על החלומות, ספר א ל״בOn Dreams, Book I 32
א׳
1[184] Rightly, therefore, was he afraid and said in an awestruck tone, “How dreadful is this place” (ibid. 17). For indeed most difficult of the “places” in the study of nature’s verities is that in which men inquire as to where, and whether at all in any thing the Existent Being is. Some say that everything that subsists occupies some space, and of these one allots to the Existent One this space, another that, whether inside the world or a space outside it in the interval between worlds. Others maintain that the Unoriginate resembles nothing among created things, but so completely transcends them, that even the swiftest understanding falls far short of apprehending Him and acknowledges its failure.
ב׳
2[185] Wherefore he straightway cried aloud “This is not” (ibid. 17); this that I supposed, “that the Lord is in some place” (ibid. 16), is not so; for according to the true reckoning He contains, but is not contained. But this that we can point out and see, this world discerned by sense, is, as I now know, nothing but a house of “God,” that is, of one of the Potencies of the Existent, that is, the Potency which expresses His goodness.
ג׳
3[186] The world which he named a “house,” he also described as “gate of” the real “heaven” (ibid. 17). Now what is this? The world which only intellect can perceive, framed from the eternal forms in Him Who was appointed in accordance with Divine bounties, cannot be apprehended otherwise than by passing on to it from this world which we see and perceive by our senses.
ד׳
4[187] For neither indeed is it possible to get an idea of any other incorporeal thing among existences except by making material objects our starting-point. The conception of place was gained when they were at rest: that of time from their motion, and points and lines and superficies, in a word extremities from the robe-like exterior which covers them.
ה׳
5[188] Correspondingly, then, the conception of the intelligible world was gained from the one which our senses perceive: it is therefore a kind of gate into the former. For as those who desire to see our cities go in through gates, so all who wish to apprehend the unseen world are introduced to it by receiving the impression of the visible world. The world whose substance is discernible only by intellect apart from any sight whatever of shapes or figures, but only by means of the archetypal eternal form present in the world which was fashioned in accordance with the image beheld by him with no intervening shadow,—that world shall change its title, when all its walls and every gate has been removed and men may not catch sight of it from some outside point, but behold the unchanging beauty, as it actually is, and that sight no words can tell or express.