St. Augustine was not hostile to the idea of a World-Soul; he regards the universe as a living organism;[205] but he often warns his readers against identifying God and the world, or supposing that God is merely immanent in creation.  The Neoplatonic teaching about the relation of individual souls to the World-Soul may have helped him to formulate his own teaching about the mystical union of Christians with Christ.  His phrase is that Christ and the Church are “una persona.”

St. Augustine arranges the ascent of the soul in seven stages.[206] But the higher steps are, as usual, purgation, illumination, and union.  This last, which he calls “the vision and contemplation of truth,” is “not a step, but the goal of the journey.”  When we have reached it, we shall understand the wholesomeness of the doctrines with which we were fed, as children with milk; the meaning of such “hard sayings” as the resurrection of the body will become plain to us.  Of the blessedness which attends this state he says elsewhere,[207] “I entered, and beheld with the mysterious eye of my soul the light that never changes, above the eye of my soul, above my intelligence.  It was something altogether different from any earthly illumination.  It was higher than my intelligence because it made me, and I was lower because made by it.  He who knows the truth knows that light, and he who knows that light knows eternity.  Love knows that light.”  And again he says,[208] “What is this which flashes in upon me, and thrills my heart without wounding it?  I tremble and I burn; I tremble, feeling that I am unlike Him; I burn, feeling that I am like Him.”

One more point must be mentioned before we leave St. Augustine.  In spite of, or rather because of, his Platonism, he had nothing but contempt for the later Neoplatonism, the theurgic and theosophic apparatus of Iamblichus and his friends.  I have said nothing yet about the extraordinary development of magic in all its branches, astrology, necromancy, table-rapping, and other kinds of divination, charms and amulets and witchcraft, which brought ridicule upon the last struggles of paganism.  These aberrations of Nature-Mysticism will be dealt with in their later developments in my seventh Lecture.  St. Augustine, after mentioning some nonsensical incantations of the “abracadabra” kind, says, “A Christian old woman is wiser than these philosophers.”  In truth, the spirit of Plato lived in, and not outside Christianity, even in the time of Porphyry.  And on the cultus of angels and spirits, which was closely connected with theurgic superstition, St. Augustine’s judgment is very instructive.  “Whom should I find,” he asks, “to reconcile me to Thee?  Should I approach the angels?  With what prayers, with what rites?  Many, as I hear, have tried this method, and have come to crave for curious visions, and have been deceived, as they deserved.[209]”