Marsilio Ficino’s Platonic Theology, Volume II

2What, then, of corporeal forms? They are certainly similar to bodies in this respect. A form implanted in bodies has lost its own excellence and become wholly corporeal, since it has now undergone every condition of body. The conditions of body are two: extension with respect to place and change with respect to time. A form immersed in bodies is extended together with the breadth of the body and changes when the body is altered. Since it has thus become thoroughly corporeal and has been deprived of its former excellence, it does not exist in its own right, as we have said elsewhere, and has no being of its own. Rather, it is so joined with matter that there is one being of the whole. If it does not exist through itself, it certainly does not act through itself. Hence, if it is related to the first cause, it must be related through something else—namely, through that by which it exists. It exists through another, higher form, free from matter, from which it continually hangs down into matter as an image in a mirror depends upon a man's face; through this higher form it is also constantly related to the first cause. If a corporeal form exists altogether through another and is likewise related to the first principle through another, what is that through which both the natural body and its form are related to the first? It is assuredly that third essence which we long ago placed above the qualities of bodies. This essence relates bodily qualities to God in the same way that it produces them in matter. It produces them by its operation, and its operation is mobile. Through motion, therefore, it generates them, and through motion it also relates them. Thus its mode of relating them is mutable. It follows that natural bodies and their forms, because they are related to God through another and through motion, neither exist through themselves nor remain stable, but waver utterly and perish.