The vision has been of God in travail of a beautiful offspring, God engendering a universe within himself in a painless labour and-rejoiced in what he has brought into being, proud of his children-keeping all closely by Him, for pleasure He has in his radiance and in theirs.
Of this offspring- all beautiful, but most beautiful those that have remained within- only one has become manifest without; from him [Zeus, sovereign over the visible universe] the youngest born, we may gather, as from some image, the greatness of the Father and of the Brothers that remain within the Father's house.
Still the manifested God cannot think that he has come forth in vain from the father; for through him another universe has arisen, beautiful as the image of beauty, and it could not be' lawful that Beauty and Being should fail of a beautiful image.
This second Kosmos at every point copies the archetype: it has life and being in copy, and has beauty as springing from that diviner world.In its character of image it holds, too, that divine perpetuity without which it would only at times be truly representative and sometimes fail like a construction of art; for every image whose existence lies in the nature of things must stand during the entire existence of the archetype.
Hence it is false to put an end to the visible sphere as long as the Intellectual endures, or to found it upon a decision taken by its maker at some given moment.
That teaching shirks the penetration of such a making as is here involved: it fails to see that as long as the Supreme is radiant there can be no failing of its sequel but, that existing, all exists.And-since the necessity of conveying our meaning compels such terms- the Supreme has existed for ever and for ever will exist.
13.The God fettered [as in the Kronos Myth] to an unchanging identity leaves the ordering of this universe to his son (to Zeus), for it could not be in his character to neglect his rule within the divine sphere, and, as though sated with the Authentic-Beauty, seek a lordship too recent and too poor for his might.Ignoring this lower world, Kronos [Intellectual-Principle] claims for his own father [Ouranoo, the Absolute, or One] with all the upward-tending between them: and he counts all that tends to the inferior, beginning from his son [Zeus, the All-Soul], as ranking beneath him.Thus he holds a mid position determined on the one side by the differentiation implied in the severance from the very highest and, on the other, by that which keeps him apart from the link between himself and the lower:
he stands between a greater father and an inferior son.But since that father is too lofty to be thought of under the name of Beauty, the second God remains the primally beautiful.
Soul also has beauty, but is less beautiful than Intellect as being its image and therefore, though beautiful in nature, taking increase of beauty by looking to that original.Since then the All-Soul- to use the more familiar term- since Aphrodite herself is so beautiful, what name can we give to that other? If Soul is so lovely in its own right, of what quality must that prior be? And since its being is derived, what must that power be from which the Soul takes the double beauty, the borrowed and the inherent?
We ourselves possess beauty when we are true to our own being; our ugliness is in going over to another order; our self-knowledge, that is to say, is our beauty; in self-ignorance we are ugly.
Thus beauty is of the Divine and comes Thence only.
Do these considerations suffice to a clear understanding of the Intellectual Sphere, or must we make yet another attempt by another road?
NINTH TRACTATE.
THE INTELLECTUAL-PRINCIPLE, THE IDEAS, ANDTHE AUTHENTIC EXISTENCE.
1.All human beings from birth onward live to the realm of sense more than to the Intellectual.
Forced of necessity to attend first to the material, some of them elect to abide by that order and, their life throughout, make its concerns their first and their last; the sweet and the bitter of sense are their good and evil; they feel they have done all if they live along pursuing the one and barring the doors to the other.And those of them that pretend to reasoning have adopted this as their philosophy; they are like the heavier birds which have incorporated much from the earth and are so weighted down that they cannot fly high for all the wings Nature has given them.
Others do indeed lift themselves a little above the earth; the better in their soul urges them from the pleasant to the nobler, but they are not of power to see the highest and so, in despair of any surer ground, they fall back in virtue's name, upon those actions and options of the lower from which they sought to escape.
But there is a third order- those godlike men who, in their mightier power, in the keenness of their sight, have clear vision of the splendour above and rise to it from among the cloud and fog of earth and hold firmly to that other world, looking beyond all here, delighted in the place of reality, their native land, like a man returning after long wanderings to the pleasant ways of his own country.
2.What is this other place and how it is accessible?
It is to be reached by those who, born with the nature of the lover, are also authentically philosophic by inherent temper; in pain of love towards beauty but not held by material loveliness, taking refuge from that in things whose beauty is of the soul- such things as virtue, knowledge, institutions, law and custom- and thence, rising still a step, reach to the source of this loveliness of the Soul, thence to whatever be above that again, until the uttermost is reached.The First, the Principle whose beauty is self-springing: this attained, there is an end to the pain inassuageable before.
But how is the ascent to be begun? Whence comes the power? In what thought is this love to find its guide?
The guiding thought is this: that the beauty perceived on material things is borrowed.
