(1) You adduce, however, as a thing by no means to be despised, “ the artificers of efficacious images .” But I should wonder if these were admitted by any one of the theurgists who survey the true forms of the Gods. For why should any one exchange truly existing beings for images, and descend from the first to the last of things? Or do we not know that all things effected by an adumbration of this kind, have an obscure subsistence, are the phantasms only of that which is true, and appear to be good, but in no respect are so? Other things, also, of this kind that accede, are borne along in a flowing condition of being; but obtain nothing genuine, or perfect, or manifest. But this is evident from the mode of their production: for not divinity, but man is the maker of them. Nor are they produced from uniform and intelligible essences, but from matter, which is assumed for this purpose. What good, therefore, can germinate from matter, and from the material and corporeal-formed powers which are in bodies? Or is not that which derives its subsistence from human art, more imbecile than men themselves, who impart existence to it? By what kind of art, likewise, is this image fashioned? For it is said, indeed, to be fashioned by demiurgic art; but this is effective of true essences, and not of certain images. Hence the image-producing art is distant by a great interval from the seminal production of realities. Besides, neither does it preserve a certain analogy with divine fabrication.

(22) Reason must not imagine, that God ever made any Beast out of a Lump of Earth, as a Potter makes a Pot. But he said, Let there come forth all Sorts of Beasts, every one after its Kind; that is, out of all Essences, every one after the Property of its Essence; and so also it was (by the Fiat) figured according to the Property of its own Essence; and in like Manner, all Trees, Herbs, and Grass, all at once together. How then should the image of God be made out of the fragile [or corruptible] Essences? But it [must be and] was made in the Paradise out of the eternal [Essences.]

(1) Why, therefore, does the maker of images, who effects these things, desert himself, though he is better than these images, and consists of things of a more excellent nature, and confide in inanimate idols, which are inspired with the representation alone of life, contain a renovated harmony, and which is externally multiform, and are in reality diurnal? Shall we say that something genuine and true is inherent in them? Nothing, however, which is fashioned by human art is genuine and pure. But you will say, that simplicity and uniformity of energy predominate in the whole of their composition. This is very far from being the case. For the idol, according to its visible composition, is mingled from all-various and contrary qualities. Shall we say then, that a certain pure and perfect power is manifest in them? By no means. For a thing of this kind possesses an adventitious multitude of effluxions, collected from many places, and which shows itself to be imbecile and evanescent. But if these particulars, which we have enumerated, are not found to take place in images, is stability present with them, as it is said to be [by the patrons of these images]? By no means, likewise, is this the case. For these idols are extinguished with much greater rapidity than the images which are seen in mirrors.

(24) Thus it is shown us in the Light of Nature, that when Adam was thus impregnated [or possessed] from the Spirit of this World, then God built [or made] a Garden in Eden upon Earth, in the Paradise, and caused to grow up all Sorts of paradisical Fruit, pleasant to behold, and good to eat, and the Tree of Temptation in the Midst [of the Garden of Eden,] which had its Essences from the Spirit of this World; and the other [Trees and Fruits] had paradisical Essences.

(28) Now since there are Varieties of Growth, according to the Essences of the Stars, and yet the Seed of God (which was sown in the Beginning) is in the Ground, and so they grow together, should God now therefore cast away the whole Crop because all have not the same Essences? Does it not all stand in his Wonders? And is it not the Joy of his Life, and the Quickening of his Tincture? [This is] spoke by Way of Similitude.

(2) But let us leave the arts and consider those works produced by Nature and admitted to be naturally beautiful which the creations of art are charged with imitating, all reasoning life and unreasoning things alike, but especially the consummate among them, where the moulder and maker has subdued the material and given the form he desired. Now what is the beauty here? It has nothing to do with the blood or the menstrual process: either there is also a colour and form apart from all this, or there is nothing unless sheer ugliness or a bare recipient, as it were the mere Matter of beauty.

Whence shone forth the beauty of Helen, battle-sought; or of all those women like in loveliness to Aphrodite; or of Aphrodite herself; or of any human being that has been perfect in beauty; or of any of these gods manifest to sight, or unseen but carrying what would be beauty if we saw?

In all these is it not the Idea, something of that realm but communicated to the produced from within the producer just as in works of art, we held, it is communicated from the arts to their creations? Now we can surely not believe that, while the made thing and the Idea thus impressed upon Matter are beautiful, yet the Idea not so alloyed but resting still with the creator- the Idea primal, immaterial, firmly a unity- is not Beauty.

If material extension were in itself the ground of beauty, then the creating principle, being without extension, could not be beautiful: but beauty cannot be made to depend upon magnitude since, whether in a large object or a small, the one Idea equally moves and forms the mind by its inherent power. A further indication is that as long as the object remains outside us we know nothing of it; it affects us by entry; but only as an Idea can it enter through the eyes which are not of scope to take an extended mass: we are, no doubt, simultaneously possessed of the magnitude which, however, we take in not as mass but by an elaboration upon the presented form.

Then again the principle producing the beauty must be, itself, ugly, neutral or beautiful: ugly, it could not produce the opposite; neutral, why should its product be the one rather than the other? The Nature, then, which creates things so lovely must be itself of a far earlier beauty; we, undisciplined in discernment of the inward, knowing nothing of it, run after the outer, never understanding that it is the inner which stirs us; we are in the case of one who sees his own reflection but not realizing whence it comes goes in pursuit of it.

But that the thing we are pursuing is something different and that the beauty is not in the concrete object is manifest from the beauty there is in matters of study, in conduct and custom; briefly in soul or mind. And it is precisely here that the greater beauty lies, perceived whenever you look to the wisdom in a man and delight in it, not wasting attention on the face, which may be hideous, but passing all appearance by and catching only at the inner comeliness, the truly personal; if you are still unmoved and cannot acknowledge beauty under such conditions, then looking to your own inner being you will find no beauty to delight you and it will be futile in that state to seek the greater vision, for you will be questing it through the ugly and impure.

This is why such matters are not spoken of to everyone; you, if you are conscious of beauty within, remember.

(3) Thus there is in the Nature-Principle itself an Ideal archetype of the beauty that is found in material forms and, of that archetype again, the still more beautiful archetype in Soul, source of that in Nature. In the proficient soul this is brighter and of more advanced loveliness: adorning the soul and bringing to it a light from that greater light which is beauty primally, its immediate presence sets the soul reflecting upon the quality of this prior, the archetype which has no such entries, and is present nowhere but remains in itself alone, and thus is not even to be called a Reason-Principle but is the creative source of the very first Reason-Principle which is the Beauty to which Soul serves as Matter.

This prior, then, is the Intellectual-Principle, the veritable, abiding and not fluctuant since not taking intellectual quality from outside itself. By what image thus, can we represent it? We have nowhere to go but to what is less. Only from itself can we take an image of it; that is, there can be no representation of it, except in the sense that we represent gold by some portion of gold- purified, either actually or mentally, if it be impure- insisting at the same time that this is not the total thing-gold, but merely the particular gold of a particular parcel. In the same way we learn in this matter from the purified Intellect in ourselves or, if you like, from the Gods and the glory of the Intellect in them.

For assuredly all the Gods are august and beautiful in a beauty beyond our speech. And what makes them so? Intellect; and especially Intellect operating within them to visibility. It is not through the loveliness of their corporeal forms: even those that have body are not gods by that beauty; it is in virtue of Intellect that they, too, are gods, and as gods beautiful. They do not veer between wisdom and folly: in the immunity of Intellect unmoving and pure, they are wise always, all-knowing, taking cognisance not of the human but of their own being and of all that lies within the contemplation of Intellect. Those of them whose dwelling is in the heavens, are ever in this meditation- what task prevents them?- and from afar they look, too, into that further heaven by a lifting of the head. The Gods belonging to that higher Heaven itself, they whose station is upon it and in it, see and know in virtue of their omnipresence to it. For all There is heaven; earth is heaven, and sea heaven; and animal and plant and man; all is the heavenly content of that heaven: and the Gods in it, despising neither men nor anything else that is there where all is of the heavenly order, traverse all that country and all space in peace.

(4) Will not, therefore, he who surveys this conspicuous statue of the Gods, thus united to itself, be ashamed to have a different opinion of the Gods, who are the causes of it, so as to introduce among them sections, and separations, and corporeal-formed circumscriptions? I, indeed, should think, that every one would be thus disposed. For if there is no ratio, no habitude of symmetry, no communion of essence, nor a connexion either in capacity or in energy, between that which is adorned and the adorning cause; if this be the case, there will neither be found in the world a certain extension according to interval, nor local comprehension, nor partible interception, nor any other such like connascent equalization in the presence of the Gods [with mundane natures]. For in things which are of a kindred nature, according to essence and power, or which are, in a certain respect, of the same species, or homogeneous, a certain comprehension, or conservation, may be discovered. But in such things as are entirely exempt from all mundane wholes, what opposing circumstance, or transition through all things, or partible circumscription, or local comprehension, or any thing else of this kind can justly be perceived? I think, therefore, that the several participants of the divinities are of such a nature, that some partake of them etherially, others aerially, and others aquatically; which also, the art of divine works perceiving, employs adaptations and invocations, conformable to such a division. And thus much concerning the distribution of the more excellent genera into the world.

(6) And yet some one might say the seal is not whole and the same in the images throughout. But of this the seal is not the cause, for it imparts itself all and the same to each; but the difference of the recipients makes the figures dissimilar, since the archetype is one and complete and the same. For instance, if the wax were soft and impressionable, and smooth and unstamped, and neither unimpressionable and hard, nor running and dissolving, it will have the figure clear and sharp and fixed. But if it should lack any of the aforesaid aptitudes, this will be the cause of the non-participative and un-figured and indistinct, and whatever else arises from inaptitude for reception. Further, there is a distinction from the goodly work of God towards us, in that the superessential Word was invested with being amongst us--from us--wholly and truly, and did and suffered whatever things are choice and pre-eminent in His human work of God. For in these, the Father and the Spirit in no respect communicated, except perhaps, one might say, as regards the benign and philanthropic purpose, and as regards all the pre-eminent and unutterable work of God which the unchangeable, qua God and Word of God, did when He had been born amongst us. Thus we, too, strive to unite and distinguish in the Word the things Divine, as the things Divine themselves, are united and distinguished.

(2) For divinity does not fabricate all things, either through the celestial physical motions, or through a partial matter, or through powers thus divided; but he produces the worlds by conceptions, will, and immaterial forms, and through an eternal and supermundane soul. The maker of images, however, is said to elaborate them through the revolving stars. But the thing does not in reality subsist so as it appears to do. For since there are certain infinite powers in the celestial Gods, the last genus of all the powers in them is physical. But again, of this power one portion being inherent in spermatic reasons [or productive powers], and prior to these reasons being established in immoveable natures, essentially precedes generation. But another portion being inherent in sensible and visible motions and powers, and in celestial effluxions and qualities, has dominion over the whole visible order of things. This last power, therefore, in all these rules over the circumterrestrial manifest generation in places about the earth. Many other arts, however, as for instance, the medical and gymnastic, use this power, which has dominion over visible generation, and the qualities of the effluxions sent from the heavens employ it, and likewise all such arts as in their operations communicate with nature. And moreover, the image-making art attracts a certain very obscure genesiurgic portion from the celestial effluxions.

(7) Now we must needs clearly [conceive, or] think, that the paradisical Fruit which was good, was not so very earthly, for (as Moses himself says) they were of two Sorts; the one good to eat, and pleasant to behold, and the other had the Death and Corruptibility in it: In the paradisical Fruit, there was no Death nor Corruptibility; for if there had been any Death or Corruptibility therein, then Adam had eaten Death in all the Fruits; but seeing there was no Death therein, therefore the Fruit could not be so altogether earthly; though indeed it sprung out of the Earth, yet the divine Virtue of the second Principle was imprinted therein, and yet they were truly in the third Principle, grown [or sprung] out of the Earth, which God cursed as to the earthly Food, that no paradisical Fruit did grow any more out of the Earth.

(1) It is a principle with us that one who has attained to the vision of the Intellectual Beauty and grasped the beauty of the Authentic Intellect will be able also to come to understand the Father and Transcendent of that Divine Being. It concerns us, then, to try to see and say, for ourselves and as far as such matters may be told, how the Beauty of the divine Intellect and of the Intellectual Kosmos may be revealed to contemplation.

Let us go to the realm of magnitudes: Suppose two blocks of stone lying side by side: one is unpatterned, quite untouched by art; the other has been minutely wrought by the craftsman's hands into some statue of god or man, a Grace or a Muse, or if a human being, not a portrait but a creation in which the sculptor's art has concentrated all loveliness.

Now it must be seen that the stone thus brought under the artist's hand to the beauty of form is beautiful not as stone- for so the crude block would be as pleasant- but in virtue of the form or idea introduced by the art. This form is not in the material; it is in the designer before ever it enters the stone; and the artificer holds it not by his equipment of eyes and hands but by his participation in his art. The beauty, therefore, exists in a far higher state in the art; for it does not come over integrally into the work; that original beauty is not transferred; what comes over is a derivative and a minor: and even that shows itself upon the statue not integrally and with entire realization of intention but only in so far as it has subdued the resistance of the material.

Art, then, creating in the image of its own nature and content, and working by the Idea or Reason-Principle of the beautiful object it is to produce, must itself be beautiful in a far higher and purer degree since it is the seat and source of that beauty, indwelling in the art, which must naturally be more complete than any comeliness of the external. In the degree in which the beauty is diffused by entering into matter, it is so much the weaker than that concentrated in unity; everything that reaches outwards is the less for it, strength less strong, heat less hot, every power less potent, and so beauty less beautiful.

Then again every prime cause must be, within itself, more powerful than its effect can be: the musical does not derive from an unmusical source but from music; and so the art exhibited in the material work derives from an art yet higher.

Still the arts are not to be slighted on the ground that they create by imitation of natural objects; for, to begin with, these natural objects are themselves imitations; then, we must recognise that they give no bare reproduction of the thing seen but go back to the Ideas from which Nature itself derives, and, furthermore, that much of their work is all their own; they are holders of beauty and add where nature is lacking. Thus Pheidias wrought the Zeus upon no model among things of sense but by apprehending what form Zeus must take if he chose to become manifest to sight.

(16) When each of the entities bound up with the pseudo-substance is taken apart from the rest, the name of Quality is given to that one among them, by which without pointing to essence or quantity or motion we signify the distinctive mark, the type or aspect of a thing- for example, the beauty or ugliness of a body. This beauty- need we say?- is identical in name only with Intellectual Beauty: it follows that the term "Quality" as applied to the Sensible and the Intellectual is necessarily equivocal; even blackness and whiteness are different in the two spheres.

But the beauty in the germ, in the particular Reason-Principle- is this the same as the manifested beauty, or do they coincide only in name? Are we to assign this beauty- and the same question applies to deformity in the soul- to the Intellectual order, or to the Sensible? That beauty is different in the two spheres is by now clear. If it be embraced in Sensible Quality, then virtue must also be classed among the qualities of the lower. But merely some virtues will take rank as Sensible, others as Intellectual qualities.

It may even be doubted whether the arts, as Reason-Principles, can fairly be among Sensible qualities; Reason-Principles, it is true, may reside in Matter, but "matter" for them means Soul. On the other hand, their being found in company with Matter commits them in some degree to the lower sphere. Take the case of lyrical music: it is performed upon strings; melody, which may be termed a part of the art, is sensuous sound- though, perhaps, we should speak here not of parts but of manifestations : yet, called manifestations, they are nonetheless sensuous. The beauty inherent in body is similarly bodiless; but we have assigned it to the order of things bound up with body and subordinate to it.

Geometry and arithmetic are, we shall maintain, of a twofold character; in their earthly types they rank with Sensible Quality, but in so far as they are functions of pure Soul, they necessarily belong to that other world in close proximity to the Intellectual. This, too, is in Plato's view the case with music and astronomy.

The arts concerned with material objects and making use of perceptible instruments and sense-perception must be classed with Sensible Quality, even though they are dispositions of the Soul, attendant upon its apostasy.

There is also every reason for consigning to this category the practical virtues whose function is directed to a social end: these do not isolate Soul by inclining it towards the higher; their manifestation makes for beauty in this world, a beauty regarded not as necessary but as desirable.

On this principle, the beauty in the germ, and still more the blackness and whiteness in it, will be included among Sensible Qualities.

Are we, then, to rank the individual soul, as containing these Reason-Principles, with Sensible Substance? But we do not even identify the Principles with body; we merely include them in Sensible Quality on the ground that they are connected with body and are activities of body. The constituents of Sensible Substance have already been specified; we have no intention whatever of adding to them Substance bodiless.

As for Qualities, we hold that they are invariably bodiless, being affections arising within Soul; but, like the Reason-Principles of the individual soul, they are associated with Soul in its apostasy, and are accordingly counted among the things of the lower realm: such affections, torn between two worlds by their objects and their abode, we have assigned to Quality, which is indeed not bodily but manifested in body.

But we refrain from assigning Soul to Sensible Substance, on the ground that we have already referred to Quality those affections of Soul which are related to body. On the contrary, Soul, conceived apart from affection and Reason-Principle, we have restored to its origin, leaving in the lower realm no substance which is in any sense Intellectual.

(16) For the Fruits were also good, and their Inclination [or that which made them to be desired] proceeded out of the inward Element, out of the Paradise. Now Adam could eat of every Fruit in the Mouth, but not in the Corruptibility, that must not be, for his Body must subsist eternally, and continue in Paradise, and generate a chaste Virgin out of himself, like himself, without rending of his Body; for this could be, seeing his Body was [proceeded] out of the heavenly Element, out of the Virtue of God.

(2) Let us, then, go back to the source, and indicate at once the Principle that bestows beauty on material things.

Undoubtedly this Principle exists; it is something that is perceived at the first glance, something which the soul names as from an ancient knowledge and, recognising, welcomes it, enters into unison with it.

But let the soul fall in with the Ugly and at once it shrinks within itself, denies the thing, turns away from it, not accordant, resenting it.

Our interpretation is that the soul- by the very truth of its nature, by its affiliation to the noblest Existents in the hierarchy of Being- when it sees anything of that kin, or any trace of that kinship, thrills with an immediate delight, takes its own to itself, and thus stirs anew to the sense of its nature and of all its affinity.

But, is there any such likeness between the loveliness of this world and the splendours in the Supreme? Such a likeness in the particulars would make the two orders alike: but what is there in common between beauty here and beauty There?

We hold that all the loveliness of this world comes by communion in Ideal-Form.

All shapelessness whose kind admits of pattern and form, as long as it remains outside of Reason and Idea, is ugly by that very isolation from the Divine-Thought. And this is the Absolute Ugly: an ugly thing is something that has not been entirely mastered by pattern, that is by Reason, the Matter not yielding at all points and in all respects to Ideal-Form.

But where the Ideal-Form has entered, it has grouped and coordinated what from a diversity of parts was to become a unity: it has rallied confusion into co-operation: it has made the sum one harmonious coherence: for the Idea is a unity and what it moulds must come to unity as far as multiplicity may.

And on what has thus been compacted to unity, Beauty enthrones itself, giving itself to the parts as to the sum: when it lights on some natural unity, a thing of like parts, then it gives itself to that whole. Thus, for an illustration, there is the beauty, conferred by craftsmanship, of all a house with all its parts, and the beauty which some natural quality may give to a single stone.

This, then, is how the material thing becomes beautiful- by communicating in the thought that flows from the Divine.

(12) And so now God created the Image, and Similitude, out of the eternal Element, in which the eternal Wonders are originally, and [God] breathed into him the Spirit of the Essences, out of his eternal original Will, out of the broken Gate of the Deep, through where the Wheel of the Stirring and Breaking-through stands in the eternal Mind, which reaches the clear, true, and pure Deity of the Heart of God.

(3) And the soul includes a faculty peculiarly addressed to Beauty- one incomparably sure in the appreciation of its own, never in doubt whenever any lovely thing presents itself for judgement.

Or perhaps the soul itself acts immediately, affirming the Beautiful where it finds something accordant with the Ideal-Form within itself, using this Idea as a canon of accuracy in its decision.

But what accordance is there between the material and that which antedates all Matter?

On what principle does the architect, when he finds the house standing before him correspondent with his inner ideal of a house, pronounce it beautiful? Is it not that the house before him, the stones apart, is the inner idea stamped upon the mass of exterior matter, the indivisible exhibited in diversity?

So with the perceptive faculty: discerning in certain objects the Ideal-Form which has bound and controlled shapeless matter, opposed in nature to Idea, seeing further stamped upon the common shapes some shape excellent above the common, it gathers into unity what still remains fragmentary, catches it up and carries it within, no longer a thing of parts, and presents it to the Ideal-Principle as something concordant and congenial, a natural friend: the joy here is like that of a good man who discerns in a youth the early signs of a virtue consonant with the achieved perfection within his own soul.

The beauty of colour is also the outcome of a unification: it derives from shape, from the conquest of the darkness inherent in Matter by the pouring-in of light, the unembodied, which is a Rational-Principle and an Ideal-Form.

Hence it is that Fire itself is splendid beyond all material bodies, holding the rank of Ideal-Principle to the other elements, making ever upwards, the subtlest and sprightliest of all bodies, as very near to the unembodied; itself alone admitting no other, all the others penetrated by it: for they take warmth but this is never cold; it has colour primally; they receive the Form of colour from it: hence the splendour of its light, the splendour that belongs to the Idea. And all that has resisted and is but uncertainly held by its light remains outside of beauty, as not having absorbed the plenitude of the Form of colour.

And harmonies unheard in sound create the harmonies we hear, and wake the soul to the consciousness of beauty, showing it the one essence in another kind: for the measures of our sensible music are not arbitrary but are determined by the Principle whose labour is to dominate Matter and bring pattern into being.

Thus far of the beauties of the realm of sense, images and shadow-pictures, fugitives that have entered into Matter- to adorn, and to ravish, where they are seen.

(42) Now therefore in the anguishing Mind of the Darkness, is the inexpressible [or unutterable] Source, [or rising Property,] from whence the Name Quality exists as from many [Sources, or Wells,] into one Source, and out of these many Sources [running] into one Source, springs forth the Plurality of Skill, so that there is a Multiplicity, [or Variety of it.] And the Spirit of God out of the Light comes to help every Skill, [or Science, or Knowledge,] and in every Skill of the Sources in the Quality (by its kind infecting of the Love) it makes again again, as a Twig out of a Tree, where again there springs forth [or infusing] of Kindness, makes all, every Thought in the Will, and [that] essentially.

(10) In view of all this we must now work back from the items to the unit, and consider the entire scheme as one enduring thing.

We ascend from air, light, sun- or, moon and light and sun- in detail, to these things as constituting a total- though a total of degrees, primary, secondary, tertiary. Thence we come to the Soul, always the one undiscriminated entity. At this point in our survey we have before us the over-world and all that follows upon it. That suite we take to be the very last effect that has penetrated to its furthest reach.

Our knowledge of the first is gained from the ultimate of all, from the very shadow cast by the fire, because this ultimate itself receives its share of the general light, something of the nature of the Forming-Idea hovering over the outcast that at first lay in blank obscurity. It is brought under the scheme of reason by the efficacy of soul whose entire extension latently holds this rationalizing power. As we know, the Reason-Principles carried in animal seed fashion and shape living beings into so many universes in the small. For whatsoever touches soul is moulded to the nature of soul's own Real-Being.

We are not to think that the Soul acts upon the object by conformity to any external judgement; there is no pause for willing or planning: any such procedure would not be an act of sheer nature, but one of applied art: but art is of later origin than soul; it is an imitator, producing dim and feeble copies- toys, things of no great worth- and it is dependent upon all sorts of mechanism by which alone its images can be produced. The soul, on the contrary, is sovereign over material things by might of Real-Being; their quality is determined by its lead, and those elementary things cannot stand against its will. On the later level, things are hindered one by the other, and thus often fall short of the characteristic shape at which their unextended Reason-Principle must be aiming; in that other world the entire shape comes from soul, and all that is produced takes and keeps its appointed place in a unity, so that the engendered thing, without labour as without clash, becomes all that it should be. In that world the soul has elaborated its creation, the images of the gods, dwellings for men, each existing to some peculiar purpose.

Soul could produce none but the things which truly represent its powers: fire produces warmth; another source produces cold; soul has a double efficacy, its act within itself, and its act from within outwards towards the new production.

In soulless entities, the outgo remains dormant, and any efficiency they have is to bring to their own likeness whatever is amenable to their act. All existence has this tendency to bring other things to likeness; but the soul has the distinction of possessing at once an action of conscious attention within itself, and an action towards the outer. It has thus the function of giving life to all that does not live by prior right, and the life it gives is commensurate with its own; that is to say, living in reason, it communicates reason to the body- an image of the reason within itself, just as the life given to the body is an image of Real-Being- and it bestows, also, upon that material the appropriate shapes of which it contains the Reason-Forms.

The content of the creative soul includes the Ideal shapes of gods and of all else: and hence it is that the kosmos contains all.

(5) But the different, since Almighty God is present to all providentially, and becomes all in all, for the sake of the preservation of all, resting upon Himself, and His own identity within Himself, standing, as beseems an energy, one and ceaseless, and imparting Himself with an unbending power, for deification of those turned to Him. And we must suppose that the difference of the manifold shapes of Almighty God, during the multiform visions, signifies that certain things are different from the phenomena under which they appear. For, as when language depicts the soul itself, under a bodily form, and fashions bodily members around the memberless, we think differently of the members attributed to it, as befits the soul's memberless condition; and we call the mind head, and opinion neck,--as intermediate between rational and irrational--and anger, breast; and lust, belly; and the constitution, legs and feet; using the names of the members as symbols of the powers. Much more then, as respects Him, Who is beyond all, is it necessary to make clear the difference of forms and shapes by reverent and God-becoming, and mystic explanations. And if you wish to apply the threefold shapes of bodies to the impalpable and shapeless God, you must say, that the Progression of Almighty God, which spreads out to all things, is a Divine extension; and length, the power extending itself over the whole; and depth, the hiddenness and imperception incomprehensible to all creatures. But, that we may not forget ourselves, in our explanation, of the different shapes and forms, by confounding the incorporeal Divine Names with those given through symbols of objects of sense, we have for this reason spoken concerning these things in the Symbolic Theology. But now, let us suppose the Divine difference, as really not a sort of change from the super-immovable identity, but as the single multiplication of itself, and the uniform progressions of its fecundity to all.