tion, borrowing Stoic logic of propositions and terms, and augmenting Aris-
totelean categories to structure the metaphysical system (CHLG, 1967: 283–
293). So far, philosophy prevailed over the religious elements in the synthesis.
In the next generation, Christianity triumphed politically. The Neoplaton-
ist school became the center of political opposition to Christianity and cam-
paigned for the restoration of traditional cults (CHLG, 1967: 279–280).
Plotinus’ pure intellectuality forged at the moment of transition could not be
maintained; popular techniques of magic increasingly prevailed as the move-
ment went underground. Iamblichus put theurgy—the process of becoming a
god by magical procedures—above intellectual philosophy. From now on,
Neoplatonists claimed powers such as clairvoyance, the ability to raise phan-
toms and to work magic spells. The coalition was widened into one last grand
effort to oppose Christianity. Iamblichus brought in Gnosticism (anathema to
Plotinus), the Egyptian mysteries, the anachronistic Chaldean Oracles (CHLG,
1967: 277–279, 295–301). The movement was not without political successes:
a circle of Iamblichus’ spirit-calling followers at Pergamum encouraged the
young Julian in the direction that would lead to his brief overthrow of official
Christianity during 361–363. (Chadwick, 1967: 157; EP, 1967: 5:175).
The last great thinker of pagan philosophy, Proclus, followed in the revived
chain of Platonic scholarchs at Athens. Proclus was devoutly religious in
anything non-Christian, observing all the holy days and rituals of the Egyptian
and Greek calendars and all the mysteries from the Chaldean to the Orphic,
practicing theurgy (which he learned from a daughter of Plutarch, the Athenian
scholarch) and claiming to conjure luminous phantoms of the gods (DSB,
1981: 11:160; CHLG, 1967: 302–313). What makes Proclus intellectually
significant is that his extreme syncretism now attempted to preserve all pagan
learning. He commented on Euclid and Ptolemy, and arranged Aristotelean
physics and astronomy into systematic form with propositions and proofs.
Emulating Euclid, he even produced a systematic Elements of Theology, in
which the elaborations of post-Iamblichian gradations of being are given in
geometrical reasoning. For all its arbitrary contents, the last wave of the pagan
united front put everything into a grand synthesis under the most rigorous
method achieved by the entire historical community of Greek intellectuals.
While the pagans’ creativity went into joining ranks, the victorious Chris-
tians were expanding laterally across intellectual turf. The great wave of
heresies internal to Christianity took off as the church gathered strength; unlike
the earlier argument against the Gnostics, who were non-organizational fac-
tions, these were battles over control of the church organization itself. The
heresy disputes around the Monarchians, Arians, Monophysites, and Pelagians
were on one plane power struggles within the church. But they were carried
out with intellectual tools, on the level of philosophical abstractions, rather
Partitioning Attention Space: Ancient Greece^ •^127