Neoplatonism was
petted by luxurious and heathen popes, as an elegant play of the
cultivated fancy, which could do their real power, their practical
system, neither good nor harm. And one cannot help feeling, while
reading the magnificent oration on Supra-sensual Love, which
Castiglione, in his admirable book "The Courtier," puts into the mouth
of the profligate Bembo, how near mysticism may lie not merely to
dilettantism or to Pharisaism, but to sensuality itself. But in
England, during Elizabeth's reign, the practical weakness of
Neoplatonism was compensated by the noble practical life which men were
compelled to live in those great times; by the strong hold which they
had of the ideas of family and national life, of law and personal faith.
And I cannot but believe it to have been a mighty gain to such men as
Sidney, Raleigh, and Spenser, that they had drunk, however slightly, of
the wells of Proclus and Plotinus. One cannot read Spenser's "Fairy
Queen," above all his Garden of Adonis, and his cantos on Mutability,
without feeling that his Neoplatonism must have kept him safe from many
a dark eschatological superstition, many a narrow and bitter dogmatism,
which was even then tormenting the English mind, and must have helped to
give him altogether a freer and more loving conception, if not a
consistent or accurate one, of the wondrous harmony of that mysterious
analogy between the physical and the spiritual, which alone makes poetry
(and I had almost said philosophy also) possible, and have taught him to
behold alike in suns and planets, in flowers and insects, in man and in
beings higher than man, one glorious order of love and wisdom, linking
them all to Him from whom they all proceed, rays from His cloudless
sunlight, mirrors of His eternal glory.
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