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248 contacts thus mingling affirmations with negations. For this order is a medium between the intelligible Gods and the first intellectual divine orders, containing the bond of both. And it guards indeed intellectually according to a uniform and unknown transcendency, but transmits the plenitudes of intelligibles as far as to the last of things. It likewise elevates all things at once, according to one common union, as far as to the intelligible father, and generates and produces them as far as to matter. Being therefore established between the unical and the multiplied Gods, it is unfolded, negatively indeed, through the unknown manner in which it transcends secondary natures, but affirmatively through its participation of the first natures. For the first demiurgus is called in the Timæus fabricator and father, and good, and all such names, so far as he participates of preexistent causes; but so far as he is the monad of all fabrication, Plato leaves him unknown and ineffable, exempt from all the fabricators of things. For he says, “it is difficult to discover him, and when found, it is impossible to speak of him to all men.” Thus therefore Plato unfolds the supercelestial place, affirmatively indeed, as being filled from the first causes, at one time indeed calling it essence which truly is, at another the plain of truth, and at another, something else of this kind; but so far as it transcends the intellectual Gods, and so far as it is supreme and unical, he celebrates it negatively, in the same manner as the principle which is exempt from all things.

CHAPTER XII.
follows therefore, in the next place, that we should consider what the negations are, and from what orders they are generated. In the Parmenides then, the negations of the one are produced from all the