lows the
intellectual apprehension of the beautiful and the good, which knows
whom it wishes to obey and to please, so that, by its nobility and
light, it kindles and invests itself with qualities and conditions
through which it appears illustrious and worthy. He (the enthusiast)
becomes a god by intellectual contact with the divine object, and he has
no thought for other than divine things, and shows himself insensible
and impassive towards those things which are commonly felt, and about
which others are mostly tormented; he fears nothing, and for love of the
divine he despises other pleasures and gives no thought to this life. It
is not a fury of black bile which sends him drifting outside of
judgment, reason, and acts of prudence, and tossed by the discordant
tempest, like those who, having violated certain laws of the divine
Adrastia, are condemned to be scourged by the Furies, in order that they
may be excited by a dissonance as corporeal through seditions,
destructions, and plagues, as it is spiritual, through the forfeiture of
harmony between the perceptive and enjoying powers; but it is aglow
kindled by the intellectual sun in the soul, and a divine impetus which
lends it wings, with which, drawing nearer and nearer to the
intellectual sun, and ridding itself of the rust of human cares, it
becomes a gold tried and pure, has the perception of divine and internal
harmony, and its thoughts and acts accord with the symmetry of the law,
innate in all things. Not, as drunk from the cups of Circe, does he go
dashing and stumbling, now in this and then in that ditch, now against
this or that rock, or like a shifting Proteus, changing now to this, now
to the other aspect, never finding place, fashion, or ground to stay and
settle in; but, without spoiling the harmony, conquers and overcomes the
horrid monsters, and however much he may swerve, he easily returns to
himself[B] by means of those inward instincts that, like the nine Muses,
dance and sing round the splendours of the universal Apollo, and under
tangible images and material things, he comes to comprehend divine laws
and counsels. It is true that sometimes, having love for his trusty
escort, who is double, and because sometimes through occasional
impediments he finds himself defrauded of his strength, then, as one
insane and furious, he squanders away the love of that which he cannot
comprehend; whence, confused by the obscurity of the divinity, he
sometimes aband