metimes according to a divinely
inspired energy, and at other times dialectically, he evolves the truth
concerning them. And sometimes he symbolically announces their ineffable
idioms, but at other times he recurs to them from images, and discovers in
them the primary causes of wholes. For in the Phaedrus being evidently
inspired, and having exchanged human intelligence for a better possession,
divine mania, he unfolds many arcane dogmas concerning the intellectual,
liberated, and mundane gods. But in the Sophista dialectically contending
about being, and the subsistence of the one above beings, and doubting
against philosophers more ancient than himself, he shows how all beings are
suspended from their cause and the first being, but that being itself
participates of that unity which is exempt from all things, that it is a
passive,[8] one, but not the one itself, being subject to and united to the
one, but not being that which is primarily one. In a similar manner too, in
the Parmenides, he unfolds dialectically the progressions of being from the
one, through the first hypothesis of that dialogue, and this, as he there
asserts, according to the most perfect division of this method. And again
in the Gorgias, he relates the fable concerning the three fabricators, and
their demiurgic allotment. But in the Banquet he speaks concerning the
union of love; and in the Protagoras, about the distribution of mortal
animals from the gods; in a symbolical manner concealing the truth
concerning divine natures, and as far as to mere indication unfolding his
mind to the most genuine of his readers.

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[8] It is necessary to observe, that, according to Plato, whatever
participates of any thing is said to be passive to that which it
participates, and the participations themselves are called by him passions.
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Again, if it be necessary to mention the doctrine delivered through the
mathematical disciplines, and the discussion of divine concerns from
ethical or physical discourses, of which many may be contemplated in the
Timaeus, many in the dialogue called Politicus, and many may be seen
scattered in other dialogues; here likewise, to those who are desirous of
knowing divine concerns through images, the method will be apparent. Thus,
for instance, the Politicus shadows forth the fabrication in the heavens.
But the figures of the five elements, delivered in geometrical proportions
in the Timaeus, represent