I do not say that there is, or ought to be, a
Christian Metaphysic. I am speaking, as you know, merely as a
historian, dealing with facts; and I say that there was one; as
profound, as scientific, as severe, as that of the Pagan Neoplatonists;
starting indeed, as I shall show hereafter, on many points from common
ground with theirs. One can hardly doubt, I should fancy, that many
parts of St. John's Gospel and Epistles, whatever view we may take of
them, if they are to be called anything, are to be called metaphysic and
philosophic. And one can no more doubt that before writing them he had
studied Philo, and was expanding Philo's thought in the direction which
seemed fit to him, than we can doubt it of the earlier Neoplatonists.
The technical language is often identical; so are the primary ideas from
which he starts, howsoever widely the conclusions may differ. If
Plotinus considered himself an intellectual disciple of Plato, so did
Origen and Clemens. And I must, as I said before, speak of both, or of
neither. My only hope of escaping delicate ground lies in the curious
fact, that rightly or wrongly, the form in which Christianity presented
itself to the old Alexandrian thinkers was so utterly different from the
popular conception of it in modern England, that one may very likely be
able to tell what little one knows about it, almost without mentioning a
single doctrine which now influences the religious world.
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