Neoplatonism
The late-antique development of Plato begun by Plotinus, on which everything flows out from a single ultimate source and returns to it. Its vocabulary — monad, procession, reversion — was absorbed by Christian theology and still shapes how the Trinity gets argued about.
Plotinus in the third century read Plato as describing a single ultimate source — the One — from which everything proceeds in stages, and to which everything returns. His successors, Porphyry, Iamblichus and above all Proclus, turned that into a systematic metaphysics with a technical vocabulary: procession, reversion, monad, hypostasis.
Christian theology absorbed the vocabulary early and thoroughly, sometimes with attribution and sometimes without. That is why an argument about the Trinity can turn on a claim from Neoplatonic number theory, and why a twelfth-century Byzantine bishop could refute Proclus point by point while writing in Proclus's own terms.
The pattern worth watching is what happens when a Neoplatonic claim about *stages of a process* is read as a claim about *how many individuals there are*. Those are different claims, and the tradition itself does not conflate them.
Where this comes up
Sources
- Debby research packet OTC-002, on the Neoplatonic triad