the Syrian, Iamblichus, a contemporary of Constantine, who gave the final form to Neoplatonism and adapted it for widest acceptance. The religion of Plotinus was an ineffable creed which avowedly excluded vulgar participation, and was addressed only to cultured aspirants;[1] but a descent was made by his successors who, with the object of amplifying their influence, embraced gradually all the crass superstitions of the multitude. A mystical signification was read into the sacred books of the Greeks, as the poems of Orpheus, Homer, and Hesiod may appropriately be termed, by an allegorical interpretation of every phrase or incident in the text. All trivial circumstances or immoral pictures were thus disclosed to be fraught with spiritual or ethical meaning for the pious reader.[2] The endless procession of invisible beings with which Eastern fancy had peopled space, angels, demons, archons, and demigods, were accepted by the latter school and associated to the theocracy as mediators who could be summoned and suborned to human purposes by magic rites,
- [Footnote: see the Psychical Society's Reports; cf. Bigg, Christian Platonists, etc.,
p. 248; also Myers' Classical Essays, 1883, p. 83, et seq.]
- ↑ "Only the cultured," he remarks, "can aspire to the summit and upwards; as for the vulgar crowd, they are bound down to common necessaries"; Enneads, II, ix, 9.
- ↑ The Stoics began this allegorizing of the ancient books; see Zeller (Stoics, Epicureans, and Sceptics, Lond., 1892) for an account of their conceits. Philo Judaeus performed a similar service for the Pentateuch, of which the Jews do not seem to have believed much literally in his day; nor, in fact, did the early Christian Fathers; see Origen, Comment. in Genesim, etc. He notices, amongst other things, the difficulty which arises from the production of light before the sun was created; Gen., i, 3, 16. Porphyry's treatise on the Cave of the Nymphs (Odyssey, xiii, 102) remains to show the method of exegesis adopted by the Neoplatonists in order to demonstrate the divine inspiration of the old Greek poets. Kingsley's novel, "Hypatia," gives a good picture of Neoplatonism in some of its popular aspects.
