Chapter XVII

[SEVERUS] ‘WITH regard to the soul as described by Plato, which he says was composed by God of an impassible and a passible essence, as some intermediate colour from white and black, this is what we have to say, that when in time a separation of them takes place the soul must necessarily disappear, like the composition of the intermediate colour, when each of its constituents is naturally separated in time into its proper colour. But if this is so we shall show the soul to be perishable and not immortal.

‘For if this is admitted, that nothing in nature is without its opposite, and that all things in the world have been arranged by God out of the nature of these opposites, He having impressed upon them a friendship and communion, as of dry with moist, and hot with cold, heavy with light, white with black, sweet with bitter, hard with soft, and on all qualities of this kind one other combination including them all, and then upon the impassible essence a combination with the passible, and if the combined and mingled elements naturally in time undergo a separation from each other, and if it is to be assumed that the soul has been produced out of an impassible and a passible essence, then, in the same way as the intermediate colour, so also this must naturally disappear in time, when the opposite elements in its composition press towards their proper nature.

‘For do we not see that what is naturally heavy, even though it be lifted up by us, or by any natural lightness being added to it from without, presses down as before in its own natural direction? How in like manner also that which is by nature light, if borne downward by similar external causes, presses upward itself as before? For things which have been combined into one out of two mutual opposites cannot possibly remain always in the same state, unless there is always in them some third kind of natural substance.

‘But soul in fact is not any third thing compounded of two mutual opposites, but simple and in its sameness of nature impassible and incorporeal: whence Plato and his School said that it was immortal.

‘Since, however, it is a doctrine common to all that man is made of soul and body, and the motions which take place within us apart from the body, whether voluntary or involuntary, are said to be affections of the soul, most of the philosophers, guessing hereby that its substance is passible, say that it is mortal and of a corporeal nature, not incorporeal. But Plato was driven to interweave the passible element with its naturally impassible essence. That neither, however, is the case we shall endeavour to demonstrate by arguing from what Plato and the others have severally said, and explaining the powers which operate within us.’

Let this suffice for my quotation from Severus the Platonist On the Soul.

But in addition to what has been already said consider also the following point in regard to the origin of heaven and the luminaries therein.