LECTURES XIV-XVI THE SPIRITUAL WORLD
Spirit is the best word for Nous. Reality consists in the Trinity n Unity of Nous, Noesis, and Noeta, in which the whole nature of the Absolute is manifested. Spirit and the spiritual world involve each other and cannot be separated. Plotinus is not an idealist or mentalist, in the modern sense.
The doctrine of Ideas in Plato and Plotinus. The view of Plotinus is that so far as every thought in Spirit is also an eternal form of being, all the thoughts of Spirit are Ideas. Each Idea is Spirit, and Spirit is the totality of the Ideas. The kingdom of the Ideas is the true reality.
The categories of the Spiritual World. The category of Being is unsatisfactory; Thought and its Object are not a pair of the same kind as Identity and Difference, Change and Permanence. The whole theory of categories is open to criticism. Proclus supports my contention that Plotinus would have done better to discard the Platonic and Aristotelian lists, and to make Goodness, Truth, and Beauty the attributes of Spirit and its world. It would then be clear that the Spiritual World is a Kingdom of Values, Values of truly existing Reality. Goodness, Truth, and Beauty are in our experience ultimates. They cannot be fused, or wholly harmonised, but they have the characteristic of mutual inclusion which belongs to the Spiritual World.
The individual Spirit is the same life as the individual Soul, only raised above itself and transfigured into the Divine image. Blessed Spirits are fully known to each other ; in heaven the whole is in every part. And they enjoy unbroken communion with the Great Spirit, who is really the God of the Neoplatonic religion. Individuality is not lost, but there is distinction without separation.
Eternal life is not “the future life”. The Platonic doctrine of immortality is very different from the wish for survival in time. The kind of immortality which physical research endeavours to establish would be the negation of the only immortality which the Platonist desires or believes in.
Eternity is an experience and a conception partly latent and partly patent in all human life. It is life amid truths which are neither born nor die. The Christian schoolmen intercalated aevum between time and eternity. Spiritual creatures, as regards their affections and intellections, are measured by time ; as regards their natural being, by aevum ; as regards their vision of glory, they participate in eternity (Aquinas). Aevum seems to be perpetual duration, and as such a symbol or sacrament of eternity. We cannot dispense with modes of envisaging eternity which depend on spatial and temporal imagery ; but popular religion has impoverished the idea of eternal life by insisting on its pictures of a material fairyland.