Socrates' Supercelestial Triad

Thomas Taylor · Mystic Verse and Insights Series · 2 pages

Two pages of Thomas Taylor's commentary on the triad Socrates describes as subsisting in the supercelestial place in the Phaedrus, taken from Taylor's Works of Plato.

The three terms are the plain of truth, the meadow, and the aliment of the gods, and Taylor takes each in turn. The plain of truth is described as intellectually expanded to intelligible light and illuminated by the splendours which proceed from it. The meadow is read as the prolific power of life and of all-various reasons, containing the primary causes of life and the cause of the variety and procreation of forms — with the homely justification that meadows in this world are fertile with forms and productive powers and contain water, itself a symbol of vivific energy. The nourishing cause of the gods is called a certain intelligible union which comprehends the whole perfection of the gods and fills them with vigour and power, so that they may provide for secondary natures while keeping an immutable intelligence of the first. The commentary then makes a distinction out of Plato's two kinds of food. The charioteer nourished with intelligibles receives the illumination unically while the horses receive it divisibly, first ambrosia and afterwards nectar — ambrosia being a solid and nectar a liquid nutriment. From this Taylor draws the conclusion the passage exists for: ambrosia signifies what is permanent and firmly established in more excellent natures, nectar what is unrestrained and indissoluble and proceeds to all things with perfect purity, and taken together they imply that the gods are permanent and at the same time proceed unconverted to subordinate natures.

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