THE CAMBRIDGE MEDIEVAL HISTORY I 298
The Neoplatonist Influence on St. Augustine
20.6. The Neoplatonist Influence on St. Augustine
In these writings the personal existence of God is threatened and the direct road to Him is closed. “God is the Being of all that is.” The Absolute Good and Beautiful is honoured by eliminating all qualities, and therefore the non-existent must participate in the Good and Beautiful. God, who can only be described by negatives, can only be reached by the surrender of all personal distinctions and a voluntary descent into uncreated nothingness. As has been well said, the name God came to be little more than the deification of the word "not." All this is the language of Brahmanism or Buddhism, and, but for the corrective influence of Christian experience on the one hand and of Greek love of beauty on the other, it would have led to Oriental apathy and hatred of the world which God called good.
The Cappadocian fathers — Basil and the two Gregorys — who were Platonists at heart, and were driven, by the argument that God being simple must be easily intelligible, to assert in strong terms the essential mystery of the divine being, yet maintained that imperfection does not render human knowledge untrue, and that the wisdom displayed in the created universe enables the mind to grasp, by analogy, the divine wisdom and the uncreated beauty. This habit of tracing analogies between the seen and the unseen is characteristic of Platonism, Christian or heathen, and, we may remark in passing, it bears pleasant fruit in that love for natural beauty that marks the writings of the Cappadocians.
The mind of Plotinus is seen still more clearly in Synesius of Cyrene (A.D. 365-412), country gentleman, philosopher, and bishop, who was in every sense a Neoplatonist first and a Christian afterwards. All his serious thought is couched in the language of the schools, while his hymns are merely metrical versions of Neoplatonist doctrine. When he was chosen bishop he was reluctantly ready to give up his dogs — he was a mighty hunter — but not his wife, nor his philosophy, although it contained much that was opposed to current Christian teaching on such important points as the end of the world and the resurrection of the body. He probably represents the attitude of many at this transition period, though few possessed his clearness of mind and boldness of speech.
The influence of Neoplatonism in the West is less marked, but it is there. Hilary's curious psychology, according to which soul makes body, is Plotinian, though he may have taken it from Origen; and his own sketch of his spiritual progress from the darkness of philosophy to the light gives evidence that he first learnt from Neoplatonism the desire for knowledge of God and union with Him (cf. de Trin. i. 1-13).
Augustine was yet more deeply affected by the philosophers, especially in his early works. It was Plato, interpreted by Plotinus, whom he read in a Latin version, that, as he himself tells us, delivered him from materialism and pantheism. Thus the ecstatic illumination recorded in the Confessions (vn. 16, 23) was called forth by the perusal of the Enneads and is indeed expressed in the very words of Plotinus.
Again, in more than one passage there is a distinct approach on his part to the Plotinian Trinity (one, mind, soul), or at least a statement of the Christian Trinity in terms of being, knowledge, and will, that seems to go beyond the limits of mere illustration or analogy. Again, Augustine accepts and repeats word for word the Neoplatonic denial of the possibility of describing God. "God is not even to be called ineffable, because to say this is to make an assertion about Him" (de doctr. christ. i. 6); but, like the Cappadocians, his feet are kept from the hopeless via negativa by an intense personal conviction of the abiding presence of God and by a real vision of the divine. His mind and heart taught him the real distinction between the old philosophy and the new religion, but all his deepest thoughts about God and the world, freedom and evil, bear the impress of the books which first impelled him "to enter into the inner chamber of his soul and there behold the light."
The appeal away from the illusion of things seen to the reality that belongs to God alone, the slight store set by him on institutions of time and place, in a word, the philosophic idealism that underlies and colours all Augustine's utterances on doctrinal and even practical questions and forms the real basis of his thought, is Platonic. And, considering the vast effect of his mind and writings on succeeding generations, it is no exaggeration to say with Harnack that Neoplatonism influenced the West under the cloak of church doctrine and through the medium of Augustine. Boethius, the last of the Roman philosophers and the first scholastic, certainly imitated Augustine's theology, and thought like him as a Neoplatonist.
At the same time it must be remembered that Platonism was the philosophy that commended itself most naturally to Christian or even to heathen thinkers. Aristotle had had no attraction for Plutarch, while Macrobius deliberately set out to refute him. The influence of Aristotle is certainly seen in the treatment of particular problems by individual writers, but the only school that deliberately preferred his method to his master's is that of Antioch. To the mystical and intuitive movement of Alexandria the Antiochenes, especially Diodorus and Theodore of Mopsuestia, opposed a rationalism and a systematic treatment of theological questions which is obviously Aristotelian.
But there were two articles of the old religion that went deeper and spread further into the new than any philosophic method. These were, first the mediators between God and man that were so prominent in Neoplatonism, and secondly the magic that was its inseparable accompaniment.
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