This passion is the instrument of that ecstasy in
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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
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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 Sufi 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 goodwill 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
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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.
132 THE ESSENTIALS OF MYSTICISM
" 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 Sufi 'Attar, describing the soul's arrival in the Valley
of Unity where it contemplates the naked Godhead," is
THE MYSTICISM OF PLOTINUS 133
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 mediaeval 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
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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 Fatherland," 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 Anima, 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
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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 medieval 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 Sufi 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 mediaval world. Translated from Greek into Syriac in the fifth century, they deeply
affected Sufi 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.
Erigena, whose original works are strongly coloured by
Neoplatonism, is the first medieval writer in whom this
influence appears. He follows Plotinus and Dionysius closely
in teaching that the Absolute Godhead is "beyond being"
and therefore transcendent to the trinity of Persons; a
doctrine of doubtful orthodoxy, which was of great importance in the later development of mysticism. But a
still closer approximation to the thought, and especially to
the psychology of Plotinus, is found in Richard of St. Victor:
perhaps the greatest mystical theologian, certainly one of
the most influential writers, of the early Middle Ages. In
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the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries his works, which are
now hardly read, circulated through western Europe, and
shaped the developing mysticism of England, Germany, and
Flanders. Dante, who calls him one "who in contemplation
was more than man," places his radiant soul among those
of the great teachers in the Heaven of the Sun (Par. X. 131).
Abandoning alike the many worlds of Dionysius and the
crude dualism of popular religion, Richard taught that three
spheres are open to human contemplation: sensibilia, intelligibilia, and intellectibilia — a series closely analogous to
the three worlds of Plotinus. He said that three kinds of
contemplation on man's part corresponded with these worlds.
These are mentis dilatalio, a widening of the soul's vision,
which yet remains within the natural order: mentis sublevatio, an uplifting of the illuminated mind to the apprehension of "things above itself" (or, as Neoplatonists would
say, intelligibles); and finally mentis alienatio or ecstasy, in
which the soul gazes on Truth in its naked simplicity. Then "elevated above itself and rapt in ecstasy, it beholds things
in the Divine Light at which all human reason succumbs."
This divine light is the lumen glories, the radiance of the
spiritual or intelligible world, which transforms the soul and
makes it capable of beholding God; a conception which
became a commonplace of medieval theology, was adopted
by nearly all the mystics, and plays an important part in
the Paradiso.
"Lume a lassu, the visibile face
to Creatore a quella creatura
che solo in lui vedere ha la sua pace " (xxx. 100).
Ruysbroeck — a student of Dionysius and of Richard — says
of it in The Twelve Beguines: "From the Face of the Father
there shines a clear light on those souls whose thought is
bare and stripped of images, uplifted above the senses and
above similitudes, beyond and without reason, in high purity
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of spirit. This Light is not God, but it is the mediator between the seeing thought and God." These passages and
many like them can be shown to derive directly through
St. Augustine from the Enneads. Thus Plotinus says: "Light
is visible by Light. The Nous sees itself, and this light,
shining on the soul, enlightens it and makes it a member
of the spiritual world" (V. 3. 8). Augustine, apparently
referring to this passage among others, says: "Often and in
many places does Plotinus declare, expounding the meaning
of Plato, that what they believe to be the Soul of the World
has its bliss from the same source as ours, namely, a Light
which it is not, but by which it was created, and from whose
spiritual illumination it shines spiritually "(De Civ. Del. X.
2). And, of his own ecstatic experience, "I entered and
beheld with the mysterious eye of my soul the Light that
never changes, above the eye of my soul, above my intelligence. . . . He who knows the truth knows that Light,
and he who knows that Light knows Eternity" (Cont. VII.
10).
From the thirteenth century onwards, the majority of the
mediæval mystics show knowledge and appreciation of those
Plotinian ideas which reached them — though in an attenuated
form — through St. Augustine, Dionysius, and Richard of
St. Victor. Even the Franciscan and Christo-centric enthusiasm of such contemplatives as Jacopone da Todi and
Angela of Foligno was affected by these lofty conceptions.
Thus Jacopone takes from the Neoplatonists the three stages
of spiritual experience, and describes in unequivocal language
his successive achievements of that Logos-Christ — so near
the Plotinian Nous — "che de omne bellezze se' fattore,"
and of the "Imageless Good" who cannot be named. So
too, Angela's successive visions of the divine fullness and
beauty, and of "the ineffable Thing of which nought
may be said" depend for their expression on the same
philosophy.
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Nor was its penetrative influence confined to the mystical
schools. St. Thomas Aquinas, who accepts and expounds
in the Summa (I. q.12. a.5) the doctrine of the lumen glorice,
is considerably indebted to Plotinus in several other particulars; though he cites him inaccurately, and does not
seem to have known him at first hand. In a remarkable
passage, which afterwards influenced one of the finest rhapsodies of Ruysbroeck, he has actually "lifted" the most
celebrated phrase in the Sixth Ennead, and adapted it to
the distinctively Christian and non-Platonic view of divine
union, as a "mutual act" of God and the soul. "In a
wonderful and unspeakable manner," says St. Thomas of
the soul in this place, "she both seizes and is seized upon,
devours and is herself devoured, embraces and is violently
embraced; and by the knot of love she unites herself with
God, and is with Him as the Alone with the Alone."
It is in a later and less orthodox son of St. Dominic, the
formidable and adventurous thinker Eckhart, that the influence of Plotinus on the mediæval mind is best seen: passing
through him to Suso, Tauler, Ruysbroeck, and other mystics
of the fourteenth century. Eckhart's philosophy still provides one of the most suggestive glosses upon the Enneads.
He made that distinction between the absolute and suprapersonal Godhead and the God of devotion, which was almost
inevitable for a Christian thinker trying to find a place in
theology for the Neoplatonic One. The Godhead, he says,
is "a non-God, a non-Spirit, a non-person, a non-image:
a sheer pure One." The Son, in whom "the Father becomes
conscious of Himself," combines the attributes of the Logos-Christ with those of the Nous. In Him are the archetypes
of all created things. There is thus an emanation from the
Godhead, through the Son, into creation. The soul's destiny
is exactly that conceived by Plotinus: it must ascend to the
spiritual world, and through it to its origin, the One, "flowing
back into the bottom of the bottomless fountain from which
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it flowed forth." In Tauler and Suso, and especially in the
great Flemish contemplative Ruysbroeck, these ideas— though modified by their inferior speculative ability and more
ardent spirit of Christian devotion — are still strongly felt:
and since their works and those of their disciples nourished
many succeeding generations of contemplatives, through
them the mystical side of the Neoplatonic tradition was
handed down. In Ruysbroeck, with his threefold division
of spiritual experience into "the moral life, the contemplative life, and the super-essential life," and his astonishing
and detailed descriptions of the soul's achievement of the
Essential Unity, the "death into the One through love,"
the vision of Plotinus is fully baptized into the Catholic
Church. In Jacob Boehme, who drew through Schwenkenfeld
and Weigel from Eckhart and his school, the doctrine of the
three worlds which forms the basis of his cosmology contains
distinct reminiscences of the Plotinian Triad. "These
three," he says, "are nought else than the One God in His
wonderful works . . . and we are thus to understand a
threefold Being, or three worlds in one another." His conception of the Light-world, source of all spiritual beauty
and home of "the true human essence," is very near to the Nous. Yet the very closeness with which all these mystics
follow those parts of the Neoplatonic doctrine which appeal
to them, makes it possible for us to measure the distance
which separates their minds, their tone and temper, from
that of Plotinus and his school. The calm, the austerity of
thought, the emphasis on beauty, the clear cool light of the
Intelligible World have departed. These men see philosophy
through the haze of Christian feeling. Their work is full of
passionate effort; is centred on the ideas of sacrifice and of
pain. Their religion is coloured by the sharp Christian
consciousness of sin, and by the difficulty — never squarely
faced — of reconciling devotion to a personal redeemer with
the mystical passion for the Absolute. That the philosophy
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of the Enneads was able to enter a world so remote from its
spirit, and come to terms with an attitude of mind in many
respects opposed to that of its creator, is an oblique proof of
the authenticity of its claim to interpret the spiritual experiences
of man.
END
