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Salutius

4. On the Gods and the World

Edited by Paolo Bagnato

VIII. THE INTELLECT AND THE SOUL

1. The intellect is a power inferior to the Essence but superior to the soul, since it receives its being from the Essence and perfects the soul1, as the sun does with the eyes2.

Among the categories of souls some are rational and immortal, others are irrational and mortal3: the former derive from the primary Gods and the latter from the secondary Gods.

2. First we must inquire what the soul is. The soul is that which differentiates animate beings from inanimate things, distinguishing them by movement, perception, imaginative faculty and intelligence. Therefore, the irrational soul is the sensitive and imaginative life. The rational soul, guiding sensation and imagination, uses reason; instead, the irrational soul is

subjected to the passions of the body: in fact, it desires and becomes angry in an irrational way. On the contrary, the rational soul despises the body according to reason and fights against the irrational soul: if the former prevails it generates Virtue, but if it is defeated, Vice is produced.

3. The rational soul is necessarily immortal, because it knows the Gods – nothing that is mortal knows the immortal -, it despises human affairs as foreign; moreover, since it is incorporeal, it has an opposite nature to that of the bodies4: for it errs when bodies are beautiful and young, while it flourishes when bodies are old. In addition to this, every virtuous soul uses the intellect, but nobody can produce the intellect: how could that which is irrational produce the intellect?5

4. The soul, though it uses the body as an instrument6, is not in it, just as the builder is not in his engines7; although many engines move without being touched. It is not surprising that the soul is often deceived because of the body: for even the arts cannot be effective if the instruments are damaged.

IX. PROVIDENCE, FATE AND FORTUNE

1. The providence of the Gods can be known from these things: where would the order of the World come from if there were no ordering principle? Where would the purpose of the generation of all things come from, such as the irrational soul so that there is sensation, or the rational soul so that there is order on earth?

2. But Providence can also be known from nature: the eyes were made transparent in order to see, the nose is above the mouth in order to recognize bad smells, the front teeth are sharp for cutting, while the internal ones are large for mincing food; we see that in all things everything is done according to reason, it is impossible that Providence is found in the last things and not in the first. Even the oracles in the World and the healings of bodies show the good Providence of the Gods.

3. It must be considered that the Gods take care of the World without deliberation8 and without effort, but as those bodies that possess their own power do what they do just by existing – as the sun that illuminates and warms just by existing – so, even more, the Providence of the Gods manifests itself without effort for the good of what it takes care of. In this way the theories of the epicureans9 are contradicted, who in fact say that the divine neither takes care of its own affairs nor of those of others.

4. This is the incorporeal Providence of the Gods towards bodies and souls. But that which comes from bodies and is in bodies is different from this Providence and is called Fate, since its concatenation is manifested mostly through bodies. For this reason, the science of mathematics was discovered. Therefore, it is reasonable and true that human affairs and especially the corporeal nature are administrated not only by the Gods but also by the divine bodies10: therefore, reason discovers that health and sickness, success and misfortune originate from there according to merit11.

5. But to attribute injustices and misfortunes to Fate is to consider ourselves good and the Gods bad; unless, with regard to the World and to what is according to nature, one means to say that everything is born inclined to the good but that a bad education or a weak nature changes for the worse the goods that come from Fate, just as the sun, which is beneficial to all, is instead harmful to those who have sore eyes or a fever. For why else do the Massagetae eat their fathers, the Jews circumcise themselves and the Persians care to have many children?12

6. How can one say that Saturn (Cronus) and Mars (Ares) are harmful and then, on the contrary, judge them good, attributing to them philosophy and royalty, military skill and accumulation of wealth? But if we speak of trines and squares13, it’s absurd to claim that the virtue of man remains the same everywhere, but the Gods change according to their position; furthermore, the good or bad birth of ancestors shows that not all things depend on the stars but that they instruct only in some parts14. For how could events preceding birth, derive from birth?

7. Just as Providence and Destiny exist for peoples, for cities and even for each man, so also Fortune: regarding this we speak next. Fortune is thought to be the power of the Gods to dispose different events towards the good even against predictions: for this reason, cities benefit from honouring the Goddess15 publicly; for every city finds itself in various difficulties.

The strength of Fortune depends on the Moon, since nothing that comes from Fortune happens above the Moon.

8. If evil people prosper and are happy while good people are poor, we should not be surprised: the former do everything for riches, the latter do nothing; moreover, the success of evil people cannot erase their evilness, while for good people, Virtue alone is enough.

X. VIRTUE AND VICE

1. The discourses on Virtue and Vice again require those on the soul: for when the irrational soul enters into the bodies and immediately produces desire and passion, the rational soul arranges them and makes the soul divided into three parts, namely rational, spirited and appetitive or passionate. The virtue of the rational soul is wisdom, of the spirited is courage, of the appetitive is temperance and of the whole soul is justice: it is in fact necessary that the rational soul choose what is appropriate, that the spirited soul obeying reason despises evident evils, that the appetitive soul pursues not apparent pleasures but those according to reason.

2. When one has these things, life becomes just: for justice in possessions is a great part of Virtue; all these virtues can be observed in educated people, while in the ignorant one finds someone who is courageous, but also unjust16, someone who is temperate but foolish, someone who is wise but dissolute; therefore it is not proper to call these things virtues when they are devoid of reason and imperfect and when they are present in irrational people.

3. Vice is to be considered through contrary things17: the vice of the rational soul is foolishness, of the spirited one is fear, of the appetitive one is intemperance and of the whole soul is injustice. Virtues arise from right government, from being raised and educated well; vices instead arise from opposite things.

  1. Here the Chain of Being is displayed, in which each element is caused by the previous one which causes and “nourishes” (to use Iamblichus’ terminology) the next one: first of all there’s the First Cause, the uncaused supersubstantial Good, and then there’s the Being that produces the intellect which in turn causes and “nourishes” the soul.[↩]
  2. The sun, shining and illuminating, allows the eyes to see and in the same way the intellect illuminates the soul making it intelligent, that is, similar to itself.[↩]
  3. Both the rational and the irrational soul are present in man.[↩]
  4. See also Plotinus (Enneads IV.7.10), on the affinity of the rational soul with the divine.[↩]
  5. Materialist evolutionary theories are thus denied.[↩]
  6. The conception of the body as an instrument of the soul, true identity of man, dates back to Plato (Alcibiades 129c-e) and is also found in Plotinus (Enneads I.1.3).[↩]
  7. The soul is incorporeal and, for this reason, it cannot be contained (i.e. limited) in any place, since, as Salutius already told us in chapter II, being in a place is a characteristic of the bodies. Plotinus (Enneads IV.3.9), speaking of the universal soul, uses the image of the sea and the fishing net: the bodies are immersed in the soul, just as the net is immersed in the sea and does not contain it within itself. For the same reason Kṛṣṇa, in Bhagavad Gītā IX.4, after saying that He pervades everything, emphasizes that He does not dwell within beings: this statement, which might seem to be in contrast with both the initial part of the verse and with other verses in which Kṛṣṇa states that He is in the heart of all things (X.20; XIII.15; XV.15), is to emphasize the omnipervasiveness of the Lord who cannot be contained (and therefore limited) by anything. We certainly do not want to suggest in any way that the soul in Salutius has the same status of Kṛṣṇa in the Gītā, but only to make clear, using two different contexts, how the apparent contradiction of the omnipervasiveness of what is incorporeal is reconciled with the fact of not being contained in any place. On this contemporaneity of transcendence and immanence see also Plotinus (Enneads III.9.4); Proclus, Elements of Theology 98; Porphyry, Sentences 31: “God is everywhere because He is nowhere, the intellect is everywhere because it is nowhere, the soul is everywhere because it is nowhere.”[↩]
  8. The Providence of the Gods is without deliberation because if it had a goal it would mean that it would want to obtain something that it does not have. Pūjya Śri Candraśekharendra Sarasvatī Svāmī, Saundaryalaharī, Mumbai, Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, 2001, page 135: “It would be wrong again to say that she performs the function of creation to derive joy from it. There is nothing she has to obtain, nothing she has to attain. She is fullness, not wanting for anything. If such a one performs the act of creation it means that she does so in the same way as we play about for no reason in the ecstasy of our happiness. […] There is no reason behind it, nor is the sport conducted with the expectation of any fruit or reward.”[↩]
  9. Epicureanism was a materialist school of philosophy, often compared to Buddhism, that, because of its degeneration, was considered atheistic and impious by the Platonists. Among other things, this school claimed that the highest good was pleasure and that truth could be established exclusively through the senses.[↩]
  10. That is, the celestial bodies.[↩]
  11. Not everything is governed exclusively by Destiny: man has a certain degree of freedom without which nothing would make sense.[↩]
  12. Salutius mentions these examples to demonstrate how a bad education affects people’s behaviour. There are various possible hypotheses regarding the behaviour of the Persians. If the interpretation of our translation is correct, it is likely that Salutius judged having numerous offspring as negative because it would mean excessive attention to the multiplicity and to becoming. Others instead see this as a reference to incest.[↩]
  13. That is, if we say that the positive or negative influence of the planets depends on their position.[↩]
  14. Salutius supports the doctrine according to which the stars do not influence the life of man but merely indicate the development of some of its parts.[↩]
  15. Fortune was considered a Goddess.[↩]
  16. Quote from the Protagoras (329e), a dialogue by Plato in which, among other things, is addressed the relationship between virtues.[↩]
  17. To those said regarding Virtue.[↩]