The Essays and Hymns of Synesius of Cyrene, Vol. 1

INTRODUCTION

Alexandria a School of Metaphysics that should be at once rationalistic and mystical. Porphyry and his other pupils, Amelius, Theodorus, and Nestorius, continued his work without alteration. With minds of this order—minds that alternately abandoned reason for faith and faith for reason—the golden age of Neoplatonism begins and ends. Iamblichus, according to Jules Simon,¹ marks the second period. With him, theurgy theurgy: a form of ritual magic intended to invoke or influence divine beings replaces ecstasy; the evocation of spirits, demonology, and the mysteries begin to supersede metaphysical speculation; the School assumes more and more a sacerdotal sacerdotal: priestly or religious character. Iamblichus and his circle, comprising men such as Sopater, Edesius, and Chrysanthius, are more like the hierophants hierophants: interpreters of sacred mysteries of the mysteries than philosophical thinkers, for they were men whose intellectual inspiration was being rapidly extinguished by superstition. The third phase might almost be termed the political phase. Neoplatonism, now struggling for its life, is at grips with Christianity, a force which had, after Julian’s unsuccessful Hellenistic revival, become openly hostile. Consider how strangely these forces had been grouped in the third and fourth centuries and later. The great Hellenic rhetorician Libanius was the master and intimate friend of such men as St. Basil and St. John Chrysostom, and the founder of Neoplatonism, Ammonius Saccas, had been born and bred in Christianity. All this is matter of history, but at the moment when Synesius came to Athens the exponent of the third phase of the doctrine was Plutarch, the son of Nestorius, a native of Athens himself, and under his guidance the focus of light seems to have passed from the younger city again to the older. "Plutarch the Great," as his pupils insisted on calling him, eventually passed on the torch to his disciple Syrianus, who in turn was succeeded by Proclus. Such was the succession in "The Golden Chain."

But alas for the glory of the great seat of learning at the end of the fourth century! Synesius, fresh from the classes of his adored Hypatia at the Schools of Alexandria, dismisses it with scant praise in a few words written to his brother from Anagyrus:

"In our day it is Egypt which nourishes the offspring of philosophy which she has received from Hypatia, whereas Athens, formerly the home of the wise, is now only famous for its commerce in honey."

And so that pair of Plutarchian

¹ Jules Simon, History of the School of Alexandria, vol. II, p. 190.