all this, so great, sprung from that greatness. Not to answer thus could only be to have neither
fathomed this world nor had any vision of that other ( II, 9, 16).
There is another reason for rejecting the Gnostic view. The Gnostics think that nothing divine is
associated with the sun, moon, and stars; they were created by an evil spirit. Only the soul of man,
among things perceived, has any goodness. But Plotinus is firmly persuaded that the heavenly
bodies are the bodies of god-like beings, immeasurably superior to man. According to the
Gnostics, "their own soul, the soul of the least of mankind, they declare deathless, divine; but the
entire heavens and the stars within the heavens have had no communion with the Immortal
Principle, though these are far purer and lovelier than their own souls" ( II, 9, 5). For the view of
Plotinus there is authority in the Timaeus, and it was adopted by some Christian Fathers, for
instance, Origen. It is imaginatively attractive; it expresses feelings that the heavenly bodies
naturally inspire, and makes man less lonely in the physical universe.
There is in the mysticism of Plotinus nothing morose or hostile to beauty. But he is the last
religious teacher, for many centuries, of whom this can be said. Beauty, and all the pleasures
associated with it, came to be thought to be of the Devil; pagans, as well as Christians, came to
glorify ugliness and dirt. Julian the Apostate, like contemporary orthodox saints, boasted of the
populousness of his beard. Of all this, there is nothing in Plotinus.
Matter is created by Soul, and has no independent reality. Every Soul has its hour; when that
strikes, it descends, and enters the body suitable to it. The motive is not reason, but something
more analogous to sexual desire. When the soul leaves the body, it must enter another body if it
has been sinful, for justice requires that it should be punished. If, in this life, you have murdered
your mother, you will, in the next life, be a woman, and be murdered by your son ( III, 2, 13). Sin
must be punished; but the punishment happens naturally, through the restless driving of the
sinner's errors.
Do we remember this life after we are dead? The answer is perfectly logical, but not what most
modern theologians would say. Memory is concerned with our life in time, whereas our best and
truest life is in eternity. Therefore, as the soul grows towards eternal