resident of Alexandria, he must have been familiar with Christian intellectuals like the Valentinians or the catechetical school of Clement and Origen.93 As a longtime Platonist, he could have been familiar with Celsus’s critique of Christianity or with Numenius’s quip about the “Attic Moses.”94 Despite all this, there is no explicit evidence in his corpus of any knowledge of Christianity, and therefore such knowledge cannot be assured.95
Another factor is the question of how well Plotinus knew his opponents. In this context, it is worthwhile recalling the following passage from Against the Gnostics: “We feel a certain regard for some of our friends (φίλοι) [italics mine] who happened upon this way of thinking before they became our friends, and, though I do not know how they manage it, continue in it.… But we have addressed what we have said so far to our own intimate pupils, not to them (for we could make no further progress towards convincing them), so that they might not be troubled by these latter, who do not bring forward proofs—how could they?—but make arbitrary, arrogant assertions. Another way of writing would be appropriate to repel (them).”96 Did Plotinus have Christian “friends”? Apparently so, and he considered them to be “votaries of Plato”;97 the problem is that they were also votaries of much else. If the evidence from Porphyry’s Vita Plotini chapter 16 about Aculinus can be squared with Eunapius, Mark J. Edwards is most likely correct that Plotinus here attacks the Platonism of Gnostic colleagues from the circle of his old teacher in Alexandria, Ammonius Saccas. These colleagues were with him in Rome around the same time as Porphyry (ca. 263 CE), at a time when the group focused on discussing the makeup of the Soul and the intelligible world, just the topics that occupy the bulk of Against the Gnostics.98 Therefore, the gulf between the Gnostic and Hellenic parties extended far beyond the single issue of authority, which then turned on the Christian invocation of Jewish seers against the speculations of the divine Plato.99
His polemic also allows us to “thicken” the description determined in Chapter 1 of his Christian “friends.” Plotinus sharply criticizes them for “despising” the world instead of engaging it politically, which in turn leads them to reject the civic cult and festivities, worship of “the beings received from the tradition of our fathers.”100 Considering the close proximity of philosophers and sophists to political power (as discussed in Chapter 1), his claim that the Gnostics thumbed their noses at current events is striking. Moreover, despite their claim that their teaching is philosophical (πεπαιδευμένης), Plotinus says they are stupid (ἀνόητοι) and that they speak like bumpkins (ἀγροικιζόμενος), that is, not like Hellenes.101 What Plotinus means is not that they are incapable of engaging technical metaphysics (the evidence from Nag Hammadi, as we will see, demonstrates otherwise); rather, they eschew the contemporary culture of philosophy, a way of life that goes back to ancients like Pythagoras and that encourages civic and popular cultic activity.
The situation was exacerbated by the pseudepigraphic appeal to the authority of Judeo-Christian antediluvian sages in their apocalypses. Plotinus’s Gnostics seem to have adopted the auto-Orientalizing approach of the Hermetica and the Chaldean Oracles, entirely rejecting Hellenic claims to primeval wisdom. Like Porphyry, Plotinus recognizes that their effort to alienate themselves from Hellenic authorities is a direct attack on the culture of Hellenic education out of which they came. Moreover, the very way in which they present their wisdom is alien to the spirit of Hellenic investigative philosophy:102 speaking “without proofs” (ἀποδείξεις), the Gnostics have, in his eyes, earned the appellation “rustic, bumpkin” (ἄγροικος); Celsus, Porphyry, and Julian all use the same term for Christians in their own polemics.103 “Another way of writing” would be more appropriate to refute them.
To summarize our evidence about Plotinus’s Christian friends, the Gnostic heretics also known to Porphyry, we can say that:
1. Unlike most sophists and philosophers in their day, they did not participate in public life.
2. They did not identify as “Hellenes,” consciously eschewing the culture of contemporary Hellenophone intellectual life.
3. Their texts were revelatory—they did not present arguments so much as statements validated by their ancient, Oriental, authority.
4. Despite all this, they did claim a philosophical αἵρεσις, but, like other “auto-Orientalizers,” they said it had priority over the Greek schools.
This last feature is striking, because, as we saw at the beginning of Chapter 1, Philo, Tertullian, and several Gnostic authors entirely reject the language of αἵρεσις. Instead, identification of Christianity as a αἵρεσις is a staple of Christian apologetics, exemplified in Justin Martyr.104 This also explains why the Gnostics claimed their teaching was “cultured”—that is, consonant with παιδεία—and why Plotinus was eager to dispel this claim. What was at stake in the Plotinus-Gnostic controversy was the definition of philosophy itself: its relationship to public life, civic cult, Hellenic nationalism, and the provenance of the Greek intellectual tradition. Plotinus emphasizes consonance with each of these pockets of life; his opponents emphasize alienation from them. His old friends had become the most bitter of enemies, and as we turn to the Sethian literature that they read, it will not be difficult to see why.
CHAPTER 3
Other Ways of Writing
Plotinus claims that the Gnostics do not write in a philosophical style, and so “another way of writing” would be necessary to refute them. Porphyry, meanwhile, denigrates the Sethian apocalypses as “forgeries” (πλάσματα), and it seems this formed the basis of his critique of the Apocalypse of Zoroaster.1 Porphyry’s use of the word “apocalypse” or “revelation” (ἀποκάλυψις) for these documents is tantalizing, and at first sight straightforward: These texts were apocalypses, “revelations” of some sort, stories dealing with whatever kinds of ideas that “revelations” traffic in. Yet the apocalyptic background of the texts has not been studied with respect to the Platonic tradition, much less Plotinus’s criticism.2 In fact, there are few studies of Gnostic apocalypses at all.3 This chapter will therefore unpack the technical language of Plotinus and Porphyry’s criticisms about “fiction,” “forgery,” and “myth,” while introducing the Platonizing Sethian literature itself, which is deeply embedded in the literary culture of the apocalypses.
Indeed, three (of the four) Platonizing Sethian treatises—Marsanes, Allogenes, and Zostrianos—are apocalypses. Analysis of their genre and their pseudepigraphic appeal to authority reveals that numerous key motifs of the texts, particularly in their frame narratives, are common stock in contemporary Jewish and Christian apocalyptic storytelling. Their cultivation of authority using these motifs challenges the culture of παιδεία explored in Chapter 1, instead employing images and authoritative figures with currency in Judeo-Christian circles, alien to Hellenism. Finally, the Sethian texts do not reject Platonic terminology about imagery, but employ it to articulate contemplative technique and authorize the concept of revelation as a perfect “image” of reality transmitted by the unknown, alien God to the seer. Such revelations, other ways of writing, thus demand to be read literally, not allegorically—another way of reading than we find prized by the Neoplatonists, who did not write stories as much as allegorically interpret the ones they deemed to be good. All of this points to the need for a reevaluation of the provenance and target audience of the Platonizing Sethian literature and the evidence of Plotinus and Porphyry.
ANOTHER
