While Plato and Aristotle had sought to rise to the intelligible world from, and by means of, the sensible, Plotinus, believing that he has attained a direct, intuitional knowledge of the former, sets out from it and thence tries to reach the other. At the summit of being he finds the supreme Platonic principle, the One or the Good, absolutely transcendent and self-sufficient; next below this, the supreme Aristotelian principle, Intelligence or Absolute Knowing, the locus of all ideas; and third, the supreme principle of the Stoics, Soul, Life, or Zeus, the animating principle of the world. Good, Intelligence, Life—these are Plotinus' divine trinity, evolved by a process of abstraction from the Nous of Aristotle (see [p. 161]). The members of this trinity are neither personal, conscious, nor equal. Each lower is caused by, but does not emanate from, the next above it; and this causation is due, not to any act of free will, but to an inner necessity. Thus the trinity of Plotinus is a mere energy, acting according to necessary laws. The third member of it turns toward matter, which is mere poverty and hunger for being, and, in so doing, produces a world of gods, dæmons, and mundane beings, the highest of which last is man. All that has matter has multiplicity.
It is easy enough to see what kind of ethics and education will spring from such a system as this. Inasmuch as the good means self-sufficiency, freedom from multiplicity and matter, evil means dependence, multiplicity, materiality. Whatever evil there is in man is due to his connection with matter, for which he is in no sense responsible. His sole business, if he desires blessedness, is to free himself from matter and multiplicity, and return to the unity of the Supreme Good. The steps by which this may be accomplished are, (1) Music or Art, (2) Love, (3) Philosophy or Dialectic: through all these he rises above multiplicity into unity. In all this there is, obviously, neither moral evil nor moral good, and, indeed, the world of Plotinus contains no moral element, for the simple reason that it contains nothing personal, either in God or man. Evil is the product of necessity, and consciousness, implying as it does, multiplicity, is part of it. The unethical character of Plotinus' teaching comes out very clearly in his reversal of the positions of instruction and purgation in the scheme of education. According to the old view, purgation was a mere medical process, preparatory to ethical training (see [p. 7]). According to the Neoplatonic view, ethical training and the "political virtues" are a mere preparation for purgation and the intellectual virtues. And this is perfectly logical; for evil, being physical, must be cured by physical means. And the means which Plotinus recommends are magical, rather than moral; rites and prayers, rather than heroic deeds; the suppression of the will, rather than its exercise.
Plotinus is too much of a Greek to accept, or even see, all the consequences of his own theory, which makes moral life consist in an attempt to escape from the world and to quench consciousness and personality. Accordingly, though he has a poor opinion of civic life (a thing excusable enough in those days), he believes that the civic virtues ought to be cultivated, as a means toward the higher, and has apparently nothing to say against the ordinary grammatical, rhetorical, and musical education of his time. He has a good deal to say in favor of Mathematics, as a preparation for what to him is the supreme branch of education, Dialectics. But the tendency of his teaching is only too obvious, and the conclusions which he did not draw, time and succeeding generations drew for him. The effect of Neoplatonism was, in the long run, to make the super-civic part of man the whole man, to discredit political life and political effort, and to pave the way for the mystic, the ascetic, and the hermit. Nor were the tendencies of the other philosophical schools in any marked degree different. Thus philosophy, instead of contributing to harmonize man and society, and to restore moral life, came to be one of the strongest agencies in bringing about confusion and dissolution, by ignoring moral life altogether, embracing superstition, and turning man into a mere plaything of blind necessity and magical forces. And thus ancient civilization fell to pieces, because man himself had fallen to pieces, and each piece tried to set itself up for the whole. The civic fragment finds its highest expression in Quintilian, the super-civic in Plotinus. Ere the fragments can be united into a truly moral being, a member of a truly moral society, a new combining force, unknown to either rhetorician or philosopher, must arise.
CHAPTER IV
CONCLUSION
Truly it was an old world, and even Cæsar's patriotic genius was not enough to make it young again. The dawn does not return till the night has fully set in.—Mommsen.
My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord.—Isaiah.
Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second like unto it is this, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.—Jesus.
Render unto Cæsar the things that are Cæsar's, and to God the things that are God's.—Id.
Are not five sparrows sold for two farthings? and not one of them is forgotten in the sight of God. But the very hairs of your head are all numbered.—Id.
We love because he first loved us. If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar.—John.
By one intelligible form, which is the divine Essence, and one conscious intention, which is the divine Word, things may be known in their multiplicity by God.—Thomas Aquinas.
If God acts in all things, and such action in no way derogates from his dignity, but even belongs to his universal and supreme power, he cannot consider it below him, nor does it stain his dignity, if he extend his providence to the individual things of this world.—Id.
Une immense espérance a passé sur la terre.—Alfred de Musset.
We have seen that the Greek ideal of life rested upon the complete identification of the man with the citizen. We have seen also how this ideal was paralyzed by the growth of individualism; how the wisest men thought to render this innocuous and even beneficent, by providing for it a sphere of contemplation, superior to that of practice, but organically related to it, and, finally how, with the failure of this attempt, the two sides of human nature, divorced from each other, degenerated, the one into selfish worldliness, the other into equally selfish other-worldliness, both conditions equally destitute of moral significance.
This sad result was mainly due to three causes, (1) that the remedies proposed for individualism were not sufficient, (2) that the best remedy was set aside, (3) that the conditions for which the remedies were offered soon ceased to exist. Both Plato and Aristotle wrote for the small Greek polities, which lost their autonomy through the Macedonian conquest. If it may be doubted whether even the proposals of the latter would have redeemed these polities, had they continued free, it is certain that they would have been ineffective under the changed circumstances. At all events, they were never adopted, and even for the super-civic man the teaching of Plato was preferred to his.