(3) That which Timaeus argues of the soul Doth not resemble that which here is seen, Because it seems that as he speaks he thinks. He says the soul unto its star returns, Believing it to have been severed thence Whenever nature gave it as a form. Perhaps his doctrine is of other guise Than the words sound, and possibly may be With meaning that is not to be derided. If he doth mean that to these wheels return The honour of their influence and the blame, Perhaps his bow doth hit upon some truth. This principle ill understood once warped The whole world nearly, till it went astray Invoking Jove and Mercury and Mars. The other doubt which doth disquiet thee Less venom has, for its malevolence Could never lead thee otherwhere from me. That as unjust our justice should appear In eyes of mortals, is an argument Of faith, and not of sin heretical. But still, that your perception may be able To thoroughly penetrate this verity, As thou desirest, I will satisfy thee.

(3) But in the world of sense we can perceive That evermore the circles are diviner As they are from the centre more remote Wherefore if my desire is to be ended In this miraculous and angelic temple, That has for confines only love and light, To hear behoves me still how the example And the exemplar go not in one fashion, Since for myself in vain I contemplate it." "If thine own fingers unto such a knot Be insufficient, it is no great wonder, So hard hath it become for want of trying." My Lady thus; then said she: "Do thou take What I shall tell thee, if thou wouldst be sated, And exercise on that thy subtlety. The circles corporal are wide and narrow According to the more or less of virtue Which is distributed through all their parts. The greater goodness works the greater weal, The greater weal the greater body holds, If perfect equally are all its parts. Therefore this one which sweeps along with it The universe sublime, doth correspond Unto the circle which most loves and knows.

(9) Further, there is a movement of soul, circular indeed,--the entrance into itself from things without, and the unified convolution of its intellectual powers, bequeathing to it inerrancy, as it were, in a sort of circle, and turning and collecting itself, from the many things without, first to itself, then, as having become single, uniting with the uniquely unified powers, and thus conducting to the Beautiful and Good, which is above all things being, and One and the Same, and without beginning and without end. But a soul is moved spirally, in so far as it is illuminated, as to the divine kinds of knowledge, in a manner proper to itself, not intuitively and at once, but logically and discursively; and, as it were, by mingled and relative operations; but in a straight line, when, not entering into itself, and being moved by unique intuition (for this, as I said, is the circular), but advancing to things around itself, and from things without, it is, as it were, conducted from certain symbols, varied and multiplied, to the simple and unified contemplations.

(26) If the whole wheel, circumference or sphere of the stars be well considered, then it is soon found that the same is the mother of all things, or the nature out of which all things are come, and wherein all things stand and live, and whereby everything moveth; all things are made of these powers, and therein they all abide eternally.

(64) For the being of God is like a wheel, wherein many wheels are made one in another, upwards, downwards, crossways, and yet they continually turn, all of them together.

(7) As the geometrician, who endeavours To square the circle, and discovers not, By taking thought, the principle he wants, Even such was I at that new apparition; I wished to see how the image to the circle Conformed itself, and how it there finds place; But my own wings were not enough for this, Had it not been that then my mind there smote A flash of lightning, wherein came its wish. Here vigour failed the lofty fantasy: But now was turning my desire and will, Even as a wheel that equally is moved, The Love which moves the sun and the other stars.

(18) Seeking Him, seek nothing of Him outside; within is to be sought what follows upon Him; Himself do not attempt. He is, Himself, that outer, He the encompassment and measure of all things; or rather He is within, at the innermost depth; the outer, circling round Him, so to speak, and wholly dependent upon Him, is Reason-Principle and Intellectual-Principle-or becomes Intellectual-Principle by contact with Him and in the degree of that contact and dependence; for from Him it takes the being which makes it Intellectual-Principle.

A circle related in its path to a centre must be admitted to owe its scope to that centre: it has something of the nature of that centre in that the radial lines converging on that one central point assimilate their impinging ends to that point of convergence and of departure, the dominant of radii and terminals: the terminals are of one nature with the centre, separate reproductions of it, since the centre is, in a certain sense, the total of terminals and radii impinging at every point upon it; these lines reveal the centre; they are the development of that undeveloped.

In the same way we are to take Intellectual-Principle and Being. This combined power springs from the Supreme, an outflow and as it were development from That and remaining dependent upon that Intellective nature, showing forth That which, in the purity of its oneness, is not Intellectual-Principle since it is no duality. No more than in the circle are the lines or circumference to be identified with that Centre which is the source of both: radii and circle are images given forth by indwelling power and, as products of a certain vigour in it, not cut off from it.

Thus the Intellective power circles in its multiple unity around the Supreme which stands to it as archetype to image; the image in its movement round about its prior has produced the multiplicity by which it is constituted Intellectual-Principle: that prior has no movement; it generates Intellectual-Principle by its sheer wealth.

Such a power, author of Intellectual-Principle, author of being- how does it lend itself to chance, to hazard, to any "So it happened"?

What is present in Intellectual-Principle is present, though in a far transcendent mode, in the One: so in a light diffused afar from one light shining within itself, the diffused is vestige, the source is the true light; but Intellectual-Principle, the diffused and image light, is not different in kind from its prior; and it is not a thing of chance but at every point is reason and cause.

The Supreme is cause of the cause: it is cause preeminently, cause as containing cause in the deepest and truest mode; for in it lie the Intellective causes which are to be unfolded from it, author as it is not of the chance- made but of what the divine willed: and this willing was not apart from reason, was not in the realm of hazard and of what happened to present itself.

Thus Plato, seeking the best account of the necessary and appropriate, says they are far removed from hazard and that what exists is what must exist: if thus the existence is as it must be it does not exist without reason: if its manner of being is the fitting, it is the utterly self-disposing in comparison with its sequents and, before that, in regard to itself: thus it is not "as it happened to be" but as it willed to be: all this, on the assumption that God wills what should be and that it is impossible to separate right from realization and that this Necessary is not to God an outside thing but is, itself, His first Activity manifesting outwardly in the exactly representative form. Thus we must speak of God since we cannot tell Him as we would.

(11) For the Deity is like a wheel, which with its fellies and spokes, and with all the naves, turneth about, and is fellied together, as seven wheels, so that it can go any way, forward, backward, downward, upward and crossways, without turning back.

(1) From centre unto rim, from rim to centre, In a round vase the water moves itself, As from without 'tis struck or from within. Into my mind upon a sudden dropped What I am saying, at the moment when Silent became the glorious life of Thomas, Because of the resemblance that was born Of his discourse and that of Beatrice, Whom, after him, it pleased thus to begin: "This man has need (and does not tell you so, Nor with the voice, nor even in his thought) Of going to the root of one truth more. Declare unto him if the light wherewith Blossoms your substance shall remain with you Eternally the same that it is now; And if it do remain, say in what manner, After ye are again made visible, It can be that it injure not your sight." As by a greater gladness urged and drawn They who are dancing in a ring sometimes Uplift their voices and their motions quicken; So, at that orison devout and prompt, The holy circles a new joy displayed In their revolving and their wondrous song.

(29) "The Man longed to pierce the circumference of the circles and understand the mystery of Him who sat upon the Eternal Fire. Having already all power, He stooped down and peeped through the seven Harmonies and, breaking through the strength of the circles, made Himself manifest to Nature stretched out below. The Man, looking into the depths, smiled, for He beheld a shadow upon the earth and a likeness mirrored in the waters, which shadow and likeness were a reflection of Himself. The Man fell in love with His own shadow and desired to descend into it. Coincident with the desire, the Intelligent Thing united Itself with the unreasoning image or shape.

(1) I do not know, O excellent Titus, whether the holy Timothy departed, deaf to some of the theological symbols which were explained by me. But, in the Symbolic Theology, we have thoroughly investigated for him all the expressions of the Oracles concerning God, which appear to the multitude to be monstrous. For they give a colour of incongruity dreadful to the uninitiated souls, when the Fathers of the unutterable wisdom explain the Divine and Mystical Truth, unapproachable by the profane, through certain, certainly hidden and daring enigmas. Wherefore also, the many discredit the expressions concerning the Divine Mysteries. For, we contemplate them only through the sensible symbols that have grown upon them. We must then strip them, and view them by themselves in their naked purity. For, thus contemplating them, we should reverence a fountain of Life flowing into Itself--viewing It even standing by Itself, and as a kind of single power, simple, self-moved, and self-worked, not abandoning Itself, but a knowledge surpassing every kind of knowledge, and always contemplating Itself, through Itself. We thought it necessary then, both for him and for others, that we should, as far as possible, unfold the varied forms of the Divine" representations of God in symbols. For, with what incredible and simulated monstrosities are its external, forms filled? For instance, with regard to the superessential Divine generation, representing a body of God corporally generating God; and describing a word flowing out into air from a man's heart, which eructates it, and a breath, breathed forth from a mouth; and celebrating God-bearing bosoms embracing a son of God, bodily; or representing these things after the manner of plants, and producing certain trees, and branches, and flowers and roots, as examples; or fountains of waters y, bubbling forth; or seductive light productions of reflected splendours; or certain other sacred representations which explain superessential descriptions of God; but with regard to the intelligible providences of Almighty God, either gifts, manifestations, or powers, or properties, or repose, or abidings, or progressions, or distinctions, or unions, clothing Almighty God in human form, and in the varied shape of wild beasts and other living creatures, and plants, and stones; and attributing to Him ornaments of women, or weapons of savages; and assigning working in clay, and in a furnace, as it were to a sort of artisan; and placing under Him, horses and chariots and thrones; and spreading before Him certain dainty meats delicately cooked; and representing Him as drinking, and drunken, and sleeping, and suffering from excess. What would any one say concerning the angers, the griefs, the various oaths, the repentances, the curses, the revenges, the manifold and dubious excuses for the failure of promises, the battle of giants in Genesis, during which He is said to scheme against those powerful and great men, and this when they were contriving the building, not with a view to injustice towards other people, but on behalf of their own safety? And that counsel devised in heaven to deceive and mislead Achab; and those mundane and meritricious passions of the Canticles; and all the other sacred compositions which appear in the description of God, which stick at nothing, as projections, and multiplications of hidden things, and divisions of things one and undivided, and formative and manifold forms of the shapeless and unformed; of which, if any one were able to see their inner hidden beauty, he will find every one of them mystical and Godlike, and filled with abundant theological light. For let us not think, that the appearances of the compositions have been formed for their own sake, but that they shield the science unutterable and invisible to the multitude, since things all-holy are not within the reach of the profane, but are manifested to those only who are genuine lovers of piety, who reject all childish fancy respecting the holy symbols, and are capable to pass with simplicity of mind, and aptitude of contemplative faculty, to the simple and supernatural and elevated truth of the symbols. Besides, we must also consider this, that the teaching, handed down by the Theologians is two-fold--one, secret and mystical--the other, open and better known--one, symbolical and initiative--the other, philosophic and demonstrative;--and the unspoken is intertwined with the spoken. The one persuades, and desiderates the truth of the things expressed, the other acts and implants in Almighty God, by instructions in mysteries not learnt by teaching. And certainly, neither our holy instructors, nor those of the law, abstain from the God-befitting symbols, throughout the celebrations of the most holy mysteries. Yea, we see even the most holy Angels, mystically advancing things Divine through enigmas; and Jesus Himself, speaking the word of God in parables, and transmitting the divinely wrought mysteries, through a typical spreading of a table. For, it was seemly, not only that the Holy of holies should be preserved undefiled by the multitude, but also that the Divine knowledge should illuminate the human life, which is at once indivisible and divisible, in a manner suitable to itself; and to limit the passionless part of the soul to the simple, and most inward visions of the most godlike images; but that its impassioned part should wait upon, and, at the same time, strive after, the most Divine coverings, through the pre-arranged representations of the typical symbols, as such (coverings) are, by nature, congenial to it. And all those who are hearers of a distinct theology without symbols, weave in themselves a sort of type, which conducts them to the conception of the aforesaid theology.

(68) For though the spirit seeth the wheel, and would fain comprehend its form or frame in every place, yet it cannot do it exactly enough, because of the turning of the wheel: But when the wheel cometh about again, so that the spirit can again see the first apprehended or conceived form, then continually it learneth more and more, and always delighteth in and loveth the wheel, and longeth after it still more and more. Now observe:

(11) Then the Formative Mind ([at-oned] with Reason), he who surrounds the spheres and spins them with his whorl, set turning his formations, and let them turn from a beginning boundless unto an endless end. For that the circulation of these [spheres] begins where it doth end, as Mind doth will. And from the downward elements Nature brought forth lives reason-less; for He did not extend the Reason (Logos) [to them]. The Air brought forth things winged; the Water things that swim, and Earth-and-Water one from another parted, as Mind willed. And from her bosom Earth produced what lives she had, four-footed things and reptiles, beasts wild and tame.

(7) Hence, too, the errant spheres, being moved contrarily to the inerrant one, are moved by one another by mutual contrariety, [and also] by the spable one through contrariety itself. And this can otherwise not be. The Bears up there , which neither set nor rise, think'st thou they rest or move? A: They move, Thrice-greatest one. H: And what their motion, my Asclepius? A: Motion that turns for ever round the same. H: But revolution - motion around same - is fixed by rest. For "round-the-same" doth stop "beyond-same". "Beyond-same" then, being stopped, if it be steadied in "round-same" - the contrary stands firm, being rendered ever stable by its contrariety.

(12) At this point I have just recollected the following. In the end of the Timoeus he says: "You must necessarily assimilate that which perceives to that which is perceived, according to its original nature; and it is by so assimilating it that you attain to the end of the highest life proposed by the gods to men, for the present or the future time." For those have equal power with these. He, who seeks, will not stop till he find; and having found, he will wonder; and wondering, he will reign; and reigning, he will rest. And what? Were not also those expressions of Thales derived from these? The fact that God is glorified for ever, and that He is expressly called by us the Searcher of hearts, he interprets. For Thales being asked, What is the divinity? said, What has neither beginning nor end. And on another asking, "If a man could elude the knowledge of the Divine Being while doing aught?" said, "How could he who cannot do so while thinking?"

(49) And the Spirit of the eternal Essences (which has Understanding and Knowledge, and also the Trial and Proving of every Thing, in which the Source [or active Property or Quality] which is in Man, consists) that was breathed into him, by the Wisdom of God, through the driving Will, which goes forward, out of the eternal Mind, out of the opened Gates of the Deep, through the Word, [together] with the moving Spirit of God. And he had the Touch of the Center of the Abyss [viz.'] the eternal Source a behind him, as a Band, and before him, the Heart and Light of God, as a Glance of the Joy and Kindling of Paradise, which springs up in the Essences with the Light of the Joy; and beneath him [he had] the four Elements in the Budding out of the Limbus which was in him.

(1) Looking into his Son with all the Love Which each of them eternally breathes forth, The Primal and unutterable Power Whate'er before the mind or eye revolves With so much order made, there can be none Who this beholds without enjoying Him. Lift up then, Reader, to the lofty wheels With me thy vision straight unto that part Where the one motion on the other strikes, And there begin to contemplate with joy That Master's art, who in himself so loves it That never doth his eye depart therefrom. Behold how from that point goes branching off The oblique circle, which conveys the planets, To satisfy the world that calls upon them; And if their pathway were not thus inflected, Much virtue in the heavens would be in vain, And almost every power below here dead. If from the straight line distant more or less Were the departure, much would wanting be Above and underneath of mundane order. Remain now, Reader, still upon thy bench, In thought pursuing that which is foretasted, If thou wouldst jocund be instead of weary.

(9) This brings us to the Spindle-destiny, spun according to the ancients by the Fates. To Plato the Spindle represents the co-operation of the moving and the stable elements of the kosmic circuit: the Fates with Necessity, Mother of the Fates, manipulate it and spin at the birth of every being, so that all comes into existence through Necessity.

In the Timaeus, the creating God bestows the essential of the Soul, but it is the divinities moving in the kosmos that infuse the powerful affections holding from Necessity our impulse and our desire, our sense of pleasure and of pain- and that lower phase of the Soul in which such experiences originate. By this statement our personality is bound up with the stars, whence our Soul takes shape; and we are set under necessity at our very entrance into the world: our temperament will be of the stars' ordering, and so, therefore, the actions which derive from temperament, and all the experiences of a nature shaped to impressions.

What, after all this, remains to stand for the "We"?

The "We" is the actual resultant of a Being whose nature includes, with certain sensibilities, the power of governing them. Cut off as we are by the nature of the body, God has yet given us, in the midst of all this evil, virtue the unconquerable, meaningless in a state of tranquil safety but everything where its absence would be peril of fall.

Our task, then, is to work for our liberation from this sphere, severing ourselves from all that has gathered about us; the total man is to be something better than a body ensouled- the bodily element dominant with a trace of Soul running through it and a resultant life-course mainly of the body- for in such a combination all is, in fact, bodily. There is another life, emancipated, whose quality is progression towards the higher realm, towards the good and divine, towards that Principle which no one possesses except by deliberate usage but so may appropriate, becoming, each personally, the higher, the beautiful, the Godlike, and living, remote, in and by It- unless one choose to go bereaved of that higher Soul and therefore, to live fate-bound, no longer profiting, merely, by the significance of the sidereal system but becoming as it were a part sunken in it and dragged along with the whole thus adopted.

For every human Being is of twofold character; there is that compromise-total and there is the Authentic Man: and it is so with the Kosmos as a whole; it is in the one phase a conjunction of body with a certain form of the Soul bound up in body; in the other phase it is the Universal Soul, that which is not itself embodied but flashes down its rays into the embodied Soul: and the same twofold quality belongs to the Sun and the other members of the heavenly system.

To the remoter Soul, the pure, sun and stars communicate no baseness. In their efficacy upon the All, they act as parts of it, as ensouled bodies within it; and they act only upon what is partial; body is the agent while, at the same time, it becomes the vehicle through which is transmitted something of the star's will and of that authentic Soul in it which is steadfastly in contemplation of the Highest.

But all follows either upon that Highest or rather upon the Beings about It- we may think of the Divine as a fire whose outgoing warmth pervades the Universe- or upon whatsoever is transmitted by the one Soul to the other, its Kin . All that is graceless is admixture. For the Universe is in truth a thing of blend, and if we separate from it that separable Soul, the residue is little. The All is a God when the divine Soul is counted in with it; "the rest," we read, "is a mighty spirit and its ways are subdivine."

(4) On which account, if thou unto the virtue Apply thy measure, not to the appearance Of substances that unto thee seem round, Thou wilt behold a marvellous agreement, Of more to greater, and of less to smaller, In every heaven, with its Intelligence." Even as remaineth splendid and serene The hemisphere of air, when Boreas Is blowing from that cheek where he is mildest, Because is purified and resolved the rack That erst disturbed it, till the welkin laughs With all the beauties of its pageantry; Thus did I likewise, after that my Lady Had me provided with her clear response, And like a star in heaven the truth was seen. And soon as to a stop her words had come, Not otherwise does iron scintillate When molten, than those circles scintillated. Their coruscation all the sparks repeated, And they so many were, their number makes More millions than the doubling of the chess. I heard them sing hosanna choir by choir To the fixed point which holds them at the 'Ubi,' And ever will, where they have ever been.

(3) After the same manner, therefore, the whole world being partible, is divided about the one and impartible light of the Gods. But this light is every where one and the same whole, and is impartibly present with all things that are able to participate of it; through an all perfect power fills all things, and by a certain causal comprehension, incloses and terminates the whole of things in itself, and is every where united to itself, and conjoins ends to beginnings. This too, all heaven and the world imitating, revolve with a circular motion, are united to themselves, and lead the elements which are carried round in a circle. Hence the world causes all things to be in each other, and to tend to each other, makes the end of one thing to coalesce with the beginning of another, as, for instance, earth with heaven, and produces one connexion and concord of wholes with wholes.