Enneads IV 8: The Soul's Descent into Body

[sdi]

This tractate opens thus:

Many times it has happened: lifted out of the body into myself; becoming external to all other things and self-encentered; beholding a marvellous beauty; then, more than ever, assured of community with the loftiest order; enacting the noblest life, acquiring identity with the divine; stationing within It by having attained that activity; poised above whatsoever within the Intellectual is less than the Supreme: yet, there comes the moment of descent from intellection to reasoning, and after that sojourn in the divine, I ask myself how it happens that I can now be descending, and how did the soul ever enter into my body, the soul which, even within the body, is the high thing it has shown itself to be.

Do not stop there, Plotinus—I beg you to continue! But he does not—this essay is about the nature of the soul and what Plato says about it, and not about Plotinus' own ecstatic experiences. Alas! I long for missives from the Beyond—but I suppose it is impossible to give voice to the ineffable, and I must patiently await my own turn.

IV 8: The Soul's Descent into Body

In the Intelligible, there is the Intellect itself, but also smaller intellects within It; as if it is some mighty Organism made up of smaller cells. The whole Organism has it's own purpose, and while It's cells share in that purpose, they have also a separate, more specialized purpose (or else they would not be distinct from the Whole). These cells are lower souls, including human souls, which both work towards the purpose of the whole—intellection—but also administer their own little spheres.

This dual purpose is like two forces tugging at souls, one downwards into the realm of actualization, and one upwards towards return to the realm of potentiality. So a soul descends into matter, returns into intellect, back and forth and back and forth, corresponding to the unique nature and degree of purity of that soul.

The many ways in which the ancients describe this process—whether as a voluntary undertaking to create the world, or as a punishment for the sin of turning away from the Source, or as an involuntary result of necessity—are all looking at this same process from different perspectives. It is voluntary as souls all bring it about by their own actions, but it is involuntary as these actions are according to an inherent tendency in the soul's own nature.