ATHERTON. So it seems. The Neo-Platonist was accustomed to call every other branch of science the ‘lesser mysteries:’ this inward contemplation, the climax of Platonism, is the _great_ mystery, the inmost, highest initiation. Withdraw into thyself, he will say, and the adytum of thine own soul will reveal to thee profounder secrets than the cave of Mithras. So that his _mysticus_ is emphatically the enclosed, self-withdrawn, introverted man.[6] This is an initiation which does not merely, like that of Isis or of Ceres, close the lips in silence, but the eye, the ear, every faculty of perception, in inward contemplation or in the ecstatic abstraction of the trance. WILLOUGHBY. So then it is an effort man is to make—in harmony with the matter-hating principles of this school—to strip off the material and sensuous integuments of his being, and to reduce himself to a purely spiritual element. And in thus ignoring the follies and the phantasms of Appearance—as they call the actual world—the worshipper of pure Being believed himself to enjoy at least a transitory oneness with the object of his adoration? ATHERTON. So Plotinus would say, if not Plato. And now we come to the transmission of the idea and the expression to the Church. A writer, going by the name of Dionysius the Areopagite, ferries this shade over into the darkness visible of the ecclesiastical world in the fifth century. The system of mystical theology introduced by him was eminently adapted to the monastic and hierarchical tendencies of the time. His ‘_Mystic_’ is not merely a sacred personage, acquainted with the doctrines and participator in the rites called mysteries, but one also who (exactly after the Neo-Platonist pattern) by mortifying the body, closing the senses to everything external, and ignoring every ‘intellectual apprehension,’[7] attains in passivity a divine union, and in ignorance a wisdom transcending all knowledge. GOWER. Prepared to say, I suppose, with one of old George Chapman’s characters— I’ll build all inward—not a light shall ope The common out-way.— I’ll therefore live in dark; and all my light, Like ancient temples, let in at my top. WILLOUGHBY. Not much light either. The mystic, as such, was not to _know_ anything about the Infinite, he was ‘to gaze with closed eyes,’ passively to receive impressions, lost in the silent, boundless ‘Dark’ of the Divine Subsistence.