Ammonius Saccas on the Incorporeality of Soul

[sdi]

Now, as regards those who assign corporeity to the soul, it suffices to recall the argument of Ammonius, the master of Plotinus, and of Numenius the Pythagoraean. It runs thus:

Bodies, by their absolute nature, are mutable, dissoluble, and, throughout their extent, divisible indefinitely, without their remaining anything of body that is not thus liable to change. Therefore a body requires some principle keeping it together, assembling its constituents, and (so to speak) binding and holding them in union. And this principle we call soul. But if the soul is, in any kind of way, corporeal, even though its body were of the most rarefied stuff, the question is, what is the principle that holds it together? For it has been demonstrated that everything corporeal needs a principle of cohesion. And so the argument is carried back indefinitely, until we arrive at an incorporeal soul.

(Nemesius of Emesa on the Nature of Man XII, as translated by William Telfer.)

Comments

[sdi]

You know, it's funny to me that, for all the scientific assumption that the world is made out of some indivisible building blocks, we still keep finding that what we thought were atoms can get split up somehow. Molecules, atoms, electrons, fermions... maybe the ancients were right after all and matter is infinitely divisible, absurd as that might seem to us.

[boccaderlupo]

I like how you bring it back to the current mindset of scientific inquiry. That method works very well for interrogating the behavior of the material (sensible) world, in particular by the process of reduction and divisional scrutiny. But in and of itself that process never reveals unity (even though it necessarily assumes a general "unity" of patterns that can be discerned in the universe!).

Only the Intellect (Nous) recognizing itself and thereby The Divine and participating in It—via processes typically derided by modern positivist types, who regard any type of introspection/intuition as unnecessary navel-gazing—can point the way to a return to the primal unity that underpins all things.

Axé and all blessings

[sdi]

Sometimes I wonder if the ancients were really right and matter is nothing at all except the boundary, as it were, of existence. Under that assumption, of course you can divide it up indefinitely: there's nothing to offer resistance, and it is we ourselves who are creating division after division. It's like how "infinity" doesn't exist, but you can always just keep on counting. Each new number appears as you enumerate it, and each new subatomic particle appears as you divide the one before it.