XIII. This will be made clear to you as
follows:—Are not Spirit, and Fire, and Light, Love, and Wisdom,
and Righteousness, and Mind and Reason, and the like, the names of the
First Nature? What then? Can you conceive of Spirit apart
from motion and diffusion; or of Fire without its fuel and its upward
motion, and its proper colour and form? Or of Light unmingled
with air, and loosed from that which is as it were its father and
source? And how do you conceive of a mind? Is it not that
which is inherent in some person not itself, and are not its movements
thoughts, silent or uttered? And Reason…what else can you
think it than that which is either silent within ourselves, or else
outpoured (for I shrink from saying loosed)? And if you conceive
of Wisdom, what is it but the habit of mind which you know as such, and
which is concerned with contemplations either divine or human?
And Justice and Love, are they not praiseworthy dispositions, the one
opposed to injustice, the other to hate, and at one time intensifying
themselves, at another relaxed, now taking possession of us, now
leaving us alone, and in a word, making us what we are, and changing us
as colours do bodies? Or are we rather to leave all these things,
and to look at the Deity absolutely, as best we can, collecting a
fragmentary perception of It from Its images? What then is this
subtile thing, which is of these, and yet is not these, or how can that
Unity which is in its Nature uncomposite and incomparable, still be all
of these, and each one of them perfectly? Thus our mind faints to
transcend corporeal things, and to consort with the Incorporeal,
stripped of all clothing of corporeal ideas, as long as it has to look
with its inherent weakness at things above its strength. For
every rational nature longs for God and for the First Cause, but is
unable to grasp Him, for the reasons I have mentioned. Faint
therefore with the desire, and as it were restive and impatient of the
disability, it tries a second course, either to look at visible things,
and out of some of them to make a god…(a poor contrivance, for in
what respect and to what extent can that which is seen be higher and
more godlike than that which sees, that this should worship that?) or
else through the beauty and order of visible things to attain to that
which is above sight; but not to suffer the loss of God through the
magnificence of visible things.