Part 11

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.

Soul is the lowest of the Divine hypostases. Below it in the scale of 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).