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Plotinus in Aristotelian disguise contributed not a little to their conception of God and his relation to the universe. The so-called "Theology of Aristotle" is a Plotinian work, and its Pantheistic point of view is in reality foreign to Aristotle's dualism.
You have begun now the Plotinian ascent from multiplicity to unity, and therefore begin to perceive in the Many the clear and actual presence of the One: the changeless and absolute Life, manifesting itself in all the myriad nascent, crescent, cadent lives.
Alike in respect to Aristotle as in reference to Plotinus, the Jewish philosophers found their models in Islamic writers. The "Theology of Aristotle" which, as we have seen, is really Plotinian rather than Aristotelian, was translated into Arabic in the ninth century and exerted its influence on the Brethren of Purity, a Mohammedan secret order of the tenth century.
This signifies that its trend of thought is Neo-Platonic, which combines Aristotelian physics with Platonic and Plotinian metaphysics, ethics and psychology. An examination of the book itself confirms Maimonides's judgment.
"Yes, Mac, the new life dawns upon me, no Plotinian trance, no somnambulic introspection, but a genuine awakening of the soul to a sense of its own beauty." "Prodigious! as Dominie Sampson would say. Nay, I am not laughing at you, Clarian," said Mac, pointing to the picture; "there is enough to make me believe in you, though how you achieved it I cannot imagine." "The means, Mac?
He was a proof from fact that body and sense and all that is distinctively human could be sublimated into the universal substance, which is the primary effluence of the Plotinian One. In a word, the incarnate Christ was, to them, the personification of the Neo-Platonist unio mystica.
Polytheism was shown to be the soil from which all trinitarian conceptions naturally spring the Brahmanic, Zoroastrian, Homeric, Plotinian, as well as the Christian trinity the latter being a Greek idea engrafted on a Jewish stalk.
In the middle of the fifth century, when monophysitism was at its zenith, Proclus was fashioning an intellectual machinery to express the Plotinian system. The story of Hypatia evidences the dominant position of Neo-Platonism in Alexandrian culture. The violence of Cyril's measures against her shows what a menace to the Church that philosophy was.
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