gr. θεουργία, theourgía: oração, invocação, ofício sagrado que faz milagres. Desempenho de ações divinas, com a ajuda de “símbolos” ou “symbola” mágicos, ocupa um lugar especial na tradição neoplatônica.
The whole subject of religious practice is illuminated by Porphyry’s intellectual honesty which leads him to express doubts about how sacrifice, theurgy, prayer, magic, divination and demonic forces can work. Though Porphyry was considered the greatest intellectual scourge of the Christians in Antiquity, and his Against the Christians was burnt twice, he raised similarly searching questions for his co-re-ligionists, and in some ways is close to his Christian opponents, as in his insistence here that the true sacrifice is that of a pure intellect. Iamblichus, his probable pupil, provides in Myst. an excoriating reply, which seeks to explain the efficacy of religious practice in non-physical terms, which he criticises Porphyry for overlooking. Iamblichus wrote just before Constantine made Christianity the official religion of the Empire, and was seen as the great authority by subsequent pagans, not least the Emperor Julian who sought for two years to restore pagan religion. Although Proclus reveres and seeks to follow Iamblichus, Damascius, whose Athenian school was closed in 529 AD by the Christian Emperor Justinian, regards Proclus as misunderstanding Iamblichus pervasively. The fragments of Damascius’ Philosophical History, which award good and (more often) bad marks to his philosophical co-religionists, are assembled, translated and explained for the first time by Polymnia Athanassiadi, 1999. I have argued in the Introduction that Ammonius and the sixth-century Alexandrian school made pagan religious practice less central to their teaching and writing. (SorabjiPC1:369)