Neoplatonism

Neoplatonism is the name modern scholars give to the powerful revival and systematization of Plato's philosophy that began with Plotinus in the third century CE and dominated late-antique thought until the closing of the pagan schools. Its practitioners did not think of themselves as 'neo' anything; they were simply Platonists, recovering, as they saw it, the deepest meaning of the master.

The core vision

At its center is a hierarchy of reality descending from the One, through Intellect and Soul — the three hypostases — down to the material world, by way of emanation. Matched to this descent is an ascent: the soul, by purification, virtue, and contemplation, retraces the path and returns toward union with its source. The system absorbed Aristotle, the Stoics, and Pythagorean number-theory into a single Platonic frame, holding that the great traditions, rightly read, all agree.

Its phases

After Plotinus and his editor Porphyry, the tradition took a more religious and ritual turn with Iamblichus, who made theurgy integral to the soul's ascent. The Athenian school of Syrianus, Proclus, and Damascius then built it into a vast, intricate system, while the Alexandrian school of Hypatia and Olympiodorus kept a more sober, scholarly focus on commentary.

Its long afterlife

Though the pagan schools closed in 529, Neoplatonism never died. It shaped Augustine and the Christian mystical theology of Dionysius the Areopagite, passed into Islamic philosophy, revived in Ficino's Florence, and reached the modern world through Thomas Taylor and the Romantics — the deep current beneath much of Western metaphysics and mysticism.