Note 48 — Chapter IX · CHRISTENDOM IN THE MIDDLE AGES

In philosophy proper he must be credited, despite his inconsistency, with deep and original thought.48 Like every theologian of philosophic capacity before and since, he passes into pantheism as soon as he grapples closely with the difficulties of theism, and “the expressions which he uses are identical with those which were afterwards employed by Spinoza.... It was a tradition of the fourth or fifth century transferred to the ninth, an echo from Alexandria.”49 Condemned by Pope Nicholas I and by two Church Councils,50 his writings none the less availed to keep that echo audible to later centuries.