from Nag Hammadi.253
What this data shows is that the invocation of foreign, alien revelations in a group like Plotinus’s was sure to raise a few eyebrows, if not start a firestorm. Philosophers and sophists of the period, and it appears Gnostic thinkers as well, were male elites from wealthy backgrounds deeply invested in the prevailing socioeconomic order. Public participation in political affairs and observance of the civic cult were expected. Yet the framing, common to scholarship, of Gnostic mythos as inspired by (usually Jewish) revolt against the Romans clashes with the privileged social context that highly educated Gnostics moved in.254 Rather, Gnostic myth recognizes and inverts the hierarchy that nurtured such privileged groups;255 this inversion took place alongside the parallel development, within Sophistic and Platonic circles, of different ways of conceiving the Orient as a source of primordial wisdom—Platonic Orientalism. Many Orientalizing authors simultaneously fetishize and subordinate the status of Eastern sources to the authority of Plato and Pythagoras. Yet select groups, including Gnostics, preferred to “auto-Orientalize,” conjuring a visage of the East around their thought in order to differentiate themselves from, and even polemicize and rebel against, the Hellenophile environment of the Second Sophistic.256 The Gnostics with their apocalypses voiced this latter perspective, appearing hostile to Hellenism. Viewed against the backdrop of skirmishes over the value of Oriental authorities in the context of Greek thought, we see that Porphyry understood the Christian Gnostics to be firing shots in what would become a culture war.
CHAPTER 2
Plotinus Against His Gnostic Friends
The testimony of Porphyry about the heretics known to him and Plotinus is a fascinating and rich account of their encounter with living, breathing readers of Sethian apocalypses. He says that this literature circulated among Christian Platonists, who invoked alien, non-Hellenic authorities popular in Jewish lore (like “Allogenes”—“the stranger-foreigner”) and challenged the authority of Plato and, by extension, the vigorous Hellenic cult(ure) of paideia. Both he and Amelius wrote treatises attacking these apocalypses. Plotinus wrote his own work responding to the heretics. Porphyry, editing his master’s work following his death, entitled it Against the Gnostics; hence we consider these heretics to have been Gnostics themselves—certainly they were understood as such by Porphyry, and as will become clear, they subscribed to the myth of the fall of Sophia and her production of a faulty creator-god, to whom we can assign responsibility for the ills of the world we inhabit. He thus also assigned the work the alternative title, Against Those Who Say That the Universe and Its Maker Are Evil.1 When we recall data culled from philosophical and sophistic sources about the sociopolitical environment of elite education, Porphyry’s remarks thus allow the closest look we can get at a particular group of Gnostics, and the sort of cultural seas they must have navigated in order to arrive at a circle like that of Plotinus. Yet while Porphyry’s testimony tells us a great deal about their background and the radical nature of their invocation of alien, oriental authorities in the context of Hellenism, it tells us little about the other doctrines to which these Gnostics—and their apocalypses—subscribed. Indeed, Porphyry says nothing about the content of the Sethian works other than their pseudepigraphic claims to ancient, alien authority.
Here we must turn to Plotinus and the Sethian texts themselves. It is worth pausing to review Plotinus’s polemic before proceeding to read it against the Sethian literature and other contemporary Platonic literature. The treatise—his thirty-third composition and the ninth tractate in the second partition of his collected works, arranged by Porphyry as six groups of nine (hence their title: the Enneads, Gk. “nines”)—is famously technical and difficult, and comprehensive scholarly treatments of it are specialized and uncommon. Yet it is also difficult to read in isolation, being the last segment of the so-called Großschrift, a hypothetical “long treatise” cut into four pieces by Porphyry to fit his enneadic schema of Plotinus’s corpus.2 Even beyond the Großschrift, the entire Plotinian corpus could be seen as a witness to Plotinus’s encounter with Gnosticism, and some have thus cast his thought in toto along the lines of their interpretation of this encounter.3 In the interests of practicality, this chapter will focus only on Ennead 2.9 in particular as Plotinus’s singular address to his Gnostic interlocutors, while referring when necessary to the rest of the Enneads and especially the Großschrift. Even this relatively restricted analysis, however, shows that he was not only concerned with his opponents’ constructions of cultic identity and revelatory authority but also with very specific ideas they had about cosmology, soteriology, and eschatology. In each case, he holds, their philosophy breaks up the unity of the cosmos, introducing separation and alienation where he sees only continuity, a practice culminating, appropriately, in their own alienation from their fellow humanity and the (Hellenic) traditions that inspire them.
AGAINST THE GNOSTIC COSMOS
Unfortunately, Plotinus’s discussion of Gnostic thought often seems to hide more than it reveals. He usually states a conclusion his opponents have reached and his (angry) response to it, without stating what arguments motivate both sides; the reader, hoping for a more full picture, must then sketch in various complex philosophical arguments between the lines. Nowhere is this more so than in the first ten chapters of Ennead 2.9, which plunge the reader into the middle of a series of polemics on seemingly unrelated topics: the number of divine intellects, the eternity of produced matter, the decline of the (World)-Soul, and the story of the Soul’s creation of the cosmos.4 However, each of these issues circulates around the problem of the creative activity of the undescended Soul—the entity mediating the divine Intellect and the physical cosmos, of which the individual soul, mediating a person’s intellect and physical body, is a microcosm—with respect to time and narrative, the eternity of the world, and the character of its author.
This is not easy to see, because when Plotinus talks about the problem of creation, he phrases it in his own characteristic terms as the problem of the Soul’s ability to create a good world, which for him is intrinsically bound with its character as an inhabitant of heaven along with divine Intellect. The Gnostics, he says, describe a “Soul” whose creation is bad because of a “descent” into matter, thus tainting its creative activity. Yet it is difficult to tell which characters in the Gnostic cosmogonic drama he is speaking about. Sometimes, he specifies arguments commonly made by Hellenistic thinkers to criticize the anthropomorphism of the demiurge’s portrait in Plato’s Timaeus, so he has none other in mind than the ambivalent, faulty demiurge of Gnostic myth, who crafts a deficient, even evil cosmos. Yet at other times he refers to the “decline” of the Gnostic “Soul,” apparently meaning the story of the fall of Sophia, the mother of the demiurge. As we will see, he even (quite possibly in bad faith) accuses his opponents of conflating these characters in just this confusing way.
It is worth pausing here to briefly recount a classic variant of this story, presented in a particularly famous (and Sethianized) text known as the Apocryphon of John.5 The story begins with a description of the transcendent first principle, the “Father,” or “Invisible Spirit.” Gazing into himself in the primordial water, his thought produces a divine Mother, the “Barbelo,” the second, generative, principle from which the rest of reality is born.6 With the “consent” of the Father, the Barbelo produces two quintets of aeons (Gk. “eternities”). (Here, as often in Gnostic literature, the divisions of salvation history into periods, or “aeons,” is reflected in the atemporal celestial topography, where aeons seem to be beings or places that emanate from God as the eternal paradigm of the drama that plays out on earth as its reflection.)7 Finally, the Father and Barbelo produce another principle, their Son, the Autogenes (“self-begotten”), an image of its parent. The Invisible Spirit anoints him and grants him authority. The Autogenes produces the Four Luminaries common to Sethian lore (Harmozel, Oroiael, Davithai, and Eleleth), who in turn produce twelve aeons, one of which is Sophia (“wisdom”).
Sophia desires to imitate the beings from which she has sprung—she desires to produce—but,
