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If it is considered unseemly to emend anything which Plato has
touched, why did Porphyry himself make emendations, and these not a
few? for it is very certain that Plato wrote that the souls of men
return after death to the bodies of beasts. Plotinus also,
Porphyry's teacher, held this opinion; yet Porphyry justly rejected
it. He was of opinion that human souls return indeed into human
bodies, but not into the bodies they had left, but other new bodies.
He shrank from the other opinion, lest a woman who had returned into a
mule might possibly carry her own son on her back. He did not shrink,
however, from a theory which admitted the possibility of a mother
coming back into a girl and marrying her own son. How much more
honorable a creed is that which was taught by the holy and truthful
angels, uttered by the prophets who were moved by God's Spirit,
preached by Him who was foretold as the coming Saviour by His
forerunning heralds, and by the apostles whom He sent forth, and who
filled the whole world with the gospel, how much more honorable, I
say, is the belief that souls return once for all to their own bodies,
than that they return again and again to divers bodies? Nevertheless
Porphyry, as I have said, did considerably improve upon this
opinion, in so far, at least, as he maintained that human souls could
transmigrate only into human bodies, and made no scruple about
demolishing the bestial prisons into which Plato had wished to cast
them. He says, too, that God put the soul into the world that it
might recognize the evils of matter, and return to the Father, and be
for ever emancipated from the polluting contact of matter. And
although here is some inappropriate thinking (for the soul is rather
given to the body that it may do good; for it would not learn evil
unless it did it), yet he corrects the opinion of other Platonists,
and that on a point of no small importance, inasmuch as he avows that
the soul, which is purged from all evil and received to the Father's
presence, shall never again suffer the ills of this life. By this
opinion he quite subverted the favorite Platonic dogma, that as dead
men are made out of living ones, so living men are made out of dead
ones; and he exploded the idea which Virgil seems to have adopted from
Plato, that the purified souls which have been sent into the Elysian
fields (the poetic name for the joys of the blessed) are summoned to
the river Lethe, that is, to the oblivion of the past, "That
earthward they may pass once more, Remembering not the things before,
And with a blind propension yearn To fleshly bodies to return."
This found no favor with Porphyry, and very justly; for it is indeed
foolish to believe that souls should desire to return from that life,
which cannot be very blessed unless by the assurance of its permanence,
and to come back into this life, and to the pollution of corruptible
bodies, as if the result of perfect purification were only to make
defilement desirable. For if perfect purification effects the oblivion
of all evils, and the oblivion of evils creates a desire for a body in
which the soul may again be entangled with evils, then the supreme
felicity will be the cause of infelicity, and the perfection of wisdom
the cause of foolishness, and the purest cleansing the cause of
defilement. And, however long the blessedness of the soul last, it
cannot be rounded on truth, if, in order to be blessed, it must be
deceived. For it cannot be blessed unless it be free from fear.
But, to be free from fear, it must be under the false impression that
it shall be always blessed, the false impression, for it is destined
to be also at some time miserable. How, then, shall the soul rejoice
in truth, whose joy is rounded on falsehood? Porphyry saw this, and
therefore said that the purified soul returns to the Father, that it
may never more be entangled in the polluting contact with evil. The
opinion, therefore, of some Platonists, that there is a necessary
revolution carrying souls away and bringing them round again to the same
things, is raise. But, were it true, what were the advantage of
knowing it? Would the Platonists presume to allege their superiority
to us, because we were in this life ignorant of what they themselves
were doomed to be ignorant of when perfected in purity and wisdom in
another and better life, and which they must be ignorant of if they are
to be blessed? If it were most absurd and foolish to say so, then
certainly we must prefer Porphyry's opinion to the idea of a
circulation of souls through constantly alternating happiness and
misery. And if this is just, here is a Platonist emending Plato,
here is a man who saw what Plato did not see, and who did not shrink
from correcting so illustrious a master, but preferred truth to
Plato.
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