That's an excellent point re. the Sassanids. Persian history is a blank spot for me as it is, I think, for many Westerners (or at least, Americans), and there's a lot that we miss because of it.
But as for this:
Imagine trying to shout firebrand sermons from the Enneads
Imagine the following, in the fire-and-brimstone voice of a Southern preacher:
"The bodily Kind, in that it partakes of Matter is an evil thing. What form is in bodies is an untrue-form: they are without life: by their own natural disorderly movement they make away with each other; they are hindrances to the soul in its proper Act; in their ceaseless flux they are always slipping away from Being.
"Soul, on the contrary, since not every Soul is evil, is not an evil Kind.
"What, then, is the evil Soul?
"It is, we read, the Soul that has entered into the service of that in which soul-evil is implanted by nature, in whose service the unreasoning phase of the Soul accepts evil- unmeasure, excess and shortcoming, which bring forth licentiousness, cowardice and all other flaws of the Soul, all the states, foreign to the true nature, which set up false judgements, so that the Soul comes to name things good or evil not by their true value but by the mere test of like and dislike."
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2022-08-31 10:02 pm (UTC)But as for this:
Imagine the following, in the fire-and-brimstone voice of a Southern preacher:
"The bodily Kind, in that it partakes of Matter is an evil thing. What form is in bodies is an untrue-form: they are without life: by their own natural disorderly movement they make away with each other; they are hindrances to the soul in its proper Act; in their ceaseless flux they are always slipping away from Being.
"Soul, on the contrary, since not every Soul is evil, is not an evil Kind.
"What, then, is the evil Soul?
"It is, we read, the Soul that has entered into the service of that in which soul-evil is implanted by nature, in whose service the unreasoning phase of the Soul accepts evil- unmeasure, excess and shortcoming, which bring forth licentiousness, cowardice and all other flaws of the Soul, all the states, foreign to the true nature, which set up false judgements, so that the Soul comes to name things good or evil not by their true value but by the mere test of like and dislike."