ATHERTON. Never fear; I only want to look about me, and see where we are just now. Suppose ourselves sent back to the Middle Age—what will be our notion of Platonism? We can’t read a line of Greek. We see Plato only through Plotinus, conserved by Augustine, handed down by Apuleius and Boethius. We reverence Aristotle, but we care only for his dialectics. We only assimilate from antiquity what seems to fall within the province of the Church. Plato appears to us surrounded by that religious halo with which Neo-Platonism invested philosophy when it grew so devotional. We take Augustine’s word for it that Plotinus really enunciated the long-hidden esoteric doctrine of Plato. The reverent, ascetic, ecstatic Platonism of Alexandria seems to us so like Christianity, that we are almost ready to believe Plato a sort of harbinger for Christ. We are devoted Realists; and Realism and Asceticism make the common ground of Platonist and Christian. If scholastic in our tendencies, Aristotle may be oftener on our lips; if mystical, Plato; but we overlook their differences. We believe, on Neo-Platonist authority, that the two great ones were not the adversaries which had been supposed. Aristotle is in the forecourt, and through study of him we pass into that inner shrine where the rapt Plato (all but a monk in our eyes) is supposed to exemplify the contemplative life. Dionysius in the East, then, is soporific. Mysticism, there, has nothing to do save drowsily to label all the Church gear with symbolic meanings of wondrous smallness. Dionysius in the West has come into a young world where vigorous minds have been long accustomed to do battle on the grandest questions; grace and free-will—how they work together; sin and redemption—what they really are; faith and reason—what may be their limits. GOWER. Compare those great controversies with that miserable Monophysite and Monothelite dispute for which one can never get up an interest. How much we owe still to that large-souled Augustine.[39] ATHERTON. Well, for this very reason, they might worship Dionysius as a patron saint to their hearts’ content at St. Denis, but he could never be in France the master mystagogue they made him at Byzantium. His name, and some elements in his system, became indeed an authority and rallying point for the mystical tendency of the West, but the system as a whole was never appropriated. He was reverentially dismembered, and so mixed up with doctrines and questions foreign to him, by a different order of minds, with another culture, and often with another purpose, that I would defy his ghost to recognise his own legacy to the Church. GOWER. Good Hugo of St. Victor, in his _Commentary on the Hierarchies_, does certainly wonderfully soften down the pantheism of his original. Dionysius comes out from under his hands almost rational, quite a decent Christian.