the Syrian Neo-Platonist, enjoyed considerable fame during his lifetime, which ended somewhere in the first half of the fourth century; and he rose again into high repute at the restoration of Greek literature, Ficinus having edited and translated his most important work, De Mysteriis, as early as 1483. Gale, in 1678, published at Oxford an edition, which may be considered our standard one, and should be known to every student of human thought. The prolix biography of Eunapius gives us very little valuable information as to Iamblichus. He seems to have been, like the majority of the Neo-Platonists, an aristocrat, of an illustrious and powerful family of Chalchis, in Coele-Syria. He assembled round him a school of disciples, whom we find with him sometimes at Alexandria, and sometimes at his favourite haunt, the baths of Gadara. We may regret the less, however, that so few facts have been preserved by them, when we look at those which remain. We can dispense with the testimony of men who assure us (and in one case, says Eunapius, as actual eye-witnesses) that he evoked the two genii of the fountains of Eros and Anteros, who came as two cupids to embrace him in their arms; that he worked miracles and prodigies; was surrounded at times by a golden glory; and in one case was raised nine feet off the ground by an ecstasy of prayer. Some of these latter tales he denied, but in a tone (if Eunapius is to be believed) which shows that he would not have been sorry had they been true. "He who deceived you," says he, "was 'oux dyaipes"—not without elegance of imagination."

These few hints, combined with the works of his which remain, give us a key to his thoughts, of which something has already been said in the article on Hypatia. Under Plotinus, and Porphyry (the tutor and afterwards the opponent of Iamblichus), the object of the Neo-Platonist mystic had been the same as that of the middle-age mystic, viz., to raise himself to communion with, and ultimately to absorption into, Deity, by that strongest exercise of the rational will which results in its self-annihilation, and in a state of absolute passivity. Plotinus and Porphyry were said to have succeeded in this effort several times during their lives: but, on the whole, the majority of those who tried the experiment must have failed; and in proportion as it was found difficult for man to rise directly to God, the desire was awakened of bringing the gods down to men, and so filling the dark void of secret unbelief. Iamblichus, as a native of Syria, the especial home of conjurors and gross superstitions, as well as of Gnostic mysticism, was a fit man to make this attempt; and from him dates a series of efforts to adapt to the mystic philosophy of the East as many of the old polytheistic forms of worship as were not absolutely impure. For this purpose it was necessary to explain the relation between the physical and the spiritual, not merely (as with Plotinus) in the case of Deity and of man, but in the case of Deity and all nature. Hence Iamblichus was especially attracted by the symbolic nature-worship of the Egyptians and Chaldeans, which he (or some disciple of his) defends against the cavils of Porphyry in the famous letter of Abamon the priest. Hence, too, he was attracted by the Pythagorean dreams as to the sacredness of numbers. We find among his works (or rather his compilations from early Pythagoreans) explanations of the symbols of that school; and the title of one lost work (The Theological Principles of Arithmetic) sufficiently explains both itself and the cast of its writer's mind.

Connected with this habit of mind is, it would seem, his denial of Plotinus's dogma, that reason in the human soul is without passivity. He requires a theory which will enable him to explain how the spiritual (whether human or divine) can be affected by incantations, ceremonies, suffumigations, sacrifices; and, above all, how the Deity adjured shall not only appear to, but inspire and possess the soul of the initiated or priestly man, independently of any human will; and he has therefore to assume (perhaps not wrongly), a capability in the soul of being influenced passively and involuntarily ab extra. If this be the true explanation, the question between Plotinus and Iamblichus is none other but the insoluble one between the advocates of grace de conguro and those of grace provenienz. But Iamblichus fell into that degraded form of the latter belief which tempts to an altogether magical view of the efficacy of symbols and of ceremonies, and which tempts likewise to a modified polytheism, in his case taking the form of a host of demons, heroes, and gods, beside angels, principalities, and souls; each rank of which depended mysteriously on the one above it (some remnant, probably, of the old notion of successive emanations, borrowed from the earlier Syrian Gnosis). These beings confer on man gifts corresponding with their own natures; and they appear in forms, and with accompaniments, symbolic of their rank and power. In sketching these various apparitions, Iamblichus shows a clumsy turn for symbolic fancy, contrasting strongly with the great acuteness with which he specially pleads in behalf of these follies. His greatest difficulty is, of course, Porphyry's objection, that the incantations, and even threats and insults, used by the priests to make the gods appear, were at once immoral and unphilosophical. The gods could not be the passive puppets of men, of herbs, of incense, of talismans. Iamblichus answers, with much ingenuity, that the threatening words are only anthropomorphic adaptations, as are all assertions that the gods are angry or alienated; and that the ceremonies used do not act by altering the will of the Deity, but by virtue of secret affinities which run through all natural and spiritual beings, linking each heavenly being to some earthly one,—as Phobos to the laurel, and Asclepios to the cock; so that “immaterial things are immaterially present in material things.” Nay, there is even a “pure and divine matter” in sacred objects underlying the gross appearance, and akin to the Deity, to which it is consecrate; which, if it be employed in the making of statues or of temples, or in holy rites, attracts and calls out the gods, by mystic sympathy, to show themselves to the worshipper.

It may be easily seen from these few hints what a door to superstition of the lowest kind Iamblichus was re-opening, by thus justifying to the educated classes that materialist idolatry which still lingered among the lower. From his time forth, Neo-Platonism followed, if not smoothly, still surely, the downhill path which he had pointed out; and which, perhaps, was the only one possible for it, and for the old mythologies which it tried to rehabilitate. But his book (if it be his) is most worthy of careful study, alike to the theologian and the philosopher, who will find it full of significance for us and to every age. Iamblichus may be considered to have said all which can be said on behalf of the magical theory of ceremonial and sacramental worship; and the metaphysic by which he justified the old polytheism was virtually that which the more mystic section of the Eastern Church justified in after ages their own idolatry. The Latin mediæval church, forming itself among nations of a more practical and objective habit of mind, adopted the results of such a form of thought, dogmatically, in a coarse and literal shape, without asking for a philosophic justification of them; and the mystic developments of mediæval Germany were rather of the Platonist than of the Iamblichian school,—protests against surrounding idolatry, and not excuses for it. But there are now signs of a desire to connect the Roman popular belief with the spiritualist philosophy of Germany; which, though tokens of old age and decay, may yet give a new galvanic life, for centuries to come, to the mediæval Pantheism. In such a case Iamblichus may regain the honour in which he was held by the Neo-Platonists of the sixteenth century, and even be once more (as he was by his contemporaries) preferred to Plato himself. In any case, all which can be said in favour of such a movement lies virtually and half-developed in the Letter of Abammon; the spiritual want is the same as that of his day; the method of patching the rent, and of putting new wine into old bottles, will probably be the same also. “The thing which has been, it is that which shall be; and there is no new thing under the sun.”