The Main Concerns of Theologians during the Late Imperial Age

The learned pagans, before surrendering, resorted to the highest forms of theology they ever had produced. First of all, Neoplatonism took increasingly the form of theological speculation; Porphyry and, even more, Jamblichus were engaged in the study of the gods, the cosmos, and the existing religions of the empire. Already middle Platonism (Platonic philosophers from the late republic to the age of Plotinus) had speculated on the phenomenology of religions; for example, Noumenios made his contribution to new interpretations of Mithraism and Jewish religion. On the other hand, the second - to third-century leading figures of Gnosticism, Mithraism, Theurgy, Hermeticism, and other traditions resorted to Plato’s doctrine to conceive their cosmology, myths of creation, concept of the soul, and many other features of their doctrines. The highest god (or gods) were placed on a hyper-cosmic level and their nature fit with that of Plato’s ideas. Platonism was more suitable than Stoicism for the difficult task of harmonizing pagan and Christian doctrines. The Stoic gods were living in everything within the cosmos; they were the lords of nature; but the Christians hated the cosmic gods and equated them with bad demons. Platonism, however, allowed the theologians to conceive of the supreme gods as separated from the material world and only thinkable by men, like Platonic ideas or Pythagorean geometric figures and numbers. The supreme god was defined as the One, the Good, the unknowable God, and the first manifestation of himself was a divine entity conceived as pure form, or the sum of every form. Gnosticism, Mithraism, and other religious streams were concerned with the distinction of a male and a female manifestation of the unknowable God. One of the main concerns of late antique theologians was to understand how the spiritual, highest God was in touch with the material world and by means of which divine mediators he acted in the world. These mediators were the gods of the ancient polytheism and a polymorphic compound of astrological divinities, angels, and demons of the material world that the theologians had to organize into a system.