literary expression in the works of Richard of St. Victor, of St.
Bernard, of Thomas à Kempis, of our own Richard Rolle, Hilton, and
Julian of Norwich, and many others. We see it in our own day in its
purest form in the living mystic who wrote _The Golden Fountain_. Those
who discredit it as “mere religious emotionalism” do so because they
utterly mistake its nature; regarding it, apparently, as the spiritual
equivalent of the poorest and most foolish, rather than the noblest,
most heroic, and least self-seeking, types of human love. “I find the
lark the most wonderful of all birds,” says the author of _The Golden
Fountain_. “I cannot listen to his rhapsodies without being inspired (no
matter what I may be in the midst of doing or saying) to throw up my own
love to God. In the soaring insistence of his song and passion I find
the only thing in Nature which so suggests the high soaring and
rapturous flights of the soul. But I am glad that we surpass the lark in
sustaining a far more lengthy and wonderful flight; and that we sing,
not downwards to an earthly love, but upwards to a heavenly.” Like real
human love, this spiritual passion is poles asunder from every kind of
sentimentality. It is profoundly creative, it is self-giving, it does
not ask for anything in exchange. Although it is the source of the
highest kind of joy—though, as à Kempis says, the true lover “flies,
runs, and rejoices; is free, and cannot be restrained”—it has yet more
kinship with suffering than with merely agreeable emotions. This is the
feeling state, at once generous and desirous, which most of all enflames
the will and makes it active; this it is which gives ardour and reality
to man’s prayers. “For love is born of God, and cannot rest save in God,
above all created things.”
But there is another form of objective emotion besides this intimate and
personal passion of love, which ought to play an important part in the
life of prayer. I mean that exalted and essentially disinterested type
of feeling which expresses itself in pure adoration, and is closely
connected with the sense of the Beautiful. Surely this, since it
represents the fullest expression of one power in our nature—and that a
power which is persistently stretched out in the direction of the
Ideal—should have a part in our communion with the spiritual, as well as
with the natural world. The Beautiful, says Hegel, is the spiritual
making itself known sensuously. It represents, then, a direct message to
us from the heart of Reality; ministers to us of more abundant life.
Therefore the widening of our horizon which takes place when we turn in
prayer to a greater world than that which the senses reveal to us,
should bring with it a more poignant vision of loveliness, a more eager
passion for Beauty as well as for Goodness and Truth. When St. Augustine
strove to express the intensity of his regret for wasted years, it was
to his neglect of the Beauty of God that he went to show the poignancy
of his feeling, the immensity of his loss. “Oh Beauty so old and so new!
too late have I loved thee!”
It needs a special training, I think—a special and deliberate use of our
faculties—if we are to avoid this deprivation; and learn, as an integral
part of our communion with Reality, to lay hold of the loveliness of the
First and Only Fair. “I was caught up to Thee by Thy beauty, but dragged
back again by my own weight,” says Augustine in another place; and the
weight of the soul, he tells us, is its love—the pull of a misplaced
desire. All prayer which is primarily the expression of our wants rather
than our worship, which places the demand for daily bread before instead
of after the hallowing of the Ineffable Name, will have this
dragging-back effect.
Now, as the artist’s passion for sensuous beauty finds expression in his
work, and urges him to create beauty as well as he can, so too the
soul’s passion for spiritual beauty should find expression in its work;
that is to say, in its prayer. A work of art, says Hegel again, is as
much the work of the Spirit of God as is the beauty of Nature; but in
art the Holy Spirit works through human consciousness. Therefore man’s
prayer ought to be as beautiful as he can make it; for thus it
approaches more nearly to the mind of God. It should have dignity as
well as intimacy, form as well as colour. More, all those little magic
thoughts—those delicate winged fancies, which seem like birds rejoicing
in God’s sight—these, too, should have their place in it. We find many
specimens of them, as it were stuffed and preserved under glass shades,
in books of devotion. It is true that their charm and radiance cannot
survive this process; the colour now seems crude, the sheen of the
plumage is gone. But once these were the living, personal, spontaneous
expressions of the love and faith—the inborn poetry—of those from whom
they came. Many a liturgic prayer, which now seems to us impersonal and
official—foreign to us, perhaps, in its language and thought—will show
us, if we have but a little imaginative sympathy, the ardent mood, the
exquisite tact, the unforced dignity, of the mind which first composed
it; and form a standard by which we may measure our own efforts in this
kind.
But the beauty which we seek to incorporate into our spiritual
intercourse should not be the dead ceremonious beauty which comes of
mere dependence on tradition. It should be the freely upspringing lyric
beauty which is rooted in intense personal feeling; the living beauty of
a living thing. Nor need we fear the reproach that here we confuse
religion with poetry. Poetry ever goes like the royal banners before
ascending life; therefore man may safely follow its leadership in his
prayer, which is—or should be—life in its intensest form. Consider the
lilies: those perfect examples of a measured, harmonious, natural and
creative life, under a form of utmost loveliness. I cannot help thinking
that it is the duty of all Christians to impart something of that
flower-like beauty to their prayer; and only feeling of a special kind
will do it—that humble yet passionate love of the beautiful, which finds
the perfect object of its adoration in God and something of His fairness
in all created things. St. Francis had it strongly, and certain other of
the mystics had it too. In one of his rapturous meditations, Suso, for
whom faith and poetry were—as they should be—fused in one, calls the
Eternal Wisdom a “sweet and beautiful wild flower.” He recognized that
flowery charm which makes the Gospels fragrant, and is included in that
pattern which Christians are called to imitate if they can. Now, if this
quality is to be manifested in human life, it must first be sought and
actualized, consciously or unconsciously, in prayer; because it is in
the pure, sharp air of the spiritual order that it lives. It must spring
up from within outwards, must be the reflection of the soul’s communion
with “that Supreme Beauty which containeth in itself all goodness”;
which was revealed to Angela of Foligno, but which “she could in no wise
describe.” The intellect may, and should, conceive of this Absolute
Beauty as well as it can; the will may—and must—be set on the attaining
of it. But only by intuitive feeling can man hope to know it, and only
by love can he make it his own. The springs of the truest prayer and of
the deepest poetry—twin expressions of man’s outward-going passion for
that Eternity which is his home—rise very near together in the heart.
THE MYSTICISM OF PLOTINUS
In spite of his enormous importance for the history of Christian
philosophy, Plotinus is still one of the least known and least
understood among the great thinkers of the ancient world. The extreme
difficulty of his style, which Porphyry well described as “dense with
thought, and more lavish of ideas than words,” together with the natural
laziness of man, may perhaps account for this neglect. He was by choice
a thinker, contemplative, and teacher, not a writer. Therefore the
Enneads, which represent merely notes of lectures hastily and
unwillingly written down during the last fifteen years of his life,
offer few inducements to hurried readers. The fact that he was a
“mystic” has been held a further excuse for failure to understand the
more cryptic passages of his works; though as a matter of fact these are
the precipitations of a singularly clear and logical intellect, and will
yield all their secrets to a sympathetic and industrious attention. His
few translators have often been content to leave difficult phrases
unelucidated, or surrounded by a haze of suggestive words; and though
his splendid and poetic rhapsodies are quoted again and again, even
those later mystics who are most indebted to him show few signs of
first-hand study and comprehension of his system as a whole. Thanks to
this same obscurity, and the richness, intricacy, and suggestive quality
of his thought, most of his interpreters have tended to do for him that
which he did for his master Plato: they have re-handled him in the
interests of their own religion or philosophy. Of this, the Cambridge
Platonists are the most notorious example; but the same inclination is
seen in modern scholars. Thus Baron von Hügel seeks to introduce a
dualism between his mysticism and his metaphysics. Even the brilliant
exposition of his philosophy in the Dean of St. Paul’s _Gifford
Lectures_ is not wholly exempt from this criticism. A comparison of his
analysis with those of Baron von Hügel in _Eternal Life_, and of Mr.
Whittaker in _The Neoplatonists_ makes plain the part which temperament
has played in each of these works.
Plotinus himself would probably have been astonished by this charge of
obscurity. His teaching had by declaration two aims. The first was the
definitely religious aim of bringing men to a knowledge of Divine
reality; for he had the missionary ardour inseparable from the saintly
type. The second was the faithful interpretation of Platonic philosophy,
especially the doctrines of Plato, and of his own immediate master, the
unknown Alexandrian Ammonius: for his academic teaching consisted wholly
of a commentary on, and interpretation of, Plato’s works. His system,
therefore, is a synthesis of practical spirituality and formal
philosophy, and will only be grasped by those who keep this twofold
character in mind. There must always seem to be a conflict between any
closed and self-consistent metaphysical system and the freedom and
richness of the spiritual life: but since few metaphysicians are
mystics, and few mystics are able to take metaphysics more seriously
than the soldier takes the lectures of the armchair strategist, these
two readings of reality are seldom brought into direct opposition. In
Plotinus we have an almost unique example of the philosopher who is also
a practical mystic; and consequently of a mind that cannot be satisfied
with anything less than an intellectual system which finds room for the
most profound experiences of the spiritual life. In this peculiarity
some scholars have found his principal merit; others a source of
weakness. The position of his critics has been excellently stated by
Baron von Hügel in _Eternal Life_. He finds in the Enneads a “ceaseless
conflict” between “the formal principles of the philosopher” and “the
experiences of a profoundly religious soul.” The philosophy issues in an
utterly transcendent Godhead without qualities, activity, or being: the
mysticism issues in ecstatic union, actual contact, with a God, “the
atmosphere and home of souls” whose richness is the sum of all
affirmations. Yet, as a matter of fact, this disharmony is only
apparent; and is resolved when we understand the formal character of the
Plotinian dialectic as a “way,” a stepping-stone, the reduction to terms
of reason of some aspects of a reality beyond reason’s grasp. The
discrepancy is like that which exists between map and landscape.
Plotinus, constantly passing over from argument to vision, speaks
sometimes the language of geography, sometimes that of adventure: yet
both, within their spheres, are true. The Neoplatonic _via negativa_
always implies an unexpressed because ineffable affirmation. Therefore
its Absolute, of which reason can predicate no qualities, may yet be the
“flower of all beauty” as apprehended by the contemplative soul.
Since the doctrine of Ammonius is unknown to us, we have no means of
gauging the extent to which Plotinus depends on him: but probably we
shall not be far wrong if we attribute to his influence the peculiar
sense of reality, the deep spiritual inwardness, colour and life, with
which his great pupil invests the dogmas of Platonism. The main elements
of the Plotinian philosophy, however, are undoubtedly Platonic. The
Divine Triad, the precession of spirit and its return to its origin, the
unreal world of sense, the universal soul, the “real” or intelligible
world of the Ideas—these and other ingredients of his system are a part
of the common stock of Platonism. His originality and his attraction
consist in the use which he makes of them, the colour and atmosphere
with which they are endowed. That which is truly his own is the living
vision which creates from these formulæ a vivid world both actual and
poetic, answering with fresh revelations of reality the widening demands
and apprehensions of the human soul. This spiritual world is not merely
arrived at by a dialectic process. It is the world of his own intense
experience from which he speaks to us; using his texts, as Christian
mystics have often used the Bible, to support doctrines inspired by his
personal vision of truth. In spite of his passion for exactitude, the
sharpness and detail of his universe, he is thrown back, again and
again, on the methods of symbol and poetry. We must always be ready to
look past his formal words to the felt reality which he is struggling to
impart; a reality which is beyond the grasp of reason, and can only be
apprehended by the faculty which he calls spiritual intuition. To this
we owe the richness and suppleness of his system, the absence of
watertight compartments, the intimate relation with life. Whilst many
philosophers have spent their powers on proving the necessary existence
of an unglimpsed universe which shall satisfy the cravings of the mind,
Plotinus spent his in making a map, based on his own adventures in “that
country which is no mere vision, but a home;” and his apparently rigid
contours and gradients are attempts to tell at least the characteristics
of a living land.
Though the Enneads are a storehouse of profound and subtle thought, the
main principles on which their philosophy is based are simple, and can
be expressed briefly. All things, according to Plotinus, have come forth
from the Absolute Godhead or One, and only fulfil their destiny when
they return to their origin. The real life of the universe consists in
this flux and reflux: the outflow and self-expression of spirit in
matter, the “conversion” or return of spirit to the One. With the rest
of the Neoplatonists, he conceives of the Universe as an emanation,
eternally poured forth from this One, and diminishing in reality and
splendour the further it is removed from its source. The general
position is somewhat like that given by Dante in the opening of the
_Paradiso_:
“La gloria di colui che tutto move
Per l’universo penetra, e resplende
In una parte più, e meno altrove,”
though Plotinus would have rejected the spatial implications of the last
line, for to him the One was present everywhere. The Divine nature is a
trinity; but not, as in Christian theology, of co-equal persons. Its
three descending degrees, or hypostases, are the unconditioned One or
the Good—a term which implies perfection but carries no ethical
implications—the Divine Mind, Spirit, or _Nous_, and the Soul or Life of
the World. Nothing is real which does not participate in one or other of
these principles. Though the first two hypostases are roughly parallel
to the Eternal Father and Logos-Christ of Christian Platonism, and some
have found in the Plotinian _Psyche_ a likeness to the immanent Holy
Spirit, this superficial resemblance must not be pressed. Fatherhood
cannot be ascribed to the One save in so far as it is the first cause of
life, for it transcends all our notions of personality. Its real
parallel in Christian theology is that conception of the
“Super-essential Godhead, beyond and above the Trinity of Persons,”
which Eckhart and a few other daring mystics took through Dionysius the
Areopagite from the Neoplatonists. The One is, in fact, the Absolute as
apprehended by a religious soul. Nor is the Plotinian _Nous_ a person,
in any sense in which orthodox Christianity has understood that term,
though it is called by Plotinus our Father and Companion. Further, the
triadic series does not involve a succession either in time, or order of
generation; but only in value. The worlds of spirit and of soul are
co-eternal with the Absolute, the inevitable and unceasing expressions
of its creative activity. The utterly transcendent Perfect manifests as
Mind or Spirit (_Nous_); and this _is_ the world of being. Mind or
Spirit manifests as Life or Soul (_Psyche_); and this _is_ the reality
of the world of becoming. The lower orders are contained in the higher,
which are everywhere present, though each “remains in its own place.”
“Of all things the governance and existence are in these three.”
Whilst every image of the universe is deceptive, since its true nature
is beyond our apprehension, Plotinus invites us to picture the Triad, as
Dante did, by concentric circles through which radiate the energy and
splendour of the “flower of all beauty,” the Transcendent One. “The
first act is the act of the Good, at rest within itself, and the first
existence is the self-contained existence of the Good. But there is also
an act upon it, that of the _Nous_; which, as it were, lives about it.
And the Soul, outside, circles about the _Nous_, and by gazing upon it,
seeing into the depths of it, through it sees God” (I. 8. 2). Again,
“The One is not a Being, but the Source of being, which is its first
offspring. The One is perfect, that is, it has nothing, seeks nothing,
needs nothing; but as we may say it overflows, and this overflowing is
creative” (V. 1. 2). Yet this eternal creative action “beyond spirit,
sense, and life,” involves no self-loss. It is the welling forth of an
unquenchable spring, the eternal fountain of life.
As Christian Platonists described the Son as the self-expression of the
Father, so Plotinus describes his second Divine Principle as the eternal
irradiation of the Absolute—_il ciel che più della sua luce prende_.
This principle he calls _Nous_; a word carrying many shades of meaning,
which the older commentators generally rendered as Divine Mind, or
Intelligible Principle. Dean Inge has shown good reason for translating
it as “Spirit,” thus bringing the language of Plotinus into line with
the many later mystics who derive from him. As a matter of fact, _Nous_
contains both meanings. It is more spiritual than mind, more
intellectual than spirit, in the sense in which that word is commonly
employed. Those mediæval theologians who made a mystical identification
between the Hebrew conception of the Eternal Wisdom as we find it
described in Proverbs and Ecclesiasticus, and the Second Person of the
Trinity, came very near the Plotinian concept of _Nous_, which is at
once Intelligence and the intelligible sphere, Spirit and the spiritual
universe; the home of reality, and object of religious and poetic
intuition. It is, in one aspect, the “Father and Companion” of the soul
(V. 1. 3), in another “the Intellectual Universe, that sphere
constituted by a Principle wholly unlike what is known as intelligence
in us” (I. 8. 2). This is the “Yonder” to which he so often refers; the
“middle heaven” of Indian philosophy, Ruysbroeck’s “clear-shining world
between ourselves and God.”
“... e questo cielo non ha altro dove
Che la mente divina,”
says Dante; once more condensing the whole Neoplatonic vision in one
vivid phrase.
This rich and suggestive conception of the Second Principle, as at once
King and Creator of the world of life, and also itself the archetypal
world of true values, is the central fact of the Plotinian philosophy.
Its apprehension, he says, is beyond ordinary human reason, which is
fitted for correspondence with the world of life or soul. It is the
function of spiritual intuition; “a faculty which all possess, though
few use.” Such communion with the world of supernal reality is possible,
because man is potentially an inhabitant of it. “The Fatherland to us is
there, whence we have come: and there is the Father” (I. 6. 8). The
“apex” or celestial aspect of our soul is domiciled there. It “never
leaves the Divine Mind; but, while it clings yonder, allows the lower
soul, as it were, to hang down” (VI. 7. 5). Man is, in fact,
intermediary between the two Plotinian worlds of Spirit and Soul, and
participates in both. Eucken, in describing him as the meeting-place of
two orders of reality, is merely restating the doctrine of the
Neoplatonists.
As Spirit is the outbirth and manifestation of the One, so Soul, or
Life—the third member of the Triad—is the manifestation or matter of
Spirit; and forms the link between the physical and the supersensual
worlds. Spirit is “at once its Father and ever-present Companion” (V. 1.
3). Soul is a term covering the whole vital essence (_a_) of the world,
and (_b_) of the individual. It has two aspects. The celestial soul
aspires toward, and is in communion with, the spiritual order; the
natural soul hangs down and inspires the physical order, thereby
conferring on it a measure of reality. We are not, however, to
understand by Soul merely the aggregate of individuals. _Psyche_ is the
divine and eternal life of the created universe, comprehending its
infinite variety in a unity which embraces every object in the
sense-known scheme, and makes it “like one animal” (IV. 4. 32). It is:
“A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.”
The whole creation, says Plotinus, in one of his great poetic passages,
is “awake and alive at every point.” Each thing has its own peculiar
life in the all; though we, because our senses cannot discern the life
within wood and stone, deny that life. “Their living is in secret, but
they live” (IV. 4. 36). Here we are reminded of the Logos-Christ of the
“Sayings”—“Raise the stone and thou shalt find me: cleave the wood, and
there am I.” By this conception, which is elaborated from the doctrine
of the world-soul in the _Timæus_, Neoplatonism bridges the gap between
appearance and reality, and also solves the paradox of multitude in
unity. “We do not declare the Soul to be one in the sense of entirely
excluding multiplicity. This absolute oneness belongs only to the higher
nature. We make it both one and manifold; it has part in the nature
which is divided among bodies, but it has part also in the indivisible,
and so again we find it to be one” (IV. 9. 2).
Soul, which has in its highest manifestations many of the characters of
Spirit, is the eternal upholder of the world of change. “Things have a
beginning, and perish when the soul that leads the chorus-dance of life
departs; but the soul itself is eternal and cannot suffer change ...
what the soul is, and what its power, will be more manifestly, more
splendidly evident, if we think how its counsel comprehends and conducts
the heavens; how it communicates itself to all this vast bulk and
ensouls it through all its extension, so that every fragment lives by
the soul entire, which is present everywhere like the Father which begat
it” (V. 1. 2). Soul, then, which is in one sense the reality of the
world of becoming and immanent therein, is also a denizen of eternity,
in virtue of its continuity with and direct dependence on _Nous_. An
unbroken series of ascending values unites the world of living effort
with the One. It is this which makes the system of Plotinus a philosophy
of infinite adventure and infinite hope.