And rolls through all things.”
The whole creation, says Plotinus, in one of his great poetic passages, is “awake and alive at every point.” Each thing has its own peculiar life in the all; though we, because our senses cannot discern the life within wood and stone, deny that life. “Their living is in secret, but they live” (IV. 4. 36). Here we are reminded of the Logos-Christ of the “Sayings”—“Raise the stone and thou shalt find me: cleave the wood, and there am I.” By this conception, which is elaborated from the doctrine of the world-soul in the Timæus, Neoplatonism bridges the gap between appearance and reality, and also solves the paradox of multitude in unity. “We do not declare the Soul to be one in the sense of entirely excluding multiplicity. This absolute oneness belongs only to the higher nature. We make it both one and manifold; it has part in the nature which is divided among bodies, but it has part also in the indivisible, and so again we find it to be one” (IV. 9. 2).
Soul, which has in its highest manifestations many of the characters of Spirit, is the eternal upholder of the world of change. “Things have a beginning, and perish when the soul that leads the chorus-dance of life departs; but the soul itself is eternal and cannot suffer change ... what the soul is, and what its power, will be more manifestly, more splendidly evident, if we think how its counsel comprehends and conducts the heavens; how it communicates itself to all this vast bulk and ensouls it through all its extension, so that every fragment lives by the soul entire, which is present everywhere like the Father which begat it” (V. 1. 2). Soul, then, which is in one sense the reality of the world of becoming and immanent therein, is also a denizen of eternity, in virtue of its continuity with and direct dependence on Nous. An unbroken series of ascending values unites the world of living effort with the One. It is this which makes the system of Plotinus a philosophy of infinite adventure and infinite hope.
Soul is the lowest of the Divine hypostases. Below it in the scale of values is the material universe to which its lower activities give form, slumbering in the rocks and dreaming in the plants. In plants, says Plotinus, “the more rebellious and self-willed phase of soul is expressed”: a doctrine which will find an echo in many a gardener’s heart. The sensible beauty of the world is the signature of soul, and points to something “Yonder”; for through loveliness it participates in the world of spiritual values, and we in apprehending beauty turn away from matter to Nous (I. 8. 4). Matter, as such, has no reality except as the stuff from which soul weaves up its outward vesture. Deprived of soul, it is in itself, he says, “not-being” and “no-thing”: “its very nature is one long want” (I. 8. 5). As a picture is the crude and partial condensation of an artist’s dream—all that he can force his recalcitrant material to express—so the physical world is but a fragmentary manifestation of the great and vivid universe of soul, and the body is the smallest part of the real man. When we grasp this, we see how great is the sum of possibilities opened to us by the Cosmos; how easily the country “Yonder” can find room for all the visions and intuitions of artists, poets, and saints.
The Plotinian doctrine of man, which became in due course the classical doctrine of Christian mysticism, is the logical outcome of this cosmology. Man, like the rest of Creation, has come forth from God and will only find happiness and full life when his true being is re-united, first with the Divine Mind, and ultimately with the One. “When the phantasm has returned to the Original, the journey is achieved” (VI. 9. 11). Hence “our quest is of an End, and not of Ends. That only can be chosen which is ultimate and noblest, that which calls to the tenderest longings of the soul” (I. 4. 6). As the descending stages of reality are three, so the stages of the ascent are three. They are called in the Enneads purification, the work of reason, which marks the transference of interest from sense to soul; enlightenment—the work of spiritual intuition—which lifts life into communion with the eternal world of spirit; and ecstasy, that profound transfiguration of consciousness whereby the “spirit in love” achieves union with the One. These stages are familiar to all students of Christian asceticism, as the codified “mystic way” of purgation, illumination, and union: a formula which Dionysius the Areopagite took from the Neoplatonists. But it is important to remember that in Plotinus this “way” is not—as it sometimes becomes in mediæval writers—a rigid series of mutually exclusive psychological states, separated by water-tight bulkheads. It is rather a diagram by which he seeks to describe one undivided movement of life; a prolonged effort and adventure, which has for its object a deeper and deeper penetration into Reality, the achievement of a true scale of values, in order that the real proportions of existence may be grasped. In this movement nothing is left behind; but everything is carried up into a higher synthesis, as the latent possibilities of humanity are gradually realized, and man grows up into eternal life.
“Since your soul is so exalted a power, so divine, be confident that in virtue of its possession you are close to God. Begin therefore with the help of this principle to make your way to Him. You have not far to go: there is not much between. Lay hold of that which is more divine than this god-like thing; lay hold of that apex of the soul which borders on the Supreme (Nous), from which the soul immediately derives” (V. 1. 3).
All practical mysticism is at bottom a process of transcendence, “passing on the upward way all that is other than God” (I. 6. 7): and this process, in different temperaments, assumes different forms. Since Plotinus united in his own person the characteristics of the metaphysician, the poet and the saint, he tends to present it under three aspects; as the logical outcome of a reasoned philosophy, as a moral purification which strips us of all unreality, and as a progressive initiation into beauty. “Beholding this Being, the Conductor of all existence, the self-intent that ever gives and never takes, resting rapt in the vision and possession of so lofty a loveliness, what beauty can the soul then lack? For this, the beauty supreme, the absolute and the primal, fashions its lovers to beauty and makes them also worthy of love. And for this the sternest and uttermost combat is set before these souls; all our labour is for this, lest we be left without part in this noblest vision, which to attain is to be blessed in the blissful sight, which to fail of is to fail utterly” (I. 6. 7). In the high place which he gives to the category of beauty, which is to him one of the three final attributes of God, the strongly poetic character of his vision of Reality becomes evident. He anticipates Hegel in regarding natural beauty as the sensuous manifestation of spirit and signature of the world-soul “fragment as it were of the Primal Beauty, making beautiful to the fullness of their capacity whatsoever it grasps and moulds” (I. 6. 6): and those lovers, artists, and musicians who can apprehend it have already made the first step towards the inner vision of the One. Therefore the harsh other-worldliness which made some mediæval ascetics turn from visible loveliness as a snare, would have seemed blasphemy to Plotinus, who would certainly have argued with St. Augustine that “there is no health in those who find fault with any part of Thy creation” (Conf. vii. 14). On the contrary, his doctrine gives a religious sanction and a philosophic explanation to those special experiences and apprehensions of artists, poets, and so-called “nature-mystics”—known to many normal persons in moments of exaltation—when
“The world is so charged with the grandeur of God
It must shine out, like shining from shook foil.”
In such hours, he would say, we perceive through matter the inhabiting Psyche, and by it reach out to communion with Nous, for “this is how the material becomes beautiful; by participating in the thought which flows from the Divine” (I. 6. 2). He would have understood Blake’s claim to see the universe as “a world of imagination and vision,” and accepted Erigena’s great saying, “every visible and invisible creature is a theophany or appearance of God.”