[590] Thus the Roman Dionysius, in a fragment against the Sabellians (Routh, Reliq. iii. pp. 373, 374), objects to the division of the μοναρχία into τρεῖς δυνάμεις τινὰς καὶ μεμερισμένας ὑποστάσεις καὶ θειότητας τρεῖς.
[591] ἀγνοούμενον ὑπὸ τῶν λαῶν, Athan. de Synod. 8 (i. 577).
[592] [As this summing up never underwent the author’s final revision, and the notes which follow stand in his MS. parallel with the corresponding portion of the Lecture as originally delivered, it has been thought well to place them here.—Ed.]
(1) The tendency to abstract has combined with the tendency to regard matter as evil or impure, in the production of a tendency to form rather a negative than a positive conception of God. The majority of formularies define God by negative terms, and yet they have claimed for conceptions which are negative a positive value.
(2) We owe to Greek philosophy—to the hypothesis of the chasm between spirit and matter—the tendency to interpose powers between the Creator and His creation. It may be held that the attempt to solve the insoluble problem, how God, who is pure spirit, made and sustains us, has darkened the relations which it has attempted to explain by introducing abstract metaphysical conceptions.
[593] It may be noted that even in the later Greek philosophy there was a view, apparently identical with that of Bishop Berkeley, that matter or substance merely represented the sum of the qualities. Origen, de Princ. 4. 1. 34.
[594] These Lectures are the history of a genesis: it would otherwise have been interesting to show in how many points theories which have been thought out in modern times revive theories of the remote past of Christian antiquity.
[595] For what follows, reference in general may be made to Keil, Attische Culte aus Inschriften, Philologus, Bd. xxiii. 212-259, 592-622: and Weingarten, Histor. Zeitschrift, Bd. xlv. 1881, p. 441 sqq. as well as to the authorities cited in the notes.
[596] Foucart, Le culte de Pluton dans la religion éleusinienne, Bulletin de Correspondance Hellénique, 1883, pp. 401 sqq.
[597] The successive stages or acts of initiation are variously described and enumerated, but there were at least four: κάθαρσις—the preparatory purification; σύστασις—the initiatory rites and sacrifices; τελετὴ or μύησις—the prior initiation; and ἐποπτεία, the higher or greater initiation, which admitted to the παράδοσις τῶν ἱερῶν, or holiest act of the ritual. Cf. Lobeck, Aglaoph. pp. 39 ff.