Changing fates of Platonism

The direction of influence in ancient philosophy went predominantly from East to West. Figures writing in Greek were commented by Latin writers, while Latin writers, even if they might have been original, were rarely considered by Greek thinkers. Indeed, Latin philosophers often seemed to be out of sync with their Greek contemporaries, following trends that had become somewhat old-fashioned in the other part of the Roman empire.

Calcidius can be taken here as a good example. His work - a translation and a commentary of Plato’s Timaeus - is itself an expression of the interest Latin culture showed in Greek philosophy. Furthermore, his commentary shows almost no indication of the ideas of Plotinus and his school - the latest step in the development of Platonism. Instead, Calcidius relies more on discussions on Plato from a time preceding Plotinus (the so-called Middle Platonism).

The aim of Calcidius is to show that Plato’s dialogue is a respectable attempt in describing the physical world. Calcidius tries to argue that some of Plato’s statements have a clear mathematical precedent. For instance, when Plato says that fire and earth as solid bodies need to have two other type of bodies (air and water) to link them, Calcidius suggests Plato is just referring to a fact of geometry that just like two similar parallelograms can be linked with one similar parallelogram, which combines length of one parallelogram with the width of the other, similarly two parallipedes can be linked with two parallipedes, one sharing two sides with first and one side with the other extreme and the second sharing one side with first and two sides with the other.

One might justifiably ask how Calcidius’s explanation fits with Plato’s idea that the four elements consist of differently shaped figures, all of which are not parallipedes. In a move cancelling his previous geometrical explanation, Calcidius explains the link as being qualitative, air resembling in its properties fire more than earth and water resembling earth more than water. He perhaps wants to connect Plato’s idea of four elements with Aristotelian notions, where the four elements were linked by such common qualitative characteristics.

Calcidius is indeed quite anxious to make Plato’s ideas compatible with later philosophical currents. While Plato describes a divinity creating the world in time, Calcidius explains this as a mere metaphor. World, he says, is eternal and eternally changing, although it is dependent on an unchanging paradigm, which the temporal world resembles. Furthermore, while Plato had not considered any further level above the divinity, Calcidius assumes a common idea of later Platonists that divinity is dependent on an indescribable primordial unity.

The world, Calcidius says, is governed by an indivisible entity, that is, a world soul, which still can be linked with the divisible world, perhaps through the mediation of lower forms of soul, more resembling material entities. Calcidius compares Plato’s account here with the Biblical story of God infusing the body made out of clay with a divine breath to control it.

Calcidius also calls the world soul fate. By this he does not mean that all things in the world would be fated to happen in a precisely determined fashion. Instead, he says, this fate is like a law determining what happens from different types of conduct. Thus, humans still have a liberty to decide how they would act, and world soul then performs the role of a judge determining whether this conduct is to be rewarded or punished. Because of these limits of determinism, Calcidius notes, divination is only partially possible and can reveal of contingent matters that they are contingent. Even the creator divinity cannot know all the future things, because some events are determined by free decisions - but the creator does know what is the destiny of a person making certain types of decisions.

Plato already had an interest in Pythagorean number theories, and he had suggested a complex account, in which world soul was like a group of numbers flowing from original unity. Pythagoreanism had continued to interest Platonists, and Calcidius continued this tradition by finding obtuse explanations for various numbers in Plato’s account of world soul. For instance, Plato chose seven numbers, Calcidius suggested, because seven is the only number smaller than 10 (excluding 1), which was both indivisible and not a divisor of other numbers smaller than 10. A more meaningful linking of Timaeus and Pythagoreanism was Calcidius’ suggestion that the numbers constituting the world soul were same as those constituting musical harmonies, making the world soul also harmonious.

In addition to arithmetic and music, Plato’s Timaeus provided Calcidius also with a clear link to astronomy. The world soul with its numerical relations moved the outermost layer of the world with a strictly regular movement, while the more inner layers of planets moved more and more irregularly. The connection with the soul, Calcidius says, makes the world alive, while the ordered and ultimately cyclical movement of the planets makes it an image of eternity.

Just like the whole world, Calcidius continues, so are the stars and planets also alive, and indeed, what the traditional polytheistic religion had called gods. While the stars and planets are, he says, living beings made of fire, there are also living beings made of air and moisture, namely, the demons or angels, who serve as intermediaries between gods and earthly living beings.

Like all these superior living beings, Calcidius notes, human beings also consist of two elements, soul and body. Human souls, he says following Plato, have their origin in the creator divinity, but they also have some affinity with some star or planet, to which they will eventually return, if they live their earthly lives well. Human bodies, on the other hand, have their origin in the celestial divinities and consist of all the four material elements. Body as such would move errantly, and while partially the soul remains untouched by concerns of the body, partially it is affected by them, thus making it difficult for the human soul to govern the body.

Calcidius considers various theories about the nature of soul. He is extremely critical of Epicurean theory that soul is just a special sort of atom, which would make soul no different than body - a mutable, mortal being. Similar deficiency Calcidius sees in Stoic idea that soul is a continuous material substance, like breath - then soul and body would never truly combine, but soul would merely lie in the holes of the body.

Aristotelian notion of soul as the activity specific to natural, living bodies Calcidius regarded more positively. This activity is not body as such, but something received by body and permeating it through and through, although it is centered around human heart as the crux of all processes of life. Yet, Calcidius is not fully satisfied with this account, because such an activity is still too closely linked to the body and dies with it. Indeed, Aristotelian soul, Calcidius suggests, is just a projection of the true soul, which can exist even without a body. This soul is, he says, immaterial and indivisible, but it does have different activities, centered around different parts of human body: reason governs head, emotions enliven the heart, while earthly desires lie in lower parts of body.

Following Plato’s account, Calcidius next turns to the question of how sense organs serve to make humans aware of world around them. He is especially interested of the question of vision - a problem widely discussed in his own time. The main point of contest was whether sensation of vision was produced by light coming out of the eye external light coming from sun or from coloured object and pinging on eye. Calcidius suggests that the truth, already known by Plato, is that all three take part in visual sensation - warmth of human body is transferred to rays of light in eyes, and when these rays are strengthened by the light radiated by warm sun and come in contact with coloured light emanating from an object, we see the colour of the object.

Calcidius also considers another pet question of ancient philosophy, namely, that of the origin of dreams. He again takes a sort of middle position and accepts no single source for dreams. Generally, he says, dreams arise from sensations, emotions, thoughts and other mental states lingering in our soul and arising again in the mind during sleep. During different phases of sleep, different faculties of the soul are more active than others, thus, some dreams are of more earthy nature, while others are more intellectual. Some - although definitely not all of them - might even be generated by the more divine levels of reality.

Although dreams can then tell us something about the divine, Calcidius thinks that vision is still our main connection to higher levels of the hierarchy of being - seeing the movement of planets and stars we come to an idea of something on the basis of this movement. The road to theology or the knowledge of divine, Calcidius says, goes then through physics or knowledge of nature. In addition to these two branches of philosophy, the knowledge of ways of reasoning, which Calcidius identifies with mathematics, is also revealed to us through vision, because we learn to measure and count through looking at the alternation of days and night. In addition to these theoretical disciplines, vision is important also for the practical branches of philosophy, teaching how to guide one’s personal life, life of a household and life of the whole society.

The harmonious order of sensible world, Calcidius notes, is the work of divine source, which imposes on the variable world stable structures, which form the content of divine mind and which we humans could also get to know through non-sensuous thinking. These two principles - God and ideas - are then required for the existence of ordered cosmos, but is that enough? Calcidius notes that many philosophers have assumed also the existence of yet another principle, that is, matter, although they are not unanimous about its properties. Perhaps farthest from the truth, Calcidius appears to imply, are the Jewish traditions that suggest matter to be just another creation of God, depriving from it the status of a true principle. Even among the philosophies which accept the uncreated nature of matter Calcidius finds quite many unsatisfactory views, such as the atomistic idea that matter is divided into distinct units: such atomic bodies are still not the ultimate matter.

Among the philosophers who believe matter to form a continuity, there are various opinions, such as the Ionian idea that all bodies consist of a single kind of moving matter with its own distinct characteristics, for instance, air of Anaximenes. Others, like Parmenides, deny that matter could move, while some, like Empedocles, suggest that matter could appear in many unrelated kinds. The problem with all these suggestions, Calcidius insists, is that they believed matter to have some characteristics of its own, while simple considerations show it could not have such. Calcidius upholds particularly a notion of matter he thinks can be found in Plato’s Timaeus - although it is not certain whether it really was what Plato thought.

Calcidius asks us to consider a process in a sense opposite to what happens when we discover divinity behind the order of cosmos. In effect, we are not combining perceived things into a regulated whole, but stripping away all their characteristics - where they are, what they do, what they are like, how big they are, how they relate to each other. Even their very substantiality or their capacity to take on various characteristics is meant to be thought away. Even after all of these things are stripped from perceptibles, we have an obscure feeling that something remains. Plato called this indefinite something place, which suggests that he was thinking about space, but Calcidius, probably following later philosophical traditions, calls it matter. In any case, it is meant to be like a featureless canvas, on which God projects his ideas or eternal paradigmatic structures of existing things. The projections of the ideas are then like active forces shaping the matter into distinct shapes or perceptible things, which come and go.

Calcidius had written his account of Timaeus at an instigation of a Christian, but his own attitude toward the religion was more ambivalent - clearly his insistence that God had not created matter contradicted the current Christian majority view. Yet, some thinkers were more willing to bridge the gap between Christianity and Platonism. A good example is Marius Victorinus, who was a teacher of rhetorics, and for instance, made commentaries on Ciceronian works on the art. Just to give an idea what his rhetorical works were like, in his book on definition, Victorinus noted how definitions were, on the one hand, based on finding the essential qualities of objects, and on the other hand, how they were the first step in delineating the world of objects that we can speak about. In addition, Victorinus discussed various types of definitions, the paradigmatic one being that where the thing to be defined is separated from a wider genus through a differentiating principle. Victorinus translated also Porphyrius’ works into Latin, being thus aware of more recent trends in Greek Platonism than Calcidius. Furthermore, he converted into Christianity and wrote some of the first Latin commentaries on Paul’s letters.

Victorinus did not compartmentalise his interests, but used his knowledge of Platonist ideas for elucidating such intricacies of Christian teaching as the relationship between the prime source of everything - Father in Christian parlance - and Logos, the only Son of this Father. Victorinus suggests that by Father Christians mean an original abundance of all possibilities, which in a sense is the primary instance of being, but in another sense is so beyond all other beings that it should not be called even being - Father is the light, or as we might say it, energy with the power to create and activate everything. The first among true beings, then, are for Victorinus ideal prototypes, which other beings can at most resemble. Material world, particularly, is for Victorinus just a shadow of these ideal prototypes, shown by the tendency of material bodies to deteriorate after a while. Human soul, then, lies between these two extremes of true, ideal being and apparent, shadowy bodies.

What is the role of Logos in this Platonic sounding hierarchy? Victorinus suggests that Logos means the process of actualising all the possibilities inherent in the primary source. Compared to source, Logos is more active than the quiet repose of Father - indeed, one might say Logos is the prime example of activity. This activity of Logos is based on the abundant source of energy or Father and its activity consists of turning the possibilities within Father into beings or of creating them - it is, as it were, the will of Father. As a source of prime activity, Father can also be called active in a sense, although it is primarily characterised by a quiet repose staying always within itself, just as Logos in all its action is in a sense always same and in repose. Indeed, what is always same in Logos is its stable substance, which is just this eternal abundance of energy or Father - active Logos and quiet primary source are in a sense just phases of the same divinity, Logos being the image or form showing what God is.

Victorinus emphasises more the underlying sameness of Father or source and Son or Logos. There are clear historical reasons for this choice - Victorinus wanted to oppose especially the Arians, who considered Logos to be just the first creation of and similar to God. Yet, there are also more essential reasons for this choice - like world of ideas in Plotinus is dominantly a unity, in which ideas are just different facets of a one self-thinking intellect, similarly God of Victorinus is dominantly a unified substance or energy flowing through different, but connected phases. In comparison, sense world is dominantly a multiplicity or just a combination of essentially separate entities. Then again, Victorinus does admit that Father and Son are in a sense different from one another. Thus, he insists, we cannot say that Father was incarnated, because incarnation belongs to the active aspect of divinity.

Victorinus concentrates his attention to the relation between Father and Son, but he does also consider the third element of the trinity or Holy Spirit. In a sense, Holy Spirit is for Victorinus just an aspect of Logos. Logos as such is the activation of divine potentialities, in other words, it makes these potentialities alive. Victorinus thus calls Logos feminine: it is the mother of all life. Yet, Logos contains also another movement, which is in a sense a return to the original unity or Father - and therefore deserves to be called masculine, Victorinus says. This returning movement is the moment of understanding, when Logos looks upon what it has made alive and finds the divine reflected in its works. This aspect of understanding or wisdom is what is usually called Holy Spirit, Victorinus concludes.

The trinitarian form of divinity, described by terms being, life and understanding, is reflected in the things Logos actualises. An important link in this regard is soul. Souls, Victorinus says, also contain the aspects of being, life and understanding. Just like Logos works as a link of potential power in the Father and created entities, similarly soul transmits divine trinity to the sense world.

If Victorinus was keen to reconcile Neo-Platonic hierarchy of beings with Christian notions, his contemporary Julian wanted to eradicate all signs of Christianity and reinstate Platonically interpreted polytheism as the official religion. Being the current emperor, he had the means to do so, but the project did not last beyond his lifetime and he was then later branded as the Apostate - a betrayer of Church. This was, undoubtedly, a one-sided view, and in Julian’s surviving personal letters, we find a thoughtful person, who worries how he can keep calm in the absence of his friends and who thinks philosophising about the affairs of state is far more rewarding and praiseworthy than actual governance.

Julian claimed that Platonic cosmology, as presented in Timaeus, was simply closer to the truth than the account of creation in Genesis. For instance, the world created and sustained by the Platonic divinity was instantly perfect, while God of Genesis had to make the world in a piecemeal fashion, one day at a time.

Even more imperfections Julian found in the behaviour of biblical God toward his human creations. Why did God want to restrict human knowledge about the difference between good and evil, and how could he condemn them for an act committed before they understood that difference? Similarly immoral was God’s commandment given to Moses that Jews should not worship other divinities, if they did not wish for retribution. Stories like these, Julian suggested, draw a picture of a jealous and petty divinity, who is unsure of his own status.

Biblical God, Julian concluded, was nothing but a divinity appointed to Jewish nation, although they had confused it with the ultimate source of all existence. In addition, Julian implied, it appeared not to be a very good divinity, since Jews had achieved nothing great in comparison with the Greeks - no great philosophers, no great poets, no great mathematicians, no great statesmen.

Christians, Julian thought, were even worse than Jews, since they had created a mongrel of Greek and Jewish cultures, choosing the bad and ignoring the best in both. Firstly, they had rejected the Hellenistic culture of their forefathers and adopted some Jewish manners instead. Then again, they had not emulated Jews in their ritualistic complexity and moral purity, which was most original and noteworthy in that culture. Christians had even ignored the command to keep no other gods and had raised their prophet, Jesus, into a status of second god.

Julian’s own sympathies lie with the whole tradition of pagan Greek philosophy, which, he insists, forms a unified whole, even if individual philosophers might have deviated from this ideal. The main principle of this single philosophy, Julian insists, has been from the start to know oneself and one’s place in the universe. Even such a philosopher like Diogenes the Cynic followed it, in his quest to live a life as close to nature as possible, although his followers had perverted his ideas into a shallow disrespect of all civilized customs. Julian was especially critical of cynics of his time, who used mythical form in their philosophising in a manner disrespectful of the traditional polytheistic religion.

Julian himself was very appreciative of traditional divinities, especially as they were incorporated in the Neoplatonic hierarchy of entities. He was particularly interested of Sol or Helios, god of sun, to whom his family had been dedicated, before turning into Christianity. For Julius, Helios held a sort of dual place in the hierarchy. The physical sun was the counterpart or manifestation of the central entity in immaterial realm, which Julian also identified with Cybele, the mother of gods: physical sun gives life to the physical world, just like its immaterial or divine analogue radiates its power to all immaterial entities. Furthermore, this immaterial Helios was an image of the primordial unity beyond all existence and thus held a mediating position also between the source of and the rest of existence.

This mother of gods, Julian notes, radiates its power to the sensible world and especially to the aetherial realm, which moves forever in a circle. Julian likens aetherial realm to Attis, the mythical beloved of Cybele. According to the myth, Cybele was enraged by Attis being wedded to a mortal and made him go mad and castrate himself. This story, Julian suggests, is a symbolic account of the imperfection of sense world, where even the relatively stable aetherial sphere is characterised by constant change and yearning.

Julian's attempt to turn the tide of history didn't have a lasting effect: Christianity had become too strong. This still did no mean the end of Platonism, since it continued its existence within Christianity.

Back to Plato

It has happened often during the history of philosophy that some philosopher is read from a one-sided or even completely distorted perspective – some feature of his writings is emphasised over others. At some point, then, a supposed return to a more faithful reading follows. Usually this new reading is then distorted in another manner and might even forget features that were taken as central in the first reading.

Something like this happened with the reception of Plato's teachings. Over time, the Platonic academy had developed into a sort of skepticism, which emphasised especially the Socratic of dialogical aspect of Plato's books – different views were weighted and all found wanting. Already during Cicero's time an insistence on a more faithful reading of Plato was apparent – certainly Plato had not thought that knowledge was completely impossible. Problem in this attempt to rejuvenate the Platonism was to decide then what would be a properly Platonic doctrine of philosophy.

One of the people trying to find the essence of Platonism was Plutarch, better known as a biographer of eminent historical persons. Even in his more philosophical works, you can see the historian, who is eager to collect all kinds of sayings and aphorisms, which he will insert to text at appropriate time. Naturally, Plutarch borrows heavily from Plato. One can see influences of Plato even in quite small details, such as Plutarch's opinion that poetry by itself is based on deception and is often detrimental to education.

Yet, Plutarch isn't just a blind follower of Plato, and for instance, does not want to banish poets altogether from a good community. Indeed, Plutarch is willing to use poetry as a means of education, as long as the reader is taught what to accept from poetic works. Thus, although one can find characters in poem expressing all sorts of immoralities, a teacher can point out that these immoralities are clearly condemned by other characters, who express the true opinion of the matter. Then again, Plutarch is highly critical of poems or plays expressing crudities just for the shake of cheap laughter, as he assumes to happen in Aristophanes's comedies. But even worse than such crude poems, in eyes of Plutarch, are supposed histories which are actually just collections of malicious gossips, such as he thinks Herodotus to have written.

In general, Plutarch is interested of matters of education. Indeed, in addition to his take on the usefulness of poetry, Plutarch also gave instructions how one should get most benefits out of a lecture and how one should respect the lecturer. But it is not just to school education that Plutarch's writings are restricted, but he is also interested of educating people to in general live well. Plutarch's general idea of good life was one shared by many ancient philosophers: spending too much time in seeking pleasure makes one sleep badly every night and is bad for health.

Plutarch wanted to especially distance his position from Epicureans. When it came to the method of acquiring knowledge, Epicureans were in Plutarch eyes a bit naive when they insisted that all sensations were true – surely this would lead to contradictions, because things seem different from different distances.

Especially critical Plutarch was of Epicurean notion of good life. Plutarch thought that Epicurean identification of all pleasures as bodily was faulty. For instance, in good parties people received pleasure from conversation, and this pleasure, Plutarch stated, was not bodily, but pertained to soul alone. Indeed, Plutarch insisted, mental pleasures were far more stable than fleeting pleasures of body. Furthermore, Plutarch didn't like the Epicurean idea that good life should be lived unknown. Instead, Plutarch stated, a good person should be happy to inspire others for good life.

Plutarch also criticized Epicurean idea of indifferent divinities and denial of afterlife, both of which were supposed to free humans from unfounded fears. Instead, Plutarch stated, people find hope in the idea of provident and well-meaning gods, and the idea of a total end to life causes nothing but anxiety.

Like many earlier philosophers, Plutarch was intrigued by the behaviour of Spartan people, which downplayed the worth of sensual pleasure in favour of military valour and fortitude. Indeed, Plutarch put on some occasions more value on military efforts than cultural achievements. Thus, he thought that people of Athens were to be more appreciated because of their conquests than their artistic endeavours and he regarded Alexander's conquest of Persia as a great practical application of philosophy, by which the whole Middle-East had been civilized. Then again, Plutarch was also keen to advice how to make anger subside.

Despite his dismissal of pleasure and anger, Plutarch was not ready to speak for a complete Stoic indifference. Plutarch even suggested that Stoics themselves did not really believe in this indifference, because they at some places suggested that things that would be indifferent according to their theories were still to be preferred or avoided. Plutarch even jested about the Stoic advice that a wise person would commit a suicide, if pain would become intolerable – a Stoic sage should be the happiest person alive and still end her life because of such a matter that Stoics considered indifferent.

Plutarch also criticized Stoics, because of their suggestion that a cleft between people living well and people living not well or philosopher and non-philosopher was infinitely wide and that one could only leap from one position to another. Plutarch noted how absurd Stoic idea seemed from the viewpoint of common life, in which we think of goodness and badness of life more as end points in a continuous scale of more or less good or bad life. Thus, he noted that we had various criteria, by which to determine whether a person had progressed in her life skills – for instance, if a person began with a certitude of knowing what is right and true and later on realised how little she actually knew, we could say she had become a better person. Plutarch also jested about the Stoic insistence that a perfectly living person would be the most beautiful sight in the world, but no ordinary person would actually appreciate this beauty and would even consider her to be the most distasteful sight – why would anyone even want to gain such a goal?

While Stoics emphasised a good faculty of choice as the only goal of human life, Plutarch noted that this was only a medium for the true goal. Thus, while Stoics stated that all supposed goals outside the human choice were irrelevant and not to be cared about, like Plato and Aristotle before him, Plutarch sought for a proper medium between indifference and sensuous affects: for instance, although grieving too much for your dead beloveds does no good, a period of mourning is seemly and proper. It is intelligence, which can tell what is proper behaviour in each circumstance and which thus secures human being from chance events. Unlike Stoics, Plutarch suggested that intelligence by itself wasn't responsible for human behaviour, because passions were completely distinct from intelligence and something that intelligence had to train.

Plutarch didn't restrict the class of passions to be trained just to desires for sensual pleasures. He was also quick to condemn such activities as talking too much and being too nosy. In many ways, Plutarch followed Aristotelian idea of virtue as a medium between two vices. Thus, Plutarch was wont to admit that one should not spend too much, but also not to procure too much wealth, or that although one should not be rude to people, one should also not try to serve every whim of other persons, or that even though one was not to praise oneself too much, there still were ways to praise oneself modestly. Then again, Plutarch also admitted that there were things one should refrain from altogether, such as being envy of other people's fortune or taking on debt.

Plutarch gave also more detailed instructions on various aspects of life. Plutarch was even concerned about such quite specific topics as giving advice on what issues to speak about during parties. Thus, he mentions that one could, of course, discuss the formalities of parties – whether some people should have a better seat than others – but also more generally interesting questions, such as whether chicken is in some sense prior to an egg.

Plutarch had also something to say about gender relations. He insisted that men and women should have a common criteria for good life: thus, women can be brave in the same manner as men. Then again, he admitted that males and females might have different natures, which would have an effect on how to apply these criteria. This is well seen when Plutarch advised how married people should live together, as he in a very conventional manner suggested that wife should always follow her husband's will. At times, he even went so far as to insist that wife should be glad if her husband chooses to do things unsuitable for well-mannered women with prostitutes. Then again, he also celebrated marriage as a communion of personalities, which is just strengthened by occasional brief moments of mutual sensual pleasure.

Plutarch also had something to say on how we should act as friends. We should not just flatter people, but to tell them frankly, if they have done badly. Furthermore, we shouldn't try to collect a huge group of friends, since one has only a finite amount of love to give to one's friends. Indeed, Plutarch continues, often enemies are more useful to people than would-be-friends, because they at least reveal our faults more truthfully. Then again, Plutarch was very adamant of the importance of family – even animals show love towards their siblings and offspring, thus, surely should human beings also do that.

Plutarch insisted that a true philosopher shouldn't abstain from dealing with the good life of a community. Indeed, he even encouraged philosophers to educate rulers, if the opportunity arose, since through such means they could benefit a great number of people. In fact, Plutarch thought that anyone with experience on how to live well, such as elder people, should not isolate themselves, but take part in communal decisions. No matter what position one holds in community, however insignificant it may seem, its importance is increased by the worth it brings to the community.

Plutarch wasn't just interested of good life of individuals and states, but he had also a keen interest on the structure of natural world, although he was willing to admit that he could just make reasonable conjectures about such matters. His main point was that the universe was a purposeful construct. For instance, Moon didn't just revolve around Earth by necessity, but its revolution had to satisfy some goal. Perhaps, Plutarch suggested, Moon was a kind of a halfway house between cold and inert Earth and bright and lively heavens, so that souls of human beings could there purify themselves of the last vestiges of earthly life on their journey to completely intellectual life of heavens.

Even more interested Plutarch was of living nature. He was quite convinced that animals were not completely removed from humanity and insisted that they could compete with humans in their various virtues – for instance, some animals could reason as well humans and they were more easily satisfied by natural pleasures. Indeed, Plutarch at time even suggested that eating animals was a cruel habit, especially as no animals devoured humans as often.

Plutarch's most original contribution for philosophy was perhaps his search for wisdom beyond this life and world. Following Plato, he suggested that body was of hindrance to seeing the true reality and that death was therefore nothing to be afraid of, but more like a return to a more divine level. Along with body, Plutarch insisted, all the work dedicated to sustaining the body was ultimately of no importance and it would be far better if a human being could survive without any nourishment. Plutarch ridiculed the idea that eating was of importance, because without the need for food there would be no agriculture and therefore no sacrifices for gods. Plutarch noted that an idea of gods as beings who demanded sacrifices and punished humans for failing to provide them was even worse than atheism – it is better to deny the existence of gods than to call them fickle and cruel.

Even though Plutarch was critical of such traditional ideas of gods, he was quite fascinated of religious practices and myths and often tried to find rational explanations for them. He was not really interested of explaining them as symbols for natural phenomena – for instance, he did not think that the myth of the death of Egyptian god Osiris in the hands of Typhon (Seth) and his eventual rebirth with the help of the goddess Isis would be just a story retelling the cycles of river Nile. Instead, Plutarch saw in this tale hints of metaphysical truths. Typhon was an indication of an idea of a source of imperfection that corrupted the natural world and led to death and dissolution of material things. Then again, nature or Isis could reproduce an image of true eternity or Osiris through its cyclical renewal of everything. Similarly, a letter E inscribed on the temple of Apollo in Delphi was according to him a Greek way of saying ”I am”, which indicates that divinity is a source of all being, just like the more famous ”know thyself” is according to him an advice not to think of oneself as a divinity.

Plutarch also criticized the Stoic notion of divinities, which essentially made lesser gods into mere powerful beings, which could be destroyed as well as any material beings. Even more ridiculous in Plutarch's eyes was the notion that the highest creator God would in no manner be any more blessed and happy than any human being that had just found the perfect mode of life. The highest blasphemy in Plutarch's eyes was the Stoic notion that evil things in the world were created by God and that they were even a necessary part of world condition.

Plutarch used Plato's Timaeus as a foundation of his own cosmogony, although he read the dialogue in a rather creative fashion. According to Plutarch, matter used to be a completely chaotic mess, governed only by a living and self-powered, but also irrational force, which ruled the matter with iron necessity. The divinity ordered the matter into a well-regulated universe and gave the force or soul reason, by which to take care of the world. Still, because the world soul had an irrational beginning, the world still contains some hints of irregularity and evil.

Although Plutarch was convinced that divinity was completely removed from human affairs, he supposed that a hierarchy of other beings bridged the gap between them, and for instance, took care that the wicked would ultimately be punished, if not right away, then in the afterlife. These demigods could also be responsible for divination, Plutarch conjectured. This would also explain, why sources of divination could change according to human needs – demigods would leave places, where people did not live anymore, and they would use more cryptic images in times, when secrecy was of utmost importance.

Then again, human souls might attain a similar status to these supposed demigods, when not tied up to the interests of their bodies. Indeed, the faculty for divination or connection to some divination inducing stuff might well be natural for human beings, but only veiled from us by our body. Socrates was an example of a person whose body did not hinder this divining element, but naturally received messages from a higher dimension, which Plutarch mythologically suggested was somewhere in the upper celestial regions.

We know little about the details of the development of Platonistic currents after Plutarch, but certain common elements seem to have persisted. Apuleius, who even suggested he might be descended of Plutarch, was, like his supposed ancestor, quite interested of mystery religions, such as the worship of Isis, the mother of gods, which in a sense were only avatars of this one central goddess – or God, since speaking of gender is just conventional, when it comes to this prime creator. Just like Plutarch, Apuleius insisted that a turn away from the sensuous world and its pleasures was required in order to reach this ultimate source of everything. Although interested of such mysteries, Apuleius firmly denied that he had any magical powers – he considered himself more of a researcher of the world around him.

A more mundane approach to Plato was apparently favoured by Alcinous, who used Aristotelianism and Stoicism to understand Plato's philosophy. Alcinous presented philosophical contemplation as a step above normal everyday activities: a philosopher can say how humans should live (object if practical philosophy) more reliably than ordinary people, because he knows what there is (object of theoretical philosophy). Yet, like Stoics had already pointed out, before trying to say what there is contemplation should begin by a study of means of contemplation (what was then called logic).

Alcinous gave a Platonic twist to the notion of studying contemplation, when he said that in addition to senses human beings had a capacity to think certain non-sensuous objects, like the Platonic ideas, which appeared to be known by us even before we were born. An important part of human cognition for Alcinous was just this duality of senses and thinking. While senses as such make us acquainted only with individual, unconnected sensations and thinking as such only with immaterial ideas, humans as both thinking and sensing can also combine individual sensations and recognise them as belonging to concrete objects and similarly recognise ideas as embodied in material entities.

The actual methodology Alcinous accepts for his philosophy is essentially Aristotelian logic, with its different parts for strict demonstrations, probable arguments and even a study of deceptive arguments. But Alcinous regards Plato as being already implicitly aware of this methodology, because he used it in his dialogues before Aristotle wrote about it.

Broadly Aristotelian is also the habit of Alcinous to divide theoretical philosophy into mathematics, theology or metaphysics and physics. Like Plato, Alcinous considers mathematics to be of great use, firstly, in practical everyday matters, but also secondly, in leading us to non-sensuous matters dealt in theology. Yet, it is is not the only way, because even by considering what is sensed we can discover something that cannot be sensed. In other words, while sensuous properties are unstable, there must be something, which remains stable throughout these changes – matter. Because this supposed matter should be able to take on any possible sensuous determinations, it itself must be without any sensible characteristics.

Still, matter by itself cannot have taken on different shapes just by itself, but these must have come out of a different source. This is where Platonic ideas come in – ideas work as a scheme by which matter is modeled, Alcinous says. Furthermore, Alcinous notes that this formation must have been instigated by someone – God.

While Apuleius and Alcinous use different routes to find divinity they conceive his relation to the world in similar manner Just like Plutarch, Apuleius and Alcinous saw especially Plato's Timaeus as a serious description of how the world around us had been created. Or actually, they were quick to explain, there was no one moment of creation, but world was in a sense created eternally – world had existed always, but its existence was dependent on the highest god. In a figurative manner we could say, according to Apuleius and Alcinous, that the wholly immaterial divinity had took independently existing shapeless matter and organised it according to ideal principles or forms. Thus, God imposed geometric shapes to the matter and so produced the first elements. From the elements God had shaped various other stuff – stars and planets and earthly bodies – and finally the whole universe. As a ruler of the universe the divinity had appointed a living entity – a world soul – which it had fashioned out of numerical relationships.

This world soul was then the progenitor of all souls in the world. Some of these souls were as immaterial as God itself, such as the gods of Greek mythology. Other souls were embodied or connected with certain physical bodies, which just meant that these bodies thus were alive. Highest of these embodied souls were fiery bodies – these were the stars and planets, which could also be called gods. Apuleisus was especially interested of an even lower rank of aery entities or lower spirits, which acted as mediators between immutable gods and the earthly worlds. Like gods, spirits or daemons were indestructible, but they still weren't as immutable and independent of all other things as gods were.

Some of the aery spirits were connected with bodies fashioned for them by the gods – these were the human souls. Human souls, Apuleius and Alcinous continued, consisted of three parts corresponding to three parts of human bodies – desires residing in stomach and the lower regions of the body, passion or anger residing in the heart and reason residing in the head. Humans shared reason with gods and non-earthly daemons, and thus reason was meant to rule the other two parts of the soul, which would insure the harmony and health of the body also.

Alcinous was especially interested of the Platonic notion that when human reason losed it control over its lower parts, it would become more like an animal and would wonder after death to an animal body. In any case, he was convinced that at least reasoning part of a human would live eternally, although he wasn't so sure about the lower parts.

In a sense, Apuleius and Alcinous regarded Timaeus as the Platonic answer to Hellenistic demand of a theory of universe or physics. Similarly, they wanted to find answers in Plato about ethics, that is, about good life, although often the answers they described as Platonic were actually taken from Aristotle or Stoics. The ultimate good, according to Apuleius and Alcinous, resided in the divinity that had created the world. Even humans could live perfectly only by imitating God and staying in contact with the lower divinities.

Apuleius was somewhat skeptical whether humans ever achieve the goal of imitation of God completely. Indeed, in humans good life, which was naturally a unity, was divided into different facets according to different facets of human soul – wisdom or a good use of reason, courage or wisely controlled use of passion and anger, austerity or a control over desires, and finally justice or a balancing of the three sides of the soul. Alcinous, on the other hand, noted that in a perfect state of human soul these four aspects were essentially a unity – no one could use one's reason perfectly unless one had a perfect command of one's lower faculties, while no one could control one's faculties, unless one could use one's reason perfectly. Still both Apuleius and Alcinous agreed that when we speak of these four aspects of good life in their imperfect, non-unified state, wisdom could be simply learned, but the other aspects require also training of one's lower faculties.

Now, the best thing a person could have, Apuleius said, is the ability to follow these four principles of good life. Only few people could follow these principles perfectly, but then again, only few people lived completely against them, while the majority of human beings lived at least partially good lives – indeed, Apuleius insisted, no one willingly chose a bad life, but this was always a result of ignorance. In comparison, Apuleius continued, other goods are only partially good, that is, good if they are put to good use. Especially pleasure was good only, if it followed a good life, while pleasure following from abuse of the principles was a shameful thing.

Alcinous was more interested of studying affections or irrational processes of human souls, because search for good life required doing something to them. All these affections, Alcinous said, were caused by soul becoming aware of something it considered good or bad – either something that was actually present or something the soul hoped or feared for – or by some mixture of these two basic affections. Alcinous especially instructed people to cultivate natural and necessary affections, which were milder than unnatural affections and thus easier to control by reason.

Friendship and love were topics, which interested both Apuleius and Alcinous. Both philosophers noted that friendship and love come in many levels. Friendship and love were good, if they were guided by principles of good life and showed concern for soul and character of the friend or beloved, whereas friendship and love based on mere seeking of pleasure or self-interest were something fickle and unreliable.

Apuleius and Alcinous also followed Plato's Republic and Laws closely in their description of good and bad communities. In an ideal community, people were governed by wise rulers and defended by brave youngsters. While ideal rulers would need only their own reason for ruling and in a perfect society all things would be common, in practice rulers required laws to guide them and they had to accept private ownership and marriages. If a state lacked wise rulers, the vacuum would be filled, in the best case by soldiers, in a somewhat worse case by rich oligarchs, in an even worse case by democratic assembly, and in the worst case by a single dictator.

Alcinous also considered what distinguished false philosophers like sophists from true philosophers like Plato. While philosophers based their considerations always on the eternal and unchanging source of being, that is, God, sophists took as their foundation things that differed from this source of being and which were thus always in some sense changing and variable. Thus, while a true philosopher would be always unerringly right, a sophist might seemingly change his opinions, as if guided by mere whims.