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Updated: June 18, 2025
Well, Jesus Christ could include in His person this wonderful doctrine of Neoplatonism. The mountainous Asia under Caucasus and Ararat, plunged into the mystery of Mithras, which was born out of the Zoroastrian dualistic religion of light and darkness, of Ormuzd and Ahriman.
In the sixth century B.C. it was in a fair way to becoming as obsolete as Neoplatonism or Gnosticism in the nineteenth A.D.; and Laotse and Confucius simply restated some aspects of it with a new force and sanction; just as H.P. Blavatsky, in the Key to Theosophy, begins, you will remember, with an appeal to and restatement of the Theosophy of the Gnostics and Neoplatonists of Alexandria.
No doubt he was too great a man to make himself the mere mouthpiece of another's thought; but, for all that, he was the legitimate successor of Plato, and it may be added that M. Robin, who has taken upon himself the arduous task of extracting Plato's real philosophy from the writings of Aristotle, has come to the conclusion that there is a great deal more 'Neoplatonism' in Plato than is sometimes supposed.
Philo Judæus, who was living near the centre of things, an observer on the scent of the spiritual, a man acquainted with the writings of Rabbi Hillel, and the father of Neoplatonism never mentions Jesus, nor does he speak of any religious uprising in Judea.
Ficinus and Picus of Mirandola worked no deliverance, either for Italian morals or polity, at a time when such deliverance was needed bitterly enough. Neoplatonism was petted by luxurious and heathen popes, as an elegant play of the cultivated fancy, which could do their real power, their practical system, neither good nor harm.
While, then, these two schools had so many grounds in common, where was their point of divergence? We shall find it, I believe, fairly expressed in the dying words of Plotinus, the great father of Neoplatonism. "I am striving to bring the God which is in us into harmony with the God which is in the universe."
The immense majority of philosophers rejected it, considering their own views superior to it, and moreover, feeling it to be formidable, made use against it of all that could be found beautiful, specious, or expedient in ancient philosophy; and the ardour of Neoplatonism, which we have considered, in part arose from precisely this instinct of rivalry and of struggle.
These contradictions need not lower the great Father of Neoplatonism in our eyes, as a moral being. All accounts of him seem to prove him to have been what Apollo, in a lengthy oracle, declared him to have been, "good and gentle, and benignant exceedingly, and pleasant in all his conversation."
It is only quite recently that historians of Greek philosophy have begun to do justice to 'Neoplatonism'. That is partly due to the contemporary philosophical tendencies noted at the beginning of this paper, and partly to historical investigations into the philosophy of the Middle Ages, which is more and more seen to be dependent mainly on Neoplatonism down to and including the system of St.
Here philosophy was ardently pursued, the works of Plato and his great rivals being diligently studied, while in a later age the innovation of Neoplatonism was abundantly debated and taught. A new school of poetry also arose, most of its followers being mechanical versifiers, though the idyllic poets of Sicily sought these favoring halls.
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