Kate. A singular fortune, indeed: so that he was two other people besides himself;—like Mrs. Malaprop’s Cerberus, three gentlemen at once.
Gower. I think we have spent time enough upon him. Grievously do I pity the miserable monks his commentators, whose minds, submerged in the mare tenebrosum of the cloister, had to pass a term of years in the mazy arborescence of his verbiage,—like so many insects within their cells in the branches of a great coral.[[37]]
Atherton. Don’t throw away so much good compassion, I dare say it kept them out of mischief.
Willoughby. I cannot get that wretched abstraction out of my head which the Neo-Platonists call deity. How such a notion must have dislocated all their ethics from head to foot! The merest anthropomorphism had been better;—yes, Homer and Hesiod are truer, after all.
Atherton. I grant the gravity of the mischief. But we must not be too hard on this ecclesiastical Neo-Platonism. It does but follow Aristotle here. You remember he considers the possession of virtues as quite out of the question in the case of the gods.
Gower. Is it possible? Why, that is as though a man should lame himself to run the faster. Here is a search after God, in which, at starting, all moral qualities are removed from him; so that the testimony of conscience cannot count for anything;—the inward directory is sealed; the clue burnt. Truly the world by wisdom knew not God!
Willoughby. This unquestionably is the fatal error of Greek speculation—the subordination of morals to the intellectual refinements of an ultra-human spiritualism. Even with Numenius you have to go down the scale to a subordinate god or hypostasis before you arrive at a deity who condescends to be good.
Gower. How much ‘salt’ there must still have been in the mediæval Christianity to survive, as far as it did, the reception of these old ethical mistakes into the very heart of its doctrine!
Atherton. Aristotle reasons thus: how can the gods exhibit fortitude, who have nothing to fear—justice and honesty, without a business—temperance, without passions? Such insignificant things as moral actions are beneath them. They do not toil, as men. They do not sleep, like Endymion, ‘on the Latmian hill.’ What remains? They lead a life of contemplation;—in contemplative energy lies their blessedness.[[38]] So the contemplative sage who energises directly toward the central Mind—the intellectual source and ultimatum, is the true imitator of the divine perfections.
Gower. Transfer this principle to Christianity, and the monk becomes immediately the highest style of man.