"Platonism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... contrary extreme; and the most orthodox doctors allowed themselves the use of the terms and definitions which had been censured in the mouth of the sectaries. After the edict of toleration had restored peace and leisure to the Christians, the Trinitarian controversy was revived in the ancient seat of Platonism, the learned, the opulent, the tumultuous city of Alexandria; and the flame of religious discord was rapidly communicated from the schools to the clergy, the people, the province, and the East. The abstruse ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... "Transcendentalism" by Kant's followers, because it included ideas which were beyond the range of experience. It became popular in Germany, as Platonism, to which it is closely related, became popular in ancient Greece. It has never been accepted in France, where scepticism still predominates, though we hear of it in Taine and a few other writers; but in Great Britain, although the English ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... I have tried to make clear, only one of the influences which produced this new intellectual climate. The rediscovered "Hermes Trismegistus," the mystically coloured Platonism, as it came from Italy, the awakened interest in Nature and in man, and the powerful message of the German Mystics all played an important part toward the formation ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... again lay a fine and delicate-looking youth, felled by the heavy fist of a recluse. A hermit wrestled hand to hand with a young philosopher who, only yesterday had delivered his first lecture on the Neo-Platonism of ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... the time of Aeschylus, for example—Plato would have been a poet; and then perhaps we should have had to invent another class of poets, one above the present highest; and reserve it solely for the splendor of Plato. Because Platonism is the very Theosophic Soul of Poetry. But he came, living when he did, to loathe the very name of poetry: as who should say: "God pity you! I give you the Way, the Truth, and the Life, and you make answer, 'Charming Plato, how exquisitely poetic is your prose!'" So his ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... after the vast critical movement of European thought during the past two centuries, in which all philosophic systems have been subjected to the severest scrutiny, the method of Plato still preserves, if not its exclusive authority unquestioned, at least its intellectual pre-eminence unshaken. "Platonism is immortal, because its principles are immortal in the ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... copious and thoroughly genuine perhaps those of Bishop Synesius a little later. Of these Julian's are a good deal affected by the influence of Rhetoric, of which he was a great cultivator: and the peculiar later Platonism of Synesius fills a larger proportion of his than some frivolous persons might wish. Julian is even thought to have "written for publication," as Latin epistolers of distinction had undoubtedly done before him. Nevertheless it is ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... the first age even was considerably indebted to the Platonic doctrines as taught in the Alexandrian school; and demonology in the third century received considerable accessions from the speculations of Neo-Platonism, the reconciling medium between Greek and Oriental philosophy. Philo-Judaeus (whose reconciling theories, displayed in his attempt to prove the derivation of Greek religious or philosophical ideas from those of Moses, have been ingeniously ...
— The Superstitions of Witchcraft • Howard Williams
... teacher whom he consulted wished him to learn music, astronomy, and geometry. Those kinds of knowledge, however, were not what Justin wanted, and besides he thought that they would take up too much time. So he next resolved to make a trial of Platonism; and this time he was ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... same year he intended to follow the Appreciations by a volume of Studies of Greek Remains, in which he then meant to include the studies in Platonism, not yet written; and he had thought of putting together a volume of 'theory,' which was to include the essay on Style. In two or three years' time, he thought, Gastom de Latour would ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... naive belief in miracles, and the rhetorician Aristides, with his Asclepius-cult and general sanctimoniousness; or a minor figure such as Aelian, who wrote whole books of a pronounced, nay even fanatical, devotionalism; or within the sphere of philosophy movements like Neo-Pythagoreanism and Neo-Platonism, both of which are as much in the nature of mystic theology as attempts at a scientific explanation of the universe. It is characteristic, too, that an essentially anti-religious school like that of the Epicureans actually dies out at this time. Under these ...
— Atheism in Pagan Antiquity • A. B. Drachmann
... classical conversation. Montaigne was here in the 15th century, and Fallopius, he of the trumpets, came here to be cured of deafness—which is one of the infirmities which the Latin inscription declares to have yielded to the use of the waters. Lorenzo di Medici came to talk platonism and the fine arts at a place which will never know either any more; and, from a Latin letter extant, was summoned from the Bagni to the death-bed of his wife. Ladies have often been recommended to the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... who are neither from a literary nor from a philosophical point of view as representative of mediaeval scholars, and philosophically they are often really unmediaeval, for the general quality of mediaeval thought is its Platonism: the Aristotelian logic was indeed known to the Middle Ages through Boethius, but the other Aristotelian works were not known till towards the middle ...
— Progress and History • Various
... and observance of Platonism favoured illicit connections between the sexes. The palaces of the nobles and of the wealthy merchants were nothing more or less than harems. The manners and traditions of the Orient took root, not only in Florence, but in all the other Italian States, and the normal strictness and restrictions of ...
— The Tragedies of the Medici • Edgcumbe Staley
... learn little more from it than that the Academy existed, that Michel Angelo was a member of it, and that he wrote some poems in which some Platonic ideas are expressed. There is no philosophic analysis of the individual Platonism which is apparent, not only in his poems, but in some of his paintings,—no exhibition of its connection with the other portions of his intellectual development. Michel Angelo's ideas of beauty, of the relation of the arts, of the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... condition in a less degree. 17. Francis of Assisi. Gradually made into a god. 18. (II.) Manichaeism. Evil spirits as inevitable as good. 19. (III.) Tendency to treat the gods of hostile religions as devils. 20. In the Greek theology. [Greek: daimones]. Platonism. 21. Neo-Platonism. Makes the elder gods into daemons. 22. Judaism. Recognizes foreign gods at first. Elohim, but they get degraded in time. Beelzebub, Belial, etc. 23. Early Christians treat gods of Greece in the same way. St. Paul's view. ...
— Elizabethan Demonology • Thomas Alfred Spalding
... one hand by such erudite research as that of Fauchet and Pasquier; on the other hand it is supported by political philosophy and speculation. To philosophy, in the wider sense of the word, the sixteenth century made no large and coherent contribution; the Platonism, Pyrrhonism, Epicureanism, Stoicism of the Renaissance met and clashed together; the rival theologies of the Roman and Reformed Churches contended in a struggle for life. PIERRE DE LA RAMEE (1515-72) ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... Christianity. Believers of the community of Jesus said: "That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, of the Word of life ... declare we unto you." In the same way it might be said in the spirit of Neo-Platonism, "That which was from the beginning, which cannot be heard and seen, must be spiritually experienced ...
— Christianity As A Mystical Fact - And The Mysteries of Antiquity • Rudolf Steiner
... actual literary progress and accomplishment of the century, from 1557 to 1660. Such essays exist already in great numbers, though some no doubt are yet to write. The extraordinary influence of Plato, or at least of a more or less indistinctly understood Platonism, on many of the finer minds of the earlier and middle period, is a very interesting point, and it has been plausibly connected with the fact that Giordano Bruno was for some years a resident in England, and was acquainted ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... paradoxes are inherent in us all. I diligently studied the different opinions: and as I had often enough heard it said that every man has his own religion at last, so nothing seemed more natural to me than that I should form mine too; and this I did with much satisfaction. The Neo- Platonism lay at the foundation; the hermetical, the mystical, the cabalistic, also contributed their share; and thus I built for myself a world ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... it demanded that the passion should be winnowed, and free from all rodomontade. I fancied what might be said on such a subject as to that overlauded star-spangled banner, and how the star-spangled flag would look when wrapped in a mist of mystic Platonism. ...
— Volume 1 • Anthony Trollope
... of Jewish theology. The matter was Jewish, the arrangement Greek. According to the relative predominance of these two elements arose Gnosticism, the Patristic theology, and the philosophical schools of Neo-Pythagoreanism, Neo-Platonism and eclectic Platonism. ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... must likewise be recognized that the language in which the Church expressed this attitude towards Christ was borrowed from Greek Metaphysics, particularly from Plato and Neo-Platonism in the patristic period, and from Aristotle in the Middle Ages. And we cannot completely separate language from thought. It was not merely Greek technical phrases but Greek ways of thinking which were imported into Catholic Christianity. And the language, the categories, the ideas of Greek Philosophy ...
— Philosophy and Religion - Six Lectures Delivered at Cambridge • Hastings Rashdall
... in point: The sermon of Dr. Seabury on the lamented death of Arthur Carey is as far from satisfying my heartfelt longings as Platonism would be to the Christian. Read the doctrine of the Catholic Church on the Communion of Saints in the Catechism of the Council of Trent attentively and devoutly, and you will see and feel the wide difference in doctrine and life between it and that ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... and all is not Age that wears them. Whilst we yet call ourselves young, and all our mates are yet youths and boyish, one good fellow in the set prematurely sports a gray or a bald head, which does not impose on us who know how innocent of sanctity or of Platonism he is, but does not less deceive his juniors and the public, who presently distinguish him with a most amusing respect: and this lets us into the secret, that the venerable forms that so awed our childhood were just such impostors. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... search of a message which is more | and more hidden.The secret message | expresses a Truth which is at the | Origins and which is always the same. | | In the Hermetic tradition, as in the | tradition of Platonism, the natural | world is conceived as the image or | living manifestation of God. | Understanding nature can reveal the | presence in the world of divine ideas | and archetypes. Bacon's rejection of | any natural philosophy founded on ...
— Valerius Terminus: of the Interpretation of Nature • Sir Francis Bacon
... might God Himself; but Descartes was fundamentally uninterested in such enthusiasms and found them even repellant—as well as unnecessary—to his thought. For More the doctrine of infinity was a proper corollary of Copernican astronomy and neo-Platonism (as well as Cabbalistic mysticism) and therefore a necessity to his whole elaborate and eclectic view of ...
— Democritus Platonissans • Henry More
... reflection, cogitation, consideration, meditation, study, lucubration, speculation, deliberation, pondering; head work, brain work; cerebration; deep reflection; close study, application &c (attention) 457. abstract thought, abstraction contemplation, musing; brown study &c (inattention) 458; reverie, Platonism; depth of thought, workings of the mind, thoughts, inmost thoughts; self-counsel self-communing, self- consultation; philosophy of the Absolute, philosophy of the Academy, philosophy of the Garden, philosophy of the lyceum, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... the virtuous Laura, who probably never saw the place, into a starched Gloriana of the old school, paraded and gallanted round it with all due form. It is, perhaps, a judgment on Petrarch's adulterous Platonism, that it has laid him open to impertinences like these, which would torture his sensitive ghost almost as keenly as oblivion itself, and which very strongly remind one of Punch's intrusion at a tragedy. Such ideas cannot be engrafted on the [36]Nonwenwerder, ...
— Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone - Made During the Year 1819 • John Hughes
... same theologic tendency to magic, and, as a result, a muddle of science and theology, which from one point of view seems blasphemous and from another idiotic, but which none the less sterilized physical investigation for ages. That debased Platonism which had been such an important factor in the evolution of Christian theology from the earliest days of the Church continued its work. As everything in inorganic nature was supposed to have spiritual significance, the doctrines ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... Emma, drawn in the ballad of "The Nut-brown Maid," she must have hated that wandering about from, place to place, living in lonely country-houses, under perpetual terror of robbers in the night, and subsisting for the most part on potatoes and Platonism; and she must have especially hated the Latin Grammar. She naturally thought, that, when she was married, she should have nothing more to say to exercises and lessons; but she found a pedagogue in Shelley, and the honeymoon saw her "attacking ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... discordantly on her ear. Her whole soul was still filled with the image of Glaucus; and the accent of tenderness from another only revolted and dismayed; yet she did not conceive that any passion more ardent than that platonism which Arbaces expressed lurked beneath his words. She thought that he, in truth, spoke only of the affection and sympathy of the soul; but was it not precisely that affection and that sympathy which had made a part of those emotions she felt for Glaucus; ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... through the life, conflicts of religious creeds, strifes between Protestantism and Catholicism, between Platonism, Mysticism, and Rationalism. In dealing with such delicate and serious topics I have avoided all controversy, and have ventured only on the simplest and briefest exposition. My effort has been to state the case fairly all round, to ...
— Overbeck • J. Beavington Atkinson
... genius and the acquisitions of modern thought. And there are in each of them, especially in Spinoza, flashes of intuition that break through the system. But if we leave out of the two doctrines what breathes life into them, if we retain the skeleton only, we have before us the very picture of Platonism and Aristotelianism seen through Cartesian mechanism. They present to us a systematization of the new physics, constructed on the ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... refracted light from the not risen but rising truth,—a scheme of physics and physiology compounded of Cartesian mechanics and empiricism (for it was the credulous childhood of experimentalism), and a corrupt, mystical, theurgical, pseudo-Platonism, which infected the rarest minds under the Stuart dynasty. The only not universal belief in witchcraft and apparitions, and the vindication of such monster follies by such men as Sir M. Hale, Glanville, ...
— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge
... not thought of as God, and the spiritual contemplation of a universal Life of which all things are modes, the highest thoughts of men hovered during the process by which, in some measure under extraneous influences, Greek speculation finally produced Neo-platonism—or, as we might say in the current phraseology of our time—a restatement of Plato's teaching. Of this school, arising in the early Christian centuries, some leaders were undoubtedly Pantheists. ...
— Pantheism, Its Story and Significance - Religions Ancient And Modern • J. Allanson Picton
... period V[a]c becomes more and more like the Greek Logos, and it may truthfuly be said that in this period "the Word was God." In Greece, on the other hand, the conception of Logos begins with Heraclitus, passes on to the Stoics; is adopted by Philo; becomes a prominent feature of Neo-Platonism; and reappears in the Gospel of St. John. It is certainly legitimate to suppose that Heraclitus might have received the idea indirectly, if not directly, from contemporary Eastern philosophers; but the fact that he did so remains unproved; ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... existence, nay, in some more fanciful minds, those of his pre-existence as well. This kind of speculation, half philosophic, half poetical, is the transcendental side of the Platonic psychology, and in the last age of the Republic was able to connect Platonism and Pythagoreanism without deserting Stoicism.[815] We can see it reflected from Posidonius in the Dream of Scipio, the beautiful myth, imitated from those of Plato, with which Cicero concluded his treatise on the State, written ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... Constantinople, bringing with them numbers of manuscripts and systems of thought wholly new to the Florentines, was one Georgius Gemisthos, a Greek philosopher of much personal charm and comeliness, who talked a bland and beautiful Platonism that was extremely alluring not only to his youthful listeners but also to Cosimo himself. Gemisthos was, however, a Greek, and Cosimo was too busy a man in a city of enemies, or at any rate of the envious, to be able ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... bring great and little souls to one level, for Marius the only possible dilemma lay between that old, ancestral Roman religion, now become so incredible to him and the honest action of his own untroubled, unassisted intelligence. Even the Arcana Celestia of Platonism—what the sons of Plato had had to say regarding the essential indifference of pure soul to its bodily house and merely occasional dwelling-place—seemed to him while his heart was there in the urn with the material ashes of Flavian, or still lingering in memory over his last agony, wholly inhuman ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... a glimpse of this doctrine can be found, he quotes it and brings it to light. But yet, in a most incomprehensible manner, he has passed over those very systems in which, above all others, this idea finds ample room; namely, the new platonism of the ancients (the Theurgic Philosophy), and the later Cabalistic, Alchymical, Mystic Philosophy (White Magic), from which system the deductions of Magister Joel are borrowed; but above all, we must name ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V2 • William Mienhold
... subject. It has been for thousands of years not only the philosophy, but the religion of India, and, to a great extent, of China. It underlies all the forms of Greek philosophy. It crept into the Church, concealed under the disguise of Scriptural terminology, in the form of Neo-Platonism. It was constantly reappearing during the Middle Ages, sometimes in a philosophical, and sometimes a mystical form. It was revived by Spinoza in the seventeenth century, and subsequently became dominant in the philosophy and literature of Europe. It is coming up again. Some distinguished naturalists ...
— What is Darwinism? • Charles Hodge
... to the fascination of superstition, romance, and day-dreaming, and at eleven absorbed his master's Rosicrucian theories of spiritual existence where spirits held converse with each other and with mankind. A mystic Platonism, which taught that Pindar's story of the Argo was only a recipe for the philosopher's stone, fascinated him at fourteen. The philosophy of obedience and of the subjection of reason to authority was early taught him, and he sought to live from ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... of a fierce and valiant watch-dog on her behalf, against the knots of clownish and often brutal sophists, the wrecks of the old Cynic, Stoic, and Academic schools, who, with venom increasing, after the wont of parties, with their decrepitude, assailed the beautifully bespangled card-castle of Neo-Platonism, as an empty medley of all Greek philosophies with all Eastern superstitions. All such Philistines had as yet dreaded the pen and tongue of Raphael, even more than those of the chivalrous Bishop of Cyrene, though he certainly, to judge from certain of his letters, hated ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... So Hermotinus (Plato will say) after his exclusive association with Stoics, cannot be expected to know the savour of other people's mouths. Chrysippus, on the other hand, might say as much or more if I were to put him out of court and betake myself to Platonism, in reliance upon some one who had conversed with Plato alone. And in a word, as long as it is uncertain which is the true philosophic school, I choose none; choice of one is insult ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata
... faith that are truly religious. Less severe, even playful and smiling, Dion Chrysostom (that is, mouth of gold, nickname given to him because of his eloquence) is penetrated with the same spirit a little mingled with Platonism, which makes him, therefore, perhaps, penetrate more easily than ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet
... conclusions the thought of four hundred years. The philosophy of Islam, which flourished first in the East, in Basra and Bagdad (800-1100), and then in the West, Cordova, Toledo, etc. (1100-1200), was a mixture of Aristotelianism and Neo-Platonism, borrowed, under the earlier Persianizing Khalifs, from the Christian (mainly Nestorian) monks of Syria and Mesopotamia, being consequently a naturalistic system. In it God was acknowledged only as the supreme abstraction; while eternal matter, law, and impersonal ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... farewell to Science exhibits a very just as well as striking picture: for however exalted in theory the Platonic doctrines may appear, it is certain that Platonism ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... after all, rare, and for that matter they are merely those that attach to all exaggerations of legitimate passion. As for the notion that one should love beautiful things without desiring them, it seems to me to lie perilously near a sort of pseudo-Platonism, which, wherever it recurs, is the enemy of life itself. As I write, my eye falls upon a Japanese sword-guard. I have seen it a thousand times, but I never fail to feel the same thrill. Out of the disc of blued steel the ...
— The Collectors • Frank Jewett Mather
... Philo's meaning, in such phrases as these, is, that he believed that, upon their leaving the body, the souls of the good would ascend to heaven, while the souls of the bad would descend to Hades. These discriminated events he supposed would follow death at once. His thorough Platonism had weaned him from the Persian Pharisaic doctrine of a common intermediate state detaining the dead below until the triumphant advent of a Redeemer should usher in the great ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... had a hold only of a few, and these were men of powerful minds, but stood aloof from the prevailing tastes and pleasures. It had still less influence on the Roman mind, which was practical and worldly. Platonism opposed the sensualism and materialism of the times, believed in eternal ideas, sought the knowledge of God as the great end of life—a sublime realism which was hardly more appreciated than Christianity itself. Platonism was doubtless the highest effort of uninspired ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... that professed in the school of Alexandria. That city, in which Greek, Jewish, and Egyptian men of letters were assembled, was the scene of a strange fusion of the system of these three people. The Greeks brought a Platonism, already much changed; the Jews, who had acquired at Babylon a great number of Oriental notions, and whose theological opinions had undergone great changes by this intercourse, endeavored to reconcile Platonism with their new doctrine, and disfigured it entirely: lastly, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... peculiar interest which he felt in Margaret Charlton. Left to himself, it is more than probable that he might never have discovered the true nature of that interest, or conjectured that anything whatever of earthly passion or sublunary emotion had mingled with his spiritual Platonism. Commissioned and set apart to preach repentance to dying men, penniless and homeless, worn with bodily pain and mental toil, and treading, as he believed, on the very margin of his grave, what had he to do with love? What power had he to ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... so well beloved, is that abstracted Platonism. But verily the fear of imagination would far outbalance any love of it, if crime had peopled for a man that viewless world with spectres, and the Medusa-head of Justice were shaking her snakes in his face. And, by way of a parergon observation, how terrible, most terrible, to the guilty ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... heart of humanity with everlasting claims, all great things have first to wander about the earth as enormous and awe-inspiring caricatures: dogmatic philosophy has been a caricature of this kind—for instance, the Vedanta doctrine in Asia, and Platonism in Europe. Let us not be ungrateful to it, although it must certainly be confessed that the worst, the most tiresome, and the most dangerous of errors hitherto has been a dogmatist error—namely, Plato's invention of Pure Spirit and the Good in Itself. But now ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... for the patronage she accorded to the works of Aristotle. Whilst the speculative mind was in later centuries allured by the supernatural, and the discussion of the criterion of truth and the principles of morality ended in the mystic doctrines of Neo-Platonism, the practical tendencies of the great Alexandrine scholars were instrumental in laying the foundations of science. To the Museion were attached the libraries: one in the Museion itself, and another ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 10 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... IN THE MIDDLE AGES.—I cannot do more than mention Neo-Platonism, that half Greek and half Oriental system of doctrine which arose in the third century after Christ, the first system of importance after the schools mentioned above. But I must not pass it by without pointing ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton
... metaphysics. But what is significant for us, in this youthful essay, is that the first time Augustin wrote as an author it was to define and to praise Beauty. He did not yet know, at least not directly from the text, the dialogues of Plato, and he is already inclined to Platonism. He was this by nature. His Christianity will be a religion all of light and beauty. For him, the supreme Beauty is identical with the supreme Love. "Do we love anything," he used to say to his friends, "except what is beautiful?" Num amamus aliquid, nisi pulchrum? Again, at the ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... century A.D., and with this estimate I am inclined to agree. It shows, as I have endeavoured to make clear in the notes, marked affinities in some respects to the Gospel of Mary (Codex Akhmim), which we know to have been in existence before 180 A.D., and its philosophical basis is the Platonism of Alexandria. If it is by one writer, I think it may be dated from 160 or 170 A.D.-200 A.D., and belongs to the ...
— The Gnosis of the Light • F. Lamplugh
... which is a brief but clear analysis of the Timaeus of Plato, omitting the introduction or dialogue and making a few small additions. It does not allude to the original from which it is taken; it is quite free from mysticism and Neo-Platonism. In length it does not exceed a fifth part of the Timaeus. It is written in the Doric dialect, and contains several words which do not occur in classical Greek. No other indication of its date, except this uncertain one of language, appears in it. In several places the writer has simplified ...
— Timaeus • Plato
... madhouse, know you not that Tasso himself found his solace, his escape, in the recognition of a holy and spiritual Theurgia,—of a magic that could summon the Angel, or the Good Genius, not the Fiend? And do you not remember how he, deeply versed as he was for his age, in the mysteries of the nobler Platonism, which hints at the secrets of all the starry brotherhoods, from the Chaldean to the later Rosicrucian, discriminates in his lovely verse, between the black art of Ismeno and the glorious lore of the Enchanter who counsels ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... tradition of Platonic love. I believe that, so far is this from being the case, he is the supreme example of a Platonic lover among the English poets. He was usually Platonic under protest, but at other times exultantly so. Whether he finally overcame the more consistent Platonism of his mistress by the impassioned logic of The Ecstasy we have no means of knowing. If he did, it would be difficult to resist the conclusion that the lady who wished to continue to be his passionate friend and to ignore the physical side ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... humanism, the adoration of cosmical and mystical powers instead of the human attributes of the deities of the older creed, was the means of re-awakening popular superstition, while at the same time the Alexandrian speculations of Neo-Platonism gave a ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... threw off in his compositions as much as would make an ordinary philosopher. More was a great enthusiast, and, of course, an egotist, so that criticism ruffled his temper, notwithstanding all his Platonism. When accused of obscurities and extravagances, he said that, like the ostrich, he laid his eggs in the sands, which would prove vital and prolific in time; however, these ostrich-eggs ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... syncretic method, which aims at a selection from contending schools of the various grains of truth dispersed among them. It is the method which has prevailed in periods of large reading but with little inceptive force of their own, like that of the Alexandrian Neo-Platonism in the third century, or the Neo- Platonism of Florence in the fifteenth. Its natural defect is in the tendency to misrepresent the true character of the doctrine it professes to explain, that it may harmonise thus the better with the other elements ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... Commandments were more essential than the rest of the Torah, it was discontinued. It is true that Philo reduces the teachings of Judaism to five essential doctrines, but that was because Judaism to Philo was Platonism divinely revealed. ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... merely dogmatic rules. Unbending uniformity is death! Let us be various and individual as life itself is. . . . Away with dry Rationalism! Let us fight it with all the powers we possess; whether by bold Platonism or simple Bible faith; whether by enthusiastic hymns, or dreamy fairy tales; whether by the fabulous world of distant times and zones, or by the instincts of the children in the next village. Let us abjure the ever-recommended nostrum of imitation of the old masters in poetry, and ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... be formed. If such a society ever comes into being, the following principles are, I think, necessary for its success. First, it must be on a religious basis, since religion has a cohesive force greater than any other bond. The religious basis will be a blend of Christian Platonism and Christian Stoicism, since it must be founded on that faith in absolute spiritual values which is common to Christianity and Platonism, with that sturdy defiance of tyranny and popular folly which ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... mature and withering matrons. A troubadour attached himself to a lady as he attached himself to a seigneur, and, as a client of both, fawned on and flattered both. I cannot refer to Petrarch, for I believe his Laura was not a married woman, and the Platonism of his affection is more than questionable. He was not an acknowledged troubadour, but an exile, whom the haughty family of Sade would not suffer Laura to marry. But there is the case of Dante and Beatrice, and of Wolfram of Eschenbach, one of the noblest and purest of singers, ...
— In Troubadour-Land - A Ramble in Provence and Languedoc • S. Baring-Gould
... the dreams of bygone generations (whether facts, like cockatrices, basilisks, and krakens, the breeding of bees out of a dead ox, and of geese from barnacles; or theories, like those of elements, the VIS PLASTRIX in Nature, animal spirits, and the other musty heirlooms of Aristotleism and Neo-platonism), to try to make a science popular, which as yet was not even a science at all. Honour to them, nevertheless. Honour to Ray and his illustrious contemporaries in Holland and France. Honour to Seba and Aldrovandus; to Pomet, with his "Historie of Drugges;" even to the ingenious Don ...
— Glaucus; or The Wonders of the Shore • Charles Kingsley
... Rome before he was thirty, soon after he had completed his course of study at Athens. The philosophical or mystical treatises of his later life, On the Universe, On the God of Socrates, On Plato and his Doctrine, do not rise above the ordinary level of the Neo-Platonist school, Platonism half understood, mixed with fanciful Orientalism, and enveloped in a maze of verbiage. That known as the Apologia, an elaborate literary amplification of the defence which he had to make before the proconsul of Africa against ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... entitled De l'Eglise Nationale, proves in him as much respect for the principles of the Christian faith as boldness of desire to change its discipline. This philosophic faith, which so closely resembles the Christian Platonism which was paramount in Italy under the Medici, and even in the palace of the popes themselves under Leo X., breathed throughout his sacred discourses. The clergy was alarmed at these lights of the age shining in the very sanctuary. The Abbe Fauchet was interdicted, ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... of the Pietists. Rationalism in Germany, without Pietism as its forerunner, would have been fatal for centuries. But the relation of these tendencies, so plainly seen in the ecclesiastical history of Germany, is one of long standing. From the days of Neo-Platonism to the present they have existed, the good to balance the evil, Faith to limit Reason. They have been called by different names; but Christianity could little afford to do without it or its equivalent, in the past; and the Church of the ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... memory as a commentator on the Pandects—why is Ficino, whose Latin is an offence to me, and who wanders purblind among the superstitious fancies that marked the decline at once of art, literature, and philosophy, to descend to posterity as the very high priest of Platonism, while I, who am more than their equal, have not effected anything but scattered work, which will be appropriated by other men? Why? but because my son, whom I had brought up to replenish my ripe learning with young enterprise, left me and all liberal pursuits that he might lash himself and ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... that Platonism and the Jewish Scriptures had real affinity to each other, and hardly perhaps asked himself how the affinity was to be accounted for." Philo, however, would have had no difficulty in accounting ...
— The Book of Delight and Other Papers • Israel Abrahams
... early Christian ideal, which recognized and encouraged the connection between the teachings of Christ and the ancient wisdom of platonism, there was in early times another which emphasized and endeavored to develop the antithesis more than the connection. From the time when the new Christian state church came to life, and sacrificial religion and the belief in devils and the priesthood were restored, a ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer |
