The Mysticism of Plotinus by Evelyn Underhill

In spite of his enormous importance for the history of Christian philosophy, Plotinus is still one of the least known and least understood among the great thinkers of the ancient world. The extreme difficulty of his style, which Porphyry well described as "dense with thought, and more lavish of ideas than words," together with the natural laziness of man, may perhaps account for this neglect. He was by choice a thinker, contemplative, and teacher, not a writer. Therefore the Enneads, which represent merely notes of lectures hastily and unwillingly written down during the last fifteen years of his life, offer few inducements to hurried readers. The fact that he was a "mystic" has been held a further excuse for failure to understand the more cryptic passages of his works; though as a matter of fact these are the precipitations of a singularly clear and logical intellect, and will yield all their secrets to a sympathetic and industrious attention. His few translators have often been content to leave difficult phrases unelucidated, or surrounded by a haze of suggestive words; and though his splendid and poetic rhapsodies are quoted again and again, even those later mystics who are most indebted to him show few signs of first-hand study and comprehension of his system as a whole. Thanks to this same obscurity, and the richness, intricacy, and suggestive quality of his thought, most of his interpreters have tended to do for him that which he did for his master Plato: they have re-handled him in the interests of their own religion or philosophy. Of this, the Cambridge Platonists are the most notorious example; but the same inclination is seen in modern scholars.

Thus Baron von Hügel seeks to introduce a dualism between his mysticism and his metaphysics. Even the brilliant exposition of his philosophy in the Dean of St. Paul's _Gifford Lectures_ is not wholly exempt from this criticism. A comparison of his analysis with those of Baron von Hügel in _Eternal Life_, and of Mr. Whittaker in _The Neoplatonists_ makes plain the part which temperament has played in each of these works.