The Classical Wisdom Tradition

"Or how else are we to become nearer to the One, if we do not rouse up the One of the soul, which is in us as a kind of image of the One, by virtue of which the most accurate of authorities declare that divine possession most especially comes about? And how are we to make this One and flower of the soul shine forth unless we first of all activate our intellect? For the activity of the intellect leads the soul towards a state and activity of calm. And how are we to achieve perfect intellectual activity if we do not travel there by means of logical conceptions, using composite intellections prior to more simple ones? So then, we need demonstrative power in our preliminary assumptions, where as we need intellectual activity in our investigations of being (for the orders of being are denied of the One), and we need inspired impulse in our consciousness of that which transcends all beings, in order that we may not slip unawares from our negations into Not-Being and its invisibility by reason of our indefinite imagination, but rousing up the One within us and, through this, warming the soul we may connect ourselves to the One itself and, as it were find mooring, taking our stand above everything intelligible within ourselves and dispensing with every other one of our activities, in order that we may consort with it alone and perform a dance around it, leaving behind all the intellections of the soul which are directed to secondary things." Proclus, Commentary on Plato's Parmenides 1071-1072

"'Heroes' refers also to souls separated from bodies, whose conduct has been good, except that these are located in a lower position than the demons. Pythagoras held the heroes in esteem also, and we honor them by believing them to be eternally existent, and by believing that they requite with evil or good whoever does harm or good to them. For them there are prescribed exaltation, incense and sacrifice on the twenty-fifth day of January." Proclus(?), Commentary on the Pythagorean Golden Verses 94b

"After the souls have been freed from generation, according to the ancients they administer the universe together with the gods, while according to the Platonists they contemplate the gods' order. According to the former, in the same way they help the angels with the creation of the universe, while according to the latter they accompany them." Iamblichus, De Anima 53

"We ought to learn by heart the hymns in honor of the Gods." Flavius Claudius Julianus, also known as Julian the Philosopher, died on this day in the year 363. He was the last pagan emperor of Rome. Julian rejected his Christian upbringing and, returning to his true ancestral faith, sought to re-paganize the empire. Tragically, he did not succeed, but his memory and writings have endured. In a letter to a priest, Julian explained that priests ought to be beyond reproach and should only study pious philosophers. He named Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics as examples and rejected philosophers such as Epicurus and Pyrrho. While this strict advice was meant for priests, not laymen, it does nevertheless indicate the shape that post-Christian paganism would likely have taken, officially, had the Empire not succumbed to Christianity. May his memory endure forever!

"Still, I would try to teach [Christians] something, slow-witted though they are: If one shuts his eyes to the things of the senses and tries to see with his mind's eye, and if one turns from the flesh to the inner self, the soul, there he will see God and know God. But to begin the journey, you must flee from deceivers and magicians who parade fantasies in front of you. You will be a laughingstock so long as you repeat the blasphemy that the gods of other men are idols, while you brazenly worship as God a man whose life was wretched, who is known to have died (in disgraceful circumstances), and who, so you teach, is the very model of the God we should look to as our Father." Celsus, The True Doctrine 9

"I beseech you, Lord, father and guide of the reason in us, remind us of our noble origin, which we were deemed worthy to receive from you. Act with us (as we are self-movers) for our purification from the body and its irrational emotions, that we may be superior to them and rule them, and that we may use them as instruments in the fitting way. Act with us also for the precise correction of the reason in us and its unification with the genuinely existent things through the light of the truth. And the third request to the Saviour: I beseech you, completely remove the mist from the eyes of our souls, 'so that we may clearly know,' as Homer says, 'both God and man.'" Simplicius, Commentary on Epictetus' Handbook 454

"Truly, above all I disclosed the stern inevitability of ancient Chaos, and Time, who in his boundless coils, produced Aether, and the twofold, beautiful, and noble Eros, whom the younger men call Phanes, celebrated parent of eternal Night, because he himself first manifested." From the theogony of the Orphic Argonautica

"Every pleasure or pain provides, as it were, another nail to rivet the soul to the body and to weld them together. It makes the soul corporeal, so that it believes that truth is what the body says it is. As it shares the beliefs and delights of the body, I think it inevitably comes to share its ways and manner of life and is unable ever to reach Hades in a pure state; it is always full of body when it departs, so that it soon falls back into another body and grows with it as if it had been sewn into it." Plato, Phaedo 83d