I. 6. 7-8 (Armstrongs Selection and Translation AP)
(The first stage in rising to the vision of the Good, the true Beauty, our Father, is to turn from the outward senses to the inner vision of the mind.)
Here the greatest, the ultimate contest is set before our souls; all our toil and trouble is for this, not to be left without a share in the best of visions. The man who attains this is blessed in seeing that blessed sight, and he who fails to attain it has failed utterly. A man has not failed if he fails to win beauty of colours or bodies, or power or office or kingship even, but if he fails to win this and only this. For this he should give up the attainment of kingship and rule over all earth and sea and sky, if only by leaving and overlooking them he can turn to That and see.
But how shall we find the way? What method can we devise? How can one see the inconceivable Beauty Which stays within in the holy sanctuary and does not come out where the profane may see It? Let him who can follow and come within, and leave outside the sight of his eyes and not turn back to the bodily splendours which he saw before. When he sees the beauty in bodies he must not run after them; we must know that they are images, traces, shadows, and hurry away to That which they image. For if a man runs to the image and wants to seize it as if it was the reality (like a beautiful reflection playing on the water, which some story somewhere, I think, said riddlingly a man wanted to catch and sank down into the stream and disappeared) then this man who clings to beautiful bodies and will not let them go, will, like the man in the story, but in soul, not in body, sink down into the dark depths where Nous has no delight, and stay blind in Hades, consorting with shadows there and here. This would be truer advice, 'Let us fly to our dear country.' Where then is our way of escape? How shall we put out to sea? (Odysseus, I think, speaks symbolically when he says he must fly from the witch Circe, or Calypso, and is not content to stay though he has delights of the eyes and lives among much beauty of sense.) Our country from which we came is There, our Father is There. How shall we travel to it, where is our way of escape? We cannot get there on foot; for our feet only carry us everywhere in this world, from one country to another. You must not get ready a carriage, either, or a boat. Let all these things go, and do not look. Shut your eyes and change to and wake another way of seeing, which everyone has but few use.
II. 9. 16 (Armstrong Selection and Translation)
(To despise the visible universe and to be insensitive to its beauty is proof that one has no real knowledge of the intelligible universe, the realm of Noûs.)
No intelligent man would even inquire about this (about whether the visible universe is good, intelligent, and providentially directed), but only someone who is blind, without perception or intelligence and far from the sight of the universe of Noûs, since he does not even see this universe here. For how could there be a musician who sees the melody in the realm of Noûs and is not stirred when he hears the melody of sensible sounds? Or how could there be anyone skilled in geometry and the science of numbers who is not pleased when he sees right relation, proportion, and order with his bodily eyes? Of course, people do not look at the same things in the same way; some, when they are looking at pictures, see the works of art with their eyes but recognize in them an imitation in the world of sense of the reality existing in Noûs, and are excited by it and come to a recollection of the truth: this is the experience from which passionate loves arise. But if someone who sees beauty excellently represented in a face is carried to that higher world, will anyone be so sluggish in mind and so immovable that, when he sees all the beauties of the world of sense, all its good proportion and the mighty excellence of its order, and the splendour of form which the stars, for all their remoteness, make manifest, he will not be seized with reverence and think, 'What wonders, and from what a source'? If he does not, he neither understands the world of sense nor sees that higher world.
II. 9. 16 (Armstrong Selection and Translation)
(To despise the visible universe and to be insensitive to its beauty is proof that one has no real knowledge of the intelligible universe, the realm of Noûs.)
No intelligent man would even inquire about this (about whether the visible universe is good, intelligent, and providentially directed), but only someone who is blind, without perception or intelligence and far from the sight of the universe of Noûs, since he does not even see this universe here. For how could there be a musician who sees the melody in the realm of Noûs and is not stirred when he hears the melody of sensible sounds? Or how could there be anyone skilled in geometry and the science of numbers who is not pleased when he sees right relation, proportion, and order with his bodily eyes? Of course, people do not look at the same things in the same way; some, when they are looking at pictures, see the works of art with their eyes but recognize in them an imitation in the world of sense of the reality existing in Noûs, and are excited by it and come to a recollection of the truth: this is the experience from which passionate loves arise. But if someone who sees beauty excellently represented in a face is carried to that higher world, will anyone be so sluggish in mind and so immovable that, when he sees all the beauties of the world of sense, all its good proportion and the mighty excellence of its order, and the splendour of form which the stars, for all their remoteness, make manifest, he will not be seized with reverence and think, 'What wonders, and from what a source'? If he does not, he neither understands the world of sense nor sees that higher world.