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The Neo-Platonic union with the deity was too vague a conception to bring about communal worship, and the deity had no definite rôle in securing the salvation of men.
When the early teachers of Christianity at Alexandria strove to show the harmony of the Gospel with the great principles of the Greco-Jewish philosophy, it underwent new modifications, and the Neo-Platonic school, which sprang up in Alexandria three centuries B.C., was completed in the first and second centuries of the Christian era.
But at the very moment of its decline, philosophy entered the Church; almost to wreck her by inspiring Arius and Pelagius. The teachings of the first were clearly Neo-Platonic; of the second, Stoic: and all the errors prevalent in the Church from the third to the sixth century originated in Arianism and Pelagianism.
In this sense knowledge was, for Philo and those who thought like him, the birth of Christ within the world of spirit. The Neo-Platonic philosophy, which developed contemporaneously with Christianity, was an elaboration of Philo's thought. Then I am sure that I have been conscious of the better part of myself.
Here we see at the outset Ibn Zaddik's Neo-Platonic tendency to make a short cut to knowledge through the study of man instead of the painful and laborious mastery of the preliminary sciences. And so it was that the Neo-Platonists added little to Aristotle's study of nature, concentrating their attention upon the intelligible or spiritual world.
It is true that there is no mention of these writings till the sixth century; it matters little when and where they were written, the point is that they give an account of Christianity which is clothed in the language of the Neo-Platonic philosophy and presented in the form of a spiritual contemplation of the higher world.
Thus he believes with Gabirol that all things corporeal as well as spiritual are composed of matter and form; but when it comes to defining what the matter of spiritual things may be, he tells us that we may speak of the genus as the matter of the species a doctrine which is not so Neo-Platonic after all.
The Reformation and counter-reformation. Protestantism an expression of character. It has the spirit of life and of courage, but the voice of inexperience. Myth should dissolve with the advance of science. But myth is confused with the moral values it expresses. Neo-Platonic revision. It made mythical entities of abstractions. Hypostasis ruins ideals. The Stoic revision.
We also sketched briefly the schools of philosophy which influenced the Jewish writers and determined their point of view as Kalamistic, Neo-Platonic or Aristotelian.
No; Jesus was a son of Israel, and his ideals were those of his race. The few words quoted from the fourth gospel are in the spirit of the larger belief, but they are Neo-Platonic in their origin, as is the whole Johannine gospel, and cannot be taken as fairly representing the mind of the greatest of the Jewish seers.
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