But if that Principle can never fall to evil and we have given a true account of the soul's entry or presence to body, what are we to say of the periodic Descents and Returns, the punishments, the banishment into animal forms? That teaching we have inherited from those ancient philosophers who have best probed into soul and we must try to show that our own doctrine is accordant with it, or at least not conflicting. We have seen that the participation of things here in that higher means not that the soul has gone outside of itself to enter the corporeal, but that the corporeal has approached soul and is now participant in it; the coming affirmed by the ancients can be only that approach of the body to the higher by which it partakes of life and of soul; this has nothing to do with local entry but is some form of communion; by the descent and embodiment of current phrasing must be understood not that soul becomes an appanage of body but that it gives out to it something of itself; similarly, the soul's departure is the complete cessation of that communion. The various rankings of the universe will determine various degrees of the communion; soul, ultimate of the Intellectual, will give forth freely to body as being more nearly of the one power and standing closer, as distance holds in that order. The soul's evil will be this association, its good the release. Why? Because, even unmerged, a soul in any way to be described as attached to this universe is in some degree fallen from the All into a state of partition; essentially belonging to the All, it no longer directs its act Thither: thus, a man's knowledge is one whole, but he may guide himself by no more than some single item of it, where his good would lie in living not by some such fragment but by the total of his knowing. That One Soul- member of the Intellectual kosmos and there merging what it has of partial into the total- has broken away, so to speak, from the All to the part and to that devotes itself becoming partial with it: thus fire that might consume everything may be set to ply its all-power upon some trifle. So long as the soul remains utterly unattached it is soul not singled out; when it has accepted separation- not that of place but that of act determining individualities- it is a part, no longer the soul entire, or at least not entire in the first sense; when, on the contrary, it exercises no such outward control it is perfectly the All-Soul, the partial in it latent. As for the entry into the World of the Shades, if this means into the unseen, that is its release; if into some lower place, there is nothing strange in that, since even here the soul is taken to be where the body is, in place with the body. But on the dissolution of the body? So long as the image-soul has not been discarded, clearly the higher will be where that is; if, on the contrary, the higher has been completely emancipated by philosophic discipline, the image-soul may very well go alone to that lower place, the authentic passing uncontaminated into the Intellectual, separated from that image but nonetheless the soul entire. Let the image-offspring of the individuality- fare as it may, the true soul when it turns its light upon itself, chooses the higher and by that choice blends into the All, neither acting now nor extinct. But it is time to return to our main theme:

The soul in man, however - not every soul, but one that pious is - is a daimonic something and divine. And such a soul when from the body freed, if...

It is necessary, therefore, to admit a thing of this kind in partial souls. For such as is the life which the soul received, prior to its insertion...

There then the poor Soul in the first Principle moves in the Door of the Deep, being clothed with the Virtue [or Power of the Dominion or] Region of...

And now if we will speak of the Soul, and of its Substance and Essences, we must say that it is the roughest [Thing] in Man; for it is the Originality...

Hence that of which you are dubious is not true, “ that all things are bound with the indissoluble bonds of Necessity ,” which we call Fate. For the...

But because the Soul stood with its most inward Root in the Abyss of Hell, and according to the Kingdom of this World in the hard [frozen] Death, so t...

But my meaning is, that it peculiarly connects the soul with the self begotten and self-moved God, and with the all-sustaining, intellectual, and all-...

When, [then,] the soul’s departure from the body shall take place,—then shall the judgment and the weighing of its merit pass into its highest...

The Devils and the Angels, in the Time of their Corporization, continued therein; and the Soul of Man, in the Time of the creating of the Body, [is] b...

We set down thus much here, to the End that the Region of his World may be understood. And thus we give the Reader exactly to understand and know how ...

The Soul of Man is generated out of the Gates of the Breaking-through out of the Outward into the Inward, and is gone forth out of the Inward (in the...

The philosophers whom we have mentioned, from whom the Marcionites blasphemously derived their doctrine that birth is evil, on which they then plumed ...

The hostile opposition, therefore, in the things that are now proposed, may be easily dissolved by demonstrating the dignity of wholes with respect...

He may bring his nature to a condition of ONE; he may nourish his strength; he may harmonize his virtue, and so put himself into partnership with God....

The deep Gate of Life.

Further, there is a movement of soul, circular indeed,--the entrance into itself from things without, and the unified convolution of its intellectual...

Now if the Spirit of the Soul remains unregenerated in its first Principle, which it has inherited out of the Eternity, with the Beginning of its...

It likewise possesses the eternity of a similar life and energy in a less degree than dæmons and heroes; yet, through the beneficent will of the...

This Soul (being cloathed with the pure elementary and paradisical Body) severed its Will, [which came] out of the Father's Will, which tends only to...

For to a Beast, (which is created out of Matter,) no Sin may be imputed, for its Spirit reaches not the first Principle; but it has its Original in th...