Elements of Theology 11: Quality in Procession and Return

After The Laws of Procession and The Cycle of Procession and Return, this is the third and final subsection of Dodds' section titled "Of Procession and Reversion." This part explains the degree of goodness which things possess as they go through the cycle introduced previously.

Quality in Procession and Return: As things proceed from a cause, they gets worse; return retraces each thing's path step-by-step back to the cause, getting better again as it does so.

XXXVI. Of things that proceed from a cause, those that are primary are better than those that are secondary, which in turn are better than those that are tertiary, etc.

Procession is the process by which causes produce things that, while worse than themselves, are as like themselves as possible [XXVIII]. From this it follows that the fewer intermediates an effect has, the better it is.

XXXVII. Of things that return to a cause, those that are primary are worse than those that are secondary, which in turn are worse than those that are tertiary, etc.

If procession is a cycle [XXXIII] in which a thing returns to its cause [XXXIV], and things become worse as they get more distant from their cause [XXXVI], then it follows that they become better as they get closer again to their cause.

XXXVIII. Every thing that returns does so through the same terms that it proceeded through.

Because procession [XXIX] and return [XXXII] are both effected through similitude, that which proceeds immediately from a cause returns to it immediately, because it is already as similar to it as possible. But if something requires an intermediary to proceed [XXXIV] it will also require an intermediary to return, since the intermediary will be as similar as possible to the cause and the effect will be as similar as possible to the intermediary.

XXXIX. Every thing returns either by existence; or by existence and life; or by existence, life, and reason.

Recall that the levels of reality are the One (the cause of existence), intellect (the cause of life), souls (the cause of reason), and bodies (which do not cause anything) [XX]. Since every thing that returns does so through the same terms it proceeded through [XXXVIII], those things that proceed from the One return by means of what the One gives them, which is existence; those things that proceed from the Intellect return by means of what the One and the Intellect give them, which is existence and life; those things that proceed from souls return by means of what the One, the Intellect, and that soul give them, which is existence, life, and reason.

As terse as the Elements is, this section strikes me as a longwinded version of Porphyry's Sentences XI: "Incorporeal realities, in the process of descent, fragment and multiply into individual things by reason of a diminution of power; on the other hand, in the process of ascent, they unify and become whole again by reason of a superabundance of power." I am grateful that it was much easier to work through than previous sections, as my mind is not strong this week.

If you'll recall in the last section, I was bewildered by Johnson's note about how return is either through essence, life, or knowledge. Well, turns out it's from right here in XXXIX! My summary follows his and Taylor's translations, from which it is very obviously the application of XXXVIII to XX; Dodds gives a very different sense of it and goes on to comment about how this proposition is all about defending theurgy from its detractors or something. Whatever—once again, either he's off in outer space or I'm missing something. The use of the term "life" here simply refers, I think, to "motion" rather than life in its true sense, since—as Porphyry notes in Sentences XII—the One and the Intellect also live, though their life is quite different than the familiar sort! I have changed Taylor's "gnostically" and Dodds' "by way of knowledge" to "by reason" since we're talking here specifically about a soul's deductive knowledge and not the Intellect's intuitive knowledge.

So what's the point of all this? If each cause is better than its effects, why proceed and return in the first place? Plotinus explains in Enneads III iv 1 ff.: the experience of having bodies is how a soul comes to understand how it is unique among souls. If it didn't, there'd be no self-recognition, no identity. Without identity, the soul wouldn't exist at all. This, in turn, is how the Intellect comes to understand its relation to the One: all souls that can have identity, must have identity, since the Intellect must be complete in order to be "one."