On the Immortality of the Soul

...is a part, as we were saying above, or even the actual conjunction of parts, for which reason it is able to survive the body through that very incorporeal nature. Moreover, not long after, Simplicius concludes thus: "so, therefore, the soul, being in itself incorporeal and immaterial, although attached to the body and having followed after matter, is not corrupted; for it would be corrupted most of all in old age." The same man also posits the mind or intellect (the nous), which he considers to be the rational soul, concerning which he relates in his commentary on the third book On the Soul that throughout the entire course of that third book, Aristotle speaks about the rational soul, which he calls both intellect and reason, and in which there is both the passive and the active intellect—which he [Simplicius] says is essential to the soul. He determines that it is so proved by Aristotle, so that from this you may easily perceive that those things which Aristotle had said somewhat obscurely, and Theophrastus not very clearly, and which had gradually received some light from [Priscian] the Lydian and Themistius, were illuminated by Simplicius, even while he was occupied with other matters.

In addition to these things, Simplicius posits another intellect better than the soul and participated in by it. For there is (to say in Latin what he says in Greek) a certain proper intellect participated in by each and every soul; he asserts that this also is better than the substance of the soul, yet connate and united to the soul. Furthermore, in the first book On the Soul, he cites another unparticipated and separate intellect of souls, which he calls an indivisible substance, and the best life, and the highest operation, and the very object of understanding, and intellection, and mind, and eternity, and the only perfection, and the end, and the cause of all things—which someone might call the active intellect, as some have indeed thought, since Aristotle considered the active intellect to possess those very prerogatives. And for this reason, they also called it God, prompted by that poorly understood opinion of Aristotle: that the active intellect was said "to make all things." Not only does Ammonius reject these people, teaching that in these books no mention of God is made, but Sophonias the Paraphrast also openly testifies that theological matters are not treated in the books On the Soul; and he teaches that the active intellect "makes all things" not in the sense that it effects all things (which belongs to God alone), but rather that it makes the potential intellect capable of receiving all things; and in this way [it makes] all intelligible things—not simply and absolutely (for some things are intelligible by their own nature), but material materialia