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. 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._