Numenius of Apamea: The Father of Neo-Platonism

...and lacking in qualities. Pythagoras, however, considers it evil; the Stoics, however, consider it as neither good nor evil. But if you ask these same Stoics for the origin of any misfortune that may have overtaken them among the vicissitudes of life, they are accustomed to assign as its cause the perversity of its germs referring to the logoi spermatikoi or seminal reasons of the Stoics. Nevertheless, they are unable to go further and in turn explain this (alleged) perversity, inasmuch as their teachings allow only for two principles of the world: God and matter; God being the highest and supereminent Good, and matter being indifferent.

Pythagoras, however, does not hesitate to defend the truth, even if he has to do so with assertions that are remarkable and that contradict the universal opinions of humanity. For he says that evils must exist necessarily, because of the existence of Providence, which implies the existence of matter and its inherent badness. For if the world derives from matter, then it must necessarily have been created from a previously existing evil nature. Consequently, Numenius praises Heraclitus, who finds fault with Homer for having wished that all evils might be so eradicated from life as to vanish (as he says in Odyssey 13, 45:

“Oh that the Gods would endue us with all sorts of virtues,
“And that there were no evil in the world!”)

Unfortunately, Homer seems to have forgotten that evil was rooted in matter, and that in thus desiring the extermination of evil he was in reality evoking the destruction of the world.

The same Numenius praises Plato for having taught the existence of two world-souls: the one being very beneficent, and the other malevolent, namely, matter. For if nature is in even only moderate motion, then it must necessarily be alive and animated, according to the laws of all things whose motion is innate.

This (matter) is also the cause and director of the passible part of the soul, which contains something corporeal, mortal, and similar to the body, just as the rational...