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Carlyle has it, "the bottomless pit got roofed over," as it may be again ere long. Are we then to say, that Neoplatonism was a failure? That Alexandria, during four centuries of profound and earnest thought, added nothing?
It was not wonderful, however, that Neoplatonism took the course it did. Spirit, they felt rightly, was meant to rule matter; it was to be freed from matter only for that very purpose. No one could well deny that. The philosopher, as he rose and became, according to Plotinus, a god, or at least approached toward the gods, must partake of some mysterious and transcendental power.
The minds of men had sported forth, not toward any sound investigation of facts, but toward an eclectic resuscitation of Neoplatonism; which endured, not without a certain beauty and use as let Spenser's "Faerie Queen" bear witness till the latter half of the seventeenth century. After that time a rapid change began.
The prospects of Christian theology are very difficult to estimate; and I am so convinced myself of the superiority of the Catholic theology based on Neoplatonism, that I cannot view the matter with impartial detachment. We all tend to predict the triumph of our own opinions. But miracles must, I am convinced, be relegated to the sphere of pious opinion.
As the centuries went by its views became further and further divorced from phenomena, and the bizarre developments of later Neoplatonism stand to this day as a warning against any system which shall neglect the investigation of nature. But in its decay Platonism dragged science down and destroyed by neglect nearly all earlier biological material.
His throne, however, was at Athens, not at Alexandria. After the murder of the maiden philosopher, Neoplatonism prudently retired to Greece. But Proclus is so essentially the child of the Alexandrian school that we cannot pass him over.
Its weakness as a moral force must not blind us to its charm for the imagination. Neoplatonism brought Egypt to the aid of Greece, and drew on Christianity itself for help. The secrets of philosophy were set forth in the mysteries of Eastern superstition. From the dim background of a noble monotheism the ancient gods came forth to represent on earth a majesty above their own.
With the rise of Christianity, Alexandria became a centre of bitter theological and political factions, the story of which haunts the memory of anyone who was so fortunate as to read in his youth Kingsley's "Hypatia." These centuries, with their potent influence of neoplatonism on Christianity, appear to have been sterile enough in medicine.
He had made for himself a curious personal religion, a bizarre mixture of theosophy and neoplatonism and Bergsonian philosophy, a faith that prescribed transport; and these works were in part conceived as rituals. They were planned as ceremonies of elevation and deification by ecstasy, in which performers and auditors engaged as active and passive celebrants.
This aspect of the modern spiritualistic epidemic did not escape attention. Dr. Leonard Marsh, of the University of Vermont, published, in 1854, a treatise called The Apocatastasis, or Progress Backwards. He proved that the marvels of the Foxes, of Home, and the other mediums, were the old marvels of Neoplatonism. But he draws no conclusion except that spiritualism is retrogressive.
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