- Lived:
- 412–485 CE · born in Constantinople, raised in Lycia, taught in Athens
- Tradition:
- Late antique Greek; the last great systematizer of pagan Neoplatonism
- The Big Idea:
- All of reality — gods, minds, souls, stones — flows from a single source in one continuous, rigorously ordered chain, and every step of that chain can be proved, like a theorem in geometry.
- In their words:
- "Every manifold in some way participates unity."
- If you remember one thing:
- While the ancient world's temples were closing around him, Proclus built paganism its final cathedral — not of marble, but of 211 interlocking proofs — and that cathedral, smuggled into the Middle Ages under two false names, quietly shaped a Christian civilization that thought it had defeated him.