Commentary on Plato's Alcibiades

and of the eternal; and of those that exist throughout all time, and those that come into being in a portion of time; and of those that are simple, and those established before any hypothesis; or of composite things that are set as bonds; and those whose laws you have seen; or those that are meant to be dissolved, and how they are separated from the things of which they were composed. When each is considered in common, one should accept it, and also, according to the intellect, what each thing is. For it would be clear that for those who have obtained indivisible essences, it is impossible to have discourses; but for those who are divisible, they are naturally extended through time. For those in between, one must contemplate them according to the measures of their subsistence and their perfection. We consider this to be the most sovereign and primary principle—even before the Platonic treatise—to perceive that which we grasp, to sing of our own selves as pure and unalloyed, circumscribed within scientific limits, and to have firmly grasped them with the arguments of cause. For from where else is it appropriate to begin, if not from the purification and perfection of ourselves, from where even the god in Delphi exhorted us? For just as those who have just been exercised in the Eleusinian mysteries would agree—the program of which is preserved until now for the uninitiated? and the unperfected?—so too, if anything Delphic is said before these things, the "Know Thyself" inscribed there revealed, I think, the method of guidance toward the most divine and the way toward purification. How is it possible not to understand, when he is practically saying it clearly to those capable of understanding?