Quotes About Neoplatonism

Stukeley was fascinated by Pythagoreanism, Neoplatonism, and the Egyptian Mysteries, as well as Druidism. His friends called him 'The Druid', and after he had met Augusta, Princess of Wales, the mother of the future George III, he wrote to her as 'Veleda, Archdruidess of Kew'.

Man as an Idea in neoplatonist religion is again an abstraction, less a monster and more a bad joke. The religious idea of man is of a bodiless being who works to undo his flesh, deny his appetites, and to rise above the ordinary requirements of the body. This abstraction has a horror of the material world as a kind of fatal allure seeking to corrupt his soul. But no man finds himself more beset by lust than the man who tries to deny he is a man.

All the same, Abelard opened the mind of the Middle Ages in new and startling ways. He gave the name of Aristotle and Aristotle's logic an edgy glamour it never entirely lost. Aristotle had said: All men desire to know. Abelard now added: All men need to question and doubt in order to know. These were important signposts for the future. For now, medieval civilization was about to swing down another path, one emblazoned by the Neoplatonist imagination.

while Judaism and the Bible gave Christianity its weight and matter, its flesh and blood, Plato and Neoplatonism became its conceptual spine.

At its heart, Roger Bacon's vision of science owes a great deal to the Neoplatonist inheritance or even Saint Augustine. For Bacon, it was the inner light of reason that stirs our desire to unlock the mysteries of nature and art, including the divine light around us: one reason Bacon was so fascinated with the science of optics.

The one great lesson Origen learned from his Neoplatonist teachers was that every human being was made in the image of God, in the same way Plato described all material objects as made in the image of the Forms.31 Of course, the most perfect of God's images was Jesus Christ himself, His only begotten son. However, everyone of every race, sex, age, or creed, from the lowest slave to the emperor himself, carried that same reflection of perfection.

This would be Plotinus's great message to his own age and to the future. All of us, whether we know it or not, want to be one with perfection—or as later Neoplatonists will say, to be one with God. No one wants to live in the cave. We all want to see the light; and once we discover the true trail, we can retrace the path of the spirit back to whence it came. Of course, finding the trail is the great difficulty.

By a mental sleight of hand, Ficino effortlessly merged Plato's theory of love with Christian Neoplatonist ideas about divine love derived from familiar authors like Augustine or Saint Bernard—not to mention Italy's two most famous love poets, Dante and Petrarch. And Plato's doctrine of love as the desire for beauty had a peculiar attraction in quattrocento Florence.

Understanding is the reward of faith," Saint Augustine says. "I believe, in order that I may understand" will be the catchphrase of the early Middle Ages. It is the summing-up of Augustine's final authoritative fusion of Neoplatonism and Christianity.

Neoplatonists also believed that the vast variety of human thought, if traced back to the One Source—what Leonardo da Vinci called the Prime Mover—would lead to spiritual enlightenment and ultimately to God. This and the mystical texts that Ficino was translating led him to attempt a fusion of all mystical beliefs, from Greek gnosticism to Egyptian hermeneutics to Christian cosmology—and to Jewish Kabbalah.

By fusing Neoplatonism and Zoroastrianism, by identifying evil with matter, the Gnostic automatically divinizes the spirit.