On the Immortality of the Soul

The manifold intellect according to Themistius, from which the immortality of the soul is deduced.

manifoldly, and of an appropriate condition by which the thing which receives admits the nature of the received thing. For if rightly understood, these things could have pertained to this: that he might learn that the intellect has, by its own nature, innate principles; nevertheless, he wanted it to be illuminated, and thus in a certain way to be passive, and so to be perfected, even though it is also perfected by itself, insofar as awakening and turning itself toward the higher intellect with which it is joined, it receives it as a perfection. This is the opinion of Theophrastus and Lydus concerning the manifold intellect, although Lydus is the authority for the fact that the entire rational life was also called by the name of "intellect" by Aristotle and Theophrastus. [As for] Themistius, the intellect of power itself—which he wanted to be so acted upon by intelligibles that it was perfected and completed, and which he had said was neither a body nor used a body as an instrument—he affirmed was the place and receptacle of forms, and yet pertained to the soul of man, to which likewise the active intellect pertained, so that he thought these two intellects were two differences of the human soul; and he asserted at length that this one makes all things, while that one becomes all things, and both are one thing, in the manner of form and matter by which one thing is constituted. Then he plainly decreed that the soul of man is immortal, which is nothing other than the "to be" of man, and he decided according to Aristotle's opinion that the active intellect—which he had said above was one with the intellect of power—is the man. However, he was by no means silent that men do not remember after death because of the passive intellect, common and mixed, which is abolished when the body is corrupted; those who do not separate this from the possible intellect involve themselves in inextricable snares. For that [passive intellect] in Themistius is the sensible phantasy, gifted with the name of "intellect"; but the possible intellect, which also has the name "of power," is properly the intellect, not bound to an organ; and to express this more clearly, he repeats several things from the first volume and also from the second, so that he might show that what he had discussed in the third coincided: namely, that although the intellect is immortal, it does not remember after death, the passive intellect which it used as a ministry having been corrupted. For the intellect does not use sight or hearing directly for understanding, but the phantasm, deprived of which it does not use [the intellect] in that manner. Later indeed he mentions Theophrastus and refutes the opinions of those who, according to Aristotle, had thought the intellect...