Essence, created and ruled the world by means of ministering spirits or potencies, of whom the Word is highest, and second only to Himself.
Philo lived just before the Christian era; and from his time a succession of Alexandrian Jews continued to give to the world their transcendental theories, founded on one portion or another of Plato's writings; some, like Apollonius of Tyana, going back to Pythagoras for their inspiration, and others, like the Therapeutæ, seeking "illumination" in a lonely and ascetic life,—until, towards the end of the second century, the school of Neo-Platonists was founded by Ammonius Saccas. They united the Eastern doctrine of "emanation" with the Platonic doctrine of ideas, believing that the ideas emanated from the One, as the soul emanates from the ideas, and that the last and lowest stage of emanation was the sensible and material world around us. They held it man's duty to purify his soul, and make it pass through various stages of perfection, until at last it should be freed from all contamination of the senses, and, in a sublime moment of ecstasy, enter into actual communion with God. Four times (so Porphyry tells us) his master Plotinus was thus "caught up" in a celestial trance. Indeed, this philosopher was so ashamed of having a body at all, that he would tell no one who were his parents or what was his country, and resolutely refused ever to have his portrait taken; for it was bad enough (he said) that his soul should be veiled at all by an earthly image, and he would never hand down an image of that image to posterity. How deeply he was imbued with
