Commentary on the First and Second Chapters of the Thirtieth Book of the Natural History of Gaius Plinius Secundus

among Galen, Hippocrates, and the Platonists, that many human souls possess such majesty of nature, and so powerfully raise themselves above all matter, that they are able, by intimate power, with the body removed, to move, impel, and turn the limbs of the world however it may please them, and to dominate any body more broadly, and as much more powerfully as they dominate their own, to which the soul of the world is enslaved, that is, the small one—man's. The soul turns the four humors at will, which will be clear if we consider vital acts and the affections of the Fantasia imagination more attentively and carefully; but when it flies out from these bonds into the vastness, the soul now full of God moves the humor of the greater animal, that is, the four elements of the greater world, so that by its own sole affection (as some maintain) it summons winds with God as leader, and brings clouds into the serene sky, and forces them into rains; that this can be done, and has been done, the Moorish and Arab theologians testify. For the Prince of the Moors, Avicebron, and likewise the Prince of the Arabs, Avicenna, go into that opinion; for the most skilled of the Chaldeans thought that it can sometimes be done by the rational soul—than which nothing more admirable can be either imagined or weighed—so that, illuminated by the splendor of rays flowing from it, the body can also be raised in a divine manner on high, with the softness inherent in the rays contributing most to this, which they say happened to Zoroaster. We certainly have such great affinity with the sky; but they say this happens most especially when the soul rises in its entirety to God the Father of lights, and is seized, having been infused from there with the greatest light, and similarly transmits luminous rays of clarity into the body. For this is the soul that, living by the mind alone, becomes like an Angel, and with its whole heart (if I may so say) in a certain way conceives God, about whom the prince of the Magi sang: "The soul of men," he says, "contracts God in a certain way into itself, when, retaining nothing mortal, it is entirely inebriated by divine draughts." If therefore man renders himself conformable to the celestial things, he will be celestial; if to the fleeting, fleeting; if to the spirit,