1845.] Constant on New Platonism. 649 Forgive my verbosity, if I have been too long. The affair itself demanded a much more extended narration; but I was unwilling to be too loquacious. Farewell, my dear Leonard. Written at Constance, May the thirtieth, the day on which this Jerome made expiation for his heresy. Continue to love me; farewell. ARTICLE IV. NEW PLATONISM. A translation of the 15th Book of Constant Du Polythéisme Romain. THE last sect of which the history of ancient Philosophy makes mention, sought to satisfy the desire of the human mind for unity, without rejecting the reminiscences of Polytheism. It was the last effort of the human mind not to reject all that it had believed, while it attained at the same time what it had need of believing. This sect has been unfairly judged by the most opposite parties. The Christians have decried them as the defenders of Polytheism; while the unbelievers of modern times, seeing in them enthusiasts and fanatics, have taken occasion from them to declaim against enthusiasm and fanaticism. We agree with Christians, that the New Platonists had the misfortune to defend some of the forms of a religion, not susceptible of being defended; and with unbelievers, that they threw themselves into a system of exaltation and ecstasy which made them visionaries. But neither of the above parties has sufficiently examined how far the mistakes and excesses of this sect were the natural result of their situation and an inevitable error of the human mind, at a time when the absence of all belief had abandoned it to the agitation and pain of a religious sentiment condemned to vagueness, and blindly seeking a form in which it might rest. Both parties, who have judged it, have constantly considered this sect with reference to what existed before it, and not as the effect of a universal tendency towards something which was about to exist. It has been reproached with obstinately maintaining, by fects, his sleeping rugs, cloak, boots, cap, and other things,-were brought forth out of the prison, and committed to the fire; after which the dust and ashes that remained were carried away in a cart and thrown into the Rhine. means of unintelligible abstractions, a fallen religion, without its being considered that the progress of knowledge had pushed it upon the extreme frontier of this religion, where it met enemies, who agreeing with it, without knowing it, in more than one point, would not understand it, and it was forced to combat with the arms it had in hand. II. A complete exposition of the New Platonism is not within the plan of our work, any more than that of the preceding philosophers. And it would be peculiarly difficult; for the partisans of this system, founded upon the most abstract metaphysics, and nevertheless, having for an end to bring back man to the most exalted religious enthusiasm, were obliged, in order to reach this end, by so unsuitable a method, to fall into frequent sophisms, too near to excessive subtleties, and to change, without giving any warning of it, the expressions always equivocal, which they em ployed. To follow out all these things would lead us to subtleties which few persons of the present day would be disposed to go into, even for the purpose of refuting them. We shall then only relate those hypotheses of the New Platonism which are indispensable to show how they composed a religion; that is to say, those which show that this philosophy was an effort to reëstablish the communication between heaven and earth which seemed to be interrupted; and to bring man again near to the Divinity from whom he found himself separated, by the downfall of the public belief. As we have followed the ancient philosophers of Greece in all the steps they made to go from Religion; so we will follow the New Platonists in all those which they made to return to it. III. The elements of the New Platonism were, first, the principal dogmas of the sacerdotal religion, viz. the principle of emanation, the fall of man, demonology; second, abstractions, the most difficult to be seized, of the Greek philosophy; and, third, an absolute belief in all the marvels of astrology, divination and magic. The union of these three apparently incompatible elements, had already been tried by the New Pythagoreans. Abstraction had conducted them to Pantheism, for they admitted only one substance which they called God, and which, at the origin of the world, being divided into matter and form, had ceased to exist by itself. However, their passion for the marvellous took possession of this Pantheism, by supposing that the Divinity, so transformed, was, as it were, in a chrysalis state, and developed himself under 1845.] Tendency of New Platonism to the Marvellous. 651 a thousand successive appearances. This hypothesis opened a vast field to magic, and those supernatural operations which influence the series of divine metamorphoses. The New Pythagoreans were soon tired with the abstract part of their doctrine; and, giving themselves up exclusively to the marvellous portion, they finished with being only vulgar sorcerers, who founded their individual, isolated practices upon almost no theory. The New Platonists, on the other hand, sought a theory for these practices. They tried to remain faithful to the marvellous and metaphysical at once, and to combine them with each other. The end certainly was chimerical, but it was the only one, which, at that epoch, the human mind could admit; the only one which could inspire in it any interest, or awaken it from its apathy. When man experiences an imperious want, moral or physical, no philosophy which speaks to anything but this want can be listened We do not mean that the New Platonists, having felt this want, had adopted this truth, as a means of success; they experienced this want, like all of their age, and in good faith, undertook to satisfy it. to. IV. The tendency to the marvellous, to ecstasy, to supernatural communications, and everything which characterizes, in so remarkable a manner, the new Platonism, has been, in our days, attributed to a philosophy represented as peculiar to the East long before the epoch in which it was spread in the Roman Empire, and which penetrated the latter only by the mixture of nations, and the knowledge that the Greeks had thereby acquired of the dogmas of that part of the world. This question is very important; for, if it were proved that this system had been transported entire from abroad, to the Greeks inhabiting Alexandria, it would not be a necessary progress of ideas, but the course of the human mind would seem disturbed by a purely accidental circumstance. Doubtless all the elements of a pure Platonism, such as we find them in Plotinus, in Porphyry, and Jamblichus, are to be met with in the oriental philosophies and religions; we see in these emanations, the immobility and impassibility of the first principle, the hierarchy of spirits, means of human communication with spirits, and among these means, ecstasy, fasts, macerations; but we have in the former part of this work demonstrated, that these things are spread through all religions subject to priests, and were known to the Greeks a long time before the confusion of all opin 1 Opinion of Brucker and Mosheim. ions in the great Empire. We found traces of them in the first founders of the Ionian School. Pythagoras was instructed in them. Plato, although he presents them only as allegories or traditions, sufficiently indicates that he would have had no repugnance to adopting them. The mysteries, also, revealed to the initiated the fall of souls and their return to the Divinity. The Greeks therefore had opportunity, very early, to give themselves up to that enthusiastic system; but their national belief, still in its strength, and their philosophy, which followed an entirely opposite direction, held them back. It was not till after this belief was overthrown, and this philosophy fallen into Epicurism and skepticism, that the human mind in its poverty (misère), seized with avidity all the sacerdotal dogmas which presented themselves, and composed this system out of them. Every dogma, therefore, of the new Platonism, goes back to an anterior epoch, and belongs to a foreign religion; but the combination of these dogmas, the action of reducing to a philosophical principle all that is borrowed of the marvellous, of recurring to dialectics to excite enthusiasm, of having, in fine, instead of pretending to impose silence upon reasoning, in order to recommend belief, declared reasoning the basis of belief and the means of the supernatural; all this is what characterizes peculiarly the New Platonists, or rather the age of which this sect was only an expression or organ. And because it characterizes the age, it merits a serious attention. There is not here a religion which comes, with miracles, to tread reason under foot, and to order it to renounce itself; it is Reason, which again demands a belief, Reason trained without interruption during 800 years, (for from Thales to Plotinus there had been no break in the march of the Grecian philosophy). And this exercised Reason, after having employed the most subtile dialectics to destroy all the ancient dogmas, made use of these dialectics, its only instrument, to reconstruct new dogmas. V. If we ask what were the principal wants of the mind and soul at this epoch, we shall find among the most imperious, first, that desire of absolute unity of which we spoke just now; secondly, the desire of an excessive abstraction, a remnant of the habit of philosophizing; thirdly, the desire of the most refined spirituality, (for souls were excited against doctrines which represented intelligence as a fortuitous and transient product of combinations of matter); lastly, the desire of the marvellous, which should furnish new means of communicating with the Divinity, 1845.] Plotinus and his Doctrines. 653 in the place of those that the ancient worship had offered, and in which most confidence had been placed. The New Platonists undertook to satisfy these different desires or necessities of the epoch. VI. Plotinus gave the New Platonism the most regular and complete form. Many of his disciples considered him as the true founder of their sect and named their doctrine from Plotinus.1 His works alone, of all these philosophers, have been preserved entire. We take him then for the representative of this epoch of philosophy, as we took Plutarch for the representative of the preceding epoch, and we shall indicate his predecessors, only when we shall be obliged to do so, in order to remark some important difference between him and them. Plotinus was born in Egypt, towards the commencement of the third century of our era.2 The place of his birth is not precisely known. He concealed whatever related to it, being ashamed, as he said, of his body. After having frequented many philosophical schools, without having been satisfied with any, he fell into an absolute discouragement and melancholy. He afterwards assigned supernatural causes to this disposition, but it was the effect of the general condition in which the human race saw itself plunged. Its degradation, its privation of hopes, the misfortune of the world, (in the time of the wicked Roman emperors,) the absence of heaven, oppressed minds, even without their being aware of it. What proves this is, that this sadness, this oppression, were reproduced at the same epoch in almost all the men who still preserved some moral strength or intellectual force. Some wished to fly into the desert, others threw far from them the burden of life; and why had their life become so insupportable ?3 Many of them were in opulence. Almost all could count upon places and honor; they all lived in the midst of a refined civilization, in the bosom of luxury, surrounded with all which rendered existence easy, and which diversified pleasure. But they had lost the two great interests without which all is empty, dead, and without charm, religion and liberty. Plotinus believed himself born again, when he heard the first lessons of Ammonius, who had risen by his talents and eloquence from the most abject state, for he had been a street por 1 Proclus, in Theol. * Under the reign of Septimus Severus. 3 Porphyry mentions himself as having taken this resolution. It was Plotinus who prevented him. |