Plotinus wrote against the paganizing Christians, or Gnostics.  Like all great men, he was accused of plagiarism.  A defence of great men accused of literary theft would be as valuable as Naude’s work of a like name about magic.  On his death the Delphic Oracle, in very second-rate hexameters, declared that Plotinus had become a demon.

Such was the life of Plotinus, a man of sense and virtue, and so modest that he would not allow his portrait to be painted.  His character drew good men round him, his repute for supernatural virtues brought “fools into a circle.”  What he meant by his belief that four times he had, “whether in the body or out of the body,” been united with the Spirit of the world, who knows?  What does Tennyson mean when he writes: 

   “So word by word, and line by line,
      The dead man touch’d me from the past,
      And all at once it seem’d at last
   His living soul was flashed on mine.

   And mine in his was wound and whirl’d
      About empyreal heights of thought,
      And came on that which is, and caught
   The deep pulsations of the world.”

Mystery!  We cannot fathom it; we know not the paths of the souls of Pascal and Gordon, of Plotinus and St. Paul.  They are wise with a wisdom not of this world, or with a foolishness yet more wise.

In his practical philosophy Plotinus was an optimist, or at least he was at war with pessimism.

“They that love God bear lightly the ways of the world—­bear lightly whatsoever befalls them of necessity in the general movement of things.”  He believed in a rest that remains for the people of God, “where they speak not one with the other; but, as we understand many things by the eyes only, so does soul read soul in heaven, where the spiritual body is pure, and nothing is hidden, and nothing feigned.”  The arguments by which these opinions are buttressed may be called metaphysical, and may be called worthless; the conviction, and the beauty of the language in which it is stated, remain immortal possessions.

Why such a man as Plotinus, with such ideas, remained a pagan, while Christianity offered him a sympathetic refuge, who can tell?  Probably natural conservatism, in him as in Dr. Johnson—­conservatism and taste—­caused his adherence to the forms at least of the older creeds.  There was much to laugh at in Plotinus, and much to like.  But if you read him in hopes of material for strange stories, you will be disappointed.  Perhaps Lord Lytton and others who have invoked his name in fiction (like Vivian Grey in Lord Beaconsfield’s tale) knew his name better than his doctrine.  His “Enneads,” even as edited by his patient Boswell, Porphyry, are not very light subjects of study.

LUCRETIUS

To the Rev. Geoffrey Martin, Oxford.