(ii.) The Doctrine of the World.—Between God and the World, the Infinite and the Finite, there is a great gulf, which Neoplatonism proceeds to fill up with variously conceived schemes of emana- tion. From the Infinite height there is a descent through less and less perfect beings, till at length crass matter is reached. Only by some such machinery would Neoplatonism allow that God could possibly be the source of material existence.
(ili.) The Doctrine Lea rans has in him a spark of the divine. He lies, however, immersed in the sensuous sphere. Salvation for him, there- fore, consists in escaping from this sphere and rising into that supersensuous sphere to which he truly belongs. This escape is accomplished in a Laurea of purification (κάθαρσις) by means of ascetic
iscipline.
To such a system had the long evolution of wreek thought arrived, when Christianity went
ize life into a whole, or quicken it with
forth on its mission. With this system Chris- tianity was confronted as its chief antagonist.
π. THE CONTACT OF CHRISTIANITY WITH GREEK PuiLosopuy.—l. THE CHRISTIAN UNITY. Into the Hellenic world, torn as it was with divisions, hysterically eager for intellectual and moral satis- faction, Christianity entered with the <laim to be the unity which men of Hellenic calture, and human hearts everywhere, required and sought for. It differed profoundly, however, from Neo- platonism or any such system, both in the inter- pretation which it put on the problem and in the nature of the solution it proposed.
(a) The Christian interpretation of the intellectual problem and of the moral need of men. Beneath the opposition of elements, Form and Matter, Infinite and Finite, which was the deepest concep- tion Greek thought had formed of the problem of life, Christianity pierces to antagonism of wills, the personal will of man in revolt from, and out of harmony with, the personal will of God. This is the hurt of the human soul ; this is the secret also of the world’s pain and unrest. Greek thought never did justice to personality. Pantheism drew the Hellenic mind hke a magnet. Its goal was ever absorption of personal life in the wide sea of impersonal being. The hindrance to such a consummation always lay outside the constitution of man, in the material environment of his soul. Christianity boldly grasped the fact of personality ; had for its goal the fulness of personal life in communion with a personal God; and saw the hindrance to this consummation within the per- sonal life itself. Evil, the barrier to unity of God and man, is not outside of man, in the material framework in which he finds himself, but within man, in the determination of his will against the divine will.
(δ) The nature of the Christian solution. In one word, it was Christ. Christianity, whose keynote, like that of Neoplatonism, is unity, whose phrase- ology often resembles that of Neoplatonism, differs from it by the whole diameter of mental culture and spiritual experience. It approaches the human spirit, not with a theory, scheme, or process, but with a gospel, a declaration whose sum and sub- stance is Christ Jesus, incarnate, crucified, risen. Holding stedfastly before the eyes of men, as the ultimate problem of life, the reconciliation of wills, human and divine, it proclaims the problem solved, the reconciliation achieved through Christ. Christ is God Incarnate, not a man who has reached the highest point in a process of κάθαρσις, but God, who, in order to effect the reconciliation of man, has entered into humanity, and taken it into union with Himself. The long quest of man for God had ended on the verge of an impassable gulf, across which he vainly sought to cast a rainbow bridge of fair images. In the Incarnation, God of His own proper motion crosses the gulf, and by His own act annihilates the distance. Christ has died for men. That which holds God and man apart is not the frailty of man, as though that could be any real hindrance to spiritual and per- sonal fellowship, or as though the removal of it could secure that fellowship. On this rock Neo- jlatonism wrecked itself as a redemptive power. The root and secret of man’s inability to reach God is sin. He does not need to make himself divine in order to hold communion with God. He does need to be delivered from the burden of guilt. This deliverance has come through the sacrificial death of Christ. Guilt is not a feeling of uneasi- ness at the division man finds in his own nature. It is the consciousness of alienation from God. Sin is not an element in man’s subjectivity, a moment in the process whereby he rises out of individualism. It is an objective reality of the spiritual world,
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which must be taken out of the way before the human spirit can be at one with God. Christ has done this in the deed of sin-bearing. Christ is risen. His life, while lifted above time and space, is con- tinued in organic union with those who occupy time and space. He raises them through personal union with Himself into union with God. He in them is the source of a life whose spirit is sonship, whose privilege is communion, whose goal is like- ness. The occasional ecstasy, which was the highest privilege possible under Neoplatonism, is replaced by a daily fellowship, without ecstasy but