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ALEXANDRINISM. Amid all this, metaphysics namely, the effort to comprehend the universe appears somewhat at a discount. Alexandrinism is a "Neoplatonism" that is, a renewed Platonism and, as considered by its authors, an augmented one. PLOTINUS. Plotinus taught this: God and matter exist. God is one, matter is multiple and divisible.
Most famous among the philosophers of Alexandria was the maiden Hypatia, who had studied in the still active schools of Athens, and taught the doctrines of Plato and Aristotle and the then popular tenets of Neoplatonism her fame being chiefly due to her violent and terrible death at the hands of fanatical opponents of her teachings.
With the Sylph at anchor, we lay off Muloa for three nights, and Leavitt gave us our fill of Farquharson, along with innumerable digressions about volcanoes, neoplatonism, the Single Tax, and what not. There was no keeping Leavitt to a coherent narrative about the missing Farquharson.
The ideas of Mohammedan philosophers, borrowed for a great part from Neoplatonism, the pantheism and the emanation theory of Mohammedan mystics are certainly still further distant from the simplicity of Qoranic religion than the orthodox dogmatics; but all those conceptions alike show indubitable marks of having grown up on Mohammedan soil.
These theories, some of which, as has been seen, go beyond dogma and form at least the beginning of heresy, are all impregnated with Platonism, especially with Neoplatonism, and lead to the supposition that Scotus Erigena possessed very wide Greek learning. ARABIAN SCIENCE. A great literary and philosophical fact in the eighth century was the invasion of the Arabs.
In India they seem indigenous to the soil and not imported by the Aryan invaders, for they are not clearly enunciated in the Rig Veda, nor formulated before the time of the Upanishads . They were introduced by Buddhism to the Far East and their presence in Manichaeism, Neoplatonism, Sufiism and ultimately in the Jewish Kabbala seems a rivulet from the same source.
They were attached to the conception of a thing: of an organized body instituted for a definite end, disciplined in a definite way, and remarkable for the possession of definite and concrete doctrine. One can talk, in speaking of the first three centuries, of stoicism, or epicureanism, or neoplatonism; but one cannot talk of "Christianism" or "Christism."
And so, to compare great things with small, there was a truly practical human element here in the Christian teaching; purely ethical and metaphysical, and yet palpable to the simplest and lowest, which gave to it a regenerating force which the highest efforts of Neoplatonism could never attain. And yet Alexandrian Christianity, notoriously enough, rotted away, and perished hideously. Most true.
He, too, is a commentator and a deducer; all has been discovered; and he tries to discover nothing more. Those who followed him seem to have commented on his comments. With him Neoplatonism properly ends. Is its last utterance a culmination or a fall? Have the Titans sealed heaven, or died of old age, "exhibiting," as Gibbon says of them, "a deplorable instance of the senility of the human mind?"
He was thinking, I am sure, of Troeltsch's significant prophecy, and warning, that the Future of Christian philosophy depends on the renewal of its alliance with Neoplatonism. Let no man suppose that the intellectual virtues are outside the range of religion.
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