In a.d. 299 a priest was unable ‘to read the auspices before the emperor Diocletian's Antioch court’ because ‘the animal's entrails bore no signs of any kind’. The priest knew whom to blame: ‘Christian courtiers who had crossed themselves during the proceedings’ (p. 1). This was not the first time that Christians were accused of being a threat to the Roman polity, but this time, D. argues, the situation was different. In the eyes of oracles and the ‘Hellene religious professionals’ responsible for them, Christians had forced the gods into exile, forced them to flee the ‘evil daemons whom blood sacrifices venerating the human Jesus had attracted’ (p. 182).
The Platonist philosopher Porphyry of Tyre was not present for that failed ritual at Antioch, but it was Porphyry, D. contends, who ‘produced the texts and generated the arguments that led indirectly to the Great Persecution’ (p. 22). At its heart, D.'s book is an attempt to show how third-century philosophical arguments about the nature and value of sacrificial rituals, the social and legal repercussions of theological reasoning, and even the physical and political implications of exegetical techniques reverberated well beyond the walls of the ivory tower. Once Porphyry's anti-Christian treatises were released into the world, the consequences of Christian philosophy ‘began circulating among an ever-widening circle of readers’ (p. 126). This created the ‘theological framework that allowed educated people to rationalize and articulate misgivings concerning Christianity’ (p. 183). In other words, the priest knew whom to blame because he knew his Porphyry.
Several chapters of this book – D.'s latest contribution to our knowledge of the intersection of philosophy, theology and politics in the late Roman Empire – stem from previously published work. Yet this is not a collection of tenuously connected essays following well-trodden paths. Each of the five chapters is a waypoint in an extended argument that leads to a chapter-length conclusion which evaluates how Porphyry's Christian adversaries themselves discussed ‘the role that Porphyry's ideas played in the onset of the Great Persecution’ (p. 165).
To reach this conclusion, D. focusses on how, why and in what contexts Porphyry's anti-Christian ideas arose in the first place. Hoping to unravel what was really going on among third-century philosophers, D. reads Porphyry alongside Origenist Christians and Iamblichaeans, referring to their disagreements as ‘an intramural debate’ (p. 22). This is in opposition to ‘most historians of theology and philosophy’, who, D. says, ‘have simply assumed that Platonist philosophers and Christian theologians would not interact with each other's circles, despite clear ancient evidence to the contrary’ (p. 13).
Central to D.'s argument is her insistence that Origenist Christian theology did not threaten late Platonist philosophy because it was so different but because it was so similar. Origenists and Hellenes shared ‘overlapping circles of teachers and students’ (p. 14). Most importantly, they shared an intellectual lineage that extended back to the great Alexandrian philosopher Ammonius Saccas. Earlier in the third century – especially in the Alexandria known to Ammonius, Plotinus and Origen – the border lines between Christian and Hellene were blurry. But by the late-third century ‘circumstances led away from a certain unity toward schism, fracture, and alienation’ within the wider ‘Ammonian community’ (p. 14). In Porphyry's view, Origenists and Iamblichaeans had taken Ammonius' philosophy down the wrong path. In order to ‘set theology back on the right track’ Porphyry ‘set himself up as the arbiter of orthodoxy for the Ammonian community’ (p. 128).
In Chapter 1 D. seeks to validate Porphyry's claim that Ammonius remained the philosophical compass for both Christians and Hellenes. Contrary to the notion that there were two Ammonii (one the Christian teacher of Origen and the other the Neoplatonist guide of Plotinus), D. argues that there was ‘one Ammonius, a philosopher and sometime Christian’, who taught Origen and Plotinus (p. 33). Although the schools of Origen and Plotinus are typically seen as recognisably distinct, Porphyry saw their similarity. He considered them to be ‘competing schools’ (p. 23). Whereas Plotinus continued the philosophy of Ammonius, however, Origen perverted it. Porphyry's exasperation with Origen's misuse of Ammonius was not confined to the classroom. According to D., Porphyry ‘had expectations for publicly active Christians trained in the Ammonian tradition – expectations that were not being fulfilled as Origen's theology spread and flourished … and as the Roman government increasingly excused Christian administrators who abstained from traditional cult activity’ (p. 48).
Chapter 2 is closely related to the first. D. sets out to prove that just as there were not two Ammonii neither were there two Origens. Her argument is somewhat tedious, but proving that there was one Ammonius and one Origen is scholarly legwork crucial to D.'s larger project. For she wants to show that Origen's ‘exegetical methodology and goals’ were indelibly marked by ‘his early contact with Ammonius’ (p. 50). This connection sheds further light on Porphyry's exasperation with Origen. As Porphyry saw it, Origen's figural exegesis of the Law was a corruption of true Ammonian hermeneutical principles and a severely mistaken exegetical approach for a publicly active teacher and philosopher to take. Porphyry, D. suggests, connected the dots between Origen's figural exegesis of the Law and his willingness to set ‘the tenets of Christian law above Jewish, Roman, and local civic legislation’ when (earlier in the third century) he exhorted his students ‘to break Roman law’ and ‘embrace martyrdom’ (pp. 70–1).
Porphyry could not countenance Origen's ‘revolutionary curriculum’ (p. 71), and in Chapter 3 D. explains the main reason why. Porphyry's portrait of Plotinus is of a fundamentally political and social philosopher. A philosophy such as Origen's not only abrogated the law but betrayed ethnos and polis in its failure to acknowledge the gods (p. 86).
In Chapters 4 and 5 D. demonstrates how Porphyry quarrelled with anyone who threatened the legacy of Ammonius – Iamblichaeans and Origenists alike. Again, their shared flaw was an ‘inability to properly apply the rules of exegesis and textual criticism’ learned from Ammonius (p. 191). Iamblichus dreamt up a universal path ‘involving all types of rituals that all human beings – philosophers as well as ordinary people – had to follow’, but Porphyry, convinced that philosophers had no need of rituals, strove to insulate ‘the Plotinian and Ammonian tradition’ against ‘all those, Christian and Hellene, who used it as a basis for any sort of via universalis’ (p. 112). Like Iamblichus, Methodius of Olympus, ‘whose circle closely resembled other Ammonian communities’, consistently employed flawed hermeneutical strategies to advance his own universal philosophy – in this case, Christianity (p. 137). Following Origen, Methodius used figural exegesis to interpret the Law, a methodology that Porphyry, as we have already learned, condemned as logically mistaken and politically treacherous (p. 161).
Not all will be convinced that esoteric philosophical debates were as publicly influential as D. makes out. And there is an obvious counterfactual to ask: in light of D.'s work, are we now to believe that the Great Persecution could not have happened without Porphyry? Even D. hedges on this point when she stresses (several times) that Porphyry's treatises ‘could have’ been read by ‘the administrators, priests, and diviners’ of Antioch (p. 8, my emphasis). All the same, fundamental questions about the thesis of D.'s book actually do little to undermine its importance. Our understanding of Christianity in the age of Diocletian should not hinge on whether a certain Antiochene priest really thought about Porphyry or not. What matters is whether we can think about the Great Persecution again without also thinking about Porphyry and the debates that consumed the ‘Ammonian community’. Thanks to D., we cannot.
