Part 12

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.

Erigena, whose original works are strongly coloured by Neoplatonism, is the first mediæval 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 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 dilatatio_, 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 gloriæ_, 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 mediæval theology, was adopted by nearly all the mystics, and plays an important part in the _Paradiso_.

“Lume è lassù, che visibile face lo 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 Béguines_: “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 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. Dei._ 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” (_Conf._ 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.

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 gloriæ_, 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 supra-personal 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 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 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.

THREE MEDIÆVAL MYSTICS

I “THE MIRROR OF SIMPLE SOULS”

I

_The Mirror of Simple Souls_—a rare work on the spiritual life, of which manuscripts exist in the British Museum, the Bodleian, and one or two other public libraries—has so far received little or no attention from students of religious literature. Yet it may turn out to possess great importance, as one of the missing links in the history of English mysticism: for it is a middle-English translation, made at the close of the fourteenth century or beginning of the fifteenth, of the lost work of a French thirteenth-century mystic. It shows, therefore, that the common View of French mediæval religion as unmystical needs qualification; and further indicates a path by which the contemplative tradition of western Europe reached England and affected the development of our native mystical school.

_The Mirror of Simple Souls_, as we now have it, is a work of nearly 60,000 words in length. So far from being simple, it deals almost exclusively with the rarest and most sublime aspects of spiritual experience. Its theme is the theme of all mysticism: the soul’s adventures on its way towards union with God. It is not, like the _Melum_ of Richard Rolle, or _Revelations_ of Julian of Norwich, a subjective book; the record of personal experiences and actual “conversations in heaven.” Rather it is objective and didactic, a work of geography, not a history of travel; an advanced text-book of the contemplative life. Only from the ardour and exactitude of its descriptions, its strange air of authority, its defiance of pious convention, can we gather that it is the fruit of first-hand experience, not merely of theological study: though its writer was clearly a trained theologian, familiar with the works of St. Augustine and Dionysius the Areopagite, whom no mystic of the Middle Ages wholly escaped, and apparently with those of St. Bernard, Hugh and Richard of St. Victor, and other mediæval authorities on the inner life.

I have said that the _Mirror_, as we have it, purports to be the translation of an unknown French treatise. This translation, so far as we can judge from its language, was probably made in the early years of the fifteenth century, perhaps at the end of the fourteenth. Its author, then, lived at the close of the golden age of English mysticism: he was the contemporary of Julian of Norwich, who was still living in 1413, and of Walter Hilton, who died in 1395. Himself a mystic, he was no servile translator; rather the eager interpreter of the book which he wished to make accessible to his countrymen. Our manuscripts begin with his prologue: an ingenuous confession of the difficulties of the undertaking, his own temerity in daring to touch these “high divine matters,” his fear lest the book should fall into unsuitable hands and its more extreme teachings be misunderstood. It appears from this prologue that our version of the _Mirror_ is a second, or revised edition; the first having failed to be comprehensible to its readers.