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Now scholars have pointed out that the idea of a prolonged conflict between a good and an evil power was characteristic of the Persian religion, and that this view tinged later Judaism and passed over into Christianity. Here it was met and reënforced by Neo-Platonism in the form usually called Gnosticism and Manicheism.
In philosophy the Jews had been gradually emancipating themselves from the influence of ancient traditions; their advance in this direction is shown by the active manner in which they aided in the development of Neo-platonism.
In the middle of the fifth century, when monophysitism was at its zenith, Proclus was fashioning an intellectual machinery to express the Plotinian system. The story of Hypatia evidences the dominant position of Neo-Platonism in Alexandrian culture. The violence of Cyril's measures against her shows what a menace to the Church that philosophy was.
For questioning moods grow burdensome with years; after a strain of virile doubt we are glad to acquiesce once more to relapse into Platonic animism, the logic of valetudinarians. The dog to his vomit. And after Plato the deluge. Neo-platonism. . . . Yet it was quite good sport, while it lasted.
It is sufficient to mention as instances authors like Suetonius, with his naïve belief in miracles, and the rhetorician Aristides, with his Asclepius-cult and general sanctimoniousness; or a minor figure such as Aelian, who wrote whole books of a pronounced, nay even fanatical, devotionalism; or within the sphere of philosophy movements like Neo-Pythagoreanism and Neo-Platonism, both of which are as much in the nature of mystic theology as attempts at a scientific explanation of the universe.
Neo-Platonism also, though it had enthusiasm and some sense of brotherhood, showed itself unable to produce a church. Plotinus, indeed, proposed to the Emperor Gallienus the establishment in Campania of a city of philosophers, a Platonopolis, in which the ideal life should be lived, but the proposal came to nothing.
ANTI-NEO-PLATONIC TENDENCIES. While the Neo-Platonism of Alexandria introduced into Greek philosophy Oriental ideas and tendencies, other positive and practical doctrines also prevailed, founded on common sense and conscience. He was originally a slave, and became a prominent teacher of philosophy in Rome, in the reign of Domitian.
The Neo-Platonism of Porphyry and Plotinus was intended, in the minds of its originators, to lay a scientific basis for polytheism; and, in Jamblichus finally, became an open justification of the most absurd fables of mythology. But, though this might satisfy Julian and those who followed him in his apostasy, it could not come to be an inner danger to the Church.
He shows a better knowledge of Aristotelian ideas than his predecessors, and is well versed in Neo-Platonism. While he attacks all those views of philosophers which are inconsistent to his mind with the religion of Judaism, he speaks in other respects the philosophic language, and even makes concessions to the philosophers.
Small, therefore, as is the consideration bestowed by Neo-Platonism on the affairs of practical life, it has no disposition to shirk the burden of them. One other peculiar aim, the highest of all, is proposed to the soul in the Alexandrian philosophy. It is peculiar, because to be understood only in connexion with the metaphysics and cosmology of the system.
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