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They were trying to excuse themselves for their lingering half belief in them, by turning them into allegories, powers of nature, metaphysical abstractions, as did Porphyry and Iamblichus, Plotinus and Proclus, and the rest of the Neo-Platonist school of aristocratic philosophers and fine ladies: but the lower classes still, in every region, kept up their own local beliefs and worships, generally of the most foul and brutal kind.
A still stronger argument against Bahya as the author of our treatise is that derived from the content of the work, which moves in a different circle of ideas from the "Duties of the Hearts." Our anonymous author is an outspoken Neo-Platonist.
The philosophical or mystical treatises of his later life, On the Universe, On the God of Socrates, On Plato and his Doctrine, do not rise above the ordinary level of the Neo-Platonist school, Platonism half understood, mixed with fanciful Orientalism, and enveloped in a maze of verbiage.
'Do you not think, then, that as the greater contains the less, and the archetype of the genus that of the species, we should have been wiser if we had speculated a little more on the archetype of man as man, before we meddled with a part of that archetype, the archetype of the philosopher?.... Certainly it would have been the easier course, for there are more men than philosophers, Hypatia; and every man is a real man, and a fair subject for examination, while every philosopher is not a real philosopher our friends the Academics, for instance, and even a Neo-Platonist or two whom we know?
We have now to examine in what manner the glimmering lamp of knowledge was sustained when it was all but ready to die out. By the Arabians it was handed down to us. The grotesque forms of some of those who took charge of it are not without interest. They exhibit a strange mixture of the Neo-platonist, the Pantheist, the Mohammedan, the Christian.
And you know that He was born without a father, like Perseus; you know also that Perseus delivered Andromeda, as Jesus Christ will deliver Rome and Lutetia." Julian was silent, for, as a Neo-platonist, he liked analogies between the heavenly and the temporal, and a poetic figure was more for him than a rhetorical ornament.
I suppose we must not try to explain them. Amiel was a Neo-Platonist and a skeptic in one. To my mind, the beliefs and the function in the world of the historic Church form just one of those obscure but all-important possibilities which the human mind is powerless effectively to dismiss from itself, and might wisely accept, in the first place, as a workable hypothesis.
One feels that he too felt the emotion that his characters display; he did not merely paint, he thought and suffered. Hence his work is dramatic. Again Botticelli had far wider sympathies than most of his contemporaries. He was a friend of the Medici, a neo-Platonist, a student of theology with the poet Palmieri, an illustrator of Dante, and a devoted follower of Savonarola.
He then adds that Aristotle attributes a similar view to his predecessors, but that this view is inconsistent with Aristotle's own thinking. For in his opinion what is material is composite and possessed of potentiality. Hence only those things have matter which are subject to generation and decay, and in general change from one state to another. Thus Gabirol was a Neo-Platonist.
He makes use besides of Aristotelian notions, and is influenced by the Neo-Platonic treatise, known as the "Liber de Causis," and derived from a work of Proclus. It is for this reason difficult to characterize his standpoint, but we shall not go far wrong if we call him a Neo-Platonist, for reasons which will appear in the sequel.
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