gathered up into one harmonious
whole. This seems very near to acosmism, but there are other passages
which are intended to guard against this error. For instance, in the
_Confessions_[198] he says that "things above are better than things
below; but all creation together is better than things above"; that is
to say, true reality is something higher than an abstract
spirituality.[199]

He is fond of speaking of the _Beauty_ of God; and as he identifies
beauty with symmetry,[200] it is plain that the formless "Infinite" is
for him, as for every true Platonist, the bottom and not the top of
the scale of being. Plotinus had perhaps been the first to speak of
the Divine nature as the meeting-point of the Good, the True, and the
Beautiful; and this conception, which is of great value, appears also
in Augustine. There are three grades of beauty, they both say,
corporeal, spiritual, and divine,[201] the first being an image of the
second, and the second of the third.[202] "Righteousness is the truest
beauty,[203]" Augustine says more than once. "All that is beautiful
comes from the highest Beauty, which is God." This is true Platonism,
and points to Mysticism of the symbolic kind, which we must consider
later. St. Augustine is on less secure ground when he says that evil
is simply the splash of dark colour which gives relief to the picture;
and when in other places he speaks of it as simple privation of good.
But here again he closely follows Plotinus.[204]

St. Augustine was not hostile to the idea of a World-Soul; he regards
the universe as a living organism;[205] but he often warns his readers
against identifying God and the world, or supposing that God is merely
immanent in creation. The Neoplatonic teaching about the relation of
individual souls to the World-Soul may have helped him to formulate
his own teaching about the mystical union of Christians with Christ.
His phrase is that Christ and the Church are "_una persona_."

St. Augustine arranges the ascent of the soul in seven stages.[206]
But the higher steps are, as usual, purgation, illumination, and
union. This last, which he calls "the vision and contemplation of
truth," is "not a step, but the goal of the journey." When we have
reached it, we shall understand the wholesomeness of the doctrines
with which we were fed, as children with milk; the meaning of such
"hard sayings" as the resurrection of the body will become plain to
us. Of the blessedness which atten