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 the Gnostic drama—are most clear in his summary of the Gnostic narrative of the “decline” of the Soul. He calls this doctrine “that one point which surpasses all the rest of their doctrine in absurdity (ἀτοπία)” (10.19–35): “For they say that Soul declined to what was below it, and with it some sort of ‘Wisdom’ (Gk. ‘Sophia’), whether Soul started it or whether Wisdom was a cause of Soul being like this, or whether they mean both to be the same thing, and then they tell us that the other souls came down too, and as members of Wisdom put on bodies, human bodies for instance.”33 Next, Plotinus describes a different version of the Gnostic fall of Sophia, probably quoting from a version of Zostrianos:34
But again they say that very being for the sake of which these souls came down did not come down itself, did not decline, so to put it, but only illuminated the darkness, and so a reflection (εἴδωλον) from it came into existence in matter. Then they fabricate an image of the image (εἰδώλου εἴδωλον πλάσαντες) somewhere here below, through matter or materiality or whatever they like to call it—they use now one name and now another, and say many other names just to make their meaning obscure—and produce what they call the Maker, and make him revolt from his mother and drag the universe which proceeds from him down to the ultimate limit of reflections (έπ’ ἔσχατα ειδώλων). The man who wrote this just meant to be blasphemous!35
Plotinus counters both versions. With reference to the first, he simply disagrees that the Soul descended;36 instead, it stays above.37 Without a descent, then, Soul creates the world, and, with souls, enters it. This entrance is described variously in the Enneads; in one early treatise, it is a “self-willed gliding downward” that is freely made but also necessary, since the world’s body must be inhabited by a soul (Plat. Tim. 34b8).38 But, he emphasizes, this is not a “descent to the below and away from contemplation,” although it does have a sense of “audacity” (τόλμα).39
The second version—that Soul did not decline but illuminated the darkness—is actually largely in agreement with Plotinus.40 Consequently, he does not have much of an answer for it, instead (somewhat unfairly) conflating the two myths, and moving on to a critique of the demiurge himself: the craftsman of the Gnostic narrative is not much of a craftsman at all.41 It works with reference to a mere “image of an image” of reality, hardly a fitting blueprint for the world.42 Again, the temporality of the events in the myth is an issue: why would a demiurge wait to produce with images? How would it know an image by memory if it has only just been born, an ontological level below the image?43
Plotinus’s disagreement with the Gnostics in these chapters clearly stems from a disagreement about the composition of the World-Soul, its relationship to time and to matter, and the logistics of its creative activity. Plotinus’s position is unsatisfying to readers ancient and modern, but the issue strikes at the heart of his thought.44 For Plotinus, as for Aristotle, philosophy