Neopythagoreanism

← Encyclopedia

Neopythagoreanism is the modern name for the revival of Pythagorean philosophy that took shape in the Roman world from about the first century BCE, recovering the teachings credited to Pythagoras and fusing them with the metaphysics of Plato. By that date the historical Pythagoras lay five centuries in the past, and his original brotherhood had long since dispersed; what survived was a reputation for hidden wisdom, a body of moral precepts, and the conviction that number is the key to the order of things. The later movement gathered these threads and made them speak in the philosophical language of its own age.

Its origins are hard to fix, precisely because the school prized antiquity and liked to disguise new work as old. A great deal of Pythagorean literature circulating in this period is now judged to be pseudonymous — treatises issued under the names of Pythagoras, his wife, and his early followers, but composed centuries later. The Roman scholar Nigidius Figulus is among the first named revivers; the figures most securely attached to the current are the mathematician Nicomachus of Gerasa, whose handbooks of arithmetic and harmonics were read for over a thousand years, and the philosopher Numenius of Apamea, who read Plato through Pythagoras and pressed toward a hierarchy of divine principles. The wandering sage Apollonius of Tyana, ascetic and reputed wonder-worker, became the movement’s emblematic holy man in later memory.

What its texts hold in common is a metaphysics built from number. They taught that reality descends from a supreme One, or Monad, with an indefinite Dyad standing beneath it as the principle of multiplicity and matter; from the interplay of unity and plurality the ordered cosmos unfolds. Bound to this was a practical discipline: vegetarian abstinence, the examination of conscience, the care of the soul understood as immortal and capable of ascent. Knowledge of mathematics was not a separate pursuit but a purification, a way of training the mind upon what does not change.

Scholarship treats Neopythagoreanism less as an organized school than as a tendency that ran alongside, and finally merged into, the Platonism of the same centuries — what is usually called Middle Platonism. The boundary between a Pythagorizing Platonist and a Platonizing Pythagorean is often impossible to draw, and the figures placed on either side knew and answered one another. The current’s lasting effect was to deliver to Plotinus and the Neoplatonists a Plato already read in Pythagorean terms: a One above being, a graded descent of principles, philosophy practiced as a way of life. Much that later traditions would call Pythagorean reached them through this revival rather than from the sixth-century BCE master himself.

→ In the library: Mead — Apollonius of Tyana (1901)

→ Related: Pythagoras · Neoplatonism · The One · Nous · Emanation