Wherein we steadfast stand, unshak’d, unmov’d,
Engrafted by a deep vitality
The prop and stay of things is Gods benignity.”
(III. iv. 14.)
As in his “Psychozoia” it was noted how the omnipresence of Psyche appealed to More’s religious sense of the nearness of God to His children, so in his other treatises, especially his “Psychathanasia,” the mystical union of the soul with The One is for More another name for the love of God as known in the soul of the Christian. The Christian religion had taught that God is love, a conception far removed from Platonism, whether of the dialogues or of the “Enneads” of Plotinus. But the tendency to find in Platonism a rational sanction for religious truth was so strong in the theology of the Cambridge school, to which More belonged, that this conception of God as love—which, indeed, is held by the Christian not as an idea but as a fact of his inmost religious experience—was interpreted in the light of the speculative mysticism of Plotinus; and thus the formless One, the ultra-metaphysical principle above all being, became the Christian God of love.
III. ETERNITY OF THE SOUL AND OF MATTER
In the work of Vaughan and Spenser two distinct phases of another form of Platonic idealism are presented: one in which the poet looks back upon eternity as a fact of the soul’s past experience, and the other in which he directs a forward glance to the future when the soul shall find its eternal rest.
In the expression of his sense of eternity, Vaughan recurs to the doctrine of the preëxistence of the soul as it is expounded in Plato. In Vaughan this idea is felt as an influence either affording the substance of his thought or determining the nature of his imagery. The idea which Vaughan carries over into his own poetry is found in Plato’s account in the “Phædrus” of the preëxistence of the soul in a world of pure ideas before its descent into the body. “There was a time,” says Plato, “when with the rest of the happy band they [i.e. the human souls] saw beauty shining in brightness: we philosophers following in the train of Zeus, others in company with other gods; and then we beheld the beatific vision and were initiated into a mystery which may be truly called most blessed, celebrated by us in our state of innocence, before we had any experience of evils to come, when we were admitted to the sight of apparitions innocent and simple and calm and happy, which we held shining in pure light, pure ourselves and not yet enshrined in that living tomb which we carry about, now that we are imprisoned in the body, like an oyster in his shell.” (“Phædrus,” 250.)
This idea occurs in two forms in Vaughan. In “The Retreat” the reminiscence of a past is described as a fact of Vaughan’s religious experience. He longs to travel back to the time when, in his purity, he was nearer to God than he is now in his sinful state.
“Happy those early days, when I