may see, in the minds of Socrates and Plato. How could he reconcile the
idea of that absolute and eternal one Being, that Zeus, Father of Gods
and men, self-perfect, self-contained, without change or motion, in whom,
as a Jew, he believed even more firmly than the Platonists, with the
Dæmon of Socrates, the Divine Teacher whom both Plato and Solomon
confessed? Or how, again, could he reconcile the idea of Him with the
creative and providential energy, working in space and time, working on
matter, and apparently affected and limited, if not baffled, by the
imperfection of the minds which he taught, by the imperfection of the
matter which he moulded? This, as all students of philosophy must know,
was one of the great puzzles of old Greek philosophy, as long as it was
earnest and cared to have any puzzles at all: it has been, since the days
of Spinoza, the great puzzle of all earnest modern philosophers. Philo
offered a solution in that idea of a Logos, or Word of God, Divinity
articulate, speaking and acting in time and space, and therefore by
successive acts; and so doing, in time and space, the will of the
timeless and spaceless Father, the Abysmal and Eternal Being, of whom he
was the perfect likeness. In calling this person the Logos, and making
him the source of all human reason, and knowledge of eternal laws, he
only translated from Hebrew into Greek the name which he found in his
sacred books, “The Word of God.” As yet we have found no unfair
allegorising of Moses, or twisting of Plato. How then has he incurred
this accusation?
I cannot think, again, that he was unfair in supposing that he might hold
at the same time the Jewish belief concerning Creation, and the Platonic
doctrine of the real existence of Archetypal ideas, both of moral and of
physical phenomena. I do not mean that such a conception was present
consciously to the mind of the old Jews, as it was most certainly to the
mind of St. Paul, a practised Platonic dialectician; but it seems to me,
as to Philo, to be a fair, perhaps a necessary, corollary from the
Genetic Philosophy, both of Moses and of Solomon.
But in one thing he was unfair; namely, in his allegorising. But unfair
to whom? To Socrates and Plato, I believe, as much as to Moses and to
Samuel. For what is the part of the old Jewish books which he evaporates
away into mere mystic symbols of the private experiences of the devout
philosopher? Its practical everyday histories, which deal with the
common human facts of family and national life, of man’s outward and
physical labour and craft. These to him have no meaning, except an
allegoric one. But has he thrown them away for the sake of getting a
step nearer to Socrates, or Plato, or Aristotle? Surely not. To them,
as to the old Jewish sages, man is most important when regarded not
merely as a soul, but as a man, a social being of flesh and blood.
Aristotle declares politics to be the architectonical science, the family
and social relations to be the eternal master-facts of humanity. Plato,
in his Republic, sets before himself the Constitution of a State, as the
crowning problem of his philosophy. Every work of his, like every saying
of his master Socrates, deals with the common, outward, vulgar facts of
human life, and asserts that there is a divine meaning in them, and that
reverent induction from them is the way to obtain the deepest truths.
Socrates and Plato were as little inclined to separate the man and the
philosopher as Moses, Solomon, or Isaiah were. When Philo, by
allegorising away the simple human parts of his books, is untrue to
Moses’s teaching, he becomes untrue to Plato’s. He becomes untrue, I
believe, to a higher teaching than Plato’s. He loses sight of an eternal
truth, which even old Homer might have taught him, when he treats Moses
as one section of his disciples in after years treated Homer.
For what is the secret of the eternal freshness, the eternal beauty, ay,
I may say boldly, in spite of all their absurdities and immoralities, the
eternal righteousness of those old Greek myths? What is it which made
Socrates and Plato cling lovingly and reverently to them, they scarce
knew why, while they deplored the immoralities to which they had given
rise? What is it which made those myths, alone of all old mythologies,
the parents of truly beautiful sculpture, painting, poetry? What is it
which makes us love them still; find, even at times against our
consciences, new meaning, new beauty in them; and brings home the story
of Perseas or of Hercules, alike to the practised reason of Niebuhr, and
the untutored instincts of Niebuhr’s little child, for whom he threw them
into simplest forms? Why is it that in spite of our disagreeing with
their creed and their morality, we still persist—and long may we persist,
or rather be compelled—as it were by blind instinct, to train our boys
upon those old Greek dreams; and confess, whenever we try to find a
substitute for them in our educational schemes, that we have as yet none?
Because those old Greek stories do represent the Deities as the
archetypes, the kinsmen, the teachers, the friends, the inspirers of men.
Because while the schoolboy reads how the Gods were like to men, only
better, wiser, greater; how the Heroes are the children of the Gods, and
the slayers of the monsters which devour the earth; how Athene taught men
weaving, and Phœbus music, and Vulcan the cunning of the stithy; how the
Gods took pity on the noble-hearted son of Danae, and lent him celestial
arms and guided him over desert and ocean to fulfil his vow—that boy is
learning deep lessons of metaphysic, more in accordance with the _reine
vernunft_, the pure reason whereby man perceives that which is moral, and
spiritual, and eternal, than he would from all disquisitions about being
and becoming, about actualities and potentialities, which ever tormented
the weary brain of man.
Let us not despise the gem because it has been broken to fragments,
obscured by silt and mud. Still less let us fancy that one least
fragment of it is not more precious than the most brilliant paste jewel
of our own compounding, though it be polished and faceted never so
completely. For what are all these myths but fragments of that great
metaphysic idea, which, I boldly say, I believe to be at once the
justifier and the harmoniser of all philosophic truth which man has ever
discovered, or will discover; which Philo saw partially, and yet clearly;
which the Hebrew sages perceived far more deeply, because more humanly
and practically; which Saint Paul the Platonist, and yet the Apostle,
raised to its highest power, when he declared that the immutable and
self-existent Being, for whom the Greek sages sought, and did not
altogether seek in vain, has gathered together all things both in heaven
and in earth in one inspiring and creating Logos, who is both God and
Man?
Be this as it may, we find that from the time of Philo, the deepest
thought of the heathen world began to flow in a theologic channel. All
the great heathen thinkers henceforth are theologians. In the times of
Nero, for instance, Epictetus the slave, the regenerator of Stoicism, is
no mere speculator concerning entities and quiddities, correct or
incorrect. He is a slave searching for the secret of freedom, and
finding that it consists in escaping not from a master, but from self:
not to wealth and power, but to Jove. He discovers that Jove is, in some
most mysterious, but most real sense, the Father of men; he learns to
look up to that Father as his guide and friend.
Numenius, again, in the second century, was a man who had evidently
studied Philo. He perceived so deeply, I may say so exaggeratedly, the
analogy between the Jewish and the Platonic assertions of an Absolute and
Eternal Being, side by side with the assertion of a Divine Teacher of
man, that he is said to have uttered the startling saying: “What is Plato
but Moses talking Attic?” Doubtless Plato is not that: but the
expression is remarkable, as showing the tendency of the age. He too
looks up to God with prayers for the guidance of his reason. He too
enters into speculation concerning God in His absoluteness, and in His
connection with the universe. “The Primary God,” he says, “must be free
from works and a King; but the Demiurgus must exercise government, going
through the heavens. Through Him comes this our condition; through Him
Reason being sent down in efflux, holds communion with all who are
prepared for it: God then looking down, and turning Himself to each of
us, it comes to pass that our bodies live and are nourished, receiving
strength from the outer rays which come from Him. But when God turns us
to the contemplation of Himself, it comes to pass that these things are
worn out and consumed, but that the reason lives, being partaker of a
blessed life.”
This passage is exceedingly interesting, as containing both the marrow of
old Hebrew metaphysic, and also certain notional elements, of which we
find no trace in the Scripture, and which may lead—as we shall find they
afterwards did lead—to confusing the moral with the notional, and finally
the notional with the material; in plain words, to Pantheism.
You find this tendency, in short, in all the philosophers who flourished
between the age of Augustus and the rise of Alexandrian Neoplatonism.
Gibbon, while he gives an approving pat on the back to his pet
“Philosophic Emperor,” Marcus Aurelius, blinks the fact that Marcus’s
philosophy, like that of Plutarch, contains as an integral element, a
belief which to him would have been, I fear, simply ludicrous, from its
strange analogy with the belief of John, the Christian Apostle. What is
Marcus Aurelius’s cardinal doctrine? That there is a God within him, a
Word, a Logos, which “has hold of him,” and who is his teacher and
guardian; that over and above his body and his soul, he has a Reason
which is capable of “hearing that Divine Word, and obeying the monitions
of that God.” What is Plutarch’s cardinal doctrine? That the same Word,
the Dæmon who spoke to the heart of Socrates, is speaking to him and to
every philosopher; “coming into contact,” he says, “with him in some
wonderful manner;” addressing the reason of those who, like Socrates,
keep their reason pure, not under the dominion of passion, nor mixing
itself greatly with the body, and therefore quick and sensitive in
responding to that which encountered it.
You see from these two extracts what questions were arising in the minds
of men, and how they touched on ethical and theological questions. I say
arising in their minds: I believe that I ought to say rather, stirred up
in their minds by One greater than they. At all events, there they
appeared, utterly independent of any Christian teaching. The belief in
this Logos or Dæmon speaking to the Reason of man, was one which neither
Plutarch nor Marcus, neither Numenius nor Ammonius, as far as we can see,
learnt from the Christians; it was the common ground which they held with
them; the common battlefield which they disputed with them.
Neither have we any reason to suppose that they learnt it from the
Hindoos. That much Hindoo thought mixed with Neoplatonist speculation we
cannot doubt; but there is not a jot more evidence to prove that
Alexandrians borrowed this conception from the Mahabharavata, than that
George Fox the Quaker, or the author of the “Deutsche Theologie,” did so.
They may have gone to Hindoo philosophy, or rather, to second and third
hand traditions thereof, for corroborations of the belief; but be sure,
it must have existed in their own hearts first, or they would never have
gone thither. Believe it; be sure of it. No earnest thinker is a
plagiarist pure and simple. He will never borrow from others that which
he has not already, more or less, thought out for himself. When once a
great idea, instinctive, inductive (for the two expressions are nearer
akin than most fancy), has dawned on his soul, he will welcome lovingly,
awfully, any corroboration from foreign schools, and cry with joy:
“Behold, this is not altogether a dream: for others have found it also.
Surely it must be real, universal, eternal.” No; be sure there is far
more originality (in the common sense of the word), and far less (in the
true sense of the word), than we fancy; and that it is a paltry and
shallow doctrine which represents each succeeding school as merely the
puppets and dupes of the preceding. More originality, because each
earnest man seems to think out for himself the deepest grounds of his
creed. Less originality, because, as I believe, one common Logos, Word,
Reason, reveals and unveils the same eternal truth to all who seek and
hunger for it.
Therefore we can, as the Christian philosophers of Alexandria did,
rejoice over every truth which their heathen adversaries beheld, and
attribute them, as Clement does, to the highest source, to the
inspiration of the one and universal Logos. With Clement, philosophy is
only hurtful when it is untrue to itself, and philosophy falsely so
called; true philosophy is an image of the truth, a divine gift bestowed
on the Greeks. The Bible, in his eyes, asserts that all forms of art and
wisdom are from God. The wise in mind have no doubt some peculiar
endowment of nature, but when they have offered themselves for their
work, they receive a spirit of perception from the Highest Wisdom, giving
them a new fitness for it. All severe study, all cultivation of
sympathy, are exercises of this spiritual endowment. The whole
intellectual discipline of the Greeks, with their philosophy, came down
from God to men. Philosophy, he concludes in one place, carries on “an
inquiry concerning Truth and the nature of Being; and this Truth is that
concerning which the Lord Himself said: ‘I am the Truth.’ And when the
initiated find, or rather receive, the true philosophy, they have it from
the Truth itself; that is from Him who is true.”
While, then, these two schools had so many grounds in common, where was
their point of divergence? We shall find it, I believe, fairly expressed
in the dying words of Plotinus, the great father of Neoplatonism. “I am
striving to bring the God which is in us into harmony with the God which
is in the universe.” Whether or not Plotinus actually so spoke, that was
what his disciples not only said that he spoke, but what they would have
wished him to speak. That one sentence expresses the whole object of
their philosophy.
But to that Pantænus, Origen, Clement, and Augustine would have answered:
“And we, on the other hand, assert that the God which is in the universe,
is the same as the God which is in you, and is striving to bring you into
harmony with Himself.” There is the _experimentum crucis_. There is the
vast gulf between the Christian and the Heathen schools, which when any
man had overleaped, the whole problem of the universe was from that
moment inverted. With Plotinus and his school man is seeking for God:
with Clement and his, God is seeking for man. With the former, God is
passive, and man active: with the latter, God is active, man is
passive—passive, that is, in so far as his business is to listen when he
is spoken to, to look at the light which is unveiled to him, to submit
himself to the inward laws which he feels reproving and checking him at
every turn, as Socrates was reproved and checked by his inward Dæmon.
Whether of these two theorems gives the higher conception either of the
Divine Being, or of man, I leave it for you to judge. To those old
Alexandrian Christians, a being who was not seeking after every single
creature, and trying to raise him, could not be a Being of absolute
Righteousness, Power, Love; could not be a Being worthy of respect or
admiration, even of philosophic speculation. Human righteousness and
love flows forth disinterestedly to all around it, however unconscious,
however unworthy they may be; human power associated with goodness, seeks
for objects which it may raise and benefit by that power. We must
confess this, with the Christian schools, or, with the Heathen schools,
we must allow another theory, which brought them into awful depths; which
may bring any generation which holds it into the same depths.
If Clement had asked the Neoplatonists: “You believe, Plotinus, in an
absolutely Good Being. Do you believe that it desires to shed forth its
goodness on all?” “Of course,” they would have answered, “on those who
seek for it, on the philosopher.”
“But not, it seems, Plotinus, on the herd, the brutal, ignorant mass,
wallowing in those foul crimes above which you have risen?” And at that
question there would have been not a little hesitation. These brutes in
human form, these souls wallowing in earthly mire, could hardly, in the
Neoplatonists’ eyes, be objects of the Divine desire.
“Then this Absolute Good, you say, Plotinus, has no relation with them,
no care to raise them. In fact, it cannot raise them, because they have
nothing in common with it. Is that your notion?” And the Neoplatonists
would have, on the whole, allowed that argument. And if Clement had
answered, that such was not his notion of Goodness, or of a Good Being,
and that therefore the goodness of their Absolute Good, careless of the
degradation and misery around it, must be something very different from
his notions of human goodness; the Neoplatonists would have
answered—indeed they did answer—“After all, why not? Why should the
Absolute Goodness be like our human goodness?” This is Plotinus’s own
belief. It is a question with him, it was still more a question with
those who came after him, whether virtues could be predicated of the
Divine nature; courage, for instance, of one who had nothing to fear;
self-restraint, of one who had nothing to desire. And thus, by setting
up a different standard of morality for the divine and for the human,
Plotinus gradually arrives at the conclusion, that virtue is not the end,
but the means; not the Divine nature itself, as the Christian schools
held, but only the purgative process by which man was to ascend into
heaven, and which was necessary to arrive at that nature—that nature
itself being—what?
And how to answer that last question was the abysmal problem of the whole
of Neoplatonic philosophy, in searching for which it wearied itself out,
generation after generation, till tired equally of seeking and of
speaking, it fairly lay down and died. In proportion as it refused to
acknowledge a common divine nature with the degraded mass, it deserted
its first healthy instinct, which told it that the spiritual world is
identical with the moral world, with right, love, justice; it tried to
find new definitions for the spiritual; it conceived it to be identical
with the intellectual. That did not satisfy its heart. It had to
repeople the spiritual world, which it had emptied of its proper
denizens, with ghosts; to reinvent the old dæmonologies and
polytheisms—from thence to descend into lower depths, of which we will
speak hereafter.
But in the meanwhile we must look at another quarrel which arose between
the two twin schools of Alexandria. The Neoplatonists said that there is
a divine element in man. The Christian philosophers assented fervently,
and raised the old disagreeable question: “Is it in every man? In the
publicans and harlots as well as in the philosophers? We say that it
is.” And there again the Neoplatonist finds it over hard to assent to a
doctrine, equally contrary to outward appearance, and galling to
Pharisaic pride; and enters into a hundred honest self-puzzles and
self-contradictions, which seem to justify him at last in saying, No. It
is in the philosopher, who is ready by nature, as Plotinus has it, and as
it were furnished with wings, and not needing to sever himself from
matter like the rest, but disposed already to ascend to that which is
above. And in a degree too, it is in the “lover,” who, according to
Plotinus, has a certain innate recollection of beauty, and hovers round
it, and desires it, wherever he sees it. Him you may raise to the
apprehension of the one incorporeal Beauty, by teaching him to separate
beauty from the various objects in which it appears scattered and
divided. And it is even in the third class, the lowest of whom there is
hope, namely, the musical man, capable of being passively affected by
beauty, without having any active appetite for it; the sentimentalist, in
short, as we should call him nowadays.
But for the herd, Plotinus cannot say that there is anything divine in
them. And thus it gradually comes out in all Neoplatonist writings which
I have yet examined, that the Divine only exists in a man, in proportion
as he is conscious of its existence in him. From which spring two
conceptions of the Divine in man. First, is it a part of him, if it is
dependent for its existence on his consciousness of it? Or is it, as
Philo, Plutarch, Marcus Aurelius would have held, as the Christians held,
something independent of him, without him, a Logos or Word speaking to
his reason and conscience? With this question Plotinus grapples,
earnestly, shrewdly, fairly. If you wish to see how he does it, you
should read the fourth and fifth books of the sixth Ennead, especially if
you be lucky enough to light on a copy of that rare book, Taylor’s
faithful though crabbed translation.
Not that the result of his search is altogether satisfactory. He enters
into subtle and severe disquisitions concerning soul. Whether it is one
or many. How it can be both one and many. He has the strongest
perception that, to use the noble saying of the Germans, “Time and Space
are no gods.” He sees clearly that the soul, and the whole unseen world
of truly existing being, is independent of time and space: and yet, after
he has wrestled with the two Titans, through page after page, and
apparently conquered them, they slip in again unawares into the
battle-field, the moment his back is turned. He denies that the one
Reason has parts—it must exist as a whole wheresoever it exists: and yet
he cannot express the relation of the individual soul to it, but by
saying that we are parts of it; or that each thing, down to the lowest,
receives as much soul as it is capable of possessing. Ritter has worked
out at length, though in a somewhat dry and lifeless way, the hundred
contradictions of this kind which you meet in Plotinus; contradictions
which I suspect to be inseparable from any philosophy starting from his
grounds. Is he not looking for the spiritual in a region where it does
not exist; in the region of logical conceptions and abstractions, which
are not realities, but only, after all, symbols of our own, whereby we
express to ourselves the processes of our own brain? May not his
Christian contemporaries have been nearer scientific truth, as well as
nearer the common sense and practical belief of mankind, in holding that
that which is spiritual is personal, and can only be seen or conceived of
as residing in persons; and that that which is personal is moral, and has
to do, not with abstractions of the intellect, but with right and wrong,
love and hate, and all which, in the common instincts of men, involves a
free will, a free judgment, a free responsibility and desert? And that,
therefore, if there were a Spirit, a Dæmonic Element, an universal
Reason, a Logos, a Divine Element, closely connected with man, that one
Reason, that one Divine Element, must be a person also? At least, so
strong was the instinct of even the Heathen schools in this direction,
that the followers of Plotinus had to fill up the void which yawned
between man and the invisible things after which he yearned, by reviving
the whole old Pagan Polytheism, and adding to it a Dæmonology borrowed
partly from the Chaldees, and partly from the Jewish rabbis, which formed
a descending chain of persons, downward from the highest Deities to
heroes, and to the guardian angel of each man; the meed of the
philosopher being, that by self-culture and self-restraint he could rise
above the tutelage of some lower and more earthly dæmon, and become the
pupil of a God, and finally a God himself.
These contradictions need not lower the great Father of Neoplatonism in
our eyes, as a moral being. All accounts of him seem to prove him to
have been what Apollo, in a lengthy oracle, declared him to have been,
“good and gentle, and benignant exceedingly, and pleasant in all his
conversation.” He gave good advice about earthly matters, was a faithful
steward of moneys deposited with him, a guardian of widows and orphans, a
righteous and loving man. In his practical life, the ascetic and gnostic
element comes out strongly enough. The body, with him, was not evil,
neither was it good; it was simply nothing—why care about it? He would
have no portrait taken of his person: “It was humiliating enough to be
obliged to carry a shadow about with him, without having a shadow made of
that shadow.” He refused animal food, abstained from baths, declined
medicine in his last illness, and so died about 200 A.D.