and then mankind, beginning with Adam and Eve. Poor Sophia, meanwhile, repents. In order to recover the creative power that Yaldabaoth has stolen from her, she is able with the help of the superior powers to trick her son into passing this power into Adam. This spark of divinity is passed on to Adam and Eve’s third son, Seth, from whom Gnostic humanity is descended—aliens to the world of Yaldabaoth, but akin to their Father, the Invisible Spirit, itself alien to the planet they inhabit. Yet the elect have forgotten their divine identity because of Yaldabaoth’s minions, who torment them, exploiting the weakness and ignorance that accompany corporeal existence. Thankfully, a savior descends to humanity to preach the origins of man and the cosmos, expose Yaldabaoth and his powers as false gods, and thereby lend human beings knowledge of its source, the hitherto unknown, alien God. This knowledge is tantamount to salvation.
At first sight, it is then puzzling that Plotinus begins his response to this myth (and those who adhere to it) by ridiculing the doctrine of dual intellects (one unparticipatory, one participatory), one of Numenius’s odder ideas, not extant in any Gnostic text.8 His reason can only be that he wishes to emphasize the coherence of the three hypostases of his metaphysical system: One, Intellect, and Soul.9 For Plotinus, the cosmic Soul, as a direct image of the Intellect, has direct access to it and dwells with it in the heavens; in turn, the various human, animal, and vegetative souls here on earth (which together compose the hypostasis of cosmic Soul) are in direct touch with their intellects (which together compose the hypostasis of celestial Intellect). He sees the possibility of there being two or more intellects in the metaphysical world as an unnecessary introduction of intermediaries between members of this triad of hypostases, which will lead to an infinite and absurd production of intelligible entities, or worse a decline of one of the hypostases.10 Thus, the proliferation of a multitude of divine entities (familiar to even the casual reader of Gnostic texts) disturbs the hierarchy of intelligible beings and could even lead to the mistaken notion that the soul descends.
His same concern with the maintenance of the intelligible hierarchy and the undescended Soul motivates his next topic, the eternity of illuminated matter. In an especially dense passage, he argues that:
If anyone says that it will be dissolved into matter, why should he not also say that matter will be dissolved? But if he is going to say that, what necessity was there, we shall reply, for it to come into being? But if they are going to assert that it was necessary for it to come into being as a consequence of the existence of higher principles, the necessity is there now as well. But if matter is going to remain alone, the divine principles will not be everywhere but in a particular limited place; they will be, so to speak, walled off from matter; but if this is impossible, matter will be illuminated by them.11
The context of this somewhat oblique argument is the proper order of derivation of the various strata of existence, and their eternity. The position that Plotinus defends at the end of the passage is the eternal generation, existence, and illumination (by Soul) of matter and its eternal, unchanging illumination by Soul.12
Like the discussion of dual intellect, the insertion of this difficult problem seems tangential but is in fact relevant, because it addresses the eternal creative activity of Soul and thus the production of a good, eternal world. For Plotinus, the nature of Soul is to create,13 so it eternally generates and illuminates matter; yet matter is an absence of being and thus of goodness and reality.14 Why would Soul (or, by extension, a demiurge), which is good, produce and illuminate something that is bad? The Gnostics argue, he says, that the badness of the created object must imply some lapse of judgment on the part of the creator. Plotinus proposes instead that the Soul’s production of something unequivocally bad nonetheless must have been in this case a positive thing; because the Soul, undescended, eternally illuminates matter and thus bestows good on it without being part of it, Plotinus can assert the positive nature of the inhabited world and the eternal nature of this goodness while acknowledging the badness of matter, instead of ascribing badness to both its creator and what is created from it.15
Keeping in mind Plotinus’s attention to preserving the undescended nature of the Soul in these opening chapters, his turn in chapter 4 to the topic of the Soul, its fall, and its demiurgic function is not so much jarring as it is tardy.16 “If,” he asks, “they (i.e., my Gnostic opponents) are going to say that it (the Soul) simply failed (σφαλεῖσαν), let them tell us the cause of the failure (σφάλματος … τὴν αἰτίαν).”17 Plotinus is determined to show that the creation and its creator are good, not an error or “failure” or fall from heaven; or in his parlance that “Soul is not a declination (νεῦσιν), but rather a non-declination.”18 He thus sets up a series of reductiones ad absurdum: a decline took place either in time or outside time; neither is possible.19 If Soul declined, it must have forgotten the intelligibles; but then it wouldn’t be a demiurge anymore, since Plato says in his Timaeus the demiurge creates with reference to the intelligible forms.20 If it does remember, then it does not decline. (See Figure 1 for a visual illustration of these ideas.)
Figure 1. Plotinus on Neoplatonic and Gnostic Creation
Plotinus shifts gears, beginning to mock his opponents’ anthropomorphic view of the creator, assserting that the demiurge did not create “in order to be honored” (ἵνα τιμῷτο).21 More specifically, the demiurge did not create “through discursive (i.e., temporal, language-based) reasoning (διανοία).” He continues, asking, “when is he (the creator) going to destroy it (the cosmos)? For if he was sorry he had made it, what is he waiting for?”22 As is well known, Plotinus here attacks his opponents along established lines of later Platonic defense of the Timaeus from Epicurean and Skeptic critics, who mocked the dialogue’s account on the grounds of its crude anthropomorphism.23 Middle Platonists responded by simply ceasing to read it literally.24 Plotinus goes further in arguing that creative activity (ποίησις) occurs through the faculty of contemplation (θεωρία), not temporal, discursive reasoning (διανοία), which yields hesitation and, ultimately, all too human error.25 Here, then, the Gnostic view of the demiurge closely coheres with the caricature of the Timaeus sketched by Hellenistic foes of Plato. However, just as with the problem of the generation of matter, Plotinus is perturbed by the problem of creation and destruction of the world in time and its implications for the character of the demiurge: why would he destroy the world unless he regretted making it, and what kind of creator is that?26 Moreover, if the world was created in time, then it must have been planned with temporal, discursive reasoning, which, as we have already seen, Plotinus found unacceptable.27
The same criticisms of the Gnostic conception of the demiurge lie behind his ongoing polemic about the Soul’s creative activity. He repeats many of the same points: the Gnostics do not understand (οὐ συνέντες) Timaeus 39b and thus falsify (καταψεύδονται) Plato’s account of cosmogony.28 The Gnostics, he continues, confuse the identity of the maker: sometimes it is the Soul, sometimes the discursive (διανοούμενον) Intellect, again perhaps exploiting the ambiguity between the characters of the demiurge and Sophia when they are conflated as the creative, Plotinian Soul.29 Censuring the director of the world, he says, they identify it with the Soul, and so attribute to it the passions of incarnate souls.30 Similar critiques are levied in chapter 8: by asking why the creation happened at all, the Gnostics misunderstand the essence of Soul itself, that is, creation via contemplation (θεωρία).31 This misunderstanding, again, stems from the confused presupposition that the world is not eternal.32
Plotinus’s objections—and his willingness to exploit the confusion between the characters in
