Works of Dionysius

where He truly is, as the sacred scriptures hand down, who is higher than all.

How the mind is purified. Through how many degrees it ascends to God. How God dwells above intellect and the intelligible. What is the opinion of the Platonists.

Marsilius.

The mind of the divine

a

About to ascend to the summit of love, one must first be inflamed in all exhortations by the love of the First Good alone. And since it is the office of supernal heat to purify us from inferior things, it must be purified by the burning of divine love, both from the affections and from the imaginations of individual things of the bodies. Then, indeed, with discipline showing the way, and with the same love meanwhile as a guide, it must be led to contemplate forms that are separable and separated from bodies—that is, to intellectual souls and angelic intellects. For the divine sun shines in souls indeed, as in the moon, but in angels as in the stars. Therefore, in both cases, the eye of the mind must be turned to the sun, and it gazes more easily at these as familiar lights; by beholding these, it guesses at the divine sun from there, and accustoms its gaze to either beholding or perceiving the same in any way. ¶ Hitherto, exhortation has purified, but discipline has shown. Love, however, has refined and led with the calves. Love, therefore, will finally happily join the lover with the beloved. In that cloud, indeed, where natural eyes have become dim under the exuberant light, the Good itself, through a beneficent grace, has illuminated and inspired the lover. ¶ In this ascent, the actions and powers of souls and angels occur first. Moses himself signifies these—the former under the name of voices, the latter under the appellation of lights. He also assents that, for purified souls, intellectual notions, because of their marvelous efficacy, transfer themselves through imagination even to the purest senses—namely, sight and hearing—as if under a certain form of lights and voices. ¶ Therefore, where Dionysius says that the Good itself proceeds above the intelligible summits of its own places, Plotinus, Iamblichus, and Proclus will say that the intelligible is to be preferred to the intellect as if to something that cannot be formed. But the immense Good is to be preferred to the intelligible, as it undergoes a certain proportion with intelligence. ¶ I omit at present that distinction of Proclus where he calls the highest divine beings the intelligible. He calls the lowest, but meanwhile superior to the world, the intellectual—namely, those formed by supernal things. But he calls those in the middle by a mixture of both appellations. I also omit those three substances among Proclus, and the three principles under the first: essence, life, mind. We will say more probably with Plotinus that these three differ among themselves by a certain reason rather than by substance. But Plotinus asserts this one, consisting of three, as the principle of the universe: namely, that which is born from the first. Dionysius, however, whom we most willingly follow, does not place some one thing of this kind as a principle under a principle. But he subjects divine minds to God, divinely constituted from these three—essence, life, intelligence—and calls such minds partly intelligible and partly intellectual. Because from there, indeed, because of the abundance of light, they offer themselves most lavishly to any capacity; here, however, because of the most serene foresight, they most easily receive any light of truth itself through the diaphanous nature of the minds. Finally, the Good itself super-eminently exceeds the intelligible region, or regions of this kind—in the Platonic manner, the first intelligible itself, by the name of the intelligible, is the fountain of all species differing formally among themselves, or any separated substance, perceptive and shining at the same time.

Confirmation of the above and how we may enjoy God through a certain manner more excellent than the intellect.

Marsilius

About the super-celestial

b

Heaven, full of its stars—that is, full of intelligible forms—the divine sun dwells indeed; for the stars shine with the light of the sun, but it marvelously super-eminently exceeds. Heaven