Million Book Collection - The Fishers of Men Ministries

THE NEOPLATONIC PHILOSOPHY AND EPOCH3 I 9exalted. If the use of free-will on earth constitutedhis trial, and made up the quality of his virtue, thereward of both would not consist in the suppressionof the gift, but in such a union of the will with Godas left it free and made it blessed. The sight of Godis the accomplishment of this.6. It is in the doctrine^on which the Christianbelief is founded that the most thorough antagonismbetween the Neoplatonist system and the Church wasrooted. To the Neoplatonist the union of mind withmatter was the fall of the soul: the encumbrance, theimposition, so to say, of the body upon the mind, inwhich lay the ever-present cause of evil. Nothingtherefore could be more abhorrent from his principlesthan the assumption of a human body by the DivineWord. Thus what to the Christian was the greatest,the most magnificent, the tenderest work of God, wasto the Neoplatonist a scandal, a degradation, a blasphemy.That God should take to Him a materialbody, and work through that body the sanctification ofmatter, that His body should become the tree of lifeto every generation of His people, was to overthrowfrom its very foundation the philosophy we have beenconsidering, for it was a denial equally of its twoparts, its doctrine as to mind and its doctrine as tomatter. The human mind was not a particle "* of thedivine mind, for God assumed a human soul in orderto destroy the rebellion of every human soul againstits Maker. The union of the body with the mindwas not the cause of evil in man, for God assumed abody in order to give eternal life to every hi mbody. Thus the Incarnation carried in itself the cure)r all those erroneous notions respecting both mindnd body which had travelled down to Plotinus, if