Page 30 - GALIET EMBERS & SAPPHIRE: Milton IV

For Lady Virtue, chastity is as visible (216) as the Idea or Form is to Plato:45 “... unblemish’t form of Chastity,/I see ye visibly...” (216-7). Her vision of this supreme idea of Chastity- ness, of this Platonic Form, as cause, deciphers her being: only purity, or pure things, or beings such as hers, can participate in absolute pureness. Just as the cause of beauty for Plato is beautiness,46 so for Lady Virtue the cause and essence or nature of purity is pureness itself. Pureness, the form, participates in purity, the particular, and the particular too expresses itself in its lovely, extolling virtuous form: the Supreme Good. In this sense just as the form of the Just and the Beautiful 3⁄4 perfect, pure, eternal, unchanging 3⁄4 lacks the possibility of error; virtue too assures her from deceit and error (222-3).
The Good as infallibility: virtue that journeys with conscience (212), and welcomes ‘pure-eyed Faith’ and ‘white-handed Hope’ (213). Virtue that endures her lofty ascension towards noesis or Plato’s spheres:
45 Ιδεα corresponds to the verb ιδειν (to see), thus etymologically Ιδεα means vision, latin videre (to see); -vid is the root of ιδειν and videre. This vision is not the vision we have of things. Plato s idea of vision is related to the aspect or form of a seen thing. It designates what is seen of a thing when a certain aspect of it is contemplated. Liddell & Scott. An Intermediate Greek-English Lexicon. Oxford: Clarendon Press, Oxford University Press, 1889.
46 In Plato’s Phaedo, the cause of beauty is beautiness or an object is beautiful as long as it participates in the idea of beauty. Plato. Complete Works. Phaedo. Ed. John M. Cooper. Indianapolis, Hackett Publishing, 1997.
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