Justified True Belief

(●) Plotinus’ student and editor, and the most formidable critic Christianity faced in its first three centuries. + Anyone who has ever read Plotinus has, without knowing it, been reading Porphyry’s filing. Plotinus wrote in bursts, never looked at a draft twice, and left behind fifty-four loose essays with no order and no titles. Porphyry sorted them into six groups of nine, named each one, wrote a memoir of his teacher to stand in front of them, and published the result. That is why the book is called the Enneads, from the Greek for "nine," and it is why we have Plotinus at all. Christians remember him for the other thing he wrote. In fifteen books he attacked Christianity, and he did not do it by calling names. He compared the Gospels with one another and listed where they disagree. He read the book of Daniel closely enough to argue, on internal evidence, that it was written nearly four centuries later than it claims. He asked why a religion that reveres the Jewish Scriptures spends so much effort explaining that they do not mean what they say. Three churchmen wrote large books in reply, and one bishop needed twenty-five volumes to do it. Here is the fact worth remembering. Every surviving line of that attack sits inside the writings of the people arguing with it. Constantine ordered the books burned; more than a century later Theodosius II ordered them burned again, which tells you plainly enough how the first order had gone. The church’s three great answers to Porphyry are lost as well. What we know of the fiercest argument of the third century, we know from the wreckage of both sides.

(●) c. 234 AD: Born in Tyre with a Phoenician name meaning "king," in the city that made the world’s purple. + Tyre was an old Phoenician port on the coast of what is now Lebanon, and for a thousand years its trade had been a colour. Workers crushed sea snails by the vatful to draw off a dye that came out deep red-violet and, unlike every other dye of the ancient world, grew richer instead of fading. It cost more by weight than silver, and it was the colour emperors wore. His name at home was Malchus, a Semitic word meaning king, which in Greek would be Basileus. According to Eunapius, a pagan biographer writing a century later, it was his teacher Longinus who renamed him Porphyrios, "the purple-clad," turning his name into a compliment and his city’s trade into a joke at once. Porphyry never tells that story himself. What he does say is that Malchus was his father’s name and his own, and that Amelius, the senior student he would later trade papers with in Plotinus’ school, addressed a book to him under the Greek form of it; Longinus, in a preface Porphyry copied into the Life of Plotinus, calls him "Basileus of Tyre." The birth year is worked out rather than recorded, and the arithmetic is simple enough to follow. Porphyry says he was thirty years old when he first met Plotinus, and he dates that meeting to the tenth year of the emperor Gallienus, which is AD 263. Subtract the one from the other and you get 234. Even the city is not perfectly secure: a few ancient notices place his birth not at Tyre but at Batanaea, a district in southern Syria, and there is no document anywhere that would settle the question.

(●) c. 255 AD: In Athens he studied under Longinus, the most learned man of the age, whom Plotinus would later call no philosopher at all. + Cassius Longinus taught in Athens, and he taught everything: grammar, rhetoric, Homer, and the Platonism of his day. Eunapius says of him that he was "a living library and a walking museum," which is affectionate and also, read a certain way, unkind. Longinus knew what every earlier writer had said about a question. Whether he had an answer of his own was another matter. What he gave Porphyry was training in reading, and it turned out to be the most useful thing Porphyry ever learned. A scholar of that school did not skim. He asked who wrote a text, and when, and in what circumstances, and whether its parts agreed with one another. Those sound like ordinary questions now, because so many generations of scholars have asked them since, but they were a hard-won discipline then, and Porphyry learned it young. He would later turn exactly those habits on the Gospels and on the book of Daniel, and the church would find them very hard to deal with. The philosophy he learned there is what historians call Middle Platonism, meaning the Platonism of the centuries between Plato’s own school and the new system Plotinus was about to build. Its teachers argued about where the eternal patterns of things belong, and the quarrel is easier to see if you picture someone building a house. Most of them by now put the patterns inside the divine mind, the way the house exists in the builder’s head before a single brick is laid. Longinus held out for the older way of taking it, that the patterns stand outside the mind that contemplates them, the way a set of blueprints lies on the table for the builder to consult. That sounds like a difference too fine to matter. Plotinus thought it was exactly backwards, and when Porphyry reached Rome he was still arguing Longinus’ side of it. Plotinus’ own verdict on his rival, which Porphyry was honest enough to write down, was that "Longinus is a man of letters, but in no sense a philosopher."

(●) 263 AD: At thirty he came to Rome, argued with Plotinus, lost, and read his own retraction aloud to the class. + Plotinus was fifty-nine and teaching in a borrowed house in Rome. His system, which later ages named Neoplatonism, is easiest to picture as a spring on a hillside. At the top is a single source he calls the One, so far beyond description that even calling it good or existent says too much. From it, without effort or loss, overflows Intellect, the level at which all the eternal patterns of things are thought; from Intellect overflows Soul; from Soul, the visible world. A human being is a soul that came down that hill and can climb back up it. Porphyry arrived convinced this was wrong on one specific point. He wrote a paper arguing that the eternal patterns must stand outside the Intellect rather than within it, which was Longinus’ position. Plotinus handed the paper to his senior student Amelius with the remark that Porphyry had not understood the position he was attacking. Amelius answered at length; Porphyry answered back; Amelius answered again. Only then did it land. Porphyry writes that he changed his mind, composed a recantation, and read it out in front of the whole circle, and that afterwards Plotinus began trusting him with the manuscripts. It is a small scene and it tells you a great deal about the man. He argued hard, he lost in public, and he wrote the loss down himself, in the memoir he knew would outlive him.

(●) c. 268 AD: He resolved to end his life, and Plotinus arrived unannounced, named what he was planning, and sent him away to Sicily. + Porphyry put the episode in the Life of Plotinus in the plainest words he had, and there is no self-pity in them and no drama either. He had formed the intention of ending his life, he says, and had shut himself away at home. Plotinus worked out what he meant to do, came to the house unannounced, told him the decision was coming from melancholy rather than from reason, and told him to leave Rome. So he went to Sicily, to the town of Lilybaeum on the western tip of the island, and there he stayed. He was still there two years later when word came that Plotinus had died on a friend’s estate in Campania. That is worth pausing over, because it means the most famous deathbed sentence in ancient philosophy comes to us from a man who was not in the room. Porphyry did not see his teacher die. The line he reports in the memoir, about giving back the divine in himself to the divine in the all, he had at second hand from the physician who was there. Whatever the modern name for what happened to him in that house would be, it is worth noticing what it did not do to the rest of his life. The man who nearly did not survive his thirties went on to write more books than almost any philosopher of antiquity, and lived to about seventy.

(●) c. 270–300 AD: He wrote fifteen books against the Christians, and not one sentence of them survives in a copy of its own. + The number comes from the Suda, the great Byzantine encyclopedia: fifteen books. Jerome, who had read them, thought the twelfth worth answering all by itself. When they were written is genuinely disputed, and the two dates on offer are thirty years apart. The older view puts them in the Sicilian years around 270, on the strength of a remark by Eusebius that Porphyry wrote against the Christians while he was living in Sicily. Many scholars now argue for a date around 300, close to the persecution Diocletian launched in 303, and some split the difference by supposing that the fifteen books gathered up material Porphyry had been accumulating for decades. However they were assembled, the attack ranged widely, and it is worth seeing how many different doors he tried. He argued that Moses did not write the books of Moses. He set the Gospel accounts of the crucifixion side by side and asked a reader which of them he was supposed to believe. He pointed at Paul rebuking Peter to his face at Antioch and asked what to make of a church whose two great pillars called each other wrong in public (Galatians 2:11–14). Then there were the jabs that an educated Greek would have thought devastating: the apostles, he observed, were fishermen and a tax collector, and he wanted to know why any sensible man should walk away from the religion of his own ancestors on the word of people like that. And he took the book of Daniel apart, which is the piece of the work still being argued about today. The replies were enormous. Jerome, listing the church’s defenders, says Methodius answered Porphyry at ten thousand lines, Eusebius of Caesarea in twenty-five books, and Apollinaris of Laodicea in thirty. All three are lost. There is one further question the evidence simply does not settle, which is whether Porphyry personally advised the emperors who began the Great Persecution. Lactantius describes an unnamed philosopher urging the persecution on at Nicomedia, and scholars have been arguing about whether that man was Porphyry for a very long time.

(●) c. 301 AD: In his sixty-eighth year he sorted his dead teacher’s papers into the six Enneads. + Plotinus was a nightmare of an author to inherit. Porphyry says he thought a piece through completely in his head and then wrote it out in one go, "as though he were copying from a book," and never read it back, partly because his eyesight was too poor for it and partly because he simply did not care about the look of a page. His handwriting was bad and his spelling worse. He had not given the essays titles, and he had not put them in any order. Porphyry counted fifty-four of them, and fifty-four is six nines, so that is how he divided them. The arrangement pleased him, he says, because it combined the perfect number six with the nines. Perfect is an old term of arithmetic for a number that equals the sum of the numbers that divide it, and six is the first of them, being one and two and three added together. Each set then got a subject: ethics first, then two sets on the world and everything in it, then the soul, then Intellect, then being and what stands above being. He supplied the titles, corrected the text, and put his memoir at the front. Scholars still cite the result by his numbering, so that a reference like Ennead I.6.9 is Porphyry’s shelving system, seventeen centuries on. In the same memoir he mentions, almost in passing, that Plotinus reached union with God four times in the years they were together, and that he himself reached it once, in his sixty-eighth year. It is the only place he says anything of the kind about himself.

(●) c. 305 AD: He died at Rome, having married a widow with seven children and left his last letter unfinished. + Late in life he married a woman named Marcella, the widow of a friend, who had five daughters and two sons. He is careful in the letter he wrote her to say why, because the marriage had drawn ugly talk from her neighbours and, he says, some danger. Not for children, he says; not for money, not for someone to nurse him, not for a name. He gives two reasons instead. The first is that he meant to keep faith with the gods who preside over the ordinary drama of a human life, taking the wedding and the trouble that came with it as his part in the play. The second, which he calls the better one, is that her mind was suited to philosophy and that, left alone, she would have been at the mercy of people who wanted her property. The Letter to Marcella was written when business took him away from her, and it breaks off in the middle. It is the warmest thing he wrote and the least like a treatise: an old man telling his wife what he believes, in short sentences, because he does not know when he will be home. Eunapius reports that he returned to Rome, taught in public, reached an advanced old age, and died there. Nobody troubled to record the year, and about 305 is the usual estimate. What happened twenty years later says more about his standing than any obituary would have. Constantine, fresh from summoning the bishops to the council at Nicaea, issued an edict to the bishops and the people saying that Porphyry, "that enemy of piety," had had his impious writings destroyed, and that anyone who thought like Arius should be called a Porphyrian. Arius was the Alexandrian priest the council had just condemned for teaching that the Son was a creature rather than fully God, and the emperor could think of no worse name for Arius’ followers than that of the pagan who had argued against the faith best.

What He Taught

(T1) The soul is a stranger in the body, and philosophy is not a subject to study but the road home. + Start with a man who will not answer an ordinary question. Plotinus would not tell anyone his parents’ names, his hometown, or his birthday, and would not sit for a portrait, on the grounds that carrying one image of himself around was quite enough without leaving a second for posterity. Porphyry opens the memoir with that refusal, because it is the whole doctrine in one gesture: the body is not where you live, it is where you are staying. On the picture Porphyry inherited, everything real comes down in ranks from a single source, and a human soul is one of the things that came down. It still remembers, faintly, what it is made for. Salvation is not being rescued from outside but turning around and climbing back, and the climb is what philosophy actually is: not lectures, but a change in how a person eats, thinks, and wants. Porphyry defended one point about that climb with real stubbornness, and it is the point on which his successors abandoned him. His younger contemporary Iamblichus taught that the soul had fallen too far to think its own way up and needed theurgy, ritual work with sacred names, statues, and invocations that draws divine power down to the worshipper. Porphyry doubted it. His Letter to Anebo, addressed to an Egyptian priest, is a list of sharp questions about exactly such rites: if the gods are beyond need and beyond change, what is a ceremony supposed to accomplish? Within a generation the pagan schools had gone the other way, and Porphyry was the last major Platonist to hold that a clean mind and a disciplined life were all the equipment the thinking part of a soul required. Even he gave a little ground: Augustine reports him allowing that the rites might cleanse the lower reaches of a person while leaving the mind untouched. Christian readers should notice how much of this is right, and where it stops. That the soul is restless until it comes home is exactly what Augustine says at the opening of the Confessions. What Porphyry has no room for is the possibility that the road might come down to meet the traveller.

(Q) "Plotinus, the philosopher our contemporary, seemed ashamed of being in the body." + Source: Porphyry, Life of Plotinus 1 (MacKenna translation). The first sentence of the memoir, and Porphyry’s own choice of where to begin. What follows it is the explanation: that this was why Plotinus would never speak of his ancestry, his parents, or his birthplace (T1).

(T2) God needs nothing from anyone, so the only offering worth making is a mind made like his. + Picture what religion looked like in a third-century city. An altar in the open air, a bull or a sheep led up, a knife, blood in a channel, and smoke going up while a crowd watches and the meat is later sold in the market. That was piety, everywhere, for everyone. Porphyry wrote a long book against it. On Abstinence from Animal Food argues that the philosopher should not eat meat and should not offer blood on an altar, and the reason is not squeamishness. It is that the highest God is complete and cannot be given anything. A being who lacks nothing cannot be bribed, thanked with a carcass, or fed. What can be offered is a mind brought into likeness with him, which means honesty, self-control, and silence. Lesser spirits might enjoy the smoke of sacrifices, he thought, and that was precisely his objection to the practice: the smell attracted the wrong company. In the letter to his wife he set down four things that must be held fast concerning God, and named them as faith, truth, love and hope (Letter to Marcella 24). A reader who knows Paul will do a double take, since three of those words close the great chapter on love: "So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love" (1 Corinthians 13:13). The overlap is real and the difference is total. Porphyry’s faith is confidence that the way up exists and is worth walking. Paul’s faith is trust in a person who came down. And where Porphyry concluded that the altars should stop because God never needed them, the letter to the Hebrews says they have stopped because one offering has been made and no other is wanted (Hebrews 10:11–14).

(Q) "Thou wilt best honour God by making thy mind like unto Him, and this thou canst do by virtue alone. For only virtue can draw the soul upward to that which is akin to it." + Source: Porphyry, Letter to Marcella 16 (Zimmern translation, 1896). Written to his wife while he was away on business, and meant to be practical rather than theoretical. The whole letter is advice on how a person actually lives if the mind is the only altar there is (T2).

(T3) Everything can be sorted by kind and by difference, and whether those kinds are real things is a question he raised and then declined to answer. + A man named Chrysaorius could not follow Aristotle’s Categories, so Porphyry wrote him a beginner’s guide. The later Greek commentators say Chrysaorius was a Roman senator, which is all anyone knows about him. The guide is about thirty pages long, it explains five words, and it went on to be one of the most read books in European history. The five words are the tools for saying what a thing is. Take a collie. Its species is dog, the kind it belongs to. Its genus is animal, the wider kind that dogs share with cats and horses. The difference is what marks dogs off inside that wider kind. A property is something that follows from being that kind without being part of the definition. An accident is what this particular one happens to have, like a torn ear, which it could lose and still be a collie. Arrange the kinds from the widest down to the narrowest and you get the branching diagram that later students called the tree of Porphyry, and that biology textbooks still use. Then, in his opening paragraph, before any of that got started, he raised the question that mattered most and set it down again unanswered. Is "dog" something real that all dogs genuinely share, or only a noise we make about a group of animals we have decided to lump together? If it is real, is it a thing you could bump into, or not? And does it exist inside the individual dogs, or somewhere apart from them? Too deep for a beginner’s book, he said, and moved on to the five words. More than two centuries later a Christian nobleman named Boethius translated the little guide into Latin, and for the next thousand years it was the first philosophy book a European student opened. So the question Porphyry had declined to answer sat there at the head of the whole curriculum, waiting, and generation after generation of students walked straight into it. The medieval quarrel that followed is called the problem of universals, a universal being any shared kind of that sort, "dog" or "human" or "triangle," as against the particular dog asleep on the floor. It ran through Abelard, Aquinas, Duns Scotus and Ockham, and it was never a game played for its own sake. If "human nature" is only a convenient name for a heap of separate people, it becomes hard to say how one man’s disobedience and one man’s obedience could possibly reach everyone else, which is the argument Paul is making in Romans 5:18–19.

(Q) "For instance, I shall omit to speak about genera and species, as to whether they subsist (in the nature of things) or in mere conceptions only; whether also if subsistent, they are bodies or incorporeal, and whether they are separate from, or in, sensibles, and subsist about these, for such a treatise is most profound, and requires another more extensive investigation." + Source: Porphyry, Isagoge, preface (Owen translation, 1853). "Genera and species" are kinds, wider and narrower; "sensibles" are the ordinary things we see and touch. The sentence is a polite refusal, and it became the most consequential refusal in the history of logic: the medieval schools spent centuries on the question he set aside as unsuitable for beginners (T3).

(T4) The book of Daniel is exact history down to Antiochus and wrong after him, so it was written in Antiochus’ reign. + Suppose a letter turns up dated forty years ago, predicting the next four decades. Everything down to last spring is uncannily right, in detail, including things only an insider could know. Everything after last spring is wrong. The natural conclusion is not that the writer was a prophet whose gift ran out. It is that the letter was written last spring. That is Porphyry’s argument about Daniel, and to follow it you need one name. Antiochus IV Epiphanes was a Greek king of Syria who ruled the Jews from 175 to 164 BC, outlawed the law of Moses, stopped the daily sacrifice in the temple, and in 167 BC set up a pagan altar inside it. The response was the Maccabean revolt, the Jewish uprising led by a village priest and his sons that eventually drove the king’s men out of Jerusalem and won the country the better part of a century of independence. Now hold that period in mind and turn to the text. Daniel 11 runs through the wars between the Greek kingdoms of Egypt and Syria in remarkable detail, the marriages, the campaigns, the betrayals, and it narrows steadily onto that one king. Then, at 11:40 and following, the account of his end does not match how Antiochus actually died. Porphyry drew the obvious inference. Everything accurate is history written after the fact, which is what scholars mean by vaticinium ex eventu, "prophecy from the outcome": a prediction composed once the outcome is known. Everything inaccurate is the author’s own guess about a future he did not know. So the book was written in Judea in the 160s BC by someone using a famous old name. Jerome thought the argument serious enough to answer verse by verse rather than wave away, and his commentary is the only reason we know what Porphyry said. The question has never gone away either. Most critical scholars today hold something close to Porphyry’s dating, and they hold it for his reasons. Those who defend the traditional sixth-century date have three lines of their own. They point to the copies of Daniel found at Qumran, the caves above the Dead Sea where a Jewish community hid its library. Eight copies of the book turned up there, the oldest of them written within about fifty years of the date Porphyry’s argument requires, and another text from the same library already cites it as the book of Daniel the prophet. That is a short window for a brand-new book to be copied, carried into the desert and read as Scripture. They point to the character of the book’s Aramaic, the everyday Semitic language of the Near East in that era, and to its Persian loanwords, which fit an earlier setting better than a later one. And they point to the awkwardness, for Porphyry’s theory, of a Maccabean writer getting Antiochus’ death wrong in a book composed for readers who had just watched him die. It is a live argument on both sides, and pretending otherwise helps nobody.

(Q) "Porphyry wrote his twelfth book against the prophecy of Daniel, denying that it was composed by the person to whom it is ascribed in its title, but rather by some individual living in Judaea at the time of the Antiochus who was surnamed Epiphanes." + Source: Jerome, Commentary on Daniel, prologue (Archer translation, 1958), reporting Porphyry. Porphyry’s own wording is lost. Jerome goes on to summarize the rest of the case: that Daniel related the past rather than foretelling the future, and that everything down to Antiochus is genuine history while everything past him is false, since the writer could not know what had not yet happened (T4).

(T5) Christians keep the Jewish Scriptures only by reading them as riddles, which is a way of not reading them at all. + There is a familiar and uncomfortable move in an argument, where someone is shown a sentence in a document they are committed to, admits it says what it says, and then explains that it means something else entirely. Porphyry thought that was the whole Christian method with the Old Testament. His target was Origen, the greatest Christian scholar of the previous generation, and the charge had bite because Porphyry had met him. Eusebius quotes the passage, sourly, from the third book of the attack: Christians embarrassed by the plainer parts of the Jewish Scriptures will not give the books up, so they invent readings that have nothing to do with the words in front of them, and then congratulate themselves on their depth. Origen, Porphyry adds, lived as a Christian while thinking as a Greek, and imported the allegorical method the Stoics had used on Homer straight into Moses. The same eye ran over the rest of the New Testament. Fragments preserved by later Christian writers have him lining up the Gospel accounts of the crucifixion against each other, asking whether the sponge held vinegar or the cup held wine mixed with gall, and pointing to Paul rebuking Peter at Antioch as a quarrel between two men who each claimed to have the Spirit. One caution belongs with all of that. A large share of those fragments comes from a work by Macarius Magnes that answers a pagan critic it never names, and whether that critic is Porphyry, or Hierocles, another anti-Christian writer of roughly the same generation, or some later compiler stitching objections together, is still disputed among scholars. The Daniel material and the Origen passage stand on much firmer ground, because Jerome and Eusebius name Porphyry outright. The Christian answer was not that the objection is silly. It was that there is a difference between allegory, which can make any text mean anything, and typology, the claim that God shaped earlier events so that they would prefigure later ones, which Jesus and the apostles had already applied to their own Scriptures (Luke 24:27; 1 Corinthians 10:1–11). Whether a given reading is typology or wishful thinking has to be argued case by case, which is precisely what Porphyry forced his opponents to do.

(Q) "Some persons, desiring to find a solution of the baseness of the Jewish Scriptures rather than abandon them, have had recourse to explanations inconsistent and incongruous with the words written, which explanations, instead of supplying a defense of the foreigners, contain rather approval and praise of themselves." + Source: Eusebius, Church History 6.19 (McGiffert translation), quoting the third book of Porphyry’s work against the Christians. "The foreigners" is Porphyry’s dismissive way of speaking of the Jews and their books, alien to Greek culture. Eusebius quotes the passage because it goes on to attack Origen by name, and it is one of the few stretches of the attack preserved in Porphyry’s own words (T5).

(Q) "no system of doctrine which furnishes the universal way for delivering the soul has as yet been received, either from the truest philosophy, or from the ideas and practices of the Indians, or from the reasoning of the Chaldæans, or from any source whatever" + Source: Porphyry, On the Return of the Soul, quoted by Augustine, City of God 10.32 (Dods translation). Porphyry is admitting that he has looked everywhere for a way of deliverance open to everyone, not only to philosophers, and has not found one. Augustine seizes on the admission: the man conceded that such a way must exist, searched the whole world for it, and would not look at the one being preached in his own streets.

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) The church answered him with something like sixty books, and every one of those replies is lost as well. + Nobody in the church treated Porphyry as a crank. Jerome, running through the church’s defenders in a letter to a Roman orator (Letter 70), notes that Celsus and Porphyry had both written against Christians and had both been answered: Celsus by Origen in eight books, Porphyry by Methodius at ten thousand lines, by Eusebius of Caesarea in twenty-five books, and by Apollinaris of Laodicea in thirty. Set beside them, Origen’s reply to Celsus looks like a pamphlet. Not one of those three replies survives. What Methodius, Eusebius and Apollinaris actually said is now known by little more than a title and a length, and the loss is a genuine hole in the record, because the church’s most sustained engagement with its ablest ancient critic is simply gone. What can still be read of Porphyry’s own case comes almost entirely from Jerome’s commentary on Daniel, from Eusebius quoting him in order to rebut him, and from Augustine arguing with him a century after his death. There is something worth sitting with in that. Two sides argue for years; the argument is judged important enough that emperors intervene; and what reaches us is a handful of quotations, mostly chosen by the side that won.

(†) His beginner’s logic became the first philosophy book Christian Europe read. + Early in the sixth century Boethius, a Christian senator serving the Ostrogothic kings who then ruled Italy in place of the vanished western emperors, translated the Isagoge into Latin and wrote two commentaries on it. Greek was drifting out of reach in the West by then, and for the next six hundred years most of what Latin Christendom knew of Aristotle came through Boethius. The little introduction sat at the front of that package, which is how it became the book a student met first. Consider what that means. From the cathedral schools of the ninth century to the universities of the thirteenth, a boy learning to think in Christian Europe began with thirty pages written by a man who had wanted his religion destroyed. Nobody seems to have found this awkward. A true thing about genus and species is true whoever noticed it, and the church took the tools and got on with the work. The question Porphyry had set aside became the great medieval quarrel. Are universals, the shared kinds like "human" or "dog," real things, or names? Abelard fought over it in twelfth-century Paris; Aquinas gave a careful middle answer, that the kind is really in the individual and is made universal by the mind that grasps it; Ockham cut hard the other way. And the stakes were never merely technical. What sort of thing "the Church" is when Paul calls it one body, and how the sin of one man and the obedience of another can reach a whole race, are questions about kinds. A pagan’s footnote about beginners’ logic turned out to be load-bearing.

(†) Augustine called him the most learned of the philosophers and the bitterest enemy of the Christians, in the same breath. + More than a hundred years after Porphyry died, Augustine was still arguing with him. The tenth book of the City of God is largely a debate with a man who could not answer back, and the tone is not contempt. It is closer to grief. The double-edged compliment comes later, in the nineteenth book, where Augustine names him the most learned of the philosophers and in the same clause the bitterest enemy of the Christians (City of God 19.22). Augustine had read Porphyry’s Philosophy from Oracles, a collection of pagan oracles with commentary, and he quotes from it a reply of Hecate’s about Christ: that the soul in question belonged to a man foremost in piety, and that the Christians worship it because they have mistaken the truth (City of God 19.23). Augustine turns that around without much effort. Even the oracles Porphyry trusted conceded that the man was good; what they denied was the only thing that would have cost anyone anything to admit. The deepest exchange is over the admission Porphyry had made in On the Return of the Soul, that no universal way of deliverance had yet been found in any philosophy, or among the Indians, or among the Chaldeans, the astrologer-priests of Babylon whose lore the Greek world treated as wisdom older than its own. Notice how wide that search was. A man who wanted a road home for everybody had looked into Greek philosophy, and then past the edges of the empire in both directions, and had come back to say that he could not find one. Augustine takes it as the confession of an honest man looking in every direction but one. He is careful, too, about why Porphyry could not take the step. It was not the resurrection alone but the Incarnation: to a Platonist, the notion that the eternal Word would take a body, be born, and be executed was not merely false, it was degrading. Porphyry did not reject the gospel because he had failed to understand it. He understood it and found it beneath God.

(†) Where the gospel parts company with him: the way home is a person, the body is raised, and the fire lit against his books was a defeat rather than an answer. + Four places where the two roads separate, and the fourth is a charge against the church rather than against him. - The way. He searched for a universal way of deliverance, one that would work for a dockworker as well as a scholar, and reported that he had not found it. The Christian answer is that he was looking for the wrong kind of thing. Not a system but a person: "Jesus said to him, I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me" (John 14:6), and Peter before the council, "And there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved" (Acts 4:12). - The body. For Porphyry the flesh is the problem and escape is the cure. Scripture says the flesh is God’s good work, that he entered it himself, "And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us" (John 1:14), and that the destination is not escape but resurrection (1 Corinthians 15:20–23). This is the point on which no compromise was ever available, and both sides knew it. - The climb. His road requires leisure, literacy, a teacher and a certain kind of mind. Paul tells a congregation of ordinary people the opposite: "For consider your calling, brothers: not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise" (1 Corinthians 1:26–27). Porphyry sneered that the apostles were fishermen and a tax collector. Christians had noticed, and thought it was the point. - The fire. Porphyry’s question about Daniel was a real question, and Jerome treated it as one, answering it chapter by chapter. The emperors chose differently. Constantine ordered the books burned and Theodosius II ordered it again, and the result is that nobody can now read the case in full, or the three large Christian books that answered it. An argument settled by fire is not settled, and the church lost its own best work in the blaze. The better instinct was Jerome’s, and it is still the better instinct: when a critic reads the text more carefully than his opponents do, the answer is to read it more carefully still.