The Heroic Enthusiasts, Part I (Gli Eroici Furori) · 33 of 63 · tr. L. Williams
Third Dialogue-h
In which generation finding themselves once more through the changes which permutably succeed, they return again to the superior forms.
Cic .
So that they mean, that souls are impelled by the necessity of fate, and have no proper counsel which guides them at all.
Tans .
Necessity, fate, nature, counsel, will, those things, justly and rightfully ordained, all agree in one.
Besides which, as Plotinus relates, some believe that certain souls can escape from their own evil, if knowing the danger, they seek refuge in the mind before the corporeal habit is confirmed; because the mind raises to things sublime, as the imagination lowers to inferior things.
The mind always understands one, as the imagination is one in movement and in diversity; the mind always understands one, as the imagination is always inventing for itself various images.
In the midst is the rational faculty, which is a mixture of all, like that in which the one agrees with the many, sameness with variety, movement with fixedness, the inferior with the superior.
Now these transmutations and conversions are symbolized in the wheel of metamorphosis, where man sits on the upper part, a beast lies at the bottom, a half-man, half-beast descends from the left, and a half-beast, half-man ascends from the right.
This transmutation is shown where Jove, according to the diversity of the affections and the behaviour of those towards inferior things, invests himself with divers figures, entering into the form of beasts; and so also the other gods transmigrate into base and alien forms.
And, on the contrary, through the knowledge of their own nobility, they re-take their own divine form; as the passionate hero, raising himself through conceived kinds of divine beauty and goodness, with the wings of the intellect and rational will, rises to the divinity, leaving the form of the lower subject.
And therefore he said, "I become from subject viler still, a god.
From an inferior thing do change me to a god."
The transformation of base substance — outer matter or the inner soul — into a purified, perfected, or 'gold' state; the magnum opus as both laboratory practice and spiritual allegory.
Transmutations and conversions are symbolized in the wheel of metamorphosis, mirroring alchemical transformation.
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.
Transmutations are symbolized in the wheel of metamorphosis, mapping spiritual states to cosmic forms.
Ecstatic irrational rapture — Plato's mania, Bruno's furore — by which the soul transcends ordinary reason and attains direct contact with divine reality; madness reframed as higher knowledge.
[auto] The passionate hero's ascent aligns with the definition of ecstatic rapture or furore leading to divine contact.
Pronoia — the doctrine that the divine actively orders the unfolding of the cosmos and human affairs toward intelligible ends, against pure chance or blind necessity.
Fate and necessity are described as 'justly and rightfully ordained' rather than blind chance.
A chain of divine beings or principles flowing downward from a single transcendent source (the One or the Father), each level less perfect than the one above.
The text references superior forms and inferior things in a hierarchical structure of being.
Bruno's eroici furori — a passionate, ennobling spiritual ardor that drives the soul toward divine wisdom; distinguished from base or animal passions by its orientation to infinite truth.
[auto] The passage is from The Heroic Enthusiasts and describes the passionate hero rising through intellect to divinity.
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.
The passionate hero raises himself through conceived kinds of divine beauty and goodness.
The human being as a small-scale image of the entire cosmos; the body, soul, and intellect mirroring the structure of the heavens and the divine — distinct from correspondence in that it makes the human the privileged mirror.
The rational faculty is a mixture of all, reflecting the agreement of one with many in the cosmos.
The doctrine — central to Eastern Orthodox and Maximian theology — that the human person is progressively transformed into a partaker of the divine nature by grace, not merely justified or united in passing ecstasy.
[auto] The passage quotes the transformation from a vile subject to a god, indicating the doctrine of becoming divine.