But the manner and motive of their teaching have been sufficiently
exhibited ; and this was the main purpose of the discussion here upon their Spirit-Powers. I leave it to yoiurselves to read the books and examine the rest of the doctrine : you will note all through how our form of philosophy inculcates simplicity of character and honest thinking in addition to all other good qualities, how it cultivates reverence and not arrogant self-assertion, how its boldness is balanced by reason, by careful proof, by cautious progression, by the utmost circumspection — and you will compare those other systems to one proceeding by this method. You will find that the tenets of their school have been huddled together under a very different plan : they do not deserve any further examination here.
There is, however, one matter which we must on no account overlook — the effect of these teachings upon the hearers led by them into despising the world and all that is in it.
There are two theories as to the attainment of the End of life. The one proposes pleasure, bodily pleasure, as the term ; the other pro- nounces for good and virtue, the desire of which comes from God and moves, by ways to be studied elsewhere, towards God.
Epicurus denies a Providence and recommends pleasure and its enjoyment, all that is left to us : but the doctrine under discussion is still more wanton ; it carps at Providence and the Lord of Providence ; it scorns every law known to us ; immemorial virtue and all restraint it makes into a laughing stock, lest any loveliness be seen on earth ; it cuts at the root of all orderly living, and of the righteousness which, innate in the moral sense, is made perfect by thought and by self-discipline : all that would give us a noble human being is gone. What is left for them — except where the pupil by his own character betters the teaching — comes to pleasure, self-seekmg, the grudge of any share with one’s fellows, the pursuit of advantage.
Their error is that they know nothing good here ; all they care for is something else to which they will at some future time apply themselves : yet, this world, to those that have known it once, must be the starting-
II. 9- i6]
"Against the Gnostics”
point of the pursuit : arrived here from out of the divine nature, they must inaugurate their effort by some earthly correction. The under- standing of beauty is not given except to a nature scorning the delight of the body, and those that have no part in well-doing can make no step towards the Supernal.
This school, in fact, is convicted by its neglect of all mention of virtue : any discussion of such matters is missing utterly : we are not told what virtue is or under what different kinds it appears ; there is no word of all the numerous and noble reflections upon it that have come down to us from the ancients ; we do not learn what constitutes it or how it is acquired, how the Soul is tended, how it is cleaned. For to say ” Look to God ” is not helpful without some instruction as to what this looking imports : it might very well be said that one can “ look ” and still sacrifice no pleasure, still be the slave of impulse, repeating the word God but held in the grip of every passion and making no effort to master any. Virtue, advancing towards the Term and, linked with thought, occupying a Soul makes God manifest : God on the lips without a good conduct of life, is a word.
On the other hand, to despise this Sphere, and the Gods within it or anything else that is lovely, is not the way to goodness.
Every evil-doer began by despising the Gods ; and one not previously corrupt, taking to this contempt, even though in other respects not wholly bad, becomes an evil-doer by the very fact.
Besides, in this slighting of the Mundane Gods and the world, the honour they profess for the gods of the Intellectual Sphere becomes an inconsistency ; Where we love, our hearts are warm also to the Kin of the beloved ; we are not indifferent to the children of our friend. Now every Soul is a child of that Father ; but in the heavenly bodies there are Souls, intellective, holy, much closer to the Supernal Beings than are ours ; for how can this Kosmos be a thing cut off from That and how imagine the gods in it to stand apart ?
But of this matter we have treated elsewhere : here we urge that
where there is contempt for the Kin of the Supreme the knowledge of the Supreme itself is merely verbal.
What sort of piety can make Providence stop short of earthly concerns or set any limit whatsoever to it ?
And what consistency is there in this school when they proceed to assert that Providence cares for them, though for them alone ?
And is this Providence over them to be understood of their existence in that other world only or of their lives here as well ? If in the other world, how came they to this ? If in this world, why are they not already raised from it ?
Again, how can they deny that the Lord of Providence is here ? How else can He know either that they are here, or that in their sojourn here they have not forgotten Him and fallen away ? And if He is aware of the goodness of some. He must know of the wickedness of others, to distinguish good from bad. That means that He is present to all, is, by whatever mode, within this Universe. The Universe, therefore, must be participant in Him.
If He is absent from the Universe, He is absent from yourselves, and you can have nothing to tell about Him or about the powers that come after Him.
But, allowing that a Providence reaches to you from the world beyond — making any concession to your liking — ^it remains none the less certain that this world holds from the Supernal and is not deserted and will not be : a Providence watching entires is even more likely than one over fragments only ; and similarly. Participation is more perfect in the case of the All-Soul — as is shown, further, by the very existence of things and the wisdom manifest in their existence. Of those that advance these wild pretensions, who is so well ordered, so wise, as the Universe ? The comparison is laughable, utterly out of place ; to make it, except as a help towards truth, would be impiety.
The very question can be entertained by no intelligent being but only by one so blind, so utterly devoid of perception and thought, so far from any vision of the Intellectual Universe as not even to see this world of our own.
Ii. 9- I?]
" Against the Gnostics ”
For who that truly perceives the harmony of the Intellectual Realm could fail, if he has any bent towards music, to answer to the harmony in sensible sounds ? What geometrician or arithmetician could fail to take pleasure in the symmetries, correspondences and principles of order observed in visible things ? Consider, even, the case of pictures ; those seeing by the bodily sense the productions of the art of painting do not see the one thing in the one only way ; they are deeply stirred by recog- nising in the objects depicted to the eyes the presentation of what lies in the idea, and so are called to recollection of the truth — the very experi- ence out of which Love rises. Now, if the sight of Beauty excellently reproduced upon a face hurries the mind to that other Sphere, surely no one seeing the loveliness lavish in the world of sense — ^this vast orderliness, the Form which the stars even in their remoteness display — no one could be so dull-witted, so immoveable, as not to be carried by all this to recollection, and gripped by reverent awe in the thought of all this, so great, sprung from that greatness. Not to answer thus could only be to have neither fathomed this world nor had any vision of that other.
Perhaps the hate of this school for the corporeal is due to their reading of Plato who inveighs against body as a grave hindrance to Soul and pronounces the corporeal to be characteristically the inferior.
Then let them for the moment pass over the corporeal element in the Universe and study all that still remains.
They will think of the Intellectual Sphere which includes within itself the Ideal-Form realised in the Kosmos. They will think of the Souls, in their ordered rank, that produce incorporeal magnitude and lead the Intelligible out towards spatial extension, so that finally the thing of process becomes, by its magnitude, as adequate a representation as possible of the principle void of parts which is its model — the greatness of power there being translated here into greatness of bulk. Then whether they think of the Kosmic Sphere (the All-Soul) as already in movement under the guidance of that power of God which holds it through and
through, beginning and middle and end, or whether they consider it as in rest and exercising as yet no outer governance : either
approach will lead to a true appreciation of the Soul that conducts this Universe.
Now let them set body within it — ^not in the sense that Soul suffers any change but that, since " In the Gods there can be no grudging,” it gives to its inferior all that any partial thing has strength to receive — and at once their conception of the Kosmos must be revised ; they cannot deny that the Soul of the Kosmos has exercised such a weight of power as to have brought the corporeal-principle, in itself unlovely, to partake of good and beauty to the utmost of its receptivity — and to a pitch which stirs Souls, beings of the divine order.
These people may no doubt say that they themselves feel no such stirring, and that they see no difference between beautiful and ugly forms of body ; but, at that, they can make no distinction between the ugly and the beautiful in conduct ; sciences can have no beauty ; there can be none in thought ; and none, therefore, in God. This world descends from the Firsts : if this world has no beauty, neither has its Source ; springing thence, this world, too, must have its beautiful things. And while they proclaim their contempt for earthly beauty, they would do weU to ignore that of youths and women so as not to be overcome by incontinence.
In fine, we must consider that their self-satisfaction could not turn upon a contempt for anything indisputably base ; theirs is the perverse pride of despising what was once admired.
We must always keep in mind that the beauty in a partial thing cannot be identical with that in a whole ; nor can any several objects be as stately as the total.
And we must recognise, that even in the world of sense and part, there are things of a loveliness comparable to that of the Celestials — forms whose beauty must fill us with veneration for their creator and con- vince us of their origin in the divine, forms which show how ineffable is the beauty of the Supreme since they cannot hold us but we must, though in all admiration, leave these for those. Further, wherever there
II. Q. l8]
is interior beauty, we may be sure that inner and outer correspond ; where the interior is vile, all is brought low by that flaw in the dominants.
Nothing base within can be beautiful without — at least not with an authentic beauty, for there are examples of a good exterior not sprung from a beauty dominant within ; people passing as handsome but essentially base have that, a spurious and superficial beauty : if anyone tells me he has seen people really fine-looking but interiorly vile, I can only deny it ; we have here simply a false notion of personal beauty ; unless, indeed, the inner vileness were an accident in a nature essentially fine ; in this Sphere there are many obstacles to self- realisation.