In the next place, following Proclus and Olympiodorus as our guides, let us consider the mode according to which Plato teaches us mystic conceptions of divine natures: for he appears not to have pursued every where the same mode of doctrine about these; but sometimes according to a divinely inspired energy, and at other times dialectically, he evolves the truth concerning them. And sometimes he symbolically announces their ineffable idioms, but at other times he recurs to them from images, and discovers in them the primary causes of wholes. For in the Phaedrus being evidently inspired, and having exchanged human intelligence for a better possession, divine mania, he unfolds many arcane dogmas concerning the intellectual, liberated, and mundane gods. But in the Sophista dialectically contending about being, and the subsistence of the one above beings, and doubting against philosophers more ancient than himself, he shows how all beings are suspended from their cause and the first being, but that being itself participates of that unity which is exempt from all things, that it is a passive,[8] one, but not the one itself, being subject to and united to the one, but not being that which is primarily one. In a similar manner too, in the Parmenides, he unfolds dialectically the progressions of being from the one, through the first hypothesis of that dialogue, and this, as he there asserts, according to the most perfect division of this method. And again in the Gorgias, he relates the fable concerning the three fabricators, and their demiurgic allotment. But in the Banquet he speaks concerning the union of love; and in the Protagoras, about the distribution of mortal animals from the gods; in a symbolical manner concealing the truth concerning divine natures, and as far as to mere indication unfolding his mind to the most genuine of his readers. ----------------- [8] It is necessary to observe, that, according to Plato, whatever participates of any thing is said to be passive to that which it participates, and the participations themselves are called by him passions. -----------------