DEAN INGE AND PLOTINUS

Press, Volume LXX, Issue 21122, 24 March 1934, Page 15

DEAN INGE AND PLOTINUS

mysticism in religion AND ART , res the rasss.) >: U IK'l.CUurT.j When I read the cabled utterances c f Dean Inge I ain relieved to think that in a few years this version of j,irn will be quite unknown and iv.-ept away. His journalism is in noway distinctive or admirable. Ke jjas said himseh: Sermons and newspaper articles are nc t literature. Tiic former arc meant to be heard ur.ee. and not read at all: lhe latter are adapted to a racy."y'.j existence of a few hours. This has not prevented him front i collecting his articles into book form; and it :s when they are read thus, apart from their environment of newsprint and the terse—sometimes staccato —expression of temporary things, that they arc least able to appeal His political and social views arc orthodox, but arc without the freshness and quick comprehension of existing states of mind that are features of journalism where it comes closest to literature. A vein of hardness can be traced through all his writings, even into those farthest removed jrom thearena; and when facing issues outside his own experience he can be disconcertingly short-sighted.

Beyond Science The fascinating thing about Dean Inge is that this intolerance—if that : be not too harsh a word—is at odds with liberal attributes in a mind thai has been able to respond to the scientific climate of a long and busy <life. Younger writers, are inclined to disparage his thought, insisting that rhe is quite out of touch with current iideas; and if they pin him down to -unwise statements on literary and matters they can triumph •without much difficulty. But Dean 3nge has been at work in a region ; jiot affected by the moods of eesthe*lic criticism; at his best he is above lhe fog, and finds his intellectual fellowship among those who ponder 'the problems of all time and space irather than some darkening segment in which can be seen the signs of decay. He has learned to smile—not without irony—at the announce"ments of science. His faith rests on foundations far more durable than those of physics; he has shown that the inevitability of decay can be faced cheerfully enough in the light of a faith that turns us towards a perfect and changeless God. To the devout Christian, confident in the reality of a world beyond time, the teaching that stresses mutability becomes anything but a pessimism.

There is indeed a sort of sombre eagerness in the way that Dean Inge

receives the newest teachings cf science. The universe is running down. In remote futurity the warmth will be out of the sun. and a frozen earth will spin lifelessly in the void. Man avill" vanish a'.vay, and his works will be forgotten. The creeping ice will cover his proudest monuments, until the ruin? of a city are like the sprawled fossil cf sonic iticredible monster, crushed within the chambers of earth. Darkness sp.d desolation! Here is a picture to be drawn with proDhetic energv. One can feel resurgent beliefs, and discover, even in the quietness of philosophy, the lineaments of men ?,*ho flung abroad the word—the warning and the hope—in the feverish days that followed Calvary. I ; ; not this the eschatology of old. longer-sighted than in the past, but concerned as ever with the end that shall be the beginning? , Dean Inge's most valuable work has been done in quietness, for the few. In his studies of Plotinus (for each new book that comes from him is another stage in the making clear df his master's thought) lie is able to employ his genius in its natural way. At first sight this mav seem to j place him aDart from the realities i of life, accounting for the contra- ' dictions and inaccuracies of his journalism; but nothing is really remote that lias truth in it. The restlessness of mankind is like a movement of many waters, a rising up and sinking down of individual lives, so that at the same time a confused multitude of beliefs e::ist tc- | gether in the one place, and out of their innate disharmony produce a tinity that becomes the spiritual climate of the whole. How can one 'man separate himself from all the of his fellows and discover what is needed for them, and j sound the words that will reach jthem most quickly? This is the iproblem of thinkers who, like Dean Jlnge, feel that their own faith and Yim of essentials arc not so much a j (possession as a responsibility. Yet |the history of thought has shown • many times that the lonely thinkers tome nearest to men in the end.

Mysticism The Dean has conducted his study 6nd interpretation of Plotinus not only in his relationship to the Neoplatonic philosophy of which he was the central and luminous thinker, but as the source of certain ideas that have become a living force in Christianity. He is one of a group who have laboured since the beginning of this century on behalf of religious states that have been attacked by psychology as being merely pathological: but from his neaniess to Plotinus he has taken a certain authority, until it would seem that lis has become the conductor of a vital current that j-ave been wasted on barren regions but is now at work in the Christian Church and taking its share of a growing spiritual activity.

Until twenty-five or thirty years S£o the wrote in 19241 it was customto rpeak of the mystics with amujecient, pity, cr contempt ... It is now nuich more widely recognised that Prayer is the mystical act par excel--£nce, and to di c pa;»ge mysticism is to disparage the devotional life.

/•ot the least factor in this change 01 public opinion has been his own effort. In 1899 he wrote Christian Mysticism" for the Bampton Lectures of that year, and in a scholarly examination cf the great 'pystic philosophies seemed able to decide the direction of future rc*llat culminated in his stuay t Plotiims. There are a mental staeuity and sound orthodoxy in Dean . that fitted him naturally for task; he is quite the antithesis of £aV re^§i°us mind which ■lanes. an eager surrender to mystitr . e ?dencies anc * * s i nca Pat>le of f u Sls ' tr ue, of course, that •ystlcism is the least describable f mental and spiritual states; and if there is made available the

beautiful writing and clear thinking i of a Saint Teresa the whole ex-1 perience is too nebulous and other- i worldly for a plausible presentation. ' Dean Inge makes no attempt to com- i municate the incommunicable, and ! at the same time he is able to view I calmly those borderline cases that lose all significance— except of the wrong kind—in a fume of hysteria. He knows that mysticism, if reduced to fundamentals, is no more than the unsought climax of a devotional life: and although he is attentive to evidence, and is able to believe that the great mystics have indubitably ! experienced the '"flight of the Alone j to the Alone," he never ceases to: stress his belief in the need for a i quiet shading down of the intoler-; able brightness to The capacity of j normal lives. i According to the Dean, it is the ! psychology of Plotinus that is the centre _of the Neoplatonic system, i and it is his theory of higher prin- j ciples—his trinity—that has been of greatest value to Christian thought. His trinity is made up of the One.! Mind or Spirit, and Soul. The One ! has been described as pure form. I "with no admixture of any sort of matter." Mind implies n plurality, > and is really a potentialit\ T for re-j ceiymg forms, a medium through which the '"ldeas" that are the hea-1

venly patterns of all tilings can come into actual existence. But a mediating principle is needed, and this is the function of Soul. "Soul it is'' (writes W. R. V. Bradc) "which forms the lower matter, so far as may be. after the divw? Ideas of Mind which she sees as the object of her desire." Dean Inge has emphasised the theory of the "double" nature of man. which completes the central concept of this psychology and points a way in which the triad of Plotinus can become effective. purer duality simply means 'iun one side of the soul is in contact with the intelligible world (that is. the world of Tdeas\ and lhe other with the sensible world. Beyond this lie all the implications of mvstieism.

The Idea The gift of a philosophy to living thought can be little more than a fragment of its original intention. Something is absorbed, and much is rejected. But there are systems of thought which make an immediate appeal to us, not because they can be accepted in entirety and make a satisfying explanation of life, or provide a belief by which men may live, but because they set before us concepts of great dignity and power. As with all philosophies. the svstem of Plotinus undergoes modifications from its interpreters, and his theory of Ideas (in itself a modification of Plato's concept) can be curiously transformed and adapted in individual minds. It in easy to confuse and destroy abstractions when we attempt to relate them to the terms and experience of life; but I think this theory of pure Ideas must always he stimulating to those who have known the moods of authorship: the quietness of preparation in which may be apprehended the approach cf thoughts as if they came softwinged but real, the breaking in of the tide and the resistance of the body, and in the end that feeling of being possessed which has been known to all who write creatively.

The "Ideas"' of Plotinus are "the ultimate form in which things are regarded by Intelligence or by God." Tiius, it would seem that mysticism is an unconscious effort to see the parity of things before they have re-ached and received their outline from the imprint of Mind. It is not too much to suggest, therefore, that the better kinds of authors — and particularly poets—are obeying an impulse indubitably mystical. The imaginative worker is for the most part content with the familiar shapes of things; but at times there is a' movement of the mind towards unknown margins; and it is a simple fact of composition that for every detail or situation expressed v

vividly in words there must be a mental counterpart that quite transcends it in its illusive power of reality. As thought reaches away from natural phenomena and draws near to all that is unknown there ecmes a curious awareness of an experience that is quite beyond words, as it were a raw material of phenomena, not yet through the process of dilution that fits it for the channels of sense. As we wait thus for ideas that chape themselves in a blurred way there come around us a confused light and a looming of things within it, not unlike the action of sunlight in a mist that lies above the hills of a far country. And we feel, as we wait and strive in our silence, that if the moment could pause until the mist were gone, there would be shown to us all the clear features and sunlit ways of a new land. But with this impression there comes a sort of despair. For as we think of sunlight, and of hills and plains broken into receptacles for the great shadows of cloud, we realise that the mind is at work in its own way, that the unsubstantial material is being transformed, even as we apprehend its unreal presence, into the shapes and visible vesture of our own world. At such moments we understand the painful climbing of the philosophic mind towards the realisation of ideas, and can see the impossibility of ultimate knowledge. But the jov of effort remains.

ELECTRON You never know how I'll behave, A most indefinite article; Sometimes you see me as a wave, And sometimes as a particle. You wake poor nature from her dream And fiercely cross-examine her; You find she is nothing but a stream And you can't put a dam in her. Y'ou'd like to make her stand and stay While you assess her quality: But she is to-morrow, not to-day, You never reach finality. And. after all, your questioning A vain and waste adventure is, The bland Hindu has known the thing For over fifty centuries. Y'ou with your toil and effort vast And he in wise passivity Attain the selfsame goal at last, The truth of relativity. He saw it with the inward eye— No need of trigonometry— While you can only find it by Wild physics and photometry. Y'ou need your sciences in herds, Your maths and electricity; He puts me in a dozen words Of crystalline simplicity. —A.W.

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