Categoria: Tratado 33 (II,9)

18. But perhaps this school will maintain that, while their teaching leads to a hate and utter abandonment of the body, ours binds the Soul down in it. In other words: two people inhabit the one stately house; one of them declaims against its plan and against its Architect, but none the less maintains his…

10. Under detailed investigation, many other tenets of this school – indeed we might say all – could be corrected with an abundance of proof. But I am withheld by regard for some of our own friends who fell in with this doctrine before joining our circle and, strangely, still cling to it. The school,…

1. We have seen elsewhere that the Good, the Principle, is simplex, and, correspondingly, primal – for the secondary can never be simplex – that it contains nothing: that it is an integral Unity. Now the same Nature belongs to the Principle we know as The One. just as the goodness of The Good is…

2. Therefore we must affirm no more than these three Primals: we are not to introduce superfluous distinctions which their nature rejects. We are to proclaim one Intellectual-Principle unchangeably the same, in no way subject to decline, acting in imitation, as true as its nature allows, of the Father. And as to our own Soul…

3. Ever illuminated, receiving light unfailing, the All-Soul imparts it to the entire series of later Being which by this light is sustained and fostered and endowed with the fullest measure of life that each can absorb. It may be compared with a central fire warming every receptive body within range. Our fire, however, is…

4. To those who assert that creation is the work of the Soul after the failing of its wings, we answer that no such disgrace could overtake the Soul of the All. If they tell us of its falling, they must tell us also what caused the fall. And when did it take place? If…

5. Still more unreasonably: There are men, bound to human bodies and subject to desire, grief, anger, who think so generously of their own faculty that they declare themselves in contact with the Intelligible World, but deny that the sun possesses a similar faculty less subject to influence, to disorder, to change; they deny that…

6. And, what are we to think of the new forms of being they introduce – their “Exiles” and “Impressions” and “Repentings”? If all comes to states of the Soul – “Repentance” when it has undergone a change of purpose; “Impressions” when it contemplates not the Authentic Existences but their simulacra – there is nothing…

7. That this world has neither beginning nor end but exists for ever as long as the Supreme stands is certainly no novel teaching. And before this school rose it had been urged that commerce with the body is no gain to a Soul. But to treat the human Soul as a fair presentment of…

9. Wealth and poverty, and all inequalities of that order, are made ground of complaint. But this is to ignore that the Sage demands no equality in such matters: he cannot think that to own many things is to be richer or that the powerful have the better of the simple; he leaves all such…

11. Now, in the first place, if the Soul has not actually come down but has illuminated the darkness, how can it truly be said to have declined? The outflow from it of something in the nature of light does not justify the assertion of its decline; for that, it must make an actual movement…

12. And how does this image set to its task immediately after it comes into being? By memory of what it has seen? But it was utterly non-existent, it could have no vision, either it or the Mother they bestow upon it. Another difficulty: These people come upon earth not as Soul-Images but as veritable…

14. In yet another way they infringe still more gravely upon the inviolability of the Supreme. In the sacred formulas they inscribe, purporting to address the Supernal Beings – not merely the Soul but even the Transcendents – they are simply uttering spells and appeasements and evocations in the idea that these Powers will obey…

16. On the other hand, to despise this Sphere, and the Gods within it or anything else that is lovely, is not the way to goodness. Every evil-doer began by despising the Gods; and one not previously corrupt, taking to this contempt, even though in other respects not wholly bad, becomes an evil-doer by the…

17. Perhaps the hate of this school for the corporeal is due to their reading of Plato who inveighs against body as a grave hindrance to Soul and pronounces the corporeal to be characteristically the inferior. Then let them for the moment pass over the corporeal element in the Universe and study all that still…

8. To ask why the Soul has created the Kosmos, is to ask why there is a Soul and why a Creator creates. The question, also, implies a beginning in the eternal and, further, represents creation as the act of a changeful Being who turns from this to that. Those that so think must be…