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 the-
ological 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 theolo-
gians had to organize into a system.
The Intellectual Choice of Julian the Apostate
Among both intellectuals and common people the idea of a higher, supreme, spir-
itual god was increasingly taking root, and therefore the main problem was to reshape
public religion in order to get in contact with him. Arnobius (Adversus nationes2.13,
62, 66) describes, at the beginning of the fourth century, three ways often chosen
in order to let the human soul come back to the supreme god, from which it had
come down to the earthly world (Mazza 1963): (1) that of the know-all, probably
the Gnostics, consisting in separating the soul from the material world; (2) that of the
Magi, who used prayers or spells by means of which they were able to overcome
the bad divinities which barred the going back up to the Father God; and (3) that
of the Etruscans, whose doctrine taught how to give the soul immortality by means of
certain sacrifices to certain gods.
Creating One’s Own Religion 389