his writings the Christian Trinity, the Word, the Church, the creation of
the world in a Jewish sense, as they really found the personality of God or
of mind, and the immortality of the soul. All religions and philosophies
met and mingled in the schools of Alexandria, and the Neo-Platonists had a
method of interpretation which could elicit any meaning out of any words.
They were really incapable of distinguishing between the opinions of one
philosopher and another--between Aristotle and Plato, or between the
serious thoughts of Plato and his passing fancies. They were absorbed in
his theology and were under the dominion of his name, while that which was
truly great and truly characteristic in him, his effort to realize and
connect abstractions, was not understood by them at all. Yet the genius of
Plato and Greek philosophy reacted upon the East, and a Greek element of
thought and language overlaid and partly reduced to order the chaos of
Orientalism. And kindred spirits, like St. Augustine, even though they
were acquainted with his writings only through the medium of a Latin
translation, were profoundly affected by them, seeming to find 'God and his
word everywhere insinuated' in them (August. Confess.)

There is no danger of the modern commentators on the Timaeus falling into
the absurdities of the Neo-Platonists. In the present day we are well
aware that an ancient philosopher is to be interpreted from himself and by
the contemporary history of thought. We know that mysticism is not
criticism. The fancies of the Neo-Platonists are only interesting to us
because they exhibit a phase of the human mind which prevailed widely in
the first centuries of the Christian era, and is not wholly extinct in our
own day. But they have nothing to do with the interpretation of Plato, and
in spirit they are opposed to him. They are the feeble expression of an
age which has lost the power not only of creating great works, but of
understanding them. They are the spurious birth of a marriage between
philosophy and tradition, between Hellas and the East--(Greek) (Rep.).