The Philosophy of Plotinus, Volume 1

INTRODUCTORY

THE honour which the University of St. Andrew’s has conferred upon me has given me the opportunity of dehvering in the form of lectures the substance of a book on which I have worked, with many interruptions, for about seventeen years. My interest in Plotinus began while I was WTiting my Bampton Lectures on Christian Mysticism, which I gave at Oxford in 1899. Mysticism is a very wide subject, and the name has been used more loosely even than ‘Socialism.’ We are unable in Enghsh to mark that distinction between the higher and the lower kinds of mysticism which the Germans indicate when they call the one Mystik and the other Mysticisfttus. To many persons a mystic is a dreamer who takes a detached and unpractical view of life. Others suppose the essence of mysticism to be the search for ‘ loose types of things through all degrees,’ as if nature were a divine cryptogram, the key to which is furnished through some kind of occultism. The Roman Catholic Church associates the word closely with what are called mystical phenomena, those strar^ge experiences of the cloistered ascetic which that Church ascribes to the direct agency of supernatural powers, benign or maleficent, and which modem psychology believes to be purely subjective and for the most part pathological. There are few stranger things in literature than the semi-official Roman Catholic books on ‘ mystical theology,’ compiled with great learning and a show of scientific method, but consisting largely of cases of levitation, incandescence, trans verberation, visions and auditions of every kind, which the mystics of the cloister, many of whom have been canonised as saints, have recorded as their own experiences. The main task for the theologians and spiritual directors who collect these cases is not to establish the objective reality of these phenomena, which is taken for granted, but to show how ‘ divine mysticism ‘ may be distinguished from diabolical imitations of it. It is, however, only fair to say that the wisest of the Catholic writers on mysticism discourage the tendency to attach great importance to miraculous favours and temptations. These experiences are a subsidiary and not indispensable part of the great mystic quest, which is the journey of the Soul, by an inner ascent, to the presence of God and to immediate union with Him. The stages of this ascent are mapped out with the same precision as the supernatural visitations above mentioned, and these records of the Soul’s progress have a recognised value for psychologists as well as for divines. Although much importance must be allowed to the effects of suggestion in all matters of religious experience, the books of the medieval mystics have great value as first-hand evidence of the normal progress of the inner life when the mind and will are wholly concentrated upon the vision and knowledge of God, The close agreement which we find in these records, written in different countries, in different ages, and even by adherents of different creeds (for Asia has here its own important contribution to make) can only be accounted for if we hold that tlie mystical experience is a genuine part of human nature, which may be developed, like the arts, by concentrated attention and assiduous labour, and which assumes the same general forms whenevet»« and wherever it is earnestly sought.