Select works of Plotinus ... and extracts from the treatise of Synesius on providence / Translated from the Greek. With an introduction containing the substance of Porphyry's Life of Plotinus. By Thomas Taylor.

Plotinus

Date:: 1817

Credit: Select works of Plotinus ... and extracts from the treatise of Synesius on providence / Translated from the Greek. With an introduction containing the substance of Porphyry's Life of Plotinus. By Thomas Taylor. Source: Wellcome Collection.

649/700 (page 555)

$spectator of what will follow, He, likewise, then learnt some particulars about Osiris which would the Gods from men,1 noxious angels % will alone remain, xvho being mingled with human nature will violently impel the mise¬ rable men [of that time\ to war, to rapine, to fraud, and to every thing contrary to the nature of the soul. Then the earth shall be in a preternatural state, the sea shall not be sailed in, nor shall the heavens accord with the course of the stars, nor the course of the stars continue in the heavens. Every divine voice shall be dumb by a necessary silence, the fruits of the earth shall be corrupted, nor shall the earth be prolific, and the air itself shall languish with a sorrowful torpor. These events and such an old age of the world as this shall take place, such irreligion, inordination, and unreasonableness of all good. When all these things shall happen, O Asclepius, thenlhat lord and father, the God who is first in power, and the one governor of the world, looking into the manners and voluntary deeds [of men], and by his will which is the benignity of God, resist¬ ing vices, and recalling the error arising from the corruption of all things, washing away likewise all malignity, by a de¬ luge, or consuming it by fire, or bringing it to an end by dis» ease and pestilence dispersed in different places, will recall the * Proclus finding that this was partially the case in his time, says prophetically in the Introduction to his MS. Commentary on the Par¬ menides of Plato, τούτον tyw φαιην ay τύπον φιλοσοφίας ιις ανθξωπους ιλθιιν cr’ ιυίξγισια των TijSt -^vy^wv, α,ντι των αγαλματων, αντί των ιΐξων, αντί της ύλης αγισταας άντης, και σωτήριας apyyyov τοις yi νυν ουσιν ανΟξωποις, και τοις %ισανθις γινησο(Λίνοις. i. e, tc With respect to this form of philosophy [viz. of the philosophy of Plato], I should say that it came to men for the benefit of terrestrial souls; that it might be instead of statues, in¬ stead of temples, instead of the whole of sacred institutions, and the leader of salvation both to the men that now are, and to those that shall exist hereafter” a i. e. Evil daemons.$