Stars not the cause of evil.
Nor can the gods or stars be said to cause evil on earth, since their influence is affected by other forces which mingle with it. Like the earlier Jewish Platonist, Philo, Plotinus denies that the planets are the cause of evil or change their own natures from good to evil as they enter new signs of the zodiac or take up different positions in relation to one another. He argues that they are not changeable beings, that they would not willingly injure men, or, if it is contended that they are mere bodies and have no wills, he replies that then they can produce only corporeal effects. He then solves the problem of evil in the usual manner by ascribing it to matter, in which reason and the celestial force are received unevenly, as light is broken and refracted in passing through water.[1362]
Against the astrology of the Gnostics.
Plotinus repeats much the same line of argument in his book against the Gnostics, where he protests against “the tragedy of terrors which they think exists in the spheres of the universe,”[1363] and the tyranny they ascribe to the heavenly bodies. His belief is that the celestial spheres are in perfect harmony both with the universe as a whole and with our globe, completing the whole and constituting a great part of it, supplying beauty and order. And often they are to be regarded as signs rather than causes of the future. Their natures are constant, but the sequence of events may be varied by chance circumstances, such as different hours of nativities, place of residence, and the dispositions of individual souls. Amid all this diversity one must also expect both good and evil, but not on that account call nature or the stars either evil themselves or the cause of evil.
Fate and free-will.
As the allusion just made in the preceding paragraph to “the dispositions of individual souls” shows, Plotinus made a distinction between the extent of the control exercised by the stars over inanimate, animate, and rational beings. The stars signify all things in the sensible world but the soul is free unless it slips and is stained by the body and so comes under their control. Fate or the force of the stars is like a wind which shakes and tosses the ship of the body in which the soul makes its passage. Man as a part of the world does some things and suffers many things in accordance with destiny. Some men become slaves to this world and to external influences, as if they were bewitched. Others look to their inner souls and strive to free themselves from the sensible world and to rise above demonic nature and all fate of nativities and all necessity of this world, and to live in the intelligible world above[1364].
Summary of the attitude of Plotinus to astrology.
Thus Plotinus arrives at practically what was to be the usual Christian position in the middle ages regarding the influence of the stars, maintaining the freedom of the human will and yet allowing a large field to astrological prediction. He is evidently more concerned to combat the notion that the stars cause evil or are to be feared as evil powers than he is to combat the belief in their influence and significations. His speaking of the stars both as signs and causes in a way doubles the possibility of prediction from them. If he attacked the language used by astrologers of the planets, and perhaps to a certain extent the technique of their art, he supported astrology by reconciling the existence of evil and of human freedom with a great influence of the stars and by his emphasis upon the importance of the figures made by the movements of the heavenly bodies above any purely physical effects of their bodies as such. Thus he reinforced the conception of occult virtue, always one of the chief pillars, if not the chief support, of occult science and magic. On the other hand, men were not likely to reform a language and technique sanctioned by as great an astronomer as Ptolemy merely because a Neo-Platonist questioned its propriety.
Porphyry’s Letter to Anebo.
Although Plotinus denied that diseases were due to demons, we once heard him speak of “demonic nature,” and one of the Enneads discusses Each man’s own demon. Here, however, the discussion is limited to the power presiding in each human soul, and nothing is said of magic. For the connection of demons with magic and for the art of theurgy we must turn to the writings of Porphyry and Iamblichus, and especially to The Letter to Anebo of Porphyry, who lived from about 233 to 305, and the reply thereto of the master Abammon, a work which is otherwise known as Liber de mysteriis[1365]. The attribution of the latter work to Iamblichus, who died about 330, is based upon an anonymous assertion prefixed to an ancient manuscript of Proclus and upon the fact that Proclus himself quotes a passage from the De mysteriis as the words of Iamblichus. This attribution has been questioned, but if not by Iamblichus, the work seems to be at least by some disciple of his with similar views[1366]. Other works of Iamblichus are largely philosophical and mathematical; among the chief works of Porphyry, apart from his literary work in connection with Plotinus, were his commentaries on Aristotle and fifteen books against the Christians.