the Divinity, the nature and origin of matter, the nature and work of the imagination, the scientific arrangement and nomenclature of the virtues—on which we have not the last word of Hypatia's teaching.
We cannot say what means Synesius had of becoming acquainted with Christianity in his early years. No one living in any part of the Eastern empire at the close of the 4th cent. could fail to be brought into frequent contact with Christians. But throughout his works, written before he became a Christian himself, the same phenomenon appears which is so striking in Claudian's poems—the existence of Christianity is entirely ignored. In his speech addressed to Arcadius, though the greatest prominence is given to the religious idea of duty, there is no allusion to the principles of Christianity, even where such a reference would have given force to his arguments. The orator appears unconscious that he is addressing a Christian emperor. The deity to whom he appeals is the god of the Theist, "whose nature no man has ever yet found a name to represent." Still more striking is a passage in one of the hymns written immediately after his return from Constantinople: "To all Thy temples, Lord, built for Thy holy rites I went, and falling headlong as a suppliant bathed with my tears the pavement. That my journey might not be in vain, I prayed to all the gods Thy ministers, who rule the fertile plain of Thrace, and those who on the opposite continent protect the lands of Chalcedon, whom Thou hast crowned with angelic rays, Thy holy servants. They, the blessed ones, helped me in my prayers; they helped me to bear the burden of many troubles." Of course the temples of which he speaks were Christian churches. No pagan temples had been erected in Constantinople, and even in the other cities they had been closed some years by an edict of Theodosius. Yet it is perfectly certain that Synesius was not then a Christian. This picture of a pagan philosopher praying in Christian church to the saints and angels of Christianity, while investing them with the attributes of the daemons of neo-Platonism is no bad illustration of the almost unconscious manner in which the pagan world in becoming Christian was then paganizing Christianity. As eclectic in religion as in philosophy, Synesius took from Christianity whatever harmonized with the rest of his creed, often adapting the tenets he borrowed to make them accord with his philosophical ideas.
How his opinions were so far altered in the next four years that he became a Christian we have, unhappily, but scanty means of knowing. In none of his letters is there the slightest trace of any mental struggle. The change was effected gradually, probably almost imperceptibly even to himself. He had never been really hostile to Christianity, and as the world gradually became more Christian he became more Christian too. Almost without a struggle the old pagan society had yielded, and was still yielding, to the tide which each year set more strongly in the direction of Christianity. With all the vigour he displayed, in great emergencies Synesius was not a man to stand long alone or to fight to the end a battle already lost. Some personal influences had also been brought to bear on him. He had known and highly respected Chrysostom at Constantinople, and afterwards come into contact with Theophilus the patriarch of Alexandria. His wife, to whom he was warmly attached and whom he married at Alexandria in 403, was a Christian, and in her he may have had an opportunity of remarking one of the noblest features of Christianity, the elevation it imparted to the female character by the prominence given to the feminine virtues in the character of Christ and therefore in the teaching of the church. But above all, when he returned to Pentapolis, in 404, to find his country desolated by barbarian invasion, he must have felt how little the highest form of neo-Platonism could meet the wants of such a troubled age. The philosophical and poetical creed was the religion of a prosperous man in peaceful times. When suffering and danger came, its support failed precisely where most needed. To enjoy that intellectual communion with God for which he craved with his whole heart, and on the possibility of which his whole system of belief depended, he needed above all things an untroubled mind. It was one of the points which had marked most strongly his separation from Christianity, that in his hymns he had always prayed at least as earnestly for freedom from anxieties as for freedom from sin. He had formed an ideal of life which could not be maintained in troubled times, and with it necessarily fell the beliefs with which it was intimately connected. The old creed told him that "the woe of earth weighs down the wings of the soul so that it cannot rise to heaven." The new religion taught him that cares and sorrows rightly borne, so far from hiding the divine light, reveal it in increased brightness. In former days, when he shrank into private life from "the polluting influence of business and, the vicissitudes of fortune," he had probably considered the doctrine of the Incarnation as the greatest obstacle to his becoming a Christian, because it seemed to degrade the Deity by connecting it with the contamination of matter. Now, when he had left his seclusion to battle and suffer with his fellow-citizens, no doctrine of Christianity had such attraction for him as that which told of a God Who had resigned His glory to share the sufferings of His creatures and to be the Saviour of mankind. Formerly he had sought to purify his mind that it might ascend in thought to God; now he caught at the doctrine of the Holy Spirit descending into men's hearts to make them the temples of God. So the first hymn which marks the transition to Christianity begins with an invocation to Christ as the Son of the Holy Virgin, and ends with a prayer to Christ and to the Father to send down upon him the Holy Spirit " to refresh the wings of the soul, and to perfect the divine gifts." But though his prayers were now addressed to Christ, it is obvious that he had rather added certain Christian tenets to his old creed than adopted a new religion. The attributes of Christ are described in almost exactly the same terms as the attributes of the Son had been described
