[Sidenote: The Gnostics.]
Such ideas of a hierarchy of subordinate emanations to fill the supposed
abyss between the Infinite and the Finite were eagerly adopted and
developed by the pseudo-philosophers called Gnostics, on both sides of
the boundary between the Church and the World. Suffice it that, like
most, though by no means all of their predecessors, they regarded the
world of earth, sun, planet, stars, and animated nature with man at its
head, as the whole Universe; and, assuming that it must have had a
beginning, they vexed their souls with futile attempts to frame some
gradual transition from the uncreated to the created, from the eternal
to the mortal. The grotesque chimaeras engendered thus are remembered
now only as illustrations of the facile transition from the sublime to
the ridiculous and from philosophy to folly.
[Sidenote: The Church Fathers.]
[Sidenote: Augustine.]
The orthodox Christian fathers were not less conscious than the
Neo-Platonists or Gnostics of the perennial problem of the Many and the
One. But they were restrained, perhaps, by the "faith that comes of
self-control," perhaps by mere common sense, from indulging in attempts
to connect the Infinite with the Finite by "vain genealogies." Indeed,
for the most part they confessed that whatever light the Gospel might
shed on moral issues, it left untouched the ultimate question of the
relation of the Infinite to the Finite.
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