himself believed that his dialectic logically led to an Absolute beyond existence, and this being the case, I cannot see how anything but the Absolute could be regarded by him as the ultimate home of the soul and the goal of its quest and aspiration. What I am disposed to question is the validity of this belief, in particular the finality and adequacy of the analysis he gives of the Spiritual Life and World, and the necessity for looking away from the Ideals of the Spirit in his search for Unity in his experience and in his metaphysic. My own position is not indeed that there can be nothing more ultimate than Spirit: how can we yet tell how many upper rungs there are on the ladder of ascent from Earth to Heaven?but simply that in so far as there are grades and stages beyond the Spiritual World, these must grow out of the needs of the Spirit, must emerge only when every effort to find a Unity and Harmony between the ideals of Beauty, Truth, and Right has been baffled, and that the further quest into the dazzling darkness beyond must be open-eyed, equipped with the categories and values of discarded stages, and prepared to explore the Upper Realm with a rich inventory of organizing ideas. It is indeed hard to believe that the almost Inaccessible One of Plotinus is nearer to the soul's ultimate needs than is the Spiritual World of Ideal Values.

In one crucial respect the One of Plotinus appears to me to be metaphysically unacceptable. It is, on Plotinus's own showing unintelligible. We are told that we penetrate to the One not by knowledge, but by mystic contemplation, that the One can be indicated only in negatives (Enn. VI., 8-11), that no attribute can be affirmed of it, that it is nameless, unclassifiable and in itself unintelligible, and that "it can enter into no relation with the world of existence" (Enn. VI., 8-8). How then can that which defies the effort to grasp it intellectually provide the profoundest inspiration for a metaphysical system? Must we not rather conclude that the experience of ecstasy in which, rapt from existence out of the body and away from mind, we are consciously united with "an actual Presence superior to any knowing" (Enn. VI., 9.4), overpowering and religiously determinative as its emotional effect may be, cannot claim to be a climax of metaphysical import. It has no intelligible character. The One in and for Itself neither knows nor can be known, is not an intelligible object. Hence no Metaphysic can grapple on to this experience as its inspiration and primal source. It can be a fount of unreasoned love and impassioned adoration, but not a fount of philosophy.

Now in the attempt to get beyond this impasse we get the surest indication from Plotinus himself. Plotinus draws an important distinction between the One as it is in and for Itself and the One

in its relation to Nous or Spirit. The former alone is ineffable; the latter can be spiritually discerned and intellectually grasped. "The One is not intelligible in itself, says Plotinus,, "but only to the Divine Intellectual principle (i.e. to Nous);* and further (Enn. V. 6.2)" In regard to the Intellectual Principle the One will be intelligible, an object of true knowing, but within Itself it will strictly neither possess Intellection nor be the object of Intellection." Taking these passages as a basis, I would venture the conclusion that the true source of the Metaphysics of Plotinus does not lie where he conceives it to lie, namely in the Vision of the One as it is in and for Itself, but in that normal spiritual Vision, intelligible as well as spiritual, of the One in relation to our spiritual nature, the unifying Bond of the Spiritual World. Briefly it is the One in relation to Nous and not the One in and for Itself that is the goal of the Dialectic, adequately meeting the deepest need of the metaphysical impulse.

We might indeed argue to some effect that even on the premisses accepted by Plotinus himself, the One as sheer Transcendence should logically be ruled out. Plotinus admits the immanence of the Ideals in our life and endeavour, he recognises the mandatory note which their presence brings into the life, and it is true that this note of absolute authority and sovereignty can spring only from a power that is essentially independent of the experience which it inwardly regulates. But in what precise sense independent? The independence here at issue is that proper to a transcendent it is agency which precisely because it is transcendent (and not merely external) has power to penetrate the life and world of our ordinary experience and yet in doing so retain its otherworldliness and intrinsic sovereignty. This is surely the transcendence which our religious sense requires, the qualitative transcendence which is the very condition of the deepest spiritual intimacy, the beyond that is within. The logic of the Plotinian dialectic provides for this truly religious transcendence within the limits of the spiritual world. Why then go further and fare worse?

We seem to find a reason for the failure of the Spirit world to satisfy Plotinus in his own failure to realise adequately the true nature of love. If Love is identified with Aspiration, how can it be ultimate? As Aspiration Love always points beyond itself. It is

Vol. 1,

* Plotinus: The Ethical Treatises, translated by Stephen Mackenna. p. 141. The extracts that immediately follow are from Mackenna's translation of the Preller-Ritter extracts.

† Cf. Enn. VI, 9.6. "The One is good not in regard to Itself, but in regard to the lower that is capable of partaking in it." Also Enn. VI. 9.3. "When we call it a Cause we are not making an assertion about It, but about ourselves: we speak of what we derive from It, while It reamins steadfast within Itself.

the Soul in need but it is not that which can satisfy fully the need of the soul.

The way beyond Plotinus lies, it seems to me, through the Christian reinterpretation of the meaning of Love, as conveyed through its Christian doctrine that "God is Love," and through the searching criticism of the great Augustine. Augustine stands as it were at the watershed of Ancient and Modern Thought. His philosophy was learnt in the school of Plato and Plotinus, but he found in Christianity something that he could not find in the schoolphilosophy. Christianity as it appealed to Augustine had its foundation in the belief that the Logos was made flesh and dwelt among us and took upon himself the form of a servant." Briefly, as Inge puts it,* "the religious philosophy to which Augustine was converted, and in which he found satisfaction, was the Platonism of Plotinus with the doctrine of the incarnation added to it." "The Logos made flesh, that I found not there," was the decisive consideration which made him a Christian." (id. ii., 208).

Now I am not concerned to ask whether the doctrine of the Incarnation in the strict sense expresses the truth of Christianity as Christ himself conceived it or whether it simply expresses that truth as Augustine conceived it. I say " in the strict sense," for it is clear, as the very etymology of the word suggests, that the Incarnation is primarily concerned with the descent into a human body and that any universalizing of the doctrine which excludes the Logos made flesh may be a doctrine of divine immanence, but will not be a doctrine of Incarnation. What impressed Augustine was not so much the fundamental and distinctive doctrine that God is Love, but that this God of Love took the human form in Jesus Christ. For our purposes it will be sufficient to consider the doctrine "God is Love" in its more general form. Even in this more general form it seems to me to be the true spiritual solvent of the Inaccessible One of Plotinus. Perhaps it may also prove to furnish the conception whereby the Ideal World of the Spirit may be unified without going beyond and outside itself for its unity and source of Inspiration.

It is not easy to reconcile the view that God is Love with the view which identifies Him with the Ideal. The Platonic Socrates in the Symposium argues that whereas the object of Love is ideal,beautiful, good and true, Love itself is not ideal but is rather a desire or aspiration after the Ideal. The aspiration is one thing, the ideal another, and we must not confuse the loving and the beloved. The Platonic inference is that God could not himself be love

id. II. 207.

or aspiration, for in that case He would be empty and imperfect and would not Himself be Truth, Beauty and Goodness, not Himself be the Ideally Good. The true function of Love is to mediate, to mediate between God and man. Aspiration is the ladder that leads from earth to Heaven, but it is not Heaven itself.

We may perhaps agree that God is not Love in so far as by love we mean no more than aspiration. We may agree that that which can alone satisfy our deepest need cannot be the mere prolongation or intensification of that need and of the quest for its satisfaction. We may agree that however we conceive the object of our need and aspiration, he must be the Good that satisfies, he must be a Perfect Being in the sense that the Ideals are his very attributes. And yet we might then go on to insist that none the less this Perfect Being was still essentially Love since the supreme function of Love is not aspiration but redemption.

With this insight we cross the watershed which divides Platonism from Christianity. If, by love, we mean, not aspiration after the ideal, but the saving help given to the soul in need, we seem to get nearer to a valid conception of God as Love. This does not imply that God ceases to be the Perfect One, unless freedom from the need to love and save is to be regarded as essential to perfection. May not the truth rather be that the Perfection after which one yearns must be intrinsically a loving and a saving power?

It is as a saving Power at any rate that Christianity has conceived its God. Christianity recognises that man's deepest need is to be delivered from evil through the power of redemptive perfection and that man's love for his fellows must follow in this primary essential, the pattern of God's love for man. The love of the Christian has no doubt an element of aspiration,-it has and must have the hunger and thirst after righteousness and eternal life: but the purification of the human soul is to be sought not directly through a cult of self-realization, but indirectly through the service of humanity. There is the refreshment of the soul in prayer, but this is subsidiary. The winning of the world is the essential thing: briefly, disregarding all the side-tracking inevitable in a great world-movement, the essential stress is laid on the love that redeems rather than on the love that aspires. World-redemption is the goal and not the happiness and bliss of the elect. The characteristic maxim of Plotinus "Never cease working at thy Statue" suggests, says Inge, "a scheme of self-improvement more like that of Goethe than the Christian quest of holiness." (id. ii. 172).

And with this stress on redemptive action goes the horror of Evil. To regard evil as a mere effect of perspective, a good in the making, good in the wrong place, a privation of good, something

negative and illusory, a mere missing of the mark-is to have lost touch with the essential attitude of Christianity and its most distinctive characteristic. Plotinus has little or nothing to say of the "dark night of the soul" (id. ii. p. 150). It means repentance and remorse and a sense of sin. But Plotinus, like Spinoza, discourages all contrition, and Inge reminds us of Spinoza's saying: "It is manifest that we can always get along better by reason and love of truth than by worry of conscience and remorse." Christian mysticism considers quite otherwise the darkness of evil. If the Christian struggle for spiritual victory is more intense than the Platonic it is because the contrasted blackness of evil is felt more vividly. Plotinus knows of no devil and no active malignancy in the nature of things. There is no sense of horror in his philosophy from first to last. The temper of the Neo-platonic saint is serene, cheerful, manly. But, as Inge remarks (id. ii. 152), “We are meant to feel the strength of the forces that pull us downward as well as of those which draw us upward: indeed we can hardly know one without the other." "Only Christianity," he adds, elsewhere, "only Christianity among all religions and philosophies has really drawn the sting of the world's evil." (cf. id. ii. 208-9). It is only Christianity that has realised that the conquest of evil demands the voluntary acceptance of unmerited suffering.

The great strength of Christianity as compared with Platonism and Neoplatonism more particularly, lies in its profound grasp of the problem of evil and of suffering. The Stoic sage,-and the Neoplatonic ethic is essentially stoical in cast,-will "practise benevolence without pity, acquiesce in inevitable evil without revolt, and love the Lord without hating the thing that is evil." (id. ii. 232). The Christian attitude is here profoundly different and far more thoroughgoing. Its very symbol is the Cross, and the Cross means self-sacrifice. Christianity and the Cross are inseparably associated, and the Cross was foolishness to the Greeks. But it expresses the profoundest answer to the problem of evil.

Let us now gather our threads together. The Christian doctrine that God is Love rests on the view that man's deepest need is to triumph over evil, not only in his own heart but in the great arena of the world, and that it is only the power of Love, understood as sympathy, service and self-sacrifice, that can conquer evil and redeem the world. Love here is in primary place not the imperfect, aspiring after perfection, but rather perfection sharing our sorrows and bearing our burdens, and revealing its sovereignty through service. As such Love for the Christian, I take it, is God, but it is no longer the God of Plotinus.