weakness of his conceptions comes out. Plotinus was an earnest thinker,
slavishly enough reverencing the opinion of Plato, whom he quotes as an
infallible oracle, with a “He says,” as if there were but one he in the
universe: but he tried honestly to develop Plato, or what he conceived to
be Plato, on the method which Plato had laid down. His dialectic is far
superior, both in quantity and in quality, to that of those who come
after him. He is a seeker. His followers are not. The great work which
marks the second stage of his school is not an inquiry, but a
justification, not only of the Egyptian, but of all possible theurgies
and superstitions; perhaps the best attempt of the kind which the world
has ever seen; that which marks the third is a mere cloud-castle, an
inverted pyramid, not of speculation, but of dogmatic assertion, patched
together from all accessible rags and bones of the dead world. Some here
will, perhaps, guess from my rough descriptions, that I speak of
Iamblichus and Proclus.
Whether or not Iamblichus wrote the famous work usually attributed to
him, which describes itself as the letter of Abamnon the Teacher to
Porphyry, he became the head of that school of Neoplatonists who fell
back on theurgy and magic, and utterly swallowed up the more rational,
though more hopeless, school of Porphyry. Not that Porphyry, too, with
all his dislike of magic and the vulgar superstitions—a dislike
intimately connected with his loudly expressed dislike of the common
herd, and therefore of Christianity, as a religion for the common
herd—did not believe a fact or two, which looks to us, nowadays, somewhat
unphilosophical. From him we learn that one Ammonius, trying to crush
Plotinus by magic arts, had his weapons so completely turned against
himself, that all his limbs were contracted. From him we learn that
Plotinus, having summoned in the temple of Isis his familiar spirit, a
god, and not a mere dæmon, appeared. He writes sensibly enough however
to one Anebos, an Egyptian priest, stating his doubts as to the popular
notions of the Gods, as beings subject to human passions and vices, and
of theurgy and magic, as material means of compelling them to appear, or
alluring them to favour man. The answer of Abamnon, Anebos, Iamblichus,
or whoever the real author may have been, is worthy of perusal by every
metaphysical student, as a curious phase of thought, not confined to that
time, but rife, under some shape or other, in every age of the world’s
history, and in this as much as in any. There are many passages full of
eloquence, many more full of true and noble thought: but on the whole, it
is the sewing of new cloth into an old garment; the attempt to suit the
old superstition to the new one, by eclectically picking and choosing,
and special pleading, on both sides; but the rent is only made worse.
There is no base superstition which Abamnon does not unconsciously
justify. And yet he is rapidly losing sight of the real eternal human
germs of truth round which those superstitions clustered, and is really
further from truth and reason than old Homer or Hesiod, because further
from the simple, universal, everyday facts, and relations, and duties of
man, which are, after all, among the most mysterious, and also among the
most sacred objects which man can contemplate.
It was not wonderful, however, that Neoplatonism took the course it did.
Spirit, they felt rightly, was meant to rule matter; it was to be freed
from matter only for that very purpose. No one could well deny that.
The philosopher, as he rose and became, according to Plotinus, a god, or
at least approached toward the gods, must partake of some mysterious and
transcendental power. No one could well deny that conclusion, granting
the premiss. But of what power? What had he to show as the result of
his intimate communion with an unseen Being? The Christian Schools, who
held that the spiritual is the moral, answered accordingly. He must show
righteousness, and love, and peace in a Holy Spirit. That is the
likeness of God. In proportion as a man has them, he is partaker of a
Divine nature. He can rise no higher, and he needs no more. Platonists
had said—No, that is only virtue; and virtue is the means, not the end.
We want proof of having something above that; something more than any man
of the herd, any Christian slave, can perform; something above nature;
portents and wonders. So they set to work to perform wonders; and
succeeded, I suppose, more or less. For now one enters into a whole
fairyland of those very phenomena which are puzzling us so
nowadays—ecstasy, clairvoyance, insensibility to pain, cures produced by
the effect of what we now call mesmerism. They are all there, these
modern puzzles, in those old books of the long bygone seekers for wisdom.
It makes us love them, while it saddens us to see that their difficulties
were the same as ours, and that there is nothing new under the sun. Of
course, a great deal of it all was “imagination.” But the question then,
as now is, what is this wonder-working imagination?—unless the word be
used as a mere euphemism for lying, which really, in many cases, is
hardly fair. We cannot wonder at the old Neoplatonists for attributing
these strange phenomena to spiritual influence, when we see some who
ought to know better doing the same thing now; and others, who more
wisely believe them to be strictly physical and nervous, so utterly
unable to give reasons for them, that they feel it expedient to ignore
them for awhile, till they know more about those physical phenomena which
can be put under some sort of classification, and attributed to some sort
of inductive law.
But again. These ecstasies, cures, and so forth, brought them rapidly
back to the old priestcrafts. The Egyptian priests, the Babylonian and
Jewish sorcerers, had practised all this as a trade for ages, and reduced
it to an art. It was by sleeping in the temples of the deities, after
due mesmeric manipulations, that cures were even then effected. Surely
the old priests were the people to whom to go for information. The old
philosophers of Greece were venerable. How much more those of the East,
in comparison with whom the Greeks were children? Besides, if these
dæmons and deities were so near them, might it not be possible to behold
them? They seemed to have given up caring much for the world and its
course—
Effugerant adytis templisque relictis
Dî quibus imperium steterat.
The old priests used to make them appear—perhaps they might do it again.
And if spirit could act directly and preternaturally on matter, in spite
of the laws of matter, perhaps matter might act on spirit. After all,
were matter and spirit so absolutely different? Was not spirit some sort
of pervading essence, some subtle ethereal fluid, differing from matter
principally in being less gross and dense? This was the point to which
they went down rapidly enough; the point to which all philosophies, I
firmly believe, will descend, which do not keep in sight that the
spiritual means the moral. In trying to make it mean exclusively the
intellectual, they will degrade it to mean the merely logical and
abstract; and when that is found to be a barren and lifeless phantom, a
mere projection of the human brain, attributing reality to mere
conceptions and names, and confusing the subject with the object, as
logicians say truly the Neoplatonists did, then in despair, the school
will try to make the spiritual something real, or, at least, something
conceivable, by reinvesting it with the properties of matter, and talking
of it as if it were some manner of gas, or heat, or electricity, or
force, pervading time and space, conditioned by the accidents of brute
matter, and a part of that nature which is born to die.
The culmination of all this confusion we see in Proclus. The unfortunate
Hypatia, who is the most important personage between him and Iamblichus,
has left no writings to our times; we can only judge of her doctrine by
that of her instructors and her pupils. Proclus was taught by the men
who had heard her lecture; and the golden chain of the Platonic
succession descended from her to him. His throne, however, was at
Athens, not at Alexandria. After the murder of the maiden philosopher,
Neoplatonism prudently retired to Greece. But Proclus is so essentially
the child of the Alexandrian school that we cannot pass him over.
Indeed, according to M. Cousin, as I am credibly informed, he is _the_
Greek philosopher; the flower and crown of all its schools; in whom, says
the learned Frenchman, “are combined, and from whom shine forth, in no
irregular or uncertain rays, Orpheus, Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, Zeno,
Plotinus, Porphyry, and Iamblichus;” and who “had so comprehended all
religions in his mind, and paid them such equal reverence, that he was,
as it were, the priest of the whole universe!”
I have not the honour of knowing much of M. Cousin’s works. I never came
across them but on one small matter of fact, and on that I found him
copying at second hand an anachronism which one would have conceived
palpable to any reader of the original authorities. This is all I know
of him, saving these his raptures over Proclus, of which I have quoted
only a small portion, and of which I can only say, in Mr. Thomas
Carlyle’s words, “What things men will worship, in their extreme need!”
Other moderns, however, have expressed their admiration of Proclus; and,
no doubt, many neat sayings may be found in him (for after all he was a
Greek), which will be both pleasing and useful to those who consider
philosophic method to consist in putting forth strings of brilliant
apophthegms, careless about either their consistency or coherence: but of
the method of Plato or Aristotle, any more than of that of Kant or Mill,
you will find nothing in him. He seems to my simplicity to be at once
the most timid and servile of commentators, and the most cloudy of
declaimers. He can rave symbolism like Jacob Böhmen, but without an atom
of his originality and earnestness. He can develop an inverted pyramid
of dæmonology, like Father Newman himself, but without an atom of his
art, his knowledge of human cravings. He combines all schools, truly,
Chaldee and Egyptian as well as Greek; but only scraps from their
mummies, drops from their quintessences, which satisfy the heart and
conscience as little as they do the logical faculties. His Greek gods
and heroes, even his Alcibiades and Socrates, are “ideas;” that is,
symbols of certain notions or qualities: their flesh and bones, their
heart and brain, have been distilled away, till nothing is left but a
word, a notion, which may patch a hole in his huge
heaven-and-earth-embracing system. He, too, is a commentator and a
deducer; all has been discovered; and he tries to discover nothing more.
Those who followed him seem to have commented on his comments. With him
Neoplatonism properly ends. Is its last utterance a culmination or a
fall? Have the Titans sealed heaven, or died of old age, “exhibiting,”
as Gibbon says of them, “a deplorable instance of the senility of the
human mind?” Read Proclus, and judge for yourselves: but first contrive
to finish everything else you have to do which can possibly be useful to
any human being. Life is short, and Art—at least the art of obtaining
practical guidance from the last of the Alexandrians—very long.
And yet—if Proclus and his school became gradually unfaithful to the
great root-idea of their philosophy, we must not imitate them. We must
not believe that the last of the Alexandrians was under no divine
teaching, because he had be-systemed himself into confused notions of
what that teaching was like. Yes, there was good in poor old Proclus;
and it too came from the only source whence all good comes. Were there
no good in him I could not laugh at him as I have done; I could only hate
him. There are moments when he rises above his theories; moments when he
recurs in spirit, if not in the letter, to the faith of Homer, almost to
the faith of Philo. Whether these are the passages of his which his
modern admirers prize most, I cannot tell. I should fancy not:
nevertheless I will read you one of them.
He is about to commence his discourses on the Parmenides, that book in
which we generally now consider that Plato has been most untrue to
himself, and fallen from his usual inductive method to the ground of a
mere _à priori_ theoriser—and yet of which Proclus is reported to have
said, and, I should conceive, said honestly, that if it, the Timæus, and
the Orphic fragments were preserved, he did not care whether every other
book on earth were destroyed. But how does he commence?
“I pray to all the gods and goddesses to guide my reason in the
speculation which lies before me, and having kindled in me the pure light
of truth, to direct my mind upward to the very knowledge of the things
which are, and to open the doors of my soul to receive the divine
guidance of Plato, and, having directed my knowledge into the very
brightness of being, to withdraw me from the various forms of opinion,
from the apparent wisdom, from the wandering about things which do not
exist, by that purest intellectual exercise about the things which do
exist, whereby alone the eye of the soul is nourished and brightened, as
Socrates says in the Phædrus; and that the Noetic Gods will give to me
the perfect reason, and the Noeric Gods the power which leads up to this,
and that the rulers of the Universe above the heaven will impart to me an
energy unshaken by material notions and emancipated from them, and those
to whom the world is given as their dominion a winged life, and the
angelic choirs a true manifestation of divine things, and the good dæmons
the fulness of the inspiration which comes from the Gods, and the heroes
a grand, and venerable, and lofty fixedness of mind, and the whole divine
race together a perfect preparation for sharing in Plato’s most mystical
and far-seeing speculations, which he declares to us himself in the
Parmenides, with the profundity befitting such topics, but which _he_
(_i.e._ his master Syrianus) completed by his most pure and luminous
apprehensions, who did most truly share the Platonic feast, and was the
medium for transmitting the divine truth, the guide in our speculations,
and the hierophant of these divine words; who, as I think, came down as a
type of philosophy, to do good to the souls that are here, in place of
idols, sacrifices, and the whole mystery of purification, a leader of
salvation to the men who are now and who shall be hereafter. And may the
whole band of those who are above us be propitious; and may the whole
force which they supply be at hand, kindling before us that light which,
proceeding from them, may guide us to them.”
Surely this is an interesting document. The last Pagan Greek prayer, I
believe, which we have on record; the death-wail of the old world—not
without a touch of melody. One cannot altogether admire the style; it is
inflated, pedantic, written, I fear, with a considerable consciousness
that he was saying the right thing and in the very finest way: but still
it is a prayer. A cry for light—by no means, certainly, like that noble
one in Tennyson’s “In Memoriam:”
So runs my dream. But what am I?
An infant crying in the night;
An infant crying for the light;
And with no language but a cry.
Yet he asks for light: perhaps he had settled already for himself—like
too many more of us—what sort of light he chose to have: but still the
eye is turned upward to the sun, not inward in conceited fancy that self
is its own illumination. He asks—surely not in vain. There was light to
be had for asking. That prayer certainly was not answered in the letter:
it may have been ere now in the spirit. And yet it is a sad prayer
enough. Poor old man, and poor old philosophy!
This he and his teachers had gained by despising the simpler and yet far
profounder doctrine of the Christian schools, that the Logos, the Divine
Teacher in whom both Christians and Heathens believed, was the very
archetype of men, and that He had proved that fact by being made flesh,
and dwelling bodily among them, that they might behold His glory, full of
grace and truth, and see that it was at once the perfection of man and
the perfection of God: that that which was most divine was most human,
and that which was most human, most divine. That was the outcome of
_their_ metaphysic, that they had found the Absolute One; because One
existed in whom the apparent antagonism between that which is eternally
and that which becomes in time, between the ideal and the actual, between
the spiritual and the material, in a word, between God and man, was
explained and reconciled for ever.
And Proclus’s prayer, on the other hand, was the outcome of the
Neoplatonists’ metaphysic, the end of all _their_ search after the One,
the Indivisible, the Absolute, this cry to all manner of innumerable
phantoms, ghosts of ideas, ghosts of traditions, neither things nor
persons, but thoughts, to give the philosopher each something or other,
according to the nature of each. Not that he very clearly defines what
each is to give him; but still he feels himself in want of all manner of
things, and it is as well to have as many friends at court as
possible—Noetic Gods, Noeric Gods, rulers, angels, dæmons, heroes—to
enable him to do what? To understand Plato’s most mystical and
far-seeing speculations. The Eternal Nous, the Intellectual Teacher has
vanished further and further off; further off still some dim vision of a
supreme Goodness. Infinite spaces above that looms through the mist of
the abyss a Primæval One. But even that has a predicate, for it is one;
it is not pure essence. Must there not be something beyond that again,
which is not even one, but is nameless, inconceivable, absolute? What an
abyss! How shall the human mind find anything whereon to rest, in the
vast nowhere between it and the object of its search? The search after
the One issues in a wail to the innumerable; and kind gods, angels, and
heroes, not human indeed, but still conceivable enough to satisfy at
least the imagination, step in to fill the void, as they have done since,
and may do again; and so, as Mr. Carlyle has it, “the bottomless pit got
roofed over,” as it may be again ere long.
Are we then to say, that Neoplatonism was a failure? That Alexandria,
during four centuries of profound and earnest thought, added nothing?
Heaven forbid that we should say so of a philosophy which has exercised
on European thought, at the crisis of its noblest life and action, an
influence as great as did the Aristotelian system during the Middle Ages.
We must never forget, that during the two centuries which commence with
the fall of Constantinople, and end with our civil wars, not merely
almost all great thinkers, but courtiers, statesmen, warriors, poets,
were more or less Neoplatonists. The Greek grammarians, who migrated
into Italy, brought with them the works of Plotinus, Iamblichus, and
Proclus; and their gorgeous reveries were welcomed eagerly by the
European mind, just revelling in the free thought of youthful manhood.
And yet the Alexandrian impotence for any practical and social purposes
was to be manifested, as utterly as it was in Alexandria or in Athens of
old. Ficinus and Picus of Mirandola worked no deliverance, either for
Italian morals or polity, at a time when such deliverance was needed
bitterly enough. Neoplatonism was petted by luxurious and heathen popes,
as an elegant play of the cultivated fancy, which could do their real
power, their practical system, neither good nor harm. And one cannot
help feeling, while reading the magnificent oration on Supra-sensual
Love, which Castiglione, in his admirable book “The Courtier,” puts into
the mouth of the profligate Bembo, how near mysticism may lie not merely
to dilettantism or to Pharisaism, but to sensuality itself. But in
England, during Elizabeth’s reign, the practical weakness of Neoplatonism
was compensated by the noble practical life which men were compelled to
live in those great times; by the strong hold which they had of the ideas
of family and national life, of law and personal faith. And I cannot but
believe it to have been a mighty gain to such men as Sidney, Raleigh, and
Spenser, that they had drunk, however slightly, of the wells of Proclus
and Plotinus. One cannot read Spenser’s “Fairy Queen,” above all his
Garden of Adonis, and his cantos on Mutability, without feeling that his
Neoplatonism must have kept him safe from many a dark eschatological
superstition, many a narrow and bitter dogmatism, which was even then
tormenting the English mind, and must have helped to give him altogether
a freer and more loving conception, if not a consistent or accurate one,
of the wondrous harmony of that mysterious analogy between the physical
and the spiritual, which alone makes poetry (and I had almost said
philosophy also) possible, and have taught him to behold alike in suns
and planets, in flowers and insects, in man and in beings higher than
man, one glorious order of love and wisdom, linking them all to Him from
whom they all proceed, rays from His cloudless sunlight, mirrors of His
eternal glory.
But as the Elizabethan age, exhausted by its own fertility, gave place to
the Caroline, Neoplatonism ran through much the same changes. It was
good for us, after all, that the plain strength of the Puritans,
unphilosophical as they were, swept it away. One feels in reading the
later Neoplatonists, Henry More, Smith, even Cudworth (valuable as he
is), that the old accursed distinction between the philosopher, the
scholar, the illuminate, and the plain righteous man, was growing up
again very fast. The school from which the “Religio Medici” issued was
not likely to make any bad men good, or any foolish men wise.
Besides, as long as men were continuing to quote poor old Proclus as an
irrefragable authority, and believing that he, forsooth, represented the
sense of Plato, the new-born Baconian philosophy had but little chance in
the world. Bacon had been right in his dislike of Platonism years
before, though he was unjust to Plato himself. It was Proclus whom he
was really reviling; Proclus as Plato’s commentator and representative.
The lion had for once got into the ass’s skin, and was treated
accordingly. The true Platonic method, that dialectic which the
Alexandrians gradually abandoned, remains yet to be tried, both in
England and in Germany; and I am much mistaken, if, when fairly used, it
be not found the ally, not the enemy, of the Baconian philosophy; in
fact, the inductive method applied to words, as the expressions of
Metaphysic Laws, instead of to natural phenomena, as the expressions of
Physical ones. If you wish to see the highest instances of this method,
read Plato himself, not Proclus. If you wish to see how the same method
can be applied to Christian truth, read the dialectic passages in
Augustine’s “Confessions.” Whether or not you shall agree with their
conclusions, you will not be likely, if you have a truly scientific habit
of mind, to complain that they want either profundity, severity, or
simplicity.
So concludes the history of one of the Alexandrian schools of Metaphysic.
What was the fate of the other is a subject which I must postpone to my
next Lecture.
LECTURE IV.
THE CROSS AND THE CRESCENT.
I TRIED to point out, in my last Lecture, the causes which led to the
decay of the Pagan metaphysic of Alexandria. We have now to consider the
fate of the Christian school.
You may have remarked that I have said little or nothing about the
positive dogmas of Clement, Origen, and their disciples; but have only
brought out the especial points of departure between them and the
Heathens. My reason for so doing was twofold: first, I could not have
examined them without entering on controversial ground; next, I am very
desirous to excite some of my hearers, at least, to examine these
questions for themselves.