Marsilio Ficino’s Platonic Theology, Volume I

14Fittingly, just as this mind, the soul's most excellent part, is the head of the soul, so this mind—which is not its own but the soul's, not absolute but contracted to the capacity of this soul, not clear but obscure and in some way doubtful—has as its head a certain mind which exists in itself, free and lucid. Here the riddle of the Magi is truly unraveled: ‘There is a thing lucid on every side. There is a thing obscure on every side. There is a middle thing, partly lucid and partly obscure.’ In the order of bodies, every star above the moon is lucid on every side; the air is obscure on every side; and the moon is intermediate. In the order of spirits, mind is full of light; the irrational soul is empty of it; and the rational soul holds the middle place. It possesses a share of intellectual light and lacks a share. The portion it has from God, as the moon has from the sun, it receives in a different manner and changes its form. Hence an angel fittingly stands above it: like every star above the moon, the angel shines in its entirety, always and in the same manner, with the light of its sun. Indeed, wherever a higher nature touches a lower one, it touches the highest point of the lower from the lowest degree of itself. Thus the lowest part of fire touches the highest part of air. Intellectual nature is higher than corporeal nature, and it touches the latter in such a way that what is most excellent among bodies participates in an intellectual soul, while the lower bodies, which are very many, do not. Among the Platonists the most excellent bodies are those of the inhabitants of heaven, of daemons, and of human beings. But are the minds allotted to bodies of this kind the highest of minds? By no means. Otherwise a lower nature would attain the summit of a higher nature without an intermediary. Therefore, just as beneath bodies endowed with mind there are very many bodies devoid of mind, so above minds implanted in bodies there are very many minds allotted to no bodies at all—and indeed far more of them than there are species of bodies.