According to
Hippolytus of Rome, the worldview was inspired by the
Pythagoreans, who called the first thing that came into existence the "monad", which begat (bore) the
dyad (from the Greek word for two), which begat the
numbers, which begat the
point, begetting
lines or
finiteness, etc. It meant
divinity, the first being, or the totality of all beings, referring in
cosmogony (creation theories) variously to source acting alone and/or an indivisible origin and
equivalent comparators. Pythagorean and
Neoplatonic philosophers like
Plotinus and
Porphyry of Tyre condemned
Gnosticism (see
Neoplatonism and Gnosticism) for its treatment of the monad. In his
Latin-language treaty ,
Alain de Lille affirms "God is an intelligible
sphere, whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere." The French philosopher
François Rabelais ascribed this proposition to
Hermes Trismegistus. The symbolism is a free
exegesis related to the
Trinity in
Christian theology. According to
Diogenes Laërtius, from the monad evolved the dyad; from it numbers; from numbers, points; then lines, two-dimensional
entities, three-dimensional entities, bodies, culminating in the four
classical elements of earth, water, fire and air, from which the rest of our world is built up. ==Modern philosophy==