MacKenna-Plotinus: bodily forms

Another school makes it incorporeal: among these, not all hold the theory of one only Matter; some of them while they maintain the one Matter, in which the first school believes, the foundation of bodily forms, admit another, a prior, existing in the divine-sphere, the base of the Ideas there and of the unembodied Beings. Enneads   II,4,1

But that argument would equally cancel the Matter present in the bodily forms of this realm: body without shape has never existed, always body achieved and yet always the two constituents. We discover these two - Matter and Idea - by sheer force of our reasoning which distinguishes continually in pursuit of the simplex, the irreducible, working on, until it can go no further, towards the ultimate in the subject of enquiry. And the ultimate of every partial-thing is its Matter, which, therefore, must be all darkness since light is a Reason-Principle. The Mind, too, as also a Reason-Principle, sees only in each particular object the Reason-Principle lodging there; anything lying below that it declares to lie below the light, to be therefore a thing of darkness, just as the eye, a thing of light, seeks light and colours which are modes of light, and dismisses all that is below the colours and hidden by them, as belonging to the order of the darkness, which is the order of Matter. Enneads II,4,5

Emancipated Souls, for the whole period of their sojourn there above, have transcended the Spirit-nature and the entire fatality of birth and all that belongs to this visible world, for they have taken up with them that Hypostasis of the Soul in which the desire of earthly life is vested. This Hypostasis may be described as the distributable Soul, for it is what enters bodily forms and multiplies itself by this division among them. But its distribution is not a matter of magnitudes; wherever it is present, there is the same thing present entire; its unity can always be reconstructed: when living things - animal or vegetal - produce their constant succession of new forms, they do so in virtue of the self-distribution of this phase of the Soul, for it must be as much distributed among the new forms as the propagating originals are. In some cases it communicates its force by permanent presence the life principle in plants for instance - in other cases it withdraws after imparting its virtue - for instance where from the putridity of dead animal or vegetable matter a multitudinous birth is produced from one organism. Enneads III,4,6

In that realm it has also vision, through the Intellectual-Principle, of The Good which does not so hold to itself as not to reach the soul; what intervenes between them is not body and therefore is no hindrance - and, indeed, where bodily forms do intervene there is still access in many ways from the primal to the tertiaries. Enneads IV,4,4

Where we read that the souls or stars stand to their bodily forms as the All to the material forms within it - for these starry bodies are declared to be members of the soul’s circuit - we are given to understand that the star-souls also enjoy the blissful condition of transcendence and immunity that becomes them. Enneads IV,8,2

Heraclitus  , with his sense of bodily forms as things of ceaseless process and passage, knows the One as eternal and intellectual. Enneads V,1,9