though Plotinus would have rejected the spatial implications of the last line, for to him the One was present everywhere. The Divine nature is a trinity; but not, as in Christian theology, of co-equal persons. Its three descending degrees, or hypostases, are the unconditioned One or the Good—a term which implies perfection but carries no ethical implications—the Divine Mind, Spirit, or Nous, and the Soul or Life of the World. Nothing is real which does not participate in one or other of these principles. Though the first two hypostases are roughly parallel to the Eternal Father and Logos-Christ of Christian Platonism, and some have found in the Plotinian Psyche a likeness to the immanent Holy Spirit, this superficial resemblance must not be pressed. Fatherhood cannot be ascribed to the One save in so far as it is the first cause of life, for it transcends all our notions of personality. Its real parallel in Christian theology is that conception of the “Super-essential Godhead, beyond and above the Trinity of Persons,” which Eckhart and a few other daring mystics took through Dionysius the Areopagite from the Neoplatonists. The One is, in fact, the Absolute as apprehended by a religious soul. Nor is the Plotinian Nous a person, in any sense in which orthodox Christianity has understood that term, though it is called by Plotinus our Father and Companion. Further, the triadic series does not involve a succession either in time, or order of generation; but only in value. The worlds of spirit and of soul are co-eternal with the Absolute, the inevitable and unceasing expressions of its creative activity. The utterly transcendent Perfect manifests as Mind or Spirit (Nous); and this is the world of being. Mind or Spirit manifests as Life or Soul (Psyche); and this is the reality of the world of becoming. The lower orders are contained in the higher, which are everywhere present, though each “remains in its own place.” “Of all things the governance and existence are in these three.”
Whilst every image of the universe is deceptive, since its true nature is beyond our apprehension, Plotinus invites us to picture the Triad, as Dante did, by concentric circles through which radiate the energy and splendour of the “flower of all beauty,” the Transcendent One. “The first act is the act of the Good, at rest within itself, and the first existence is the self-contained existence of the Good. But there is also an act upon it, that of the Nous; which, as it were, lives about it. And the Soul, outside, circles about the Nous, and by gazing upon it, seeing into the depths of it, through it sees God” (I. 8. 2). Again, “The One is not a Being, but the Source of being, which is its first offspring. The One is perfect, that is, it has nothing, seeks nothing, needs nothing; but as we may say it overflows, and this overflowing is creative” (V. 1. 2). Yet this eternal creative action “beyond spirit, sense, and life,” involves no self-loss. It is the welling forth of an unquenchable spring, the eternal fountain of life.
As Christian Platonists described the Son as the self-expression of the Father, so Plotinus describes his second Divine Principle as the eternal irradiation of the Absolute—il ciel che più della sua luce prende. This principle he calls Nous; a word carrying many shades of meaning, which the older commentators generally rendered as Divine Mind, or Intelligible Principle. Dean Inge has shown good reason for translating it as “Spirit,” thus bringing the language of Plotinus into line with the many later mystics who derive from him. As a matter of fact, Nous contains both meanings. It is more spiritual than mind, more intellectual than spirit, in the sense in which that word is commonly employed. Those mediæval theologians who made a mystical identification between the Hebrew conception of the Eternal Wisdom as we find it described in Proverbs and Ecclesiasticus, and the Second Person of the Trinity, came very near the Plotinian concept of Nous, which is at once Intelligence and the intelligible sphere, Spirit and the spiritual universe; the home of reality, and object of religious and poetic intuition. It is, in one aspect, the “Father and Companion” of the soul (V. 1. 3), in another “the Intellectual Universe, that sphere constituted by a Principle wholly unlike what is known as intelligence in us” (I. 8. 2). This is the “Yonder” to which he so often refers; the “middle heaven” of Indian philosophy, Ruysbroeck’s “clear-shining world between ourselves and God.”
“... e questo cielo non ha altro dove
Che la mente divina,”
says Dante; once more condensing the whole Neoplatonic vision in one vivid phrase.
This rich and suggestive conception of the Second Principle, as at once King and Creator of the world of life, and also itself the archetypal world of true values, is the central fact of the Plotinian philosophy. Its apprehension, he says, is beyond ordinary human reason, which is fitted for correspondence with the world of life or soul. It is the function of spiritual intuition; “a faculty which all possess, though few use.” Such communion with the world of supernal reality is possible, because man is potentially an inhabitant of it. “The Fatherland to us is there, whence we have come: and there is the Father” (I. 6. 8). The “apex” or celestial aspect of our soul is domiciled there. It “never leaves the Divine Mind; but, while it clings yonder, allows the lower soul, as it were, to hang down” (VI. 7. 5). Man is, in fact, intermediary between the two Plotinian worlds of Spirit and Soul, and participates in both. Eucken, in describing him as the meeting-place of two orders of reality, is merely restating the doctrine of the Neoplatonists.
As Spirit is the outbirth and manifestation of the One, so Soul, or Life—the third member of the Triad—is the manifestation or matter of Spirit; and forms the link between the physical and the supersensual worlds. Spirit is “at once its Father and ever-present Companion” (V. 1. 3). Soul is a term covering the whole vital essence (a) of the world, and (b) of the individual. It has two aspects. The celestial soul aspires toward, and is in communion with, the spiritual order; the natural soul hangs down and inspires the physical order, thereby conferring on it a measure of reality. We are not, however, to understand by Soul merely the aggregate of individuals. Psyche is the divine and eternal life of the created universe, comprehending its infinite variety in a unity which embraces every object in the sense-known scheme, and makes it “like one animal” (IV. 4. 32). It is:
“A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,