Enneads VI 4: On the Integral Omnipresence of the Authentic-Existent (1)

[sdi]

Porphyry writes in his Sentences:

Spatial position and extent are properties of bodies; incorporeal things do not possess these properties and are therefore omnipresent. As such, they are not physically located within a body, but rather "illuminate" that body in their own peculiar manner when they so choose. (Porphyry, Sentences I, II, III)

Once the assertion is made, it seems self-evident to me: soul exists at a level of reality higher than space does (e.g. soul is prior to nature) and so seems to need no justification. (After all, no matter how quickly a body moves in space, the soul seems to always be present to animate it; further, my angel's Presence seems to be a function of my mental state, rather than my physical location.) And yet Porphyry clearly needed justification, since this essay happens to be the very first one he pestered Plotinus to write:

After coming to know [Plotinus], I passed six years in close relation with him. Many question were threshed out in the Conferences of those six years and, under persuasion from Amelius and myself, he composed two treatises [which I have collected as Enneads VI 4–5]. (Porphyry, Life of Plotinus V)

In any case, let's look at what Plotinus has to say on the matter:

VI 4: On the Integral Omnipresence of the Authentic-Existent (1)

Space requires division, since an object being in a location implies that the object is not in others, and that there is space which contains that object and space which does not. But recall that the nature of the intelligible world is unity, while the nature of the sensible world is division. It is not possible to divide things so in the intelligible world—therefore, the intelligible world is not spatial.

So even though we say that the intelligible world "contains" the sensible world, this is not meant in the sense of a box which is spatially larger than its contents: rather, it is that the intelligible world is more fundamental than the sensible world, it contains the non-spatial "building blocks" of which the sensible world is composed. So we say that the sensible world "participates" in the intellectual, but something can't participate in itself—that is simply identity rather than participation—and so space needs to be a participant in something spaceless.

This is the same as with your body and your soul: your soul isn't some fragment broken off of Soul itself, but rather a unique range in the continuum of Soul. That soul is eternal, godlike—it is only when it deigns to allow the body to participate in it that it is lost in individuality of the body. By withdrawing again to itself, heedless of the clamoring of the body with its pleasures and pains, it again takes up its rightful estate within the Soul, not separate from any other part of it but unified and whole again.

I had been wondering about where the Homeric shade fits into the system of Plotinus. He goes ahead and lays it out for us in §16: assuming I understand aright, it is the reflection of soul in the sensible world—that is to say, the spirit mediating between the unified soul and the fragmented body. It sticks around so long as the soul allows the body to participate in it—when the soul withdraws to itself, the spirit ceases to have something to reflect and disappears.