Million Book Collection - The Fishers of Men Ministries

288 THE FORMATION OF CHRISTENDOMliving Plotinus. Yet the imagined Apollonius waslikewise devoted to the worship of the gods : and theapparently absolute monotheism of Plotinus found roomin his system for an unlimited number of deities, inwhich he could comprehend the ancestral gods ofthe popular worship, and the visible gods, the starsand heavenly bodies. The Mind, the Second God, themost immediate revelation of the Inconceivable, pro-duces all the Ideas, all the invisible gods. They areportions of his substance, and so make up collectivelythe supersensuous world. The divine Mind comprehendsthese several minds. They are personified intogods, and gifted with the contemplative knowledgeof the intellectual world. Then again their separatepersonality vanishes away into identity with the divineMind. They are indescribably beautiful and venerable,but only through the Mind which works in them.a They are not," 1 he says, " at one time intelligent, atanother time unintelligent. They are always wise inthe impassible, stable, pure Mind, and know all things,and are acquainted not with human affairs, but theirown, and all things which the mind beholds." Here,then, he can find room for all the deities of the Greekor any other mythology. By interpreting the mythfreely used by philosophy, and by using the interpretationof the myth which had become common in philosophy,his Primal2 Being can become Uranos, thefather of the gods, and Kronos, who swallows his ownchildren, whilst that Being is also the Mind, in thathe encloses in himself his offspring which is the intelligibleworld. If Zeus is said to escape from that destiny,the real meaning here indicated is the production of the1 Ennead, v. 8, 3. Quoted by Zeller, v. 558,2 Zeller, v. 560.