In two chapters of Enn. II.9 [33], Plotinus discusses the Gnostic idea that the creation of the world is due to the ‘decline’ (νεῦσις) of a principle that he variously calls Soul or Sophia.Footnote ¹ The identity of Plotinus' Gnostics is notoriously difficult to establish with any degree of precision; I can only note here that the idea of Sophia's ‘decline’ features in a number of extant Gnostic texts, such as those from Nag Hammadi and the Berlin Codex (Papyrus Berolinensis 8502), as a recent survey of the evidence by Poirier has demonstrated.Footnote ²

The first mention occurs in chapter 4 (lines 6–11): on the basis of the principle that creative power derives from the activity of contemplating a higher reality (discussed at length at III.8 [30]),Footnote ³ Plotinus here points out a fundamental incompatibility between the activity of creating and that of a ‘decline’. If the Soul ‘declines’, it must be in the sense that it loses contact with intelligible reality, presumably because Soul is an incorporeal entity and thus cannot literally tend towards a downward motion in space. But if the ‘decline’ of the Soul implies a kind of forgetfulness of the intelligibles, it must result in a weakening of its power, which will in fact make it less able, if not unable, to bring about the perceptible universe.

In chapter 10 of Enn. II.9, the discussion returns to the issue of the Soul's supposed decline, in a brief passage worth quoting in full (lines 19–26):

This second account of the decline of Sophia differs from the version in chapter 4 in some important respects.Footnote ⁷ First, Plotinus acknowledges that a distinction between Soul and Sophia may need to be drawn, although he subsequently continues to talk about Soul only. A second important difference between the present account of Sophia's fall and the one in chapter 4 is that individual souls, as ‘members of Sophia’, are now conceptually distinct from the Soul or Sophia. Lastly, the reference to an ‘image’ (εἴδωλον) created in matter appears to refer to the creation of a lower Sophia, who will in turn go on to create the Demiurge—an aspect omitted from the simpler presentation of Sophia's decline in chapter 4.Footnote ⁸

The main problem with this second account of Sophia's decline is that it seems to ascribe two beliefs to the Gnostics, which cannot easily be reconciled: (i) The Soul, which is related to, if not identical with, Sophia, declines, while other individual souls follow her by descending; (ii) The Soul, for whose sake the individual souls descended, did not descend, i.e. did not decline. Plainly, one and the same Soul cannot both decline and not decline at the same time, and so (i) and (ii) cannot be true together.Footnote ⁹

It might be argued that this apparent inconsistency ought to be accepted as evidence that the Gnostics contradicted themselves, or that, at any rate, Plotinus thought they did.Footnote ¹⁰ As we have seen, Plotinus argues, for example, that the Gnostic account of the Sophia's creation of the world forms an inconsistent set of beliefs, on the grounds that Sophia's decline away from intelligible reality should weaken any creative power she may have.Footnote ¹¹ But in the case of chapter 10, a mere six lines separate the assertion of the Soul's decline (in line 19: Ψυχὴν γὰρ εἰπόντες νεῦσαι κάτω) from the denial of the same (line 25: οἷον μὴ νεῦσαι)—yet what Plotinus goes on to criticize about this account is not its glaring inconsistency but a subtler tension between the Gnostics' view that the Soul ‘declines’ but does not ‘descend’ (in chapter 11, lines 1–6, which I discuss below). If a better explanation of this remarkable oversight on Plotinus' part can be offered, it is surely to be preferred.

The apparent contradiction inherent in Plotinus' account of the decline of Sophia, then, should not simply be accepted, but needs to be resolved in some form. How is this to be done? One possible solution, suggested by Karin Alt, would be to imagine two stages of descent.Footnote ¹² On this proposal, chapter 4 of the anti-Gnostic treatise describes the fall of Sophia in so far as she exits the Pleroma, while chapter 10 is concerned with the creation of the world properly speaking, which falls to the Demiurge rather than to Sophia. Thus, what is affirmed in chapter 4 would be a partial decline of Sophia in her fall away from the Pleroma, and what is denied in chapter 10 a further decline towards matter on her part.

This suggestion, to which I will refer as ‘the two-stage theory’ in what follows, is ingenious, but not supported by the text. For a start, chapter 4 from the outset connects the making of the world with the fall of Sophia, without offering any hint that the creation of the world takes place at a later stage in which only the Demiurge is immediately involved. Chapter 4 unambiguously assumes that, on account of her fall, Sophia is the agent responsible for the world's creation (compare, for example, lines 7–8: εἰ δὲ ἔνευσε [sc. ἡ Ψυχή], τῷ ἐπιλελῆσθαι δηλονότι τῶν ἐκεῖ· εἰ δὲ ἐπελάθετο, πῶς δημιουργεῖ;).

When we turn to chapter 10, textual support for the two-stage theory is similarly lacking. It is true that, in this chapter, only the illumination of matter is directly tied to the decline of the Soul, while the Demiurge is concerned with the production of further images. Here too, however, Plotinus attributes to the Gnostics the view that the Soul ‘declined’, just as we have seen in chapter 4, while other—presumably particular—souls (so-called ‘members of Sophia’) in their turn ‘descended’, taking on human bodies (lines 19–23). What is clear from these lines, and chapter 10 generally, is that Plotinus in fact makes two distinctions that cannot be reduced to each other: he distinguishes (A) two stages in the making of the universe (the illumination of matter by Sophia/Soul, and the creation of images by the Demiurge), yet he also clearly separates (B) the ‘decline’ of Sophia/Soul when it ‘illuminates’ matter from the ‘descent’ of particular souls when they become embodied.

In sum, the two-stage theory is right to look for a relevant distinction in chapter 10 that would help us resolve the apparent contradiction in Plotinus' account, but it goes wrong in selecting the particular distinction between two ways of making the world (A), rather than the one that has a real bearing on the issue of the Soul's decline and non-decline (B). I propose that, if we take seriously the difference between ‘decline’ and ‘descent’ that must have been part of the Gnostic cosmogony, Plotinus' presentation can be rendered more comprehensible. The phrase οἷον μὴ νεῦσαι (‘that is, [sc. the Soul] did not decline’) in chapter 10, line 25, which so flagrantly contradicts the views that Plotinus attributes to the Gnostics elsewhere in the treatise (for example at 4.6–11, 10.19–26, 11.2–3), should be considered as a misleading gloss.

Here is how it may have come about: at the beginning of chapter 11 (lines 1–6) of Enn. II.9, Plotinus attacks the Gnostic distinction between ‘declining’ and ‘descending’:

In response to the Gnostic view, Plotinus presents a dilemma: if the Soul ‘illuminates’ the darkness, and the light travels forth from it, then it would have neither descended nor declined, but remains above the lower realm. But if ‘declining’ means that the Soul is spatially located next to what it illuminates, then it has also descended. Either way, the idea that the Soul could decline without descending is proved to be impossible.

Someone persuaded by Plotinus' reasoning at the beginning of chapter 11, that denying the Soul's descent implies denying its decline also, would naturally have explicated μὴ κατελθεῖν with οἷον μὴ νεῦσαι. But despite Plotinus' polemic, the two terms ‘decline’ and ‘descent’ are in fact quite separate in the Gnostics' mind: it is only the individual souls that take on bodies which descend, while the Soul declines and illuminates matter, but does not itself ‘descend‘—in other words, does not place itself into the material realm or become embodied, even though its activity is directed towards it in so far as it produces a ‘material image’ in the darkness (that is, the lower Sophia).Footnote ¹³ Once we realize that the apparent contradiction in Plotinus' report of Sophia's decline is entirely due to the misleading words οἷον μὴ νεῦσαι in chapter 10, line 25, we have a strong reason to ignore or excise it. It is most likely a gloss by a later editor, who may have been impressed by the lines from chapter 11 quoted just above—unless we assume that Plotinus himself is its author, in which case he reveals once more the impatience with which he views the (for him) pointless distinctions in his opponents' writings, much to the detriment of our understanding of the ideas that he attacks.Footnote *