being a part of a consubsistent triad, that he is not to be connumerated
with any thing; but is so perfectly exempt from all multitude, that he is
even beyond being; and he so ineffably transcends all relation and
habitude, that language is in reality subverted about him, and knowledge
refunded into ignorance. What that trinity however is in the theology of
Plato, which doubtless gave birth to the Christian, will be evident to the
intelligent from the notes on the Parmenides, and the extracts, from
Damascius. And thus much for the doctrine of Plato concerning the principle
of things, and his immediate offspring, the great importance of which will,
I doubt not, be a sufficient apology for the length of this discussion.

In the next place, following Proclus and Olympiodorus as our guides, let us
consider the mode according to which Plato teaches us mystic conceptions of
divine natures: for he appears not to have pursued every where the same
mode of doctrine about these; but sometimes according to a divinely
inspired energy, and at other times dialectically, he evolves the truth
concerning them. And sometimes he symbolically announces their ineffable
idioms, but at other times he recurs to them from images, and discovers in
them the primary causes of wholes. For in the Phaedrus being evidently
inspired, and having exchanged human intelligence for a better possession,
divine mania, he unfolds many arcane dogmas concerning the intellectual,
liberated, and mundane gods. But in the Sophista dialectically contending
about being, and the subsistence of the one above beings, and doubting
against philosophers more ancient than himself, he shows how all beings are
suspended from their cause and the first being, but that being itself
participates of that unity which is exempt from all things, that it is a
passive,[8] one, but not the one itself, being subject to and united to the
one, but not being that which is primarily one. In a similar manner too, in
the Parmenides, he unfolds dialectically the progressions of being from the
one, through the first hypothesis of that dialogue, and this, as he there