IAMBLICHUS ON THE MYSTERIES.

On the knowledge of divine things

Egyptian writers, thinking that all things were discovered by Mercury, inscribed their books to Mercury. Mercury is the Roman name for the Egyptian Hermes Trismegistus, the legendary sage and founder of writing and magic. Mercury presides over wisdom and eloquence. Pythagoras, Plato, Democritus, Eudoxus, and many others visited the Egyptian priests. The doctrines of this book belong to the Assyrians and Egyptians and are taken from the columns of Mercury. Pythagoras and Plato learned philosophy from the columns of Mercury in Egypt. The columns of Mercury are full of teachings. Before any use of reason, there is a naturally implanted notion of the gods. Indeed, there is a certain "touch" original: tactus of divinity that is better than knowledge, from which the natural appetite for the good, as well as reasoning and judgment, are incited. The essential knowledge of divine things is perpetual to the soul; and in truth, this is not the [same] knowledge by which we enjoy God. For in [ordinary] knowledge there is "otherness," alteritas (otherness): the logical distinction between the person knowing and the object being known but here there is a certain essential and simple contact. For we cannot reach unity itself except by a most united part and a unity of the mind, which stands above the specific properties of the soul and the mind. The unity of the gods itself unites souls to itself from eternity through their own unities, according to a proximity so proper and effective that it appears to be a continuity. The divine intellect gives being to the soul through its own essential act of understanding. Therefore, the "being" of the soul is a certain understanding—namely, of God, upon whom it depends. Our being is to know God, because the principal being of the soul is its intellect, in which "to be" is the same as "to understand" divine things in a perpetual act. From that principal being, however, the discursive powers of the soul are derived. Discursive powers refers to the step-by-step logical reasoning humans use, as opposed to the direct, "simple" intuition of the divine. After the gods, we place demons, heroes, and pure souls; these three orders are the attendants of the gods. We cannot reach the attendants of the gods—demons, heroes, and pure souls—by the usual discourses of human reason. Instead, it is necessary to rise to essential and eternal intelligence.

Just as the gods are always reached by an innate notion, so the powers attending the gods are first reached only when the soul has set aside its "mobile" or shifting mode of knowledge—which belongs to the rational power formed by intellect and understanding—which they call the "acquired intellect." intellectum adeptum (acquired intellect): knowledge that is learned or developed through experience, rather than being an innate part of the soul's essence For the first knowledge consists in the "active intellect." agente intellectu (active intellect): in Renaissance philosophy, the aspect of the mind that actively produces universal concepts Since knowledge occurs through "adequation" original: adæquationem, the concept that truth is the "matching" or correspondence of the mind to the object, it follows that we reach eternal and immobile powers by a notion that is eternal, immobile, and simple. The knowledge by which we know separate substances "Separate substances" refers to beings existing without physical bodies, such as angels, demons, or gods. is of a different kind than the knowledge by which we know other things.

The knowledge of divine things was always in the soul through simple intuition.