But in opposition to this pantheism which, while identifying God with the universe, placed the chief home of divine energy in the celestial spheres and particularly in the highest of them, the sectaries of Plato transported the supreme Power beyond the limits of the world and made of him a Being no longer immanent, but transcendent and distinct from all matter. This conception became more and more predominant in pagan theology as Stoicism lost influence in favour of Neo-Platonism. This God, “ultramundane and incorporeal, father and architect” of creation,[257] had his seat, it was thought, in the infinite light which extended beyond the starry spheres. Religion called him sometimes the Most High (Ὕψιστος), sometimes Jupiter, but gave him at the same time the epithets “Uppermost,” “Insuperable” (_summus_, _exsuperantissimus_).[258] It was this celestial Father whom the elect souls aspired to join, but only those who had attained to perfection succeeded in doing so, as we shall see in our last lecture. The others stayed, in accordance with their degree of purity, in a lower zone of the successive stages formed by the atmosphere, by the planetary circles, and by the heaven of the fixed stars, which were the “visible gods,” opposed to the spiritual world.[259] * * * * * This was the last conception of paganism and on the whole it was to impose itself on men for many centuries. Judaism had already made concessions to the astronomical theories of the “Chaldeans,” and had borrowed from them the idea of seven stories of heavens, an idea which we find developed in particular in the apocryphal Book of Enoch. It also belonged to Christianity almost from the beginning, and the gnostics gave it a large place in their speculations. But especially Origen, who borrowed it directly from the Greek philosophers, lent the authority of his name to the doctrines of astral eschatology. According to him, souls, after they have sojourned in Paradise, which he imagined as a remote place of earth where they learn terrestrial truths, rise to the zone of the air and there understand the nature of the beings who people this element. But if they are free from all material weight, they cross the atmosphere rapidly and reach “the dwellings of the heavens,” that is, the celestial spheres. There they grasp the nature of the stars and the causes of their movements. Finally, when they have made such progress that they have become pure intelligences, they are admitted to contemplate the reasonable essences face to face and see invisible things, enjoying their perfection. Although Origen was condemned by the Church, his ideas were not abolished. Since the Christian lore adopted the ancient conception of the world’s structure, as formulated by Ptolemy, it had necessarily to admit that souls traversed the planetary circles in order to reach that “supermundane light” in which they found perfect beatitude.