CHAPTER I.
——a man is not as God,
But then most godlike being most a man.
Tennyson.
Kate. What a formidable bundle of papers, Henry.
Atherton. Don’t be alarmed, I shall not read all this to you; only three Neo-Platonist letters I have discovered.
Mrs. Atherton. We were talking just before you came in, Mr. Willoughby, about Mr. Crossley’s sermon yesterday morning.
Willoughby. Ah, the Tabernacle in the Wilderness; did you not think his remarks on the use and abuse of symbolism in general very good? Brief, too, and suggestive; just what such portions of a sermon should be.
Atherton. He overtook me on my walk this morning, and I alluded to the subject. He said he had been dipping into Philo last week, and that suggested his topic. I told him I had paid that respectable old gentleman a visit or two lately, and we amused ourselves with some of his fancies. Think of the seven branches of the candlestick being the seven planets—the four colours employed, the four elements—the forecourt symbolizing the visible, the two sanctuaries the ideal world—and so on.
Gower. At this rate the furniture in one of Hoffmann’s tales cannot be more alive with spirit than Philo’s temple apparatus. An ingenious trifler, was he not?
Atherton. Something better, I should say.
Gower. Not, surely, when his great characteristic is an unsurpassed facility for allegorical interpretation. Is not mystical exegesis an invariable symptom of religious dilettantism?
Atherton. With the successors and imitators—yes; not with the more earnest originals,—such names as Philo, Origen, Swedenborg.
Gower. But, at any rate, if this spiritualizing mania be Philo’s great claim to distinction, head a list of mystical commentators with him, and pass on to some one better.
Atherton. He need not detain us long. For our enquiry he has importance chiefly as in a sort the intellectual father of Neo-Platonism—the first meeting-place of the waters of the eastern and the western theosophies. This is his great object—to combine the authoritative monotheism of his Hebrew Scriptures with the speculation of Plato.
Gower. Absurd attempt!—to interpret the full, clear utterance of Moses, who has found, by the hesitant and conflicting conjectures of Plato, who merely seeks.
Willoughby. Yet a very natural mistake for a Jew at Alexandria, reared in Greek culture, fascinated by the dazzling abstractions of Greek philosophy. He belonged less to Jerusalem, after all, than to Athens.
Atherton. There lies the secret. Philo was proud of his saintly ancestry, yet to his eye the virtues of the Old Testament worthy wore a rude and homely air beside the refinement of the Grecian sage. The good man of Moses and the philosopher of Philo represent two very different ideals. With the former the moral, with the latter the merely intellectual, predominates. So the Hebrew faith takes with Philo the exclusive Gentile type,—despises the body, is horrified by matter, tends to substitute abstraction for personality, turns away, I fear, from the publican and the sinner.
Gower. So, then, Platonism in Philo does for Judaism what it was soon to do for Christianity,—substitutes an ultra-human standard—an ascetic, unnatural, passively-gazing contemplation—an ambitious, would-be-disembodied intellectualism, for the all-embracing activities of common Christian life, so lowly, yet so great.
Willoughby. Yet Alexandrian Platonism was the gainer by Philo’s accommodation. Judaism enfeebled could yet impart strength to heathendom. The infusion enabled the Neo-Platonists to walk with a firmer step in the religious province; their philosophy assumed an aspect more decisively devout. Numenius learns of Philo, and Plotinus of Numenius, and the ecstasy of Plotinus is the development of Philo’s intuition.
Gower. Let me sum up; and forgive an antithesis. Philo’s great mistake lay in supposing that the religion of philosophy was necessarily the philosophy of religion. But we have forgotten your letter, Atherton.
Atherton. Here is the precious document—a letter written by Philo from Alexandria, evidently just after his journey to Rome. (Reads.)
Philo to Hephæstion.
I am beginning to recover myself, after all the anxiety and peril of our embassy to Caligula. Nothing shall tempt me to visit Rome again so long as this Emperor lives. Our divine Plato is doubly dear after so long an absence. Only an imperative sense of duty to my countrymen could again induce me to take so prominent a part in their public affairs. Except when our religion or our trade is concerned, the government has always found us more docile than either the Greeks or the Egyptians, and we enjoy accordingly large privileges. Yet when I saw the ill turn our cause took at Rome, I could not but sigh for another Julius Cæsar.
I am sorry to find you saying that you are not likely to visit Alexandria again. This restless, wicked city can present but few attractions, I grant, to a lover of philosophic quiet. But I cannot commend the extreme to which I see so many hastening. A passion for ascetic seclusion is becoming daily more prevalent among the devout and the thoughtful, whether Jew or Gentile. Yet surely the attempt to combine contemplation and action should not be so soon abandoned. A man ought at least to have evinced some competency for the discharge of the social duties before he abandons them for the divine. First the less, then the greater.
I have tried the life of the recluse. Solitude brings no escape from spiritual danger. If it closes some avenues of temptation, there are few in whose case it does not open more. Yet the Therapeutæ, a sect similar to the Essenes, with whom you are acquainted, number many among them whose lives are truly exemplary. Their cells are scattered about the region bordering on the farther shore of the Lake Mareotis. The members of either sex live a single and ascetic life, spending their time in fasting and contemplation, in prayer or reading. They believe themselves favoured with divine illumination—an inner light. They assemble on the Sabbath for worship, and listen to mystical discourses on the traditionary lore which they say has been handed down in secret among themselves. They also celebrate solemn dances and processions, of a mystic significance, by moonlight on the shore of the great mere. Sometimes, on an occasion of public rejoicing, the margin of the lake on our side will be lit with a fiery chain of illuminations, and galleys, hung with lights, row to and fro with strains of music sounding over the broad water. Then the Therapeutæ are all hidden in their little hermitages, and these sights and sounds of the world they have abandoned, make them withdraw into themselves and pray.
Their principle at least is true. The soul which is occupied with things above, and is initiated into the mysteries of the Lord, cannot but account the body evil, and even hostile. The soul of man is divine, and his highest wisdom is to become as much as possible a stranger to the body with its embarrassing appetites. God has breathed into man from heaven a portion of his own divinity. That which is divine is invisible. It may be extended, but it is incapable of separation. Consider how vast is the range of our thought over the past and the future, the heavens and the earth. This alliance with an upper world, of which we are conscious, would be impossible, were not the soul of man an indivisible portion of that divine and blessed Spirit (εἰ μὴ τῆς θείας καὶ εὐδαίμονος ψυχῆς ἐκείνης ἀπόσπασμα ἦν οὐ διαιρετόν). Contemplation of the Divine Essence is the noblest exercise of man; it is the only means of attaining to the highest truth and virtue, and therein to behold God is the consummation of our happiness here.
The confusion of tongues at the building of the tower of Babel should teach us this lesson. The heaven those vain builders sought to reach, signifies symbolically the mind, where dwell divine powers. Their futile attempt represents the presumption of those who place sense above intelligence—who think that they can storm the Intelligible by the Sensible. The structure which such impiety would raise is overthrown by spiritual tranquillity. In calm retirement and contemplation we are taught that we know like only by like, and that the foreign and lower world of the sensuous and the practical may not intrude into the lofty region of divine illumination.
I have written a small treatise on the Contemplative Life, giving an account of the Therapeutæ. If you will neither visit me nor them, I will have a copy of it made, and send you.[[11]] Farewell.
Gower. How mistaken is Philo in maintaining that the senses cannot aid us in our ascent towards the supersensuous;—as though the maltreatment of the body, the vassal, by the soul, the suzerain, were at once the means and the proof of mastery over it. Duly care for the body, and the thankful creature will not forget its place, and when you wish to meditate, will disturb you by no obtrusive hint of its presence. I find that I can rise above it only by attention to its just claims. If I violate its rights I am sued by it in the high court of nature, and cast with costs.
Mrs. Atherton. And certainly our most favoured moments of ascent into the ideal world have their origin usually in some suggestion that has reached us through the senses. I remember a little song of Uhland’s called The Passing Minstrel—a brief parable of melody, like so many of his pieces,—which, as I understood it, was designed to illustrate this very truth. The poet falls asleep on a ‘hill of blossoms’ near the road, and his soul flutters away in dream to the golden land of Fable. He wakes, as one fallen from the clouds, and sees the minstrel with his harp, who has just passed by, and playing as he goes, is lost to sight among the trees. ‘Was it he,’ the poet asks, ‘that sang into my soul those dreams of wonder?’ Another might inform the fancy with another meaning, according to the mood of the hour. It appeared to me an emblem of the way in which we are often indebted to a sunset or a landscape, to a strain of music or a suddenly-remembered verse, for a voyage into a world of vision of our own, where we cease altogether to be aware of the external cause which first transported us thither.
Atherton. That must always be true of imagination. But Platonism discards the visible instead of mounting by it. Considered morally, too, this asceticism sins so grievously. It misuses the iron of the will, given us to forge implements withal for life’s husbandry, to fashion of it a bolt for a voluntary prison. At Alexandria, doubtless, Sin was imperious in her shamelessness, at the theatre and at the mart, in the hall of judgment and in the house of feasting, but there was suffering as well as sin among the crowds of that great city, with all their ignorance and care and want, and to have done a something to lessen the suffering would have prepared the way for lessening the sin.