A Platonick Discourse Upon Love

IT is a Principle of the Platonists, That every created thing hath a threefold being: Causal, Formal, Participated. In the Sun there is no heat. that being but an elementary quality, not of Celestial nature: yet is the Sun the cause and Fountain of all heat. Fire is hot by nature, and its proper form: Wood is not hot of itself, yet is capable of receiving that quality by Fire. Thus hath heat its Causal being in the Sun, its Formal in the Fire, its Participated in the Fuel. The most noble and perfedt of these is the Causal: and therefore Platonists assert. That all excellencies are in God after this manner of being; That in God is nothing, but from him all things; That Intelletft is not in him, but that he is the original spring of every Intellecft. Such is Plotinus’s meaning, when he affirms,” God neither understands nor knows; *’ that is to say, after a formal way. As Dionysius Areopagita,“God is neither an Intelledtual nor Intelligent nature, but unspeakably exahed above all Intellecft and Knowledge.”