ill.]  THE  ESTHETIC  GROUND  OF  FAITH  217

This  beautiful  passage  shows  how  the  later  Platonism
reconciled  the  ascetic  and  aesthetic  strands  in  Plato's
philosophy  of  the  beautiful.  Stern  discipline  is  needed
to  purify  the  soul  from  the  taint  which  it  has  contracted
by  contact  with  evil  and  ugliness.  For  only  the  pure  in
heart  can  see  God  ;  only  the  purged  mind  can  behold  the
loveliness  of  divine  reahty.  This  is  no  artificial  combina-
tion of  contradictory  theories  ;  the  two  parts  complement
and  safeguard  each  other.  This  view  passed,  practically
unchanged,  into  Christianity.  St.  Thomas  Aquinas  argues,
quite  in  the  manner  of  Plotinus,  that  since  nature  is  sym-
bolic of  the  divine  mind,  and  the  human  mind  is  the  image
of  God,  the  human  mind,  if  pure  from  sin,  can  behold  God
in  nature.
