Thus, God is the principle of the three orders of beauty that we have distinguished, physical beauty, intellectual beauty, moral beauty. In him also are reunited the two great forms of the beautiful distributed in each of these three orders, to wit, the beautiful and the sublime. God is, _par excellence_, the beautiful--for what object satisfies more all our faculties, our reason, our imagination, our heart! He offers to reason the highest idea, beyond which it has nothing more to seek; to imagination the most ravishing contemplation; to the heart a sovereign object of love. He is, then, perfectly beautiful; but is he not sublime also in other ways? If he extends the horizon of thought, it is to confound it in the abyss of his greatness. If the soul blooms at the spectacle of his goodness, has it not also reason to be affrighted at the idea of his justice, which is not less present to it? God is at once mild and terrible. At the same time that he is the life, the light, the movement, the ineffable grace of visible and finite nature, he is also called the Eternal, the Invisible, the Infinite, the Absolute Unity, and the Being of beings. Do not these awful attributes, as certain as the first, produce in the highest degree in the imagination and the soul that melancholy emotion excited by the sublime? Yes, God is for us the type and source of the two great forms of beauty, because he is to us at once an impenetrable enigma and still the clearest word that we are able to find for all enigmas. Limited beings as we are, we comprehend nothing in comparison with that which is without limits, and we are able to explain nothing without that same thing which is without limits. By the being that we possess, we have some idea of the infinite being of God; by the nothingness that is in us, we lose ourselves in the being of God; and thus always forced to recur to him in order to explain any thing, and always thrown back within ourselves under the weight of his infinitude, we experience by turns, or rather at the same time, for this God who raises and casts us down, a sentiment of irresistible attraction and astonishment, not to say insurmountable terror, which he alone can cause and allay, because he alone is the unity of the sublime and the beautiful. Thus absolute being, which is both absolute unity and infinite variety,--God, is necessarily the last reason, the ultimate foundation, the completed ideal of all beauty. This is the marvellous beauty that Diotimus had caught a glimpse of, and thus paints to Socrates in the _Banquet_: