Even more significantly, these harmonic patterns are likened to the longing and groans of a world that is earnestly engaged in making itself as like the eternal simplicity of the divine as it can. Eternity is the world’s “paradigm” (its exemplar, goal, and end), and that end is invisible and full of joy, the realm of “pure intelligible light.” For this reason, the visible world, in Plato’s phrase, is a great “icon”: it is an artistic representation that translates into a new medium the eternal principles of a higher order. The very physical movements of the world constitute a kind of longing
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