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Updated: May 7, 2025
Then may we not say, Simmias, that if, as we are always repeating, there is an absolute beauty, and goodness, and an absolute essence of all things; and if to this, which is now discovered to have existed in our former state, we refer all our sensations, and with this compare them, finding these ideas to be pre-existent and our inborn possession then our souls must have had a prior existence, but if not, there would be no force in the argument?
What we feel has nothing to do with a pre-existent mood; we are transported into a world washed clean of all past experience æsthetic or sentimental. When we have picked ourselves up we begin to suppose that such a state of mind must have been caused by something of which the significance was inherent and the value absolute. "This," we say, "is absolute beauty." Perhaps it is.
The legends have no more difficulty in dealing with the particular experiences of the pre-existent states than in enriching and adorning the incidents of his earthly life; and both are doubtless about equally authentic. Gautama discarded the idea of a divine revelation; he rejected the authority of the Vedas totally.
This consisted, according to his surmise, in the disruption of a parent mass during its sweep round the star latest visited. Be this as it may, the fact is undoubted that numerous comets fall into groups, in which similar conditions of motion betray a pre-existent physical connection.
And undoubtedly it founders on the facts of embryology, which disclose nothing to suggest the unfolding of a pre-existent miniature model, but show us how the egg-cell divides into two, into four, and so on, with continued multiplication followed by varied arrangements and rearrangements of cells—in short, all the complex changes which constitute development.
We mean by the doctrine respecting the Person of Jesus, that He is, with reference to His pre-existent state, the Logos and Only-begotten Son of God; and that, as being such, He is to be worshipped and honoured as Lord and God; and that, in order to be our Mediator, and the Sacrifice for our sin, He took upon Him our nature.
For this reason elements can be found in the Epistle to the Romans and in the Epistle to the Hebrews which are easily susceptible of an Adoptionist interpretation, and others equally indicative of Pre-existent Christology. This means that Christians at that moment had not formulated the problem.
It throws little light on the question of Adoptionism, for though there is nothing in it which contradicts Pre-existent Christology, there is also nothing in it which would have startled an Adoptionist. After this comes the first Epistle of Clement, a letter sent by the Church of Rome to the Church at Corinth.
Scoffers have long pointed with indignation at the Christian doctrine that a child inherits a moral bias from his parents, but nowadays evolutionists carry the law of heredity to an extreme which no hyper-Calvinist ever thought of, and many cavillers at "original sin" have become eloquent in their praises of Buddhism, which handicaps each child with the accumulated demerit of pre-existent beings with whom he had no connection whatever.
He observed that all fools were philosophers, and that all philosophers were fools. There was AEstheticus Ethix. He spoke of fire, unity, and atoms; bi-part and pre-existent soul; affinity and discord; primitive intelligence and homoeomeria. There was Theologos Theology. He talked of Eusebius and Arianus; heresy and the Council of Nice; Puseyism and consubstantialism; Homousios and Homouioisios.
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