Middle Platonism

Middle Platonism is the term for the phase of the tradition between the scepticism of the New Academy and the rise of Neoplatonism — roughly from the first century BCE, when Antiochus of Ascalon broke with scepticism and returned to positive doctrine, to the early third century CE. It was less a single school than a broad movement of thinkers across the Roman world who again read Plato as a source of settled truth.

Its characteristic doctrines

Middle Platonists tended to place the Forms within the mind of God, as his thoughts and the patterns of creation; to set a supreme, transcendent God above a demiurgic divine power that shapes the world; and to fill the cosmos with mediating daimones. They drew freely on Stoic ethics and Aristotelian and Pythagorean elements, and they took the harmonizing of the schools as a natural task. The handbook of Alcinous and the works of Apuleius preserve this common framework.

Its leading figures

Among its representatives are Plutarch of Chaeronea, the moralist and priest of Delphi; Numenius of Apamea, whose strongly Pythagorean theology most directly anticipates Plotinus; the Latin Platonist Apuleius; the popular lecturer Maximus of Tyre; and, on its religious frontier, Philo of Alexandria, who fused it with Jewish scripture.

Middle Platonism is thus the seedbed of Neoplatonism: nearly every theme Plotinus would weld into a system was already in the air, awaiting the mind that could unify it.