ardour with formal acuteness, connected the whole mass of traditional lore into a huge system, making good defects, and smoothing away contradictions by means of distinctions and speculations. “It was reserved for Proclus,” says Zeller, “to bring the Neoplatonic philosophy to its formal conclusion by the rigorous consistency of his dialectic, and, keeping in View all the modifications which it had undergone in the course of two centuries, to give it that form in which it was transferred to Christianity and Mahommedanism in the middle ages.” Forty-four years after the death of Proclus the school of Athens was closed by Justinian (A.D. 529), but it had already fulfilled its mission in the work of Proclus. The works of Proclus, as the last testament of Hellenism to the church and the middle ages, exerted an incalculable influence on the next thousand years. They not only formed one of the bridges by which the medieval thinkers got back to Plato and Aristotle; they determined the scientific method of thirty generations, and they partly created and partly nourished the Christian mysticism of the middle ages.
The disciples of Proclus are not eminent (Marinus, Asclepiodotus, Ammonius, Zenodotus, Isidorus, Hegias, Damascius). The last president of the Athenian school was Damascius (q.v.). When Justinian issued the edict for the suppression of the school, Damascius along with Simplicius (the painstaking commentator on Aristotle) and five other Neoplatonists set out to make a home in Persia. They found the conditions were unfavourable and were allowed to return (see Chosroes I.).
At the beginning of the 6th century Neoplatonism had ceased to exist in the East as an independent philosophy. Almost at the same time, however—and the coincidence is not accidental—it made new conquests in the church theology through the writings of the pseudo-Dionysius. It began to bear fruit in Christian mysticism, and to diffuse a new magical leaven through the worship of the church.
In the West, where philosophical efforts of any kind had been very rare since the 2nd century, and where mystical contemplation did not meet with the necessary conditions, Neoplatonism found a congenial soil only in isolated individuals. C. Marius Victorinus (q.v.) translated certain works of Plotinus, and thus had a decisive influence on the spiritual history of Augustine (Confess. vii. 9, viii. 2). It may be said that Neoplatonism influenced the West only through the medium of the church theology, or, in some instances, under that disguise. Even Boetius (it may now be considered certain) was a catholic Christian, although his whole mode of thought was certainly Neoplatonic (see Boetius). His violent death in the year 525 marks the end of independent philosophy in the West. But indeed this last of the Roman philosophers stood quite alone in his century, and the philosophy for which he lived was neither original, nor well-grounded, nor methodically developed.
Neoplatonism and the Theology of the Church.—The question as to the influence of Neoplatonism on the development of Christianity is not easily answered, because it is scarcely possible to get a complete view of their mutual relations. The answer will depend, in the first instance, upon how much is included under the term “Neoplatonism.” If Neoplatonism is understood in the widest sense, as the highest and fittest expression of the religious movements at work in the Graeco-Roman empire from the 2nd to the 5th century, then it may be regarded as the twin-sister of the church dogmatic which grew up during the same period; the younger sister was brought up by the elder, then rebelled against her and at last tyrannized over her. The Neoplatonists themselves characterized the theologians of the church as intruders, who had appropriated the Greek philosophy and spoiled it by the admixture of strange fables. Thus Porphyry says of Origen (Euseb. H.E. vi. 19), “The outer life of Origen was that of a Christian and contrary to law; but, as far as his views of things and of God are concerned, he thought like the Greeks, whose conceptions he overlaid with foreign myths.” This verdict of Porphyry’s is at all events more just and apt than that of the theologians on the Greek philosophers, when they accused them of having borrowed all their really valuable doctrines from the ancient Christian books. But the important point is that the relationship was acknowledged on both sides. Now, in so far as both Neoplatonism and the church dogmatic set out from the felt need of redemption, in so far as both sought to deliver the soul from sensuality and recognized man’s inability without divine aid—without a revelation—to attain salvation an a sure knowledge of the truth, they are at once most intimately related and at the same time mutually independent. It must be confessed that when Christianity began to project a theology it was already deeply impregnated by Hellenic influences. But the influence is, to be traced not so much to philosophy as to the general culture of the time, and the whole set of conditions under which spiritual life was manifested. When Neoplatonism appeared, the Christian church had already laid down the main positions of her theology; or if not, she worked them out alongside of Neoplatonism—that is not a mere accident—but still independently. It was only by identifying itself with the whole history of Greek philosophy, or by figuring as pure Platonism restored, that Neoplatonism could stigmatize the church theology of Alexandria as a plagiarism from itself. These assumptions, however, were fanciful. Although our sources are unfortunately very imperfect, the theology of the church does not appear to have learned much from Neoplatonism in the 3rd century—partly because the latter had not yet reached the form in which its doctrines could be accepted by the church dogmatic, and partly because theology was otherwise occupied. Her first business was to plant herself firmly on her own territory, to make good her position and clear away old and objectionable opinions. Origen was quite as independent a thinker as Plotinus; only, they both drew on the same tradition. From the 4th century downwards, however, the influence of Neoplatonism on the Oriental theologians was of the utmost importance. The church gradually expressed her most peculiar convictions in dogmas, which were formulated by philosophical methods, but were irreconcilable with Neoplatonism (the Christological dogmas); and the further this process went the more unrestrainedly did theologians resign themselves to the influence of Neoplatonism on all other questions. The doctrines of the incarnation, the resurrection of the flesh and the creation of the world in time marked the boundary line between the church’s dogmatic and Neoplatonism: in every other respect, theologians and Neoplatonists drew so closely together that many of them are completely at one. In fact, there were special cases, like that of Synesius, in which a speculative reconstruction of distinctively Christian doctrines by Christian men was winked at. If a book does not happen to touch on any of the above-mentioned doctrines, it may often be doubtful whether the writer is a Christian or a Neoplatonist. In ethical precepts, in directions for right living (that is, asceticism), the two systems approximate more and more closely. But it was here that Neoplatonism finally celebrated its greatest triumph. It indoctrinated the church with all its mysticism, its mystic exercises and even its magical cultus as taught by Iamblichus. The works of the pseudo-Dionysius contain a gnosis in which, by means of the teaching of Iamblichus and Proclus, the church’s theology is turned into a scholastic mysticism with directions on matters of practice and ritual. And as these writings were attributed to Dionysius, the disciple of the apostles, the scholastic mysticism which they unfold was regarded as an apostolic, not to say a divine, science. The influence exercised by these writings, first on the East, and then—after the 9th (or 12th) century—on the West, cannot be overestimated. It is impossible to enlarge upon it here; suffice it to say that the mystical and pietistic devotion of our own day, even in the Protestant churches, is nourished on works whose ancestry can be traced, through a series of intermediate links, to the writings of the pseudo-Areopagite.
In the ancient world there was only one Western theologian who came directly under the influence of Neoplatonism; but that one is Augustine, the most important of them all. It was through Neoplatonism that Augustine got rid of scepticism and the last dregs of Manichaeism. In the seventh book of his Confessions he has recorded how much he owed to the perusal of Neoplatonic works. On all the cardinal doctrines—God, matter, the relation of God to the world, freedom and evil—Augustine retained the impress of Neoplatonism; at the same time he is the theologian of antiquity who most clearly perceived and most fully stated wherein Neoplatonism and Christianity differ. The best ever written by any church father on this subject is to be found in chaps. ix.-xxi. of the seventh book of the Confessions.
Why Neoplatonism succumbed in the conflict with Christianity is a question which the historians have never satisfactorily answered. As a rule, the problem is not even stated correctly. We have nothing to do here with our own private ideal of Christianity, but solely with catholic Christianity and catholic theology. These are the forces that conquered Neoplatonism, after assimilating nearly everything that it contained. Further, we must consider the arena in which the victory was won. The battlefield was the empire of Constantine and Theodosius. It is only when these and all other circumstances of the case are duly realized that we have a right to inquire how much the essential doctrines of Christianity contributed to the victory, and what share must be assigned to the organization of the church.
In medieval theology and philosophy mysticism appears as the powerful opponent of rationalistic dogmatism. The empirical science of the Renaissance and the two following centuries was itself a new development of Platonism and Neoplatonism, as opposed to rationalistic dogmatism, with its contempt for experience. Magic, astrology and alchemy—all the outgrowth of Neoplatonism—gave the first effectual stimulus, to the observation of nature, and consequently to natural science, and in this way finally extinguished barren
