Apocalypse of the Alien God. Dylan M. Burns
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The uniquely Hellenic background of παιδεία is paramount for Plutarch even at the lowest stages of education, as it is for Lucian.124 Galen, too, valorizes education when describing how he earned fame among the elite at Rome.125
The Hellenic valorization of παιδεία was publicly articulated not just in the sphere of rhetorical demonstration but in civic ritual as well, and the two often coincided, as at festivals.126 The cultic sense of Hellenism is embodied in Philostratus’s portrayal of Apollonius, who spends time making sure that local priests are running the local cults in a sufficiently Hellenic fashion,127 rebuking the sacrifices of Babylon, discovering Indian sages who worship Greek gods, and correcting the Egyptian rites.128 He is typical of the flowering of participation in traditional Greek religion and popular civic cult that forms the ritual background of the Second Sophistic. Plutarch served as a priest of Delphi, leading a public ritual life that should not be subsumed under his critiques of superstition.129 The same Delphic Apollo exhorted Dio Chrysostom to launch his peregrinations and thus his career as a Cynic.130 Like Plutarch, Lucian praised local civic cults, despite reservations about superstition.131 Aelius Aristides devoted much of his life and writing to the service of Asclepius, as related in his Sacred Tales. The historian Cassius Dio practiced incubation and pilgrimage to temples across Asia and Greece, both in dreams and waking life.132
This background of Pan-Hellenic culture in the spheres of education and religion is crucial for the social context of the development of Platonism, including its Gnostic variety. The philosophers continued to enshrine παιδεία, but internalized it as cultivation of the soul. Possession of it defines the virtuous life, as in sophistic literature: Porphyry quips that “lack of education (ἀπαιδευσία) is the mother of all evils.”133 In the fourth century CE, Sallustius would assert that “in the educated (πεπαιδευμένος) all virtues may be seen, while among the uneducated (ἀπαίδευτος) one is brave and unjust.”134 At the same time, the Neoplatonists absorbed culture into the greater philosophical enterprise, despite remaining informed by it. Plutarch says that it is “necessary to make philosophy the center of education.”135 Two centuries later, in Plotinus’s thought, παιδεία is much more: the positive development of the soul itself.136 No wonder, then, that he chides the Gnostics for speaking in a way that does not befit the πεπαιδευμένος.137 In his Protrepticus, Iamblichus likens the acquisition of παιδεία to the blind man finding eyes to see.138
Cultic conservatism was also shared by sophists and Platonists.139 Adherence to the traditional cult is central to the proper (and legal) spiritual life as portrayed by Celsus (second century CE), writing an anti-Christian polemic.140 Plotinus rejects the efficacy of astrology, but not magic per se, and never discourages participation in civic religious life.141 Porphyry’s On Abstinence, meanwhile, esteems vegetarianism and so attacks sacrificial institutions, a position difficult to harmonize with the rest of his corpus.142 Yet even when he is dismissive of a superstitious approach to cult,143 he takes care to add that he does not oppose civic law regarding sacrifice, and sometimes discusses ritual with enthusiasm:144
For this is the principal fruit of piety: to honor the divine in the traditional (i.e. Hellenic) ways (τιμᾶν τὸ θεῖον κατά τὰ πὰτρια), not because (God) needs it, but because He summons us by this venerable and blessed dignity to worship him. God’s altars, if they are consecrated, do not harm us; if they are neglected, they do not help us.… It is not by doing certain things or forming certain opinions about God that we worship Him properly. Tears and supplications do not move God; “sacrifices do not honor God; numerous votive offerings do not adorn God. Rather Intellect filled with God, firmly established, is united to God, for like must gravitate to like.” … But as for yourself, as has already been said, “let the intellect within you be a temple of God.”145
Iamblichus proclaimed ritual the crown jewel of the philosophical life; one of his ancient admirers addressed him in a letter as “savior of the whole Hellenic world,” and Julian the Apostate based the theological content of his religious reforms on the philosopher’s work.146 Iamblichus would probably not have minded, for he also supported the contemporary Hellenic cult.147 He is pictured by Eunapius as performing miracles for his disciples on the way home from a civic festival, his participation in which would be consonant with his defense of animal sacrifice in the cultic treatise De mysteriis.148 In the early fifth century, Macrobius insisted that the gods preferred to be worshipped by means of traditional, civic cultic imagery, despite its disparity with their transcendent essence.149 As for Proclus, the title of his treatise on theurgic practice says it all: On the Hieratic Art of the Hellenes (περὶ τῆς καθ’Ἕλληνας ἱερατικῆς τέχνης).
Even in the second century, then, a social group of philosophers, rhetoricians, and teachers began to identify themselves as “Hellenes,” not by birth but by education, with παιδεία as their byword. To be sure, more specific self-identifications were negotiated by more specific markers; moreover, alignment with Hellenism was compatible with the layering of other local and ethnic identities, and being a Hellene meant different things in different parts of the empire.150 What all these accounts have in common, however, is a manufactured heritage of Hellenic παιδεία with the shared ritual background of traditional Greek religion and civic cult. This is the heritage prized by Plotinus and Porphyry, and which their Christian Gnostic interlocutors challenged. However, a more specific heritage was also prized in the circles of philosophers—the pedigree of classical Greek philosophy. Plotinus’s group went so far as to celebrate the birthdays of Plato and Socrates.151 Philosophers expressed their Hellenic heritage with the tone and idiom of the Second Sophistic, but identified it foremost with the Platonic “golden chain” reaching back to Plato and Pythagoras, and, through them, to the Orient of hoary antiquity.
BARBARIAN WISDOM, ALIEN WISDOM
The rise of pan-Hellenic nationalism in educated circles coincides—paradoxically, it seems at first—with a surge of interest in the East as a source of primordial wisdom.152 Thanks in part to its nod to Judaism and its reception among the church fathers,153 Numenius’s fragment from his dialogue On the Good remains the most memorable example: “With respect to this, the one speaking and providing an interpretation about something will go beyond the Platonic tradition and fuse it (ἀναχωρήσασθαι καὶ συνδήσασθαι) with the sayings of Pythagoras. Then, he must appeal to the justifiably famous nations, addressing their rituals, doctrines, and accomplishments, insofar as Brahmins, Jews, Magi, and Egyptians are in accord with one another, but only to the extent that they agree with Plato (συντελουμένας Πλάτωνι ὁμολογουμένως ὁπόσας Βραχμᾶνες καὶ Ἰουδαῖοι καὶ Μάγοι καὶ Αἰγύπτιοι διέθεντο).”154 This passage has often been invoked in the context of Gnosticism, a movement that seems to meld some kind of Greek philosophical learning with Oriental revelation (to say nothing of dualism). The relevance of this problem for the social context of the Platonizing Sethian literature is obvious: the Sethian apocalypses bear the names of ancient Eastern sages. They discuss Greek metaphysics, but cite no Greeks, notably omitting Plato, to whom their debt is clear. Modern interpreters have therefore explained the Gnostic reliance on extra-Platonic sources, as reported in Neoplatonic testimonia, with recourse to the Antonine-Severan philosophical appeal to alien wisdom made famous here by Numenius.155 Conversely, some argue that Numenius himself was in the thrall of “la gnose orientale.”156
Alien wisdom was an issue, but not as formulated by Numenius. First, in much of the literature of the Second Sophistic and second-to-fourth-century Platonism, alien (or barbarian) wisdom is invoked in order to be subjugated by Hellenic παιδεία.157 Second, the period also witnesses the rise of what I will refer to as “auto-Orientalizing” texts that