econd to the fifth
centuries, the ecclesiastical dogmatic which was developed in the same
period, may appear as a younger sister of Neoplatonism which was
fostered by the elder one, but which fought and finally conquered her.
The Neoplatonists themselves described the ecclesiastical theologians as
intruders who appropriated Greek philosophy, but mixed it with foreign
fables. Hence Porphyry said of Origen (in Euseb., H. E. VI. 19): "The
outer life of Origen was that of a Christian and opposed to the law;
but, in regard to his views of things and of the Deity, he thought like
the Greeks, inasmuch as he introduced their ideas into the myths of
other peoples." This judgment of Porphyry is at any rate more just and
appropriate than that of the Church theologians about Greek philosophy,
that it had stolen all its really valuable doctrines from the ancient
sacred writings of the Christians. It is, above all, important that the
affinity of the two sides was noted. So far, then, as both
ecclesiastical dogmatic and Neoplatonism start from the feeling of the
need of redemption, so far as both desire to free the soul from the
sensuous, so far as they recognise the inability of man to attain to
blessedness and a certain knowledge of the truth without divine help and
without a revelation, they are fundamentally related. It must no doubt
be admitted that Christianity itself was already profoundly affected by
the influence of Hellenism when it began to outline a theology; but this
influence must be traced back less to philosophy than to the collective
culture, and to all the conditions under which the spiritual life was
enacted. When Neoplatonism arose ecclesiastical Christianity already
possessed the fundamental features of its theology, that is, it had
developed these, not by accident, contemporaneously and independent of
Neoplatonism. Only by identifying itself with the whole history of Greek
philosophy, or claiming to be the restoration of pure Platonism, was
Neoplatonism able to maintain that it had been robbed by the church
theology of Alexandria. But that was an illusion. Ecclesiastical
theology appears, though our sources here are unfortunately very meagre,
to have learned but little from Neoplatonism even in the third century,
partly because the latter itself had not yet developed into the form in
which the dogmatic of the church could assume its doctrines, partly
because ecclesiastical theology had first to succeed in its own r