as the female principle, the "Mother of Christ" in His eternal life.
This metaphor is a relic of Gnosticism, which the Church wisely
rejected.

The second Person of the Trinity contains in Himself the archetypes of
everything. He is the "_elementum_," "_habitaculum_," "_habitator_,"
"_locus_" of the universe. The material world was created for man's
probation. All spirits pre-existed, and their partial immersion in an
impure material environment is a degradation from which they must
aspire to be delivered. But the whole mundane history of a soul is
only the realisation of the idea which had existed from all eternity
in the mind of God. These doctrines show that Victorinus is involved
in a dualistic view of matter, and in a form of predestinarianism; but
he has no definite teaching on the relation of sin to the ideal
world.

His language about Christ and the Church is mystical in tone. "The
Church is Christ," he says; "The resurrection of Christ is our
resurrection"; and of the Eucharist, "The body of Christ is life."

We now come to St. Augustine himself, who at one period of his life
was a diligent student of Plotinus. It would be hardly justifiable to
claim St. Augustine as a mystic, since there are important parts of
his teaching which have no affinity to Mysticism; but it touched him
on one side, and he remained half a Platonist. His natural sympathy
with Mysticism was not destroyed by the vulgar and perverted forms of
it with which he was first brought in contact. The Manicheans and
Gnostics only taught him to distinguish true Mysticism from false: he
soon saw through the pretensions of these sectaries, while he was not
ashamed to learn from Plotinus. The mystical or Neoplatonic element in
his theology will be clearly shown in the following extracts. In a few
places he comes dangerously near to some of the errors which we found
in Dionysius.

God is above all that can be said of Him. We must not even call Him
ineffable;[194] He is best adored in silence,[195] best known by
nescience,[196] best described by negatives.[197] God is absolutely
immutable; this is a doctrine on which he often insists, and which
pervades all his teaching about predestination. The world pre-existed
from all eternity in the mind of God; in the Word of God, by whom all
things were made, and who is immutable Truth, all things and events
are stored up together unchangeably, and all are one. God sees the
time-process not as a process, but