Such is the religious philosophy of Plotinus, and for himself personally it sufficed, without the aid of the popular religion or worship. Nevertheless he sought for points of support in these. God is certainly in the truest sense nothing but the primeval Being; but He reveals Himself in a variety of emanations and manifestations. The nous is a sort of second god, the X6yot which are wrapped up in it are gods, the stars are gods.
Amongst his pupils, Amelius and Porphyry are the most emi nent. Amelius modified the teaching of Plotinus on certain points; and he also put some value on the prologue to the Gospel of John. To Porphyry (q.v.) belongs the credit of having recast and pop ularized the system of his master Plotinus. He was not an original thinker, but a diligent student, distinguished by great learning, by a turn for historical and philological criticism, and by an earnest purpose to uproot false teaching, especially Christianity, to ennoble men and train them to goodness. The system of Porphyry is more emphatically practical and religious than that of Plotinus. The object of philosophy, according to Porphyry, is the salva tion of the soul. The origin and the blame of evil are not in the body, but in the desires of the soul. Hence the strictest asceti cism (abstinence from flesh, and wine, and sexual intercourse) is demanded, as well as the knowledge of God. As he advanced in life, Porphyry protested more and more earnestly against the rude faith of the common people and their immoral worships. His work Against the Christians was directed, not against Christ, nor against what he believed to be Christ's teaching, but against the Christians of his own day and their sacred books, which, according to Porphyry, were the work of deceivers and ignorant people. In his trenchant criticism of the origin of what passed for Christianity in his time, he spoke bitter and severe truths, which have gained for him the reputation of the most rabid and wicked of all the enemies of Christianity. His work was destroyed, it was condemned by an edict of the emperors Theodosius II. and Valentinian in the year 448, and the copious extracts which we find in Lactantius, Augustine, Jerome, Macarius Magnus and others show how profoundly he had studied the Christian writings, and how great was his talent for real historical research.
Porphyry marks the transition to a new phase of Neoplatonism, in which it becomes completely subservient to polytheism, and seeks before everything else to protect the Greek and Oriental religions from the formidable assault of Christianity. In the hands of Iamblichus (q.v.), the pupil of Porphyry, Neoplatonism is changed from a philosophical theory to a theological doctrine."
The numerous followers of Iamblichus—Aedesius, Chrysan thius, Eusebius, Priscus, Sopater, Sallust, and, most famous of all, Maximus (q.v.), rendered little service to speculation. Some of them (Themistius in particular) are known as commentators on the older philosophers, and others as the missionaries of mysti cism. The work De mysteriis Aegyptiorum is the best sample of the views and aims of these philosophers. Their hopes rose high when Julian ascended the imperial throne (361-363). But the emperor himself lived long enough to see that his romantic policy of restoration was to leave no results ; and after his early death all hope of extinguishing Christianity was abandoned.
But undoubtedly the victory of Christianity in the age of Valentinian and Theodosius had a purifying influence on Neo platonism. During the struggle for supremacy, the philosophers had been driven to make common cause with everything that was hostile to Christianity. But now Neoplatonism was thrust from the great stage of history. The church and church theology, to whose guidance the masses now surrendered themselves, took in along with them their superstition, their polytheism, their magic, their myths, and all the machinery of religious witchcraft. The more all this settled and established itself—certainly not without opposition—in the church the purer did Neoplatonism become. While maintaining intact its religious attitude and its theory of knowledge, it returned with new zest to scientific studies, espe cially the study of the old philosophers. If Plato still remains the divine philosopher, yet we can perceive that after the year 400 the writings of Aristotle are increasingly read and valued. In the chief cities of the empire Neoplatonic schools flourished till the beginning of the 5th century; during this period, indeed, they were the training-schools of Christian theologians. At Alex andria the noble Hypatia (q.v.) taught, to whose memory her impassioned disciple Synesius, afterwards a bishop, reared a splen did monument. But after the beginning of the 5th century the fanaticism of the church could no longer endure the presence of "heathenism." The murder of Hypatia was the death of phi losophy in Alexandria, although the school there maintained a lingering existence till the middle of the 6th century. But there was one city of the East which, lying apart from the crowded highways of the world, had sunk to a mere provincial town, and yet possessed associations which the church of the 5th century felt herself powerless to eradicate. In Athens a Neoplatonic school still flourished.