SOURCE: Edwards, M. J. “Birth, Death, and Divinity in Porphyry's Life of Plotinus.” In Greek Biography and the Panegyric in Late Antiquity, edited by Tomas Hägg and Philip Rousseau, with the assistance of Christian Hogel, pp. 52-71. Berkeley, Cal.: University of California Press, 2000.

[In the following essay, Edwards analyzes the Life of Plotinus and suggests that in this work Porphyry attempts to solve the mysteries about his teacher Plotinus—including his supernatural capacities—that remained obscure during his lifetime. The critic also characterizes the work as more than a biography, calling it a gospel of sorts.]

Open any book about Plotinus, and it is almost sure to be prefaced by a chapter on his life. The method is that of Porphyry, his most successful pupil, and the content of the chapter in most cases will be drawn entirely from his introduction to the Enneads, although perhaps with an occasional animadversion on his dates.¹ The collaborative project recently edited in Paris by Luc Brisson has reminded us that the Life has all the usual opacities of a literary artifact; we may add to this a handful of articles, most of them by the same scholars, on the Oracle of Apollo, and some incidental remarks in F. M. Schroeder's magisterial essay on Ammonius Saccas.² Nevertheless, Patricia Cox is still, so far as I know, the only author who has tried to grasp the pattern and the spirit of the whole, and it is her Biography in Late Antiquity that provides the starting point of the present chapter.³

Among the debated features of Cox's book is her distinction between biographies that present the main figure as “the son of a god” and those that confer on him only a “godlike status.”⁴ I do not think that this distinction, any more than the book itself, is asking to be read as either technical or exhaustive. We are all aware that Greek has more than two such terms, and that each of the expressions θεόs, δαίμων, υἱὸs θεοῦ, and θεῖοs ἀνήϱ is employed with even less discrimination by the ancients than in modern studies of them.⁵ I take it that the author's aim was therefore, not to foist a new precision on ancient writers who were neither lexicographers nor philosophers, but to make the important point that the biographies of different pagan saints are so constructed as to yield very different hints of their relation to the gods. In the following analysis of Porphyry's Life of Plotinus, I use his own vocabulary because, as a philosopher, he may be supposed to have chosen his words advisedly; we have the right to assume that if he verbally contradicts his own beliefs, it is because he is speaking through, or on behalf of, other men.

I argue here that one of the cardinal aims of the Life, at least when read in conjunction with the Enneads, is to make the reader privy to a mystery hidden from all the pupils and antagonists of Plotinus during his lifetime and not even discovered by the biographer until a short time before he prepared this work in commemoration of his master. First, I argue that, while Porphyry attributed supernatural capacities to his hero, he does not wish us to think that these were extraneously imparted or inherited at his birth. Second, the narrative of Plotinus's death estranges the master even from his pupils when the destiny that he promises to others in the Enneads is treated as peculiarly his own. Third, although the truth about Plotinus is unwittingly detected by a priest of his native Egypt, it can be comprehended only by a reader who already knows the Enneads. Fourth, the author's commentary on the Oracle of Apollo shows philosophy to be wiser than the gods.

This chapter will thus, I hope, fulfill the main purpose of this collection, the study of the uses of biographical literature in late antiquity. Such a collection of studies will inevitably lead us to ask whether late antiquity recognized a genre of biography; if we answer in the affirmative, we shall also wish to know whether Christianity appropriated the genre, and indeed whether Christian writings may have contributed to its evolution. Porphyry's Life of Plotinus is a prime example in any account of late antique biography; I also hope to show here that it affords a proper subject for comparison with at least one eminent work in the Christian canon. My final argument, therefore, is that Porphyry's protagonist is intended to be, not merely a pagan saint, but a pagan Christ.

THE BIRTH OF PLOTINUS AND THE BIOGRAPHICAL TRADITION

I begin with the birth of Plotinus, if only because we have so much to learn from the fact that Porphyry does not. Plotinus is described in the opening sentence as ὁ χαθ' ἡμas γεγονos φιλόσοφοs, which could be rendered as “the philosopher who came to be among us.” This use of γίγνομαι is not unparalleled in Life of Plotinus, which says of the Gnostics γεγόνασι χατ' αὐτόν when it means that they were active in his time (VP 16). It is, however, strange to style Plotinus a contemporary of younger men without first saying something of his time of birth, which Porphyry himself had calculated at his death.⁶

Porphyry cannot have been unacquainted with the miraculous nativities attributed in his own century to men like Apollonius of Tyana. Philostratus, an older contemporary of Plotinus's, wrote, for example: “The people of that region [about Tyana] say that Apollonius was the son of Zeus, though he styled himself the son of Apollonius” (Vita Apollonii 1.6). Porphyry knew something of Apollonius's travels in India, which are mentioned in his treatise On the Styx and may have prompted him to assign the unlikely motive of visiting India to Plotinus when the latter joined the army of Gordian III.⁷

Miracles, clairvoyance, vegetarianism, and readiness to die are traits that both Plotinus and Apollonius share with the prototype of all philosophical biographies, Pythagoras. Tales of miraculous origin abound for this figure, although Porphyry may have borrowed both the legend and his detachment in rehearsing it from a celebrated work by Apollonius himself: “Apollonius in what he writes about Pythagoras gives his mother's name as Pythais, a descendant of Ancaeus the founder of Samos. Some say that he was the offspring of Apollo and Pythais, though according to Apollonius, Mnesarchus was alleged to be his father” (Porphyry, Vita Pythagorae p. 18.10 Nauck).⁸

Scholars have pointed out that the biographers who preserved these anecdotes did not endorse them,⁹ and in any case divine paternity would not suffice of itself to make a man a god. Apollonius and Pythagoras, whatever their parentage, both lived and died as human beings, as is evident from the catalogues of their previous incarnations; Plotinus, the only one of the three who has no history before his life, is the only one whom the gods themselves acknowledge as divine.

If Porphyry had thought it anachronistic to attach the gods to the birth of a contemporary figure, he could have availed himself of the superstitions that surrounded those of Socrates and Plato. A life of Plato reminds us that the verb γίγνομαι denotes, not the reality or essence of a thing but its contingent occupation of time and space: “All that comes into being does so at a certain time and place. Now let us learn each of these, and also the manner and circumstances of his coming into being” (Vita Platonis p. 6.12-15 Westermann). The biographer has already said that Plato was born on the seventh day of Thargelion and Socrates on the sixth; from this he concludes that Plato had the better of his master, since the first was the day of Apollo and the second that of Artemis. Porphyry, by contrast, withholds the information that the verb γίγνομαι seems to promise, alleging that Plotinus “seemed ashamed to be in the body” and “could not bear to speak of his race, nor of his parents, nor of the land of his birth” (VP [Vita Pythagorae] 1.1-3). The second chapter says that, while Plotinus honored the natal days of Socrates and Plato, “he did not think it proper for anyone to honor the day of his birth by feasts or sacrifice” and so would not divulge it. There was, however, at least one source, attested by Eunapius and the Suda, which professed to know the birthplace of Plotinus; Porphyry himself concedes that an Alexandrian sorcerer knew his birthday well enough to do him mischief through the influence of the stars.¹⁰ Porphyry's ignorance surprised Eunapius, and we are entitled to suspect that it is feigned.

Even if Plotinus, like other prominent figures of his epoch, thought it dangerous to make his birthday public,¹¹ Porphyry would have needed other reasons for conniving at the reticence of his teacher once the latter had been delivered from his body. Marinus clearly thought that his Life of Proclus would enhance the reputation of its subject if it ended with a horoscope.¹² When Porphyry draws attention to Plotinus's refutation of astrology, this is partly a defense of his own omissions in the Life: “He studied the principles of astrology, though not like a practitioner, paying special attention to the methods which enable men to cast horoscopes; having ascertained that their conclusions were unreliable, he was not afraid to expose many things in their writings” (VP 15.21-26). Neither Plotinus nor his pupil wholly denied that stars possess some power to affect the body; but neither would allow that they were capable of determining the mind.¹³ Any Neoplatonist would agree that the philosopher can lay no claim to virtue if he loses his autonomy; inherited divinity would compromise this no less than stellar influence, and perhaps it is because Porphyry sees more clearly than Philostratus or Marinus that he exempts his master's birth from every favorable accident and all suspicion of honorable parentage, whether human or divine.

DEATH AND REPUTATION

Astrologers of Porphyry's time may not have claimed to know Plotinus's horoscope, but they knew what he had suffered, and Firmicus Maternus cites his death as a refutation of his claim to freedom. Plotinus, he informs us, mocked the stars and built himself a residence in Campania, where he hoped to be secure from fate but found instead that virtue was no shield against the indignant constellations:

Not at all did he turn his mind or his eyes upon the end of Socrates or Plato. … Behold, as he was safe in this elated confidence the whole power of the fates threw itself upon him. First his limbs grew rigid with a cold torpor of the blood, and little by little his sight was dimmed, so that his eyes lost their sharpness and splendour. After this a pest erupted through the whole of his skin, and the consequent putrefaction of his body was accompanied by the wasting of his limbs and the corruption of his blood. Every day and hour, minute parts of his entrails were dissolved by the illness that was creeping through them. Where the observer had seen a healthy organ, it was suddenly deformed by the ulceration of his expiring body.

(F. Maternus, Mathesis 1.20-21)

This syndrome of conventional diseases is as likely to originate in poetry as in the records of Plotinus's own physician. Paul Henry is no doubt right to maintain, against Hans Oppermann, that Maternus has merely embellished the account that he found in Porphyry, incidentally confusing the project for constructing Platonopolis with the retirement of Plotinus to his deathbed in Campania.¹⁴ Nonetheless, the long narrative that Porphyry devotes to this cruel episode suggests that it was sufficiently notorious already to be the subject of polemic. He preempts the exultation of the astrologers by telling us at the outset that Plotinus did not care for either his body or his birthday, and he vindicates his freedom by asserting that he left Rome voluntarily to spare his friends the affliction of his presence (2.20f.). By making this the first date in his biography, he reminds us that the founder of his philosophy had defined it as a preparation for death;¹⁵ and he puts into the mouth of the expiring sage two sentences suggesting that his long struggle with the body is more conducive than a quiet or sudden departure would have been to the elevation of the soul.

In the Life, Plotinus is superior to his illness, choosing when and how to end it. Eustochius arrives in time to hear his patient say, “I am waiting for you,” but at once it becomes apparent that he is waiting not for medicine but for death:

When he was about to die, so Eustochius informed us, the latter, who was living in Puetoli, came to his bed with little haste. Plotinus said, “I am still waiting for you,” and then “I am trying to lift up the divine within me [τὸ ἐν ἡμῖν θεῖον] to the divine in the All [τὸ ἐν τῶ παντὶ θεῖον].”

(VP 2.23-27)

Plotinus greets Eustochius with a sentence of the same type as the one with which he is said to have commenced his philosophical career: he exclaimed of Ammonius Saccas, τοῦτον ἐζήτουν, and here he says to his last disciple, σε ἔτι πεϱιμένω.¹⁶ The most eminent philosopher to have watched his master's deathbed was Pythagoras, who attended Pherecydes during equally painful and protracted symptoms.¹⁷ It is not, however, given to Plotinus's doctor to maintain so long a vigil, or do anything but catch the valediction of his liberated soul. The content of this utterance, which ought to have been the most pregnant of his life, is partly concealed from us by the textual tradition. Henry's celebrated article lists the following variants:¹⁸

I am trying to reconcile the divine in myself [or, in us] to the divine in the All.

Try to reconcile the god in yourselves [τόν ἐν ὑμῖν θεόν] to the divine in the All.

Try to reconcile the divine in yourselves [τό ἐν ὑμῖν θεῖον] to the divine in the All.

There is external evidence, if we know how to use it rightly, in a letter by Synesius of Cyrene, where he tells his correspondent to “lead back the divinity in yourself to the ancestral divinity” (τό ἐν σαυτῶ θεῖον ἄναγε ἐπὶ τὸ πϱόγονον θεῖον), adding that “they say that this was the dictum of Plotinus.”¹⁹ But σαυτ is not a variant in the manuscripts of Porphyry's Life, and Synesius's object is not to reproduce the words exactly but to apply them. His statement affords no evidence that Plotinus used the second-person pronoun, and indeed it suggests the opposite; for if, as he implies, the words were passing into a proverb, the identity of the speaker would be lost and they would be bound to take the form of an exhortation. We can understand how a copyist would substitute the proverb for a statement; it is harder to surmise how, if Plotinus had employed the second person, it could have been superseded by the first.

The true variant, then, is the one in which Plotinus makes a statement about himself. The word θεόν is not attested here any more than in the allusion by Synesius; its presence in one rejected reading may be best explained as the result of assimilation to the Enneads, where Plotinus does indeed speak of the “god within each of us” (τὸν ἐν ἐχάsτῳ ἡμῶν θεόν), referring to the nous or intellect that dwells in every rational being and implying no distinction between his pupils and himself.²⁰ The words ascribed to him here imply a consciousness of something that must be spoken of more reticently, something therefore higher than a god and not to be shared with his deciduous admirers. Porphyry was the only one to be absent by command and not by choice,²¹ and so it falls to him to expound in chapters 10 and 23 of his biography what he intimates discreetly in chapter 2.

Eustochius left one other observation that found its way into Porphyry's redaction of the scene: “A snake crawled out of the bed in which he lay and slipped out through an aperture in the wall, and at that moment he breathed out his spirit, being, as Eustochius said, a man of sixty-six years” (VP 2.27-30).

The snake can hardly be, as some have thought, the “allotted daemon of Plotinus,” for, as we shall see, the Enneads do not suggest that this could take a shape outside the body, while Porphyry maintains that it did, but in a different form.²² Emile Bréhier refers to Hermes Trismegistus, who is likened to Plotinus by the historian Ammianus Marcellinus;²³ but since Ammianus lived a century later, and the Egyptian Hermes finds no place in the works of either Porphyry or Plotinus, this conjecture can be supported only by an appeal to the “superstition of the Alexandrian Eustochius.” We have no reason to think that an Alexandrian would have been especially prone to superstition, and in any case we have to explain, not why the thing was stated by Eustochius, but why it was transcribed in this biography.

One answer (which I think both new and true, but not sufficient) would be that Porphyry intended to draw a contrast with the unsuccessful fraud essayed by Heraclides Ponticus, an early and irresponsible biographer of Pythagoras,²⁴ who is said to have been a charlatan in death as well as life:

He had a grown snake, which he had reared from its infancy. When his death was approaching, he requested one of his confidants to conceal his body and place the snake in his bed, so that he would seem to have gone to the gods. And as the citizens were carrying out the bier and blessing the name of Heraclides, the snake, disturbed by the noise, crept out of the robes to general consternation. Subsequently, however, the fraud was detected and Heraclides was known, not as he made himself appear, but as he was.

(Diogenes Laertius 5.6.89)

Plotinus, too, is seen in death “not as he would appear, but as he was”; but since he had no confidants and little expectation of an audience, he cannot be suspected of deceit. Nor can Porphyry mean us to interpret the departing snake as his master's soul, for he himself did not believe that human souls migrated after death into animal bodies,²⁵ and such a change on any view would be, not release, but the penalty of wrongdoing. Heraclides Ponticus was a man to be outdone, like Pherecydes, but only one philosopher had died in a way that was always agreed to merit emulation. Firmicus Maternus sneered that his great contemporary forgot the end of Socrates; it would not escape a disciple that the comparison could be given a far more favorable turn.

The death of Socrates, like that of Plotinus, began in the lower regions of the body, and it would have been a source of shame to his disciples had not he himself construed it as a blessing when he gave instructions for a final sacrifice: “Critias,” he said, “we owe a cock to Asclepius; let him have it and don't forget” (Phaedo 118a7-8). Satirists and Christians were amused by this belated vow; Damascius's reply is that Asclepius, the divine physician, is here receiving paradoxical honors as the deity who effects the separation of soul and body.²⁶ Death is the remedy of the true philosopher, who perceives that the disease is life itself. Asclepius, as a chthonic god, was often represented by a serpent, and appeared thus in the dreams of those who came to his temples seeking only bodily salvation.²⁷ Plotinus is in no temple, and the lateness of Eustochius might have led us to suppose that he died for want of a physician; but the presence of Eustochius coincides with the departure of the snake to make it obvious that their roles are complementary. Each is a doctor, each with his task, and only the human doctor need remain to gather up the mortal wrappings. Porphyry has composed a novel scene in which a man receives the visit of Asclepius and decides upon his own remedy; but how could it be otherwise when the living man had told his bewildered pupils that “the gods should come to me, not I to them?”²⁸

KNOWING THE GOD WITHIN

This saying is reported in the tenth chapter as an epilogue to two frustrated intrigues by exponents of a false power over nature. The first of these, mentioned earlier as a possible explanation for the concealment of his birthday, is an attack upon the body of Plotinus through the heavens:

One of those with pretensions to philosophy was Olympius, an Alexandrian … who endeavoured to work against him through the magic of the stars. But when he found that the attempt had turned against himself he said to his cronies, “Great is the force of Plotinus' soul, for it can reciprocate the attacks of those who try to do him harm.” Plotinus, for his part, resisted the machinations of Olympius, saying that his body at that time was being drawn together “like the contracted purses” as his members were compressed. But Olympius, once he was in danger of suffering more himself than he did to Plotinus, desisted; for Plotinus had something more by birth than others.

(VP 10.1-15)

Porphyry, with the same candor that he displays in his account of the mortal illness of Plotinus, does not conceal the pains that he incurred from these assaults. Instead, he subordinates them to philosophy by making Plotinus use a flippant metaphor that Plato had applied to the creation of the sexes;²⁹ the sage who “seemed ashamed to be in the body” thus reminds himself and us that our afflictions are not the consequence of any discrete event, but of our mere corporeal presence in the world.

Olympius himself imputes his failure to the force of Plotinus's soul, and Porphyry adds that he had something more by birth than other mortals. Porphyry does not gloss this by repeating what was said about Pythagoras, that “he let men know that he was of greater seed than that according to mortal nature.”³⁰ For one thing, his Plotinus is too humble to reveal his powers except on irresistible provocation; for another he has the commentary to hand in Plotinus's treatise On Our Allotted Personal Daemon, which he represents as the sequel to another inadvertent demonstration of these powers:

Plotinus has something more by birth than others. For a certain Egyptian priest arrived in Rome and became known to him through a friend. Wishing to make a display of his wisdom he invited Plotinus to come and see an exhibition of his so-called proper daemon that dwelt within him. Plotinus agreeing readily, the conjuration took place in the Temple of Isis, this being, as he said, the only pure spot that he could find in Rome. The daemon was summoned, but proved on becoming visible to be not one of the race of daemons but a god. The Egyptian cried “O blessed art thou, whose companion daemon is not one of the lesser race but a god.” … There is indeed a book written by him as a result of this occasion, entitled “On our Allotted Daemon,” in which he explores the reasons for the distinction between the companions.

(VP 10.15-32)

This treatise is Enneads 3.4, and was written before Plotinus made the acquaintance of his biographer. Porphyry has described the contents better than the occasion, for the daemon of which Plotinus speaks could hardly have been evoked by any rite. It is the fate allotted to the soul at the beginning of each embodiment, or rather the future state that it should strive to attain in the course of that embodiment. It is not the driving force within the body that the astrologers (and Porphyry) would have called the natal daemon; rather, it is the star that the aspiring mind has adopted as its pilot (3.4.6), and this pilotage is assumed to be both benevolent and compatible with freedom. It is left to the biographer to insinuate that Plotinus was unique in being the master, not the victim, of his birth.³¹

The priest betrays his ignorance by assuming that a daemon, which is merely the state of soul above the present one, must be always something other than a god. Porphyry is satisfied that the rivals of Plotinus should confess his superiority; that superiority is all the more apparent, and the confession more sincere, when it is framed in the crude vocabulary of the defeated party. Literature offered precedents for such contests, where Pythagoras gets the better of Apollo's priest Abaris, or Apollonius prophesies misfortune to a celebrant of the Eleusinian mysteries;³² but Porphyry's innovation is to link the tale to a treatise that, if the link were sound, would put a wholly new construction on it. Plotinus says that one who lives entirely in his intellect is the equal of those gods who would otherwise have been his guardians; such a man he knew himself to be, and we must thus conclude, with Armstrong, that his tutelary daemon is the One.³³

CORRECTING THE GODS

These early chapters of the Vita Plotini have been a riddle to those not already acquainted with the teaching of Plotinus. Porphyry says that his master was of rarer birth than others, yet conspires with him to conceal the time and place of it; the dying sage is conscious of a divinity within him, and, in chapter 10, we appear to see the undeniable signs of both its presence and its nature, yet the book that is recommended as an interpretant subverts the origin of the sign itself. So long as we are hampered by the defective understanding of a Eustochius, an Olympius, or an Isiac priest, it is only by an inference (if at all) that we can name the divine companion of Plotinus. The Life does not so much endorse the witnesses to his greatness as supply us with the materials to correct them, and Porphyry concludes that the authoritative verdict must be delivered by the gods: “But what is all this talk of mine about a tree and a rock, as Hesiod says? For if one ought to use the testimonies that come from the wisest, who could be wiser than a god?” (VP 22.1-4). Porphyry belonged to a generation of philosophers who no longer thought it childish to believe that the gods expressed themselves in verse. In this time, the Sibyls revived, the Orphic fragments multiplied, and Empedocles acquired a new reputation as a poet; Porphyry compiled at least one digest of the Philosophy to be Imbibed from Oracles and perhaps another work entitled On the Regression of the Soul.³⁴ The supposed Chaldaean Oracles, on which this was based, were manufactured by and for philosophers,³⁵ and so, we may suspect, is the one recorded in the Life as having been spoken to Amelius; for it comes from one of Apollo's shrines, which were never so verbose and were alleged in the previous century to have lapsed either into prose or into silence.³⁶ The precedents that Porphyry himself cites are archaic—two verses from Herodotus and the famous testimonial to Socrates;³⁷ archaic, too, is the diction, which conceals at least as much as it discloses and can only be construed by a second act of divination, Porphyry's commentary in chapter 23.

The apophthegm that justifies the quotation of the Oracle of Apollo is from Hesiod's Theogony; his Works and Days supplies the leading image, with its story that the first generation of mortals, the most virtuous and the happiest, were a race of gold who when they perished took the form of tutelary daemons.³⁸ Plotinus is saluted in the Oracle as a man who now enjoys, along with Minos, Rhadamanthus, and the rest of the “golden race,” the “more divine estate of daemons”; five times the word is used of his new condition, but his soul in life already possessed this quality, and what he now receives from Zeus, he has earned by his dauntless ardor in pursuing the goal illumined by the “radiance” from above.³⁹ This notion of return to a primordial felicity, is not, however, derived from Hesiod but from Empedocles, who represents himself as a fallen daemon but exults in his redemption by proclaiming himself to be “no longer a mortal, but a god.”⁴⁰

The Oracle's phrase is δαῖμον, ἄνεϱ τὸ πάϱοιθεν, but Plotinus himself preferred the Empedoclean θεὸs ἄμβϱοτοs, οὐχἐτι θνητόs.⁴¹ Porphyry must have seen that this discrepancy between Apollo's language and his master's is the symptom of a fundamental difference in the thought. The seer includes himself among the gods who have the power to bestow felicity on such beings as Plotinus, who can aspire to no higher state than that of daemons. A Platonist would have answered that Apollo himself in his mantic role is not so much a deity as a daemon,⁴² and Plotinus, as we have seen, maintained that the gods should come to him. Porphyry pretends not to understand him, but this is merely an indication that his Life is of a propaedeutic character; for in the Sententiae, he himself distinguishes between those who have obtained the rank of θεοί by their philosophic virtues, and those who have risen higher to deserve the appellation, “father of gods.”⁴³ This phrase is elucidated in the writing that his own edition treats as the summit of his master's thought: “For activity [energeia] also generates gods in silence by contact with [the One], and it generates beauty, righteousness and virtue” (Enneads 6.9.9). In an earlier paragraph (6.9.7), the story that Minos was the son of Zeus is understood as a prefigurement of the intimacy with the One to which the human soul aspires. The Eros and Aphrodite of the Symposium are now not so much the causes as the progeny of this ascent, and this alone the philosopher will acknowledge as his goal. Discoverable only by the logos of philosophy, the One, in Porphyry's commentary on the Oracle, is the key that unlocks the muthos of a less enlightened seer:

And as he kept on drawing himself by this daemonic light towards the first and transcendent God, through meditation and according to the methods described by Plato in the Symposium, there appeared to him that God who has neither form nor any concept, but is seated above the mind and all intelligible. To this I Porphyry testify that I also once approached and was united in my sixty-eighth year. So then the “nearby goal” appeared to Plotinus.

(VP 23.7-14)

Without at least one experience of divine illumination, Porphyry could not, in a single passage, have offered such tendentious readings of the Oracle of Apollo, Plato's Symposium, and Plotinus's own allusions to the “god who sits within us.”⁴⁴ In the Life, the acolytes of other gods bestow their ignorant praises on the sage, who has disarmed them by his miracles, and after his death, the failure of understanding will be even more acute. At the same time, it is easier to correct, for it is now contending, not with the spontaneous defenses of his body, but with the thoughts of his imperishable mind.

BIOGRAPHY AND GOSPEL

It should be observed at this point that the work I have called the Life of Plotinus in this chapter received a slightly different title from its author: he named it On the Life of Plotinus and the Arrangement of His Works. In the usage of the period, such prepositional phrases denote a work of a partisan character, nearer to panegyric than to what we now call biography, and intended to support the cause or polity that its subject introduced into the world. Just as Porphyry's memoir is a preface to fifty-four treatises, so Philostratus's Concerning Apollonius of Tyana was succeeded by the Letters of that philosopher; Iamblichus's On the Pythagorean Life is the first of ten books in a projected encyclopedia; and the fifth book of Eusebius's On the Life of Constantine is an Oration to the Saints.⁴⁵

One English word for a narrative with such a patent tendency is gospel, and it would not be surprising if the exponent of a new Platonism conceived his own memorial of his master as a pagan contribution to this genre. He produced it perhaps a little after 300 a.d., and his own Contra Christianos may have been written about the same time, with the intention of enhancing or excusing the severity of Diocletian's measures against the Christians.⁴⁶ The Gospels were already being compared with the Philostratean account of Apollonius, and one at least had been perused with sympathetic attention by a Platonist, who exclaimed that the opening verses of the Fourth Gospel should be inscribed in permanent characters of gold.⁴⁷

Desire to outshine Amelius, to overreach Philostratus, or to belittle Christianity would all have been strong motives for the writing of a Neoplatonic gospel. Polemic may, however, be compatible with respectful imitation, especially when an author has so much in common with Porphyry as the fourth evangelist. Each professed to write from personal knowledge; each ascribed the wisdom of his master to a deity and contrasted it with the superficial piety of his rivals; each presented himself as the interpreter of a text in which those rivals would have sought a different meaning; each maintained, against less percipient disciples, that the world had more to learn from the master's death than from his birth. To take three points:

1. In both accounts the rivals look for truth in the wrong locality. Plotinus shows that he, not the temple of Isis, is the true seat of divinity; Jesus in the Fourth Gospel treats the temple as a symbol of his body, and denies that God prescribes any place of worship.⁴⁸ The “Jews” who frequent the temple are revealed to be ignorant of their own religion; and, just as the astrologer and the priest maintain their errors even when they commend Plotinus, so when Caiaphas speaks of Jesus “dying for the people,” we are told that he did not perceive the import of his words.⁴⁹

2. The sacred text that vindicates Plotinus is an oracle; in the Fourth Gospel, Jesus tells the Jews to “search the scriptures.” The latter text explains itself no better than the former, for the evangelist is asking us to believe in a Messiah who was neither born in Bethlehem nor preceded by Elijah.⁵⁰ Both testimonies call for an interpreter, not in spite of, but because of their assumed infallibility. The hermeneutical instruments for Porphyry are the Enneads and the dialogues of Plato; the Christ of the evangelist needs no instrument, because he is the embodied Word of God. Porphyry assimilates events to books; the evangelist is guided by the continuing revelation of the Logos through the Paraclete, and his book is the event.⁵¹

3. For the fourth evangelist, the Cross is both a signal, drawing everyone to Jesus, and a means of grace, restoring him to the glory that he possessed before the world as the only-begotten of the Father. Yet no account is given of this begetting, because, as Logos, he was always with the Father, and as Son he was born, “not of blood or the will of the flesh, but of the will of God.”⁵² All that can be said of his nativity is ὁ λόγοs σὰϱξ ἐγἐνετο, “the Word became flesh”; when Cyril of Alexandria spoke of Christ as one who “came to be man among us” (χαθ' ἡμas γενἐsθαι ἄνθϱωπον), he chose the verb of generation carefully, to remind us that the Word experienced no change in himself.⁵³ Plotinus, the “philosopher who came to be among us,” dies at peace with his guiding deity; the Christ of the fourth evangelist proves his unity with the Father when he gives his life without complaint and takes it back at will.⁵⁴

I do not suggest that Porphyry would have called his work a gospel; the Church of his day acknowledged only four, and when they were more numerous, the term defined the intention of a writing, not its form.⁵⁵ Here—and I would say, not only here—it is better to speak of common themes and elements, of influences or models, than of genre. There are certainly common elements, I have argued that there could have been an influence, and I think that there is a demonstrable unity of aim. Porphyry's Life begins with a criticism of the trick by which Amelius perpetuated the body of Plotinus in a portrait;⁵⁶ the fourth evangelist's proem is ostentatiously indifferent to the human birth of Jesus, which had been immortalized in other gospels. In both the Life and the Gospel, the protagonist has the right to be called a god, but in neither book is this perceived by others before his death. The logos-proem points, like Apollo's Oracle, to a life too long for history, so that neither Life nor Gospel can pretend to be an adequate memorial. One is an introduction to the Enneads, the other an earthly sampler of that multitude of volumes, yet unwritten, which “the world could not contain.”⁵⁷

Notes

1. See, e.g., Rist, Plotinus, 2-20. Igal, Cronología de la Vida de Plotino de Porfirio, remains an outstanding contribution to the study of the chronology, on which Barnes, “Chronology,” may also be consulted. All these works are interested in the Life of Plotinus as a historical text, not a literary one.

2. Brisson, ed., Porphyre: Vie de Plotin, vols. 1 and 2; Schroeder, “Ammonios Saccas.”

3. Cox, Biography in Late Antiquity. The final chapter deals with the Life of Plotinus.

4. Ibid., 20: “One paradigm, followed by Philostratus (Life of Apollonius), Porphyry (Life of Pythagoras) and Iamblichus (Pythagorean life) characterizes the divine philosopher as the son of a god. The other, followed by Porphyry (Life of Plotinus) and Eusebius (‘Life of Origen’) attributes only a godlike status to the divine philosopher.”

5. A discussion of, and antidote to, much loose modern writing on the subject of the θεῖοs ἀνήϱ can be found in Francis, Subversive Virtue, 54-129.

6. Life of Plotinus (=VP) 2.29-31, ed. Henry and Schwyzer, Plotini Opera, 1: 1-38; Igal, Cronología, 55-75.

7. VP 3.13-17. For discussion and bibliography, see Edwards, “Plotinus and the Emperors.”

8. On Apollonius as a source for Pythagorean biography, see Rohde, “Quellen des Iamblichus in seiner Biographie des Pythagoras.”

9. See, e.g., Francis, Subversive Virtue, 120-21. On the philosophical background to the passage, see O'Meara, Pythagoras Revived, 39 and n. 60.

10. See Eunapius, Vitae philosophorum, ed. Boissonade (= VS), p. 455.33-35; Porphyry, VP 2.37-42 (on the birthdays of philosophers); 15.21-26 (on the rejection of astrology); 10.4-5 (on the assault by Olympius).

11. On the measures taken against astrology by emperors, see MacMullen, Enemies of the Roman Order, 235ff.

12. See Marinus, Vita Procli 35-36. The importance of fixing the time of a person's genesis is emphasized at [Anonymi] Vita Platonis p. 6.12-15 Westermann.

13. See, e.g., Enneads 2.2-3 (on whether stars are causes) and 4.4.40 (on physical magic).

14. On the Platonopolis project, see Porphyry, Vita Plotini 12, and Edwards, “Plotinus and the Emperors.” Oppermann, Plotins Leben, argues that Eustochius was Firmicus's source, but is rebutted by Henry, Plotin et l'Occident, 25-43.

15. Plato, Phaedo 64a. Further analogies with this Platonic dialogue will become apparent from the following discussion.

16. See Vita Plotini 3.13 for Plotinus's verdict on Ammonius Saccas, which recalls Antisthenes' compliment to Socrates, recorded by Jerome, Adv. Jovinianum 2.14.344: “Go and seek another master, for I have found mine.”

17. See esp. Apuleius, Florida 15; Diogenes Laertius 1.117-8; Aelian, Varia Historia 4.28. On the life of Pherecydes, which includes a number of miracles foreshadowing those of his supposed pupil Pythagoras, see Schibli, Pherekydes of Syros, 140-75. On the literary epidemic called phthiriasis, which carried off Plato, Speusippus, and Alcman as well as Pherecydes, see Keaveney and Madden, “Phthiriasis and Its Victims.”

18. See Henry, “Dernière parole de Plotin.”

19. Synesius, Ep. 138, cited by Henry, “Dernière parole de Plotin,” 127. On Synesius's knowledge of the Neoplatonists, see Bregman, Synesius of Cyrene, 145-54.

20. Plotinus, Enneads 6.5.1.

21. See Vita Plotini 11.11 ff. for Porphyry's journey to Sicily; Eunapius's account suggests, on the contrary, that he returned before Plotinus died (Vitae Philosophorum p. 453.2 Boissonade). See further Goulet, “Variations romanesques sur la melancolie de Porphyre.” On the importance of being present (or excusing one's absence) at the death of one's master, cf. Plato, Phaedo 59b, and Owen, “Philosophical Invective,” esp. 11 ff.

22. See below on Enneads 2.4; also Edwards, “Two Episodes from Porphyry's Life of Plotinus.”

23. Plotin: Les Enneades, ed. Bréhier, 1.2 n. 1; Ammianus Marcellinus, Historiae 22.16.15-16.

24. See Gottschalk, Heraclides of Pontus, 110ff.

25. At least according to Augustine, De civitate Dei 10.30; although Stobaeus, Eclogae 1.41.60, implies a literal understanding of transmigration.

26. See Phaedo 118a; Damascius/Olympiodorus, In Phaedonem pp. 205 and 241 Norvin. For satiric comments, see Lucian, Bis Accusatus 5 and Lactantius, Div. Inst. 3.20.16-17.

27. See testimonia collected in Edelstein, Asclepius.

28. VP 10.35. The superiority of philosophers to gods is acknowledged even by Porphyry, Sententiae p. 31.8 Lamberz, so that his claim to be ignorant of Plotinus's meaning here would seem to be intended to set a puzzle for the reader.

29. Symposium 190e on the σύsπαστα βαλλάντια. Plotinus himself put a serious construction on the myth, citing 192e at Enneads 6.5.1.16.

30. Cf. Aelian, Varia Historia 4.17.

31. Thus Plotinus is a philosopher, not a magician. See Armstrong, “Was Plotinus a Magician?” against Merlan, “Plotinus and Magic.” On the natal daemon and related figures, see Edwards, “Two Images,” 163-65.

32. Iamblichus, Devita Pythagorica 92; Philostratus, Vita Apollonii 4.18.2. In each case the man who professes a peculiar wisdom or talent discovers that he has encountered his superior.

33. See Enneads 3.4.6 and the introduction to Armstrong, Plotinus, 3: 141.

34. See O'Meara, Porphyry's Philosophy from Oracles in Augustine, on the De regressu animae in De civitate Dei 10.

35. See, e.g., Saffrey, “Neoplatoniciens et les oracles chaldaïques.”

36. See Plutarch, De defectu oraculorum and De Pythiae oraculis. Many scholars are, however, willing to believe that the oracle emanated from a shrine: see, e.g., Brisson, “Oracle d'Apollon dans la Vie de Plotin par Porphyre,” where he favors a shrine in Asia Minor; on these see Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians, 177-85.

37. See Herodotus 1.47; Plato, Apology 21a.

38. See Hesiod, Opera 115ff.; Bidez, Vie de Porphyre, 126 n. 1; Goulet. “Oracle d'Apollon dans la Vie de Plotin.”

39. For daemons or the daemonic in the Oracle, see VP 22. 23, 46, 47, 57, 59. For the radiance from above, see VP 22.29 ff.

40. On Empedocles in Neoplatonism, see Plotinus, Enneads 4.7.10, 4.8.12, etc., with Porphyry, Vita Pythagorae p. 33 Nauck, and Edwards. “Late Use of Empedocles.”

41. Empedocles, Fr. 112.4 DK, cited by Plotinus at Enneads 4.7.10.38.

42. See, e.g., Apuleius, De Deo Socratis, provoking a Christian rejoinder in Augustine, De civitate Dei 10.

43. See n. 28 above. On the uses of the term θεόs in the Enneads, see Rist, “Theos and the One.”

44. The illumination comes to Porphyry when he is the same age as that of Plotinus at death; he will not allow himself to be the equal of his master.

45. For further consideration of this point, see my “Epilogue: Biography and the Biographic.”

46. See Barnes, “Porphyry against the Christians,” for a late dating of the Contra Christianos. Porphyry may be one of the philosophers said by Lactantius at Div. inst. 5.2 to have trampled on the prostrate Christians during the persecution by Galerius. I am inclined to accept the argument of Simmons, Arnobius of Sicca, that Arnobius is responding to Porphyry's treatise, but I would assign a later date to the Latin apologist.

47. See Augustine, De civitate Dei 10.29. Augustine himself was wiser than Amelius: see his famous contrast between Neoplatonism and the incarnational theology of the Christians at Confessions 7.9.

48. John 2.21 (Jesus' body as temple); 4.21-24 (worship in Spirit, not in Jerusalem).

49. John 11.49-50. Caiaphas unwittingly parodies Jesus' own allegations of ignorance at 3.8-11, 4.23, etc.

50. John 5.39 (on searching the Scriptures, either indicative or imperative); 8.42 (Messiah alleged to be born at Bethlehem); 1.21 (John the Baptist, not Elijah, in contrast to Mark 9.13).

51. See esp. John 14-16, and the assimilation of Jesus to the Torah at 10.35.

52. John 12.31-32 (the Cross draws all men); 1.13 (born of the will of God). Whether the true reading of the latter be singular or plural, it includes Jesus; but any allusion to the Virgin Birth is secondary to the implication that any physical circumstances of birth are beside the point.

53. Cyril of Alexandria, Ad Nestorium 3.8.

54. John 10.17; 19.28-30. At John 19.30, Jesus gives up his spirit; at VP 2, Plotinus lets his spirit go.

55. Others now extant include the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Philip, the Gospel of Nicodemus, and the Gospel of the Egyptians. The diversity of form and content is remarkable.

56. See Edwards, “Portrait of Plotinus.”

57. John 21.25.

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Porphyry, Vita Plotini (= VP). Ed. Paul Henry and Hans-Rudolf Schwyzer. Plotini Opera 1: 1-38. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964.

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