idea of how sight (and sound) can work at a distance is a very pretty piece of Neoplatonic mysticism: the whole cosmos is sort of like a living being, a unified whole, and its various parts are therefore in a kind of contact or sympathy with each other. It is this sympathy which allows us to perceive things at a distance — because, in that sense, they are not separated by distance at all, being linked by the fact that they are all parts of the same cosmos (§5, 8). Light, he says, is not a property of some containing medium (e.g. of air); it doesn't flow from the luminous object like some sort of liquid; rather, it is an act of the luminous object, much like life is an act of the soul (§6–7). This is why it can have an effect at range and without an intervening medium.

As for Ficino's commentary, I didn't learn anything new from it as it does little more than restate Plotinus's points slightly more briefly.

IV.6 — Perception and Memory

Another very short treatise; Plotinus emphasizes again that perception doesn't work by having the perceived object leave an impression upon the mind or the soul, like on wax or something like that (§1). The soul does not passively receive such perceptions; rather, perception is an act of the soul (§2). And therefore, memory doesn't work on the basis of such impressions either; it too is an act of the soul — otherwise we wouldn't have to make an effort to recollect things, and we wouldn't be able to train our memory (§3).

IV.7 — The Immortality of the Soul

Plotinus provides various arguments on why the soul is non-material and immortal, and spends much of this treatise arguing against the views of other philosophical schools (especially the Stoics) on this subject. Our body, being material and thus a composite of several parts, needs something immaterial to make it into a whole and give it life, and that is the soul (§1–2, 8). A material ‘soul’ would be divisible and could not be wholly present in all parts of the body at once (§5, 8²), which is necessary for perception to work (§6–7). Abstract thinking also requires that the soul can detach itself from the body (§8).

Some philosophers suggested (instead of a non-material soul) that we have a material soul-like thing they called the pneuma (spirit), which is either mostly air or mostly fire, depending on whom you ask; Plotinus, of course, disagrees (§3, 8³). Other theories he argues against is that the soul is a kind of harmony or accord between the parts of the body, thus separate from it but still belonging to it (§8⁴), or that it is to body as form is to matter (e.g. as the design of a statue is to the bronze it's made of; §8⁵).

The soul is immortal because its life springs from itself, not from some outside reason (§11, 14). He also discusses why souls bother to descend from the intellectual realm and enter bodies at all; his idea is that while the intellectual principle (2nd hypostasis) just contemplates all the fine order of the universe, the soul is seized with an urge to actually implement it (§13).

Ficino adds an interesting detail: the souls are a mixture of an intellectual (higher) and psychic (lower) part, in different proportions; in celestial souls the intellectual part predominates, in daemonic souls they are balanced, but in human souls the lower part prevails (¶13).

IV.8 — The Soul's Descent into Body

Plotinus discusses how and why souls descend into bodies at all. Is this a step down, a failure of the soul to stay in the intellectual realm? Or are the souls sent down by a benevolent demiurge to endow the sensible realm with intelligence? (§1) He leans more towards the latter explanation. This descent of the soul into body is involuntary and happens by an “inherent tendency” to bring order to bodies (§5). It happens partly because of the principle that anything can participate in the Good within its ability, and for matter this participation happens by becoming ensouled; and partly because of the principle that “every kind must produce its next” (§6), the same mechanism that previously caused intellectual principle to create the soul by emanation and descent (§7).

Ficino's commentary points out some interesting parallels between this “Platonic fall of souls” and the fallen angels or demons in christianity (¶3). He also tries to play down the ideas about reincarnation, which Plotinus mentioned as a kind of punishment for the errors that the souls commit while trapped in the body (§5); Ficino says that, first of all, reincarnation is only possible into a new human body (as opposed to an animal or plant body), and secondly that a soul can only get reincarnated three times before being “permanently either wretched or blessed” (¶4). He also adds some hilarious details about how daemons harass the human souls as a kind of punishment; they “assail the imaginations of sinners” and mess with their humours (¶7). :))

IV.9 — Are All Souls One?

For once, Betteridge's law of headlines doesn't really apply. Plotinus says that all souls are simultaneously one and many (§2); they are united in their higher (intellectual) phase, while the lower phase is divided amongst the various bodies. So this unity doesn't mean that they are completely identical or that one person's feelings are completely transferred to another, but it does explain why a certain sympathy can exist between people or why magical spells can work at a distance (§3) :))

The souls started as one and then dispersed by entering into bodies (§4).

Plotinus tries to bolster the case for this curious ‘simultaneously one and many’ situation by pointing out similar arrangements elsewhere: e.g. an individual's soul is present in its entirety in each part of his body (§1); a scientific theory is a whole and yet divided into multiple propositions (§5).