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RELIGION AND IDENTITY IN PORPHYRY OF TYRE
Porphyry, a native of Phoenicia educated in Athens and Rome during the third century ad, was one of the most important Platonic philosophers of his age. In this book, Professor Johnson rejects the prevailing modern approach to his thought, which has posited an early stage dominated by “Oriental” superstition and irrationality followed by a second rationalizing or Hellenizing phase consequent upon his move West and exposure to Neoplatonism.
Based on a careful treatment of all the relevant remains of Porphyry’s originally vast corpus (much of which now survives only in fragments), he argues for a complex unity of thought in terms of philosophical translation. The book explores this philosopher’s critical engagement with the processes of Hellenism in late antiquity. It provides the first comprehensive examination of all the strands of Porphyry’s thought that lie at the intersection of religion, theology, ethnicity, and culture.
aaron p. johnson is Assistant Professor of Humanities and Classics at Lee University, working on the intellectual and cultural history of late antiquity. He is also the author of Ethnicity and Argument in Eusebius’ Praeparatio Evangelica (2006).
At the limits of Hellenism An introduction
Philosophers are interpreters of things that are unknown to most people.1 Even if they should make images of [God] in any way whatsoever and translate Him for us with a word – but He is beyond every word . . . 2 hellenism in the third century ad The cultural history of the eastern Mediterranean following the conquests of Alexander and his Greco-Macedonian troops (in the fourth century bc) and then Pompey the Great and his Roman troops (in the first century) has for a long time been told as the story of a massive clash of cultures, in which Greek culture, under the sweeping term of “Hellenism,” came to dominate the native cultural landscape of the East. Modern historians have often preferred to use the term Hellenism to designate a colossal cultural process in which an active and powerful Greek culture overwhelmed passive or only weakly resistant Eastern cultures. The first and most memorable phase had, according to this modern model, occurred during and following the campaigns of Alexander the Great, whose work as a missionary of enlightened Greek culture is enshrined in the picture of his sleeping with a copy of the Iliad under his pillow throughout his conquests; the second phase under the Romans merely solidified the Hellenizing impact for future generations. Rome, after all, had itself fallen under the cultural hypnotism of Greek culture well before its own acquisition of the East, as Horace’s wellknown dictum reminds us (Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit, “Captive Greece captured her wild conqueror”).
The modern temptation to develop such a master narrative of clashing civilizations and the generalized representations of a monolithic cultural triumphalism have, however, begun to be tempered by searching investigations into the complexity of ancient cultural engagements or criticisms of prevalent models of cultural interaction. Conflict schemas are still useful, but in recognizably limited ways, while nuanced investigations are now providing wonderfully complex and vibrant accounts of the multiple, sometimes ad hoc, cluster of accommodations, assimilations, manipulations, resistances, refractions, cleavages, and connections in the various interactions and articulations of cultural players who cannot be categorized as simply active or simply passive. Importantly, many recent discussions have attempted to set aside modern definitions of Hellenism and have called instead for careful attention to ancient identifications: What did ancient Greek speakers suppose the terms Hell¯enismos and hell¯enizein denoted?4 On the one hand, it is difficult to find ancient usage of these terms to mean quite what modern conceptions have envisaged. While many Hellenistic and imperial era authors certainly did offer literary representations of a cultural clash of world-shaking proportions, they usually continued to conceive of “Hellenism” in the rather narrow and prosaic terms laid down already in the classical period.5
At least as early as Plato, the verb hell¯enizein (from which Hell¯enismos derived) referred to speaking Greek well;6 and, at least as early as the late Hellenistic period the noun Hell¯enismos similarly designated primarily the proper use of Greek.7 On the other hand, ancient understandings of the Greek language and, in particular, the correct use of the Greek language, recognized its embeddedness within social, political, and intellectual matrices that were fraught with significance (and anxiety) for those intent on locating themselves at desired levels of authority, honor, and economic wellbeing. Properly contextualized, then, even the linguistically circumscribed domain for the term Hellenism (as “speaking Greek”) begins to answer the questions of cultural change, conflict, exchange, and absorption with which historians and classicists of the modern period have concerned themselves when using the term. Language was rooted in broader configurations of elite culture (paideia), historical traditions, conceptions of social life and practices, intellectual authority, political power, and so on.8 Any attempt to grapple adequately with these clusters of culturally formative activities and conceptual frames must include an inquiry into the question of Greek identity. Not only must we ask how classical and postclassical texts used hell¯enizein and Hell¯enismos, and how these conceptions worked within broader constellations of meaning and practice; the question must also be addressed regarding how they identified themselves as Greeks (Hell¯enes). What did it mean to be Greek for self-ascribed Greeks (or, for that matter, for non-Greeks)?9 Connected to this, who were the other peoples from whom Greeks were distinguished and what marks of difference had been articulated to affirm the distinction? The movement of modern investigation towards a more cautious attempt to isolate and assess the various expressions of Greekness, or Hellenicity, in antiquity is surely welcome in that it provides more rigorous checks on the application of inappropriate models that simplify or distort the otherwise variegated expressions of ancient conceptual and performative frameworks. Any history of Hellenism (understood as a cluster of often disparate cultural encounters and processes) in the Roman Mediterranean or in late antiquity more broadly requires (even though it need not be strictly limited to) a history of Hellenicity, that is, a history of the rhetorical formulations of the Greek self in contradistinction from – or even in conversation with – its others.
The present inquiry is meant to be a chapter in that history. Porphyry of Tyre (c.ad 235–c.305) probably would have used Hell¯enismos in its common usage as a designation for the proper employment of the Greek language, though we cannot be certain since the extant writings of Porphyry do not contain the term. Hell¯enizein fares only slightly better with a single, yet highly significant, occurrence in a fragment of his Against the Christians where it is applied to a Christian who adopted Greek interpretive strategies when reading the Hebrew Scriptures; hence, “to Hellenize” meant something like “to read like a Greek.”10 Numerous passages, however, discuss the Greeks (Hell¯enes) and their history, literature, religious practices, and character traits. Yet, in none of these instances does Porphyry expressly identify himself as a Greek;11 and, indeed, in some cases he is clearly critical of the Greeks. This may come as something of a surprise since he has been dubbed an “apologist of the Greeks” by one of the greatest modern scholars of Porphyry.12 But, before we simply reject the appellation, further parsing of its meaning might be possible. When Joseph Bidez adopted this label for Porphyry, he may have wanted only to emphasize that Porphyry was a defender of “paganism.”13 In this signification, Bidez has been followed by most subsequent assessments of the philosopher whose infamous Against the Christians has received a great deal of attention – especially its reference to Hellenizing, which was just noted.14
The observation that Hell¯en came to mean “pagan” in late antiquity has been almost ubiquitously made in scholarly discussion of the religious history of the period.15 If Porphyry were to defend paganism under the name of the “Greeks” or Greekness (either as Hell¯enismos or as to hell¯enikon) – or, even if he did not defend, but at least used the terms in this way – this would mark a noteworthy shift in the conception of religion as a cultural idea in late antiquity, and, indeed, he would stand as a precursor to the Christian adaptation of Hell¯en as “pagan.”16 Two points need to be made, however, before we can countenance such a possibility. First, the claim that Hell¯en came to mean “pagan” misleadingly simplifies the conceptual developments of late antiquity, even among Christian authors. In spite of Marius Victorinus’ assertion that the Greeks (Graeci) were those “whom they call Hell¯enas or paganos”17 (a statement that deserves further interpretation within the context of Victorinus’ corpus beyond simply invoking it as proof of the claim that “Hellene” means “pagan” in late antiquity), Hell¯en continued to carry a cluster of ethnic identity markers among Hellenophone authors. Greeks continued to be identified as those who traced their lineage from Greek ancestors, bore a shared history, and possessed a common fund of writings, teachings, religious practices, theological ideas, and a language with various registers signifying levels of cultural and educational superiority.18 Certainly, a religious valence could receive greater priority when the term “Greek” was used in theological debate or apologetic efforts to differentiate a Christian and Hebrew identity from its non-Hebrew “gentile” (ethnikoi) others (especially after pagani/ Hell¯enes begin frequently to replace the terms gentiles/ethnikoi in the fourth century to refer to polytheists).19
Yet, throughout late antiquity Greekness rarely became a strictly religious identity (whether in the eyes of those who identified themselves as Greeks or those who attacked it), if a religious identity is understood to be an identity delimited by doctrinal or narrowly cultic elements alone. In spite of a heightened religious sense in works dedicated to theology, whether of a Christian or Neoplatonist stamp (i.e., whether of a Theodoret or a Proclus), the term Hell¯en maintains its earlier breadth.20 Though this conclusion may appear surprising, especially given the widespread assumptions to the contrary among historians, one is hard-pressed to find a clear instance of a “pagan” author of late antiquity who sought to limit the signification of Hell¯en to a religious identity in any sustained way. Even if we prefer the dominant interpretation (identifying Hellene with “pagan”), a second point needs to be made with respect to Porphyry in particular. His development of a “pagan” theological system and his philosophical appraisal of traditional religious activity deserve reassessment.21
A fairly strong case can be made (and will take up a good deal of our attention in the following chapters) that Porphyry was not a defender of paganism, if the term is taken as a shorthand for the traditional religious practices, or “ways of the forefathers” (ta patria), traditionally understood and popularly performed in temples and shrines across the Roman Mediterranean.22 Many of his works are filled with criticism or reserve towards popular religious expressions, and, even in those works that seem more open to such phenomena, a more nuanced interpretive framework necessitates a cautious evaluation of his pagan sympathies. A more flexible model of pagan religious and theological conceptions thus becomes a desideratum, so that we may adequately account for a philosopher who criticized popular religious devotion, pursued a heady rationalizing henotheism, and yet maintained a polytheist theology and vocabulary. Though terms like “pagan” and “paganism” remain convenient shorthand for discussing the religious practices of those who refused to follow (exclusively) the God of the Jews or the Christ of the Christians, it masks the great variety of theological systems, conceptions, habits of speaking, and repetitious forms of practice, at the levels of the civic, familial, and individual spheres of cult.23
The present book will attempt to delineate at least one possibility of how a philosopher might go about making theological sense of his world and the manifold religious expressions it produced; the degree to which he broke with or perpetuated the strategies, questions, or formulations of other ancient thinkers will play a significant role here. Hell¯en continued, therefore, to carry a more-than-religious signification and, furthermore, “paganism” (which is only our modern attempt at a religious label) represented a mass of variegated and even contradictory approaches to religion, all of which were engaged in various ways with envisioning the embeddedness of religious cult within ethnic and cultural frameworks. Instead of an assertion of religious affinity shorn of cultural entanglements, then, we might find an alternative sense to the label “defender of Hellenism.” Porphyry’s Greekness might better appear to reside in his adoption of the Greek literary and intellectual heritage.24 As a pepaideumenos (one who had been educated, or was “cultured”), Porphyry had been formed by educational processes that meticulously cultivated the reading of Greek texts and the imitation of Greek literary (and moral and philosophical) models.25
If we take Hellenism (or Hellenization) to refer to the processes of an individual’s training in the Greek language and literary heritage then Porphyry stands as one of the most exquisite products of these processes. His wide range of learning and depth of philological knowledge are stunning. His Commentary on the Timaeus, On the Cave of the Nymphs, and also Homeric Questions combined philological attentiveness with allegorical sensibilities.26 Though lost to us, treatises on the preface to Thucydides’ history, the sources of the Nile, and grammatical problems are included among his works. His Philological Lecture recorded traces of plagiarism detected in various authors, while his Against the Book of Zoroaster compiled a “string of refutations” proving it to be a recently forged counterfeit.27 He wrote learned commentaries on many of Aristotle’s and Plato’s works, as well as on more recent works such as Ptolemy’s Harmonics. Porphyry’s corpus exhibits a firm grasp of Greek language and literature.28 With such erudition, one might reasonably conclude that the Phoenician philosopher was clearly a product of Hellenism, even if he never explicitly claimed a Greek identity for himself. Hellenizing processes formed his corpus and the vision of the world it depicts, even if he refused Hellenicity. But how far did Hellenism reach? Recognizing his deep immersion in the texts and thought of Greek antiquity can scarcely mark the end of analysis. I have argued elsewhere that Hellenism might best be understood as a toolbox from which authors in late antiquity drew in crafting their own particular literary, rhetorical, scientific, or philosophical projects.29 To continue the metaphor, Porphyry may have had an amazing facility with many (even most) of the tools provided by the Greek heritage, but this did not predetermine the scope or aims of his various intellectual projects, nor did it preclude the ways in which he would conceive of the Greek heritage itself. For Porphyry and his late antique contemporaries, Hellenicity was a manipulable and contested identity.
What it meant to be Greek and what element(s) of Greekness mattered most at any given time and within any given social or rhetorical situation shifted depending on the various ways in which a speaker or author had been shaped by Hellenizing educational processes, the felt constraints of discursive channels, the pressures of power relations, and the specific projects over which one sought to exercise one’s agency. One of the most complex and illuminating projects to which intellectuals of the imperial and late antique eras dedicated themselves, and indeed, a project which went on in tandem with other projects, thus shaping the contours of those more limited projects, was the task of cultural translation. A vast series of incessant cultural engagements by Greek (or at least, Greek-speaking) intellectuals has received the authenticsounding name of interpretatio Graeca. 30 Here both senses of the term interpretatio come into play: not only were words found in Greek to match those in other languages (“translation”), but the ideas, stories, and deities of barbarian peoples were reformulated and reframed within a Greek conceptual apparatus (“interpretation”).31 Aided by the imperial conquests first of Alexander and the Greco-Macedonian dynasties then of the Roman Empire, and in turn becoming a significant expression of those conquests, the interpretatio Graeca marked a cultural–intellectual hegemony over subject native knowledges.32 Nietzsche’s declaration that “translation was a form of conquest” applies to a much broader frame of cultural engagements than he had noticed.33 The climax of this project of Hellenism was thus the incessant inscription of local knowledge within a Hellenocentric and panoptic framework.
The universalism of Hellenism’s all-embracing gaze only served to bolster a Greek cultural centrism. In other words, even when particular Greek authors sought to incorporate ideas or images that were allegedly foreign into their own frameworks, this was no innocent, inclusive universalism. Rather, the interpretatio Graeca was a translation of non-Greek elements into a Greek frame of reference that perpetuated Hellenocentrism.
It was a universalism that masked a particular hierarchical arrangement of cultural power.34 As will be shown in a later chapter, the first-century biographer and philosopher Plutarch of Chaeroneia provides an example of this Hellenocentric form of interpretatio Graeca. 35 Yet, if identities could be and were contested and if, furthermore, Hellenism was not a single dominating process, but one which allowed for differentiation and even centrifugal proliferation of rival projects by variously educated (or cultivated and “cultured”) thinkers, then we must foster a sensitivity to translational activity performed in Greek (i.e., in texts written in Greek), yet from other centers of ethnic gravitational pull, that is, Greek translation in another (barbarian) key.36
Translation could be performed in Greek even while experimenting with interpretive strategies that sought to develop a non-Hellenocentric framework or a non-centrist framework altogether. A differentiated picture of translational projects provides a helpful model for making sense of the otherwise convoluted picture that Porphyry’s largely fragmentary corpus leaves us. Much of his work is best seen as a persistent and wide-ranging series of cultural and philosophical translation acts. In Porphyry, philosophy and culture are largely inseparable (in spite of what he may have hoped to achieve ultimately): the task of doing philosophy involved multiple cultural engagements, ethnic representations, and religious investment and reformulation. For the purposes of our analysis, however, we shall focus first upon what looks like more strictly philosophical systematizing moves (in the first half of this book) before turning to the scattered and varied abundance of ethnic conceptions and representations (in the second half ). Put differently, we shall first attempt to discern what may be called acts of “vertical translation” in Porphyry’s writings and then delineate his work of “horizontal translation.
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