The delights of love are made to stand for the raptures of union with the divine, the tavern symbolizes an oratory, and intoxication is the bewilderment of sense before the surpassing vision. Very often, if not most frequently, it cannot be doubted that the occult religious significance depends on an artificial exegesis; but there are also poems of Hafiz, Saadi, and other writers, religious in their first intentions. These are unequivocally pantheistic in tone, and the desire of the soul to escape and rest with God is expressed with all the fervour of Eastern poetry. This speculative mood, in which nature and beauty and earthly satisfaction appear as a vain show, is the counterpart of the former mood of sensuous enjoyment.
For opposite reasons, neither the Greek nor the Jewish mind lent itself readily to mysticism: the Greek, because of its clear and sunny naturalism; the Jewish, because of its rigid monotheism and its turn towards worldly realism and statutory observance. It is only with the exhaustion of Greek and Jewish civilization that mysticism becomes a prominent factor in Western thought. It appears, therefore, contemporaneously with Christianity, and is a sign of the world-weariness and deep religious need that mark the decay of the old world. Whereas Plato’s main problem had been the organization of the perfect state, and Aristotle’s intellect had ranged with fresh interest over all departments of the knowable, political speculation had become a mockery with the extinction of free political life, and knowledge as such had lost its freshness for the Greeks of the Roman Empire. Knowledge is nothing to these men if it does not show them the infinite reality which is able to fill the aching void within. Accordingly, the last age of Greek philosophy is theosophical in character, and its ultimate end is a practical satisfaction. Neoplatonism seeks this in the ecstatic intuition of the ineffable One. The systematic theosophy of Plotinus and his successors does not belong to the present article, except so far as it is the presupposition of their mysticism; but, inasmuch as the mysticism of the medieval Church is directly derived from Neoplatonism through the speculations of the pseudo-Dionysius, Neoplatonic mysticism fills an important section in any historical review of the subject.
Neoplatonism owes its form to Plato, but its underlying motive is the widespread feeling of self-despair and the longing for divine illumination characteristic of the age in which it appears. Before the rise of Neoplatonism proper we meet with various mystical or semi-mystical expressions of the same religious craving. The Neo-platonism. contemplative asceticism of the Essenes of Judaea may be mentioned, and, somewhat later, the life of the Therapeutae on the shores of Lake Moeris. In Philo, Alexandrian Judaism had already seized upon Plato as “the Attic Moses,” and done its best to combine his speculations with the teaching of his Jewish prototype. Philo’s God is described in terms of absolute transcendency; his doctrine of the Logos or Divine Sophia is a theistical transformation of the Platonic world of ideas; his allegorical interpretation of the Old Testament represents the spiritualistic dissolution of historical Judaism. Philo’s ethical ideal is renunciation, contemplation, complete surrender to the divine influence. Apollonius of Tyana and the so-called Neopythagoreans drew similar ethical consequences from their eclectic study of Plato. Wonder-workers like Alexander the Paphlagonian exhibit the grosser side of the longing for spiritual communion. The traits common to Neoplatonism and all these speculations are well summed up by Zeller (Philos. der Griechen, iii. 2. 214) as consisting in: “(1) the dualistic opposition of the divine and the earthly; (2) an abstract conception of God, excluding all knowledge of the divine nature; (3) contempt for the world of the senses, on the ground of the Platonic doctrines of matter and of the descent of the soul from a superior world into the body; (4) the theory of intermediate potencies or beings, through whom God acts upon the world of phenomena; (5) the requirement of an ascetic self-emancipation from the bondage of sense and faith in a higher revelation to man when in a state called enthusiasm.” Neoplatonism appears in the first half of the 3rd century, and has its greatest representative in Plotinus. He develops the Platonic philosophy into an elaborate system by means of the doctrine of emanation. The One, the Good, and the Idea of the Good were identical in Plato’s mind, and the Good was therefore not deprived of intelligible essence. It was not separated from the world of ideas, of which it was represented as either the crown or the sum. By Plotinus, on the contrary, the One is explicitly exalted above the νοῦς and the “ideas”; it transcends existence altogether (ἐπέκεινα τῆς οῦσίας), and is not cognizable by reason. Remaining itself in repose, it rays out, as it were, from its own fullness an image of itself, which is called νοῦς, and which constitutes the system of ideas of the intelligible world. The soul is in turn the image or product of the νοῦς, and the soul by its motion begets corporeal matter. The soul thus faces two ways—towards the νοῦς, from which it springs, and towards the material life, which is its own product. Ethical endeavour consists in the repudiation of the sensible; material existence is itself estrangement from God. (Porphyry tells us that Plotinus was unwilling to name his parents or his birthplace, and seemed ashamed of being in the body.) Beyond the καθάρσεις, or virtues which purify from sin, lies the further stage of complete identification with God (οὐκ ἔξω ἁμαρτίας εἶναι; ἀλλὰ θεὸν εἶναι). To reach the ultimate goal, thought itself must be left behind; for thought is a form of motion, and the desire of the soul is for the motionless rest which belongs to the One. The union with transcendent deity is not so much knowledge or vision as ecstasy, coalescence, contact (ἔκστασις ἅπλωσις, ἁφή, Ennead., vi. 9. 8–9). But in our present state of existence the moments of this ecstatic union must be few and short; “I myself,” says Plotinus simply, “have realized it but three times as yet, and Porphyry hitherto not once.”
It will be seen from the above that Neoplatonism is not mystical as regards the faculty by which it claims to apprehend philosophic truth. It is first of all a system of complete rationalism; it is assumed, in other words, that reason is capable of mapping out the whole system of things. But, inasmuch as a God is affirmed beyond reason, the mysticism becomes in a sense the necessary complement of the would-be all-embracing rationalism. The system culminates in a mystical act, and in the sequel, especially with Iamblichus and the Syrian Neoplatonists, mystical practice tended more and more to overshadow the theoretical groundwork.
It was probably about the end of the 5th century, just as ancient philosophy was dying out in the schools of Athens, that the speculative mysticism of Neoplatonism made a definite lodgment in Christian thought through the literary forgeries of the pseudo-Dionysius (see Dionysius the Areopagite). The doctrines of Christianity were by that time so firmly established that the Church could look upon a symbolical or mystical interpretation of them without anxiety. The author of the Theologia mystica and the other works ascribed to the Areopagite proceeds, therefore, to develop the doctrines of Proclus with very little modification into a system of esoteric Christianity. God is the nameless and supra-essential One, elevated above goodness itself. Hence “negative theology,” which ascends from the creature to God by dropping one after another every determinate predicate, leads us nearest to the truth. The return to God (ἕνωσις, θέωσις) is the consummation of all things and the goal indicated by Christian teaching. The same doctrines were preached with more of churchly fervour by Maximus the Confessor (580–622). St Maximus represents almost the last speculative activity of the Greek Church, but the influence of the pseudo-Dionysian writings were transmitted to the West in the 9th century by Erigena, in whose speculative spirit both the scholasticism and the mysticism of the middle ages have their rise. Erigena translated Dionysius into Latin along with the commentaries of Maximus, and his system is essentially based upon theirs. The negative theology is adopted, and God is stated to be predicateless Being, above all categories, and therefore not improperly called Nothing. Out of this Nothing or incomprehensible essence the world of ideas or
