The extinction of the Neoplatonists as a religious fraternity followed the compulsory closure of the Athenian school. The surviving members continued to work in seclusion at their favourite theses, and even produced some commentaries to which students still resort in order to elucidate the history of philosophy.[1] But, although Neoplatonism was objectively defunct, the soul of the movement was irrepressibly vital, and many of the Catholic ecclesiastics had long been in secret sympathy with the mystical tenets of the sect. Some of the Christian fathers had been nurtured in the same intellectual atmosphere as the first Neoplatonists, and had sat in the same class-room with Plotinus as hearers of Ammonius at Alexandria. A stealthy admirer of Proclus had adapted his ternary system with great ingenuity to the Christian hierarchy, and produced his treatise as the composition of Dionysius the Areopagite, who was known to have been a companion of St. Paul. The Pagan triads of the Athenian scholarch reappeared under Biblical names, and a long array of Cherubim, Thrones, Principalities, Virtues, Powers, Archangels, and Angels, were ranged in orderly sequence as a heavenly host proper to intervene
- [Footnote: soul, sleep, dreams; the routine of the seasons; why doctors differ; the
tides; rain and lightning; variation of animal and plants after removal to a different climate; and the venom of serpents. Indisputably Chosroes was a very able ruler, and it is clear that he evinced great curiosity in every department of knowledge, but that he could have studied with the assiduity necessary for the attainment of erudition is a scarcely tenable supposition; and the episode of Uranius falls in very aptly with what we should predicate as likely to be the outcome of his desultory inquisitiveness.]
- ↑ Damascius profited by his Persian experiences to give an account of Babylonian dualism in one of his treatises. This work has received considerable attention of late. See books by Ruelle, Paris, 1889, and Chaignet, Paris, 1898.
