,
finding himself, he comes to lose the love and affection for every other
thing senseful as well as intellectual, because this, conjoined to that
light, itself also becomes light, and in consequence becomes a god:
because it contracts the divinity into itself, it being in God through
the intention with which it penetrates into the divinity so far as it
can, and God being in it, so that after penetrating, it comes to
conceive, and so far as it can, receive and comprehend the divinity in
its conception. Now in such conceptions and similitudes the human
intellect of this lower world nourishes itself, till such time as it
will be lawful to behold with purer eye the beauty of the divinity. As
happens to him, who, absorbed in the contemplation of some elaborate
architectural work, goes on examining one thing after another in it,
enchanted and feeding in a wonder of delight; but if it should happen
that he sees the lord of all those pictures, who is of a beauty
incomparably greater, leaving all care and thought of them, he is turned
intently to the examination of him. Here, then, is the difference
between that state where we see divine beauty in intelligible
conceptions apart from the effects, labours, works, shadows, and
similitudes of it, and that other state in which it is lawful to behold
it in real presence. He says: "My pasture is the high emprise," because
as the Pythagoreans remark, "The soul moves and turns round God, as the
body round the soul."

CIC. Then the body is not the habitation of the soul?

TANS. No; because the soul is not in the body locally, but as intrinsic
form and extrinsic framer, as that which forms the limbs indicates the
internal and external composition. The body, then, is in the soul, the
soul in the mind, the mind either is God or is in God, as Plotinus said.
As in its essence it is in God who is its life, similarly through the
intellectual operation, and the will consequent upon such operation, it
agrees with its bright and beatific object. Fitly, therefore, this
rapture of heroic enthusiasm feeds on such "high emprise." For the
object is infinite, and in action most simple, and our intellectual
power cannot apprehend the infinite except in speech or in a certain
manner of speech, so to say in a certain potential or relative
inference, as one who proposes to himself the infinity, so that he may
constitute for himself a finality where no finality is.

CIC. Fitly so, because the ultimate oug