Note to page 131.
The writings of Augustine handed Neo-Platonism down to posterity as the original and esoteric doctrine of the first followers of Plato. He enumerates the causes which led, in his opinion, to the negative position assumed by the Academics, and to the concealment of their real opinions. He describes Plotinus as a resuscitated Plato. Contra Academ. iii. 17-20.
He commends Porphyry for his measure of scepticism as regards Theurgy, and bestows more than due praise on the doctrine of Illumination held by Plotinus, for its similarity to the Christian truth concerning divine grace. De Civitate Dei, x. 10; x. 2.
He gives a scale of the spiritual degrees of ascent to God, formed after the Platonist model (the ἐπαναβαθμοὶ of the Symposium), and so furnished a precedent for all the attempts of a similar kind in which scholastic mysticism delighted to exercise its ingenuity. De Quantitate Animæ, c. 35.
He enumerates three kinds of perception,—corporeal, intellectual (scientia) and spiritual (sapientia); and in describing the last uses the words introrsum ascendere (De Trin. xii. 15; and comp. De Lib. Arbit. ii. 12). But this phrase does not appear to have carried, with Augustine, the sense it bore when gladly adopted by mystical divines of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. He says elsewhere that man, like the prodigal, must come to himself before he can arise and go to his Father. (Retract. i. 8.) Here what the wanderer finds within is the voice of conscience, and in this sense it is quite true that the step inward is a step upward. But it is not true that the inmost is the highest in the sense that man is able by abstraction and introspection to discover within himself a light which shall supersede, or supplement, or even supply the place of external Revelation.
Note to page 131.
John Scotus Erigena.—This remarkable man began to teach in the ‘School of the Palace,’ under Charles the Bald, about the middle of the ninth century. He translated Dionysius, took part in the Gottschalk controversy, and, at last, when persecuted for the freedom of his opinions, found a refuge with Alfred the Great.
Erigena idolizes Dionysius and his commentator Maximus. He believes in their hierarchies, their divine Dark, and supreme Nothing. He declares, with them, that God is the essence of all things. Ipse namque omnium essentia est qui solus vere est, ut ait Dionysius Areopagita. Esse, inquit, omnium est Superesse Divinitatis.—De Div. Nat. i. 3, p. 443. (Jo. Scoti Opp., Paris, 1853.)
But though much of the language is retained, the doctrine of Dionysius has assumed a form altogether new in the brain of the Scotchman. The phraseology of the emanation theory is, henceforth, only metaphor. What men call creation is, with Erigena, a necessary and eternal self-unfolding (analysis, he calls it) of the divine nature. As all things are now God, self-unfolded, so, in the final restitution, all things will be resolved into God, self-withdrawn. Not the mind of man merely, as the Greek thought, but matter and all creatures will be reduced to their primordial causes, and God be manifested as all in all. De Div. Nat. i. 72. Postremo universalis creatura Creatori adunabitur, et erit in ipso et cum ipso unum. Et hic est finis omnium visibilium et invisibilium, quoniam omnia visibilia in intelligibilia, et intelligibilia in ipsum Deum transibunt, mirabili et ineffabili adunatione, non autem, ut sæpe diximus, essentiarum aut substantiarum confusione aut interitu—v. 20, p. 894. In this restitution, the elect are united to God with a degree of intimacy peculiar to themselves—v. 39. The agent of this restoration, both for beings above and below mankind, is the Incarnate Word—v. 25, p. 913. Erigena regards our incarceration in the body, and the distinction of sex, as the consequence of sin. He abandons the idea of a sensuous hell. What is termed the fire of hell is with him a principle of law to which both the good and evil are subject, which wickedness assimilates and makes a torment; goodness a blessing. So, he says, the light is grateful to the sound eye, painful to the diseased; and the food which is welcome to health is loathed by sickness. De Predestinatione, cap. xvii. p. 428. This idea, in which there lies assuredly an element of truth, became a favourite one with the mystics, and re-appears in many varieties of mysticism. Erigena, farther, anticipates Kant in regarding time and space as mere modes of conception peculiar to our present state. He himself is much more rationalist than mystic (except in the fanciful interpretations of Scripture to which he is compelled to resort); but his system was developed, three centuries later, into an extreme and revolutionary mysticism.
The combination of Platonism and Christianity, so often attempted, abandoned, and renewed, assumes five distinct phases.