Synopsis
1. Inaugural proposition: Everything aspires to contemplation.
Problem: How does Nature contemplate?
2. Nature as an unmoved and creative rational formative principle.
3. This logos is contemplative in character.
4. Hence Nature creates as it contemplates,
and action is a weakened form of contemplation.
5. The soul: each one of the different levels of its life is also a level of contemplation.
6. Action and reasoning in relation to contemplation.
7. Summary.
8. Contemplation in its primary form: the Intellect.
It is unitary, but also inherently multiple.
9. The highest principle: the One.
It transcends multiplicity of any kind.
It can only be grasped by that within us which is like it.
It is present in all things, as cause of all things.
10. The One as universal possibility.
11. As the ultimate end to which all things aspire, the One is also the supreme Good.
Introduction
As R. Harder has persuasively shown, the present “treatise” is in substance the first section of a far lengthier work, composed by P. around 265 CE with the primary aim of drawing up against those Gnostic apocalyptic treatises that were circulating at the time in Rome the “sublime mysteries” of the true philosophy, and more particularly of authentic Platonism.