- Perhaps a sect of the Followers of the Mother: Ennead II, 9, 10; II, 9, 12.
- Ennead II, 9, 5.
- Ennead II, 9, 9.
- Ennead II, 9, 18.
- Ennead II, 9, 15.
- Ennead II, 9, 5: “Le ciel est fait pourtant de choses bien plus belles et bien plus pures que notre corps: ils en voient la régularité, la belle ordonnance et ils blâment plus que personne le désordre des choses terrestres.” Cf. above all Ennead II, 9, 17: “Il n’est pas possible qu’un être réellement beau à l’extérieur ait une âme laide.”
[Plotinus Ennead 2.9.5, ibid., 239. Ennead 2.9.17: “But perhaps it is not really possible for anything to be beautiful outwardly but ugly inwardly” (ibid., 295).—Trans.]
universe and the gods in it and other noble things is certainly not becoming good.”75
b) It is therefore through his sense of the order and economy of the world that Plotinus feels himself wounded. “Then besides this, God in his providence cares for you; why does he neglect the whole universe in which you yourselves are? . . . But they have no need of him. But the universe does need him, and knows its station.”76 Dramatic climaxes, creation, this human and sensible god, all this is repugnant to Plotinus. But perhaps even more repugnant to him—to his aristocracy—is the unrealistic Christian humanitarianism: “Do the Gnostics think it right to call the lowest of men brothers, but refuse, in their ‘raving talk,’ to call the sun and the gods in the sky brothers and the soul of the universe sister?”77 It is, therefore, also ancient Greek naturalism that protests in Plotinus.
But it is very certain that all these objections are summed up in Greek wisdom’s revulsion regarding Christian “anarchy.” The theory of unmerited and irrational Salvation is at bottom the object of all the attacks of this treatise. As we have seen, this doctrine of salvation implies a certain disinterest regarding virtue in the Hellenic sense. To appeal to God, to believe in him and to love him, atones thoroughly for one’s errors. Plotinus has well understood to criticize precisely this point, and he did so with uncommon violence: “This, too, is evidence of their indifference to virtue, that they have never made any treatise about virtue . . . For it does no good at all to say ‘Look to God,’ unless one also teaches how one is to look. In reality it is virtue which goes before us to the good and, when it comes to exist in the soul along with wisdom, shows God; but God, if you talk about him without true virtue, is only a name.”78 The
- Ennead II, 9, 16: “Non, encore une fois, mépriser le monde, mépriser les dieux et toutes les beautés qui sont en lui ce n’est pas devenir un homme de bien.”
[Plotinus Ennead 2.9.16, ibid., 285.—Trans.] - Ennead II, 9, 9: “Si Dieu exerce sa providence en votre faveur, pourquoi négligeraitil l’ensemble du monde dans lequel vous êtes … les hommes, dites-vous, n’ont pas besoin qu’il regarde le monde. Oui, mais le monde en a besoin. Ainsi le monde connaît son ordre propre.”
[Plotinus Ennead 2.9.9, ibid., 261–63.—Trans.] - Ennead II, 9, 18: “Voilà des gens qui ne dédaignent pas de donner le nom de frères aux hommes les plus vils; mais ils ne daignent accorder ce nom au soleil, aux astres du ciel et pas même à l’aimé du monde tellement leur langage s’égare.”
[Plotinus Ennead 2.9.18, ibid., 297–99.—Trans.] - Ennead II, 9, 15: “Ce qui prouve ce défaut [méconnaissance de la nature divine]
chez eux, c’est qu’ils n’ont aucune doctrine de la vertu. Il est tout é fait superflu de dire: Regardez vers Dieu, si l’on n’enseigne pas comment regarder. Ce sont les progrès de la vertu intérieure à l’âme et accompagnée de prudence qui nous font voir Dieu. Sans la vertu véritable, Dieu n’est qu’un mot.” [Plotinus Ennead 2.9.15, ibid., 285.—Trans.]
arbitrariness inherent in any doctrine of salvation cannot be reconciled with a doctrine in which beings act according to the necessities of their nature, and not, as Plotinus becomes indignant about it, at one moment rather than at another.79
It must be well understood that it is a matter of Gnosticism and that these reproaches are addressed to a certain caricature of Christianity. But in the end, Plotinus is fighting far more an attitude toward the world than the details of doctrine. In this sense, what are opposed are two reflections on the human condition. We already know enough about these reflections to determine how, on certain points, they remain irreconcilable.
Plotinus’s disciple, however, has gone further and has not hesitated to write an entire work against the Christians. It took him between 35 and 40 years to write it (after 208 CE). This treatise was composed of no less than fifteen books. We know his work through the fragments80gathered by Harnack. We will leave aside the detailed critiques (implausibility, contradiction) that Porphyry does not fail to formulate. They constitute the common foundation of all pagan polemical works. We will cite only those texts that contrast, on points of doctrine, Christianity and Neoplatonism.
Porphyry complains that the apostles had been unintelligent peasants.81 The complaint is common, but further on he reproaches the believers for being attached to an “irrational faith”82and expresses himself in these terms: “The great work of Christ on this earth is to have concealed from the wise the ray of science in order to reveal it to beings deprived of sense and to unweaned infants.”83
- Ennead II, 9, 4; II, 9, 11.
- Saint Jerome, Chronique d’Eusèbe: Manuscrit de Macarius.
[The English title of Jerome’s work is Eusebius’s Chronicle. Manuscrit de Macarius appears to refer to a later edition of Jerome’s collected works by Marianus Victorius.— Trans.] - Fragment 4, cited by De Labriolle, La Réaction païenne, p. 256.
- Fragment 73, according to De Labriolle, [La Réaction païenne,] p. 212 [sic]: “Foi irrationnelle.”*
[The page reference in Labriolle should be p. 272.—Trans.] - Fragment 52 according to Labriolle, [La Réaction païenne,] p. 272: “La grande trouvaille du Christ sur cette terre c’est d’avoir dissimulé aux sages le rayon de la science pour le dévoiler aux êtres privés de sens et aux nourrissons.”*
[The text in English translation that most closely approximates the one Camus cites is as follows: “He thanked his Father that these things were revealed unto babes. If so, they certainly ought to have been spoken more plainly. If his object was to hide them from the wise, and reveal them to fools, it must be better to seek after ignorance than knowledge.” T. W. Crafer, “The Work of Porphyry against the Christians, and Its Reconstruction,”Journal of Theological Studies 15 (1913–1914): 504.—Trans.]
Regarding his understanding of the Christian conception of the world, Porphyry stumbles upon this Pauline text: “The form of this world is passing away.”84 How could the world pass away, asks Porphyry, and what could make it pass away: “If it had been the demiurge, he would expose himself to the reproach of disturbing and distorting a peacefully established whole … If the condition of this world is truly dismal, a concert of protests should rise up against the demiurge for having arranged the elements of the Universe in such a deplorable way, in disregard for the rational character of nature.”85
Christian eschatology offends, not only Porphyry’s idea of order, but also his æsthetic sense: “And he, the Creator, he would see heaven (can we imagine something more wonderfully beautiful than heaven?) dissolve, whereas the decayed, destroyed bodies of men would rise from the dead, among them those who, before death, presented a hard and repulsive aspect.”86
Moreover, Porphyry occasionally passes from indignation over into insult.87 A cultivated Greek could not adopt this attitude without serious reasons.
III. The Meaning and Influence of Neoplatonism
But it is time to determine the meaning of the Neoplatonic solution and its role in the evolution of Christian metaphysics. Our task here will
- 1 Corinthians 7:31.
- Fragment 34, according to Labriolle, [La Réaction païenne,] p. 260: “Si c’était le démiurge un ensemble paisiblement établi . . . Si vraiment la condition du monde est lugubre, c’est un concert de protestations qui doit s’élever contre le démiurge, pour avoir disposé les éléments de l’Univers d’une façon si fâcheuse au mépris du caractère rationnel de la nature.”*
- Fragment 94, according to Labriolle, [La Réaction païenne,] p. 287: “Et lui, le Créateur, il verrait le ciel (peut-on imaginer quelque chose de plus admirablement beau que le ciel) se liquéfier … tandis que les corps pourris, anéantis des hommes ressusciteraient, y compris ceux qui avant la mort offraient un aspect pénible et repoussant.”*
- Fragments 23, 35, 49, 54, 55, according to Labriolle, [La Réaction païenne,] p. 287.
be to bring out the novelty of Neoplatonism and to indicate in what directions it has exercised its influence. Our study of Christianity will permit us to enter into the detail of this influence. But let us first summarize in a few words the general characteristics of Neoplatonism.
a) It is a never-ending task to reconcile contradictory notions with theassistance of a principle of participation, which is valid only in nonspatial and nontemporal logic. Mystic reason, sensible Intelligence, God, who is both immanent and transcendent, such contradictions abound. However, they all indicate a constant
