This is the truth which the Fathers developed; the general relation of the first Christian Church to Philosophy is hereby given. On the one hand, the philosophic Idea has been transplanted into this religion; on the other, this moment in the Idea—according to which the latter breaks up within itself into wisdom, the active Logos, the Son of God, &c., but yet in so doing remains in universality—has been brought to a culmination in subjectivity, and further in the sensuous immediate individuality and present existence of a human individual appearing in time and space. These two elements are essentially intermingled in this Christian system, the Idea itself, and secondly the form as it presents itself through its connection with a single individuality present in time and space. To the Fathers this history had thus the Idea as its principle; the true Idea of the Spirit was consequently to them likewise in the determinate form of history. But the Idea was not yet, as such, separated from history; because the Church thus held to this Idea in historic form, it determined the doctrines. This, then, is the general character of the time. From this Idea as comprehended through the Spirit, many so-called heresies arose in the first centuries after Christ. Among such heretics must be included those of the Gnostics who take the Christian literature as their basis, but give a spiritual significance to everything therein present. For they did not remain at this historical form of the Idea of Spirit, since they interpreted the history and deprived it of its historical value. The reflections which they introduced are, as we have seen (Vol. II., pp. 396-399), to a greater or less extent such as are to be found in the philosophy of the Alexandrians or of Philo. In conformity with their principles they adopted a speculative attitude, but they proceeded into extravagances both of the imagination and morality, although in this dim fantastic region the elements which we found in history may always be recognized. But the form of immediate existence, an essential moment in Christ, is by them etherealized into a universal thought, so that the determination of the individual as a ‘this’ disappears. The Docetæ, for example, said that Christ had only a phantom body, a phantom life; yet in such assertions thought still constituted the background. The Gnostics were thus antagonistic to the Western Church, and, like Plotinus and the Neo-Platonists, this last strove hard against Gnosticism, because it remained in what is general, grasped the conception in the form of imagination, and because this conception was opposed to that of Christ in the Flesh (Χριστὸς ἐν σαρκί).[1] The Church, on the contrary, held to the definite form of personality as the principle of concrete actuality.