Yet in spite of the majesty and purity of his vision, the devil’s advocate is not without material for an attack upon Plotinus. The charge brought by St. Augustine against “the books of the Platonists” as a whole—and by these he meant chiefly the Enneads—is well known. He found in their philosophy no response to the needs of the struggling and the imperfect. In its complete escape from the standing religious snare of anthropomorphism, Neoplatonism also escaped from the grasp of humanity. It left man everything to do for himself. For the Christian philosophy of divine incarnation, dramatized in history, and expressed in the phrase “God so loved the world,” the Neoplatonist substitutes “So the world loves God.” “No one there,” says Augustine of their school, “hearkens to Him who calleth, Come unto Me all ye that labour.” The One is the transcendent Source and the Magnet of the Universe, the object and satisfaction of spiritual passion; but not the lover, helper, or saviour of the soul. It “needs nothing, desires nothing.” The quality of mercy cannot be ascribed to it. As a term, it is as attractive and impersonal as a mountain peak; and the mystic attaining it has something of the aristocratic self-satisfaction of the successful mountaineer. The Christian and Sūfi mystics, even when most deeply influenced by Neoplatonism, have always felt the incompleteness of this conception. They see the soul’s achievement of reality as the result of two movements, one human and one divine: a “mutual attraction.” “God needs me as much as I need Him,” said Meister Eckhart. “Our natural will,” said Julian of Norwich, “is to have God, and the good-will of God is to have us.” “I was given,” says Angela of Foligno, “a deep insight into the humility of God, towards man and all other things.” “The love of God,” says Ruysbroeck, “is an outpouring and an indrawing tide.” These statements undoubtedly represent a normal element in spiritual experience; that sense of a response, a self-giving on the part of its transcendent object which—whatever explanation we may choose to give of it—is integral to a developed mysticism. Neoplatonism, considered as a religious philosophy, is impoverished by its failure to recognize and find a place for this.