Christian Neoplatonism tended to identify the Logos, as the Second Person of the Trinity, with the [Greek:  Nous], “Mind” or “Intelligence,” of Plotinus, and rightly; but in Plotinus the word Logos has a less exalted position, being practically what we call “law,” regarded as a vital force.[138]

Plotinus’ Trinity are the One or the Good, who is above existence, God as the Absolute; the Intelligence, who occupies the sphere of real existence, organic unity comprehending multiplicity—­the One-Many, as he calls it, or, as we might call it, God as thought, God existing in and for Himself; and the Soul, the One and Many, occupying the sphere of appearance or imperfect reality—­God as action.  Soulless matter, which only exists as a logical abstraction, is arrived at by looking at things “in disconnexion, dull and spiritless.”  It is the sphere of the “merely many,” and is zero, as “the One who is not” is Infinity.

The Intelligible World is timeless and spaceless, and contains the archetypes of the Sensible World.  The Sensible World is our view of the Intelligible World.  When we say it does not exist, we mean that we shall not always see it in this form.  The “Ideas” are the ultimate form in which things are regarded by Intelligence, or by God. [Greek:  Nous] is described as at once [Greek:  stasis] and [Greek:  kinesis], that is, it is unchanging itself, but the whole cosmic process, which is ever in flux, is eternally present to it as a process.

Evil is disintegration.[139] In its essence it is not merely unreal, but unreality as such.  It can only appear in conjunction with some low degree of goodness which suggests to Plotinus the fine saying that “vice at its worst is still human, being mixed with something opposite to itself.[140]”

The “lower virtues,” as he calls the duties of the average citizen,[141] are not only purgative, but teach us the principles of measure and rule, which are Divine characteristics.  This is immensely important, for it is the point where Platonism and Asiatic Mysticism finally part company.[142]

But in Plotinus, as in his Christian imitators, they do not part company.  The “marching orders” of the true mystic are those given by God to Moses on Sinai, “See that thou make all things according to the pattern showed thee in the mount.[143]” But Plotinus teaches that, as the sensible world is a shadow of the intelligible, so is action a shadow of contemplation, suited to weak-minded persons.[144] This is turning the tables on the “man of action” in good earnest; but it is false Platonism and false Mysticism.  It leads to the heartless doctrine, quite unworthy of the man, that public calamities are to the wise man only stage tragedies—­or even stage comedies.[145] The moral results of this self-centred individualism are exemplified by the mediaeval saint and visionary, Angela of Foligno, who congratulates herself on the deaths of her mother, husband, and children, “who were great obstacles in the way of God.”