Select Works, Section 65

A form of meditation that uses imagery, imagination, or symbolic thought rather than purely empty stillness.

[auto] The soul actively discerns and judges objects based on an inner standard.

Platonic recollection: knowledge as the soul's recovery of what it knew before birth, with learning as remembering rather than acquisition.

The soul affirms the Beautiful where it finds something accordant with the Ideal-Form within itself.

The material body viewed as a prison, tomb, or source of error that hinders spiritual knowledge and return.

Matter is characterized as shapeless and dark, opposed in nature to the Idea.

The Hermetic axiom that the structure of the cosmos is reflected at every scale — 'as above, so below; as within, so without' — making each level a legible map of the others.

The architect analogy illustrates the correspondence between the inner ideal and the outer material form.

Ontological opposition between two primal principles (light/darkness, truth/lie, spirit/matter) as the fundamental structure of reality.

[auto] Matter is explicitly described as opposed in nature to the Ideal-Form.

The uncreated luminous quality of the divine, sometimes experienced directly in mystical states; illumination as revelation.

[auto] Light is a central metaphor for Form and Beauty, described as pouring into matter to conquer darkness and create splendour.

The doctrine that God has no parts, divisions, or composite attributes; pure undivided being.

[auto] The Ideal-Form is described as indivisible and not a thing of parts despite diversity.

Augustinian and Plotinian doctrine that evil has no positive being of its own but is a lack, distortion, or absence of the good — denying ontological dualism while preserving moral seriousness.

Matter is described as shapeless and dark, with beauty arising only from the conquest of this deficiency by Form.

Salvation through direct experiential knowledge of the divine nature, not through faith, ritual, or moral works alone.

[auto] The soul possesses a faculty sure in appreciation, affirming the Beautiful through direct inner accord.

The divine spark or luminous quality residing within the human person, potentially recognisable through introspection.

The soul possesses an Ideal-Form within itself that acts as a canon for judging beauty.

The claim that the divine realm is present inside the individual, accessible without external mediation.

[auto] The standard for beauty and judgment is located within the soul itself.

Diotima's staged ascent from love of beautiful bodies → beautiful souls → beautiful pursuits → beautiful knowledge → Beauty itself; the canonical scala amoris that grounds Plotinus's On the Beautiful and Bruno's Eroici Furori — distinct from generic spiritual_ascent in that eros is the specific motive force.

[auto] The passage describes the ascent from sensible beauties (images/shadow-pictures) to the Ideal-Principle, grounding the canonical scala amoris.

The divine reason, word, or ordering principle through which the universe was created; mediates between the transcendent God and the material world.

[auto] The Ideal-Form acts as an ordering principle that binds and controls shapeless matter.

The recognition of one's own true divine nature as the primary path to liberation; 'know thyself' as soteriology.

[auto] The soul uses an Idea within itself as a canon of accuracy for its decisions.

A staged journey of the soul upward through heavenly realms or levels of being toward the divine source.

Fire is described as making ever upwards, and the soul carries fragmentary things within to the Ideal-Principle.

The doctrine that all existence is ultimately one substance or one divine reality; non-duality as a theological claim.

[auto] The perceptive faculty gathers fragmentary objects into unity within itself.