If it is considered unseemly to emend anything which Plato has
touched, why did Porphyry himself make emendations, and these not
a few? for it is very certain that Plato wrote that the souls of
men return after death to the bodies of beasts.[429] Plotinus also,
Porphyry's teacher, held this opinion;[430] yet Porphyry justly
rejected it. He was of opinion that human souls return indeed into
human bodies, but not into the bodies they had left, but other new
bodies. He shrank from the other opinion, lest a woman who had
returned into a mule might possibly carry her own son on her back. He
did not shrink, however, from a theory which admitted the possibility
of a mother coming back into a girl and marrying her own son. How
much more honourable a creed is that which was taught by the holy
and truthful angels, uttered by the prophets who were moved by God's
Spirit, preached by Him who was foretold as the coming Saviour by His
forerunning heralds, and by the apostles whom He sent forth, and who
filled the whole world with the gospel,--how much more honourable,
I say, is the belief that souls return once for all to their own
bodies, than that they return again and again to divers bodies?
Nevertheless Porphyry, as I have said, did considerably improve upon
this opinion, in so far, at least, as he maintained that human souls
could transmigrate only into human bodies, and made no scruple about
demolishing the bestial prisons into which Plato had wished to cast
them. He says, too, that God put the soul into the world that it
might recognise the evils of matter, and return to the Father, and
be for ever emancipated from the polluting contact of matter. And
although here is some inappropriate thinking (for the soul is rather
given to the body that it may do good; for it would not learn evil
unless it did it), yet he corrects the opinion of other Platonists,
and that on a point of no small importance, inasmuch as he avows that
the soul, which is purged from all evil and received to the Father's
presence, shall never again suffer the ills of this life. By this
opinion he quite subverted the favourite Platonic dogma, that as dead
men are made out of living ones, so living men are made out of dead
ones; and he exploded the idea which Virgil seems to have adopted
from Plato, that the purified souls which have been sent into the
Elysian fields (the poetic name for the joys of the blessed) are
summoned to the river Lethe, that is, to the oblivion of the past,
"That earthward they may pass once more,
Remembering not the things before,
And with a blind propension yearn
To fleshly bodies to return."[431]
This found no favour with Porphyry, and very justly; for it is indeed
foolish to believe that souls should desire to return from that
life, which cannot be very blessed unless by the assurance of its
permanence, and to come back into this life, and to the pollution
of corruptible bodies, as if the result of perfect purification
were only to make defilement desirable. For if perfect purification
effects the oblivion of all evils, and the oblivion of evils creates
a desire for a body in which the soul may again be entangled with
evils, then the supreme felicity will be the cause of infelicity, and
the perfection of wisdom the cause of foolishness, and the purest
cleansing the cause of defilement. And, however long the blessedness
of the soul last, it cannot be founded on truth, if, in order to
be blessed, it must be deceived. For it cannot be blessed unless
it be free from fear. But, to be free from fear, it must be under
the _false_ impression that it shall be always blessed,--the false
impression, for it is destined to be also at some time miserable.
How, then, shall the soul rejoice in truth, whose joy is founded on
falsehood? Porphyry saw this, and therefore said that the purified
soul returns to the Father, that it may never more be entangled in
the polluting contact with evil. The opinion, therefore, of some
Platonists, that there is a necessary revolution carrying souls away
and bringing them round again to the same things, is false. But, were
it true, what were the advantage of knowing it? Would the Platonists
presume to allege their superiority to us, because we were in this
life ignorant of what they themselves were doomed to be ignorant of
when perfected in purity and wisdom in another and better life, and
which they must be ignorant of if they are to be blessed? If it were
most absurd and foolish to say so, then certainly we must prefer
Porphyry's opinion to the idea of a circulation of souls through
constantly alternating happiness and misery. And if this is just,
here is a Platonist emending Plato, here is a man who saw what Plato
did not see, and who did not shrink from correcting so illustrious a
master, but preferred truth to Plato.