But their speculations about the divine Being were touched by
Oriental emotion. And we may with some confidence believe that their
development of the Platonic Trinity owed a good deal to the rapid spread
of Christianity. Thus the sentiment, the fervour, the yearning for
"salvation," the worship and devotion taught by the best of the
Neo-Platonists were not so much, from Athens as from Sinai and Galilee.
Yet, though there were in their world-conception many anticipations of
the gospel of the "God-intoxicated man," whom the counsels of the
Eternal reserved for the fulness of times, it would scarcely be accurate
to describe the system of any of them as strictly Pantheistic. For they
were always troubled about "matter" as an anomalous thing in a divine
universe, and in treating of it they hesitated between the notion of an
eternal nuisance which the Demiurgus, or acting God, could only modify,
not destroy, and, on the other hand, a strained theory of an evil
nothing, which is yet something. Again, so far from realising Spinoza's
faith in God as so literally All in All that there is nothing else but
He, they would not tolerate the contact of the Infinite with the finite,
of God with the world. Consistently with such prepossessions, they held
obstinately to the notion of some beginning, and therefore some ending
of the ordered world. And this beginning was effected by emanations such
as the Logos, or, as others had it, the world-soul and other divine
energies, between the Eternal and creation; a phantasy which, however
poetically wrought out, is not really consistent with Pantheism.
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