The first generation of Christians died away without having experienced the fulfillment of their hopes. The manipulation of apocalyptic imagery and "forecasting," or the belief that unfulfilled prophecies had been misread prophecies, provided some consolation to the beleaguered community. Of more consequence, however, was a change in the perception of the risen-but-absent Jesus' relationship to the community. The soon-to-return Lord had always been understood to be -- in some sense -- mystically [Matt. 28.20) as well as spiritually (John 20.22) and sacramentally [1 Cor. 11.26) present in the waiting church. With the collapse of the eschatological hope for the speedy return of Jesus the spiritual and sacramental presence of Jesus was all that remained.

There is some evidence that certain churches of the Christian diaspora, despite efforts by Jewish missionaries like Paul to curb their excesses, were ecstatic cults, that is, congregations which understood emotional, physical and sexual energy as proofs of the presence of Christ within their community. At Corinth, Paul complains that the community there exhibits "such immorality as is not even found among the pagan." The source of the trouble seems to have been a natural affinity between the sacramental understanding of Christ as a god made spiritually present through the outpouring of divine gifts (charismata) and the ancestral rituals of the Corinthians themselves, which tended to be luxurious and highly emotional. Paul's major themes in the letter are a configuration of the problems that would define a church poised on the brink of religious enthusiasm: celibacy versus marriage; incest; gluttony associated with the eucharist; food-offerings to idols; spiritual ecstacy, especially glossolalia or speaking in tongues; and the mystery of resurrection of the body -- the last of which the Corinthians found either puzzling or unacceptable.

Paul's task at Corinth was to domesticate religious enthusiasm without losing the congregation in the process; to make a distinction, in other words, between the "freedom" he thought Christ had made available and the licentiousness that seemed to follow from it. Christians who had never known the constraints of Jewish law, however, would have had difficulty making sense of Paul's idea of freedom.

There is no specific evidence that the Christian church in Corinth practiced omophagia, the tearing apart of a sacrificial victim and eating its warm flesh as the theriomorphic deity, though Paul's use of body imagery in his first letter to the Corinthians and the theme of spiritual communion through incorporation into the "body of Christ" [1 Cor. 12.27f.] is familiar from the language of the Dionysiac mysteries: "Blessed is he who hallows his life in the worship of God, he whom the spirit of God possesseth, who is one with those who belong to the holy body of God" (Euripides, Bacchae 73-75). Pagan critics of the early movement pointed to the fact that Christians addressed Jesus in terms equivalent to those used by the bacchantes (Dionysus' worshipers). Jesus was kyrios (lord) and lysios, redeemer. In the Dionysiac cult, the god redeemed adherents from a world of darkness and death by revealing himself in ecstatic visions and providing glimpses of a world-to-come.

The imagery of wine, already a feature of Christian worship having evolved from Passover ritual, was also a natural symbol in the context of bacchantic worship: immortality flowed from the god as wine flowed naturally from the grape, its red hue symbolizing the essence of life itself. In the Christian mystery, which incorporated the Dionysian wine ritual in the story of the wine miracle at Cana (John 2.11), the wine-element of the eucharist was understood both in terms of its Jewish association (i.e., the blood of the atoning, sacrificial victim: Rom. 5.6-11) and in Hellenic style (the blood of communion which imparts immortality to the believer: Ignatius, To the Ephesians 20.2). At Corinth, the excesses would suggest that the communion feasts were not merely drunken revels but specifically related to the sacramental understanding of the "gifts" made available through Jesus the Lord.

It is sometimes suggested that the pagan observers merely "misunderstood" Christian language, charged as it was with references to the "body and blood of the Lord" (cf. Tertullian, Apology 9) This observation, however, misses the point that the Christian churches in Macedonia and Rome were working out of a specific cultic context in which communion with the provisioning god was essential in the process of achieving immortality. As late as 170, Justin the Martyr, a Syrian writer, describes the eucharist "not as common bread and common drink [wine] to be received, but as food which is blessed by the prayer of his word and from which our blood and flesh by transmutation are nourished."

The problem of emotional and sexual excess linked to the sacramental understanding of Christ's presence was not limited to Corinth. At the beginning of the second century, an epistle written in the name of the apostle Jude was composed to imprecate those "who walk in the way of Cain and abandon themselves to Balaam's error and perish in Korah's rebellion" (Jude 11). The writer is especially severe against those Christians who "concern themselves with the things of the flesh and thus corrupt themselves" (Jude 10). The location of their excesses is said to be the Christian "love feasts" associated with, if not identical to, the eucharist (Jude 12); and their specific sins seem to include the flouting of rules designed to keep the love feasts sexually above board (Jude 8).

While the parochial history of the early church has tended to credit Tertullian's early third-century protestations of Christian innocence, it must be said that the early second-century church -- the source of most later pagan assessments of Christianity -- was an odd assortment of puritanical and enthusiastic congregations. For writers like Paul, the appropriate apocalyptic position toward the things of the flesh was denial (Rom. 6.12-15; 1 Cor. 6.10-19). God's judgment was to be pronounced on a world already deemed to be corrupt. To participate in a material way in its corruption was a mark of not having "received" the forgiveness made possible in Jesus Christ. Yet Paul could be interpreted antinominally -- that is, as someone who taught the permissibility of all actions to those who knew themselves saved, and beyond the law. Indeed, the Christians at Corinth seem to have interpreted Paul in just this way. The enthusiasm for salvation was easily translated into a frenzy of the saved.

ROMAN OBSERVANCES AND ROMAN OBSERVERS

Fronto

The ritual practices of the Christians were certainly well known by the year 111, when the Roman governor of Bythynia, the younger Pliny, received reports of Christian excesses in his province. Professing a healthy skepticism about their practices and an ignorance of their belief, Pliny reports in his letter to the emperor Trajan that "[the Christians] claim to partake of food, but food of an ordinary and innocent kind," The charge, later repeated by pagan critics of the cult, was either cannibalism or omophagia. In the same period, the Latin rhetorician Marcus Cornelius Fronto (100-166) describes the rites of a sect of Christians as abominations and affronts to the Roman sense of decency:

A young baby is covered over with flour, the object being to deceive the unwary. It is then served to the person to be admitted to the rites. The recruit is urged to inflict blows upon it which appear to be harmless because of the covering of flour. Thus the baby is killed with wounds that remain unseen and concealed. It is the blood of the infant -- I shudder to mention it -- it is this blood that they lick with thirsty lips; the limbs they distribute eagerly; this is the victim by which they seal the covenant. (Fronto, para. by Minucius Felix, Octavius 9.5-6)

Graphic as this description is, and marginal though the group being described may be, it is doubtful that Fronto knew what he was talking about. References in early Christian writers to Jesus as the "lamb of God" and often the "child of God," together with the sacrificial symbolism of the eucharist and literal representations of the drinking of the blood of the lamb, were enough to fuel Latin rhetoric of Fronto's variety. He goes on to describe the incestuous passions of the sect following their ritual communion:

On a special day they gather in a feast with all their children, sisters, mothers, all sexes and ages. There, flushed with the banquet after such feasting and drinking, they begin to burn with incestuous passions. They provoke a dog tied to a lampstand to leap and bound toward a scrap of food, which they have tossed outside the reach of his chain. By this means the lamp is overturned and extinguished and with it common knowledge of their actions; in the shameless dark and with unspeakable lust they copulate in random unions, all being equally guilty of incest -- some by deed but everyone by complicity. (Octavius 9.5-6)

In evaluating Fronto's attack, it is important to distinguish his viewpoint from that of critics such as Celsus and Porphyry. In the first place, Fronto was the tutor of Marcus Aurelius and his adopted brother, Lucius Verus. An African and a lawyer, Fronto seems to represent the views of the imperial court rather than those of the philosophical observer: slander and gossip are his stock and trade. [LC-1]

Accordingly, the Christians are a rabble of ignorant fanatics and debauched conspirators who follow a man who was deservedly crucified. Fronto pays lip service to the gods of Rome, who have the greatness of Rome to commend them as objects of service and ritual devotion. The Christians have no such god. Their doctrines are absurd: They worship the head of an ass and believe that their god races about the world searching the hearts of humankind before destroying the world by fire and raising stinking corpses from their graves (cf. Tertullian, Apology 7). What we know of Fronto's attack is preserved in the speeches of Caecilius, the "agnostic" in Minucius Felix's dialogue, The Octavius. The charge of ass-worship is as old as Tacitus (Hist. 5.3.4), who alleges it of the Jews, and was known also to Posidonius, Apollonius Molon, and Apion.

Aristides

A more studious line of attack came from "religious" critics such as Aristides, another tutor of Marcus Aurelius and a devotee of the cult of the healer-god Asklepios. In his attack on the philosophy of the Cynics (Oration 46.2), Aristides compares them to the "impious men of Palestine who do not respect their betters." Like the Cynics, the Christian teachers are enemies of Greek culture, ridicule the philosophers, cause strife in households, do not see fit to attend the religious festivals and refuse any form of civic duty. Unlike the agnostic Fronto (as recorded in Caecilius), Aristides sees the Christians as shirking their religious obligations. They do not "conform" to old and established ways and cannot be taught true religion. The title of Celsus' attack on the Christians' alethes logos, or "true doctrine," suggests how sorely Christian obstinance and refusal to take lessons from the consensus of religious wisdom vexed the pagan teachers. The charge that Christians, like the Cynics, cause "strife in households which they cannot cure" is an interesting comment on the effect of the Christian mission on families. There is no doubt that families were torn apart over the preaching of the "Galileans" (as Epictetus referred to them). For their part, however, Christians pointed to Jesus' prophecy that families would fall to ruin over the gospel (Mark 13.12) and could then use this state of affairs as a sign that the last days were approaching.

Marcus Aurelius

The "persecuting" reign of Marcus Aurelius in the late second century (161-180) was driven by the emperor's religious convictions. More and more, Christian stubbornness and arrogance (obliviousness to their own error is the favorite way of construing it) come into play. To the Stoic emperor the Galileans appeared foolish. Their vaunted fearlessness in the fact of death was not based (like Stoicism) on genuine philosophical principles but came to them out of habit, without appeal to reason or demonstration (Discourses 4.7.6) The criticism is not especially poignant. What the emperor meant to say was that Christians faced death obstinantly on the basis of irrational ideas, e.g., the belief in the resurrection of the body and the eternal life to come. Their courage was akin to childish ignorance and madness, and lacked the element of authentic acceptance with which a philosopher would greet the inevitability of his death or choose suicide (for example) over shame (cf. Meditations 11.3).

Galen

Writing in Rome around 170, the physician-philosopher Galen blamed the Christians for their invincible prejudice. While he admitted that their mode of teaching (parables) was decidedly inferior to philosophical demonstration, he speculated about their conduct, which seemed to him better than the base morality of others of their class. "We ought to beware of medical dogmatism lest, like those who have entered the school of Moses and Christ, we should start by lending our ears to laws that do not admit of demonstration" (On the Usefulness of Body Parts 2.4; 3.3). Yet, "It is easier to convert the followers of Moses and of Christ than physicians and philosophers, who have surrendered themselves to the scientific sects."

Contrary to what is sometimes suggested, Galen did not admire Christians for the outcome of their nonphilosophical approach to virtue. He agreed with Marcus Aurelius that the effect of their efforts, while agreeing with philosophically considered approaches, were based on ignorance and not on a desire for the truth. "In our time," he wrote, "we see those who are called Christians gathering their faith from parables. And yet sometimes they do just what the philosophers do. That they despise death is evident; we can see it with our own eyes. We also can see that they avoid sexual promiscuity: there are men and women in the Christian sect who remain celibate throughout their lives." The purity of this passage has often been challenged; Gregory Abulpharagius cited it in his History of Dynasties (1663) as coming from Galen's commentary on Plato's Phaedo. The argument for the partial authenticity of the passage stems from its observation that Christians "visibly despise death" -- one that flies in the face of the familiar apologetic view that the martyrs embraced death gladly as assurance of their eternal reward (cf. Tertullian, Scorpiace 12).

***

From Aristides, Fronto, Marcus Aurelius and Galen we can construct what may be called the "moral" critique of Christianity. Christian worship, though in a transitional stage at the end of the second century, ranged in practice from ascetic to enthusiastic. Some sects, such as the Corinthians and Carpocratians, indulged in luxurious rites marked by drinking bouts and -- perhaps -- sexual license. Groups such as the Marcosians, known to the church writer Irenaeus and branded by him as heretical, seem to have practiced ritual prostitution in the Hellenistic style, and other groups, such as the Phibionites, took seriously the words ascribed to Jesus (Mark 16.18) concerning immunity from poison. The tendency to judge all Christians by the actions of these sectarian movements prompts Justin Martyr to write before the end of the second century, "We demand that those accused to you be judged in order that each one who is convicted may be punished as an evildoer and not as a Christian" (1 Apology 7). By Tertullian's day (144-220), however, suspicion of the cult had increased and had become a favorite topic for literary invective. "Not one hundred and fifty years have passed since our life began," Tertullian writes (To the Nations 7f.); "yet the rumors that circulate against us, anchored in the cruelty of the human mind, enjoy considerable success .... If the Tiber has overflowed its banks, or if the Nile has remained in its bed, if the sky has been still or the earth has been disrupted, if plague has killed or famine struck, your cry is, 'Let the Christians have it!'" Among the charges that most worry Tertullian are those of cannibalism, murder, treason, sacrilege, and incest, and the general complaint that Christian clannishness prevents them from leading the lives of ordinary citizens: they avoid the clubs, religious associations, the theater and (though there were exceptions) military service.

Lucian

According to the early critics Tacitus, Pliny and Aristides, Christianity was to be judged according to the unwillingness of its adherents to compromise. They were superstitious fanatics given to outpourings of enthusiasm, or they occasionally indulged in sexual orgies in association with their eucharistic banquets.

With the satires of Lucian, the moral critique of the church enters a new phase. Born at Samosata (Syria) around 120, Lucian regarded Christianity as a form of sophistry aimed at an unusually gullible class of people -- a criticism later exploited by Celsus (Contra Celsum 3.44). The members of the new sect worship a "crucified sophist," an epithet that suggests the influence of Jewish views of the church on pagan observers. Like Galen, Lucian imagines the Christians as men and women with little time, patience or ability for philosophy, and who are willing to enthrone new leaders and gurus at the drop of a hat. To make his point, Lucian invents a mock Cynic-turned-Christian priest, Peregrinus Proteus, who dabbles in a thousand different sects and philosophies before becoming an "expert" in "the astonishing religion of Christianity." As a man of atypical abilities in the context of the new faith, Peregrinus rises quickly in the ranks:

In no time at all he had them looking like babies and had become their prophet, leader, head of their synagogue and what-not all by himself. He expounded and commented on their sacred writings and even authored a few himself. They looked up to him as a god, made him their lawgiver, and put his name down as the official patron of the sect, or at least vice patron, second to that man they still worship today, the one who was crucified in Palestine because he brought this new cult into being. (Death of Peregrinus 10-13)

Lucian's "hero" is a shyster -- the first example in literature of an anything-for-profit evangelist who bilks his congregations. The communal spirit and puling generosity of the Christian community are themes of Lucian's satire, as when a deputation of Christians from the cities of Asia come to Peregrinus' aid after he is arrested for treason: "And thus Peregrinus reaped a large harvest of money to console him in his bonds" (Death 13), "for their first lawgiver persuaded them that they are all brethren." To his dismay, the governor of Syria, a philosopher, sets Peregrinus free when he discovers the priest only wants to be a martyr. After he is refused the glory of martyrdom Peregrinus' enthusiasm for the new faith cools, "until one day ... when the brethren saw him eating forbidden food and turned him out" (Death 16).

For all its looseness of detail, Lucian's portrait of Peregrinus can be said to reflect a popular view of the Christians at the close of the second century. They are both generous and gullible, quick to be seduced by anyone professing to share their faith, overadmiring of "true" philosophical talent, characteristically amiable but intolerant and suspicious, and bonded together (as Celsus would observe) out of fear rather than doctrinal agreement.

Celsus

The climax of late second-century critiques of Christianity comes in the work of the philosopher Celsus. Virtually nothing is known for certain of his life apart from what we learn from his eloquent and ardent opponent, Origen (185-254). According to spotty information, Celsus was active "during Hadrian's reign and later" (i.e., the thirties of the second century), though scholars have generally preferred to date him in the last quarter of the second century, during the persecutions at Lyon and Vienne. Origen, for polemical motives, calls Celsus an Epicurean -- a term of abuse often meant to suggest atheism. In fact, his philosophy is that of a conservative middle Platonist. He holds that the vulgar must have their parables and myths, but that philosophy is the only true guide to life. Like Plutarch, he argues that there is one supremely good God who employs a vast array of daimones (some good, some evil) who act as influences within the material world.

Against Judaism and Christianity, Celsus holds that man is not the foremost of God's creatures: "If a man kills a tiger, a tiger kills a man." Animals exceed humans in wisdom and social relations; elephants, storks and the phoenix are more pious while bees are more industrious, wise and sociable. Christianity and Judaism err, therefore, when they think that the nobility of humankind, as the "highest" of God's creation, would cause the divine being to undergo change, to show pity, or to involve himself in the rescue of a world governed adequately by his own ministering spirits.

Celsus' argument has been called the first thorough-going attack upon the whole Christian position. Celsus had studied the subject as no writer before him appears to have done, and it would wait until Porphyry at the end of the third century for someone as well versed in the gospels to produce a detailed refutation of Christian ideas. Celsus had read one or two of the gospels, Genesis, Exodus, and some of the Pauline epistles; had studied gnostic (and other peripheral) texts; and was aware of differences in Jewish and Christian interpretations of the prophets. Celsus was better acquainted than Origen with gnosticism, but sometimes conflates "Catholic" and "gnostic" Christian teaching in the course of his attack.

In his comments, Celsus attempts impartiality: He is no admirer of Judaism ("runaway Egyptian slaves who have never done anything worth mentioning") but acknowledges the antiquity of Jewish teaching and juxtaposes it with the newness of Christian doctrine. He thinks Christian teachers are no better than the begging priests of Cybele and the shysters of other popular religions. Importantly, Celsus does not dwell on the impurity of Christian ritual (though he alludes to it), but emphasizes that Christians are sorcerers like their founder, that they lack patriotism, and that every Christian church is an illegal association which exists not because their God arranges it (thus Tertullian), but because the emperor does not choose to stamp them out entirely.

The True Word or True Doctrine of Celsus was divided into two sections. In the first, Celsus presents a Jew as the antagonist to Christianity; in the second, he argues his own case. The strategy seems intended to show that Christianity is opposed not only by the philosophers of the "pagan" empire, but also by those with whom Christianity claims to have the closest affinity. In this way, the church could be seen to have neither the wisdom of the philosophical schools nor the antiquity of custom and law to its credit. Its teaching was merely eccentric -- sectarian in the mean sense of the word. In his hierarchy of civilization, the Egyptians were beast-worshipers, the Jews infinitely worse in their religious practices, and the Christians renegade Jews "whom their miserable countrymen despised and hated." What would have aroused official distaste for Christianity, however, was Celsus' suggestion that the Christians were "breaking the religious peace of the world." With an outlaw as their head, they were rebels by nature and tradition.

Celsus' "Jew" is strident in his dialogue with the Christian teacher on the failure of the life of Jesus, a theme to which Porphyry will return over a century later. That Celsus would emphasize this theme is unsurprising: we have already noted that it was at the heart of the earliest Jewish-Christian "dialogue" and their fictional reenactments by teachers like Justin. Celsus' "Jew" is, however, a more worthy opponent than Justin's. In the pagan dialogue, the Jew lectures the Christian; in Justin's the Christian lectures -- and defeats -- the Jew.

Familiar slanders resurface in the True Doctrine: Jesus was the son of a woman named Mary by a Roman soldier named Panthera. The prophets foretold a great king, a ruler and leader of armies -- not an inconspicuous criminal who could not even command the loyalty of his disciples. There was no proof of his power: Pentheus was torn to shreds for imprisoning the god Bacchus, but Pontius Pilate suffered nothing in reprisal for crucifying Jesus. Why did he refuse to save himself and to punish those who had betrayed him? Celsus' "Jew" continues:

The truth is, as long as he [Jesus] lived he persuaded nobody, not even his own disciples, and finally was punished and endured all this. His life here was a complete failure -- and yet you want to argue that having failed to persuade people here, he marched down to Hell to persuade people there. You invent absurd excuses for him, but if we are to accept them [we will need to know] why we should accept anyone who has been condemned and died a miserable death as a divine messenger? Anyone who is rash enough may say of a robber, "This was no robber but a god, for he foretold his fellow robbers what he was to suffer."

As to the miracles, Celsus rejects them on the premise that Jesus himself acknowledged that even wicked men could work miracles (Mark 3.25). Prophecies of the Christ's suffering and death are rejected both because they do not seem to refer to the fate of Jesus specifically and because, if true, they would have caused Jesus to face his death with Stoic courage and resignation. The resurrection is rejected on the grounds that the only witnesses were "women half crazy from fear and grief, and possibly one other from the same band of charlatans, who dreamed it all up or saw what he wanted to see -- or more likely, simply wanted to astonish his friends with a good tale."

As a Platonist Celsus believed in the immortality of the soul and the unchangeability of the divine being. The derivatives of this belief led to a "steady state" theory of creation, which denied any positive relationship between the divine being and the world. Among other conclusions, Celsus holds that because evil is inherent in matter there can never be more or less evil in the material world. Christian doctrine saw evil as having "entered" the world with the sin of Adam and increasing from age to age, until the time of the redeemer when its control weakened (Rom. 5.12-17). Similarly, Celsus' world needs no "improvements," no saviors. Revelation or an increase in revelation is contrary to the use of reason, and reason's systematic expression is philosophy. Thus, philosophy is the "true doctrine" of which all the best religious teachings are unsystematic, provisional, or preliminary expressions.

What irritates Celsus the most, however, is the impudence of Christian teachers with their stories about the incarnation and resurrection of Jesus. Insofar as these stories have any value, they are blundering attempts to repeat in a coarse fashion the stories of the ancient myths. The style of Christian preaching also comes under attack:

They are forever saying, "Do not inquire, only believe .... " This is their cry: Let no educated men enter in, no one wise, no one prudent, for these things we count as evil. But if any be ignorant, any foolish, any untaught, anyone simple-minded, let him come boldly. These they count worthy (as indeed they are) of their god, and it is therefore obvious that they can and will persuade only fools and the lowborn, the dull-witted, slaves, foolish women, and little children [Contra Celsum 3.44] .... We see in private houses wool carders, cobblers, fullers, the most ignorant and stupid of characters who would never dare open their mouths in the hearing of their teachers and intellectual betters. [But these then] get the children and women into corners and tell them wonderful things. "Do not listen to your father or your teachers," they will say, "Listen to us! Your teachers don't know what we know; they're too full of learning and systems. We alone know how to live; listen to us and you will be healthy, happy and prosperous." (Contra Celsum 3.55)

Obliged to operate among the "misfits" of Roman society, as Celsus thought of them, the Christians had made a virtue of necessity, insisting that the kingdom of god was for the unrighteous and not the virtuous. His comments on the social and moral situation of converts to the new faith serve almost as an epitome of anti-Christian polemical writing:

The priests of the other mystery [cults] cry, "Come, you who are clean of heart, discreet of tongue and pure of sin, those whose life has been good and just and free from deceit." But whom do the Christians invite? The sinners. The foolish. The childish. The unhappy. These the kingdom of God will admit. The sinner! The unjust, the thief, the burglar, the prisoner, the robber of temples and tombs. [This preaching] is a robber's invitation. God [is] sent to sinners -- not to the sinless. What harm is there in being without sin? The unjust man brought down by his wickedness, God will receive: but the just man who practices virtue and looks up to God from the beginning, that man God will not receive. The wardens of prisons order the prisoners to stop their wailing before the judge, so that justice can be administered fairly and not out of pity. The Christian God, however, is guided in his judgments not by truth but by flattery. (Contra Celsum 3.59, 62-3)

Celsus intensely disliked everything about Christians and their teaching. He is not even willing to grant -- as Galen evidently was -- that their actions are naively virtuous even though their philosophy is contemptible. With Fronto and Marcus Aurelius, he argues that their defenselessness, the fact that they stand condemned solely on the basis of the faith they profess, is proof enough that their God has no power to save them.

Celsus thought that extreme measures were the right way to deal with fanaticism. If the "martyrs" suffer, they suffer out of sheer obstinacy, not (as they say) because their cause is destined to prevail. The God professed by the Christians seems to have deserted them -- as he deserted the Jews before them. As a religious "conservative" by Roman standards, a man who understands pietas essentially as loyalty to what the state approves, Celsus finds the Christians ungrateful: should Caesar fall, the control of the earth would fall into the hands of uncultured, irreligious (= disloyal) and lawless barbarians, and insofar as the Christians look for the end of the world or the end of Roman hegemony over the world, lawlessness must be what they want (Contra Celsum 8.69-75).

PORPHYRY AND HIS TIME

By 270 Christianity and traditional Roman religion were on a collision course. Fewer than fifty years later, Christianity would survive the encounter -- changed, to be sure, but indisputably the healthiest of the cults recognized by the state. Military successes in the east around 272 were attributed by the emperor Aurelian to the sun god at Emesa, and in the final years of his reign Aurelian installed the god (Sol Invictus) as the Lord of the empire, built a temple in his honor, struck coins bearing the image of the emperor receiving the orb of majesty from Jupiter directly, and created a new class of senator-priests devoted to his worship.

The image of the "unconquerable sun" was thereafter etched in the religious consciousness. Constantine was reported by the church historians Eusebius and Lactantius as receiving a vision of the cross (The "crossed" Greek letters chi [X] and rho [P]) imposed on the disc of the sun at the battle of the Mulvian Bridge in 312. As described by Eusebius (Life of Constantine 1.28), the emperor-to-be had read the words "in hoc [signo] vinces (In this sign you shall conquer)," the sign being that of the Christian cross. Like Aurelian before him, Constantine attributed the augur to the divine being -- in this case a synthesis of the Sol Invictus and the Christian God. His correspondence suggests that he was not terribly concerned to make the distinction (his coins professed his allegiance to the sun god), though he did not reopen persecution of the Christians and was thus remembered as their liberator. The power and persistence of the symbol, however, could be shown by the fact that in 325, still during Constantine's reign, Christian bishops in Nicaea would define the power of Christ and his relation to God the father as "light from [the] light, true God from true God." More graphically, the early (ca. 300?) mosaic known as "Christos Helios" ("Christ the Sun") in the mausoleum under St. Peter's in Rome shows a glorified Christ having assimilated the attributes of the sun god. He holds a globe in his left hand and drives a chariot pulled by a team of horses, like Apollo. Grape vines surround the central figure -- an allusion to the life-giving wine of Dionysus, but also to Christ, the true vine, whose "life" is made available in the eucharist.

To return for the moment to Aurelian: the emperor was pressed at the end of his reign to launch an attack against the Christians and to make the religion of the sun god universal in the empire. Ostensibly, this was a period of renewed self-confidence in Rome and its institutions. The coins of the Illyrian soldier-emperor, Probus (276-282), proclaim the age of an "eternal Rome and her companion, the unconquerable sun." The help of the gods was invoked as seldom before to ensure a new Augustan age of security and peace.

This security was guaranteed in part by the military successes of the emperor, but "eternal Rome" needed philosophical defending as well. This came in the form of two pupils of the neoplatonic philosopher Plotinus: Porphyry of Tyre (d. 304) and Amelius (fl. 246-270), the "senior boy" in Porphyry's school. Neoplatonism had already emerged as a nexus between Christianity and paganism in the work of Origen of Alexandria against Celsus' True Doctrine. The two "systems" had beliefs in common. They blended philosophical principles with religious ideals, believed in a universe guided by the influence of a providential being (and his subordinate gods and demigods, in the case of the pagan philosophers), and acknowledged equally the possibility of divine union or mystical "ascent" to that providential being and the power of divine insight, "clairvoyance" or theurgy -- god-given magical power that permitted the seer to speak with authority about things unseen. Christianity had been infused in one way or another with these ideas from two sides: in its battles with Platonizing gnosticism in the second and third centuries and in its ongoing struggle to develop a philosophical vocabulary suitable for its place and time. From Clement of Alexandria right through to Athanasius, the workshop for this vocabulary was the Christian "academy" of Alexandria with its amalgam of ideas borrowed from Plato, the Stoics, Pythagoras, and assorted minor philosophical systems and religious cults.

For all this agreement, however, differences between state-sponsored philosophy and the Christian theologians were substantial. The Christian tendency had always been -- as its critics alleged -- to reason from the "facts" of revelation and to employ philosophy as needed or when convenient. This meant that the use of philosophical reasoning was in the service of the sacred texts. There were those, of course, above all Origen, who spent long hours attempting to reconcile the meaning of revelation with the practice of philosophy. In the end, however, he fell between the stools, between the gnostics and Plotinus, in his attempts to rescue the Bible from its historical and literary limitations. The "plain sense" of the text was an embarrassment to the philosophically disposed Christian ("How can Christ have been lifted up to a mountain high enough to see all the kingdoms of the world: there is no such mountain?"). At such moments, Origen can sound almost like his pagan opponents. For him, however, the doctrine of inspiration immunizes the text against "real" self-contradiction and error. The Bible is an enormous allegory, a series of divine paradoxes, a book full of mysterious meanings. How else could the divine mystery be expressed, except in parables and signs that occasionally thwart commonsense interpretations? The Bible revealed its meaning to the Christian soul -- also a great mystery -- and this soul can be prepared for enlightenment by philosophy. Origen tried and failed to do for Christianity what the Platonists (including Porphyry) had done for Homer, namely, to turn a diverse literature into a species of religious truth. After his death, his efforts were condemned as heretical.

As a result of Origen's failure to provide a philosophical shield for the faith of the apostles, the quarrel between "Athens and Jerusalem," as Tertullian had styled the distinction between philosophy and Christian teaching, became increasingly vicious. To the Romans the Christian charge of idolatry as applied to their religion was as galling as the pagan charge of atheism was to the Christians. Claims of "Thyestean banquets," incest, and rampant immorality were hurled by each in the other direction, while the Christians were repeatedly blamed for their lack of pietas -- loyalty to Rome and her ways -- and their indifference to civic duty. Neoplatonic philosophers such as Amelius (ca. 270) criticized the gospels for their barbarian origins. And despite Eusebius' claims that Amelius found much to praise in the Christian logos doctrine (John 1.1-18) he seems primarily to have regarded the Christian doctrine as a theft from Stoic teaching.

THE LIFE OF PORPHYRY

Amelius was succeeded as a watchdog of the Christian movement by someone known even by Augustine as the ablest philosopher of them all -- Porphyry of Tyre in Hellenized Phoenicia, whose name was originally Malkos.

Accounts of Porphyry's origins are notoriously confused -- owing largely to Christian traditions concerning his life. Two fifth-century writers and a notable early twentieth-century historian (Harnack) believed he had been a Christian. The conclusion depends on our reading his anti-Christian polemic as a case of "lapsed Catholicism," a sellout to court philosophy, and as the best way of accounting for his mastery of Jewish and Christian sources. Church fathers from Eusebius to Augustine were intimidated by Porphyry's challenges and arguments -- so much so that his worthiest opponent (Macarius Magnes) is not an especially articulate one, wholly unable to play the role of Origen to his Celsus. Constantine in the fourth century and Theodosius in the fifth decided that the only way to overcome Porphyry's objections was to put his books to the torch. Thus, the extent of his writings against Christianity is unknown. What we know (see the following bibliography) must be gleaned from a scattering of references, quotations and paraphrases in the writings of an army of church writers from the fourth century onward.

Whatever Porphyry's origins -- his biographer, Eunnapius, locates his birth in Tyre in 233 -- Porphyry visited Palestine, Syria and Alexandria in his youth. His knowledge of the geography of the region permits him to challenge the description of certain scenes in the gospels -- for example, the story of the Gadarene demoniacs -- with which the evangelists themselves had only a scanty acquaintance. By the time of the persecutions of Christians under the emperor Decius (ca. 250), Porphyry was a committed enemy of the young religion. Eusebius tells us that Porphyry heard the lectures of Origen in Caesarea and was profoundly disappointed with the famous Christian philosopher's attempts to reconcile Platonic principles with Christian doctrine: "A Greek educated in Greek [Origen] plunged headlong into barbarian recklessness. Immersed in this, he peddled himself and his skill in argument. In this way of life he behaved like a Christian ... [but] in his metaphysical and theological ideas he played the Greek, giving a Greek twist to foreign tales" (Eusebius, Eccles. History 6.19).

Porphyry studied philosophy with Longinus at Athens for six years. There, like many philosophical dillettantes before and since, he flirted with a variety of schools of thought before becoming committed to neoplatonism. In Athens he published a work of literary criticism showing his mastery of textual analysis, the so-called Homeric Questions. According to tradition, it was Longinus who "changed" the pupil's name from its Syrian form (Malkos = prince) to the Greek Porphyrios (= purple, the princely color). In 262 or 263, when he was about thirty, Porphyry committed himself to the neoplatonic school, having met Plotinus in Rome when the teacher was sixty. Assembled around the sage were the wealthy, the wise, and the merely curious of both sexes from Rome and far beyond. On arrival -- and as an indication of his philosophically precocious temperament -- Porphyry sat down to write a treatise against Plotinus. After examining it, Plotinus assigned the task of refutation to his disciple Amelius. Porphyry's own description of this early "dispute" gives us some insight into the style of philosophical argument which, later and unsuccessfully, Christian teachers would apply to his writings:

I replied to what [Amelius] had written; Amelius answered my reply; and the third time with difficulty. I understood the doctrine, changed my mind and wrote a recantation which I read in the meeting of the school. After this I believed in Plotinus' writings. (Porphyry, Life of Plotinus, trans. Armstrong, 18)

The process of disputation (propositions followed by refutation) was the Socratic means of arriving at truth. Christian teachers such as Justin, Origen and Minucius Felix had long since affected this style of literary opposition, though their opponents were either dead (Celsus) or fictionalized (Justin's Trypho), thus rendering them more amenable to persuasion. In taking on the Christians later in his career, Porphyry was issuing the same sort of challenge he had issued to Plotinus in 263. Unfortunately, there was no Christian Amelius to take him on, though a number tried: Eusebius, the church historian; Jerome; Methodius of Olympus; Apollinarius of Laodicaea; and Macarius Magnes did their best.

Porphyry joined a group that included pupils from all over the empire: Romans, Greeks, Arabs and Egyptians, and doubtless a number of Jews. Porphyry's encyclopaedic knowledge of the ways and customs of the world originates in discussion -- informal and formal -- with his fellow students. Plotinus himself lived frugally, in the ancient manner of the Peripatetics, living as a guest in the houses of friends whether in Rome or away on "tour." He died penniless, on the estate of an Arab named Zethas. During his life Plotinus lived "as one ashamed of his body," suffered from indigestion which seems to have been brought on by his vegetarian diet (cf. Life 9.2), and refused to speak about himself or his needs. Plotinus' style as a teacher was both systematic and unstructured: he began by explaining Plato, then Aristotle, then the divergences between them, regarding this explication as the "foundation course" in philosophy. He then moved on to discuss the Stoics, the Peripatetics, and the "moderns," presumably including the philosophy of the Christians, whom he knew as gnostics and termed "unreasonable":

These [Christian] teachers in their contempt for this creation and this earth proclaim that another earth has been made for them into which they are to enter when they depart. Now this new earth [they think] is the the Logos of our world [the heavenly archetype]. Why should they want to live in the archetype of a world which is abhorrent to them? (2 Ennead 9.5; cf. Apocriticus 11.12-15)

The doctrine of the beauty of this world and the unsoundness of Christian teaching in the area of metaphysics would become one of Porphyry's themes in Against the Christians.

The ethos of Plotinus' circle was actively anti-Christian, even though the teacher himself was indirect rather than polemical in his attack. He proposed problems based on a close reading of the relevant texts, raised incidental questions, and probed and prodded until he was satisfied that the meaning of the text -- and its associated questions -- was completely clear. From the standpoint of Socratic method, the Christian style was distinctly un-Socratic, consisting of injunctions to have faith and believe rather than ask questions. The Christian concept of truth consisted of revealed propositions in search of philosophical legitimation; it was doctrinaire where Platonism was dynamic.

Porphyry excelled in learning his teacher's method and was often singled out for praise. On May 7, the inner circle celebrated Plato's birthday as a red letter day in the form of a symposium -- a drinking fest and banquet, which always included oratorical and song competitions. On at least one occasion, Porphyry won acclaim: for his philosophical poem, "Of the Heavenly Marriage," a hymn to the Platonic ideal of beauty reminiscent of the Symposium.

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A word, at least, should be said to summarize Plotinus' teaching, as it has come down to us through Porphyry's transcription in the Enneads. From Plato, Plotinus derived the belief that all genuine knowledge is knowledge of the ideal form of a material thing. Philosophy rather than the mystery cults was the means to free oneself from the oppression of the material world -- understood as a world of destruction, plague, war and famine, disease and death -- but also a world in which truth shines through, where corruptible images point to the ideal archetypes. Like Plato, Plotinus believed that the human soul originated from above and contained within it certain "information" (powers) from the world of ideas. Submerged in the material world of becoming rather than "being," the soul is confused, tossed, handicapped by bodily existence (4 Ennead 1.8; 4.14). The soul must be taught to oppose the forces at work in the world. This was done through "upward striving," a diverting of the spiritual gaze away from the confusions of the changing world toward the unchanging perfection of the world of ideas. The task, however, was practical rather than mystical. It began with a clarification of everyday understanding ("What does Plato mean by 'an idea'?"). It included a correction of our desires, since the body is naturally attracted to the changeable, the material. It ended with a mastery of the process of dialectical philosophy as taught in the neoplatonic school.

The "end" of knowledge is truth, though one could also call it a "god." This "god" is not the Christian God, nor even the Christian idea of God. Theologians from the second century onward had misread Plato (and would later misread Plotinus and Porphyry) on this fundamental point. The confusion arises, as Etienne Gilson once noted, because "after so many years of Christian thought it has become exceedingly difficult for us to imagine a world where the gods are not the highest reality, while that which is the most supremely real in it is not a god" (E. Gilson, God and Philosophy [1941], p. 27). In Plato's mind, the gods were inferior to Ideas. The sun, for instance, was held by Plato -- as by Constantine and the early church -- to be a god. And yet in Plato's philosophy, the sun, who is a god, is a child of the Good, which is not a god. Gods were individual living beings, intelligible, necessary, and eternal (in the sense of being immortal: not-mortal), but they were not the immutable Ideas (cf. Plotinus, 6 Ennead 1.3).

Also unlike the Christian doctrine of God was Plotinus' understanding of the soul. A heavenly eros (attraction) dwells in every human soul -- a natural but dysfunctional desire to move upward from stage to stage toward the perfection of Ideas and away from the imperfections that hem it in. The ascent makes the soul increasingly like a god -- divine -- in the sense that it increasingly loses the encroachments of mortality and becomes like the gods. This aim (ascent) is understood to be fundamentally practical, though the language in which it is expressed is that of Greek myth. The "upward ascent" is through nous or mind; the ascent, philosophically expressed, is the increase in understanding. Discursive thought leads to understanding: first of the intelligible, then of the divine, the original. By intuitive insight, the soul that has achieved this insight feels itself to be in union with the divine light but knows as well that it is only a part of this light. Individuation (and thus the Christian notion of a personal god-creator, resurrection of the flesh, and salvation of the individual soul) is the very opposite of this line of thought.

Plotinus' followers were fond of singing an ancient Greek song, still taught by the Stoic philosophers, about the beauty of this world. It was, after all, the launching point for the ascent of the mind to the realm of Ideas. Plotinus therefore insisted his students sing the song to defend his teaching against the barbarous idea of the Christians, that this world was a contemptible place -- a view, oddly, which they had derived not from the Bible but from their own idiosyncratic interpretation of Plato (cf. 2 Ennead 3.5; 1.4; 3.9; 4.9, etc.).

***

While it is possible to overstate Porphyry's debt to Plotinus, the effect of the old teacher on the pupil seems to have approximated religious conversion. Porphyry recounts this in his Life of Plotinus. Whole families were attracted by his teaching. Women on their deathbeds gave their children into the keeping of the teacher, and he took numbers of children under his wing, serving collaterally as guardian, tutor in philosophy, and confidant. Plotinus won the trust of senators and politicians to such a degree that after twenty-six years of teaching in Rome -- not the most charitable of cities -- Plotinus was reckoned to have no enemies among the politicians of the city (Life 15; 9; cf. Eusebius, Preparation of the Gospel 10.3).

When Plotinus died after a long illness, Porphyry became head of the Roman school but was unable to ensure its survival. After a career in which he flirted with magic and tried to explain prophecy on philological grounds, he took on the task of explaining diversity in human perceptions of the divine. Images of the Gods, which has perished but is known to us through later citations, is an early work of demythologization within the pagan context. The gods are there viewed as symbols of the powers operating in and through nature. Zeus is regarded as the supreme power, the living essence of the universe, which was created as an expression of divine nous, i.e., mind or will. The constellations and heavenly bodies are "revelations" of the gods in their totality, like "books" that can be read to obtain information about them.

While superficially this "theology" sounds like the same Platonizing use of images as conveyances or shadows of an ultimate reality used in Christian circles, Porphyry's understanding of myth was essentially historical: myths were parables of philosophical truth. In Christianity, the myth was the truth. According to the Porphyrian myth, the soul descends as an astral particle acquiring more and more mass as it descends through the universe. Even after death and the decay of the body, the soul is doomed to enter into new bodies which effectively make its ascent impossible. Religion offers a "theoretical" solution: it teaches that the body can be purified by means of magical practices -- ablutions and baptisms -- which are attempts to exorcize the demons or to win them over as friends, thereby arranging for the soul's partial ascent or escape from the powers that rule the world (cf. Paul, 2 Cor. 12.2- 4). Belief in God as a pure intellectual principle and ground of virtue was recommended because it was a benefit for humans to aspire to the "divine mind": "You will best honor God by making your mind like unto him, and this you can do by virtue alone. For only virtue can draw the soul upward to that which is akin to it. Next to God there is nothing great but virtue" (Letter to Marcella 49).

While Porphyry's language can often sound "Christian" -- an annoyance to Augustine, who concluded that the philosopher was always half right and thus all wrong -- it is clear upon inspection that Porphyry found the Christians annoying on just the same terms. Porphyry tells us in language prefiguring Augustine that the soul in need of God is restless, but Porphyry (unlike the Christian bishop) reserves this longing for the wise man, since "God is best honored by him who knows him best. And this must naturally be the wise man alone, who in wisdom must honor the divine, and in wisdom adorn for it a temple in his thought" (Marcella 46). Like Christian teachers from Tertullian onward, who taught that human sinfulness was an impediment to the knowledge of God (a clouding of the reason) and hence could be regarded as the condition which made revelation -- a divine "overcoming" of the natural impediment -- necessary for salvation, Porphyry saw sinfulness as the choice which fools made against virtue, and hence as what made them unwise. "To the wise man God gives the authority of a god and a man is purified by the knowledge of God .... But of evil, we ourselves are the authors" (Marcella 47).

Given the different analysis of the source of evil, Porphyry could find the Christian view of salvation only contemptible. It seemed to him to require nothing of humans and everything of a God who had been compromised by his own creation -- put into the position of working out a clever trick to save human beings from their own natures. Though this is veiled or submerged in his letter to Marcella, Porphyry recognized that the linguistic similarity between his own teaching and that of the "Sophist" [Christian] teachers might confuse those who are looking for the God represented by the philosophers. Thus, he advises his wife, Marcella, not to associate with "anyone whose opinions cannot profit you, nor join with him in converse about God," since "it is not fitting for a man who is not purified from unholy deeds to speak about God" (Marcella 15). The Christian view that the son of God came to save the wicked and unrighteous was scandalous; godlike (virtuous) deeds should precede any discussion of God. The wise man is distinguished by his deeds; he does nothing unworthy of God, who does nothing contrary to virtue and holiness. Thus the pursuit of virtue is not only the trademark of the wise man's nature; it actually makes him godlike: "A man worthy of God is a god" (Marcella 15). Although certain Christian teachers, including Athanasius, could dub salvation the "godding" of the elect, the idea was conspicuously alien to the mainstream of Christian thought and tended to threaten the doctrines of divine sovereignty and humankind's reprobation. For Porphyry, becoming godlike was the active quest of every soul that loved virtue and aspired to excellence. And it was precisely the Platonic doctrine of excellence that -- from the philosopher's standpoint -- Christianity lacked.

Porphyry's "God," therefore, has no need to save because he is not affected by sin. This is not to say that the philosopher fails to recognize a category of actions which are displeasing to God. But these actions are expressions of active failure and not of a passive genetic deficiency in a God-created race of men, as Augustine theorized. God strengthens those who practice virtue and "noble deeds" (Marcella 16), but he does not (cannot) punish those who fail to practice virtue or who do things contrary to virtue (Marcella 17), since the divine nature can only work for the good. Accordingly, the classical Christian theodicy does not arise in Porphyry's thought; he thinks it foolish to speculate, on Christian premises, about an all-good God, creator of an originally good world, over which, through lack of foresight (omniscience) or power (omnipotence) evil reigns and in which he is obliged to intervene time and time again. The puzzles of Christian theology are non-puzzles for Porphyry: The pieces comprise not a picture but a muddle, and can only be slotted together by trimming edges and omitting embarrassingly contorted segments. This, however, does not prevent Christian priests and teachers from selling their wares as a kind of philosophy. While religious observances -- pagan or Christian -- are not actually harmful, they encourage the simple-minded in a belief that God has need of them. The only true priests are the wise of the world, not the "fools praying and offering sacrifice." The only truly sinful man is "he who holds the opinions of the multitudes concerning God" (Marcella 17), and those who think that tears, prayers, and sacrifices can alter the divine purpose. The Christian God fails, in Porphyry's view, because he epitomizes false opinion, baseless hopes. He is changeable, fickle, unpredictable. His priests preach "mere unreasoning faith [in a God] who is gratified and won over by libations and sacrifices," without perceiving that men making exactly the same request receive different answers to their prayers (Marcella 23). Worse, human beings seem to believe that their basest actions can be erased by prayer, or, caught in the web of their own illogic, they become haters of the world and the flesh and mistakenly accuse the flesh of being the source of all evil (Marcella 29). "Salvation" for Porphyry cannot begin with self-hatred or the abnegation of the flesh. In its demythologized form, it is simply the "soul's" quest for wisdom as expressed in the pursuit of virtue -- an acknowledgment of redemption being natural to the soul because of the soul's affinity to God. Porphyry does not think of the body as vile; he thinks of it as the discardable "outer man," whose satisfaction cannot be a final end or goal because it is corruptible, limited and earthbound. The body defines creaturely existence and not the soul's quest.

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This description of Porphyry's philosophy, deriving chiefly from his letter to Marcella, a widow with seven children whom he married when he was almost seventy, is often seen as proof that Porphyry and the Christians shared certain religious values (Wilken, p. 134), as, for example, when he invokes the principles of faith, truth, hope and love as the appropriate ones concerning God (cf. 1 Cor. 13.13). The linguistic parallels, however, are misleading, especially if the trip undertaken "for the need of the Greeks" (Marcella 4), occurring around the time Diocletian was mounting a new assault against the Christian church, was actually undertaken to prepare a defense of traditional (Roman) religion against the Christians. That Porphyry was immersed in Christian books and Christian vocabulary in preparation for writing this defense would account for the style of the writing, as well as for its strategic difference from Christian teaching. The historian Lactantius mentions a "priest of philosophy living in Constantinople" who undertook to defend Roman religion and pejorate Christian teaching (Divine Inst. 5.2), though it is not certain that he means Porphyry.

AGAINST THE CHRISTIANS

The first thing to say about Porphyry's fifteen books against the Christians is that they are lost. The exact title is not known, and its popular title, Kata Christianon, can be dated securely only from the Middle Ages. Opinions radically differ over the question whether the books can be substantially restored. A few facts can be stated succinctly, however. First, the church was unusually successful in its efforts to eradicate all traces of Against the Christians from at least 448. Not only were Porphyry's books destroyed, but many of the works of Christian writers incorporating sections of Porphyry's polemic were burned in order to eliminate what one critic, the bishop Apollinarius, called the "poison of his thought." Apollinarius' response to Porphyry amounted to thirty books. Methodius of Olympus (ca. 311), Eusebius, the church historian, and St. Jerome also turned their hand to answering the philosopher. Second, the ninety-seven fragments gathered by Harnack, half of which were taken from the fourth(?)-century writer Macarius Magnes, are enough -- if barely enough -- to give us the shape of Porphyry's critique. Harnack (Porphyrius, gegen din Christen, 1916) has been accused of giving too much weight to the words of the pagan philosopher cited by Macarius (who does not actually name his opponent as Porphyry), whose voice is muted by the agenda of the Christian teacher. In a study done some twenty years ago, Timothy Barnes argued that the fragments used by Macarius could not be used uncritically to reconstruct Porphyry's lost work, (cf. T. D. Barnes, 1973, pp. 42·1-42), and the tendency since that time has been to chip away at the number of "authentic" Porphyrian statements educible from Macarius' work (cf. R. L. Fox, 1986, p. 771 n.1). The dating of the fragments has proved to be an even more stubborn problematic.

For good or ill, however, the Macarius fragments must serve as a basis for any discussion of Porphyry's work, even though they represent a very shaky foundation (cf. Wilken, p. 136). Expressing qualified doubt about Macarius' use of Porphyry's books does not mean that he did not use them. On average, the voice to be heard is that of a conservative pagan intellectual arguing a line with unmistakable affinities to Porphyry's known criticisms of the Christian faith. If the voice seems hollow, more akin to Justin's fictional Trypho than to Origen's full-blooded Celsus, it is because Macarius is less respectful of his source. Conversely, there can be no doubt that the source is not merely fictional. The pagan's words are far too strong and too coherent to be attributed to a conglomerate of the Christian teacher's imagination. The philosophy is consistently that of a neoplatonist who finds Christian teaching objectionable on grounds we can trace directly to Porphyry's school and for which there are analogies in Marcella, the Philosophy from Oracles, and especially On the Return of the Soul, where moderate praise for the character of Jesus is coupled with scathing criticism of the disciples, especially Peter (a dabbler in the black arts).

That Macarius does not name his opponent and sometimes seems to characterize rather than quote his opinions could easily be explained as a strategic decision by a Christian teacher who wished his defense to survive. Naming his adversary -- or quoting him too precisely -- would have almost certainly guaranteed the burning of Macarius' defense (cf. Waelkens, 1974). Put appositely, anyone wishing to write a defense of the faith in the fourth or fifth century would have been foolhardy to identify the enemy as Porphyry. The persecutions were still a recent memory, and the role of pagan philosophers in promoting them could not be forgotten or forgiven. An inadequate defense would only serve to enshrine the words of the critic. Even Jerome was guilty, in his famous Commentary on the Book of Daniel (early 5th century) of suppressing Porphyry's comments when necessary to his defense (cf. Commentary on Matthew 24.16) as when he discusses the famous "prophecy" of the destruction of the temple in Dan. 9.24f.

In a devastating critique which has not survived, but which has evoked plenty of reaction from his critics, Porphyry began Against the Christians with an attack on the Christian view of prophecy. Although Platonism had actually inspired the allegorical interpretation of prophecy by teachers such as Origen, the philosopher's nemesis, Porphyry condemned the use of allegory as a means of explaining away difficulties and contradictions in the biblical text. It has even been suggested that Porphyry drew some of his polemic directly from Origen's book on the difficulties of interpreting scripture, the Stromateis. All he had to do was to "accept Origen's negative statements ... and reject the deeper spiritual meanings" that Origen found for them (Grant, 1972, p. 292). Despite his contempt for allegory -- a feature which shines through rather clearly in Macarius' fragments -- the philosopher was more concerned with chronology than interpretation. He denied the extreme antiquity of the Moses story, the traditional dating of the law, and the ascription of the Book of Daniel to the period before the Babylonian captivity in the sixth century B.C.E.

Christianity had no special interest in the antiquity of Judaism (though Porphyry may have thought that it did -- since we have seen that the argument "from antiquity" was a key factor in earlier indictments of Christianity as a new religion. It did, however, have some interest in the Book of Daniel, which figured prominently in the gospels and in Christian apocalyptic thinking about Jesus as the son of man. On philological grounds, Porphyry seems to have argued that the book belonged to a later period and described the events of the authors' own time -- the Maccabean period of the second century B.C.E. -- rather than events that were still to unfold. (Jerome, Comm. on Daniel, prol.) The idea that the Book of Daniel was not prophetic was profoundly disturbing, provoking responses from Eusebius, Methodius, and St. Jerome, whose commentary on Daniel was a defense of the traditional Christian view.

That view, dominant since the second century, was that Daniel contained prophecies essential to establish certain elements of Christian belief. Both Justin the Martyr and Hippolytus argued that the chronology of Daniel accurately predicted the birth of the messiah, the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem, and the second coming. What Porphyry did was to undermine a whole system of Christian interpretation based on the prophetic value of the book (Wilken, p. 141). Elsewhere, Porphyry seems to have ridiculed the Book of Jonah (cited by Augustine, Ep. 102), which Christians had used as a prophecy of the resurrection (Matt. 12. 39-41; 16.4): "It is improbable and incredible that a man should have been swallowed up with his clothing on in the inside of a fish." The carping literalism with which the philosopher approached these questions, as recounted by Augustine, Jerome, and others, parallels closely the approach recorded in the work of Macarius Magnes, where allegory is systematically rejected as a means of avoiding inconsistencies or improbabilities in the biblical accounts.

Porphyry had perfected this technique of narrative criticism in his early work on Homer. Unreserved in the comprehensiveness of his treatment, Porphyry did not stop at the conclusion that the Book of Daniel was written four centuries later than Jews and Christian taught. He insisted, according to St. Jerome, that the prophetic interpretation was inconsistent even with the claims Christians made for the book: The Christians seemed to say that the Book of Daniel was -- so to speak -- doubly prophetic: if written before the Captivity in the sixth century, it pointed forward to events of the second century (namely, the Syrian violation of the temple precinct in 167 B.C. E.) as well as to events which took place under the Romans after the time of Christ -- the burning of the temple. Christian teachers claimed that Jesus himself had invoked the prophecy in forecasting the destruction of the temple (Mark 13.2). But if the book was written about events in its own time -- namely the second century -- then it had no prophetic value at all. The Christians were mistaken. And if Jesus had cited it, then Jesus was mistaken as well.

It is impossible to know whether there is a specific cause, other than an intellectual's impatience with error, for Porphyry's assault. A number of scholars continue to maintain (contra Barnes) that he was deeply troubled by the spread of Christianity (Frend, Rise, p. 587), though some -- Fox and Demarolle among them -- question the passages that had supported this view (Fox, Pagans, p. 586). On average, the skepticism seems unwarranted. The famous statement cited by Macarius Magnes, that Porphyry complained of how the "Christians were building up great houses where they could assemble for prayer, [with] no one preventing them from doing this" (Apocriticus 4.21 and Harnack, Gegen die Christen, frag. 76, p. 93) is entirely consistent with the views of a depressed observer of events at the end of the late third century C.E. -- a man who, like Swinburne's "Julian the Apostate," grimaces at the passing of the old order, the victory of the Galileans, the staleness of their teaching. Furthermore, we know from Augustine (City of God 19.23) that Porphyry complained of the influx of educated women into the church; in his Philosophy from Oracles, written around 263, he laments (en masque as Apollo, the god of enlightenment) that it is almost impossible to win back anyone who has converted to Christianity: it is easier, he says, to write words on water than try to use argument on a Christian. They simply cannot understand the folly of worshiping as a god a man who had died as a criminal. Despite the persecutions, Lactantius tells us, Christians persisted in building their houses of worship -- sometimes in plain view of the imperial palace.

Porphyry was doubtless distressed by the failure of Rome to contain the spread of what he regarded as a dangerous superstition. Only a few decades later, Eusebius could boast not only of the spread of the gospel but of its infiltration into the highest circles (Eccles. History 8.1.1;8.11.2) -- precisely the success that Porphyry feared.

***

When he sat down to write his extensive refutation of Christian teaching, Porphyry was not starting from scratch. He had composed years before a book about the worship of the gods titled Philosophy from Oracles, in which he offered a reasoned defense of the old religions, while expressing a reserve bordering on contempt for popular expressions of religious devotion. As we have already noted in his mature work, the Letter to Marcella, Porphyry's attention was focused on a god who is incorporeal, immoveable and invisible -- a "God concept," so to speak, who requires neither sacrifice nor prayer (cf. Of Abstinence 2.37). Like Platonists before him, Porphyry recognized the world as being full of lesser divinities and influences -- gods and daimones. These lesser divinities were for hoi polloi, the man on the street and women in the marketplace. Thus in the Philosophy from Oracles, Porphyry assigns a place to the high god, to the Olympians, the celestial bodies, and in book three of the same work, a place to heroes (divine men), among whom he numbers Jesus.

Traditionally it has been thought that Porphyry began by thinking highly of Jesus but badly of his followers who had elevated him to divinity. The evidence is very thin and what exists is extremely obscure. It comes mainly from Augustine (see City of God 19.22-23), where Porphyry is said to have praised the Jews for their belief in one God but condemned the Christians for their worship of Jesus as a god. But on the analogy that great men, Heracles, Orpheus, and Pythagoras among them, are rightly worshiped as gods for their feats, it makes nonsense of the evidence to say that Porphyry thought highly of Jesus. In Book 19 of City of God, Augustine quotes Porphyry as saying in the Philosophy from Oracles that it is easier to fly through the air like a bird than to recall a superstitious Christian wife to her senses. Let her do what she pleases, he advises, "singing lamentations for a god [Jesus] who died in delusions, who was condemned by right-thinking judges, and killed in hideous fashion by the worst of deaths, a death [whereby he was] fastened by nails" (City of God 19.23). The conclusion can only be that the Christians mistakenly worship Jesus as a god, even though he is plainly not to be compared with the heroes. This, then, makes sense of Apollo's "oracle" to the effect that Christians cannot be persuaded of the foolishness of worshiping a criminal as a god -- a theme recurrent in anti-Christian polemic from at least the time of Celsus and also in the critique of Macarius' pagan.

Bluntly put, Augustine's "defense" must be viewed with extreme caution. The notion that the gods have pronounced Jesus devout and the inclusion of Jesus among the "wise men of the Hebrews" (City of God 19.23) have all the flavor of Christian interpolation. In the same passage cited by Augustine, an oracle of Hecate seems to suggest that the soul of Jesus, though entangled in delusion and error, like other souls, was released from this error after death and entered, like the souls of other men, into heaven. It is this "soul" that the Christians "in their ignorance" mistakenly worship as God. This oracle is not, however, as so many have suggested, a favorable assessment of the person or teaching of Jesus. Furthermore, the sentence, "What I am about to say may appear startling to some: I mean that the gods have pronounced Christ to have been extremely devout, and have said that he has become immortal," makes no sense unless Augustine himself would have regarded it as startling coming from his patron philosopher. And it is more startling still that Porphyry should have introduced the oracle in this way. By the same token, we need not attribute its invention to Augustine, since Eusebius (Demonstration 3.6.39-3.7.1) has already cited the same passage to show that Porphyry did not despise Jesus, as Hierocles, a Christian-hater and pupil of Porphyry, apparently did. Subsequent references to the piety or to the wisdom of Jesus (cf. Augustine, Harmony 1.11) seem to refer to the single oracle of Hecate quoted by Augustine as belonging to Porphyry's work. Nevertheless, it cannot be maintained from this scant and internally improbable testimony that Christians feared Porphyry's work "because it gave a positive appraisal of Jesus within the framework of pagan religion" (Wilken, p. 1130). Much less can it be maintained that statements derogatory to Jesus should not be attributed to Porphyry, or that Porphyry would have maintained a favorable view of Jesus on the basis of the latter's worship of the one God of the Jewish people. Augustine's comparison of the oracle of Apollo, which called Christ unrighteous, with that of Hecate, which called him "a man of supreme piety," is Augustine's attempt to show up contradictions in Porphyry's attack. In fact, however, Augustine repeatedly misrepresents the Hecate oracle, and progressively reinterprets its fundamentally negative assessment of Jesus' teaching.

By the same token, it is clear that Porphyry, like pagan observers before him, believed that the disciples of Jesus departed from the founder's teaching; but it does not follow that he held to the view that Jesus himself taught a religion centering on the supreme God of all (cf. Wilken, p. 154). The truth seems to be that Porphyry regarded Jesus as a criminal, justly punished for his crimes by the power of the Roman state, and hence undeserving of the status of hero or of the divinity conferred upon him by his misguided followers.

Whatever Porphyry may have thought of Jesus, the bulk of his criticism was reserved for the evangelists, the apostles of Jesus -- especially Peter -- and the Christian mission epitomized by Paul. He began with the premise that the gospel accounts were not harmonious (Augustine, Harmony 1.1) and moved quickly to discuss specific cases, ranging from the words of Jesus on the cross to the healing miracles ascribed to him. Macarius' "pagan" deals with most of the same subjects we know, from Augustine's Harmony, to have attracted Porphyry's criticism: that the apostles fabricated genealogies, that there are discrepancies concerning the time of Jesus' death, that Jesus had not claimed to be divine, and that the teaching of Jesus was obscure and self-contradictory. Augustine's characterization is borne out by Jerome (Epistle 57), who records that Porphyry found the evangelists unable to produce a coherent chronology and frequently wrong in their use of Hebrew prophecy. Mark cites a passage from Malachi and attributes it to Isaiah (Mark 1.2); Matthew attributes to Isaiah a verse of Psalm 77, and so on.

A general view of Porphyry's work yields the following picture: Beginning with an introduction in which the ambitions of the Christians were repudiated ["they want riches and glory ... they are renegades seeking to take control": Apoc. 11.7f.], Porphyry went on to show their unworthiness. They accepted but misunderstood the "myths" and oracles of the Jews, then turned around and altered these to make them even more contemptible (Harnack, Frags. 1, 52, 73). Their religion had neither a national anchor nor a rational basis; they required initiates to accept everything on blind faith. Moreover, the initiates themselves were the worst sort of people, moral invalids who (cf. Celsus) found security in their common weakness (Frags. 81, 82, 87). The Christians had proved that they cared nothing for those who had lived in the era before the coming of Jesus; these could not be saved.

The Christians taught absurd doctrines about the suffering of God or the suffering of a son of the supreme God. They also prayed for the destruction of the world -- which they hated because they were hated by it -- and believed that at its end they alone would be raised bodily from the dead (Frags. 84, 85, 89, 92, 94). The sky would be destroyed and the ruler of the world would be cast into an outer darkness, as a tyrant might be driven out by a good king. By such thinking the Christians showed contempt for God. How could God be angry? How, if all powerful, as even some of their teachers said, could his property have been stolen in the first place?

After attacking the chronology of the Old Testament (cf. Frags. 39; 40-41; 68; 43) and arguing against Christian allegorical interpretation, Porphyry took up the subject of the writers of the gospels and epistles, whom he regarded as ignorant, clumsy, and deceptive. The fact that he wages his assault chiefly against the "pillar" apostles, Peter and Paul, suggests that he regarded the destruction of their reputations essential to wiping out the claims of an emergent Catholic Christianity (Frags. 2-18, 49, 55, 19-37). Thus Paul himself had called Christian believers "wretches" (1 Cor. 6.9f.) and promised his followers the resuscitation of the "rotten, stinking corpses of men" (cr. Augustine, City of God 22.27). As for Peter, he had been called "satan" even by Jesus, yet was entrusted with the keys to the kingdom of heaven (Apocriticus III. 19f.]. The apostles proved themselves traitors, cowards, weakling and hypocrites -- even in the accounts written by them.

The Jesus allegedly praised for piety and wisdom by Hecate in Porphyry's Philosophy from Oracles, finds no grace in Against the Christians. His parables are trivial and incomprehensible. They are "hidden from the wise but revealed to babes" (Matt. 11.25), a state of affairs which encourages ignorance and unreasonableness. Jesus and his followers represent a lethargic ethic of the status quo, the very opposite of the Greek quest for moral excellence; indeed, his blessing on the poor and downtrodden and his repudiation of the rich make moral effort impossible. Had he not taught that selling everything and giving it to the poor (Matt. 19.21), thereby becoming a lout and a beggar and a burden on others, was the height of Christian perfection? (Frags. 52, 54, 56, 58)

Furthermore, Jesus did not follow his own advice. His show of weakness in the Garden of Gethsemane prior to his arrest was disgraceful: having preached fearlessness in time of persecution to his disciples, he exhibited only fear and trembling at the moment of his capture. When Jesus stood before his accusers, he spoke like a guilty man, not like a hero on the order of Apollonius of Tyana who had been hauled before Domitian (Frags. 62, 63; cf. Philostratus, Life of Apol. 8.8f.). Had he been a god on the order of the ancient heroes, he would have flung himself from the parapet of the temple; he would have appeared after his death to haunt Herod and Pilate -- or indeed, to the Senate and People of Rome, to prove he had risen from the dead. That would have convinced everyone of the truth of Christian belief, and it would have spared his followers the punishment they now suffered for their beliefs. In short, had Jesus cared for his followers he could have taken care to spare them their martyrdom.

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Librarian's Comments:

[LC-1] I'm going to fully credit Marcus Cornelius Fronto's statements about the bad behavior of the Christians, and not discount him as R. Joseph Hoffman unfairly does, for allegedly "representing the views of the imperial court rather than those of the philosophical observer: slander and gossip are his stock and trade." Mr. Hoffman has no right to make such accusations and discount crucial evidence that probably saved innocent people's lives as it provoked the just punitive action of the state. He wasn't there, Fronto had a great reputation (educated at Rome, renowned as an advocate and orator second only to Cicero), and a lot of other people made the same complaints.

At the same time he slanders Marcus Cornelius Fronto, he slanders Marcus Aurelius, who appears to me to be the most noble Roman emperor who ever lived, who spent his life steeped in the very philosophical meditation of which Mr. Hoffman is so admiring. If Marcus Aurelius persecuted the Christians, they probably deserved it due to their bad behavior. Why would Marcus Aurelius need to stir up trouble with the Christians when he already had wars on both the east and the north to deal with -- in which he himself served as commander-in-chief -- and pestilence and starvation in Rome itself, unless it was absolutely necessary? As Mr. Hoffman recounts, many conservative thinkers criticized Marcus Aurelius for not getting rid of the Christians altogether.  Why didn't he exterminate them?  Because he was fair. We can see where Mr. Hoffman's sympathies lie in all this, in an inexplicable sympathy for the nasty Christian practices of eating babies and incest. People who deny the existence of terrible wrongdoing are not friends of humanity.  Why is it so important to Mr. Hoffman to "not dwell on the impurity of Christian ritual?" To do so is to deny us important information about the early Christians, and perhaps find the source of the same practices being done today.

And what was the point of Mr. Hoffman calling Mr. Fronto an "African and a lawyer"? Calling on a little racism and lawyer-bashing to aid his argument, and match his friend Porphyry's hatred of the Jews?

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