Moreover, the so-called social side of religion, so grossly exaggerated by the amateur theologians of the present day, certainly receives less than justice from Plotinus; for whom the “political virtues” are merely preparatory to the spiritual life, and that spiritual life an exclusive system of self-culture, having as its final stage a “flight of the alone to the Alone.” Moral goodness is a form of beauty, and therefore “real”; but there is no suggestion that goodness as such is dearer to the Absolute than beauty or truth. The problem of evil is looked at, but left unsolved: a weakness which Plotinus shares with most mystical philosophers. Evil, he says, has no place in the “untroubled blissful life” of the three Divine Principles. Therefore it is not real, but “a form of non-being” (I. 8. 3): a doctrine which makes an unexpected reappearance eleven hundred years later in the Revelations of Julian of Norwich. Since the aim of the “wise man” is the transcendence of the sense world, there is, moreover, no adequate recognition of those sins, wrongs, and sufferings with which that “half-real” world is charged. Though effort and self-denial have their part in the Plotinian scheme, that transfiguration of pain which was the greatest achievement of the Gospel is beyond the scope of his philosophy. Its remedy for failure and grief is not humble consecration, but lofty withdrawal to that spiritual sphere where the divine element of the soul is at home, untroubled by the conflicts, evils, and chances of life. Even the selfless sorrow of a father or a patriot is to be transcended. Though in this his practice was doubtless better than his doctrine—for we know that he was a good citizen, a beloved teacher, and a loyal friend—he speaks in a tone of icy contempt of those who allow themselves to be disturbed by the world’s woe. “If the man that has attained felicity meets some turn of fortune that he would not have chosen, there is not the slightest lessening of his happiness for that. If there were, his felicity would be veering or falling from day to day; _the death of a child would bring him down_, or the loss of some trivial possession.... How can he take any great account of the vacillations of power, or the ruin of his fatherland? Verily, if he thought any such event a great disaster, or any disaster at all, he must be of a strange way of thinking” (I. 4. 7). Such a sentence, however we look at it, goes far to justify the description of the Neoplatonic saint as “a self-sufficient sage”; and explains the question with which Augustine turned from the Enneads—“When would those books have taught me charity?”