Ruysbroeck—a student of Dionysius and of Richard—says of it in _The Twelve Béguines_: “From the Face of the Father there shines a clear light on those souls whose thought is bare and stripped of images, uplifted above the senses and above similitudes, beyond and without reason, in high purity of spirit. This Light is not God, but it is the mediator between the seeing thought and God.” These passages and many like them can be shown to derive directly through St. Augustine from the Enneads. Thus Plotinus says: “Light is visible by Light. The _Nous_ sees itself, and this light, shining on the soul, enlightens it and makes it a member of the spiritual world” (V. 3. 8). Augustine, apparently referring to this passage among others, says: “Often and in many places does Plotinus declare, expounding the meaning of Plato, that what they believe to be the Soul of the World has its bliss from the same source as ours, namely, a Light which it is not, but by which it was created, and from whose spiritual illumination it shines spiritually” (_De Civ. Dei._ X. 2). And, of his own ecstatic experience, “I entered and beheld with the mysterious eye of my soul the Light that never changes, above the eye of my soul, above my intelligence.... He who knows the truth knows that Light, and he who knows that Light knows Eternity” (_Conf._ VII. 10). From the thirteenth century onwards, the majority of the mediæval mystics show knowledge and appreciation of those Plotinian ideas which reached them—though in an attenuated form—through St. Augustine, Dionysius, and Richard of St. Victor. Even the Franciscan and Christo-centric enthusiasm of such contemplatives as Jacopone da Todi and Angela of Foligno was affected by these lofty conceptions. Thus Jacopone takes from the Neoplatonists the three stages of spiritual experience, and describes in unequivocal language his successive achievements of that Logos-Christ—so near the Plotinian _Nous_—“_che de omne bellezze se’ fattore_,” and of the “Imageless Good” who cannot be named. So too, Angela’s successive visions of the divine fullness and beauty, and of “the ineffable Thing of which nought may be said” depend for their expression on the same philosophy.