I have written a small treatise on the Contemplative Life, giving an account of the Therapeutæ. If you will neither visit me nor them, I will have a copy of it made, and send you.[[11]] Farewell.
Gower. How mistaken is Philo in maintaining that the senses cannot aid us in our ascent towards the supersensuous;—as though the maltreatment of the body, the vassal, by the soul, the suzerain, were at once the means and the proof of mastery over it. Duly care for the body, and the thankful creature will not forget its place, and when you wish to meditate, will disturb you by no obtrusive hint of its presence. I find that I can rise above it only by attention to its just claims. If I violate its rights I am sued by it in the high court of nature, and cast with costs.
Mrs. Atherton. And certainly our most favoured moments of ascent into the ideal world have their origin usually in some suggestion that has reached us through the senses. I remember a little song of Uhland’s called The Passing Minstrel—a brief parable of melody, like so many of his pieces,—which, as I understood it, was designed to illustrate this very truth. The poet falls asleep on a ‘hill of blossoms’ near the road, and his soul flutters away in dream to the golden land of Fable. He wakes, as one fallen from the clouds, and sees the minstrel with his harp, who has just passed by, and playing as he goes, is lost to sight among the trees. ‘Was it he,’ the poet asks, ‘that sang into my soul those dreams of wonder?’ Another might inform the fancy with another meaning, according to the mood of the hour. It appeared to me an emblem of the way in which we are often indebted to a sunset or a landscape, to a strain of music or a suddenly-remembered verse, for a voyage into a world of vision of our own, where we cease altogether to be aware of the external cause which first transported us thither.
Atherton. That must always be true of imagination. But Platonism discards the visible instead of mounting by it. Considered morally, too, this asceticism sins so grievously. It misuses the iron of the will, given us to forge implements withal for life’s husbandry, to fashion of it a bolt for a voluntary prison. At Alexandria, doubtless, Sin was imperious in her shamelessness, at the theatre and at the mart, in the hall of judgment and in the house of feasting, but there was suffering as well as sin among the crowds of that great city, with all their ignorance and care and want, and to have done a something to lessen the suffering would have prepared the way for lessening the sin.
CHAPTER II.
La philosophie n’est pas philosophie si elle ne touche à l’abîme; mais elle cesse d’être philosophie si elle y tombe.—Cousin.
Gower. I hope you are ready, Atherton, to illumine my darkness concerning Neo-Platonism, by taking up that individual instance you were speaking of last Monday.
Atherton. I have something ready to inflict; so prepare to listen stoutly. (Reads.)
Plato pronounces Love the child of Poverty and Plenty—the Alexandrian philosophy was the offspring of Reverence and Ambition. It combined an adoring homage to the departed genius of the age of Pericles with a passionate, credulous craving after a supernatural elevation. Its literary tastes and religious wants were alike imperative and irreconcilable. In obedience to the former, it disdained Christianity; impelled by the latter, it travestied Plato. But for that proud servility which fettered it to a glorious past, it might have recognised in Christianity the only satisfaction of its higher longings. Rejecting that, it could only establish a philosophic church on the foundation of Plato’s school, and, forsaking while it professed to expound him, embrace the hallucinations of intuition and of ecstasy, till it finally vanishes at Athens amid the incense and the hocus-pocus of theurgic incantation. As it degenerates, it presses more audaciously forward through the veil of the unseen. It must see visions, dream dreams, work spells, and call down deities, demi-gods, and dæmons from their dwellings in the upper air. The Alexandrians were eclectics, because such reverence taught them to look back; mystics, because such ambition urged them to look up. They restore philosophy, after all its weary wanderings, to the place of its birth; and, in its second childhood, it is cradled in the arms of those old poetic faiths of the past, from which, in the pride of its youth, it broke away.
The mental history of the founder best illustrates the origin of the school. Plotinus, in A.D. 233, commences the study of philosophy in Alexandria, at the age of twenty-eight. His mental powers are of the concentrative rather than the comprehensive order. Impatient of negation, he has commenced an earnest search after some truth which, however abstract, shall yet be positive. He pores over the Dialogues of Plato and the Metaphysics of Aristotle, day and night. To promote the growth of his ‘soul-wings,’ as Plato counsels, he practises austerities his master would never have sanctioned. He attempts to live what he learns to call the ‘angelic life;’ the ‘life of the disembodied in the body.’ He reads with admiration the life of Apollonius of Tyana, by Philostratus, which has recently appeared. He can probably credit most of the marvels recorded of that strange thaumaturgist, who, two hundred years ago, had appeared—a revived Pythagoras, to dazzle nation after nation through which he passed, with prophecy and miracle; who had travelled to the Indus and the Ganges, and brought back the supernatural powers of Magi and Gymnosophists, and who was said to have displayed to the world once more the various knowledge, the majestic sanctity, and the superhuman attributes, of the sage of Crotona. This portraiture of a philosophical hierophant—a union of the philosopher and the priest in an inspired hero, fires the imagination of Plotinus. In the New-Pythagoreanism of which Apollonius was a representative, Orientalism and Platonism were alike embraced.[[12]] Perhaps the thought occurs thus early to Plotinus—could I travel eastward I might drink myself at those fountain-heads of tradition whence Pythagoras and Plato drew so much of their wisdom. Certain it is, that, with this purpose, he accompanied, several years subsequently, the disastrous expedition of Gordian against the Parthians, and narrowly escaped with life.