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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Alexandria and her Schools by Charles Kingsley: borrowed partly from the Chaldees, and partly from the Jewish rabbis,
which formed a descending chain of persons, downward from the highest
Deities to heroes, and to the guardian angel of each man; the meed of
the philosopher being, that by self-culture and self-restraint he could
rise above the tutelage of some lower and more earthly daemon, and
become the pupil of a God, and finally a God himself.
These contradictions need not lower the great Father of Neoplatonism in
our eyes, as a moral being. All accounts of him seem to prove him to
have been what Apollo, in a lengthy oracle, declared him to have been,
"good and gentle, and benignant exceedingly, and pleasant in all his
conversation." He gave good advice about earthly matters, was a
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