In like manner Porphyry sought absorption in or union with God.

He was a Tyrian by birth, established a school at Rome, and wrote against Christianity; his treatise on that subject was answered by Eusebius and St.Jerome, but the Emperor Theodosius silenced it more effectually by causing all the copies to be burnt.

Porphyry bewails his own unworthiness, saying that he had been united to God in ecstasy but once in eighty-six years, whereas his master Plotinus had been so united six times in sixty years.
A complete system of theology, based on the theory of emanation, was constructed by Proclus, who speculated on the manner in which absorption takes place: whether the soul is instantly reabsorbed and reunited in the moment of death, or whether it retains the sentiment of personality for a time, and subsides into complete reunion by successive steps.
ARABIC PSYCHOLOGY.

From the Alexandrian Greeks these ideas passed to the Saracen philosophers, who very soon after the capture of the great Egyptian city abandoned to the lower orders their anthropomorphic notions of the nature of God and the simulachral form of the spirit of man.

As Arabism developed itself into a distinct scientific system, the theories of emanation and absorption were among its characteristic features.