50 years before Philoponus, two Christians from Gaza, seeking to influence Alexandrian Christians, defended the Christian belief in resurrection and the finite duration of the world, and attacked rival Neoplatonist views. Aeneas addresses an unusual version of the food chain argument against resurrection, that our bodies will get eaten by other creatures. Zacharias attacks the Platonist examples of synchronous creation, which were the production of light, of shadow, and of a footprint in the sand. A fragment survives of a third Gazan contribution by Procopius. Zacharias lampoons the...

How was the universe created, and what is our place within it? These are the questions at the heart of Plotinus' Against the Gnostics. For the Gnostics, the universe came into being as a result of the soul's fall from intelligible reality--it is the evil outcome of a botched creation. Plotinus challenges this, and insists that the soul's creation of the world is the necessary consequence of its contemplation of the ideal forms. While the Gnostics claim to despise the visible universe, Plotinus argues that such contempt displays their ignorance of the higher realities of which the...