values is the material universe to which its lower activities give form,
slumbering in the rocks and dreaming in the plants. In plants, says
Plotinus, “the more rebellious and self-willed phase of soul is
expressed”: a doctrine which will find an echo in many a gardener’s
heart. The sensible beauty of the world is the signature of soul, and
points to something “Yonder”; for through loveliness it participates in
the world of spiritual values, and we in apprehending beauty turn away
from matter to _Nous_ (I. 8. 4). Matter, as such, has no reality except
as the stuff from which soul weaves up its outward vesture. Deprived of
soul, it is in itself, he says, “not-being” and “no-thing”: “its very
nature is one long want” (I. 8. 5). As a picture is the crude and
partial condensation of an artist’s dream—all that he can force his
recalcitrant material to express—so the physical world is but a
fragmentary manifestation of the great and vivid universe of soul, and
the body is the smallest part of the real man. When we grasp this, we
see how great is the sum of possibilities opened to us by the Cosmos;
how easily the country “Yonder” can find room for all the visions and
intuitions of artists, poets, and saints.
The Plotinian doctrine of man, which became in due course the classical
doctrine of Christian mysticism, is the logical outcome of this
cosmology. Man, like the rest of Creation, has come forth from God and
will only find happiness and full life when his true being is re-united,
first with the Divine Mind, and ultimately with the One. “When the
phantasm has returned to the Original, the journey is achieved” (VI. 9.
11). Hence “our quest is of an End, and not of Ends. That only can be
chosen which is ultimate and noblest, that which calls to the tenderest
longings of the soul” (I. 4. 6). As the descending stages of reality are
three, so the stages of the ascent are three. They are called in the
Enneads purification, the work of reason, which marks the transference
of interest from sense to soul; enlightenment—the work of spiritual
intuition—which lifts life into communion with the eternal world of
spirit; and ecstasy, that profound transfiguration of consciousness
whereby the “spirit in love” achieves union with the One. These stages
are familiar to all students of Christian asceticism, as the codified
“mystic way” of purgation, illumination, and union: a formula which
Dionysius the Areopagite took from the Neoplatonists. But it is
important to remember that in Plotinus this “way” is not—as it sometimes
becomes in mediæval writers—a rigid series of mutually exclusive
psychological states, separated by water-tight bulkheads. It is rather a
diagram by which he seeks to describe one undivided movement of life; a
prolonged effort and adventure, which has for its object a deeper and
deeper penetration into Reality, the achievement of a true scale of
values, in order that the real proportions of existence may be grasped.
In this movement nothing is left behind; but everything is carried up
into a higher synthesis, as the latent possibilities of humanity are
gradually realized, and man grows up into eternal life.
“Since your soul is so exalted a power, so divine, be confident that in
virtue of its possession you are close to God. Begin therefore with the
help of this principle to make your way to Him. You have not far to go:
there is not much between. Lay hold of that which is more divine than
this god-like thing; lay hold of that apex of the soul which borders on
the Supreme (_Nous_), from which the soul immediately derives” (V. 1.
3).
All practical mysticism is at bottom a process of transcendence,
“passing on the upward way all that is other than God” (I. 6. 7): and
this process, in different temperaments, assumes different forms. Since
Plotinus united in his own person the characteristics of the
metaphysician, the poet and the saint, he tends to present it under
three aspects; as the logical outcome of a reasoned philosophy, as a
moral purification which strips us of all unreality, and as a
progressive initiation into beauty. “Beholding this Being, the Conductor
of all existence, the self-intent that ever gives and never takes,
resting rapt in the vision and possession of so lofty a loveliness, what
beauty can the soul then lack? For this, the beauty supreme, the
absolute and the primal, fashions its lovers to beauty and makes them
also worthy of love. And for this the sternest and uttermost combat is
set before these souls; all our labour is for this, lest we be left
without part in this noblest vision, which to attain is to be blessed in
the blissful sight, which to fail of is to fail utterly” (I. 6. 7). In
the high place which he gives to the category of beauty, which is to him
one of the three final attributes of God, the strongly poetic character
of his vision of Reality becomes evident. He anticipates Hegel in
regarding natural beauty as the sensuous manifestation of spirit and
signature of the world-soul “fragment as it were of the Primal Beauty,
making beautiful to the fullness of their capacity whatsoever it grasps
and moulds” (I. 6. 6): and those lovers, artists, and musicians who can
apprehend it have already made the first step towards the inner vision
of the One. Therefore the harsh other-worldliness which made some
mediæval ascetics turn from visible loveliness as a snare, would have
seemed blasphemy to Plotinus, who would certainly have argued with St.
Augustine that “there is no health in those who find fault with any part
of Thy creation” (_Conf._ vii. 14). On the contrary, his doctrine gives
a religious sanction and a philosophic explanation to those special
experiences and apprehensions of artists, poets, and so-called
“nature-mystics”—known to many normal persons in moments of
exaltation—when
“The world is so charged with the grandeur of God
It must shine out, like shining from shook foil.”
In such hours, he would say, we perceive through matter the inhabiting
_Psyche_, and by it reach out to communion with _Nous_, for “this is how
the material becomes beautiful; by participating in the thought which
flows from the Divine” (I. 6. 2). He would have understood Blake’s claim
to see the universe as “a world of imagination and vision,” and accepted
Erigena’s great saying, “every visible and invisible creature is a
theophany or appearance of God.”
Thus the whole mystic ascent can be conceived as a movement through
visible beauty to its invisible source, and thence to “the inaccessible
Beauty, dwelling as if in consecrated precincts apart from the common
ways” (I. 6. 8). Yet this progress is not so much a change in our
consciousness of the world and of ourselves, as a shifting of the centre
of our being from sense to soul, from soul to spirit, whereby we come
actually to live at new levels of existence. “For all there are two
stages of the path, according to whether they are ascending or have
already gained the upper sphere. The first stage is conversion from the
lower life: the second—taken by those who have already reached the
Spiritual sphere, as it were set a footprint there, but must still
advance within that realm—lasts till they reach its extreme summit, the
term attained When the topmost peak of the Spiritual realm is won” (I.
3. 1).
The process is both intellectual and moral, since its goal is the
absolute Truth and Beauty no less than the absolute Good. “Each must
become God-like and beautiful who cares to see God and Beauty” (I. 6.
9). It involves deliberate effort and drastic purification of mind and
heart, “cutting away all that is excessive, straightening all that is
crooked, bringing light to all that is in shadow, labouring to make all
one glow of beauty” (I. 6. 9). As “all knowing comes by likeness” (I. 8.
1), we must ourselves have moral beauty if we would see the “Beauty
There.” But whether this way be conceived under æsthetic or ascetic
symbols, Plotinus is at one with all the mystics in declaring that the
driving force which urges the soul along the pathway to reality is love.
This inspires its labour, supports its stern purifications, “detaches it
from the body and lifts it to the Intelligible World” (III. 6. 5), and
gives it at last “the only eye that sees the mighty Beauty” (I. 6. 9).
Love means for him active desire; “the longing for conjunction and
rest.” All shades of spiritual and poetic passion, the graded meanings
of admiration, enthusiasm, and worship, are included in it. It is “the
true magic of the universe”; an attribute of _Nous_, and an earnest of
real life. “The fullest life is the fullest love, and the love comes
from the celestial light which streams forth from the Absolute One” (VI.
7. 23). It is true that the impersonal nature of the Neo-platonic One
gives no apparent scope to the intimate feeling which plays so large a
part in Christian devotion. But the reality and warmth of the true
mystical passion for the Absolute—its complete independence of
anthropomorphic conceptions—is strikingly demonstrated by those glowing
passages in which Plotinus allows his overpowering emotion, “that
veritable love, that sharp desire,” to speak; and appeals to the
experience of those fellow-mystics who have attained the vision of “the
splendour yonder, and felt the burning of the flame of love for that
which is there to know; the passion of the lover resting on the bosom of
his love” (VI. 9. 4). This passion is the instrument of that ecstasy in
which he taught that those men who have “wrought themselves into harmony
with the Supreme” may briefly experience the vision of the ineffable
One. In it the spirit is burned to a white heat, which fuses in one
single state the highest activities of feeling, thought, and will.
Though the doctrine of ecstasy appears in Philo, and could reasonably be
deduced from Plato himself, its treatment by Plotinus, the intense
actuality and poetic fervour of its presentation, are the obvious
results of such personal experiences as Porphyry describes to us. This
ecstasy, according to him—and here he is supported by the majority of
later mystics—is not a merely passive state, nor does it result in a
barren satisfaction. When, withdrawing from all lesser interests, the
soul passes beyond all contingency “through virtue to the Divine Mind,
through wisdom to the Supreme,” and poises itself upon God in a simple
state of rapt attention, it receives as a reward of its effort not only
the beatific vision of the Perfect, but also an accession of vitality.
At this moment, says Plotinus, it “has another life” and “knows that the
Supplier of true life is present.” The mystic, or “sage,” is not a
spiritual freak; but the man who has grown up to the full stature of
humanity and united himself with that Source of life which is “present
everywhere, yet absent except only to those prepared to receive it” (VI.
9. 4). Therefore he alone can be trusted to be fully active; since his
action is not a mere restless striving after the discordant objects of a
scattered attention, but an ordered movement based on the contemplation
of Reality.
“We always move round the One. If we did not, we should be dissolved and
no longer exist. But we do not always look at the One. When we do, we
attain the end of our existence, and our rest; and no longer sing out of
tune, but form a divine chorus round the One” (VI. 9. 7).
Yet in spite of the majesty and purity of his vision, the devil’s
advocate is not without material for an attack upon Plotinus. The charge
brought by St. Augustine against “the books of the Platonists” as a
whole—and by these he meant chiefly the Enneads—is well known. He found
in their philosophy no response to the needs of the struggling and the
imperfect. In its complete escape from the standing religious snare of
anthropomorphism, Neoplatonism also escaped from the grasp of humanity.
It left man everything to do for himself. For the Christian philosophy
of divine incarnation, dramatized in history, and expressed in the
phrase “God so loved the world,” the Neoplatonist substitutes “So the
world loves God.” “No one there,” says Augustine of their school,
“hearkens to Him who calleth, Come unto Me all ye that labour.” The One
is the transcendent Source and the Magnet of the Universe, the object
and satisfaction of spiritual passion; but not the lover, helper, or
saviour of the soul. It “needs nothing, desires nothing.” The quality of
mercy cannot be ascribed to it. As a term, it is as attractive and
impersonal as a mountain peak; and the mystic attaining it has something
of the aristocratic self-satisfaction of the successful mountaineer. The
Christian and Sūfi mystics, even when most deeply influenced by
Neoplatonism, have always felt the incompleteness of this conception.
They see the soul’s achievement of reality as the result of two
movements, one human and one divine: a “mutual attraction.” “God needs
me as much as I need Him,” said Meister Eckhart. “Our natural will,”
said Julian of Norwich, “is to have God, and the good-will of God is to
have us.”
“I was given,” says Angela of Foligno, “a deep insight into the humility
of God, towards man and all other things.” “The love of God,” says
Ruysbroeck, “is an outpouring and an indrawing tide.” These statements
undoubtedly represent a normal element in spiritual experience; that
sense of a response, a self-giving on the part of its transcendent
object which—whatever explanation we may choose to give of it—is
integral to a developed mysticism. Neoplatonism, considered as a
religious philosophy, is impoverished by its failure to recognize and
find a place for this.
Moreover, the so-called social side of religion, so grossly exaggerated
by the amateur theologians of the present day, certainly receives less
than justice from Plotinus; for whom the “political virtues” are merely
preparatory to the spiritual life, and that spiritual life an exclusive
system of self-culture, having as its final stage a “flight of the alone
to the Alone.” Moral goodness is a form of beauty, and therefore “real”;
but there is no suggestion that goodness as such is dearer to the
Absolute than beauty or truth. The problem of evil is looked at, but
left unsolved: a weakness which Plotinus shares with most mystical
philosophers. Evil, he says, has no place in the “untroubled blissful
life” of the three Divine Principles. Therefore it is not real, but “a
form of non-being” (I. 8. 3): a doctrine which makes an unexpected
reappearance eleven hundred years later in the Revelations of Julian of
Norwich. Since the aim of the “wise man” is the transcendence of the
sense world, there is, moreover, no adequate recognition of those sins,
wrongs, and sufferings with which that “half-real” world is charged.
Though effort and self-denial have their part in the Plotinian scheme,
that transfiguration of pain which was the greatest achievement of the
Gospel is beyond the scope of his philosophy. Its remedy for failure and
grief is not humble consecration, but lofty withdrawal to that spiritual
sphere where the divine element of the soul is at home, untroubled by
the conflicts, evils, and chances of life. Even the selfless sorrow of a
father or a patriot is to be transcended. Though in this his practice
was doubtless better than his doctrine—for we know that he was a good
citizen, a beloved teacher, and a loyal friend—he speaks in a tone of
icy contempt of those who allow themselves to be disturbed by the
world’s woe.
“If the man that has attained felicity meets some turn of fortune that
he would not have chosen, there is not the slightest lessening of his
happiness for that. If there were, his felicity would be veering or
falling from day to day; _the death of a child would bring him down_, or
the loss of some trivial possession.... How can he take any great
account of the vacillations of power, or the ruin of his fatherland?
Verily, if he thought any such event a great disaster, or any disaster
at all, he must be of a strange way of thinking” (I. 4. 7).
Such a sentence, however we look at it, goes far to justify the
description of the Neoplatonic saint as “a self-sufficient sage”; and
explains the question with which Augustine turned from the Enneads—“When
would those books have taught me charity?”
In spite, however, of this fundamental difference in tone, the wider our
reading the more clearly we must realize the extent to which the
Christian mystics are conscious or unconscious disciples of Plotinus.
That unity of witness which is one of the most impressive facts in the
history of mysticism, may reasonably be regarded as evidence of the
reality of that world of spiritual values which contemplatives
persistently describe. But on its literary side, this same unity of
witness depends closely upon the fact that these contemplatives, however
widely separated by time and formal creed, were able to make plain their
adventures to other men by means of conceptions drawn from the Plotinian
scheme; which has proved itself able to rationalize and find room for
the deepest spiritual intuitions of man. It could do this because a
great mystic made it. Hence we find it implied, even where unexpressed,
in many of the masterpieces of later mysticism—both Christian and
Mahomedan—and some knowledge of it is a necessary clue to the full
understanding of these writings. The Sūfi ’Attar, describing the soul’s
arrival in “the Valley of Unity where it contemplates the naked
Godhead,” is equally its debtor with the Protestant mystic William Law,
declaring that “everything in temporal nature is descended out of that
which is eternal, and stands as a palpable visible outbirth of it; so
that when we know how to separate the grossness, death, and darkness of
time from it, we find what it is in its eternal state.” Yet few of the
theologians and contemplatives who owe most to Plotinus had any
first-hand acquaintance with the Enneads. Their influence reached the
mediæval world by two main channels. The first line of descent is
through the works of Victorinus and St. Augustine; the second through
the philosopher Proclus and his mysterious disciple Dionysius the
Areopagite. These lines meet in the _Divina Commedia_, which may be
regarded in one aspect as the supreme poetic flower of Neoplatonism.
The dramatic life-history and exuberant self-revelations of St.
Augustine have obscured the debt which Christian philosophy owes to that
less assertive convert and theologian, Victorinus. Yet since Augustinian
Neoplatonism is derived from his writings and translations, he is the
real link between Plotinus and the mystics of the Latin Church. A
celebrated man of letters and a professor of rhetoric, he had been
formed by Neoplatonic philosophy; and is said to have been the author of
that Latin translation of the Enneads, which was chief among those
“books of the Platonists” that provided St. Augustine’s stepping-stones
to faith. The stir, not to say scandal, caused by his conversion—so
vividly described in the “Confessions”—was justified: for the event was
crucial in the history of western Christianity. After his conversion,
which took the form of a re-interpretation, not an abandonment, of his
old beliefs, he set himself to the creation of a Neoplatonic theology;
in which the Plotinian triad, and doctrine of the soul’s precession and
return to the One, appear almost undisguised. The One he tries to
identify with the transcendent and immutable Father. “Son” and “Spirit”
are to him two aspects of _Nous_; the fount of all substantial
existence, and containing from eternity all things in their archetypal
reality. The Son or Logos is “the Logos of all that is,” ever gushing
forth from the “living fountain” of the Father. It was from Victorinus
that Catholicism obtained the characteristic Plotinian notions of Deity
as “ever active and ever at rest,” and of the life of reality as
consisting in immanence, progress, and return, which meet us again and
again in the writings of the mystics.
It is plain that St. Augustine, in his first Christian period, was
deeply indebted to Plotinus, whom he knew through Victorinus and
frequently quotes by name; calling him “one of those more excellent
philosophers” whose doctrine of the soul is in harmony with the Prologue
of the Fourth Gospel. When he came to write the “Confessions,” the
glamour of the Platonic vision had begun to fade, and he was able to
deal in a critical spirit with his own brief Plotinian experience of
“that which Is” (VII. 17). Nevertheless, none can understand that book
without some knowledge of the Enneads, from which all its finest
passages are derived, and in more than one instance—especially Book VII
and the celebrated tenth chapter of Book IX—closely imitated. In
Augustine’s invocation of “the Beauty so old and so new,” in his
description of the “Country which is no vision but a Father-land,” or of
“the Light which never changes, above the soul, above the intelligence,”
we see how closely he had studied them, the extent to which their
language had permeated his thought. It is, however, in the tracts
composed soon after his conversion—e.g. _De Quantitate Animæ_, written
about A.D. 388—that their influence is most strongly marked; and the
ecstatic vision of the One is definitely put forward as the summit of
Christian experience. From this time onwards, the main outlines of
mystical theology were more or less fixed: and since St. Augustine was
one of the most widely read and deeply reverenced of the Fathers, with
an authority hardly inferior to that of Scripture itself, its
Neoplatonic colour was never lost. Wherever Christian mysticism passes
from the emotional and empirical to the philosophic, this colour is
clearly seen, and the concepts of Plotinus, more or less disguised,
reappear: even in those mediæval writers who had no direct acquaintance
with Greek philosophy. The immense popularity of the so-called Dionysian
writings, which derive much of their doctrine through Proclus from the
Enneads, helped to establish yet more firmly the Neoplatonic character
of Christian and also of Sūfi mysticism. Through these writings the
conceptions of the Super-essential Godhead; of successive spiritual
spheres or emanations of descending splendour, intervening between the
Absolute and the physical world; and of ecstatic union with the
transcendent and unconditioned One as the term of religious experience,
passed over from the ancient to the mediæval world. Translated from
Greek into Syriac in the fifth century, they deeply affected Sūfi
philosophy. They entered Western thought in the ninth century, through
Erigena’s Latin translation. It is said that by A.D. 850 Dionysius was
known from the Tigris to the Atlantic: and from this time onwards his
influence, and through him that of Plotinus, can be traced in the
spiritual literature of Christianity and Islam.