Miscellanies 5.13.83

Everything, then, that falls under a name is begotten, whether they like it or not. Whether, then, the Father himself draws to himself everyone who has lived purely and has advanced to the conception of the blessed and incorruptible nature, or whether our free will, having come to the knowledge of the good, leaps and bounds beyond the pit, as the trainers say, yet it is not without special grace that the soul grows wings and rises and is lifted above the things that lie above, laying aside all that weighs it down and giving it back to what is akin to it. Plato too says in the Meno that virtue is given by God, as these words show: “From this reasoning, then, Meno, virtue appears to come by divine dispensation to those to whom it comes.” Does it not seem to you that he hinted that the disposition of knowledge, which does not come to all, is a divine dispensation? And he adds more clearly: “But if we have inquired well in this whole discussion, virtue would be neither by nature nor taught, but comes by divine dispensation, not without intelligence, to those to whom it comes.” Wisdom, then, given by God, being the power of the Father, stirs our free will, receives faith, and rewards the attentiveness of the elect with the highest fellowship.