Iamblichus: On the Mysteries · 14 of 218 · tr. Thomas Taylor
Chapter Xa
After these things, you again subjoin another division for yourself, “ in which you separate the essences of the more excellent genera by the difference of passive and impassive .” But neither do I admit this division.
For no one of the more excellent genera is passive, nor yet impassive in such a way as to be contradistinguished from that which is passive; nor is naturally adapted to receive passions, but liberated from them through virtue, or some other worthy condition of being.
But because they are entirely exempt from the contrariety of action and passion; and because they are not at all adapted to suffer, and have essentially an 49 immutable firmness, on this account I place the impassive and the immutable in all the divine genera.
For consider, if you are willing, the last of divine natures, viz.
a soul purely liberated from bodies.
What does such a soul want with the generation which is in pleasure, or the restitution which is in it to a natural condition, since such a soul is above nature, and lives an unbegotten life?
Why, also, should it participate of the pain which leads to corruption and dissolves the harmony of the body, since it is beyond all body, and the nature which is divided about body, and is entirely separate from the harmony which descends from the soul into the body?
But neither is it in want of the passions which precede sensation: for neither is it detained in body, nor inclosed by it, so as to require corporeal organs, in order to apprehend certain other bodies which are external to these organs.
And, in short, being impartible, and abiding in one and the same form, and also being essentially incorporeal, and having no communication with a generated and passive body, it cannot suffer any thing either according to division, or according to a change in quality, nor can have any thing which is allied to any kind of mutation or passion.
But neither does the [rational] soul, when it 50 accedes to body, either itself suffer, or the reasons which it imparts to the body.
For these reasons are forms , and being simple and uniform, they receive no perturbation in themselves, and no departure from their proper mode of subsistence.
That which remains, therefore [or the participant of the rational soul], becomes the cause of suffering to the composite.
Cause, however, is not the same with its effect.
Hence, as soul is the first origin of generable and corruptible composite animals, but is itself by itself ingenerable and incorruptible; thus, also, though the participants of the soul suffer, and do not wholly [ i.
e.
truly] possess life and existence, but are complicated with the indefiniteness and diversity of matter, yet the soul is itself by itself immutable, as being essentially more excellent than that which suffers, and not as possessing impassivity, in a certain deliberate choice, which verges both to the impassive and the passive, nor as receiving an adscitious immutability in the participation of habit or power.
Since, therefore, we have demonstrated that it is impossible for even the last genus of the more excellent order of beings, viz.
the soul, to participate of suffering, how can it be proper to adapt this participation to dæmons and heroes, who are perpetual, and the attendants 51 of the Gods, and who always invariably preserve the same divine order, and never desert it?
For we know this indeed, that passion is something disorderly, confused, and unstable, never having any proper authority of its own, but being devoted to that by which it is detained, and to which it is subservient for the purposes of generation.
Themes
◆Apophatic Theologytheology
Describing the divine only by negation—God transcends all positive categories and concepts; the via negativa.
The text defines divine natures by negating categories like passivity and suffering.
Augustinian and Plotinian doctrine that evil has no positive being of its own but is a lack, distortion, or absence of the good — denying ontological dualism while preserving moral seriousness.
Passion is described as disorderly and unstable, lacking proper authority of its own.
The felt condition of exile from one's divine origin — Rumi's reed flute torn from its bed, Plotinus's 'we have forgotten,' the Gnostic forgetfulness; the affective wound that complements return_to_source and gives the return its motive.
The text contrasts the liberated soul with the composite body that suffers due to being divided about body.
The doctrine — central to Eastern Orthodox and Maximian theology — that the human person is progressively transformed into a partaker of the divine nature by grace, not merely justified or united in passing ecstasy.
The text describes the soul's liberation from bodies and participation in divine order as a state of being more excellent than that which suffers.