NEO-PLATONISM-ITS THEOSOPHY AND ITS THEURGY. 143

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. Neo-Platonism begins with theosophythat is, a philosophy, the imagined gift of special revelation, the product of the inner light. But soon, finding this too abstract and unsatisfactory, impatient of its limitations, it seeks after a sign and becomes theurgic. 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, demigods, and demons, 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 know

ledge, 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 NewPythagoreanism of which Apollonius was a representative, Orientalism and Platonism were alike embraced. 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.

At Alexandria, Plotinus doubtless hears from Orientals there some fragments of the ancient eastern theosophy-doctrines concerning the principle of evil, the gradual development of the divine essence, and creation by intermediate agencies, none of which he finds in his Plato. He cannot be altogether a stranger to the lofty theism which Philo marred, while he attempted to refine, by the help of his ' Attic Moses.' He observes a tendency on the part of philosophy to fall back upon the sanctions of religion, and on the part of the religions of the day to mingle in a Deism or a Pantheism, which might claim the sanctions of philosophy. The signs of a growing toleration or indifferentism meet him on every side. Rome has long been a Pantheon for all nations, and gods and provinces together have found in the capitol at once their Olympus and their metropolis. He cannot walk the streets of Alexandria without perceiving that the very architecture tells of an alliance between the religious art of Egypt and of Greece. All, except Jews and Christians, join in the worship of Serapis. Was not the very substance of which the statue of that god was made, an amalgam?-fit symbol of the syncretism which paid him homage. Once Serapis had guarded the shores of the Euxine, now he is the patron of Alexandria, and in him the attributes of Zeus and of Osiris, of Apis and of Plato, are adored alike by East and West. Men are learning to overlook the external differences of name and ritual, and to reduce all religions to one general sentiment of worship. For now more than fifty years, every educated man has laughed, with Lucian's satire in his hand, at the gods of the popular superstition. A century before Lucian, Plutarch had shown that some of the doctrines of the barbarians were not irreconcilable with the philosophy in which he gloried as a Greek. Plutarch had been followed by Apuleius, a practical eclectic, a learner in every school, an initiate in every temple, at once sceptical and credulous, a sophist and a devotee.

ECLECTICISM OF AMMONIUS SACCAS.

145

Plotinus looks around him, and inquires what philosophy is doing in the midst of influences such as these. Peripateticism exists but in slumber, under the dry scholarship of Adrastus and Alexander of Aphrodisium, the commentators of the last century. The New Academy and the Stoics attract youth still, but they are neither of them a philosophy so much as a system of ethics. Speculation has given place to morals. Philosophy is taken up as a branch of literature, as an elegant recreation, as a theme for oratorical display. Plotinus is persuaded that philosophy should be worship-speculation, a search after God-no amusement, but a prayer. Scepticism is strong in proportion to the defect or weakness of everything positive around it. The influence of Ænesidemus who, two centuries ago, proclaimed universal doubt, is still felt in Alexandria. But his scepticism would break up the foundations of morality. What is to be done? Plotinus sees those who are true to speculation surrendering ethics, and those who hold to morality abandoning speculation.

In his perplexity, a friend takes him to hear Ammonius Saccas. He finds him a powerful, broad-shouldered man, as he might naturally be, who not long before was to be seen any day in the sultry streets of Alexandria, a porter, wiping his brow under his burden. Ammonius is speaking of the reconciliation that might be effected between Plato and Aristotle. This eclecticism it is which has given him fame. At another time it might have brought on him only derision, now there is an age ready to give the attempt an enthusiastic welcome.

Let us venture, as Mr. Kingsley has done with Hypatia, to make him speak for himself, and imagine, as nearly as may be, the probable tenor of his lecture.

6

'What,' he cries, kindling with his theme, did Plato leave behind him, what Aristotle, when Greece and philosophy had "waned together? The first, a chattering crew of sophists: the second, the lifeless dogmatism of the sensationalist. The selfstyled followers of Plato were not brave enough either to believe or to deny. The successors of the Stagyrite did little more than reiterate their denial of the Platonic doctrine of ideas. Between them morality was sinking fast. Then an 'effort was made for its revival. The attempt at least was good. 'It sprang out of a just sense of a deep defect. Without morality what is philosophy worth? But these ethics must rest ' on speculation for their basis. The Epicureans and the Stoics, I say, came forward to supply that moral want. Each said, we 'will be practical, intelligible, utilitarian. One school, with its hard lesson of fate and self-denial; the other, with its easier

6

'doctrine of pleasure, more or less refined, were rivals in their 'profession of ability to teach men how to live. In each there ⚫ was a certain truth, but I will honour neither with the name of 'a philosophy. They have confined themselves to mere ethical 'application-they are willing, both of them, to let first prin'ciples lie unstirred. Can scepticism fail to take advantage of 'this? While they wrangle, both are disbelieved. But, sirs, ' can we abide in scepticism?-it is death. You ask me, what I 'recommend? I say, travel back across the past. Out of the ' whole of that by-gone and yet undying world of thought construct a system greater than any of the sundered parts. Repu'diate these partial scholars in the name of their masters. Leave ' them to their disputes, pass over their systems, already tottering ' for lack of a foundation, and be it yours to show how their ' teachers join hands far above them. In such a spirit of reverent ' enthusiasm you may attain a higher unity, you mount in spe'culation, and from that height ordain all noble actions for your 'lower life. So you become untrue neither to experience nor ' to reason, and the genius of eclecticism will combine, yea, shall • I say it, will surpass while it embraces, all the ancient triumphs ' of philosophy!'

Such was the teaching which attracted Longinus, Herennius, and Origen (not the father). It makes an epoch in the life of Plotinus. He desires now no other instructor, and is preparing to become himself a leader in the pathway Ammonius has pointed out. He is convinced that Platonism, exalted into an enthusiastic illuminism, and gathering about itself all the scattered truth upon the field of history; Platonism, mystical and catholic, can alone preserve men from the abyss of scepticism. One of the old traditions of Finland relates how a mother once found her son torn into a thousand fragments at the bottom of the River of Death. She gathered the scattered members to her bosom, and rocking to and fro, sang a magic song, which made him whole again, and restored the departed life. Such a spell the Alexandrian philosophy sought to work - thus to recover and re-unite the relics of antique truth dispersed and drowned by time.

Plotinus occupied himself only with the most abstract questions concerning knowledge and being. Detail and methodall the stitching and clipping of eclecticism, he bequeathed as the handicraft of his successors. His fundamental principle is the old petitio principii of idealism. Truth, according to him, is not the agreement of our apprehension of an external object with the object itself-it is rather the agreement of the mind with itself. The objects we contemplate and that which contem

PLATONISM AND NEO-PLATONISM.

147

plates, are identical for the philosopher. Both are thought; only like can know like; all truth is within us. By reducing the soul to its most abstract simplicity, we subtilise it so that it expands into the infinite. In such a state we transcend our finite selves, and are one with the infinite; this is the privileged condition of ecstasy. These blissful intervals, but too evanescent and too rare, were regarded as the reward of philosophic asceticism-the seasons of refreshing, which were to make amends for all the stoical austerities of the steep ascent towards the abstraction of the primal unity.

Thus the Neo-Platonists became ascetics and enthusiasts; Plato was neither. Where Plato acknowledges the services of the earliest philosophers-the imperfect utterances of the world's first thoughts,-Neo-Platonism (in its later period, at least) undertakes to detect, not the similarity merely, but the identity between Pythagoras and Plato, and even to exhibit the Platonism of Orpheus, and of Hermes. Where Plato is hesitant or obscure, Neo-Platonism inserts a meaning of its own, and is confident that such, and no other, was the master's mind. Where Plato indulges in a fancy, or hazards a bold assertion, Neo-Platonism, ignoring the doubts Plato may himself express elsewhere, spins it out into a theory, or bows to it as an infallible revelation. Where Plato has the doctrine of Reminiscence, Neo-Platonism has the doctrine of Ecstasy. In the Reminiscence of Plato, the ideas the mind perceives are without it. Here there is no mysticism, only the mistake incidental to metaphysicians generally of giving an actual existence to mere mental abstractions. In Ecstasy, the ideas perceived are within the mind. The mystic, according to Plotinus, contemplates the divine perfections in himself; and, in the ecstatic state, individuality (which is so much imperfection), memory, time, space, phenomenal contradictions and logical distinctions all vanish. It is not until the rapture is past, and the mind, held in this strange solution, is, as it were, precipitated on reality, that memory is again employed. Plotinus would say that Reminiscence could impart only inferior knowledge, because it implies separation between the subject and the object. Ecstasy is superior is absolute, being the realization of their identity. True to this doctrine of absorption, the pantheism of Plotinus teaches him to maintain alike, with the Oriental mystic at one extreme of time, and with the Hegelian at the other, that our individual existence is but phenomenal and transitory. Plotinus, accordingly, does not banish reason, he only subordinates it to ecstasy where the Absolute is in question. It is not till the last that he calls in supernatural aid. The wizard king

L2