This great conception of the transcendence of God filled a large place in later Greek philosophy, even outside the Platonic schools.[459] The history of it is beyond our present purpose; but we shall better understand the relation of Christian theology to current thought if we take three expressions of the conception at the time when that theology was being formed—in Plutarch, in Maximus of Tyre, and in Plotinus. Plutarch says: “What, then, is that which really exists? It is the Eternal, the Uncreated, the Undying, to whom time brings no change. For time is always flowing and never stays: it is a vessel charged with birth and death: it has a before and after, a ‘will be’ and a ‘has been:’ it belongs to the ‘is not’ rather than to the ‘is.’ But God is: and that not in time but in eternity, motionless, timeless, changeless eternity, that has no before or after: and being One, He fills eternity with one Now, and so really ‘is,’ not ‘has been,’ or ‘will be’, without beginning and without ceasing.”[460] Maximus of Tyre says: “God, the Father and Fashioner of all things that are, He who is older than the sun, older than the sky, greater than time and lapse of time and the whole stream of nature, is unnamed by legislators, and unspoken by the voice and unseen by the eyes: and since we cannot apprehend His essence, we lean upon words and names and animals, and forms of gold and ivory and silver, and plants and rivers and mountain-peaks and springs of waters, longing for an intuition of Him, and in our inability naming by His name all things that are beautiful in this world of ours.”[461] And again: “It is of this Father and Begetter of the universe that Plato tells us: His name he does not tell us, for he knew it not: nor does he tell us His colour, for he saw Him not; nor His size, for he touched Him not. Colour and size are felt by the touch and seen by the sight: but the Deity Himself is unseen by the sight, unspoken by the voice, untouched by fleshly touch, unheard by the hearing, seen only—through its likeness to Him, and heard only—through its kinship with Him, by the noblest and purest and clearest-sighted and swiftest and oldest element of the soul.”[462] Plotinus similarly, in answer to the old problem, “how from the One, being such as we have described Him, anything whatever has substance, instead of the One abiding by Himself,” replies: