Only the system of that great mystical soul, Plotinus, has, for our present purposes, a claim on our close attention. Indeed this, the last great attempt at synthesis of the ancient Greek mind, will have to occupy us in such detail throughout a great part of this book, that here we can but briefly indicate its chief characteristics as regards the One and the Many.
It is then clear that Plotinus is an even more intensely and exclusively religious spirit than is Plato himself. Some of his descriptions of the soul’s flight from the world of sense and of the soul’s substantial touch of God in ecstasy, and again his penetrating apprehension of the timeless and spaceless characteristics of Spirit, have never ceased, at least indirectly, to leaven, and to lend much of their form to, the deepest recollective aspirations of religious souls in Europe and Western Asia, for some fourteen centuries at least.
Yet this religious sense is here so exclusive, and it thirsts so vehemently for perfect unity and for an infinite Superiority and utter Self-sufficingness of God, that it readily allies itself with, and reinforces by a massive enthusiasm and asceticism, the abstractive trend which, so strong at all times in Greek philosophy, was at this period already, for other reasons, growing more intensely abstractive than ever. Under this double influence Plotinus reduces the two great, deliberate, alternating movements of the soul,—its Outgoing to the Particular and Contingent, and its Incoming to the General and Infinite, as they are taught by Plato,—to one only, that of Recollection and Abstraction, a movement ever up and away, from all Multiplicity, to the One alone. And he denies to this One all Multiplicity whatsoever,—hence all such conscious, volitional action upon the world as is involved in Plato’s magnificent, though never worked out, intuition that it is love, (some energizing analogous to our thinking, loving and willing the existence, the self-realization and the happiness of other self-conscious beings,) which moves the Good, as it were, to go out from Itself, and to communicate Itself to others. Here, in Plotinus’s scheme, Man begins indeed with sense-impressions and imaginative picturings, with discursive reasoning and intuitive reason, with feelings, volitions, and energizings of every kind. But the more he moves up, the more of all this he leaves utterly behind; till, in ecstasy, all will, love, thought, consciousness, cease altogether. For man has thus been getting nearer and nearer, and more and more like, the One; and this One is just nothing besides sheer, pure Oneness,—it is neither Will, nor Love, nor Thought, nor Self-consciousness, in any degree or sense of these words.
Plotinus’s scheme is thus indeed prompted by some of the deepest Mystical aspirations. But whilst in its one deliberate movement—that of man up to God—it starts from convictions and requirements that are deeply ethical, libertarian, spiritual, theistic: it will be shown, in its conception of the nature of the One and of this One’s relations down into the world, to be curiously naturalistic and determinist, and subtly materialistic. Thus does Greek Philosophy end in an impressively all-devouring Abstraction, in an intense Realism destructive, step by step, of precisely all that concrete, individual, personal Beauty, Truth, and Goodness, of all the spiritual, hence organic, interior, self-conscious reality, which had given occasion to this system. We have now but so many hypostatized abstractions, each more pale and empty than the other, each ever more simply a mere category of the human mind, indeed, but a category appropriate to Things and to Mathematico-Physical Laws, not to Spirit and to Ethico-Personal Organisms. The system, in its ultimate upshot and trend, is thus profoundly anti-Immanental, anti-Incarnational: a succession of increasingly exalted and increasingly empty Transcendences, each of which is, as it were, open upwards but closed downwards, takes the place of all deliberate operations and self-expressions of the Higher in and through the Lower, hence of all preveniences and condescensions of God.
And in Proclus, practically the last non-Christian Greek Philosopher, all these intensely abstractive, naturalistic features get finally and fully systematized, whilst but intermittent traces remain of Plato’s richly manifold, organized activities and his at times strikingly incarnational conceptions; and only skeleton-schemes persist of those rapt recollective experiences of Plotinus which, derived in his case from direct experience, constitute him, among all Philosophers, as Dr. Edward Caird most aptly calls him, the “Mystic par excellence.”
II. The Second of the Three Forces: Christianity, the Revelation of Personality and Depth.
Now the whole of this clear, conceptual, abstractive Greek method, in as far as it identified abstractions with realities, and names with things, and reasoning with doing, suffering, and experience; and sought for Unity outside of Multiplicity, for Rest outside of Energizing, for the Highest outside of Personality and Character as these are developed and manifested in the permeation and elevation of the lower; has in so far been succeeded and superseded by two other great world-moving experiences of the human race, experiences apparently even more antagonistic to each other than either appears to be to the Greek view: Christianity and Scientific Method.
1. The unique fulness and closeness of unity in multiplicity of our Lord’s life.
As to Christianity, it is really impossible to compare it directly with Hellenism, without at once under-stating its originality. For its originality consists not so much in its single doctrines, or even in its teaching as a whole, and in the particular place each doctrine occupies in this teaching, as in its revelation, through the person and example of its Founder, of the altogether unsuspected depth and inexhaustibleness of human Personality, and of this Personality’s source and analogue in God, of the simplicity and yet difficulty and never-endingness of the access of man to God, and of the ever-preceding condescension of God to man. Hence if Christianity is thus throughout the Revelation of Personality; and if Personality is ever a One in Many, (and more deeply One and more richly Many, in proportion to the greatness of that spiritual reality): then we need not wonder at the difficulty we find in pointing out any one particular doctrine as constitutive of the unique originality of Christianity.
For a Person came, and lived and loved, and did and taught, and died and rose again, and lives on by His Power and His Spirit for ever within us and amongst us, so unspeakably rich and yet so simple, so sublime and yet so homely, so divinely above us precisely in being so divinely near,—that His character and teaching require, for an ever fuller yet never complete understanding, the varying study, and different experiments and applications, embodiments and unrollings of all the races and civilizations, of all the individual and corporate, the simultaneous and successive experiences of the human race to the end of time. If there is nothing shifting or fitful or simply changing about Him, there is everywhere energy and expansion, thought and emotion, effort and experience, joy and sorrow, loneliness and conflict, interior trial and triumph, exterior defeat and supplantation: particular affections, particular humiliations, homely labour, a homely heroism, greatness throughout in littleness. And in Him, for the first and last time, we find an insight so unique, a Personality so strong and supreme, as to teach us, once for all, the true attitude towards suffering.