In Ann Radcliffe's The Italian (1797), shortly after having escaped from her imprisonment in the monastery of San Stephano, the heroine, Ellena di Rosalba, accompanied by the hero, Vivaldi, and his garrulous servant, Paulo, travels toward Naples through the pastoral mountain scenery near Celano. In this scene between two imprisonments (the hero will shortly be confined in the prisons of the Inquisition in Rome), Ellena and Vivaldi, two characters whose aesthetic sense is a function of their genteel social status, admire the ruins of an ancient castle and the sublime and beautiful landscape. But their aesthetic sense is also determined differentially by gender. Vivaldi is typically more sensitive to the sublime, noting how the mountains appear “threatening, and horrid,” “barren and rocky,” “mighty” and dark. Ellena observes how the beautiful - that which is sweet, soft, elegant, under cultivation, and under human control - contrasts with “the awful grandeur” of the mountains (I 58). The third observer, Paulo, apparently as a natural consequence of his low birth, sees nothing in these scenes to arouse aesthetic appreciation, admiring in the prospect only the things that remind him of his native city of Naples.

That the novel began in either 1719 with Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe or in 1740 with Samuel Richardson's Pamela is a commonplace familiar to all students of English literature. Both assertions are based upon the notion that an entirely new literary form emerged in the first half of Britain's eighteenth century, for no one familiar with early fiction would deny that an extensive body of prose fiction existed before either of these two dates. Without attempting to show that the so-called “Greek romances” of antiquity contained almost all the possibilities that the eighteenth-century novelists were to explore, as a recent critic has maintained,' I find it difficult to disqualify Cervantes's Don Quixote, some of the many picaresque fictions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and many of the extremely popular “novels” (a work of prose fiction often as long as a modern novel and frequently about contemporary life) written mainly in France and Spain during the latter century merely because they were not written in English.

Laurence Sterne has always been considered the least rule-bound of the British eighteenth-century novelists, and his Tristram Shandy is generally cited as the most eccentric production within the already varied collection of narrative types of eighteenth-century fiction. The common method of assimilating his work to the new province of novel writing is to assume that the digressions, apostrophes, typographical outrages and zany time scheme that make it so unaccountable are the result of a thoroughgoing parody of the conventions of realism established during the previous decade by Richardson and Fielding. Accordingly, when Sterne is not sporting with the immediacy encouraged by the epistolary novel by intimately addressing the reader, accumulating heaps of pointless minutiae, or confounding real time with narrative time, he is taking Fielding's modified neoclassicism to absurd conclusions by invoking the principle of selectivity to justify his missing chapters, or using that principle to authorize wild appeals to the reader about what to include and what to leave out, and by wickedly clever misapplications of the rule of ut pictura poesis (a poem should be like a speaking picture) in the shape of marbled and blackened pages, and waving lines intended to represent the flourish of a stick or the digressions of his story.'

Toward the end of The Rise of the Novel, Ian Watt makes a throwaway remark that has since become famous: that most of the novels of the eighteenth century were written by women. A recent study of the eighteenth-century novel echoes Watt with the claim that “the numerical (if not qualitative) majority [of novels] were actually written by women.” Such remarks seem to be made less with a view to statistical accuracy than in order to belittle the women novelists' achievements as merely quantitative: they are the modern version of the eighteenth-century reviewers' complaints that women writers were engrossing the trade in novels and debasing the new genre with hastily written performances. The most recent statistical and bibliographical work does not substantiate assertions of female numerical dominance, but does suggest that the sharp increase in novel production in the final decades of the century was even steeper in the case of female writers than male, and that women novelists may have equaled or slightly outnumbered men in certain subgenres such as the epistolary novel. This indicates such a high proportion of women writing fiction as compared to their share in the production of poetry or drama that it is not surprising that women were perceived as taking over, even though they were not. Such an unprecedented level of female participation in a literary genre deserves investigation.

Henry Fielding was born in 1707, into a family in straitened circumstances but of aristocratic connections. A family myth, based on forged papers, claimed descent from the Habsburgs. The combination of financial embarrassment and gentlemanly caste is emblematic of the whole atmosphere of his life, and is variously reflected in his writings. He turned to writing fiction for a living (and to practicing law for the same reason) after his career as a prominent and successful dramatist was ended by the Licensing Act of 1737, which his own antigovernment plays helped to precipitate. He is the only one among the early novelists whose origins were patrician, and the only one whose style and cultural loyalties were closely tied to the tradition we sometimes call Augustan. Early in his career he sometimes called himself Scriblerus Secundus, after the Scriblerian coterie of Swift and Pope. One of his earliest poems, however, was an unpublished mock Dunciad against these authors, discovered some years ago among the papers of his cousin Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, an adversary of Pope and his friends.

The title of this volume is misleading in a usefully revealing sense. As a classification for the many prose narratives produced in Britain over the course of the eighteenth century, “novel” is a convenient label rather than a historically accurate term, which tells us much more about our own late twentieth-century assumptions concerning narrative than about the eighteenth-century sense of what prose fiction was for its contemporary readers and writers. What we now think of as the novel - a long prose narrative about largely fictional if usually realistic characters and plausible events - did not actually solidify in the minds of readers and writers as a literary type or a set of expectations for narrative in the English-speaking world until the beginning of the nineteenth century, when Jane Austen and Walter Scott flourished, and when the novel in our current sense of it was widely accepted in Britain and elsewhere in Europe as a major literary form, as the inevitable and inescapable mode of telling a long fictional story. Eighteenth-century “novels” such as we now read and study represent part of the “prehistory” of novelistic development; they constitute the early and truly formative phase of the novel as a genre of prose fiction that has since then come to dominate readers' sense of what literary narrative should be.

In their own time they were most often called “histories,” these fictional narratives of present time that chronicled the daily experiences, conflicts, and thoughts of ordinary men and women. They went by other names, too - “romances,” “adventures,” “lives,” “tales,” “memoirs,” “expeditions,” “fortunes and misfortunes,” and (ultimately) “novels” - because a variety of features and traditions competed for attention in this new hybrid form that in the course of the eighteenth century came to dominate the reading habits of English men and women of all classes. When the term “novel” finally stuck, near the end of the century after several decades in which novels had been the most popular books in England, it represented both the power of a “new” literary form to dominate the reading public and the cultural acceptance of narratives about contemporary life and times.

Samuel Richardson belonged to the age of the Philosophes, of the wits and men (and sometimes women) of letters who created or contributed to the new projects of mind - the dictionaries, encyclopedias, grammars, histories, that gave order and definition to the pursuit of knowledge. Such landmark guidebooks, among which the great French Encyclopédie figures most prominently, are not only containers (as it were) for what is known; they also make possible the creative work of thought. Such works tend to be lengthy, in order to be thorough, like the Encyclopédie itself, or the multivolume histories such as Charles Burney's History of Music or Edward Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

Perhaps the most surprising fact about the “sentimental novel” of the eighteenth century is that the category is not just the useful invention of literary historians. The declaration “A Sentimental Novel” actually appeared on the title pages of many works of fiction of this period, and was particularly common during the 1770s and 1780s. Yet the novels that advertised themselves in this way are no longer read, even if they might once have been largely responsible for the poor reputation that “sentiment” earned, and for a change in the meaning of the word “sentimental” recorded by the Oxford English Dictionary. At the end of the eighteenth century the use of “sentimental” turned from the approbatory to the pejorative; from “exhibiting refined and elevated feelings” to “addicted to indulgence in superficial emotion.” Yet clearly this change cannot have been certain even by the 1790s, when some novels were still willing to declare themselves “sentimental.”

These novels, prominent in the now buried world of formula fiction of the late eighteenth century, must have been in Jane Austen's mind when she satirized the avid novel reader Sir Edward Denham in Sanditon (1817), the work that she began shortly before her death. “Sir Edward . . . had read more sentimental Novels than agreed with him,” she tells us, and makes him speak with ludicrous enthusiasm of their special qualities:

If Tobias Smollett is a more important figure now than he used to be, it is not because his novels seem any better now than they did thirty years ago. Neither the first, Roderick Random (1748), nor the last, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771), have attained the superstar status of Clarissa (1747-48), Tom Jones (1749), or Tristram Shandy (1760-67) - nor are they likely to. But because the kinds of questions entertained by the academy have changed so radically, the terms for assessing importance have also changed. It no longer seems quite so pressing to make a case for one of his “neglected” novels, or to assess his achievement in relation to that of his rival Fielding's, or to ask whether the novels are best described as “picaresque,” or romance, or satire, and in just what amalgam. At least for now, these questions, framed from the traditional perspective of “literature,” have yielded to a different set of concerns. The sleepy “period” that used to be “Augustan” has now become the “culture” of an “early modern England” busily engaged in a multitude of simultaneous construction projects: nationhood and empire; the literary market place and commodity culture; turnpikes and the modern subject.

The heroines of Frances Burney's four novels embody a set of contradictions so paradigmatic of the later eighteenth century that they might be said to define the ideological tensions inhering in the period's complex demarcations of woman's social place. Burney's heroines are proper, decorous, and innocent, yet preternaturally aware of social danger; diffident yet fiercely self-protective; publicly self-effacing yet bent on independence of thought and action; ambiguously presented as to class yet adhering to upper-class ambitions; apparently unknowing about social mores and expectations, yet acutely observant of others and conscious of their own desires. Many recent feminist critics have analyzed these contradictions in Burney's fiction and in her life.' The conflicts Burney's protagonists face energize the novel of courtship in the later eighteenth century. Burney insists that the period in which a young woman becomes quintessentially identified as marriageable - as single in several senses - forms a crucially liminal proving ground, a period during which fundamental social barriers are traversed.

Plotinus adheres to the classical Greek tenet that we understand and explain something's nature by knowing and articulating its causes, and he articulates the order of causes which explains physical reality as a metaphysical procession whose first principle is his One. Here, though, I shall focus on some main features of Plotinus's analysis of physical reality which prepare the way for relating it to his metaphysical principles.

Plotinus thinks of physical reality, first and foremost, as the domain of coming-to-be (genesis). His analysis of coming-to-be focuses on the coming-to-be of particular things - for example, particular plants or animals or human beings and, in so doing, he intends to continue Plato's project of assuring and explaining the real existence of those particulars and of their comings-to-be. Plotinus does so, in part, by incorporating into his analysis the notion of substance (ousia), which Aristotle introduced to denote the proper subject)s) for assertions of real existence or ascriptions which presuppose real existence; but he considers the notion of substance to be by itself insufficient for his explanatory task.

“Our concern,” remarks Plotinus, in the course of his treatise On Virtues, which is his chief discussion of the principles of ethics (I.2.6.2-3), “is not to be free of sin, but to be god.” This remark, while not by any means as hybristic as it might appear at first sight, nevertheless points to an important aspect of Plotinus's ethical thought, an aspect which must be addressed at the outset of any discussion of the subject.

To what extent, it must be asked, does Plotinus in fact have an ethical theory? This may seem a silly, even perverse question to ask, but I think we shall see that it has a point. Of course, Plotinus has an ethical stance.

We can derive this from a perusal of Porphyry's Life of Plotinus, and from many remarks scattered throughout his writings. Like most late antique philosophers, especially those of a Platonist or Pythagorean persuasion, he tended to asceticism in his personal life, to celibacy, both heterosexual and homosexual, and even to vegetarianism. 1 He was also, as we learn (Life ch. 9), a kind and caring guardian of orphans, who took his financial and educational responsibilities very seriously and was therefore much in demand in this role. He was also a person of preternaturally powerful psychic powers (ibid. chs. 10-11), which he used for virtuous purposes.

A COMPANION TO PLOTINUS

This volume, like the others in the series, is intended to serve as an aid to the reading of a major Western philosopher. One service that the editor and contributors would be glad to perform is to change the mind of those who cavil at the use of the term “major” or even “philosopher” in reference to Plotinus. Read them and him for yourself and decide. Do not be put off by ignorant detractors or uncritical enthusiasts or by the essentially empty label “Neoplatonist,” which in some circles has become nothing more than a term of abuse.

How best to assist someone who wants to read Plotinus, whose works, regardless of their quality, are intensely difficult, is not easy to determine. First of all, his thought is not simply divisible into the traditional categories of metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and so on. And so it would be positively unhelpful to suggest otherwise by offering a tidy package of essays each of which “does” a given subject. Second, Plotinus's writings can hardly be characterized as systematic, although there is a Plotinian system in the sense that there are basic entities, principles of operation, and an effort at a unified explanation of the world. The system, however, does not for the most part cut up nicely into the written works, such that an introductory exposition of a work would provide one of that system's building blocks. Third, Plotinus is a philosopher deeply and selfconsciously rooted in a long and complex tradition. To try to represent his views without some appreciation of this context could only result in grotesque distortions and it would make this book at best a treacherous “companion.”

Freedom belongs to the category of issues that affect the whole of Plotinus's metaphysics. Insofar as they are not merely beings ranged in a hierarchy but also moments in an infinite process by which the One expresses itself and infinitely offers itself as the Good, all aspects of this metaphysics, whether subjective or objective, are brought into play by freedom. Metaphysics must give an account of this process; it must express its dynamic and offer an explanation of its principal stages in narrative form. Consequently, what is at issue is nothing other than the freedom of each being to evolve or act, depending on its nature, within the context of the whole conceived systematically as depending upon and manifestating the One. “Freedom” has the same meaning at every level: that of a being to be what it is. This meaning pertains to the identity of the Good and Being: “It is obvious that the Good is in being, and in being it would clearly be for each individual in himself” (VI.5.1.23-5). One can legitimately ask, therefore, in what sense can we say that freedom is not identical with necessity? Indeed, in what sense is there even a place for freedom in a universal emanationism?

Within the history of philosophy, Plotinus is presented as the founder not only of a school, but of an entire current of thought, which we are accustomed to call “Neoplatonism.” From Hegel onward, the relationship between later thinkers belonging to this current and its founder has been presented as an increasing systematization of a rich and somewhat chaotic thought into a deductive structure. This process is seen as having reached its summit with Proclus, who distinguishes himself from Plotinus precisely insofar as he gives to Neoplatonic philosophy a systematic order. However, many relevant contemporary studies show that this model does not exhaust the complexity of the historical development of Neoplatonic thought.

The first part of this study will deal with the most prominent features of Plotinus's interpretation of the Platonic doctrine of Ideas, and it is meant to elucidate the set of basic philosophic tenets issuing from this interpretation, which later Platonic thinkers endorsed as the common inheritance of their philosophy. In the second part I shall try to set out the reasons why, within the development of Neoplatonic thought, Plotinus's representation of suprasensible reality gave way to a more complex picture.

A study of the relationship between Plotinus and Christian philosophy is far less than an investigation of the overall influence of Platonism on Christianity. It treats of the effect on Christianity of a particular Platonist philosopher of the third century a.d.: A task at once more manageable in scope and more difficult to identify precisely. For Platonism had influenced Christian philosophers before Plotinus (particularly Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria, and Origen) and it was to be influential over hundreds of years on later Christians, many of whom knew Plotinus as just a prominent name in the tradition. However, to discuss the influence of Plotinus on Christianity is not only to discuss those who knew Plotinus at first hand, and liked (or reacted against) what he taught; it is also to consider the thought of those whose understanding of Platonism was affected indirectly by the particular brand of Platonism established as dominant by Plotinus and which in modern times we have learned to call Neoplatonism.