Like object and image—or more exactly, object and idea or a man and his soul—the two are somehow at once the same and different. And the Active Intellect at the base of the hierarchy of sphere-minds is the source of all the world’s diversity, at once the world-soul and the form of forms. Thus neo-Platonism solves the knotty problem of God’s relationship to the world not by calling Him its creator ex nihilo, but by seeing in Him the ontological fountain from which all creation springs; and in concrete being, ripples in the ocean of God’s mind.
