Million Book Collection - The Fishers of Men Ministries

THE NEOPLATONIC PHILOSOPHY AND EPOCH 303eternity and unchangeableness, be subject to everychange in time, idolaters were not to be blamed forhonouring with divine worship the air, or the fire,or irrational animals. Bather the only blame theydeserved was that they did not worship everything.Plotinus was only faithful to the whole course ofGreek philosophy from its rise in rejecting the doctrineof creation. Even Plato and Aristotle had neverrisen above the conception of a Mind who arrangedand ordered matter, an architect of the universe, whobuilt from pre-existent materials. The creation ofmatter and mind equally out of nothing was notreached by them; or we may rather say it was opposedto certain principles which were the basis of alltheir thought. That out of nothing nothing comes,was an axiom with all Greek thinkers. It was theStoic conception of utmost impossibility that anythingshould come out of nothing. And that anythinghould happen without a cause they said was similTheir view of the order of the world was this: " Theuniverse is a unity governed by a living, reasonable,and intelligent nature, in which all things proceed byan eternal series linked and strung together; so thatin this process of becoming, every antecedent has itsresult necessarily suspended from it as a cause. Nothingtherefore in the universe is, or becomes, withouta cause, inasmuch as there is nothing in it unattachedor severed from all the constituents preceding it. Forthe universe would be distracted, * divided, * and no longer oretain its unity, nor the one order and series of itsdistribution, if a single uncaused movement could beintroduced." Again, the conception is brought out byCicero with all the lucidity of the master of Romandiction. " Fate I call the order and series of causes,