The Divinity Beyond Being

Writings of Plato
"... For it is not immortal, as participating of life, but as supplying divine life, and deifying life itself. Thus imparticipable intellect is an intellect which is notconsubsistent with soul. In the second place, intellect, which is prior to soul, is intelligible.

Nor do they subsist, says he, together with intellect, in the same manner as those slender conceptions which are denominated universals abstracted fromsensibles, according to the hypothesis of Longinus: for if that which subsists is unsubstantial, it cannot be consubsistent with intellect. See my translation ofAristotle's Metaphysics, p. 347.

For as a deity of an intellectual characteristic is its fabricator, and both the essence and energy of intellect are established in eternity the sensible universe, whichis the effect or production of such an energy, must be consubsistent with its cause, or in other words, must be a perpetual emanation from it.

For the highest God, according to Plato, as we have largely shown from irresistible evidence, is so far from being a part of a consubsistent triad, that He is not to be connumerated with any thing; but is so perfectly exempt from all multitude, that He is even beyond being; and He so ineffably transcends all relationand habitude, that language is in reality subverted about Him, and knowledge refunded into ignorance. ..."
Thomas Taylor - Introduction to the Philosophy and Writings of Plato

The Basilidian Gnosis on; The Divinity Beyond Being

   "... Let us then raise our thoughts to those sublime heights to which the genius of Basilides soared so many centuries ago, when faith in the universal possibilities of the Glad Tidings was really living. And first we must rise to that stupendous intuition of Deity, which transcends even Being, and which to the narrow minds of earth seems pure nothingness, instead of being that which beggars all fullness. Beyond time, beyond space, beyond consciousness, beyond Being itself--

"The names [we use] are not sufficient even for the [manifested] universe [which is outside the world of real being], so diversified is it; they fall short." ..."

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