Eclogae de philosophia Chaldaica

From Proclus, On the Same Chaldaean Philosophy: The courts of the divine and the eternal orders are the everlasting arrangements. And the "all-receiving court" of the Father is the paternal order, which receives and contains all the souls that have been led upward. And the portion of the angels, how does it lead the soul upward? By illuminating, it is said, the soul with fire, that is, by shining around it from all sides, and making it full of the undefiled fire, which gives it an unswerving order and a power through which it is not swept away into material disorder but is attached to the light of the divine; and it also holds the soul in its proper place, and makes it unmixed with matter, by lightening it with the warm breath and making it elevated through the life that leads upward; for the warm breath is a transmission of life. Everything that hastens to the upper region is lightened, just as that which is borne toward matter is weighed down. The end of the ascents is the participation in the divine fruits and the self-manifest fulfillment of fire, which is the vision of God, as it places the soul before the eyes of the Father. And the soul of the divine is perfected by hymns, according to the oracle, putting forward the unspeakable tokens of the Father and offering them to the Father, which the Father placed in it at the first passage of its essence. For such are the intelligible and invisible hymns of the soul being led upward, stirring the memory of the harmonic principles which bear unspeakable images of the divine powers in it. From Proclus, On the Same Philosophy: "Depth of the soul" refers to its threefold cognitive powers, he says: the noetic, the dianoetic, and the doxastic; and "all eyes" refers to the threefold cognitive activities of these. For the eye is a symbol of knowledge.

tains all things. Life is of desire; each is threefold. Earth, from which one must lift the heart, is all material things and the manifold things borne in generation, and every bodily form. To these succeed the vision of the paternal monad, undefiled joy at it, and stability from this intellectual watchtower. From these it is clear that our good is mixed, from both motion and innate joy. For every life, having its own activity unconstrained, has pleasure as its companion. A hymn to the Father is not composed words, nor the construction of works; for being alone incorruptible, he does not accept a corruptible hymn. Therefore let us not hope to persuade the master of true words with an empty gale of phrases, nor with the imagination of works embellished by art; God loves unadorned beauty. Let us therefore offer this hymn to God: let us leave the flowing substance; let us come to the true goal, assimilation to him; let us know the master, let us love the Father; let us obey him who calls; let us run to the warm, fleeing the cold; let us become fire, let us journey through fire. We have an unconstrained path to ascent; the Father guides, having unfolded the ways of fire. Let us not flow as a lowly stream from forgetfulness. Of Proclus. The root of evil is the body, just as the root of virtue is the intellect. For the latter gushes forth from above to souls, while the former invades from below and from the worse; to cast down to earth is to cut it off from us; to let it be borne where it has been stationed; it is stationed in the whole of generation.

Since evils are here and "necessarily haunt this place," and our body is also a part of generation, it is possible to make a part unaffected, but the whole of generation impossible, unless we were to destroy its very being. Into this, both envy and jealousy must be cast down, from wherever they were enumerated; for being material, they have matter as their nurse. The phrase "do not extinguish with the mind" is said with a view to exclusion, not to annihilation, just as things extinguished in something are wholly contained in that thing and fill it with their own heat. Instead of "extinguish," cast down, not having it shut up within. Therefore he adds: "Do not defile the spirit," by having it within and concealing it. Envy is material; for it is cohabitant with privation of goods, and privation subsists together with barren matter. The theurgic race is without envy and stretches up toward the zeal of God's goodness, not being dragged down into human contentions and enmities. These passions, when shut up in souls, imprint some material evil in the spirit and fill it with material privation and lifelessness. From the same author, from the same philosophy. The soul, standing according to its own discursive intellect, is knowledgeable of beings. Having established itself in the noetic part of its own essence, it intuits all things with simple and undivided apprehensions. But having ascended to the One and having folded together all multiplicity in itself, it acts in an inspired manner and is united to existences beyond intellect.

For like is everywhere naturally joined to like, and every kind of knowledge, through likeness, unites the knower with the known: the perceptive with the sensible, the discursive with the discursive object, the intellective with the intelligible, so that also the flower of intellect is united with that which is prior to intellect. For just as in other things the highest is not intellect, but that which is beyond intellect, so in souls the first form of activity is not intellective, but more divine than intellect; and every soul and every intellect has two kinds of activity: the one unitary and superior to intellection, the other intellective. Therefore one must conceive that intelligible, and according to its very station and existence, by closing the eyes to all other lives and powers. For just as by becoming intellective we approach intellect, so by becoming unitary we ascend to union, standing at the summit of our own intellect; since the eye does not see the sun otherwise than by becoming sun-like, but not by its fire-light; and this makes clear that that intellection is not intellection. "But if," he says, "you incline your intellect," that is, if you press your intellectual projections toward contact with that, and thus "you will think that intelligible" "as thinking something," that is, according to some measure of form and knowledge by projection, "you will not think that." For even if such intellections are simple, they fall short of the unitary simplicity of the intelligible and are borne toward certain secondary intellectual natures that have already proceeded into plurality. For nothing knowable is known by a lesser knowledge; therefore neither is that which is beyond intellect known through intellect; for as soon as intellect applies itself to something, it declares the object of intellection to be such-and-such, which is secondary to the intelligible.

with the intelligible. But if we know this intelligible in the flower of the intellect within us, established at the summit of the first intelligible triad, to what could it still be conjoined with the One, which is uncoordinated with all things and unparticipated? For if the first "Father" is said to snatch "himself" away from intellect and "power", who is it that has not even needed to snatch himself away in this way, but is simply snatched away from all things and hymned as god of all? And if it has been said elsewhere concerning the most primal Father, "and first power of the sacred word", who is the one beyond this, of whom this one is said to participate as sacred? And if the word that reveals what is more ineffable is named, there must be before the word the silence that established the word, and before every sacred thing the deifying cause. Therefore, just as the things after the intelligibles are words of the intelligibles, when they are gathered together, so the word among those, subsisting from another more ineffable monad, is word of the silence before the intelligibles, but silence of the intelligibles when they are kept silent. Is it not, then, that the flower of intellect and the flower of our entire soul are not the same? But one is the most unified aspect of our intellectual life, while the other is the one of all the psychic powers, which are many-formed; for we are not only intellect, but also discursive reason, opinion, attention, and choice, and before these powers there is one substance that is both many and divided and undivided. Since the one appears as twofold, one being the flower of our most primary powers, the other being the center of the whole substance and of all the various powers around it, only that one conjoins us with the father of the intelligibles.

For it is one intelligible, and that is also intellected by the paternal intellect according to the one in it. And the one into which all the soul's powers converge is alone naturally able to lead us to that which is beyond all beings, and is itself the unifying principle of all things in us. By this we are also rooted in essence in that, and being rooted, even if we proceed, we will not be separated from our own cause. From Proclus, from the same philosophy. Philosophy attributes both forgetfulness and recollection of the eternal principles to the departure from the gods and the return to them; the oracles, to the paternal tokens. Both agree; for the soul is composed of sacred principles and divine symbols: the former are from the intelligible forms, the latter from the divine unities; and we are images of the intelligible substances, but statues of the unknown tokens. And just as every soul is a plenitude of all forms, but subsists according to a single whole cause, so too it participates in all the tokens, through which it is conjoined with god, but its existence is defined in one, by which all the multitude in it is gathered into a single summit. For it is necessary to know this as well, that every soul is distinct in form from every other, and as many souls as there are, so many are the forms of souls; for first, according to one form, there is a subsistence of many uniform individuals concerning matter and the composite beings, with one underlying nature participating in the same form in various ways; for if the being of the soul is a principle and a simple form, either no soul will differ in essence from another, or it would differ in form.

What will differ is only form, and it is form alone. Hence it is clear that every soul, even if it is full of the same principles, has received one form that distinguishes it from the others, just as the solar form characterizes the solar soul, and another form characterizes another soul.