moment when it returns upon myself. I feel myself then stripped and
empty, like a convalescent who remembers nothing. My travels, my
reading, my studies, my projects, my hopes, have faded from my mind.
All my faculties drop away from me like a cloak that one takes off,
like the chrysalis case of a larva. I feel myself returning into a
more elementary form." But Amiel, instead of expecting the advent of
"the One" while in this state, feels that "the pleasure of it is
deadly, inferior in all respects to the joys of action, to the
sweetness of love, to the beauty of enthusiasm, or to the sacred
savour of accomplished duty.[149]"

We may now return to the Christian Platonists. We find in Methodius
the interesting doctrine that the indwelling Christ constantly repeats
His passion in remembrance, "for not otherwise could the Church
continually conceive believers, and bear them anew through the bath of
regeneration, unless Christ were repeatedly to die, emptying Himself
for the sake of each individual." "Christ must be born mentally
([Greek: moêtôs]) in every individual," and each individual saint,
by participating in Christ, "is born as a Christ." This is exactly the
language of Eckhart and Tauler, and it is first clearly heard in the
mouth of Methodius.[150] The new features are the great prominence
given to _immanence_--the mystical union as an _opus operatum_, and
the individualistic conception of the relation of Christ to the soul.

Of the Greek Fathers who followed Athanasius, I have only room to
mention Gregory of Nyssa, who defends the historical incarnation in
true mystical fashion by an appeal to spiritual experience. "We all
believe that the Divine is in everything, pervading and embracing it,
and dwelling in it. Why then do men take offence at the dispensation
of the mystery taught by the Incarnation of God, who is not, even now,