CHAP. V.
But why am I prolix about these particulars? For I have abundantly shown, in what has been before said, the transcendency of divine above human divination. It is better, therefore, in compliance with your request, “to point out to you the way to felicity, and show you in what the essence of it is placed.” For from this the truth will be discovered, and at the same time all the doubts may be easily dissolved. I say, therefore, that the more divine[[149]] intelligible man, who was formerly united to the Gods by the vision of them, afterwards entered into another soul, which is coadapted to the human form, and through this became fettered with the bonds of necessity and fate. Hence it is requisite to consider how he may be liberated from these bonds. There is, therefore, no other dissolution of them than the knowledge of the Gods. For to know scientifically the good is the idea of felicity; just as the oblivion of good, and deception about evil, happen to be the idea of evil. The former, therefore, is present with divinity; but the latter, which is an inferior destiny, is inseparable from the mortal nature. And the former, indeed, measures the essences of intelligibles[[150]] by sacred ways; but the latter, abandoning principles, gives itself up to the measurement of the idea of body. The former is a knowledge of the father; but the latter is a departure from him, and an oblivion of the God who is a superessential father, and sufficient to himself. The former, likewise, preserves the true life of the soul, and leads it back to its father; but the latter draws down the generation-ruling[[151]] man, as far as to that which is never permanent, but is always flowing. You must understand, therefore, that this is the first path to felicity, affording to souls an intellectual plenitude of divine union. But the sacerdotal and theurgic gift of felicity is called, indeed, the gate to the Demiurgus of wholes, or the seat, or palace, of the good. In the first place, likewise, it possesses a power of purifying the soul, much more perfect than the power which purifies the body; afterwards it causes a coaptation of the reasoning power to the participation and vision of the good, and a liberation from every thing of a contrary nature; and, in the last place, produces a union with the Gods, who are the givers of every good.