seize hold of it”--so as thus to descend to earth. (2) We have next the symbol of the Sun and its purifying, healing Light, under which God and His action are rapturously proclaimed by Dionysius. “Even as our sun, by its very being, enlightens all things able to partake of its light in their various degrees, so also the Good, by its very existence, sends unto all things that be, the rays of its entire goodness, according to their capacity for them. By means of these rays they are purified from all corruption and death … and are separated from instability.” “The Divine Goodness, this our great sun, enlightens … nourishes, perfects, renews.” Even the pure can thus be made purer still. “He, the Good, is called spiritual light … he cleanses the mental vision of the very angels: they taste, as it were, the light.”[80] All this imagery goes back, in the first instance, to Proclus. For Proclus puts in parallel “sun” and “God,” and “to be enlightened” and “to be deified”; makes all purifying forces to coalesce in the activity of the Sun-God, Apollo Katharsios, the Purifier, who “everywhere unifies multiplicity … purifying the entire heaven and all living things throughout the world”; and describes how “from above, from his super-heavenly post, Apollo scatters the arrows of Zeus,--his rays upon all the world.”[81] The Sun’s rays, here as powerful as the bolts of Zeus, thus begin to play the part still assigned to them in Catherine’s imagery of the “Saëtte” and “Radii” of the divine Light and Love. And the substance of the whole symbol goes back, through fine sayings of Plotinus and through Philo, to Plato, who calls the Sun “the offspring of the Good and analogous to it,” and who (doubtless rightly) takes Homer’s “golden chain” to be nothing but the Sun-rays,--thus identifying the two symbols.[82]