§1.6.5. We should next ask those who are indeed enamoured of the beauties not available to the senses: ‘What state are you in regarding the practices said to be beautiful and in regard to beautiful ways of being in the world and to self-controlled characters and, generally, to products of virtue or dispositions, I mean the beauty of souls?’27 And ‘When you see 5 your own “interior beauty”,28 what do you feel?’ And ‘Can you describe the frenzied29 and excited state you are in and your longing to be united with yourselves,30 when extricating yourselves from your bodies?’ For this is how those who are truly enamoured feel. But what is it that makes them feel this way? It is not shapes or colours or some magnitude, but rather they feel this way about soul, it 10 being itself ‘without colour’31 and having self-control that is also without colour and the rest of the ‘splendour’32 of virtues. You feel this way whenever you see in yourselves or someone else greatness of soul or a just character or sheer self-control or the awe-inspiring visage of courage33 or dignity and reserve circling around a calm and unaffected 15 disposition with divine intellect shining on them all. We then love and are attracted to these qualities, but what do we mean when we say that they are beautiful? For they are real and appear to us so, and no one who has ever seen them says anything other than that they are real Beings. What does‘real Beings’ mean? In fact, it means 20 that they are beautiful Beings. But the argument still needs to show why Beings have made the soul an object of love. What is it that shines on all the virtues like a light? Would you like to consider the opposites, the ugly things that come to be in the soul, and contrast them with the beauties? For perhaps a consideration of what ugliness is and why it appears as such 25 would contribute to our achieving what we are seeking. Let there be a soul that is actually ugly,34 one that is licentious and unjust, filled with all manner of appetites and every type of dread, mired in fear due to its cowardice and in envy due to its pettiness, thinking that everything it can actually think of is mortal and base, deformed in every way, a lover of impure pleasures, that is, one who lives a life in which corporeal 30 pleasures are measured by their vileness. Shall we not say that, just as in the case of something beautiful added to the soul, this very vileness supervenes on the soul, and both harms it and makes it impure and ‘mixed with much evil’,35 no longer having a life or sense-perceptions that are pure, but rather living a murky life by an evil adulteration that includes much death in it, no longer seeing what a soul should see, no longer even being allowed to remain in itself due to its always being dragged to the exterior and downward into darkness?36 40 This is indeed what I regard as an impure soul, dragged in every direction by its chains towards whatever it happens to perceive with its senses, with much of what belongs to the body adulterating it, deeply implicating itself with the material element and, taking that element into itself due to that adulteration that only makes it worse, it exchanges the form it has for another. It is as if someone fell into mud or slime and 45 the beauty he had is no longer evident, whereas what is seen is what he smeared on himself from the mud or slime. The ugliness that has actually been added to him has come from an alien source, and his job, if indeed he is again to be beautiful, is to wash it off and to be clean as he was before. We would be speaking correctly in saying that the soul indeed becomes ugly by a mixture or adulteration and by an inclination in the 50 direction of the body and matter. And this is ugliness for a soul; not being pure or uncorrupted like gold, but filled up with the earthly. If someone removes that, only the gold is left, and it is beautiful, isolated from other things and being just what it is itself. Indeed, in the identical 55 manner, the soul – being isolated from appetites which it acquires because of that body with which it associates too much – when it is separated from other affections and is purified of what it has that is corporeal, remains just what it is when it has put aside all the ugliness that comes from that other nature. §1.6.6. For it is indeed the case, as the ancient doctrine37 has it, that self-control and courage and every virtue is a purification and is wisdom itself. For this reason, the mysteries correctly offer the enigmatic saying 5 that one who has not been purified will lie in Hades in slime, because one who is not pure likes slime due to his wickedness. They are actually like pigs that, with unclean bodies, delight in such a thing.38 What would true self-control be, besides not having anything to do with the pleasures of the body and fleeing them as impure and as not belonging to one who is pure? And what is courage but the absence of 10 fear of death? But death is the separation of the soul from the body.39 And this is not feared by one who longs to be alone. And greatness of soul40 is actually contempt for the things here below. And wisdom is the intellection that consists in a turning away from the things below, leading the soul to the things above.
The soul, then, when it is purified, becomes form,41 and an expressed principle, and entirely incorporeal and intellectual and wholly divine, which is the source of beauty and of all things that 15 have a kinship with it. Soul, then, being borne up to Intellect, becomes even more beautiful. And Intellect and the things that come from Intellect are soul’s beauty, since they belong to it, that is, they are not alien to it, because it is then really soul alone. For this reason, it is correctly said that goodness and being beautiful for the soul consist in 20 ‘being assimilated to god’,42 because it is in the intelligible world that Beauty is found as well as the fate of the rest of Beings. Or rather, Beings are what Beauty is and ugliness is the other nature, primary evil itself, so that for god ‘good’ and ‘beautiful’ are identical, or rather the Good and Beauty are identical.43 In a similar way, then, we should seek to discover that which is beautiful and good and the ugly and evil. And first we should posit 25 Beauty,44 which is the Good from which Intellect comes, which is itself identical with Beauty. And Soul is beautiful by Intellect. Other things are beautiful as soon as they are shaped by Soul, including examples of beauty in actions and in practices. Moreover, bodies that are said to be beautiful are so as soon as Soul makes them so. For 30 inasmuch as it is divine and, in a way, a part of Beauty, it makes all that it grasps and masters beautiful insofar as it is possible for them to partake of Beauty.
§5.8.3. There is, then, an expressed principle in nature that is the archetype of corporeal beauty, and the expressed principle in soul is more beautiful than the one in nature, and its source.10 This is really clearest in the virtuous soul which is already advanced in beauty. For 5 adorning hissoul and providing light coming from a greater light, which is primarily beautiful, it makes us, on the basis of its presence in the soul, infer the nature of the beauty that is prior to it, a beauty that in this case does not come into another thing, but remains in itself. For this reason, it is not an expressed principle, but the producer of the first expressed principle of beauty in the soul in its capacity as a material principle.11 This producer is Intellect, which is always Intellect and never not 10 Intellect, because it does not come to itself from outside itself. What, then, could someone take as an image of it, for all of these would be drawn from that which is inferior to it? Indeed, the image must come from Intellect, so that one is not grasping it through an image, but in a way like a piece of gold that stands for all gold, and if that which is taken is not pure, to purify it in deed or in word, showing that the piece 15 is not entirely gold, but the gold is only this bit in the entire mass. In the same way, we may start from the purified intellect in us or, if you wish, from that of the gods, and the nature of intellect in them. For all the gods are dignified and beautiful and their beauty is extraordinary.12 But what is it that makes them so? 20 In fact, it is Intellect, I mean Intellect that is more active in them, so that it is visible. It is certainly not because their bodies are beautiful. For those that do have bodies, it is not this that makes them to be gods, but these are gods, too, because of their intellects. Indeed, they are beautiful insofar as they are gods. And it is certainly not the case that they sometimes act wisely and sometimes not; they always act wisely in unaffected 25 and steady and pure intellect, and they know all things and are acquainted not with human affairs but with their own divine affairs, and those things that Intellect sees.13 Among the gods, some are in heaven and – since they are at leisure – they are always contemplating, as if from afar, the things that are in that intelligible heaven above their heads. But other gods are in that intelli- 30 gible heaven,14 namely, those that have their dwelling on it and in it, dwelling in everything which is there in that heaven – for everything in the intelligible world is heaven; the earth is heaven and the sea and the animals and plants and human beings, everything of that heaven is heavenly.15 The gods that are in it do not disrespect human beings or 35 anything else that is in the intelligible world, but just because the things are in the intelligible world, they travel across the region there and are always resting in place for in the intelligible world it is ‘the life of ease’,16 and truth is their mother and nurse and Substantiality and nourishment – and they see all things, ‘not those to which becoming belongs’17 but those to which Substantiality belongs, and they see themselves in others. For 5 everything is transparent and there is nothing dark or opaque, but every god is visible to all the others through and through, for it is light that is visible to light. For every god has everything in himself, and, again, he sees everything in another, so that everything is everywhere and all is all and each is all and the glory is unlimited. For each of them 10 is great since even the small is great. And the sun in the intelligible world is all the stars, and all the stars are, again, the sun and all the other stars. Something different stands out in each, even if everything is manifest in all.18 The motion is also pure, for the mover does not disturb its moving by being different from the motion. And the stability is not disturbed because it is not mixed with that which is not stable.19 And that which 15 is beautiful is beautiful because it is not in that which is not beautiful. Each one travels on land which is in a way not foreign, but its essence infuses every place it occupies, and the place from which it came runs along with it going in a way upward; and it is not the case that it is one thing, and the place another. For Intellect is the substrate, that is, 20 Intellect itself. It is as if one thought that in the case of our visible heaven, being luminous, the light which came from it gave birth to the stars. But in the sensible world one part does not come from another, and each part would just be itself alone, whereas in the intelligible world each always comes from the whole and each is at once also all. For it 25 looks like a part, but sharp sight sees into it as whole; it is in a way as if sight were like that of Lynceus, who in the myth was said to be able to look into the interior of the earth, an enigmatic reference to eyes in the intelligible world.20 There is no satiety or weariness of the contemplation in the intelligible world so that they cease to contemplate. For there is no emptiness 30 such that when they are full, the end would be reached; nor is one different from the other such that what satisfies one does not satisfy the other. There is no weariness in the intelligible world. But there is a lack of fullness there inasmuch as the fullness does not make them disdain that which has produced the fullness. For in seeing one sees more, and observing one’s own unlimitedness, and the objects one sees, one follows one’s own nature. And no one’s life is wearying when it is 35 pure. What could weary someone living the best life? This life is wisdom, wisdom that is not furnished by means of calculative reasoning, because it was always there omitting nothing that would require being sought. But it is the first, and is not derived from another. Its substantiality itself is wisdom; it does not first exist, and next become wise. Because of this, no wisdom is 40 greater, and scientific understanding itself here is enthroned with Intellect, being revealed together with it, as they say that Justice is symbolically enthroned beside Zeus.21 All such things in the intelligible world are in a way statues that can see themselves, so that it is a sight seen by ‘supremely happy spectators’.22 One could, then, glimpse the magnitude and the power of the wisdom 45 that it has with itself and that has produced all the Beings, and all the Beings that followed from it, and it is itself the Beings, and they came to be with it, and were one together with it, and the Being there was wisdom. We did not, however, achieve comprehension because we have 50 supposed that types of scientific understanding are a matter of theorems and a nexus of propositions; this is not true, even in areas of scientific understanding in the sensible world. But if someone wants to dispute these matters, let them be set aside for now. Regarding scientific understanding in the intelligible world, which Plato actually glimpsed and said, ‘it is not scientific understanding that becomes different as it knows different things’23 – though he left it to us to investigate and discover what this means, if indeed we are to 55 be judged worthy of our name24 – perhaps it would be better to start from the beginning now.
§5.8.5. for, not for everything that comes to be, whether products of.....
