From
beauty of form and body we rise to beauty of mind and spirit, and so to
the Beauty of God Himself.
He who under the influence of true love rising upward from these
begins to see that beauty, is not far from the end. And the true
order of going or being led by another to the things of love, is to
use the beauties of earth as steps along which he mounts upwards
for the sake of that other beauty, going from one to two, and from
two to all fair forms, and from fair forms to fair practices, and
from fair practices to fair notions, until from fair notions he
arrives at the notion of absolute beauty, and at last knows what
the essence of beauty is. This ... is that life above all others
which man should live, in the contemplation of beauty absolute.[4]
That is a passage whose music re-echoes through many pages of English
literature, especially in the poems of Spenser, Shelley, and Keats.
Plato may therefore be regarded as the source of speculative mysticism
in Europe, but it is Plotinus, his disciple, the Neo-platonist, who is
the father of European mysticism in its full sense, practical as well as
speculative, and who is also its most profound exponent.
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