influences they work weal or woe; what beings of the middle air crowd in embattled rows the mountain side, or fill some vast amphitheatre of silent and inaccessible snow,—how some encamp in the valley, under the pennons of the summer lightning, and others find a tented field where the slow wind unrolls the exhalations along the marsh, and builds a billowy canopy of vapours: all is largely told,-what ethereal heraldry marshals with its blazon the thrones and dominions of the unseen realm; what giant powers and principalities darken with long shadow, or illumine with a winged wake of glory, the forms of following myriads, their ranks and races, wars and destiny, as minutely registered as the annals of some neighbour province, as confidently recounted as though the seer had nightly slipped his bonds of flesh, and mingled in their council or their battle. ATHERTON. A true portraiture. Observe how this mysticism pretends to raise man above self into the universal, and issues in giving us only what is personal. It presents us, after all, only with the creations of the fancy, the phenomena of the sensibility peculiar to the individual,-that finite, personal idiosyncrasy which is so despised. Its philosophy of the universe subsides into a morbid psychology. Man is persuaded that he is to traverse the realms of fire and air, where the intelligible essences and archetypes of all things dwell; and, like the Knight of La Mancha, he never stirs in reality from the little grass-plot of individual temperament on which his wondrous wooden horse stands still. This theosophy professes to make man divine, and it fails at last to keep him even rational. It prevents his becoming what he might be, while it promises to make him what he never can become.

NOTE TO PAGE 90.

M. Simon has shown, with much acuteness, in what way the exigencies of the system of Plotinus compelled him to have recourse to a new faculty, distinct from reason.

c. 3.]

Plotinus' System a Failure.

93

Plotinus perceived that Plato had not been true to the consequences of his own dialectics. When he had reached the summit of his logical abstraction, had passed through definition after definition, each more in-" tangible than the last, on his way upward towards the One, he arrived at last at a God who was above Being itself. From this result he shrank, and so ceased to be consistent. How could such a God be a God of Providence, such a shadow of a shade a creator? Plato was not prepared, like Plotinus, to soar so completely above experience and the practical as to accept the utmost consequences of his logical process. So, that his God might be still the God of Providence, he retained him within the sphere of reason, gave him Being, Thought, Power, and called him the Demiurge. When Plotinus, like a true eclectic, carried still farther his survey of what history afforded him, he found Aristotle postulating a Deity so restricted by his own abstraction and immutability as to render it impossible to associate with his nature the idea of superintendence. It was feared that to represent God as the God of Creation and of Providence would be to dualize him. And yet the world did exist. How were the serene and remote Unity demanded by logic, and that activity and contact with matter no less imperatively demanded for God by experience, to be reconciled with each other? It is scarcely necessary to observe that there was no real difficulty. The whole problem was the result of the notion, so universal, concerning the evil of matter and of the wrong answer given by ancient philosophy to the vexed question-Does the Supreme work τῷ εἶναι, οι τῷ βούλεσθαι? Philosophy maintained the former; the Christian Church the latter. Το remove this obstacle which philosophy had itself constructed, Plotinus proposed his theory of these hypostases, in the Divine Nature. Above and beyond a God such as that of Plato, he places another like that of Aristotle, and above him a simple Unity, like the God of the Eleatics. The last was the ultimatum of the process of logical simplification-a something above being. But the hypothesis was destitute of proof-it was, in fact, contrary to reason.. Plotinus must therefore either surrender his theory or bid farewell to reason. He chose the latter course. He does not deny the important services of reason, but he professes to transcend its limits. He calls in mysticism to substantiate, by the doctrines of Illumination and Identity, his imaginary God. He affirms a God beyond reason, and then a faculty beyond reason to discern that God withal.

This attempt to solve the problem in question is of course a failure. It is still more open than the system of Plato to Aristotle's objection, that it resembled the expedient of an arithmetician who should endeavour to simplify a calculation he found perplexing by taking still higher figures. Plotinus does not explain what he means by a Hypostasis. If the Hypostases in his Trinity have reality, the ideal unity he is so anxious to preserve in the Divine Nature is after all, destroyed. If they have not, the gap between the One and the Manifold is still without a bridge, and the difficulty they are introduced to remove remains in effect where it was. If this hypothesis had made no part of the system of Plotinus, the great occasion for the doctrine of Ecstasy and the most powerful internal inducement to mysticism would have been wanting. The philosopher escapes from his labyrinth by borrowing the wings of the mystic.-See Jules Simon, tom. i. PP. 63, 84; ii. 462.

CHAPTER IV.

Stargaze. 'Tis drawn, I assure you, from the aphorisms of the old Chaldeans, Zoroaster the first and greatest magician, Mercurius Trismegistus, the later Ptolemy, and the everlasting prognosticator, old Erra Pater.—MÄSSINGER.

ILLOUGHBY. We have now about done, I suppose, with the theosophic branch of the Neo-Platonist school; with its latest leaders it degenerates into theurgic mysticism.

KATE. I hope it is going to degenerate into something one can understand.

GOWER. The great metaphysician, Plotinus, is off the stage, that is some comfort for you, Miss Merivale. Magic is less wearisome than metaphysics.

ATHERTON. The change is marked, indeed. Plotinus, wrapt in his proud abstraction, cared little for fame. His listening disciples were his world. Porphyry entered his school fresh from the study of Aristotle. At first the daring opponent of the master, he soon became the most devoted of his scholars. With a temperament more active and practical than that of Plotinus, with more various ability and far more facility in adaptation, with an erudition equal to his fidelity, blameless in his life, pre-eminent in the loftiness and purity of his ethics, he was well fitted to do all that could be done towards securing for the doctrines he had espoused that reputation and that wider influence to which Plotinus was so indifferent. His aim was twofold. He engaged in a conflict hand to hand with two antagonists at once, by both of whom he was eventually

c. 4.]

Heathendom cannot be rescued.

95

vanquished. He commenced an assault on Christianity without, and he endeavoured to check the progress of superstitious usage within the pale of Paganism. But Christianity could not be repulsed, and heathendom would not be reformed. In vain did he attempt to substitute a single philosophical religion which should be universal, for the manifold and popular Polytheism of the day. Christian truth repelled his attack on the one side, and idolatrous superstition carried his defences on the other.

WILLOUGHBY. A more false position could scarcely have been assumed. Men like Porphyry constituted themselves the defenders of a Paganism which did but partially acknowledge their advocacy. Often suspected by the Emperors, they were still oftener maligned and persecuted by the jealousy of the priests. They were the unaccredited champions of Paganism, for they sought to refine while they conserved it. They defended it, not as zealots, but as men of letters.1 They defended it because the old faith could boast of great names and great achievements in speculation, literature, and art, and because the new appeared novel and barbarian in its origin, and humiliating in its claims. They wrote, they lectured, they disputed, in favour of the temple and against the church, because they dreamed of the days of Pericles under the yoke of the Empire: not because they worshipped idols, but because they worshipped Plato.

MRS. ATHERTON. And must not that very attempt, noticed just now, to recognise all religions, have been as fatal to them as the causes you mention?

ATHERTON. Certainly. Mankind does not require a revelation to give them a religion, but to give them one which shall be altogether true. These Neo-Platonists were confronted by a religion intolerant of all others. They attempted, by keeping

1 J. Simon, i. 154 ; ii. 173.

open house in their eclectic Pantheon, to excel where they thought their antagonist deficient. They failed to see in that benign intolerance of falsehood, which stood out as so strange a characteristic in the Christian faith, one of the credentials of its divine origin. No theory of the universe manufactured by a school can be a gospel to man's soul. They forgot that liphomage paid to all religions is the virtual denial of each.

GOWER. Strange position, indeed, maintaining as their cardinal doctrine the unity and immutability of the divine nature, and entering the lists as conservators of polytheism; teaching the most abstract and defending the most gross conceptions of deity; exclaiming against vice, and solicitous to preserve all the incentives to it which swarm in every heathen mythology. Of a truth, no clean thing could be brought out of that unclean, the new cloth would not mend the old garment. Men know that they ought to worship; the question is, Whom? and How?

WILLOUGHBY. Then, again, their attempt to combine religion and philosophy robbed the last of its only principle, the first of its only power. The religions lost in the process what sanctity and authoritativeness they had to lose, while speculation abandoned all scientific precision, and deserted its sole consistent basis in the reason. This endeavour to philosophise superstition could only issue in the paradoxical product of a philosophy without reason, and a superstition without faith. To make philosophy superstitious was not difficult, and they did that; but they could not-do what they would-make superstition philosophical.

ATHERTON. Add, too, that Greek philosophy, which had always repelled the people, possessed no power to seclude them from the Christianity that sought them out. In vain did it borrow from Christianity a new refinement, and receive some rays of light from the very foe which fronted it