Million Book Collection - The Fishers of Men Ministries

THE NEOPLATONIC PHILOSOPHY AND EPOCH 30 Icome of the Pythagorean, Platonic, and Peripateticphilosophy as to the important point of the relation ofGod to the universe. .Thus the highest reach of pre-Christian philosophicthought in the Grgeco-Roman world may amount tihis, the admission of one Supreme God who is a purelymmaterial intelligence without beginning and withoutmd ; the belief that the soul of man is an immaterialntelligence of the same nature, and related to it as apart to the whole. By an image familiarly usedis in regard to the universal Mind as a drop of thocean, as a spiration of the breath, as a sparkjof thfire. And the God so conceived is to the universe athe human soul is to its body.In the three centuries which elapse between Cicerand Plotinus, Greek philosophy does not shift itstanding-ground as to the relation between the substance of what it terms by a neuter and abstracnoun" the Divine/' and the intellectual part in man.We have seen how this kinship, or rather, identity,of nature between the divine and human mind runsthrough the doctrine of Epictetus and Marcus Aure-lius; how it no less rules the opposite school ofPlutarch, Dio, and Maximus Tyrius; how it makesup as it were the whole philosophy of the pretendedApollonius, as drawn by Philostratus.Confusion between the substance of God and thesubstance of the world, in one shape or another, andmaking something which is denominated God eitherthe material or formal cause of the visible and intelligibleuniverse, runs in various degrees throughall the philosophic thought of the nine hundredyears before Plotinus. So the doctrine of Plotinusmay be considered one in which Pantheism obtains a