alone which impede our anagogic impulse to the first be at peace; but let
the air, and the universe itself, be still. And let all things extend us
with a tranquil power to communion with the ineffable. Let us also
standing there, having transcended the intelligible (if we contain any
thing of this kind), and with nearly closed eyes adoring as it were the
rising sun, since it is not lawful for any being whatever intently to
behold him,--let us survey the sun whence the light of the intelligible
gods proceeds, emerging, as the poets say, from the bosom of the ocean;
and again from this divine tranquillity descending into intellect, and
from intellect employing the reasonings of the soul, let us relate to
ourselves what the natures are from which in this progression we shall
consider the first God as exempt. And let us as it were celebrate him,
not as establishing the earth and the heavens, nor as giving subsistence
to souls, and the generations of all animals; for he produced these
indeed, but among the last of things. But prior to these, let us
celebrate him as unfolding into light the whole intelligible and
intellectual genus of gods, together with all the supermundane and
mundane divinities as, the God of all gods, the Unity of all unities,
and beyond the first adyta--as more ineffable than all silence, and more
unknown than all essence,--as holy among the holies, and concealed in
the intelligible gods." Such is the piety, such the sublimity, and
magnificence of conception, with which the Platonic philosophers speak of
that which is in reality in every respect ineffable, when they presume to
speak about it, extending the ineffable parturitions of the soul to the
ineffable cosensation of the incomprehensible one.

From this sublime veneration of this most awful nature, which, as is
noticed in the extracts from Damascius, induced the most ancient
theologists, philosophers, and poets, to be entirely silent concerning
it, arose the great reverence which the ancients paid to the divinities