hopes, have faded from my mind.  All my faculties drop away from me like a cloak that one takes off, like the chrysalis case of a larva.  I feel myself returning into a more elementary form.”  But Amiel, instead of expecting the advent of “the One” while in this state, feels that “the pleasure of it is deadly, inferior in all respects to the joys of action, to the sweetness of love, to the beauty of enthusiasm, or to the sacred savour of accomplished duty.[149]”

We may now return to the Christian Platonists.  We find in Methodius the interesting doctrine that the indwelling Christ constantly repeats His passion in remembrance, “for not otherwise could the Church continually conceive believers, and bear them anew through the bath of regeneration, unless Christ were repeatedly to die, emptying Himself for the sake of each individual.”  “Christ must be born mentally ([Greek:  moetos]) in every individual,” and each individual saint, by participating in Christ, “is born as a Christ.”  This is exactly the language of Eckhart and Tauler, and it is first clearly heard in the mouth of Methodius.[150] The new features are the great prominence given to immanence—­the mystical union as an opus operatum, and the individualistic conception of the relation of Christ to the soul.

Of the Greek Fathers who followed Athanasius, I have only room to mention Gregory of Nyssa, who defends the historical incarnation in true mystical fashion by an appeal to spiritual experience.  “We all believe that the Divine is in everything, pervading and embracing it, and dwelling in it.  Why then do men take offence at the dispensation of the mystery taught by the Incarnation of God, who is not, even now, outside of mankind?...  If the form of the Divine presence is not now the same, we are as much agreed that God is among us to-day, as that He was in the world then.”  He argues in another place that all other species of spiritual beings must have had their Incarnations of Christ; a doctrine which was afterwards condemned, but which seems to follow necessarily from the Logos doctrine.  These arguments show very clearly that for the Greek theologians Christ is a cosmic principle, immanent in the world, though not confined by it; and that the scheme of salvation is regarded as part of the constitution of the universe, which is animated and sustained by the same Power who was fully manifested in the Incarnation.

The question has been much debated, whether the influence of Persian and Indian thought can be traced in Neoplatonism, or whether that system was purely Greek.[151] It is a quite hopeless task to try to disentangle the various strands of thought which make up the web of Alexandrianism.  But there is no doubt that the philosophers of Asia were held in reverence at this period.  Origen, in justifying an esoteric mystery-religion for the educated, and a mythical religion for the vulgar, appeals to the example of the “Persians and Indians.”