Divine wisdom

Philosophy is concerned not only with human well-being, but with the search for soul-transforming wisdom. This means to recover the soul‟s “ancient state”. It is the same as to be illuminated by the truth from the Good, which radiates truth over all the intelligibles. The soul, purified and cleansed by philosophy, resembles the “living gold”:

This soul does make it clear that its evils are external accretions to the soul and come from elsewhere, but that when it is purified the best things are present in it, wisdom and all the rest of virtue, and are its own. If, then, the soul is something of this kind when it goes up again to itself, it must surely belong to that nature which we assert is that of all the divine and eternal.

For wisdom and true virtue are divine things, and could not occur in some trivial mortal being, but something of such a kind [as to possess them] must be divine, since it has a share in divine things through its kinship and consubstantiality.