Iamblichus

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Iamblichus of Chalcis (c. 245 – c. 325) was a Syrian Neoplatonist who reshaped the school he inherited, insisting that philosophy could not save the soul by thinking alone and must take ritual seriously. He studied in the circle of Porphyry, Plotinus’s editor, and then broke from his teacher on exactly that point — a disagreement that set the course of Neoplatonism for the two centuries it had left.

What is known of his life is thin. He came from a prominent family in Roman Syria, founded a school of his own, probably at Apamea, and drew enough pupils to be remembered by them with reverence; the later tradition surrounded him with miracle stories that say more about his standing than his biography. The writings are better attested than the man. He produced commentaries on Plato and Aristotle, now mostly lost, and a long work on Pythagoras of which several volumes survive — the source for much of what later ages believed about the Pythagorean life. His most consequential book travels under the title On the Mysteries of the Egyptians, a reply, written in the voice of an Egyptian priest, to a sceptical letter from Porphyry.

That book makes the case for which he is chiefly read. Porphyry had argued, in the manner of Plotinus, that the soul rises to the divine by contemplation — by turning inward and thinking its way up the chain of being. Iamblichus answered that the soul has fallen too far for thought to carry it the whole distance, and that the gods themselves have provided the remedy: theurgy, “god-work,” a body of consecrated rites, names, symbols, and material objects through which the divine reaches down to lift the soul it cannot lift itself. The point was not magic in the manipulative sense, on his account, but the opposite — an act the gods perform, to which the rite only consents. He also multiplied the levels of reality above the visible world far beyond what Plotinus had mapped, filling the descent from the One with graded ranks of gods, archangels, angels, and daemons.

Scholarship long treated this turn as a decline — philosophy surrendering to ritualism and superstition. Recent study has been more careful, reading theurgy as a coherent response to a real problem in the system: if the One is truly beyond reach, the upward way may need more than the mind can supply. Whether that move rescued Neoplatonism or compromised it remains a live question. What is not in doubt is its reach. Proclus systematised the theurgic Neoplatonism Iamblichus founded; the emperor Julian drew on it in his attempt to restore the old gods; and through the Renaissance recovery of these texts the idea of a ritual that draws the divine down entered the long history of Western magic. The library holds his defence of the rites in Thomas Taylor’s translation. The man who wrote it had argued that some knowledge cannot be reached by argument.

→ In the library: Iamblichus — On the Mysteries (Taylor, 1821)

→ Related: Neoplatonism · Proclus · Plato · The One · Emanation · Hermes Trismegistus