Neoplatonism

One of the most persistent strands of Western philosophy, Neoplatonism is, as the name suggests, a philosophy which begins from the work of Plato, and interprets him in a special manner. The manner of that interpretation tends to associate God with the principle of unity, making Him completely transcendent, and related to the world by means of a series of intermediaries, who (or which) derive from the One by a principle of emanation. In this view reality is a graded series from the divine to the material, and man, who has in him some part of the divine, longs for union with the eternal source of things. The system thus has spiritual as well as intellectual implications.