Chapter VIII-p

It causes us, therefore, to pass through life in an irreprehensible manner; just as the internal prophetic mania contracts and elevates all the multiplied and many powers and lives of the soul to the one , in order that it may in a greater degree be preserved and connected. But the amatory mania converts young persons to us, and causes them to become our friends, being instructive of youth, and leading them from sensible beauty to our psychical beauty, and from this sending them to intelligible beauty; in the same manner as the internal amatory mania conjoins the one of the soul to the Gods. “All the above mentioned manias, therefore, are superior to the prudent and temperate energies of the soul. Nevertheless, there is a mania which is coordinate with temperance, and which we say has in a certain respect a prerogative above it. For certain inspirations are produced, according to the middle and also according to the doxastic reasons of the soul, conformably to which artists effect certain things, and discover theorems beyond expectation, as Asclepius, for instance, in medicine, and Hercules in the practic life.” Afterwards, in commenting on what Plato says of the mania from the Muses, viz. “that it adorns the infinite deeds of the ancients,” Hermeas observes, “that the inward energy in the soul of the poetic mania, by applying itself to superior and intelligible natures, imparts to subordinate natures harmony and order; but that the external divinely-inspired poetry celebrates the deeds of the ancients, and instructs both its contemporaries and posterity, extending its energies every where.” But Plato says, “that he who without the divinely-inspired mania of the Muses expects to become a divine poet, will, by thus fancying, become himself imperfect, and his poetry will be vanquished and concealed by the poetry which is the progeny of mania.” Hermeas adds, “For what similitude is there between the poetry of Chærilus and Callimachus, and that of Homer and Pindar? For the divinely-inspired poets, as being filled 358 from the Muses, always invoke them, and extend to them all that they say.” For a fuller and most admirable account of the poetic mania, and of the different species of poetry by Proclus, see the notes on the tenth book of the Republic, in my translation of Plato, and also the Introduction to my translation of the Rhetoric, Poetic, and Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle. From what is here said by Hermeas about enthusiasm, the intelligent reader will easily see that none of the Roman poets, whose works have been transmitted to us, possessed that which is primarily, properly, and truly enthusiasm, or that highest species of it in which the one of the soul is illuminated by a divine nature, and through transcendent similitude is united to it. As to Virgil, indeed, the prince of these poets, though he invokes the Muse in the beginning of the Æneid, yet his invocation of her is but a partial and secondary thing. For he only calls on her to unfold to him the causes that involved a man of such remarkable piety as Æneas in so many misfortunes: Musa, mihi causa memora, &c. And, confiding in his own genius, he begins his poem without soliciting supernal inspiration, Arma, virumque cano, &c. To which may be added, that this placing himself before the Muse, resembles the ego et meus rex of Wolsey.