Elements of Theology 16: Power and Unity

After Power and Complexity, this is the second subsection of Dodds' section titled "Of the Grades of Causality." I'm taking it a little easier this week and only covering three propositions, in which Proclus continues by discussing the creative power of different things in the causal chain.

Power and Unity: The One is perfectly unified, perfectly good, and produces all. The further from the One a thing is, the more divided, the less good, and the less productive it becomes.

LX. Creative power is proportional to goodness.

Suppose we have two things, one which can produce many effects and another which can only produce few effects. Every number of effects the second can produce the first can as well, but the first can produce a number of effects that the second can not. Thus the first is more comprehensive than the second, and in that sense is closer to the universal cause than the second. But the universal cause is the Good [XII], and to be closer to it is to be better. Therefore, the cause of a greater number of effects is better than the cause of a lesser number of effects.

LXI. Creative power is proportional to unity.

Unity and goodness are equivalent [XIII]; therefore, since creative power is proportional to goodness [LX], the same is also true of unity.

LXII. A many which is less remote from the One is less divided, but of greater potency, than a many which is more remote.

The One is productive of all things [XII, XIII] while remaining wholly unified [V], and all procession is effected through similitude [XXIX]; therefore, even though everything that is not the One is many [I], those that are closer to the One must be more similar to the One, in that they are more productive and less divided.

Further, we have previously described the four levels of being [XX] and noted that each level of being begins in a Monad [XXI]; this means that each Monad is more divided than the prior one, and so there are a greater number of bodies than souls, a greater number of souls than intelligences, and a greater number of intelligences than henads.

These made me double-take when I first saw them—they seem to follow on so immediately from XII and XIII that I figured it was already settled! Interesting that Proclus didn't think so and delays making it explicit for such a long time.

Proclus' corollary to LXII—the part where he states that bodies outnumber souls, and that souls outnumber intelligences, and that intelligences outnumber henads—is logically sound within Proclus' framework, but strikes me as problematic. After all, every body has a soul (or else it wouldn't have a connection to the One—that is to say, it wouldn't exist), but not every soul has a body (the gods, for example); therefore there must be more souls than bodies. I don't remember what Plotinus said about it, but Porphyry at least seems to agree with Proclus (Sentences XI). Proclus' way around it seems to be that bodies come from the Nature Monad and are merely modeled on or animated by (rather than given existence by) souls? Another way around it is if multiple bodies can share the same soul (though this seems problematic, too). Going into this, my "gut feeling" was that souls were the most numerous existences, as the Intellect is creative in a way that souls can't be (e.g. Intellect creates everything at once, souls create one things at a time), and that the world of soul was the "most vast" in the sense of being both infinite and diverse (while Intellect is infinite but not diverse and the sensible world is finite and diverse), but maybe I just made a mistake somewhere. I'll have to keep this in mind as I go back over Plotinus...