Intelligences and celestial government · Lexicon

From the book

The Summary of Physics Restored

Attributed to Jean d’Espagnet · Diotimos Editions · 2026

Orientation

At a Glance

The wordIntelligences are the incorporeal intellectual beings of the author's higher order. Intelligible means apprehended by intellect, not merely an especially clever material organism.
In the bookThey receive illumination and commands from divine mind, then participate in a hierarchy through which powers reach lower natures. Shared light sustains an ordered obedience.
In this editionThe Creator is expressly not a part of the created commonwealth. The musician analogy distinguishes an author of harmony from one constituent sound.
A place to readCanons 239–240 show the upward source and downward communication; 192 supplies the classification and 245 the limited faculties of created intellectual natures.

Meaning

Intelligentia here names a being, not the abstract faculty normally meant by modern “intelligence.” The plural refers to intellectual natures in an ordered superheavenly domain. The book speaks of them through light, food, mirror, command, choir, and political office. These metaphors connect reception and action: the beings are illuminated and sustained, understand what is commanded, and operate within a delegated order. Their powers are derived, not equal to those of the source.

Use in the book

Canon 10 distinguishes the wholly spiritual intelligible region from the celestial region of the most perfect bodies and the lower elemental realm. This difference remains essential when the later vocabulary of spirits becomes wider. Canon 192 says philosophers call spiritual not only incorporeal natures, such as Intelligences, Angels, and Daemons are believed to be, but also exceedingly subtle material natures. The wider class therefore does not make an ethereal breath and an Intelligence identical kinds of being.

Canon 188 describes divine communication descending through simpler spiritual natures into bodily ones. Near the conclusion, canon 239 gives this order a governmental form. The weak lower province is subject to the ethereal middle; the middle has received rights and a delegated office from the highest. The Empyrean Heaven and choir of intelligible beings breathe into the celestial order powers successively received from the Archetype. The immediately subordinate natures are the first instruments of the material world; their harmonious movement stirs lower things into their measured alternations. The passage joins a choir with a dance and an empire, but their common work is to describe ordered transmission rather than independent rival powers.

Canon 240 explains how the Intelligences themselves receive. Divine mind illuminates them immediately according to their orders. They feed on the light as immortal nourishment, read commands within it as in a mirror, and are kindled towards obedience. The order matters: their knowledge and activity depend on received illumination. The illumination is “direct” at this level, but not an assertion that all lower bodies receive their forms without intermediaries. The preceding canon has carefully supplied those intermediaries.

The same canon calls divine love the binding Herculean knot of the world's threefold nature. Its conclusion prevents a misleading inference from universal union. The Creator is in no way a part of the commonwealth. The comparisons are unity, which constitutes and measures number without being counted as one of its parts in this account, and the musician, who authors rather than constitutes the harmony. The argument does not identify divinity with the material universe, even though its presence and action sustain that universe throughout.

Canon 245 finally places the angelic nature and human soul together as small images of divinity, possessing intellect and will according to their own weight and measure. This supplies a limit to the lofty political and luminous language. An Intelligence is not omniscient merely because its knowledge comes from divine illumination, nor omnipotent because it carries a delegated command. The book's hierarchy combines likeness, participation, difference, and limitation. The entry remains within that historical theological cosmology rather than presenting the existence or workings of these beings as independently verified facts.

Places to read

Canon 10; 1653, pp. 6, 7LatinThe intelligible, wholly spiritual region distinguished from celestial bodies.
Canon 188; 1653, pp. 134, 135LatinCommunication through simpler natures to bodily ones.
Canon 192; 1653, pp. 137, 138LatinIntelligences among the beings believed incorporeal, distinct from subtle material spirits.
Canon 239; 1653, p. 173LatinDelegated celestial government, choir, instruments, and measured dance.
Canon 240; 1653, pp. 173, 174LatinIllumination, immortal nourishment, commands, and the Creator/created distinction.
Canon 245; 1653, p. 179LatinCreated intellectual faculties have a limited measure.

A triad, completing the created commonwealth's threefold order. — Canon 240; 1653, pp. 173, 174.

Read: Canon 240 · Latin.

Lyre-player — citharœdus

Lyre-player, the author of harmony rather than one of its constituent parts. — Canon 240; 1653, pp. 173, 174.

Read: Canon 240 · Latin.