Commentary on the Dream of Scipio and the Saturnalia

BOOK I.

b

...under a veil, where things are covered by honorable realities and dressed in names. And this is the only kind of fiction that the caution of a philosopher dealing with divine matters permits. Since, therefore, neither the reporter Er A reference to the "Myth of Er" from the end of Plato’s Republic, where a soldier returns from the dead to describe the afterlife. nor the dreaming Africanus Scipio Africanus the Younger, whose dream is the subject of Cicero’s work. causes any harm to the discussion—but rather the declaration of sacred things remains whole in its dignity, covered by these names—let the accuser at last, having been taught to distinguish between fables meaning mere entertaining lies and fabulous narratives allegorical stories containing truth, fall silent.

It must be known, however, that philosophers do not admit fabulous or even "permitted" fables into every discussion: they are accustomed to use them only when speaking of the soul, or of the spirits of the air or the heavens, or of the other gods. But when the discourse dares to raise itself toward the highest and principal God of all—who among the Greeks is called the Good original: τἀγαθὸν (tagathon) and the First Cause original: ππρῶτον αἴτιον (proton aition)—or toward the Mind, which the Greeks call Nous original: νοῦν, containing the original species of things which are called Ideas original: ἰδέαι, and which is born from and proceeds from the highest God: when, I say, they speak of these—the highest God and the Mind—they touch upon nothing fabulous at all.

Instead, if they attempt to describe anything about these subjects—which exceed not only human speech but even human thought—they take refuge in analogies and examples. Thus Plato, when he was inspired to speak concerning the Good original: περὶ τἀγαθοῦ (peri tagathou), did not dare to say what it is, knowing only this about it: that what it is like cannot be known by man. In the visible world, he found only the sun to be its closest likeness; and through this analogy, he opened a path for his discourse to raise itself toward things that cannot be comprehended. Therefore, antiquity fashioned no image simulachrum: a physical statue or representation of a deity for him, though images were established for other gods, because the highest God and the Mind born from him are as far beyond the soul as they are above nature; to that level, it is not permitted for any fables to reach. Regarding the other gods, however, as I have said, and the soul, they do not turn to fabulous things without reason, nor for the sake of entertainment, but because they know that an open [nakedness] is hostile to nature...