NEOPLATONISM
Reversion to Metaphysics.
Imaginative Metaphysicians after the Manner of Plato, but in Excess.
ALEXANDRINISM.--Amid all this, metaphysics--namely, the effort to
comprehend the universe--appears somewhat at a discount. It enjoyed a
renaissance in the third century of our era among some teachers from
Alexandria (hence the name of the Alexandrine school) who came to lecture
at Rome with great success. Alexandrinism is a "Neoplatonism"--that is, a
renewed Platonism and, as considered by its authors, an augmented one.
PLOTINUS.--Plotinus taught this: God and matter exist. God is one,
matter is multiple and divisible. God in Himself is incomprehensible, and
is only to be apprehended in his manifestations. Man rises not to
comprehension of Him but to the perception of Him by a series of degrees
which are, as it were, the progressive purification of faith, and which
lead us to a kind of union with Him resembling that of one being with
another whom he could never see, but of whose presence he could have no
doubt. Matter, that is, the universe, is an emanation from God, as perfume
comes from a flower. All is not God, and only God can be God, but all is
divine and all participates in God, just as each of our thoughts
participates of our soul. Now, if all emanates from God, all also tends to
return to Him, as bodies born of earth, nourished by earth, invigorated by
the forces proceeding from the earth, tend to return to the earth. This is
what makes the harmony of the world. The law of laws is, that every
fragment of the universe derived from God returns to Him and desires to
return to Him. The universe is an emanation from the perfect, and an
effort towards perfection. The universe is a God in exile who has
nostalgia for himself. The universe is a progressive descent from God with
a tendency towards reintegration with Him.
How does this emanation from God becoming matter take place? That is a
mystery; but it may be supposed to take place by successive stages. From
God emanates spirit, impersonal spirit which is not spirit of this or that,
but universal spirit spread through the whole world and animating it. From
spirit emanates the soul, which can unite itself to a body and form an
individual. The soul is less divine than spirit, which in turn is less
divine than God, but yet retains divinity. From the soul emanates the body
to which it unites itself. The body is less divine than the soul, which was
less divine than spirit, which was less divine than God; but it still
possesses divinity for it has a form, a figure, a design marked and
impressed with divine spirit. Finally, matter without form is the most
distant of the emanations from God, and the lowest of the descending stages
of God. God _is_ in Himself; He thinks in pure thought in spirit; He
thinks in mixed and confused thought in the soul; He feels in the body; He
sleeps in unformed matter. The object of unformed matter is to acquire
form, that is a body; and the object of a body is to have a soul; and the
aim of a soul is to be united in spirit, and the aim of spirit is to be
absorbed into God.
Souls not united to bodies contemplate spirit and enjoy absolute
happiness. Other souls not united to bodies, but solicited by a certain
instinct to unite themselves to bodies, are of ambiguous but still very
exalted nature. Souls united to bodies (our own) have descended far, but
can raise themselves and be purified by contemplation of the eternal
intelligence, and by relative union with it. This contemplation has
several degrees, so to speak, of intensity, degrees which Plotinus termed
hypostases. By perception we obtain a glimpse of ideas, by dialectics we
penetrate them; by a final hypostasis, which is ecstasy, we can sometimes
unite ourselves directly to God and live in Him.
THE PUPILS OF PLOTINUS.--Plotinus had as pupils and successors,
amongst others, Porphyry and Iamblichus. Porphyry achieves little except
the exposition of the doctrine of his master, and shows originality only as
a logician. Iamblichus and his school made a most interesting effort to
revive exhausted and expiring paganism and to constitute a philosophic
paganism. The philosophers of the school of Iamblichus are, by the way,
magicians, charlatans, miracle-mongers, men as antipositivist as
possible. Iamblichus himself sought to reconcile polytheism with
Neoplatonism by putting in the centre of all a supreme deity, an essential
deity from whom he made a crowd of secondary, tertiary, and quaternary
deities to emanate, ranging from those purely immaterial to those inherent
in matter. The subtle wanderings of Neoplatonism were continued obscurely
in the school of Athens until it was closed for ever in 529 by the Emperor
Justinian as being hostile to the religion of the Empire, which at that
epoch was Christianity.