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They move one to another in delicate responsive measures, now violent, now gentle, now in conflict, now in peace; yet ever weaving the pattern of a ritual dance, and obedient to the music of that invisible Choragus whom Boehme and Plotinus knew. What is that great wind which blows without, in continuous and ineffable harmonies? Part of you, practical man.
And among its greatest members, such as Plotinus, Porphyry, Proclus, the religious influence of the East was distinctly apparent. True, they followed Socrates and Plato in reverence for knowledge as the unfailing begetter of virtue. But their speculations about the divine Being were touched by Oriental emotion.
"My guardian, my tutelary dæmon," he exclaimed, "visible manifestation of Æsculapius! Then I am not forsaken by the immortal gods." "Take away the monster," cried Leaena, in violent agitation, "the nasty thing! Plotinus, how can you? Oh, I shall faint! I shall die! Take it away, I say. You must choose between it and me." "Then, Madam," said Plotinus, civilly but firmly, "I choose it."
What Dr. Inge, who quotes these words, says of Plotinus declares his own character. He speaks of "the intense honesty of the man, who never shirks a difficulty or writes an insincere word." But though he is associated in the popular mind chiefly with modernism, Dr. Inge is not by any means only a controversial theologian. Above and beyond everything else, he is a mystic.
In this house we now find Emerson, at the age of thirty-one, studying Plato and Plotinus, and the English mystics, but also, with Sarah Ripley, studying Goethe and savants of the new school, like Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire. Here was conceived his first book, "Nature."
This is the way to arrive at dilemmas, antinomies, and blind-alleys of thought. The philosophies of Plato, of Aristotle, and of Plotinus were developed from the thesis that there is more in the immutable than in the moving, and that it is by way of diminution that we pass from the stable to the unstable.
You, I know, expect and long to become an angel after death: I am under the strange hallucination that my body is part of me, and in spite of old Plotinus, look with horror at a disembodiment till the giving of that new body, the great perfection of which, in your eyes, and those of every one else, seems to be, that it will be less, and not more of a body, than our present one. . . . Is this hope, to me at once inconceivable and contradictory, palpable and valuable enough to you to send you to that Italian Avernus, to get it made a little more certain?
Very learned men, Origen and Plotinus among the rest, were let into the secret, and grew so fond of it, that the former, willing to support his opinion by something very solid, catches at the authority of an Apocryphal book, ascribed to the patriarch Joseph, where Jacob is introduced speaking to his twelve sons: "I have read in the register of heaven what shall happen to you and your children."
"Here she is!" exclaimed Porphyry, as a woman of masculine stature and bearing, with the remains of beauty not unskilfully patched, forced an entrance into the room. "Plotinus," she exclaimed, "behold the most impassioned of thy disciples. Let us celebrate the mystic nuptials of Wisdom and Beauty. Let the claims of my sex to philosophic distinction be vindicated in my person."
Not a single one would have stayed if I had not yielded to their demands, which, as regarded the bath, involved the addition of exedrae and of a sphaeristerium." "And what can they want with an amphitheatre?" groaned Plotinus. "They say it is for lectures," replied Porphyry; "I trust there is no truth in the rumour that the head of the Stoics is three parts owner of a lion of singular ferocity."
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