Page:The Classical Heritage of the Middle Ages.djvu/48

 30 THE CLASSICAL HERITAGE [chap. seeking spiritual aid through prayer came to the last great representatives of Stoicism — to Epictetus and to Marcus; perhaps God or the gods may help the soul to resolve more firmly. Stoicism, however, was losing its power to cheer ; with many, the system was becoming a matter of devitalized phrases. True Stoics needed self-reliance and self-sufficiency, qualities which were ceasing to be general. Humanity was a little weary of its self-poised rationalism. In the second century, there sprang up a new spirit of religiousness, showing itself in a craving to learn the future from the supernatural powers and to gain their aid through prayers or sacrifices or magic rites. This was not a crude, strong mode of religion, capable of purification. Rather it represented the weakness of men consciously turning from their best strength and highest thoughts to seek aid or stupefaction by means which those best thoughts had not approved. A loftier phase of the new religiousness lay in a yearning for communion with the divine. The soul, its self-reliance outworn, its reason found empty, was seeking to renew its life through ecstatic union with God. This yearning was to create philosophies or at least remould old thoughts. The greatest of these new forms of philosophy was Neo-platonism, a system which sought in dialectic mode to outsoar reason and attain the super-rational. Its goal was that ecstatic vision in which sense as well as reason falls away, leaving the soul enraptured with the immediacy of God. Neo-platonism was Hellenic in structure, but touched with oriental influences which entered through the eclectic moods of the Hellenic temperament of the