Aristotle says: "It has been handed down in a mythical form, from the earliest times to posterity, that there are Gods, and that The Divine compasses entire nature. All besides this has been added, after the mythical style, for the purpose of persuading the multitude, and for the interest of the laws and the advantage of the State. Thus men have given to the Gods human forms, and have even represented them under the figure of other beings, in the train of which fictions followed many more of the same sort. But if, from all this, we separate the original principle, and consider it alone, namely, that the first Essences are Gods, we shall find that this has been divinely said; and since it is probable that philosophy and the arts have been several times, so far as that is possible, found and lost, such doctrines may have been preserved to our times as the remains of ancient wisdom."
Porphyry says: "By images addressed to sense, the ancients represented God and his powers—by the visible they typified the invisible for those who had learned to read in these types, as in a book, a treatise on the Gods. We need not wonder if the ignorant consider the images to be nothing more than wood or stone; for just so, they who are ignorant of writing see nothing in monuments but stone, nothing in tablets but wood, and in books but a tissue of papyrus."
Apollonius of Tyana held, that birth and death are only in appearance; that which separates itself from the one substance (the one Divine essence), and is caught up by matter, seems to be born; that, again, which releases itself from the bonds of matter, and is reunited with the one Divine Essence, seems to die. There is, at most, an alteration between becoming visible and becoming invisible. In all there is, properly speaking, but the one essence, which alone acts and suffers, by becoming all things to all; the Eternal God, whom men wrong, when they deprive Him of what properly can be attributed to Him only, and transfer it to other names and persons.
The New Platonists substituted the idea of the Absolute, for the Supreme Essence itself;—as the first, simplest principle, anterior to all existence; of which nothing determinate can be predicated; to which no consciousness, no self-contemplation can be ascribed; inasmuch as to do so, would immediately imply a quality, a distinction of subject and object. This Supreme Entity can be known only by an intellectual intuition of the Spirit, transcending itself, and emancipating itself from its own limits.
This mere logical tendency, by means of which men thought to arrive at the conception of such an absolute, the [Greek: όν], was united with a certain mysticism, which, by a transcendent state of feeling, communicated, as it were, to this abstraction what the mind would receive as a reality. The absorption of the Spirit into that superexistence ([Greek: τό έπέκεινα τής ούσίας]), so as to be entirely identified with it, or such a revelation of the latter to the spirit raised above itself, was regarded as the highest end which the spiritual life could reach.
The New Platonists' idea of God, was that of One Simple Original Essence, exalted above all plurality and all becoming; the only true Being; unchangeable, eternal [Greek: Εϊς ών ένί τώ νύν τό άει πεπλήρωκε καί μόνον έστι τό κατά τούτον όντως ών]: from whom all Existence in its several gradations has emanated—the world of Gods, as nearest akin to Himself, being first, and at the head of all. In these Gods, that perfection, which in the Supreme Essence was inclosed and unevolved, is expanded and becomes knowable. They serve to exhibit in different forms the image of that Supreme Essence, to which no soul can rise, except by the loftiest flight of contemplation; and after it has rid itself from all that pertains to sense—from all manifoldness. They are the mediators between man (amazed and stupefied by manifoldness) and the Supreme Unity.
Philo says: "He who disbelieves the miraculous, simply as the miraculous, neither knows God, nor has he ever sought after Him; for otherwise he would have understood, by looking at that truly great and awe-inspiring sight, the miracle of the Universe, that these miracles (in God's providential guidance of His people) are but child's play for the Divine Power. But the truly miraculous has become despised through familiarity. The universal, on the contrary, although in itself insignificant, yet, through our love of novelty, transports us with amazement."
In opposition to the anthropopathism of the Jewish Scriptures, the Alexandrian Jews endeavored to purify the idea of God from all admixture of the Human. By the exclusion of every human passion, it was sublimated to a something devoid of all attributes, and wholly transcendental; and the mere Being [Greek: όν], the Good, in and by itself, the Absolute of Platonism, was substituted for the personal Deity [Hebrew: יהוה] of the Old Testament. By soaring upward, beyond all created existence, the mind, disengaging itself from the Sensible, attains to the intellectual intuition of this Absolute Being; of whom, however, it can predicate nothing but existence, and sets aside all other determinations as not answering to the exalted nature of the Supreme Essence.
Thus Philo makes a distinction between those who are in the proper sense Sons of God, having by means of contemplation raised themselves to the highest Being, or attained to a knowledge of Him, in His immediate self-manifestation, and those who know God only in his mediate revelation through his operation—such as He declares Himself in creation—in the revelation still veiled in the letter of Scripture—those, in short, who attach themselves simply to the Logos, and consider this to be the Supreme God; who are the sons of the Logos, rather than of the True Being, (όν)
"God," says Pythagoras, "is neither the object of sense, nor subject to passion, but invisible, only intelligible, and supremely intelligent In His body He is like the light, and in His soul He resembles truth. He is the universal spirit that pervades and diffuseth itself over all nature. All beings receive their life from Him. There is but one only God, who is not, as some are apt to imagine, seated above the world, beyond the orb of the Universe; but being Himself all in all, He sees all the beings that fill His immensity; the only Principle, the Light of Heaven, the Father of all. He produces everything; He orders and disposes everything; He is the REASON, the LIFE, and the MOTION of all being."