Porphyry Against the Christians (review)

Trolling in the deep and often murky waters of Porphyrian studies can be risky and dangerous simply because many of the works of the disciple of Plotinus are either lost or, as in the case of his anti-Christian literature, in deplorable, fragmentary condition. To compound the latter problem one must keep in mind also that all the fragments both of Porphyry’s Contra Christianos (C.C.) and Philosophia ex oraculis (which contains some anti-Christian oracles) derive from the works of his greatest enemies, the Christians. Scholars are still not in agreement as to how many of Harnack’s fragments of the C.C., originally published in his Porphyrius Gegen die Christen, 15 Bücher, Zeugnisse, und Referate (Berlin, 1916), are genuinely Porphyrian or whether they mainly come from the Apocriticus of the fifth-century Macarius Magnes. And though A. D. Nock’s assessment of Porphyry’s importance for an understanding of religion in the third century of the Roman Empire still stands (“For the study of the paganism of the third century of our era no writer is more important than Porphyry”; Classical Journal 56 [1960], 134), he is as controversial today as he ever has been.

Robert M. Berchman attempts to rectify this hermeneutical/text critical problem by presenting us with a longer list of fragments than has ever been produced (215 from 18 ancient writers) which are directly or indirectly related to the C.C. Chapter 1 addresses the author, title, date, sources, and provenance of the C.C. The biographical sketch is very weak, ignoring as it does Porphyry’s relationship with Origen (Eus., h. e. 6.19) and the question whether Porphyry was a Christian (Soc., h. e. 3.23 ), and including nothing about Eunapius’s testimony concerning Porphyry (Vit. Phil. 455–57). Regrettably, it is only much later in the book, namely Chapter 4 (113–17), which deals with Porphyry’s cultural background, that the reader finds anything resembling a more substantial biographical sketch. Biographical inaccuracies also appear, as, for example, when Berchman, referring to a fragment of the Phil. or., asserts (50) that Porphyry “analyzed a vivication of Hecate’s statue performed by Maximus in a subterranean temple at Ephesus. This resulted in the immortal oracle from the goddess’s thighs.” Berchman confuses this with the conversion of the emperor Julian at the temple of Hecate in Ephesus when the neoplatonic Maximus conducted a theurgic initiation in the year a.d. 351 (Eunap. VS 475 [LCL: Wright]). Also in Chapter 1 a number of Porphyry’s works are generally grouped together without attempting to sort them out chronologically vis-à-vis the development of the author’s thought or, more importantly, critically re-evaluating the Wolff-Bidez hypothesis (though Berchman seems to concur with its chronology by defining the Phil. or. as an early work of Porphyry [see 44 and 47, and cf. 123 n. 2]).

The author claims that all of Porphyry’s superstitious and religious works were written in the author’s pre-Plotinian period and that the ones which are more philosophically mature were published after 260. There are errors here. Though it has been established that Arnobius is responding to Porphyry (see my Arnobius of Sicca, Oxford, 1996), Berchman’s numerous references to Arnobius’s Adv. nat. II.67 (3, n. 14; 4, nn. 19 and 22; 6, n. 33) to support the claim that Arnobius is either describing the C.C. in this passage or that he agrees with Lactantius’s (Div. inst. 5.2) contention that Porphyry is the “Priest of Philosophy” betray that Berchman is trying to infer something from the text that is not there. On page 4 the Phil. or. is called Porphyry’s “philosophical critique of the faith” (cf. 14, where a different view is given), but the extant fragments reveal more a work written for pagans than a predominantly anti-Christian book. And though none of the works of the Italian scholar Beatrice are listed in the bibliography, Berchman’s suggestion that the C.C. contained...