“Plotinus (A.D. 205-270) was not a Christian, but his influence on Christian mystics was enormous; he compared human beings to the choir standing around a choir master but with their attention distracted by things going on about them, so they fail to sing in tune or in time. He held that creation was a series of steps leading away from the One (or God); he called those steps emanations. (The Kabbalists later borrowed his ideas, as William Blake was to borrow from the Kabbalah.) This is definitely a non-Christian view, for Plotinus’s evil is a negative thing, depending upon how many steps you have taken away from the One; it is like someone walking away from a lighted house at night, moving further into the darkness of the garden. But why should people walk away, unless tempted by the Devil? Because, says Plotinus, we are empty-headed, and easily distracted. The philosopher is the man who determinedly ignores distractions and multiplicity, and tries to see back towards the One. ‘Such,’ he concludes, ‘is the life of gods and of godlike men; a liberation from all earthly bonds, a life that takes no pleasure in earthly things, a flight of the alone to the alone.”