on the essentially Greek doctrine which it received,—a reaction
all the more inevitable from the very affinity between the Stoic
sage and the ancient Roman ideal of manliness. It was natural
that the earlier Stoics should be chiefly occupied with delineating
the inner and outer characteristics of ideal wisdom and virtue,
and that the gap between the ideal sage and the actual philosopher,
though never ignored, should yet be somewhat overlooked.
But when the question “What is man’s good?” had been
answered by an exposition of perfect wisdom, the practical
question “How may a man emerge from the folly of the world,
and get on the way towards wisdom?” naturally attracted
attention; and the preponderance of moral over scientific
interest, which was characteristic of the Roman mind, gave
this question especial prominence. The sense of the gap between
theory and fact gives to the religious element of Stoicism a new
force; the soul, conscious of its weakness, leans on the thought
of God, and in the philosopher’s attitude towards external
events, pious resignation preponderates over self-poised indifference;
the old self-reliance of the reason, looking down on man’s
natural life as a mere field for its exercise, makes room for a
positive aversion to the flesh as an alien element imprisoning
the spirit; the body has come to be a “corpse which the soul
sustains,”[1] and life a “sojourn in a strange land”;[2] in short,
the ethical idealism of Zeno has begun to borrow from the
metaphysical idealism of Plato.
In no one of these schools was the outward coherence of tradition so much strained by inner changes as it was in Plato’s. The alterations, however, in the metaphysical position of the Academics had little effect on their ethical teaching, as, even during the period of Scepticism, they History of Plato’s school. appear to have presented as probable the same general view of human good which Antiochus afterwards dogmatically announced as a revival of the common doctrine of Plato and Aristotle. And during the period of a century and a half between Antiochus and Plutarch, we may suppose the school to have maintained the old controversy with Stoicism on much the same ground, accepting the formula of “life according to nature,” but demanding that the “good” of man should refer to his nature as a whole, the good of his rational part being the chief element, and always preferable in case of conflict, but yet not absolutely his sole good. In Plutarch, however, we see the same tendencies of change that we have noticed in later Stoicism. The conception of a normal harmony between the higher and lower elements of human life has begun to be disturbed, and the side of Plato’s teaching that deals with the inevitable imperfections of the world of concrete experience becomes again prominent. For example, we find Plutarch amplifying the suggestion in Plato’s latest treatise (the Laws) that this imperfection is due to a bad world-soul that strives against the good,—a suggestion which is alien to the general tenor of Plato’s doctrine, and had consequently been unnoticed during the intervening centuries. We observe, again, the value that Plutarch attaches, not merely to the sustainment and consolation of rational religion, but to the supernatural communications vouchsafed by the divinity to certain human beings in dreams, through oracles, or by special warnings, like those of the genius of Socrates. For these flashes of intuition, he holds, the soul should be prepared by tranquil repose and the subjugation of sensuality through abstinence. The same ascetic effort to attain by aloofness from the body a pure receptivity for supernatural influences, is exhibited in Neo-Pythagoreanism. But the general tendency that we are noting did not find its full expression in a reasoned system until we come to the Egyptian Plotinus.
The system of Plotinus (205–270 A.D.) is a striking development of that element of Platonism which has had most fascination for the medieval and even for the modern mind, but which had almost vanished out of sight in the controversies of the post-Aristotelian schools. At the Neoplatonism. same time the differences are the more noteworthy from the reverent adhesion which the Neoplatonists always maintain to Plato. Plato identified good with the real essence of things;
with that in them which is definitely conceivable and knowable. It belongs to this view to regard the imperfection of things as devoid of real being, and so incapable of being definitely thought or known; accordingly, we find that Plato has no technical term for that in the concrete sensible world which hinders it from perfectly expressing the abstract ideal world, and which in Aristotle’s system is distinguished as absolutely formless matter (ὕλη). And so, when we pass from the ontology to the ethics of Platonism, we find that, though the highest life is only to be realized by turning away from concrete human affairs and their material environment, still the sensible world is not yet an object of positive moral aversion; it is rather something which the philosopher is seriously concerned to make as harmonious, good and beautiful as possible. But in Neoplatonism the inferiority of the condition in which the embodied human soul finds itself is more intensely and painfully felt; hence an express recognition of formless matter (ὕλη) as the “first evil,” from which is derived the “second evil,” body (σῶμα), to whose influence all the evil in the soul’s existence is due. Accordingly the ethics of Plotinus represent, we may say, the moral idealism of the Stoics cut loose from nature. The only good of man is the pure existence of the soul, which in itself, apart from the contagion of the body, is perfectly free from error or defect; if only it can be restored to the untrammelled activity of its original being, nothing external, nothing bodily, can positively impair its perfect welfare. It is only the lowest form of virtue—the “civic” virtue of Plato’s Republic—that is employed in regulating those animal impulses whose presence in the soul is due to its mixture with the body; higher or philosophic wisdom, temperance, courage and justice are essentially purifications from this contagion; until finally the highest mode of goodness is reached, in which the soul has no community with the body, and is entirely turned towards reason. It should be observed that Plotinus himself is still too Platonic to hold that the absolute mortification of natural bodily appetites is required for purifying the soul; but this ascetic inference was drawn to the fullest extent by his disciple Porphyry.
There is, however, a yet higher point to be reached in the upward ascent of the Neoplatonist from matter; and here the divergence of Plotinus from Platonic idealism is none the less striking, because it is a bona fide result of reverent reflection on Plato’s teaching. The cardinal assumption of Plato’s metaphysic is, that the real is definitely thinkable and knowable in proportion as it is real; so that the further the mind advances in abstraction from sensible particulars and apprehension of real being, the more definite and clear its thought becomes. Plotinus, however, urges that, as all thought involves difference or duality of some kind, it cannot be the primary fact in the universe, what we call God. He must be an essential unity prior to this duality, a Being wholly without difference or determination; and, accordingly, the highest mode of human existence, in which the soul apprehends this absolute, must be one in which all definite thought is transcended, and all consciousness of self lost in the absorbing ecstasy. Porphyry tells us that his master Plotinus attained the highest state four times during the six years which he spent with him.
Neoplatonism, originally Alexandrine, is often regarded as Hellenistic rather than Hellenic, a product of the mingling of Greek with Oriental civilization. But however Oriental may have been the cast of mind that welcomed this theosophic asceticism, the forms of thought by which these views were philosophically reached are essentially Greek; and it is by a thoroughly intelligible process of natural development, in which the intensification of the moral consciousness represented by Stoicism plays an important part, that the Hellenic pursuit of knowledge culminates in a preparation for ecstasy, and the Hellenic idealization of man’s natural life ends in a settled antipathy to the body and its works. At the same time we ought not to overlook the affinities between the doctrine of Plotinus and that remarkable combination of Greek and Hebrew thought which Philo Judaeus had expounded two centuries before; nor the fact that Neoplatonism was developed in
