Erigena, whose original works are strongly coloured by Neoplatonism, is the first mediæval writer in whom this influence appears. He follows Plotinus and Dionysius closely in teaching that the Absolute Godhead is “beyond being” and therefore transcendent to the trinity of Persons; a doctrine of doubtful orthodoxy, which was of great importance in the later development of mysticism. But a still closer approximation to the thought, and especially to the psychology of Plotinus, is found in Richard of St. Victor: perhaps the greatest mystical theologian, certainly one of the most influential writers, of the early Middle Ages. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries his works, which are now hardly read, circulated through western Europe, and shaped the developing mysticism of England, Germany, and Flanders. Dante, who calls him one “who in contemplation was more than man,” places his radiant soul among those of the great teachers in the Heaven of the Sun (_Par._ X. 131). Abandoning alike the many worlds of Dionysius and the crude dualism of popular religion, Richard taught that three spheres are open to human contemplation: _sensibilia_, _intelligibilia_, and _intellectibilia_—a series closely analogous to the three worlds of Plotinus. He said that three kinds of contemplation on man’s part corresponded with these worlds. These are _mentis dilatatio_, a widening of the soul’s vision, which yet remains within the natural order: _mentis sublevatio_, an uplifting of the illuminated mind to the apprehension of “things above itself” (or, as Neoplatonists would say, intelligibles); and finally _mentis alienatio_ or ecstasy, in which the soul gazes on Truth in its naked simplicity. Then “elevated above itself and rapt in ecstasy, it beholds things in the Divine Light at which all human reason succumbs.” This divine light is the _lumen gloriæ_, the radiance of the spiritual or intelligible world, which transforms the soul and makes it capable of beholding God; a conception which became a commonplace of mediæval theology, was adopted by nearly all the mystics, and plays an important part in the _Paradiso_. “Lume è lassù, che visibile face lo Creatore a quella creatura che solo in lui vedere ha la sua pace” (xxx. 100).