Quotes & Sayings About Neoplatonism

If we're stuck on one world, we're limited to a single case; we don't know what else is possible. Then - like an art fancier familiar only with Fayoum tomb paintings, a dentist who knows only molars, a philosopher trained merely in NeoPlatonism, a linguist who has studied only Chinese, or a physicist whose knowledge of gravity is restricted to falling bodies on Earth - our perspective is foreshortened, our insights narrow, our predictive abilities circumscribed. By contrast, when we explore other worlds, what once seemed the only way a planet could be turns out to be somewhere in the middle range of a vast spectrum of possibilities. When we look at those other worlds, we begin to understand what happens when we have too much of one thing or too little of another. We learn how a planet can go wrong. — Carl Sagan

Fusing the doctrines of Plotinus and Proclus with the creeds and beliefs of Christianity, Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite combined the Neo-Platonic conviction of the fundamental oneness and luminous aliveness of the world with the Christian dogmas of the triune God, original sin and redemption. The universe is created, animated and unified by the perpetual self-realization of what Plotinus had called "the One," what the Bible had called "the Lord," and what he calls "the superessential Light. — Erwin Panofsky

It is striking how many spiritual writers react to the specificity of real prayer. It runs deeper than Greek Neoplatonism and the influence of Buddhist spirituality. Frankly, God makes us nervous when he gets too close. We don't want a physical dependence on him. It feels hokey, like we are controlling God. Deep down we just don't like grace. We don't want to risk our prayer not being answered. We prefer the safety of isolation to engaging the living God. To embrace the Father and thus prayer is to accept what one pastor called "the sting of particularity."4 Our dislike of asking is rooted in our desire for independence. — Paul E. Miller

...the history of all love is writ with one pen. — William Hope Hodgson

Hypatia's case then was this. She lived in a time when her intellectual heritage, a seven-hundred-year-old tradition, was crumbling. The supports that had once seemed so secure - the Museum and the libraries - had all been swept away by the swell of ignorant dogmatism. Almost alone, virtually the last academic, she stood for the intellectual values, for rigorous mathematics, ascetic Neoplatonism, the crucial role of the mind, and the voice of temperance and moderation in civic life. — Michael A.B. Deakin

In his numerous historical and Scriptural works Bauer rejects all supernatural religion, and represents Christianity as a natural product of the mingling of the Stoic and Alexandrian philosophies ... — Joseph McCabe

If we separate our mundane needs (doing) from God's best gift, his loving presence (being), then we are overspiritualizing prayer. If we ask nothing of God, we are left adrift in an evil world. Such a position may feel spiritual because it seems unselfish, but it is unbiblical because it separates the real world of our desires from God's world. The kingdom can't come because it is floating. By discounting the spiritual and physical worlds, Neoplatonism did exactly what the Enlightenment did. The only difference was Neoplatonism valued the spiritual while the Enlightenment valued the physical. So the church is influenced by Neoplatonism (the physical isn't important), and the world is shaped by the Enlightenment (the spiritual isn't important). Both perspectives stifled honest, person-to-person praying in the church. — Paul E. Miller

The soul exists partly in eternity and partly in time. — Marsilio Ficino