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Updated: May 15, 2025
In the combination of Judaism and Hellenic philosophy made by the "Hellenizing Jews" and by the "Judaizing Hellenes," the existence of God was admitted quite as freely, and maintained quite as zealously, as by the Christians themselves, and even the incipient Neo-Platonists made no quarrel with them on this ground.
In the supposed depths of this dialogue the Neo-Platonists found hidden meanings and connections with the Jewish and Christian Scriptures, and out of them they elicited doctrines quite at variance with the spirit of Plato.
He adopted much of the teaching, but gave it a twist brain-mindwards; yet not such a twist, either, but that the Neo-Platonists in their day, and certain of the Arab and Turkish philosophers after them, could re-Platonize it to a degree and admit him thus re-Platonized into their canon.
And so, coming down through the centuries, since the Christian time, you will find the word Gnostic used every now and again, but more often the term "Theosophist" and "Theosophy"; for this term came into use in the later school, the Neo-Platonists, and became the commonly accepted word for those who claimed this possibility of knowledge, or even claimed to know.
It is supposed that the Neo-platonists of the second and third Alexandrian Schools were the followers of Indian Yogis, more especially was their theurgy brought from India by Pythagoras, according to the tradition. There still exist in India hundreds of Yogis who follow the system of Patanjali, and assert that they are in communion with Brahma.
Unsuspected sources of inspiration, as yet unutilised, abound in the writings of the Pythagoreans, the Essenes, and even the Neo-Platonists.
Perhaps, indeed, if we could exclude from emanation the idea of time, as Christians are supposed to do when they speak of the "eternal generation" of the Divine Son or the "procession" of the Holy Ghost, we might regard Philo, with the succeeding Neo-Platonists and some of the Gnostics, as approximately Pantheistic. But his vagueness and uncertainty about matter forbid such a conclusion.
The truth is that very little was known of Mr Abney's pursuits or temper. The Professor of Greek at Cambridge had been heard to say that no one knew more of the religious beliefs of the later pagans than did the owner of Aswarby. Certainly his library contained all the then available books bearing on the Mysteries, the Orphic poems, the worship of Mithras, and the Neo-Platonists.
And we may with some confidence believe that their development of the Platonic Trinity owed a good deal to the rapid spread of Christianity. Thus the sentiment, the fervour, the yearning for "salvation," the worship and devotion taught by the best of the Neo-Platonists were not so much, from Athens as from Sinai and Galilee.
Although the society of "Madre Natura" themselves accepted the allegorical interpretation which the Neo-Platonists had placed upon the pagan creeds during the first ages of Christianity, they could not suppose that the populace could ever comprehend an exposition so refined, not to say so fanciful.
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