In Plotinus's Neoplatonism the soul rises to the One mainly through contemplation. A generation later, a Syrian philosopher questioned this path and proposed another, destined to leave a deep mark on the history of spirituality: theurgy, the "divine work", a set of ritual practices through which the soul is united with the gods. That philosopher was Iamblichus, and his best-known work is one of the key texts for understanding the relationship between philosophy and ritual in antiquity.
Who Iamblichus was
Iamblichus was born in Chalcis, in Syria, around the middle of the third century and died in the early decades of the fourth. He studied with Porphyry, Plotinus's disciple and biographer, but developed positions of his own, often in debate with his teacher. He founded a school in Syria, probably at Apamea, which drew students from across the Greek world.
He wrote a great deal. Besides his work on theurgy, parts survive of a vast collection on Pythagoreanism, including a Life of Pythagoras, which presents Pythagoras as the model of a divinely inspired sage. Iamblichus indeed regarded the Pythagorean tradition as an essential component of Platonic philosophy.
De mysteriis: a reply to Porphyry
Porphyry had written a Letter to Anebo, an Egyptian priest, raising critical questions about religious practice: how can the gods, who are beyond passion, be moved by prayers and sacrifices? Are divination and ritual not a form of superstition?
The reply came under the name of "Abammon", an Egyptian master. Already in antiquity it was attributed to Iamblichus, and modern scholars agree. The work is known by the Latin title De mysteriis Aegyptiorum, given to it by Marsilio Ficino when he prepared a Latin paraphrase, printed in 1497.
The tone is that of a teacher correcting an overly rationalist pupil. Iamblichus argues that it is not human thought that unites the soul with the gods, but divine action carried out through ritual.
What theurgy is
For Iamblichus the distinction is clear. Theology speaks about the gods; theurgy works with the gods. It is not a matter of compelling divine powers, as a magician in the negative sense would try to do, but of preparing the soul to receive their presence.
Its foundation is a vision of the cosmos as a web of correspondences. Every level of reality contains traces of the higher levels. The gods have scattered their "tokens" throughout the world, called symbola or synthemata: stones, plants, sounds, names, figures. Used in ritual, these tokens awaken in the soul its kinship with the divine.
A fully descended soul
Behind this choice lies a precise philosophical difference. Plotinus held that part of the soul always remains in the intelligible world, undescended. Iamblichus denies this: the soul has descended entirely into the body and cannot rise by its own powers alone.
This has important practical consequences:
- intellectual purification is not enough;
- practices are needed that also involve the body and the senses;
- rituals must suit the level of the person performing them: more material for beginners, more spiritual for the advanced.
This last point is one of Iamblichus's most original contributions. Theurgy is not a single rite valid for all, but a graded ladder.
The Chaldean Oracles
Neoplatonic theurgy also relied on an enigmatic text, the Chaldean Oracles, a collection of oracular verses attributed to Julian the Chaldean and his son Julian the Theurgist, who lived in the second century. The text survives only in fragments quoted by the Neoplatonists, but they regarded it as a genuine revelation, to be placed beside Plato's dialogues.
The Oracles speak of a supreme Father, an Intellect, intermediate powers and the theme of the soul's ascent through divine fire.
The legacy of Iamblichus
After him theurgy became an integral part of Neoplatonism. In the fourth century Emperor Julian deeply admired his teaching. Proclus, in fifth-century Athens, combined theurgy with a philosophical system of extraordinary complexity and composed hymns to the gods that give it poetic expression.
In the Renaissance, Ficino and his contemporaries found in Iamblichus a philosophical justification for natural magic and ritual. For Studio Esoterico Cornelio, Iamblichus's lesson remains valuable: ritual is not a mechanism for obtaining something, but a way of educating the soul that also works through the body, gestures and symbols.
In short
- Iamblichus of Chalcis, a pupil of Porphyry, founded a Neoplatonic school in Syria in the third and fourth centuries.
- In De mysteriis he defended theurgy, ritual as a path uniting the soul with the gods.
- For Iamblichus the soul has fully descended and needs the divine tokens present in the world to rise again.
- Theurgy influenced Julian, Proclus and, through Ficino, the Renaissance.