Apocalypse of the Alien God. Dylan M. Burns
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Porphyry, Plotinus recognizes that their effort to alienate themselves from Hellenic authorities is a direct attack on the culture of Hellenic education out of which they came. Moreover, the very way in which they present their wisdom is alien to the spirit of Hellenic investigative philosophy:102 speaking “without proofs” (ἀποδείξεις), the Gnostics have, in his eyes, earned the appellation “rustic, bumpkin” (ἄγροικος); Celsus, Porphyry, and Julian all use the same term for Christians in their own polemics.103 “Another way of writing” would be more appropriate to refute them.
To summarize our evidence about Plotinus’s Christian friends, the Gnostic heretics also known to Porphyry, we can say that:
1. Unlike most sophists and philosophers in their day, they did not participate in public life.
2. They did not identify as “Hellenes,” consciously eschewing the culture of contemporary Hellenophone intellectual life.
3. Their texts were revelatory—they did not present arguments so much as statements validated by their ancient, Oriental, authority.
4. Despite all this, they did claim a philosophical αἵρεσις, but, like other “auto-Orientalizers,” they said it had priority over the Greek schools.
This last feature is striking, because, as we saw at the beginning of Chapter 1, Philo, Tertullian, and several Gnostic authors entirely reject the language of αἵρεσις. Instead, identification of Christianity as a αἵρεσις is a staple of Christian apologetics, exemplified in Justin Martyr.104 This also explains why the Gnostics claimed their teaching was “cultured”—that is, consonant with παιδεία—and why Plotinus was eager to dispel this claim. What was at stake in the Plotinus-Gnostic controversy was the definition of philosophy itself: its relationship to public life, civic cult, Hellenic nationalism, and the provenance of the Greek intellectual tradition. Plotinus emphasizes consonance with each of these pockets of life; his opponents emphasize alienation from them. His old friends had become the most bitter of enemies, and as we turn to the Sethian literature that they read, it will not be difficult to see why.
CHAPTER 3
Other Ways of Writing
Plotinus claims that the Gnostics do not write in a philosophical style, and so “another way of writing” would be necessary to refute them. Porphyry, meanwhile, denigrates the Sethian apocalypses as “forgeries” (πλάσματα), and it seems this formed the basis of his critique of the Apocalypse of Zoroaster.1 Porphyry’s use of the word “apocalypse” or “revelation” (ἀποκάλυψις) for these documents is tantalizing, and at first sight straightforward: These texts were apocalypses, “revelations” of some sort, stories dealing with whatever kinds of ideas that “revelations” traffic in. Yet the apocalyptic background of the texts has not been studied with respect to the Platonic tradition, much less Plotinus’s criticism.2 In fact, there are few studies of Gnostic apocalypses at all.3 This chapter will therefore unpack the technical language of Plotinus and Porphyry’s criticisms about “fiction,” “forgery,” and “myth,” while introducing the Platonizing Sethian literature itself, which is deeply embedded in the literary culture of the apocalypses.
Indeed, three (of the four) Platonizing Sethian treatises—Marsanes, Allogenes, and Zostrianos—are apocalypses. Analysis of their genre and their pseudepigraphic appeal to authority reveals that numerous key motifs of the texts, particularly in their frame narratives, are common stock in contemporary Jewish and Christian apocalyptic storytelling. Their cultivation of authority using these motifs challenges the culture of παιδεία explored in Chapter 1, instead employing images and authoritative figures with currency in Judeo-Christian circles, alien to Hellenism. Finally, the Sethian texts do not reject Platonic terminology about imagery, but employ it to articulate contemplative technique and authorize the concept of revelation as a perfect “image” of reality transmitted by the unknown, alien God to the seer. Such revelations, other ways of writing, thus demand to be read literally, not allegorically—another way of reading than we find prized by the Neoplatonists, who did not write stories as much as allegorically interpret the ones they deemed to be good. All of this points to the need for a reevaluation of the provenance and target audience of the Platonizing Sethian literature and the evidence of Plotinus and Porphyry.
ANOTHER KIND OF STORY—THE SETHIAN APOCALYPSES
As noted earlier in this book, Coptic treatises bearing the titles of several of the apocalypses mentioned by Porphyry in Vita Plotini 16 were discovered among the Nag Hammadi hoard in Upper Egypt in 1945. These treatises appear to belong to a Gnostic literary tradition that spans a wider group of Nag Hammadi texts, first identified and dubbed “Sethian” by Hans-Martin Schenke.4 The study of these Sethian treatises in the greater project of understanding the relationship between Plotinus and his Gnostic friends thus brings one to the study of Sethian tradition, and how it may have affected the particular issues that were contested by these thinkers. “Sethianism” describes a literary tradition defined by a family resemblance of various shared features, but chiefly the veneration of Seth, the third child of Adam and Eve, as revelator and even savior in the context of the “classic” Gnostic myth recounted at the beginning of Chapter One and criticized by Plotinus.5 The tradition encompasses, if not a system of thought, a school of thought, which thus presupposes some kind of belief in the Gnostic myth.6 Despite occasional criticism,7 the category of “Sethianism” enjoys widespread scholarly acceptance, even from those who dub it instead “Classic Gnosticism”8 or even eschew the term “Gnosticism” itself (thus speaking of “Sethian Christianity”).9 It is worth pausing to discuss this tradition here, since recent work brings into sharp relief the fact that nearly every Sethian treatise, even when they are Platonizing, is an apocalypse; therefore, the treatises criticized by Plotinus and Porphyry possess a very specific literary background that deserves to be explored in full.
One scholar of Gnosticism, John D. Turner, drew up a hypothetical but widely followed “literary history” of the movement that may have produced the Sethian literature.10 This history is based on a perceived tension between three subgroups within the Sethian corpus identified by Schenke: midrashic texts concerned with exegesis of the Paradise narrative in Genesis, texts focusing on baptism and the incarnation of Christ in Jesus of Nazareth, and the Platonizing texts full of metaphysical terminology but no speculation about the story of the serpent in Paradise or Jesus of Nazareth. Turner thus speculated that the Sethian literature offers snapshots of three phases of the transformation of a single Gnostic group that arose out of speculation on Jewish themes, was Christianized in the second century CE with the incorporation of Barbelo-Gnosticism (speculation about the Barbelo, or divine mother known to Irenaeus) and separate traditions about the veneration of Seth, suffered persecution at the hands of the proto-orthodox, and attempted to find a home among contemporary Platonic thinkers, like Plotinus’s group.11 These later Sethians composed Platonizing but “pagan” apocalypses where Judeo-Christian motifs and ideas have been replaced with Platonic metaphysics, in an attempt to appeal to the philosophers.12 As we know from Plotinus and Porphyry themselves, the rapprochement was unsuccessful, but these pagan apocalypses nonetheless deeply influenced the development of Neoplatonic thought. Thus, most scholars today refer to the Platonizing Sethian treatises as pagan apocalypses, written with the aim of appealing to the philosophical sensibility of Plotinus and other Hellenes.13
However, recent, groundbreaking research has forced us to reconsider the contours of Sethian tradition, by demonstrating that the Jewish midrashic texts first identified as “Sethian” are not Sethian at all. They possess few Sethian features (including the most important one—veneration of Seth himself), and instead belong to a separate Gnostic literary tradition dealing with Adam, Eve, and the serpent in the Garden of Eden. Hence, they should be termed “Ophite” texts (Gk. ὄφις = “serpent”).14 Much confusion, for instance, stems