"The Primary God," he says, "must be free
from works and a King; but the Demiurgus must exercise government, going
through the heavens. Through Him comes this our condition; through Him
Reason being sent down in efflux, holds communion with all who are
prepared for it: God then looking down, and turning Himself to each of
us, it comes to pass that our bodies live and are nourished, receiving
strength from the outer rays which come from Him. But when God turns us
to the contemplation of Himself, it comes to pass that these things are
worn out and consumed, but that the reason lives, being partaker of a
blessed life."
This passage is exceedingly interesting, as containing both the marrow
of old Hebrew metaphysic, and also certain notional elements, of which
we find no trace in the Scripture, and which may lead--as we shall find
they afterwards did lead--to confusing the moral with the notional, and
finally the notional with the material; in plain words, to Pantheism.
You find this tendency, in short, in all the philosophers who flourished
between the age of Augustus and the rise of Alexandrian Neoplatonism.
Gibbon, while he gives an approving pat on the back to his pet
"Philosophic Emperor," Marcus Aurelius, blinks the fact that Marcus's
philosophy, like that of Plutarch, contains as an integral element, a
belief which to him would have been, I fear, simply ludicrous, from its
strange analogy with the belief of John, the Christian Apostle.
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