Cicero Christianised

While Greek-speaking Christians had a long tradition of applying philosophy to religious questions, Latin-speaking Christians were slower to take advantage of it. If we ignore the rather antiphilosophical Tertullian, the first Latin Christian philosopher of note, Lactantius, discoursed especially with the Latin tradition of philosophers, such as Cicero and Seneca. Like them, Lactantius endorses the idea that world was made for a purpose. He especially extols the symmetrical, beautiful and intricate structure of human body and the materialistically insolvable wonder of life processes as proofs of the existence of a divine designer. A major point of his criticism is the Epicurean idea that gods in their perfection would have nothing to do with lesser beings. Lactantius instead notes that a truly powerful being would essentially use its power and not remain passive.

Although Lactantius sympathises with the Stoic idea that the organiser of the world cared providentially for other entities, unlike them, he believes that God would also punish those behaving against the rules of good life - in addition to love, God could also experience anger. Of course, Lactantius admits, this divine anger is not be blind rage or fury, but a will for a just retribution against subjects who ignored the commands of their superior. Thus, emperors who had persecuted Christians were eventually punished by God.

Lactantius insists that only a single designer could be behind the world around us. If there would be several creators, he argues, their creations would essentially limit one another, thus making it impossible that world would form a unified whole. Hence, he rejects the polytheism inherent in Roman religion. Supposed divinities, Lactantius speculates, had been mere mortal human beings. Statues and images were made of them, originally just to make their memory last. Due to their fame, they had finally been relegated to the status of gods, and images made of them were worshiped in hope of rewards. They were thus no true gods, and even their fame was often due to quite wrong reasons, such as their physical prowess.

The falsity of Roman gods, Lactantius believes, had been known by philosophers, but they still could not find true religion with mere human reason. Some of them, like Cicero, still followed the common rituals, out of respect for tradition. Yet, Lactantius thinks, previous generations had been not wiser than current generations, so it would have been better to cease such futile traditions altogether, since they were contrary to reason. He has no respect either for philosophers who called natural things, like planets, gods. Planets do follow regular courses, unlike earthly objects with quite fortuitous movements, Lactantius admits, but this is no sign of their divinity - it just shows that God had ordained their movements.

The ultimate source of the errors of polytheists, and indeed, the ultimate source of everything evil, Lactantius suggests, is a creature which had rebelled against God, because it was jealous of perfection it did not possess. Lactantius is somewhat ambivalent of the status of this adversary. On the one hand, he says, the choice of the adversary had been free and God had merely given it the ability to err. On the other hand, Lactantius also insists, God requires opposite forces, that is, both good and evil, for creation of the world.

Although Lactantius speaks as if God required good and evil to make the world, he does not mean that God was in need of pre-existing material for his creation, like pagan thinkers had believed. Instead, Lactantius is certain that God was able to create, in addition to conscious beings, also something that has no consciousness at all, namely, matter. Indeed, he continues, if matter had existed eternally, it must have been incapable of being changed in any fashion and so utterly unsuitable for the role of material to be shaped.

Lactantius’ account of creation shows a rather old-fashioned view of the world, even in the context of ancient philosophy. Just like good and evil are the two forces governing the world, Lactantius says, the world also contains two regions - the heavenly abode full of light and essentially dark earth underneath it. The region of earth is also characterised by the same duality - East is where sun rises and light begins, while West is where the sun sets and darkness begins. Lactantius is obviously speaking about a flat earth, and to complete the account, he notes that cold North is close to dark West and warm South to light East. The geographical duality, he continues, is linked to a temporal duality, where day is filled with a single light of Sun, while dark night is only feebly lighted by the plurality of stars.

In addition to world in general, Lactantius notes, God designed also living things, which again require duality - divine heat in them is tempered by wetness of water. Lactantius explicitly notes that animals could not have been born without the help of divinity. He especially disparages the Epicurean notion that earth would have spontaneously been filled with the first individuals of all animal species and that it would have produced milkish sustenance to all these animals. Lactantius argues that world could not have been so different in the beginning, and if it were, animals could not have survived to adulthood without divine guidance.

The duality of animals, Lactantius believes, is augmented by another duality in human beings - the human body is infused by divine breath or soul. Although these two parts are necessary components of a human being, Lactantius notes that the soul is meant to be the controlling part of this combination. A person who lets his body control his soul will then be evil.

Lactantius continues then with details taken out of Biblical stories. First human beings had lived in eastern part of the world, which symbolises the goodness of the whole world. The adversary tricked humans into breaking God’s commands, which led to them being expelled from the paradise. Humans lost their immortality, but retained long lives, until God flooded the world because of the wicked ways of humankind. After that event, the humans who had remained alive filled all the corners of the earth, and the true religion faded away from their memories.

God had created guardians for the human race, Lactantius writes, but the adversary seduced some of them to succumb to temptation of bodies and to produce children with human beings. These fallen guardians and their offspring became then henchmen of the adversary, according to Lactantius, and they spread various false teachings over the earth. God allowed them to do this, Lactantius conjectures, because he was willing to test the worth of human beings.

If pagan religions are for Lactantius just deceptions of demons, pagan philosophy as mere love of wisdom is for him no true wisdom. It consists, Lactantius says, either of an admission of human ignorance or of a collection of opinions masking itself as knowledge. The former, he notes, clearly does not deserve the name of wisdom, while the latter ignores the inevitable source of error inherent in the bodily constitution of a human being.

Lactantius is especially critical of the opinions of philosophers about ethics - physics and logic concern only frivolous issues, while ethics should guide our very behaviour. He considers particularly the supreme goals philosophers had suggested for human life and finds them all wanting: pleasure is a goal good for pigs, while knowledge and virtue are only good as means for further goals. True goal of human life, Lactantius suggests, has to be a reward for the worship of God, namely, an eternal life without the shackles of bodily restrictions.

Like many early Christian thinkers, Lactantius thinks that true wisdom is revealed to humankind through Logos, the first creation of God and in so intimate connection with him that it should be called the son of God. Logos could even be called God itself, without destroying the unity of divinity - it is the necessary manner in which God appeared and revealed itself and without it no knowledge of God was possible. Logos had taken a human form, Lactantius continues, in order to show the humankind an example of a perfect life. This perfect specimen had to be God, in order to have authority over all humans, but it had to also be a human, so that it would prove that human body was no complete obstacle for perfect life.

Pagan religion, Lactantius states, did not just block our connection to God, but it also undermined the whole society. Pagans worshiped Jupiter, who had rebelled against his father Saturn and thus destroyed the idyllic past. No wonder then, Lactantius continues, that the Roman society rewarded thugs and militaristic leaders. Christians, on the other hand, are willing to share their fortune with people of less means, and during a shipwreck they would gladly give the last plank to another person, because they know a true reward waits them in the afterlife. The injustice of pagans, Lactantius argues, can even be seen in that they will not argue for their religion, but persecute Christians, who decline to follow its rituals, while Christians force no one to convert to their religion.

The rituals of Christians, Lactantius points out, involve no animal sacrifices, but just living the life as it should be lived. This way of life is narrow and difficult one. Indeed, Lactantius goes even so far as to suggest that one could not naturally live a truly good life, unless one had the certainty given by God’s revelation that an immortal life would be its reward. Still, unlike some pagan philosophers had insisted, it is not enough just to know what one should do, if one does not really do it. Even the purging of sins by Logos is not enough, if one still continues to live a sinful life.

The life following this vision of divinity, Lactantius insists, should be a life dedicated to others and especially to those most in need. Lactantius notes that we have an innate way to recognise those needing our assistance, through the feeling of pity, and unliked Stoics insisted, we should follow this feeling, at least when done in moderation. Indeed, Lactantius notes that all feelings, even the seemingly negative ones, could be useful. We should not fear earthly pains, but we should fear divine punishments, and we should not be angered by evil works made against us, but we should use anger to control the urges of growing youngsters.

What one requires, according to Lactantius, is to control all emotions and sensations, so that their excess will not lead one away from one’s duties. Thus, Lactantius states, we should not use vision to watch brutal gladiator fights or rowdy theatricals, we should not use hearing to listen poems without moral teaching, we should not smell flowers or eat delicacies and we should not engage in sexual frivolities. While one might wonder why God then gave us the capacity to use all the senses in a manner we shouldn’t, Lactantius has a simple answer - good life requires battle against desires. Still, he does not think that one error would be enough to condemn a person, but honest repenting followed by good behaviour could still purge them.

God had made the world, Lactantius says, for the purpose of testing whether humans are capable of good life, which deserves then immortality for its prize. Human being is conjoined of good and evil - immortal soul and earthly body, with contrary desires pointing to different directions. In the state of innocence, the first human being did not yet understand the difference between the two. Lactantius suggests that fall was in a sense necessary step, because then human beings received the ability to understand the difference of good and evil in their own constitution. With this understanding, human beings became responsible for their evil nature and they were then appointed with the duty to purge themselves.

The final purification from all evil would require separation of soul from the evil of body. Lactantius suggests that this is in a sense a reason to believe in the immortality of soul - if we don’t assume it, it would make no sense to live a good life against the instigation of body. Against Epicureans, who thought that soul would instantly disperse when body collapsed, Lactantius insists that body is more like a container holding soul down. Thus, the slow collapse of the body can affect mental faculties, as long as soul is confined by the body, but when separated from the body, the soul would quickly return to its senses.

Once the purpose of the world is fulfilled, Lactantius notes, world in its current shape is not required and God as its creator has the power to undo it. For numerological reasons, Lactantius suggests that God has chosen number seven for this purpose. When world will have existed for six thousand years - something Lactantius thinks would happen in couple hundred years - Rome, which was already old, requiring the mastership of one person, will collapse in a civil war and finally its remnants will be assaulted by a king from north. Lactantius continues that the world will be in a state of upheaval, with land not bearing any fruit and all sorts of cosmological signs, like comets and eclipses, being commonplace. A final prophet will rise and do wonders, but will also be killed by an eastern tyrant, who will also have power to do all sorts of magic and who will pretend to be Logos. This state of constant warfare, Lactantius notes, will end when the real Logos returns to take up the governance of the world.

This will still not be the end of the world, Lactantius says, but it will continue existing for another thousand years. All the good people who had lived from the dawn of the world will rise from their graves and will go on to live and procreate - and some evil persons will also have survived, to be used as slaves. This millennium will be, Lactantius pictures, an era of prosperity, when world will spring honey and delicacies everywhere and the prince of evil would be chained. After thousand years, this source of all evil will be let free and he will incite nations of the world in a final assault against the fortification of Logos. This seems like a desperate attempt, since the end result, according to Lactantius, will be just God destroying the world as it is, with the remaining good persons surviving in caverns. The world will be made completely anew and the good human beings will receive new, purer bodies.

Strangely enough, Lactantius notes that all the evil people will also receive a kind of immortality, after all. They will be resurrected at this final moment and they will also receive new bodies. Yet, the purpose these bodies, Lactantius says, is just to make the evil persons suffer - they will be put to an everlasting fire, which while destroying flesh also renews it, thus making the bodily pain never-ending. And while Lactantius earlier disparaged people watching brutal fights, he somewhat inconsistently remarks that the just persons will go on watching the pain of their fellow human beings.

School of Plotinus

While Plotinus was still joined with mortal body, his philosophy was constantly going through slight alterations - although the broad details remained same, there were always uncertainties in details, which Plotinus hadn’t decided upon. When the soul of Plotinus returned to its pure state, time stopped also for the natural development of his philosophy. Instead, reinterpretation began almost instantly. Plotinus was regarded as an almost mythical figure, who had an instant line to the more divine levels of reality. One of his disciples, Porphyry, rearranged his philosophical texts, often dividing continuous essays into separate texts. His aim was apparently to systematise the philosophy of Plotinus. He put first texts dealing with ordinary human life, then through the study of corporeal world rose to the levels of soul and intellect. The final texts in Porphyry’s reordering should have concerned the primordial unity, but perhaps because there is so little to say about it, he also appended Plotinus’ discussion of categories and numbers to the final part.

Porphyry himself was a true polymath, who could both interpret Homer’s writings and follow Ptolemy’s account of musicology. In addition, he also combined all he knew into a worldview with clear Platonist origins. Thus, when reading in Homer a description of a cavern of water nymphs with two entrances, Porphyry regarded it as a symbolic representation of Platonic cavern or world, water being linked to impurities of embodied life, and two entrances marking the journey of soul both to and from world. And Ptolemian account of the study of musicology inspired Porphyry to discuss the general method for true knowledge: a reasoning being used perception (such as perceived sounds) as a tool for covering universal patterns (such as quantitative relations behind different melodies), which the reasoning being in its highest state could recognise as belonging to an immaterial realm of paradigmatic models.

Mostly just fragments of purely philosophy works of Porphyry have survived, but he was clearly influenced by Plotinus. Like Plotinus, Porphyry spoke of a hierarchy of body, soul and intellect, in which body was enlivened by and served soul and soul was enlivened by and served intellect. But whereas Plotinian intellect was something clearly removed from embodied soul - a state of pure self-reflection - with Porphyry it seems to be closely linked to soul as its controlling force.

Furthermore, Porphyry calls the highest point of his hierarchy God, thus linking his ideas more to a religious context. His God appears to be also quite active force, taking care of the physical world, yet, unlike Christian God, Porphyry’s God was not interested of punishing anybody. Now, Porphyry noted that God was helped by a real hierarchy of lower spiritual entities, such as demons and heroic souls. Some of these lower entities might be less helpful and even work against the common interest.

The connection to the spiritual entities and especially to God is the only method for stable happiness for human soul, Porphyry says. Despite the religious connotations, Porphyry notes that traditional forms of worship have little to do with establishing this link, and many religious ceremonies he considered to be even harmful. For instance, it makes no sense to sacrifice food for God, who as an incorporeal entity does not eat anything. Especially to be avoided is animal sacrifice, which at most attracts malevolent gaseous entities (that is, demons) that devour smoke rising from burning flesh. Besides, animals take part in the common rationality of living nature and should therefore not be killed vainly.

Similarly, Porphyry is mostly skeptical of conventional means for receiving messages from God. God himself would not even feel a need to contact anyone, so such messages would at most come from beneficial incorporeal entities and in worse cases from the delusions of oneself or deceptions of evil entities.

Instead, Porphyry emphasises the importance of lawful behavior. Law in question is not conventional law of some community, but, firstly, the natural law governing the affairs of physical world, and secondly, the divine law, connecting natural world with higher realms of existence, when soul gets rid of its bodily shackles.

The rule of behaviour in natural law emphasises healthy use of one’s bodily and mental faculties and its aim is to stifle unbridled passions. The divine law, on the other hand, means severing the ties between soul and body, through such practices like abstinence. The universe of material bodies is in a sense just a projection of souls, when they have lost their connection with their innermost selves - souls project these vanishing bodies into the barely existing canvas of matter, which as completely featureless cannot change into anything. Bodies governed by souls can generate other bodies, which at first lived in womb like plants, with no motion of their own and nourished by an umbilical cord. When such a body finally leaves the womb, another soul, which feels an interest on the newly born body, will voluntarily connect itself with the body and control it. While in itself an indivisible unity, in connection with body it might be said to have parts, because it attends to different parts of its body with its different capacities.

The aim of the practices severing the tie between soul and body, according to Porphyry, is to return soul to itself, to its original unity with itself. Soul cannot be said to exist in a place, except in the sense that it is inclined to something which has a place. In its earthly state, soul is interested in body and objects impinging on it. At this state, soul then directs its sensation to these objects and projects a life force to direct the body. Soul cannot change the basic character of the body, such as whether it is male or female, but it can guide the body to a healthier life. For instance, dietary choices, like abstinence from meat, weaken the link between soul and body.

Depending on the life lived, soul can choose a new life for itself and thus go through many personalities. When it turns more and more toward its own non-vanishing nature, it combines with more starry bodies. Finally, at the moment of its perfection, soul becomes intellect, which timelessly thinks perfect models of all entities, all at the same time, and in this world of perfections it also contemplates itself. Through this self-thinking intellect soul can finally unite with divinity, which for Porphyry is the truth of all existence.

Although his ideas resemble Christianity in some measure, for Porphyry it is just one sect among many others. He is quick to note that the history of Christianity had been coloured by internal strife from the start, when Peter and Paul had debated about letting uncircumcised into the church - how could single truth be found among these contentions? Porphyry is also skeptical about the various ways in which Christians had interpreted their holy writings. He is especially wary of Origen’s creative readings, which have in his eyes almost no connection with Bible itself.

Still, Porphyry is also critical of more literal readings and holds the opinion that Christians are completely wrong about the supposed high age of such biblical figures like Moses. Furthermore, Porphyry raises doubts towards the prophecies in Old Testament - for instance, he thinks that prophecies in book of Daniel were actually no tales of times to come, but histories, written in a form of prophecy to raise the credibility of the book.

Porphyry’s criticism is not restricted to questions of exegesis. He also notes that it makes no sense that God would have punished people for eating fruits that gave people knowledge - not just of evil, but also of good. Indeed, even the act of planting such a deadly tree he holds to be beneath the character of divinity.

Porphyry also criticises the Christian notion of Logos. Either this Logos is just some internal aspect of divinity - its “reason” - and then no independent entity, or it is like a literal word, that is, an expression of the power of divinity, but thus also something evanescent in comparison to the divinity, in other words, not God itself. Indeed, he thinks that Jesus, this supposed incarnation of Logos, was at most a person who because of his pure behaviour was in contact with God, but still was no God.

Porphyry also ridicules the notion that Jesus would have been born in order to save all humanity. Why, he asks, did Jesus then come to world so late, when a number of people could have had no chance of hearing about him? Because of all these contradictions Porphyry notes that Christianity is not a doctrine fit for philosophers, but suitable only for people of low intellectual talent. In a rather misogynistic fashion he implies that it is all due to women having such a big role in Christian societies.

Despite - or perhaps because of - this criticism, Christian writers commented quite a lot on Porphyry’s writings, explaining how Porphyry had understood their sacred writings completely wrong, Still, the greatest influence Porphyry had in the history of at least western Christendom occurred in the area of logic, as his Isagoge, an introduction to works of Aristotle, happened for a long time to be almost the only work on logic surviving the fall of Roman empire in the Western Christendom.

Isagoge is essentially just a clarification of some basic concepts. Just like lines can be drawn from forefathers to their ascendants, forming a sort of tree, a similar tree could be formed starting from highest genus. The lines would descend, always dividing into two, according to differences like rational and irrational, which shape the genus like material into lower genera. This tree goes all the way down to lowest species, which are just above individuals. In addition to genera, differences and species, Porphyry mention salso various characteristics, some of which (properties) characterise certain species, like capacity to laugh characterises humans, while others are accidental to the species, either because we can conceptually distinguish them (like blackness from crows) or because they really are just accidental features (like walking is something we are not always doing).

Although this simple scheme itself was important to medievals, perhaps even more important was what Porphyry left out. He specifically mentions he won’t deal with the nature of these genera and species. Are they perhaps something that exists only in our thoughts? Porphyry would probably have said that they are something more real, but are they then something material? Again, Porphyry would most likely have denied this, but might they exist only within and as completely dependent on individual things? Although he doesn’t say it, it is probable Porphyry thought that they existed independently of individuals.

Followers of Plotinus were more and more inclined to provide an alternative to Christianity. This was evidenced by an interest in Pythagoras, who is a topic of a biography with both Porphyry and his student Iamblichus and who is presented by them as a purer type of sage than Jesus. Just like Jesus, Pythagoras is told to have instructed fishermen to get a good catch - but unlike Jesus, Pythagoras apparently convinced them to release the fishes. 

Pythagoras is also viewed as an exemplar and instigator of all virtues, who was acquainted with all the divine secrets, taught wisdom to selected students, disciplined his followers to withstand all bodily temptations and act bravely in all circumstances, and created a just society which nurtured harmonious relationships between its members. Iamblichus goes even further and points out statements suggesting Pythagoras was an embodiment of some divinity like Apollo. Furthermore, Iamblichus tries to interpret obscure elements in Pythagorean cult as allegories, with profound truths hidden behind metaphors - thus, command to not urinate toward sun is seen as a reminder that divinities (metaphorical sun) do not enjoy bodily crassness.

In addition to Pythagoreanism, Plato’s dialogues were seen as a route toward higher knowledge. These dialogues, Iamblichus says, are organic wholes, where each element serves a single purpose, that is, the theme of the dialogue. Indeed, Iamblichus considers in his commentaries not just the strictly philosophical content of the dialogues, but also the external setting of the dialogue as information of hidden knowledge.

An important thing for Iamblichus is also the order in which the dialogues should be read. One should start from Alcibiades, because it urges the reader to study oneself and to raise oneself above the concerns of everyday life. The ending point is Philebus, a dialogue about what is good in all levels of being and also what is the ultimate paradigm and source of goodness. Or then one could just read Timaeus and Parmenides, two dialogues summarising the whole of Plato’s philosophy, first describing Plato’s view on temporal world and second describing things beyond temporal world.

Iamblichus is also eager to regard common religious rituals as containing important truths about reaching the divine realm, thus taking Platonism into a direction Porphyry was not willing to take it. Just like Porphyry and Plotinus, Iamblichus speaks of a hierarchy of entities, adding that rungs of this hierarchy were described by different parts of Plato’s Parmenides. Like with his predecessors, Iamblichian hierarcy begins from the Primary source or primordial unity. Just below the unity is the self-conceiving intellect or the proverbial Creator, which provides being among other things also to itself. Together with Creator, there are other immaterial entities or divinities, which are completely removed from the realm of matter and embody some abstractions, working in a similar role as Platonic ideas, for instance, the sources of sameness and difference.

Between the realm of wholly immaterial deities and sense world, Iamblichus places the realm of mathematical entities, which interested the Pythagorean school. These entities share characteristics with both the more immaterial entities (such as non-temporality) and sensuous beings (such as being divisible) and thus work for human beings as a road from the one to the other. While sensuous beings fluctuate even as we view them and the same finger might seem both a unity and a multiplicity, mathematical entities are stabler. They also are controlled by the abstractions of the more ideal realm - for instance, mathematical entities could be either similar or dissimilar with one another - and control sensuous entities, which also have their quantities.

Because of their mediating place, Iamblichus notes, mathematical entities cannot be perceived, but they have to be thought of, while this mathematical manner of thinking cannot reach ideal divinities. Still, they at least form the first stepping stone that lead us to think the ideal realm. The mathematical entities are derived from various unions of unity and multiplicity and are either combined sets of diverse units (objects of arithmetic, which have a natural lower limit, but no highest limit) or unities divisible into multiple parts (objects of geometry, which have a natural highest limit, but no lowest limit).

Below the immaterial realms in Iamblichean hierarchy is time, which is an image of eternity and which confers to temporal entities a kind of being, which is divided into what was and what is and what will be. Highest of these temporal entities are souls, which Iamblichus thinks are a sort of mix of ideal and material realms. In other words, souls as such have their own, immaterial activities, but in contact with matter they produce new activities, such as bodily memory.

Iamblichus notes that some souls are less material than others. Of the souls, the least connection with matter have divinities which rule over the most general entities of temporal world or stars. Below these is a being who fashioned the earthly realm and is thus connected with the earthly matter or ultimate lack of being, but also gazes upon the immutability of the heavens and the immaterial ideas and tries to replicate this immutability in its own works - Iamblichus compares it to a sophist, who tries to fool people with his imitations of truth.

Below gods are demons, which transform the invisible effects of divinities into visible goods to be used by lower entities. Next after demons are heroes or demigods, which appear to be human souls of the purest kind, capable of better life than ordinary humans. Some of them might be people like Pythagoras, who have been able to raise themselves permanently above the human condition through their heightened awareness, although they might occasionally have to enter the lower world because of preordained rules. In practice, Iamblichus seems to have suggested even further levels of entities between gods and human souls - archangels, angels and various archons - but it is unclear what their role in the hierarchy is.

The lowest rank in the hierarchy is held by ordinary human souls, which have took on more and more material and solid encasings, being finally encased in human bodies, which they try to control, although at the same they are completely overwhelmed by bodily urges. The human soul still have a reason or capacity to look upon the higher realms and thus a possibility to improve itself. If purified enough, at the time of death the human soul will rise again to more heavenly realms and control the sensible world with the higher entities, leaving only an irrational shadow behind it.

Unlike Plotinus and Porphyry, Iamblichus emphasises that purification of human soul is of religious nature. All the entities higher than human souls, Iamblichus notes against Porphyry, have to be beneficial, because they have been generated by the very source of goodness. All of them have to be also celebrated with proper rituals, Iamblichus says, and indeed, one could not straightaway move to the highest level of the hierarchy, before becoming tuned with its lower rungs.

Iamblichus does not completely deny the possibility of evil entities fooling people taking part in false religious rituals. Yet, with proper rituals no such deception is possible. Even if divinities contacted with such rituals might appear to act in an evil fashion and hurt people, there always is a good reason for such a behaviour. For instance, these divinities might punish humans because of crimes they have committed in previous lives. Furthermore, the seeming divine punishments might actually be beneficial, although our inferior human souls cannot comprehend this. Another possibility is that the seemingly evil actions are caused by some intermediary material cause muddying the original beneficial purpose - or they were the result of our soul turning away from the beneficial influence of gods.

Now, religious rituals seemingly speaking to highest ranks of divine hierarchy, Iamblichus insists, are not meant to command entities in these highest ranks, unlike Porphyry disparagingly suggested. Instead, they are meant to open up the soul to an occasion in which a divinity or some other higher entity has freely chosen to connect with the mundane level. Through such a connection divinities can reveal truths more important than those known by scholars of mundane matters. Thus, although someone with knowledge of the seasons could foretell the weather, this is nothing in comparison to an oracular divination.

Unlike Porphyry, Iamblichus is not critical even of animal sacrifices. Indeed, he says, higher beings might well come in contact with material things, without losing their own purity, just like some of these beings controlled stars. Of course, they do not need matter for their sustenance, which would have made divinities and demons ridiculously dependent on their worshippers. Instead, the idea of sacrifice is to purify matter with fire and thus raise it to the level of higher beings. Even the crassness of some mysteries have their purpose, Iamblichus noted. A sexual imagery is meant to be taken as a symbolism of generative forces of life, while even more radical rituals are supposed to shock and so sever soul from its material connections.

Divine knowledge revealed by religious rituals is then, according to Iamblichus, something profoundly higher than mere scholarship, which is based on mere human cognitive faculties. Just like beyond self-aware Creator is the primordial unconscious unity, Iamblichus thinks that beyond cognitive faculties is a higher activity connecting us mystically to all of existence. Indeed, innocent youth might well have a more intimate connection with divine reality, because of the purity of his soul. Some religious rituals are just supposed to purify the soul to a more divine level. With the connection to divine established, human being might have the ability to command and threaten lower powers, which would normally be above her level.