6. Thus, according to the ancient (Platonic or Empedoclean) maxim,
"courage, temperance, all the virtues, nay, even prudence, are but
purifications." The mysteries were therefore wise in teaching that the
man who has not been purified will, in hell, dwell at the bottom of a
swamp; for everything that is not pure, because of its very perversity,
delights in mud, just as we see the impure swine wallow in the mud
with delight. And indeed, what would real temperance consist of, if it
be not to avoid attaching oneself to the pleasures of the body, and
to flee from them as impure, and as only proper for an impure being?
What else is courage, unless no longer to fear death, which is mere
separation of the soul from the body? Whoever therefore is willing to
withdraw from the body could surely not fear death. Magnanimity is
nothing but scorn of things here below. Last, prudence is the thought
which, detached from the earth, raises the soul to the intelligible
world. The purified soul, therefore, becomes a form, a reason, an
incorporeal and intellectual essence; she belongs entirely to the
divinity, in whom resides the source of the beautiful, and of all the
qualities which have affinity with it.