TANS. I mean that it is not the figure or the conception, sensibly or
intelligently represented, which of itself moves us; because while one
stands beholding the figure manifested to the eyes, he does not yet
arrive at loving; but from that instant that the soul conceives within
itself that figure, not visible, but thinkable; no longer dividual, but
individual; no longer classed among things in general, but among things
good and beautiful; then immediately love is born. Now this is the
seeing, from which the soul desires to divert the eyes of her thoughts.
Here the sight usually moves the affection to a greater love than the
love of that which is seen; for, as I have just said, it always
considers, through the universal knowledge that it holds of the
beautiful and the good, that, besides the degrees of known conceptions
of goodness and beauty, there are others and yet others _ad infinitum_.
CIC. How is it that after we become informed of that conception of the
beautiful which is begotten in the soul, we yet desire to satisfy the
exterior vision?
TANS. From this, that the soul would ever love that which it loves, and
ever see that which it sees. Therefore she wills that, the conception
which has been produced in her through seeing, should not become
weakened, enervated and lost; but would ever see more and more, and that
which becomes obscure in the interior affection, should be frequently
brightened by the exterior aspect, which as it is the principle of
being, must also be the principle of conservation. This results
proportionately in the act of understanding and of considering, for as
the sight has reference to visible things, so has the intellect to
intelligible things. I believe now that you understand to what end and
in what manner the soul tends, when she says "repress the sight."
CIC. I understand very well. Now continue to unfold what happens to
these thoughts.
TANS. Now follows the disagreement between the mother and the aforesaid
children, who having, contrary to her orders, opened their eyes, and,
having fixed them on the splendour of the object, they remained in
company with the heart.
22.
Cruel sons are ye to me, me whom ye left
Still farther to exasperate my pain;
And ever without cease ye weary me,
Taking away from me my every hope!
Why should the sense remain? oh, grasping heavens!
Wherefore these broken ruined powers, if not
To make me subject and exemplar
Of such heavy martyrdom, such lengthened pain?
Leave, dear sons, my winged fire enchained,
And let me, some of you once more behold,
Come back to me from those retaining claws!
Oh, weariness! not one returns
To bring a late refreshment to my pains.
Behold me, miserable one, deprived of heart, abandoned of thoughts, left
by hope, I, who had fixed my all in them. Nothing is left to me but the
sense of my poverty, my unhappiness and misery; why does not this too
leave me? Why does not death succour me, now that I am deprived of life?
To what use do I possess these natural powers if I be deprived of the
use of them? How can I alone nourish myself with intelligible
conceptions as with intellectual bread, if the substance of this bread
be composed of this contingency. How can I linger in the intimacy of
these friendly and dear members which I have woven round me, adjusting
them with the symmetry of the elementary conditions, if my thoughts and
all my affections abandon me, intent upon the care of the bread that is
immaterial and divine? Up, up; oh my flying thoughts; up, oh my rebel
heart; let live the sense of things that are felt, and the understanding
of things intelligible, come to the succour of the body with matter and
corporeal subject, and let the understanding delight in its own objects,
to the end that this composition of the body may be realized, that this
machine dissolve not, in which, by means of the spirit, the soul is
united to the body. Why, unhappy as I am (more through domestic
circumstances than through external violence), am I doomed to see this
horrible divorce between my parts and members? Why does the intellect
trouble itself to give laws to the sense and yet deprive it of its food?
and this, on the other hand, resists; desiring to live according to its
own decrees, and not according to the decree of others; for these and
not those are able to maintain and bless it, therefore it ought to
attend to its own comfort and life, and not to that of others. There is
no harmony and concord where there is only one, where one individual
absorbs the whole being, but where there is order and analogy in things
diverse; where each thing serves its own nature. Therefore let the sense
feed according to the law of things that can be felt, the flesh be
obedient to the law of the spirit, the reason to its own law. Let them
not be confounded nor mixed. Enough that one neither mar nor prejudice
the law of the other, since it is not just that the sense outrage the
law of reason. And verily it is a shameful thing that one should
tyrannize over the other, particularly where the intellect is a pilgrim
and strange, and the sense is more domesticated and at home. I am forced
by you, my thoughts, to remain at home in charge of the house, while
others may wander wherever they will. This is a law of Nature, and
therefore a law of the author and originator of Nature. Sin on then, now
that all of you, seduced by the charm of the intellect, leave the other
part of me to the peril of death. How have you gotten this melancholy
and perverse humour, which breaks the certain and natural laws of the
true life, and which is in your own hands, for one, uncertain, and which
has no existence except in shadow, beyond the limits of fantastic
thought? Seems it to you a natural thing that they should live divinely
and not as animals and humanly, they being not gods, but men and
animals? It is a law of fate and Nature that everything should adapt
itself to the condition of its own being, wherefore then, while you
follow after the niggard nectar of the gods, do you lose that which is
present and is your own, and trouble yourself about the vain hopes of
others? Ought not Nature to refuse to give you the other good, if that
which she at present offers to you, you stupidly despise?
Heaven the second gift denies,
To him who does the first despise.
With these and similar reasons the soul, taking part with the weakest,
seeks to recall the thoughts to the care of the body. And these,
although late, come and show themselves, but not in that form in which
they departed, but only to declare their rebellion, and force her to
follow. And the sorrowing one thus laments:
23.
Ah, dogs of Actæon, ah, proud ingrates!
Whom to the abode of my divinity I sent;
Without hope do ye return to me;
And, coming to the mother's side, ye bring
Back unto me a too unhappy boon;
Ye mangle me, and will that I live not.
Leave me, life, that I may mount up to my sun,
A double streamlet, mad, without my fount!
When shall this ponderous mass of me dissolve?
When shall it be, that, taking myself hence,
And swiftly rising to the heights above,
Together with my heart I may abide,
And with my thoughts I may be deified?
The Platonists say that the soul, as to its superior part, always
consists in the intellect, in which it has more of understanding than of
soul, seeing that it is called soul only in so far as it vivifies the
body and sustains it. So here, the same essence which nourishes and
maintains the thoughts on high, together with the exalted heart, is
induced by the inferior part to afflict itself, and recall them as
rebels.
CIC. So that they are not two contrary existences, but one, subject to
two contradictory terms?
TANS. So it is, precisely. As the ray of the sun which touches the
earth, and is joined to obscure and to inferior things, which it
brightens, vivifies, and kindles, and is then joined to the element of
fire--that is, to the star, whence it proceeds, and has its beginning,
and is diffused, and in which it has its own and original
subsistence--so the soul, which is in the horizon of Nature, is
corporeal and incorporeal, and contains that with which it rises to
superior things and declines to things inferior. And this, you may
perceive, does not happen by reason and order of local motion, but
solely through the impulse of one and of another power or faculty. As
when the sense rises to the imagination, the imagination to the reason,
the reason to the intellect, the intellect to the mind, then the whole
soul is converted into God, and inhabits the intelligible world; whence,
on the other hand, she descends in an inverse manner to the world of
feeling, through the intellect, reason, imagination, sense, vegetation.
CIC. It is true that I have heard that the soul, in order to put itself
in the ultimate degree of divine things, descends into the mortal body,
and from this goes up again to the divine degrees, which are three
degrees of intelligence. For there are others in which the intellectual
surpasses the animal, which are said to be the celestial intelligences;
and others in which the animal surpasses the intellectual, which are the
human intelligences; others there are, of which those things are equal,
as those of demons or heroes.
TANS. The mind then cannot desire except that which is near, close,
known, and familiar. The pig cannot desire to be a man, nor wish for
those things that are suitable to the human appetite. He likes better
to turn about in mud than in a bed of linen, he would prefer a sow to
the most beautiful of women, because the affection follows the reason of
the species. And amongst men the same thing is seen, according as some
resemble one species of brute beast and some another: these having
something of the quadruped, and those of birds, and, may be, some
affinity, which I will not explain, but through which those have been
known who are affected by certain sorts of beasts. Now, it is lawful for
the mind which finds itself oppressed by the material conjunction of the
soul, to raise itself to the contemplation of another state, to which
the soul may arrive, comparing the two, and so through the future
despise the present. If a beast had a sense of the difference which
exists between his own condition and that of man, and the meanness of
his own state with the nobility of the human state, which he would deem
it not impossible to be able to reach, he would love death, which would
open to him that road, more than that life which keeps him in the
present state of being. When the soul complains, saying, "Ah! dogs of
Actæon!" she is represented as a thing which appears only in the
inferior powers, and against which the mind rebels for having taken away
the heart with it; that is to say, the entire affections, with all the
army of the thoughts. So that, having a knowledge of the present state,
and being ignorant of every other, and not believing that others exist
about which she can have any knowledge, she complains of her thoughts,
which, tardily turning towards her, come rather to draw her up than to
make themselves accepted by her. And through the distraction which she
endures on account of the ordinary love of the material and of things
intelligible, she feels herself lacerated and mangled, so that at last
she is forced to yield to the more vigorous impulse. And if, by virtue
of contemplation, she rises or is caught up above the horizon of the
natural affections, whence with purer eye she learns the difference
between the one life and the other, then, vanquished by the lofty
thoughts, and, as if dead to the body, she aspires to that which is
elevated, and, although alive in the body, she vegetates there as if
dead, being present as an animating principle and absent in operative
activity; not because she does not act while the body is alive, but that
the actions of this mass are intermittent, weak, and, as it were,
purposeless.
CIC. Thus a certain theologian, who was said to be transported to the
third heaven and enchanted with the view of it, said that what he
desired was the dissolution of his body.
TANS. So; first complaining of the heart and quarrelling with the
thoughts, she now desires to rise on high with them, and exhibits her
regret for the connection and familiarity contracted with corporeal
matter, and says: "Leave me life (corporeal), and do not impede my
progress upwards to my native home, to my sun. Leave me now, for no
longer do my eyes weep tears; neither because I cannot succour them (the
thoughts), nor because I cannot remain divided from my happiness. Leave
me, for it is not fit nor possible that these two streams should run
without their source, that is, without the heart. I will not, I say,
make two rivers of tears here below, while my heart, which is the source
of such rivers, is flown away on high with its nymphs, which are my
thoughts." Thus, little by little, from dislike and regret, she proceeds
to the hatred of inferior things, which she partly shows, saying, "When
shall this ponderous mass of me dissolve?" and that which follows.
CIC. This I understand right well, and also that which you would infer
about the principal intention; that is to say, that these are the
degrees of the loves, of the affections, and of the enthusiasms,
according to the degrees of greater and lesser light, of cognition, and
of intelligence.
TANS. Thou understandest rightly. From this thou oughtest to learn that
doctrine taken from the Pythagoreans and Platonists, which is, that the
soul makes the two progressions of ascent and descent, by the care that
it has of itself and of matter; being moved by its own proper love of
good, and being urged by the providence of fate.
CIC. But, prythee, tell me briefly what you mean about the soul of the
world, if she can neither ascend nor descend?
TANS. If you ask of the world, according to the common
signification--that is, in so far as it signifies what is called the
universe--I say that, being infinite, it has no dimension or measure, is
immobile, inanimate, and without form, notwithstanding it is the place
of infinite moving worlds and is infinite space, in which are so many
large animals that are called stars. If you ask according to the
signification held by the true philosophers--that is, in so far as it
signifies every globe, every star, such as this earth, the body of the
sun, moon, and others--I say that such soul does not ascend nor descend,
but turns in a circle. Thus, being compounded of superior and inferior
powers, with the superior it turns round the divinity, and with the
inferior, towards the mass of the worlds, which is by it vivified and
maintained between the tropics of generation and the corruption of
living things in those worlds, serving its own life eternally; because
the act of the divine providence, always preserves it with divine heat
and light, with the same order and measure, in the ordinary and
self-same being.