movement between the sensible and the intellectual, between the religious aspect of principles and their explanatory power. In this dialogue between the heart and Reason, truth can only be expressed through images. This is the source of the abundance of comparisons in Plotinus. This wealth of images doubtless corresponds to the same need as did the Evangelical parables: to cast the intelligible in a sensible form, rendering to intuition what would belong to Reason. But at the same time, these apparent contradictions are clarified through the hypothesis of a form of thought situated outside Space and Time. This is why Plotinus’s originality resides above all in the method that governs his reconciliations. But a method is valuable only to the extent that it expresses a need in the nature of its author. We have also shown that this was the case with Plotinus.

What place must we attribute, therefore, to Neoplatonism between Hellenism and Christianity? Regarding the former, we have sufficiently demonstrated that the Enneads contain what is purely Hellenic. But something nevertheless made Plotinus a completely original figure. In Plato’s writings, myths of the destiny of the soul seem added and juxtaposed to properly rational explanations. In Plotinus, the two processes form one body, and neither can be excluded, since they conceal the same reality. This is the difference essential to understand and which distinguishes Plotinus in his epoch. It is a difference equally valuable with regard to Christianity, since, all the more, it is the rational aspect that is missing from Christian thought. Midway between two doctrines,88 Plotinus is clearly appointed to serve as intercessor.

88. Here would be placed the question of Plotinus’s Orientalism.

b) To tell the truth, what Neoplatonism has furnished Christianitywith for its subsequent development is a method and a direction of thought.
We say a direction of thought because, in furnishing Christianity with ready-made structures for religious thoughts, Neoplatonism necessarily oriented it toward the ways of looking inward from which these structures had been created. It is toward the reconciliation of metaphysics and primitive faith that Alexandrian thought encouraged Christianity to move. But here there was little to do—the movement was given. The method, however, arrived at the right moment. It is actually according to the principle of participation that Christianity will resolve its great problems, that is to say, the problems of the Incarnation and the Trinity. But let us attempt to clarify this by means of a specific example.

Arius89relied on certain scriptural texts in order to affirm the creation of the Son by the Father and the subordination of the one to the other.
“The Lord has created me to be the beginning of his ways.”90
Neither the Angels in Heaven nor the Son are informed about the day or the hour. Only the Father knows them. Then Arius cited Johannine texts. “[If you loved me, you would have rejoiced,] because I go to the Father; for the Father is greater than I.”91 “And this is eternal life, that they know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent.”92 “The Son can do nothing of his own accord.”93

To this affirmation, Athanasius, defender of orthodoxy, opposed three explicit texts by John: “I and the Father are one.”94 “The Father is in me and I am in the Father.”95 “He who sees me sees him who sent me.”96 According to these texts, the Son was and was not God. But Neo- platonism’s classic question is: who sees only the problem posed in this manner? And how can one be surprised if it is according to a similar method that Christian thought will bring the debate to a close? The Nicean symbol (325 CE) established the principle of consubstantiality

89. For the history of Arianism, cf. Tixeront, Histoire des dogmes dans l’antiquité chrétienne, vol. II, chap. II.
90. VIII, 22.
    [Camus does not indicate the text from which this passage is cited. The text which most closely approximates it, in terms of its content, is Luke 1:76b: “For you will go before the Lord to prepare his ways.”—Trans.]
91. John 14:28.
92. John 17:3.
93. John 5:19; also John 11:33, 38; Luke 2:52; Matthew 26:39; Philemon 19; Hebrews 1:9.
94. John 10:30. 95. John 10:38.
95. John 12:45.

and opposed the begotten Christ to the Jesus created by Arius. “We believe in One God, Father Almighty, the Maker of all things visible and invisible. And in One Lord Jesus Christ, the Word of God, God from God, Light from Light, Life from Life, Only-begotten Son, first-born of all creation, before all the ages begotten from the Father, by Whom also all things were made; Who for our salvation was incarnated, and lived among men, and suffered, and rose again on the third day, and ascended to the Father, and will come again in glory to judge living and dead. And we believe also in One Holy Spirit.”97 And if this text does not seem sufficiently explicit, consider Athanasius’s Defense of the Nicene Council, in which he cites Theognoste, head of the Catechetical School of Alexandria between 270 and 280 CE.98 “The essence of the Son is not procured from without, nor accruing out of nothing, but it sprang from the Father’s essence, as the radiance of light, as the vapour of water; for neither the radiance, nor the vapour, is the water itself or the sun itself, nor is it alien; but it is an effluence of the Father’s essence, which, however, suffers no partition. For as the sun remains the same, and is not impaired by the rays poured forth by it, so neither does the Father’s essence suffer any change, though it has the Son as an Image of Itself.”99
These texts are significant and show us the nature of Neoplatonism’s influence concerning methods of resolution. Numerous texts might further demonstrate it.100 But as eloquent as these reconciliations may be,

97. In Hésèle, Histoire des Conciles, vol. I, pp. 443, 444: “Nous croyons en un seul Dieu, Père tout-puissant, créateur des choses visibles et invisibles et en un Seigneur JésusChrist, fils de Dieu, lumière des lumières, vrai Dieu, engendré, non créé, de la même substance que le Père, par qui toutes choses ont été engendrées et celles qui sont dans le ciel pour nous et notre salut, s’est fait homme, a souffert, est ressuscité le troisième jour, est monté aux cieux, et il viendra juger les vivants et les morts. Et au Saint Esprit.” [Cited in A New Eusebius, ed. J. Stevenson (London: S. P. C. K., 1957), 364.—Trans.] 98. Plotinus died in 270.
    [Notes 253 and 254 (notes 97 and 98 herein) have been reversed in my translation in order to clarify the references.—Trans.]
98. No. 25 [sic]: “La substance du Fils n’est pas venue du dehors, elle n’a pas été tirée du néant, elle provient de la substance du Père comme l’éclat provient de la lumière, la vapeur de l’eau, car la splendeur n’est pas le soleil même, la vapeur n’est pas l’eau même. Ce n’est pas cependant une chose étrangère, c’est une émanation de la substance du Père, sans que celle-ci subisse aucune division. De même que le soleil demeurant ce qu’il est n’est pas diminué par les rayons qu’il répand; de même la substance du Père ne subit aucune altération en ayant son fils pour image.”
    [Athanasius, Defense of the Nicene Council, ch. 6, section 25, trans. Newman, in The Nicene and Post Nicene Fathers, vol. 4, ed. A. Robertson (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1966), 166–67.—Trans.]
99. Saint Basil, Homélies sur le précepte “Observation,” par. 7, et Eusèbe de Césarée, Préparat. Évang. XII, 17 [sic]: “C’est le rayonnement d’une lumière qui s’en échappe sans troubler sa quiétude, etc.”
    [Eusebius, Preparation for the Gospel, 11.17, trans. E. H. Gifford (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1903), pt. 2, p. 577: “[How then and what must we conceive concerning that abiding substance?] A light shining around and proceeding from it, while it remains itself unchanged.”—Trans.]

let us not draw from them hasty or overly generous conclusions regarding Neoplatonism. Christianity lies elsewhere, and with it its fundamental originality.
c) We see therefore in what sense we can speak of Neoplatonism’s influence on Christian thought. To tell the truth, it is the influence of a metaphysical doctrine on a religious form of thought: this is what Neoplatonism provides for Christianity. It is therefore with good reason that we have taken Plotinus’s thought as the symbol of this influence. It has prepared and made more flexible formulas which, in the required time, were ready to be used by Christianity. Apart from that which is moving and original in itself, its role stops there. Too many things separate Saint Augustine and Plotinus.

Chapter Four Augustine

I. The Second Revelation

A. The Psychological Experience of Saint Augustine and Neoplatonism

a) Before demonstrating how the evolution that we have
attempted to retrace finds in Augustinianism one of its most admirable formulas, it is necessary for us to consider the Neoplatonism of Saint Augustine. Let us first state the problem: the new Platonic philosophy has exercised its influence over the great doctor. He cites several texts of the Enneads.1We can compare a certain number of Augustinian texts and Plotinian thoughts. The most suggestive in this regard concern the nature of God.

On God’s ineffability: Sermon 117, 5; De civitate Dei IX, 16 with Enneads VI, 9, 5; De Trinitate, VIII, 2 and XV, 5 with Enneads V, 3, 13; on his eternity: Confessions XI, 13 and Enneads III, 6, 7; on his ubiquity: Sermon 277, 13 and 18 with Enneads VI, 4, 2; on his spirituality: De civitate Dei XIII, 5 and Enneads VI, 8, 11. From this influence some have

1. Enneads I, 5, On Beauty; III, 6, [sic] On Providence; III, 4, On Our Allotted Guardian Spirit; IV, 3,