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Synesius was still silent. 'And what do you think I saw in my dream that that man did when he found these Christians enforcing, as a necessary article of practice, as well as of faith, a baseless and bombastic metaphor, borrowed from that very Neo-Platonism out of which he had just fled for his life?
On the other hand, the many subtleties and oddities which have made the later Neo-platonism so repulsive to us, hardly existed for the consciousness of the masses, which could only adopt the fundamental ideas of the Logos system with a great effort.
At Naples Temple's dark life became still darker. He dallied, it is true, with Neo-Platonism, and boasts that he, like Plotinus, had twice passed the circle of the nous and enjoyed the fruition of the deity; but the ideals of even that easy doctrine grew in his evil life still more miserably debased.
They further suggest that Neo-Platonism was the connecting link. Such in fact it was. Monophysitism, we might almost say, was Neo-Platonism in Christian dress. The ethos of the two systems is the same, and the doctrinal resemblance is marked. It was natural that the home of pagan mysticism should cradle the kindred system of heretical Christian mysticism.
He was, roughly speaking, a Neo-Platonist. But it is not as a professed philosopher that he writes. It is only that Neo-Platonism had permeated the whole atmosphere of the age.[181:1] The strife of the philosophical sects had almost ceased. Just as Julian's mysticism made all gods and almost all forms of worship into one, so his enthusiasm for Hellenism revered, nay, idolized, almost all the great philosophers of the past. They were all trying to say the same ineffable thing; all lifting mankind towards the knowledge of God. I say 'almost' in both cases; for the Christians are outside the pale in one domain and the Epicureans and a few Cynics in the other. Both had committed the cardinal sin; they had denied the gods. They are sometimes lumped together as Atheoi. L'athéisme, voil
In the same way it might be said in the spirit of Neo-Platonism, "That which was from the beginning, which cannot be heard and seen, must be spiritually experienced as the Word of life." And so the old conception of the universe is developed and splits into two leading ideas.
The origin of this point of view may be studied in the theology of John Scotus Erigena, who lived in the ninth century at the court of Charles the Bald, and who represents a natural transition from the earliest ideas of Christianity to the ideas of Thomas Aquinas. His conception of the universe is couched in the spirit of Neo-Platonism.
Above all he acted the part of a fierce and valiant watch-dog on her behalf, against the knots of clownish and often brutal sophists, the wrecks of the old Cynic, Stoic, and Academic schools, who, with venom increasing, after the wont of parties, with their decrepitude, assailed the beautifully bespangled card-castle of Neo-Platonism, as an empty medley of all Greek philosophies with all Eastern superstitions.
The intellectualism of the heresy was largely due, as we have shown, to the Aristotelian logic and metaphysic; its mystic elements derive, as we proceed to indicate, from Neo-Platonism and kindred theosophies. Alexandria had been for centuries the home of the mystics.
The only source of Maimonides's ideas is to be sought in Neo-Platonism, in the so-called Theology of Aristotle which, however, Maimonides never quotes. He need not have used it himself.
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