Panthenosia: The Composition of All Dissensions

themselves, nor can they receive anything from an immobile God without an intermediary. Therefore, that spirit which unites scattered things and disperses united things toward the multiplication of essences and the end of actions must preside over this mass. For just as the power of the property instilled in sensitive animals causes the natural virtue to be nourished by its own spirit, the vital by its own, the animal by its own, and the sensitive by its own: so does that same spirit act upon these antecedent natures, so that the individual elements, though of a fourfold nature, possess within themselves their own faculties conspiring toward the same end. There are, therefore, with respect to the descent, five spirits of this circuit: the spirit of God, the spirit of Christ, the spirit of angelicity, the spirit of heavenliness, and the spirit of elementality. Hence it has come about that in the microcosm, besides the spirit of the four preceding lives, there is added the rational one proper to our genus, into whose essence all things finally tend through the possible intellect, which becomes all things by the power of that superior agent who makes all things in Christ, and thence gives us wretched ones the same power, if we were to love by contemplating. For that spirit does not remain in man as long as he is flesh, or revolves toward the affection of carnal things, without reducing the praise of all participation back to the author. For this part is in use only for the servants of God, the judges of the world, although in truth that good Jesus of ours offers it freely to all. There are in this way five inferior orbs in us...