These exalted ideas of His transcendence, which had especially thriven on Alexandrian soil, were further elaborated at the end of the second century by the Christian philosophers of the Alexandrian schools, who inherited the wealth at once of regenerated Platonism, of Gnosticism, and of theosophic Judaism. Clement anticipated Plotinus in conceiving of God as being “beyond the One and higher than the Monad itself,”[506] which was the highest abstraction of current philosophy.[507] There is no name that can properly be named of Him: “neither the One, nor the Good, nor Mind, nor Absolute Being, nor Father, nor Creator, nor Lord.” No science can attain unto Him; “for all science depends on antecedent principles; but there is nothing antecedent to the Unbegotten.”[508] Origen expressly protests against the conceptions of God which regarded Him as supra-cosmic rather than transcendent,[509] and as having a material substance though not a human form.[510] His own conception is that of a nature which is absolutely simple and intelligent, or which transcends both intelligence and existence. Being absolutely simple, He has no more or less, no before or after, and consequently has no need of either space or time. Being absolutely intelligent, His only attribute is to know and to be known. But only “like knows like.” He is to be apprehended through the intelligence which is made in His image: the human mind is capable of knowing the Divine by virtue of its participation in it. But in the strict sense of the word He is beyond our knowledge: our knowledge is like the vision of a spark as compared with the splendour of the sun.[511] (2) _Revelation or Mediation of the Transcendent._—But as in Greek philosophy, so also in Christian theology, the doctrine whether of a supra-cosmic or of a transcendent God necessitated the further question, How could He pass into the sphere of the phenomenal? The rougher sort of objectors ridiculed a God who was “solitary and destitute” in his unapproachable uniqueness:[512] the more serious heathen philosophers asked, If like knows like, how can your God know the world? and the mass of Christian philosophers,[513] both within and without the associated communities, felt this question, or one of the questions that are cognate to it, to be the cardinal point of their theology.[514] The tentative answers were innumerable. One early group of them maintained the existence of a capacity in the Supreme Being to manifest Himself in different forms. The conception had some elements of Stoical and some of popular Greek theology, in both of which anthropomorphism had been possible.[515] It came to an especial prominence in the earlier stages of the Christological controversies, as an explanation of the nature of Jesus Christ. It lay beneath what is known as Modal Monarchianism, the theory that Christ was a temporary mode of the existence of the one God. It was simply His will to exist in one mode rather than in another.[516]