Abstract

The thesis of the partly undescended soul, typically Plotinian, is not a simple testimony of Plotinus’s personal abilities to ascend on his own to the First Principle — as it has long been thought to be, for want of a better suggestion — but the reformulation of a specific doctrine, that of the Gnostic/Hermetic ὁμοούσιος. The soul of the Gnostic elect — the “pneumatic” soul, to be more precise — remained consubstantial to the divine Pleroma, never losing its substantial link with it, its salvation being thus guaranteed. The soul, not only akin (συγγενής) to the divine, as Plato taught before, but in fact undescended and consubstantial to it (cf. 2 [IV 7], 10, 19), as Plotinus conceives it, grants therefore to every man what the Gnostics denied to all but a few, an uninterrupted and indissoluble link with the highest realities. The audacity of this approach, recognized by Plotinus (cf. 6 [IV 8], 8, 1-3), consists in challenging, not Platonic adversaries, which in fact cannot be found, but Platonic Gnostics, “Sethians” who attend his School and who claim for themselves only the power to reach the Intelligible (cf. 33 [II 9], 9, 79), whereas, in the opinion of the Neoplatonic philosopher, “every soul is a child of That Father” (33 [II 9], 16, 9).