NOTE TO PAGE 75.

This imaginary fragment from Ammonius Saccas is, I believe, true to what seems fairly inferred concerning his teaching. See Brucker, ii. p. 211; and Jules Simon,-i. 205; ii. 668.

Plotinus appears to have been indebted to Numenius even more than to Ammonius or Potamon for some of the ideas peculiar to his system. The modicum of information concerning Numenius which Eusebius has handed down shows that this Platonist anticipated the characteristic doctrine of Neo-Platonism concerning the Divine Being. Like the Neo-Platonist, he pursued philosophical inquiry in a religious spirit, imploring, as Plotinus does, divine illumination. He endeavoured to harmonize Pythagoras and Plato, to elucidate and confirm the opinions of both by the religious dogmas of the Egyptians, the Magi, and the Brahmins, and, like many of the Christian Fathers, he believed that Plato stood indebted to the Hebrew as well as to the Egyptian theology for much of his wisdom. He was pressed by the same great difficulty which weighed upon Plotinus. How could the immutable One create the Manifold without self-degradation? He solved it in a manner substantially the same. His answer is by means of a hypostatic emanation. He posits in the Divine Nature three principles in a descending scale. His order of existence is as follows:

I. God, the Absolute.

II. The Demiurge; he is the Artificer, in a sense, the imitator of the former. He contemplates matter, his eye ordains and upholds it, yet he is himself separate from it, since matter contains a concupiscent principle,-is fluctuating, and philosophically non-existent. The Demiurge is the apn yevérews, and good; for goodness is the original principle of Being. The second Hypostasis, engaged in the contemplation of matter, does not attain the serene self-contemplation of the First.

III. Substance or Essence, of a twofold character, corresponding to the two former.

The Universe is a copy of this third Principle.

This not very intelligible theory, which of course increases instead of lessening the perplexity in which the Platonists were involved, though differing in detail from that of Plotinus, proceeds on the same principle ;-the expedient, namely, of appending to the One certain subordinate hypostases to fill the gap between it and the Manifold. (See, on his opinions, Euseb. Prap. Evang. lib. viii. p. 411 (ed. Viger); lib. xi. c. 18, p. 537 ; capp. 21, 22, and lib. xv. c. 17.

C. 9.

NOTE TO PAGE 81.

Plotinus and his successors are the model of the Pseudo-Dionysius in his language concerning the Deity. Of his abstract primal principle neither being nor life can be predicated; he is above being and above life. Enn. iii. lib. 8, But man by simplifying his nature to the utmost possible extent may become lost in this Unity. In Enn. v. lib. 5, c. 8, the mind of the contemplative philosopher is described as illumined with a divine light. He cannot tell whence it comes, or whither it goes. It is rather he himself who approaches or withdraws. He must not pursue it (ov xph diker) but abide (a true Quietist) in patient waiting, as one looking for the rising of the sun out of the ocean. The soul, blind to all beside, gazes intently on the ideal vision of the Beautiful, and is glorified as it contemplates itἐκεῖ ἑαυτὸν πᾶς τρέπων καὶ διδοὺς στας δὲ καὶ οἷον πληρωθεὶς μένους, εἶδε μὲν τὰ πρῶτα καλλίω γενόμενον ἑαυτὸν, και ἐπιστίλβοντα ὡς ἐγγὺς ὄντος αὐτοῦ,

But this is only a preliminary stage of exaltation. The Absolute or the

c. 2.]

Plotinus on Ecstasy.

83

One, has no parts; all things partake of him, nothing possesses him ; to see impartially is an impossibility, a contradiction,-if we imagine we recognise a portion he is far from us yet, to see him mediately (δι' ετέρων) is to behold his traces, not himself. Οταν μὲν ὁρᾶς ὁλον βλέπε. But, asks Plotinus, is not seeing him wholly identity with him? cap. 10.

The mystical aspirant is directed therefore to leave the glorified image of himself, radiant with the transforming effulgence of Beauty, to escape from his individual self by withdrawing into his own unity, wherein he becomes identined with the Infinite One-εἰς ἓν αὑτῷ ἐλθὼν, καὶ μήκετι σχίσας, ἓν ὁμοῦ πάντα ἐστὶ μετ' ἐκείνου τοῦ θεοῦ, ἀψοφητι παρόντος. Retreating into the inmost recesses of his own being, he there έχει πᾶν, καὶ ἀφεὶς τὴν αἴσθησιν εἰς τ ̓ οὐπίσω, τοῦ ἕτερος εἶναι φόβῳ, εἰς ἐστίν ἐκεῖ. No language could more clearly express the doctrine of identity-the object seen and the subject seeing are one. Plotinus triumphantly asks πῶς οὖν ἔσται τίς ἐν καλῷ, μὴ ὁρμῶν αὐτό; ἢ ὁρῶν αὐτὸ ὡς ἕτερον, οὐδέπω ἐν καλῷ γενόμενος δὲ αὐτὸ, οὕτω μάλιστα ἐν καλῷ· εἰ οὖν ὅρασις τοῦ ἔξω, ὅρασιν μὲν οὐ δεῖ εἶναι, ἡ οὕτως ὡς ταὐτὸν τῷ ὁρατῷ. Ibid. pp. 552-3.

MRS.

RS. ATHERTON. I confess I cannot understand what that state of mind can be which Plotinus calls ecstasy in the letter you read us last night, and about which most of your mystical fraternity talk so mysteriously.

KATE. I think I shall have myself mesmerised some day to form an idea.

WILLOUGHBY. I suppose the mystic, by remaining for many hours (enfeebled, perhaps, by fast and vigil), absolutely motionless, ceasing to think of anything-except that he thinks he is successful in thinking of nothing, and staring pertinaciously at vacancy, throws himself at last into a kind of trance. In this state he may perceive, even when the eyes are closed, some luminous appearance, perhaps the result of pressure on the optic nerve-I am not anatomist enough to explain; and if his mind be strongly imaginative, or labouring with the ground-swell of recent excitement, this light may shape itself into archetype, dæmon, or what not. In any case, the more distinct the object seen, the more manifestly is it the projection of his own mind-a Brocken-phantom, the enlarged shadow of himself moving on some shifting tapestry of mist.

KATE. Like the woodman described by Coleridge as beholding with such awe an appearance of the kind, when he

1 There is above a light which makes visible the Creator to that

creature who finds his peace only in the vision of Him.

c. 3.]

Influence on the Church.

Sees full before him gliding without tread
An image with a glory round its head,
This shade he worships for its golden hues,

And makes (not knowing) that which he pursues.

85

ATHERTON. Such has been the god of many a mystic. He will soar above means, experience, history, external revelation, and ends by mistaking a hazy reflex of his own image for Deity.

GOWER. But we must not forget that, according to Plotinus,/ all sense of personality is lost during ecstasy, and he would regard any light or form whatever (presented to what one may call his cerebral vision) as a sign that the trance was yet incomplete. He yearns to escape from everything that can be distinguished, bounded, or depicted, into the illimitable inane.

ATHERTON. Very true. And it is this extreme of negation and abstraction for which Plotinus is remarkable, that makes it alone worth our while to talk so much about him. His philosophy and that of his successors, mistaken for Platonism, was to corrupt the Christian Church. For hundreds of years there will be a succession of prelates, priests, or monks, in whose eyes the frigid refinements of Plotinus will be practically, though not confessedly, regarded as representing God far more worthily than the grand simplicity and the forcible figurativeness of Scripture language. For the Christian's God will be substituted that sublime cypher devised by Plotinus-that blank something, of which you cannot say that it exists, for it is above. existence.

Stop a moment-let me tell my beads, and try to count off the doctrines we shall meet with again and again in those forms of Christian mysticism where the Neo-Platonist element prevails-the germs of all lie in Plotinus.

There is, first of all, the principle of negation; that all socalled manifestations and revelations of God do in fact veil him; that no affirmative can be predicated of him, because he is

above all our positive conceptions; that all symbols, figures, media, partial representations, must be utterly abandoned because, as finite, they fall infinitely short of the Infinite.

Here we are sunk below humanity—our knowledge consists in ignorance-our vision in darkness.

The next step raises us in an instant from this degrading limitation up to Deity-sets our feet in a large room,' as the later mystics phrased it-even in infinity, and identifies us for a time with God.

Since the partial finite way of knowing God is so worthless, to know him truly we must escape from the finite, from all processes, all media, from the very gifts of God to God himself, and know him immediately, completely, in the infinite wayby receiving, or being received into, him directly.

To attain this identity, in which, during a brief space of rapture at least, the subject and object, the knower and the known, are one and the same, we must withdraw into our inmost selves, into that simple oneness of our own essence which by its very rarity is susceptible of blending with that supreme attenuation called the Divine Essence. So doing, we await in passivity the glory, the embrace of Union. Hence the inmost is the highest-introversion is ascension, and introrsum ascendere the watchword of all mystics. God is found within, at once radiating from the depths of the soul, and absorbing it as the husk of personality drops away.

WILLOUGHBY. And so the means and faculties God has given us for knowing him are to lie unused.

ATHERTON. Certainly; night must fall on reason, imagination, memory-on our real powers-that an imaginary power may awake. This is what the mystics call the absorption of the powers in God, leaving active within us nothing natural, in order that God may be substituted for ourselves, and all operations within be supernatural, and even divine.