IAMBLICHUS

A Greek philosopher from Chalcis in Syria, a pupil of Porphyrius, and the founder of the Syrian school of Neo-Platonic philosophy. He died about 330 A.D. He employed the Neo-Platonic philosophy entirely in the service of polytheistic religion, and mingled it with Oriental superstition, which he endeavoured to justify on speculative grounds. He even taught that divination and magic were necessary to bring about a re-absorption into the Deity. He himself had the reputation of working miracles, and was highly venerated by his disciples. Of his work in ten books on the Pythagorean philosophy, we still possess four parts, including a life of Pythagoras, an uncritical and careless compilation from the works of earlier writers. A work, formerly attributed to him, on the theology of arithmetic, setting forth the mystic lore of numbers according to the later Pythagoreans and Platonists, is not written by him, any more than the work on the Mysteries of Egypt. Both however belong to his school.