By Maximus of the Dyercord.
Plato Contra Atomism
Plato considered such people who were atomists denied knowledge altogether not just for reducing first principles but how first principles are in their paradigm which transcends all sensible things and categories known to the senses which he said is illusory.
He consisted direct apprehension (nœoia) [? Maximus wrote “neora”] to not be accessible through speculative reasoning (diánœa), but comprehension (nóēsis). When the nûs contemplates and partakes in truth, goodness, beauty, it is a spiritual perception that cannot be deduced rationally but mystically when the senses ended its movement.
This isn’t our position but even Plato understood materialism cannot give you knowledge, not generically predicated forms but what makes something whatever it is in itself perceived beyond baseline comprehension, i.e. spiritual perception of things eternal and imminently beyond one’s own experience.
Against Theurgy
Platonism requires theurgy and magic rituals, Porphyry said it was necessary. In order to partake in higher forms (the gods), one must be cleansed through rituals. And once one has been purified he can access theōría by means of anagogic ascent beyond the gods or the intellectual light that governs all in the world soul. He argued that even the light of the angels and gods was circumscribed and limited and cannot give you knowledge of the One.
Platonic theurgy starts with self apia thesis and is henothistic. We have anathematized this practice. St. Gregory Palamas says these people are demonically possessed with lights of demons that give them visions. St. Augustine does as well.
Their tradition in the Middle East under Simplicius explicitly evokes dæmons for the cosmos for magic. They say, the Haggarenes, that man is divine by nature and contains the cosmos and has access to the gods. By ascent, they transcend bodily existence and ascend to “the good” by denying all of bodily realities for it deprives them of divinities—plural.
When they start with the cosmos as they believed everything has a living soul (hypostases), as rational being. This teaching explicitly states that all inanimate things are rational by nature and love eternally the cosmos and the gods.