LECTURES XVII-XIX THE ABSOLUTE
The paths of Goodness, Truth, and Beauty all lead up the hill of the Lord. Plotinus shows us all three.
Dialectic is the study of first principles, which leads to intuitive wisdom. It shows us that the common source of Goodness, Truth, and Beauty must be beyond existence and beyond knowledge. The duality in unity of Spirit and the Spiritual World points to an absolute unity behind them. This unity is beyond knowledge and existence, and is revealed only in the mystical experience. In considering this train of reasoning, we must remember that (1) the nature of the Godhead is certainly unknown to us ; (2) we are not cut off from the highest form of life ; (3) we have in the mystical state an experience of formless intuition. The doctrine goes back to a famous passage in the Republic and has had a long history. Augustine says that God is essentia, not substantia. Dionysius describes God the Father as super-essential indetermination; and Erigena is not afraid to say, Deus per excellentiam non immerito Nihilum vocatur. For Plotinus, the One is beyond ovala and beyond Spirit. It is what it willed to be, but it wills nothing not yet present. It is all necessity, and the giver of freedom. It does not think, but abides in a state of wakefulness beyond Being. It is infinite, in the sense that its centre is everywhere, its circumference nowhere. It is the First Cause and Final Cause of all. Plotinus does not profess to explain how plurality can emanate from unity : the problem is equally insoluble for natural science. His hypothesis is that of Creation. The One could not be alone. It creates a second nature, without passing out of itself in doing so. The activity of the Absolute is one-sided. The manner of creation is incomprehensible by us, because it can never fall within our experience; the path back to the One can be trodden in experience. The Plotinian Absolute is different from the Hegelian, in that for Plotinus the world is not an essential factor in the Being of the Absolute. We cannot deny the possibility of this one-sided creative activity without surrendering the transcendence of God, an essential doctrine of theism.
Plotinus does not call the One the Beautiful ; but he really puts Goodness, Truth, and Beauty on the same level. The One is the beginning and end of Beauty. The First Beautiful, and Beauty, are formless.
The Good means the Perfect. The Good makes things what they are good for, and we must not take this in a narrowly ethical sense. The Good is unity as the goal of desire. The longing for self-completion and self-transcendence is universal; our whole life is a striving towards its proper goal. Virtue is not the Good, but a good. All things aspire to the Good. The Spirit in love yearns for the source of all perfection.
The character of the Plotinian mysticism is best illustrated by his own descriptions. They are based on personal experience, and closely resemble the visions of God described by other mystics. The ‘ method of abstraction,’ or via negativa, which is often blamed as a progressive emptying of the personality, ending in a blank trance, is really only intense concentration on what are believed to be the essentials of the quest. Plotinus never despises the rich world of concrete experience, still less the fullness of life in the Kingdom of the eternal Ideas. Nor is there (as some have alleged) any contradiction between his philosophy and his personal religion.
In some particulars the mysticism of Plotinus differs from the prevailing type in Catholic Christianity, (1) There is no occultism or thaumaturgy in it, and no lore of Divine favours and supernatural visitations. There are no bodily showings and no revelations imparted during ecstasy. (2) There is in Plotinus no trace of the experience of dereliction, ‘ the dark night of the Soul.’ The absence of this experience characterises philosophical as opposed to emotional mysticism ; but it is also connected with the comparatively slight consciousness of sin and alienation from God in the Neoplatonists. (3) The ecstatic state is for the Neoplatonist a very rare experience, and is reserved for those who have climbed the heights of Divine wisdom. The mystics of the cloister, on the other hand, found it by no means uncommon, and tended to regard it as an encouragement often vouchsafed to beginners. Here much must be attributed to expectation and tradition, and something to the greater strain of monastic discipline. The mystical state always follows intense mental concentration, and is not confined to religious contemplation. Poets and musicians have described similar experiences.
The importance of ecstasy in Neoplatonism has often been much exaggerated, as has that of Nirvana in Buddhism. The mystic does not crave for absorption or annihilation, but for deliverance from the fetters of separate existence : he longs to know that there is nothing between himself and God. There is and must be an element of illusion in the vision; the mind which thinks that it contemplates the One really visualises symbols of the unlimited. But the idea of the One is capable of inspiring love and devotion for the source of all goodness, truth, and beauty.
The object of this love is never personalised, as in Christianity. But the Christian mystic also transmutes the objects of his veneration into Ideas, and knows them, and his fellows, no more after the flesh. Conversio fit ad Dominum ut Spiritum. Christian Platonism invests Christ with the attributes of the Neoplatonic.