Apollonius of Tyana, and Other Essays

An excerpt of a review from The Philosophical Review, Volume 16: This volume contains three historical papers, "Apollonius of Tyana," "Celsus and Origen," "John Scotus Erigena," followed by three shorter discussions, "Animism, Religion, and Philosophy," "A Compendious Classification of the Sciences," "Teleology and the Individual." The first of these essays has already appeared in The Monist, and the fifth in Mind; the others have not hitherto been published....
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An excerpt of a review from The Philosophical Review, Volume 16:

This volume contains three historical papers, "Apollonius of Tyana," "Celsus and Origen," "John Scotus Erigena," followed by three shorter discussions, "Animism, Religion, and Philosophy," "A Compendious Classification of the Sciences," "Teleology and the Individual." The first of these essays has already appeared in The Monist, and the fifth in Mind; the others have not hitherto been published.

The historical papers connect themselves, the first two directly, the third remotely, with a period in which Mr. Whittaker seems to have a special interest, the period (roughly speaking, the third century) in which Christianity was taking its place as the organizing power of the life and thought of the world, but the men of the old order still had hope of being able to maintain the ancient system of culture and religion, and were rallying all its forces to meet the spiritual needs of the age. Philosophy became an effort to guide man to his salvation; and as the evil grew deeper and men more and more despaired of the world, the guidance underwent an inevitable modification. Stoicism, with its belief in a reason immanent in the world, more and more gave place to philosophies which directed men's hopes away from the world to a transcendent God, in union with whom is that completeness of salvation in which we are delivered both from ourselves and from the evil of the world. The historical dialectic, that is to say, which governed the last vital movements of ancient thought, was a dialectic that led away from Stoicism toward Neo-Platonism. But, naturally, there were intervening stages; and one of these is seen in the school of which Apollonius of Tyana is a representative, in Neo-Pythagoreanism. Outwardly this school was Pythagorean; it felt a kinship with that ancient school which had been in reality a brotherhood for the purposes of the higher life, intellectual culture, the pursuit of ceremonial holiness, the regeneration of society by the political supremacy of the saints. But intrinsically Neo-Pythagoreanism was a transformed Platonism, renouncing the world and the flesh and worshipping a transcendent God. With this position the little that we know of Apollonius as a religious founder, "a reformer of Greek religion from within," agrees. Spirit and matter he sets in sharp opposition. Life, therefore, must be ascetic, a course of purification from all bondage to the flesh; and religion must be spiritual. The one transcendent God is to be apprehended only by reason, and worshipped only spiritually, without offerings and sacrifices which, since they are material, are essentially impure; while, if offerings are brought to the inferior gods, these offerings must at least be bloodless.