conceptions of His nature.  Unable any longer to soar to Heaven, it sullied the majesty of the Deity, and divided the Godhead in order to bridge the gap.  Numenius represents in philosophy the Gnostic ideas about God which were widely held by the heretics, Jewish and Christian, of the second century.  He divides the Godhead into two separate powers:  (1) the impersonal Being behind all reality, free from all activity whatsoever; (2) the Demiurge or active governor of the universe, who again is subdivided into a transcendent and an immanent power.

The teaching of Plotinus, the most famous of the later Alexandrian neo-Platonists, shows a further step in the development of religious Platonism.  Viewed from its higher side it is an attempt to explain everything as the emanation of the One.  But philosophy in the third century debased itself in order to support the tottering polytheistic religion of the pagan world against the modified Hebraic creed, Christianity, which was fast demolishing its power.  Against the Trinity of the Church the philosophers set up a heavenly Trinity of so-called reason:  the Ineffable One, the Demiurgic Mind, and the World Soul; and between this Trinity and man they placed intermediate hierarchies of gods, angels, and demons—­in fact, the whole fugitive army of Greek polytheism thinly disguised.  All the vulgar fancies and superstitions which Philo had intellectualized, these later Eastern Platonists sought to revive and justify by conceptions of physical emanation blended of false science and mysticism.  They hoped to found a universal religion by finding room in one system for the deities of all nations!

From Plotinus down to Proclus, neo-Platonism became more unintellectual, more insane, more pagan, and, finally, with its vapid dreams, it brought the history of Greek philosophy to an inglorious close.  Its finer teachings, however, deeply affected mediaeval philosophy, and not least the Arab-Jewish school.  The theory of emanations and spiritual hierarchies pervades the writings of Ibn Ezra, Ibn Gabirol, and Ibn Daud, and thus indirectly provides a connection between the culture of Alexandrian Judaism and the culture of Spanish Judaism.  The praise of God known as the [Hebrew:  ktr mlkot] by Ibn Gabirol is a splendid example of the Hebraizing of neo-Platonic doctrines, which, though probably quite independent of his teaching, recalls constantly the ideas of Philo.

By his place at the head of the neo-Platonic school Philo enters the broad stream of the world’s philosophical development, but his more lasting influence was exercised over the religious philosophy of Christianity.  He was the direct master of what is known as the Patristic school, which sought to combine the intellectual conceptions of Plato with the religious ideas of the Gospels.  Its most celebrated teachers were Clement and Origen, both of Alexandria, who flourished in the second century.  They resorted largely to allegorical interpretation,