A closer look

Neoplatonists figured the universe was just a series of spiritual hand-me-downs. According to this theory, a perfect, abstract source endlessly overflows, and each successive layer of reality gets slightly worse, like making a photocopy of a photocopy. By the time you get down to physical matter, the quality is so degraded it is basically trash. It is a highly philosophical way of saying everything is currently terrible compared to the original source.