The essentials of mysticism, and other essays

by Evelyn Underhill

Thus the whole mystic ascent can be conceived as a movement through visible beauty to its invisible source, and thence to “the inaccessible Beauty, dwelling as if in consecrated precincts apart from the common ways” (I. 6. 8). Yet this progress is not so much a change in our consciousness of the world and of ourselves, as a shifting of the centre of our being from sense to soul, from soul to spirit, whereby we come actually to live at new levels of existence. “For all there are two stages of the path, according to whether they are ascending or have already gained the upper sphere. The first stage is conversion from the lower life: the second—taken by those who have already reached the Spiritual sphere, as it were set a footprint there, but must still advance within that realm—lasts till they reach its extreme summit, the term attained When the topmost peak of the Spiritual realm is won” (I. 3. 1).

The process is both intellectual and moral, since its goal is the absolute Truth and Beauty no less than the absolute Good. “Each must become God-like and beautiful who cares to see God and Beauty” (I. 6. 9). It involves deliberate effort and drastic purification of mind and heart, “cutting away all that is excessive, straightening all that is crooked, bringing light to all that is in shadow, labouring to make all one glow of beauty” (I. 6. 9). As “all knowing comes by likeness” (I. 8. 1), we must ourselves have moral beauty if we would see the “Beauty There.” But whether this way be conceived under æsthetic or ascetic symbols, Plotinus is at one with all the mystics in declaring that the driving force which urges the soul along the pathway to reality is love. This inspires its labour, supports its stern purifications, “detaches it from the body and lifts it to the Intelligible World” (III. 6. 5), and gives it at last “the only eye that sees the mighty Beauty” (I. 6. 9). Love means for him active desire; “the longing for conjunction and rest.” All shades of spiritual and poetic passion, the graded meanings of admiration, enthusiasm, and worship, are included in it. It is “the true magic of the universe”; an attribute of Nous, and an earnest of real life. “The fullest life is the fullest love, and the love comes from the celestial light which streams forth from the Absolute One” (VI. 7. 23). It is true that the impersonal nature of the Neo-platonic One gives no apparent scope to the intimate feeling which plays so large a part in Christian devotion. But the reality and warmth of the true mystical passion for the Absolute—its complete independence of anthropomorphic conceptions—is strikingly demonstrated by those glowing passages in which Plotinus allows his overpowering emotion, “that veritable love, that sharp desire,” to speak; and appeals to the experience of those fellow-mystics who have attained the vision of “the splendour yonder, and felt the burning of the flame of love for that which is there to know; the passion of the lover resting on the bosom of his love” (VI. 9. 4). This passion is the instrument of that ecstasy in which he taught that those men who have “wrought themselves into harmony with the Supreme” may briefly experience the vision of the ineffable One. In it the spirit is burned to a white heat, which fuses in one single state the highest activities of feeling, thought, and will. Though the doctrine of ecstasy appears in Philo, and could reasonably be deduced from Plato himself, its treatment by Plotinus, the intense actuality and poetic fervour of its presentation, are the obvious results of such personal experiences as Porphyry describes to us. This ecstasy, according to him—and here he is supported by the majority of later mystics—is not a merely passive state, nor does it result in a barren satisfaction. When, withdrawing from all lesser interests, the soul passes beyond all contingency “through virtue to the Divine Mind, through wisdom to the Supreme,” and poises itself upon God in a simple state of rapt attention, it receives as a reward of its effort not only the beatific vision of the Perfect, but also an accession of vitality. At this moment, says Plotinus, it “has another life” and “knows that the Supplier of true life is present.” The mystic, or “sage,” is not a spiritual freak; but the man who has grown up to the full stature of humanity and united himself with that Source of life which is “present everywhere, yet absent except only to those prepared to receive it” (VI. 9. 4). Therefore he alone can be trusted to be fully active; since his action is not a mere restless striving after the discordant objects of a scattered attention, but an ordered movement based on the contemplation of Reality.

“We always move round the One. If we did not, we should be dissolved and no longer exist. But we do not always look at the One. When we do, we attain the end of our existence, and our rest; and no longer sing out of tune, but form a divine chorus round the One” (VI. 9. 7).

Yet in spite of the majesty and purity of his vision, the devil’s advocate is not without material for an attack upon Plotinus. The charge brought by St. Augustine against “the books of the Platonists” as a whole—and by these he meant chiefly the Enneads—is well known. He found in their philosophy no response to the needs of the struggling and the imperfect. In its complete escape from the standing religious snare of anthropomorphism, Neoplatonism also escaped from the grasp of humanity. It left man everything to do for himself. For the Christian philosophy of divine incarnation, dramatized in history, and expressed in the phrase “God so loved the world,” the Neoplatonist substitutes “So the world loves God.” “No one there,” says Augustine of their school, “hearkens to Him who calleth, Come unto Me all ye that labour.” The One is the transcendent Source and the Magnet of the Universe, the object and satisfaction of spiritual passion; but not the lover, helper, or saviour of the soul. It “needs nothing, desires nothing.” The quality of mercy cannot be ascribed to it. As a term, it is as attractive and impersonal as a mountain peak; and the mystic attaining it has something of the aristocratic self-satisfaction of the successful mountaineer. The Christian and Sūfi mystics, even when most deeply influenced by Neoplatonism, have always felt the incompleteness of this conception. They see the soul’s achievement of reality as the result of two movements, one human and one divine: a “mutual attraction.” “God needs me as much as I need Him,” said Meister Eckhart. “Our natural will,” said Julian of Norwich, “is to have God, and the good-will of God is to have us.”

“I was given,” says Angela of Foligno, “a deep insight into the humility of God, towards man and all other things.” “The love of God,” says Ruysbroeck, “is an outpouring and an indrawing tide.” These statements undoubtedly represent a normal element in spiritual experience; that sense of a response, a self-giving on the part of its transcendent object which—whatever explanation we may choose to give of it—is integral to a developed mysticism. Neoplatonism, considered as a religious philosophy, is impoverished by its failure to recognize and find a place for this.

Moreover, the so-called social side of religion, so grossly exaggerated by the amateur theologians of the present day, certainly receives less than justice from Plotinus; for whom the “political virtues” are merely preparatory to the spiritual life, and that spiritual life an exclusive system of self-culture, having as its final stage a “flight of the alone to the Alone.” Moral goodness is a form of beauty, and therefore “real”; but there is no suggestion that goodness as such is dearer to the Absolute than beauty or truth. The problem of evil is looked at, but left unsolved: a weakness which Plotinus shares with most mystical philosophers. Evil, he says, has no place in the “untroubled blissful life” of the three Divine Principles. Therefore it is not real, but “a form of non-being” (I. 8. 3): a doctrine which makes an unexpected reappearance eleven hundred years later in the Revelations of Julian of Norwich. Since the aim of the “wise man” is the transcendence of the sense world, there is, moreover, no adequate recognition of those sins, wrongs, and sufferings with which that “half-real” world is charged. Though effort and self-denial have their part in the Plotinian scheme, that transfiguration of pain which was the greatest achievement of the Gospel is beyond the scope of his philosophy. Its remedy for failure and grief is not humble consecration, but lofty withdrawal to that spiritual sphere where the divine element of the soul is at home, untroubled by the conflicts, evils, and chances of life. Even the selfless sorrow of a father or a patriot is to be transcended. Though in this his practice was doubtless better than his doctrine—for we know that he was a good citizen, a beloved teacher, and a loyal friend—he speaks in a tone of icy contempt of those who allow themselves to be disturbed by the world’s woe.

“If the man that has attained felicity meets some turn of fortune that he would not have chosen, there is not the slightest lessening of his happiness for that. If there were, his felicity would be veering or falling from day to day; the death of a child would bring him down, or the loss of some trivial possession.... How can he take any great account of the vacillations of power, or the ruin of his fatherland? Verily, if he thought any such event a great disaster, or any disaster at all, he must be of a strange way of thinking” (I. 4. 7).

Such a sentence, however we look at it, goes far to justify the description of the Neoplatonic saint as “a self-sufficient sage”; and explains the question with which Augustine turned from the Enneads—“When would those books have taught me charity?”

In spite, however, of this fundamental difference in tone, the wider our reading the more clearly we must realize the extent to which the Christian mystics are conscious or unconscious disciples of Plotinus. That unity of witness which is one of the most impressive facts in the history of mysticism, may reasonably be regarded as evidence of the reality of that world of spiritual values which contemplatives persistently describe. But on its literary side, this same unity of witness depends closely upon the fact that these contemplatives, however widely separated by time and formal creed, were able to make plain their adventures to other men by means of conceptions drawn from the Plotinian scheme; which has proved itself able to rationalize and find room for the deepest spiritual intuitions of man. It could do this because a great mystic made it. Hence we find it implied, even where unexpressed, in many of the masterpieces of later mysticism—both Christian and Mahomedan—and some knowledge of it is a necessary clue to the full understanding of these writings. The Sūfi ’Attar, describing the soul’s arrival in “the Valley of Unity where it contemplates the naked Godhead,” is equally its debtor with the Protestant mystic William Law, declaring that “everything in temporal nature is descended out of that which is eternal, and stands as a palpable visible outbirth of it; so that when we know how to separate the grossness, death, and darkness of time from it, we find what it is in its eternal state.” Yet few of the theologians and contemplatives who owe most to Plotinus had any first-hand acquaintance with the Enneads. Their influence reached the mediæval world by two main channels. The first line of descent is through the works of Victorinus and St. Augustine; the second through the philosopher Proclus and his mysterious disciple Dionysius the Areopagite. These lines meet in the Divina Commedia, which may be regarded in one aspect as the supreme poetic flower of Neoplatonism.

The dramatic life-history and exuberant self-revelations of St. Augustine have obscured the debt which Christian philosophy owes to that less assertive convert and theologian, Victorinus. Yet since Augustinian Neoplatonism is derived from his writings and translations, he is the real link between Plotinus and the mystics of the Latin Church. A celebrated man of letters and a professor of rhetoric, he had been formed by Neoplatonic philosophy; and is said to have been the author of that Latin translation of the Enneads, which was chief among those “books of the Platonists” that provided St. Augustine’s stepping-stones to faith. The stir, not to say scandal, caused by his conversion—so vividly described in the “Confessions”—was justified: for the event was crucial in the history of western Christianity. After his conversion, which took the form of a re-interpretation, not an abandonment, of his old beliefs, he set himself to the creation of a Neoplatonic theology; in which the Plotinian triad, and doctrine of the soul’s precession and return to the One, appear almost undisguised. The One he tries to identify with the transcendent and immutable Father. “Son” and “Spirit” are to him two aspects of Nous; the fount of all substantial existence, and containing from eternity all things in their archetypal reality. The Son or Logos is “the Logos of all that is,” ever gushing forth from the “living fountain” of the Father. It was from Victorinus that Catholicism obtained the characteristic Plotinian notions of Deity as “ever active and ever at rest,” and of the life of reality as consisting in immanence, progress, and return, which meet us again and again in the writings of the mystics.