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This teaching, called Brahmoism, from Brahma, the purest and highest of Hindoo divinities, is, under another form, the Neo-Platonism of the Greeks, or the Soofeeism of the Persians. There was even the germ of it in the grotesque medicine-man encountered by David Brainerd.
Constructed with reference to the broken-down state of ancient society, and seeking its highest aim in a regeneration of humanity, the philosophical system of Neo-Platonism was throughout ethical or ethico-religious in spirit; yet its ethics admits of no great development according to the usual topics.
The ethical part of neo-Platonism and the corresponding Christian doctrine of salvation had accordingly to be discarded; for mystical as the northern soul may gladly be in speculation, to satisfy its sentimentality, it hardly can be mystical in action, since it has to satisfy also its interest in success and its fidelity to instinct.
There Ammonius Saccas, after his lapse from the Christian faith, taught and laid the foundation of Neo-Platonism. Plotinus was the greatest of his disciples, and, though he taught at Rome for most of his life, it was in the spirit of Alexandria that he wrought his absolute philosophy, the full-orbed splendour of the setting sun of Greek thought. Neo-Platonism did not die with Plotinus.
As goddess, priestess and prophetess, woman continued to play her rôle in human affairs until the Christian period, when a remarkable transformation took place. The philosophy of dualism that emanated from Persia had affected all the religions of the Mediterranean Basin and had worked its way into Christian beliefs by way of Gnosticism, Manicheanism, and Neo-Platonism.
They conceived His thought as lost in the universal reason, His will as surrendered to the will of God, His human affections as fused in the fire of divine feeling, His body as a phantom. They could not admit that He lived the real life of a real man. They could not see the value of such a life. Neo-Platonism had paralysed their optic nerve.
It was no longer with the comparative merits of Stoicism and Epicureanism and Neo-Platonism, or with the rival literary fame of their own Ariston and Kerykos as against Meleager and Menippus and Theodorus of Gadara, that the Gerasenes concerned themselves.
In Israeli, Gabirol and the other Jewish Neo-Platonists, it occupies the same place as the Nous in Plotinus. In Bahya, whose taint of Neo-Platonism is not even skin deep, there is no universal Reason spoken of. But we do not really know what his ideas may have been on the subject, as he does not develop them in this direction.
A very different account must be given of the short work entitled 'Timaeus Locrus, which is a brief but clear analysis of the Timaeus of Plato, omitting the introduction or dialogue and making a few small additions. It does not allude to the original from which it is taken; it is quite free from mysticism and Neo-Platonism. In length it does not exceed a fifth part of the Timaeus.
Evil spirits as inevitable as good. 19. Neo-Platonism. Makes the elder gods into daemons. 22. Judaism. Recognizes foreign gods at first. Elohim, but they get degraded in time. Beelzebub, Belial, etc. 23. Early Christians treat gods of Greece in the same way. St. Paul's view. 24. The Church, however, did not stick to its colours in this respect. Honesty not the best policy.
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