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Updated: May 15, 2025
Here we see at the outset Ibn Zaddik's Neo-Platonic tendency to make a short cut to knowledge through the study of man instead of the painful and laborious mastery of the preliminary sciences. And so it was that the Neo-Platonists added little to Aristotle's study of nature, concentrating their attention upon the intelligible or spiritual world.
It is to place him in the light which streams forth from the Mysteries. Plato's later disciples, the Neo-Platonists, credit him with a secret doctrine which he imparted only to those who were worthy, and which he conveyed under the "seal of secrecy." His teaching was looked upon as mysterious in the same sense as the wisdom of the Mysteries.
Here we find the influence of the Hindu thought, principally through the medium or channel of Theosophy, or of the Yogi Philosophy and there we find the influence of the Grecian or Egyptian philosophical conceptions manifesting principally through the medium of a number of occult orders and organizations, whose work is performed quietly and with little recognition on the part of the general public, the policy being to attract the "elect few" rather than the curious crowd and again we find quite a number of persons in America and Europe, believing in Reincarnation because they are attracted by the philosophy of the Neo-Platonists, or the Gnostics of the Early Christian Church, and favoring Reincarnation as a proper part of the Christian Religion, and who while remaining in the bosom of the Church interpret the teachings by the light of the doctrine of Rebirth, as did many of the early Christians, as we have seen.
You recollect, too, as you have read the Neo-Platonists, the result of their similar attempt. 'Idolatry and magic. 'True; and yet, such is the ambition of man, you who were just now envying Tregarva, are already longing to climb even higher than Saint Theresa. 'I do not often indulge in such an ambition.
There also we have the Theosophical Society of India, professing in its constitution to be "the nucleus of a Universal Brotherhood of Humanity, representing and excluding no religious creed." Ammonius, founder of the Neo-Platonists, was a pantheist like the present leader of the Theosophical Society, Mrs. Besant, and like her too, curiously, had begun as a Christian.
This was not the case with the system of philosophic doctrine. There we can see a development from Kalam through Neo-Platonism to Aristotelianism, and we accordingly classified the Jewish thinkers as Mutakallimun, Neo-Platonists or Aristotelians, or combinations in varying proportions of any two of the three systems mentioned.
While the common man held a store of traditional magical beliefs respecting the natural world, the learned man deduced these beliefs from the Neo-Platonists, from the Kabbala, from Hermes Trismegistos, and from a variety of other sources, and attempted to arrange this somewhat heterogeneous mass of erudite lore into a system of organized thought.
I am asked for an explanation as to what Theosophy is, and as to my own opinion on Theosophy the word 'theosoph' is old, and was used among the Neo-platonists. From the dictionary its new meaning appears to be, 'one who claims to have a knowledge of God, or of the laws of nature by means of internal illumination. An Atheist certainly cannot be a Theosophist. A Deist might be a Theosophist.
It had not very much to do with Plato, except that it read him and quoted him as a great authority. The Neo-Platonists did not face facts as Plato did. They lived on quotations, on authority and fancy, great thinkers as some of them were. They pictured the universe as one vast unity. Far beyond all things is God. Of God man can form no conception.
And the righteous man must have substituted the will of God for his individual will, if he is to become a saint. And this new man, this regenerate being, is the spiritual man, the heavenly man, of which the Vedas speak as well as the gospel, and the Magi as well as the Neo-Platonists. March 17, 1870.
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