that purity should not be inherent in intellect from accident, it is the deity of those beings that are exempt from secondary natures, and is the supplier of immutable power, which the mighty Heaven producing in conjunction with intellect, is at the same time the efficient cause of the Gods who are the sources of purity, and of the intellectual fathers. These indications therefore of the truth concerning the connective Gods, may also be assumed from the Cratylus.
CHAPTER XXIII.
It remains therefore that in conformity to what is written in the Phædrus, we should survey the subcelestial arch, and the peculiarity of the Gods that are there. Before however we begin the doctrine concerning it, I wish to premise thus much, that some of the most celebrated of the interpreters prior to us, conceiving that this subcelestial arch is a divine order arranged under the heaven, have thought fit to rank it immediately after the first God, calling the first God Heaven. But others have arranged both the heaven, and the subcelestial arch in the breadth of intelligibles. For the Asinæan philosopher indeed [Theodorus] being persuaded by Plotinus, calls that which proximately proceeds from the ineffable, the subcelestial arch, as in his treatise concerning names he philosophizes about these things. But the great Iamblichus conceiving the mighty heaven to be a certain order of the intelligible Gods, (and in one place he considers it to be the same with the demiurgus,) asserts that the order proximately established under the heaven, and as it were begirding it, is the subcelestial arch. And these things he has written in his Commentaries on the Phædrus. Let no one therefore think that we make any innovation concerning the theology of this order, and that we
