This ecstatic contemplation of the highest conception of their Theology exhibited a mysticism which had a more degrading side, one which is specially conspicuous in the Neo-Platonist Dæmonology. There also the Mysticism is in combination with refinements of logical definition. Plotinus takes the floating conceptions of Dæmonology and makes them submit to a rigid classification in formal harmony with the tripartite character of the Divine Nature. Divine Powers he divides into three classes. The first Power is that which dwells in the world of Ideas, apart from the perception of man and in close touch with the Divine Intelligence. The next is the race of visible Gods, the Stars, Nature, Earth: the third is that of the Dæmons. The Dæmons are again subdivided into three ranks: Gods, Loves, and Dæmons. Porphyry insists on a similar classification. In one of the oracles collected by him and preserved by Eusebius, the beings of the Dæmonic hierarchy are classified with equal strictness, but with greater simplicity than that shown by Plotinus. His highest rank corresponds with that of his Master. The second rank corresponds with Plotinus’ third class, but does not here undergo a tripartite subdivision. His third class, unlike the first, which moves in the presence of God, is far away from communion with Him, and corresponds with the created and visible gods in the second class of Plotinus. He is not always faithful to this simplicity. In the third book of his “De Philosophia ex Oraculis” he admits another class of Dæmons called Heroes, admitting Christ to their number. Elsewhere he divides the Dæmons into archangels, angels, and dæmons. Proclus will have six ranks: and Dionysius the Areopagite, who classified this Dæmonlore for the Christian Church, will have nine. We can equally discern here the operation of that spurious Eclecticism which fits its thefts into the clamps of a preconceived system. The simple notion of Beings intermediate between God and Man, breaking the distance between the two by participating in the Divine and Human nature, is rendered absurd and impossible by its compulsory harmonizing with the demand of the Alexandrine Trinity. Plotinus thought he had made Aristotle agree with Plato, but the harmony was of the same character as that secured between Christianity and Neo-Platonism by making the Christian God-man a Neo-Platonist Dæmon. The Ideas of Plato, the νόησις τῆς νοήσεως of Aristotle, and the World Soul of the Stoics: how easy to reconcile these different conceptions of the Deity, if they are placed in different spheres of thought, and connected by the mysterious process of Emanation! The Neo-Platonist school was damned by its fatal proclivity for trinities. There were three kinds of gods, three kinds of dæmons, and three methods of approach to the supernatural world. These three methods were of course systematic, almost scientific, constructions. Before Porphyry there were Magic (γοητεία) and Theosophy (θεοσοφία). That philosopher introduced a third and middle term Theurgy (θεουργία). Theosophy was the process by which the philosopher attained the Perfect Vision, arrived at the consummation of ἕνωσις. Magic was the process by which the evil Dæmons, whom Porphyry puts under the dominion of Serapis and Hecate, were approached. The object of Theurgy was communion with the good Dæmons. Aided by Oriental fervour, we know the absurdities which these systems developed in the world of practice. But the development of these sciences on the theoretical side was enough to drag them down with their own weight. In Proclus the practical and the theoretic sides of Neo-Platonism are both driven to a culmination which passes the intelligence of humanity. “From the Incommunicable One spring—one knows not how—a host of Henads. Each has the character of absolute being, yet each has distinctive qualities. The Henads run down in long lines; the Intelligible are followed by the Intellectual, these by the Overworldly, these again by the Inworldly. From the Intelligible springs the family of Being, from the Intellectual that of Intelligence, from the Overworldly that of Soul, from the Inworldly that of Nature. These principal ‘chains’ are mainly like brooks falling into one river; that which has a body may also have a soul and an intelligence; but they subdivide as they go down, there are different kinds of intelligences and different kinds of souls dependent on them, so that the river is perpetually branching off into other rivers. Yet, further, the principal chains have to be multiplied by the number of Henads, for each chain is a family depending on a God, and exhibiting throughout the characteristic of that God. It includes not only Angels, Heroes, Demons, and human beings, but stones, plants, animals, which bear the signature of the deity, and have sacramental virtues with respect to him.”
If Proclus believed all this, we can understand his being a victim to the grossest superstition, both in belief and in practice. In the life of Proclus, second Aristotle as he was, we see the natural culmination of that excess of Reason and that exaggeration of Emotion which had marked the Neo-Platonic attitude from the beginning. When Justinian closed the School of Athens in the Sixth Century its professors, the last representatives of Neo-Platonism, were being hunted down as practitioners of magic of the meanest description. The “De Superstitione” of Plutarch marked a stage in the history of the human mind which the Neo-Platonists left behind, and which the European world has only just attained again after centuries of horrible crimes born of a sincere belief in witchcraft.[390]
It is a natural subject of speculation to those who are interested in the history of this period, how far the character of modern civilization would have been modified, had not the free and tolerant traditions of Greece been clamped into the systematized absurdities of Neo-Platonism. The struggle for social and political ascendancy reacted also upon the liberal and gentle spirit of the Man of Nazareth, whose teachings were thus embedded in a theological formalism which robbed them of half their meaning and all their inspiration. Christianity fought the enemy with its own weapons, and the scientific terminology of the Neo-Platonists gave definiteness to the Christian conception of the Trinity and the celestial hierarchy, while the whole system of Dæmonology, which has played so sinister a part in modern civilization, was to be found entire in the works of Porphyry and Proclus. It has even been asserted that the chief merit of the Neo-Platonist school lay in the fact that it prepared the educated circles of Pagan Society for the acceptance of the Gospel, and laid the foundations for the construction of Christian Theology.[391] But it is conceivable that had Christianity come face to face with the calm rationalism and gentle piety of Pagan Religion and Philosophy as they appear in Plutarch, more of the spirit, if less of the form, of the old tradition might have passed into the teachings of the new Faith. We should, perhaps, then have been spared the martyrdom of Christians at the hands of Christians, the Inquisition, and the whole terrible consequences of the Odium Theologicum. Plutarch suggested a frame of mind rather than inculcated a body of dogma, and in that he resembled the founder of Christianity a great deal more than the most honoured theologians of the Church have done. But Paganism girt on its armour in direct hostility to the new Creed, and from these clenched antagonisms sprang that accentuation of points of difference which broke the continuity of civilization, and separated the modern from the classical world by a chasm which the efforts of four centuries have not succeeded in bridging over.[392] Is it not possible that Paganism, which out of the multitude of separate gods had evolved the idea of the One Pure and Perfect Deity, might also, out of the many-sided activities of the half-human, half-divine Dæmons, have arrived at the belief in a single mediatory power, and, with a perception unblinded by polemic bitterness, have been prepared to merge this conception in the Divine Man of the Catholic Church?[393]
But though the spirit of Plutarch was not destined in this way to pass directly on to the believer in Christianity, the time was to come when, among the best and purest adherents of that faith, his teachings would be regarded as efficacious for the sincerest goodness. “The works of Jeremy Taylor,” says Archbishop Trench, “contain no less than two hundred and fifty-six allusions or direct references made by him to the writings of Plutarch.” But direct indebtedness of this kind does not necessarily imply similarity of spirit, and fortunately the mental attitude of Plutarch is one which appears essential to human progress, and does not depend upon the continuity of a tradition. “Plutarch,” wrote Emerson, “will be perpetually rediscovered from time to time as long as books last.”[394] He will be perpetually rediscovered because there will be a perpetually recurring necessity to look at life from his point of view. But he will be perpetually rediscovered because he is perpetually allowed to disappear. There will always be those among the disciples of Religion and the followers of Science who maintain that there can be no truce, no toleration between the two, and the history of the human race will be formulated into an indictment against the Superstition of the one, and the most terrible anathemas of the Church will be fulminated against the Atheism of the other. Meanwhile those who take a middle course and recognize the “immortal vitality of Philosophy and the eternal necessity of Religion,”[395] and would leave the individual mind to select its appropriate support from the dogmas of the one or the discoveries of the other, without dressing Philosophy in the fantastic garb of Religion, as the Neo-Platonists did, or turning Religion into a matter of rules and regulations as the Clerical Rationalists of the Eighteenth Century did, will be regarded by the extremists as traitors at once to the cause of progress and the cause of morality, and will be placed among the—
“Anime triste di coloro
Che visser senza infamia, e senza lodo.
Mischiate sono a quel cattivo coro
Degli Angeli, che non furon ribelli