Porphyry of Tyre

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A man who has seen a master’s whole work and decides where each piece belongs has made a second authorship out of the first. Porphyry of Tyre took the fifty-four loose essays Plotinus had dictated over twenty-odd years — undated, untitled, written to no plan — and set them in six groups of nine, the Enneads, the arrangement the world has read ever since. Then he wrote the life that stands in front of them, the one source we have for the man inside the philosophy. Almost everything later ages knew of the founder of Neoplatonism reached them through the hands of his editor; and the editor was himself a philosopher of the first rank, whose own short Introduction to logic outlived, in sheer hours of use, nearly everything else either of them wrote.

The King Who Wore the Purple Name

He was born around 234 at Tyre, the Phoenician port whose dye-works gave the Mediterranean its imperial color, and his parents named him in their own tongue — Malchus, Malkos, from the Aramaic for king. Aramaic was his first language; in the Life of Plotinus he calls it his native speech. The name traveled the way the man did, from East to Greek school. He first rendered it into Greek as Basileus, the plain word for king; then his teacher Cassius Longinus, the great Athenian critic and rhetorician, gave him the name that stuck — Porphyrios, the purple-clad, a learned pun that kept the royalty of Malchus and folded into it the purple of Tyre, the city’s own commodity. A Phoenician boy became a purple-named Hellene without losing the sense of the word underneath. He died around 305, an old man, in or near Rome.

The education was Greek and thorough. At Athens under Longinus he read grammar and rhetoric and the Platonism of the day — the Middle Platonism that still kept Plato and the Pythagorean number-lore in a loose alliance. Longinus was a man of letters of the old kind, a critic who valued the soul as he valued a sentence. From him Porphyry took a habit he never lost: the philologist’s care, the editor’s eye, the conviction that getting the text right is part of getting the doctrine right. It is the temper that would later sort fifty-four essays into a system.

Six Years in Rome

In 263, at about thirty, he came to Rome and into the circle of Plotinus, then near sixty and at the height of his teaching. The meeting reordered him. He had arrived holding the conventional view that the intelligible objects of thought exist outside the Intellect that thinks them; Plotinus had his pupil Amelius write a refutation, Porphyry answered, and after a third round he gave way and recanted in public — the convert’s thoroughness. He stayed about six years, long enough to become the school’s keenest reader and its appointed corrector: Plotinus, whose eyesight was failing and who never reread what he had dictated, handed Porphyry the work of setting his treatises in order.

The strain of that closeness shows in the one personal scene the Life records. Porphyry fell into a depression that turned toward suicide, and his master saw it. In his own words, copied into the Life of Plotinus: “I myself at one period had formed the intention of ending my life; Plotinus discerned my purpose; he came unexpectedly to my house where I had secluded myself, told me that my decision sprang not from reason but from mere melancholy and advised me to leave Rome.” He obeyed and sailed for Sicily, near Lilybaeum, around 268. He was still there when Plotinus died in 270 — absent, by the cure that had saved him, from the deathbed he would later describe at second hand from Eustochius, the physician who stayed. From Sicily, too, Plotinus kept sending him new treatises; the editor worked at a distance from the author to the end.

The Enneads, and a Life for Their Front

Years later — by his own account around 301, an old man — Porphyry carried out the editorial act for which the whole tradition is in his debt. Plotinus’s writings had no order: composed as questions arose, circulated to friends, some early and some late, none meant as chapters of a book. Porphyry made them a book. He counted fifty-four treatises and divided them into six sets of nine — ennea, nine — placing the ethical and practical first, then the physical world, the soul, the Intellect, and last the treatises on the One and the Good, so that the reader climbs the very ladder the system describes, from the world up to its source. The numerology was deliberate: six nines, a Pythagorean shaping imposed on a corpus that grew without one. Where a single long essay had been split to fit, he said so. The Enneads are Plotinus’s thought in Porphyry’s architecture.

In front of them he set On the Life of Plotinus and the Arrangement of His Work, half biography, half editorial preface. It is the reason Plotinus is a person and not only a doctrine: the master who would not name the day of his birth, who would not sit for a portrait, who lived as though ashamed to be in a body; the household of orphans left in his care; the chronology of the treatises keyed to the regnal years of Gallienus; the deathbed words about the god within rising to the god in the all. Porphyry also fixed the relative chronology of the writings, and in doing so created the science of dating Plotinus that scholars still refine. The doctrine of descent and return, of emanation from the One through Intellect and Soul, belongs to Plotinus; its survival belongs to the man who shelved it.

The Little Book That Taught Logic to Three Civilizations

Porphyry’s own most consequential work is the shortest and the driest. The Isagoge — Introduction — was written as a primer to Aristotle’s Categories, a few pages explaining the five terms a beginner needs before he opens Aristotle: the quinque voces, genus, species, difference, property, and accident, the five ways one predicate can be said of many things. It is a model of expository clarity, and it became, without rival, the gateway to the study of logic — first in the Greek schools, then, through the Latin translation and double commentary of Boethius around 510, throughout the medieval West, where no student met Aristotle except through Porphyry first; and in parallel through the Syriac and Arabic schools, where the Isagoge (the Isaghuji) opened the logical curriculum for the philosophers of Islam.

It did one thing more, almost in passing, that shaped a thousand years of argument. In the proem Porphyry raises three questions about genera and species — whether they subsist in themselves or only in the mind, whether they are corporeal or incorporeal, whether they are separate from sensible things or located in them — and then sets them aside as too deep for an introduction. That refusal was an invitation. Boethius took up the questions in his commentary, and from there they passed into the schools as the problem of universals: do general kinds have real being, or are they names, or concepts? The realists, the nominalists, the conceptualists of the Middle Ages all begin from a paragraph Porphyry declined to write. The schematic ladder of genus and species in his text — kind dividing into kinds down to the lowest species and the individual — was drawn out by later logic as the Porphyrian tree, the branching diagram of classification that is still the picture every taxonomy borrows.

The Soul’s Ladder, and the Quarrel Over the Rites

In his own metaphysics Porphyry was a faithful Plotinian who pressed the system toward the individual and the practical. He read Plato and Aristotle as fundamentally agreed — Aristotle’s logic and physics a true preparation for Plato’s higher vision — and that harmonizing program, carried forward by his heirs, became the standing assumption of the late schools. His Sententiae ad intelligibilia ducentes, the Auxiliaries to the Perception of Intelligible Natures, distill the whole of Plotinus into a chain of dense maxims: the One, Intellect, Soul, and the body, and the soul’s movement among them. Where Plotinus could be torrential, Porphyry is lapidary; the Sententiae are the system reduced to portable form.

His ethics is best known for its scale of virtues — political, purificatory, contemplative, and paradigmatic, an ascending ladder by which the soul climbs out of attachment toward the divine — a scheme his successors elaborated for centuries. The accent throughout is on purification of the individual soul, the philosopher’s own labor of self-cleansing, reason raising itself toward its source. That accent set him at odds with his most formidable pupil. When Iamblichus argued that the fallen soul cannot climb back by thought alone and needs the gods’ own help through theurgy — the consecrated rites — he was answering Porphyry’s confidence in contemplation. The disagreement is the hinge of the whole later tradition, and it runs forward to Proclus, who built the systematic theology of the rites that Porphyry mistrusted.

Porphyry’s own relation to the ritual religion of his day was famously divided, and the division is genuine, not a muddle. His Letter to Anebo, framed as questions to an Egyptian priest, presses hard on the logic of cult: how impassible gods can be moved by sacrifice, why a rite should compel a being beyond compulsion, what divination really is — a skeptic’s interrogation of the whole apparatus of religious practice. Iamblichus wrote his great defense, On the Mysteries, in answer to it. Yet earlier Porphyry had composed the Philosophy from Oracles, which gathered and expounded divine utterances, including the Chaldean Oracles, the verse revelations the Neoplatonists prized as scripture. The two works mark a genuine tension across a long career — the philosopher drawn to the gods’ own words and wary of the gods’ machinery, holding that the highest soul is saved by intellect while the lower may need the help of rites. He never fully resolved it, and the unresolved place in him is exactly where Iamblichus planted the school’s future.

Abstinence, Allegory, and a Letter to His Wife

Around the metaphysics stands a wide and humane body of writing on how a philosopher should live. On Abstinence from Animal Food, in four books, argues for vegetarianism as a discipline of purity — addressed to a friend who had lapsed from it — and ranges across the ethics of sacrifice, the rationality and kinship of animals, the customs of nations, and the soul’s need to keep itself unweighted by the body. It is one of antiquity’s fullest defenses of not eating flesh, and the ancient argument that animals are owed justice finds in it a serious philosophical voice.

His exegetical art appears at its finest in On the Cave of the Nymphs, a small masterpiece of allegory that reads thirteen lines of the Odyssey — the cave on Ithaca with its two gates, where Odysseus hides the Phaeacians’ gifts — as a coded map of the soul’s descent into birth and its way out again, the twofold gate by which souls come down into bodies through rebirth and rise back to the gods. The method — Homer as a veiled theologian, every detail a symbol of the unseen — became the standard Neoplatonic way of reading the poets, and through later channels the deep ancestor of every claim that the old myths hide a philosophy.

Late in life he married Marcella, the widow of a friend, a woman left with seven children, taking on the household as much from duty as from love; called away soon after, he wrote her the Letter to Marcella, a short, grave exhortation to the philosophic life — that the true worship of God is to know him and to make the mind like him, that the wise man’s law is within. It is among the most personal philosophical documents to survive from the ancient world, a man telling his wife what philosophy is for.

His range was vast. He wrote a Life of Pythagoras, one of the chief sources for Pythagoras and the Pythagorean rule of life; a History of Philosophy in four books reaching down to Plato; commentaries on Plato’s Timaeus and, on strong argument, the anonymous commentary on the Parmenides that may be the earliest surviving Neoplatonic reading of that dialogue; commentaries on Aristotle, including a second, longer treatment of the Categories; and a learned study of Ptolemy’s Harmonics, the mathematics of musical proportion. Much of this survives only in fragments, the common fate of a corpus this large.

Against the Christians

One work made his name a byword for centuries and survives only because his enemies could not stop quoting it to refute it. Against the Christians, in fifteen books, was the most learned pagan critique of the new religion that antiquity produced — a philologist’s assault as much as a philosopher’s, turning the tools of textual scholarship against the scriptures: he argued that the Book of Daniel was written not by a prophet but in the second century BCE, after the events it claims to foretell, a dating modern criticism would independently reach; he pressed the contradictions among the Gospels and the quarrel of Peter and Paul; he questioned the coherence of incarnation and resurrection. It was answered at length — by Methodius, by Eusebius of Caesarea, by Apollinaris, by the fifth-century Apocriticus of Macarius Magnes — and it frightened the authorities enough to be condemned by imperial edict and burned: an order under Constantine, and again, decisively, the edict of Theodosius II and Valentinian III in 448 commanding every copy destroyed by fire. The destruction was nearly complete. What remains is a scatter of fragments embedded in the Christian rebuttals, gathered most famously in Adolf von Harnack’s 1916 reconstruction — a great lost book known chiefly through the mouths of the men who hated it. Read now, without the heat, it is a window onto how a cultivated late-antique philosopher saw a faith still finding its footing in the empire.

The Long Afterlife

Porphyry’s influence ran in channels he never saw. Augustine of Hippo, who read him with admiration and alarm, called him the most learned of the philosophers even while naming him the bitterest enemy of the Christians, and wove long stretches of the City of God around Porphyry’s teaching on the soul’s return and his admission — to Augustine the crucial one — that no school had yet found a universal way of deliverance for the soul. Through Augustine, Porphyry’s Neoplatonism entered the bloodstream of Western Christian thought. Through Boethius, who translated the Isagoge and built two commentaries on it, Porphyry became the schoolmaster of the entire Latin Middle Ages and the unwitting author of the universals controversy. Through the Syriac and Arabic translators, the Isagoge became the first book of logic for the philosophers of Islam.

The Renaissance recovered him whole. Marsilio Ficino’s translations and the Florentine revival of Platonism restored Porphyry to the company of Plotinus and Iamblichus as a master of the prisca theologia, the ancient wisdom. And in English the entire Neoplatonic corpus came back through the labor of one self-taught devotee, Thomas Taylor, whose Select Works of Porphyry (1823) put On Abstinence, the Cave of the Nymphs, the Sententiae, and the Letter to Anebo into English for the first time, and carried Porphyry into the world of nineteenth-century esotericism. The editor of another man’s work became, across seventeen centuries, the teacher of logicians who never read Plotinus, of theologians who burned his books, and of mystics who could not have named his master — the purple-named Phoenician who put the ladder of the soul in order and stood quietly at its foot.

Editions and Scholarship

The Greek corpus rests on August Nauck’s Porphyrii Philosophi Platonici Opuscula Selecta (Teubner, 2nd ed. 1886; archive.org/details/porphyriiphilos00naucgoog), which gathers the Life of Pythagoras, the Cave of the Nymphs, On Abstinence, the Letter to Marcella, and the fragments of the History of Philosophy; on Adolf Busse’s edition of the Isagoge in the Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca IV.1 (Berlin, 1887); and on Andrew Smith’s modern Teubner collection of the fragments, Porphyrii Philosophi Fragmenta (1993). The Sententiae were edited by Erich Lamberz (Teubner, 1975).

The standard modern English of the Isagoge is Jonathan Barnes, Porphyry: Introduction (Clarendon Press, 2003); Gillian Clark translated On Abstinence from Killing Animals (Duckworth, 2000); and Mark Edwards rendered the Life of Plotinus in Neoplatonic Saints (Liverpool University Press, 2000). The field is surveyed in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Porphyry (plato.stanford.edu/entries/porphyry), and Andrew Smith’s Porphyry’s Place in the Neoplatonic Tradition (Martinus Nijhoff, 1974; rev. 1987) remains the standard study of his thought; the collected essays in Aaron P. Johnson’s Religion and Identity in Porphyry of Tyre (Cambridge University Press, 2013) reassess the unity of the corpus and the Against the Christians.

The public-domain witnesses are open and complete. Stephen MacKenna’s 1917 translation of the Life of Plotinus stands in front of the Enneads; Thomas Taylor’s Select Works of Porphyry (1823) carries the ascetic and allegorical treatises; and the Isagoge survives in Octavius Freire Owen’s 1853 English, hosted with Porphyry’s three questions on universals intact at tertullian.org/fathers/porphyry_isagogue_02_translation.htm. For the Against the Christians, the fragments preserved by Eusebius are read in Edwin Hamilton Gifford’s 1903 translation of the Praeparatio Evangelica.

A philologist’s whole vocation was to keep a text from being lost. His own greatest book was lost anyway, burned by edict; what could not be burned was the order he had given to another man’s words, and the small clear primer that taught the schools how to begin.

→ In the library: Porphyry — On the Life of Plotinus (MacKenna, 1917) · Porphyry — On the Cave of the Nymphs (Taylor, 1823)

→ Related: Plotinus · Neoplatonism · Iamblichus · Proclus · The One · Nous · Universals · Theurgy · Chaldean Oracles Tradition · Boethius · Platonism · Aristotle