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CHAPTER 2

Plotinus Against His Gnostic Friends

The testimony of Porphyry about the heretics known to him and Plotinus is a fascinating and rich account of their encounter with living, breathing readers of Sethian apocalypses. He says that this literature circulated among Christian Platonists, who invoked alien, non-Hellenic authorities popular in Jewish lore (like “Allogenes”—“the stranger-foreigner”) and challenged the authority of Plato and, by extension, the vigorous Hellenic cult(ure) of paideia. Both he and Amelius wrote treatises attacking these apocalypses. Plotinus wrote his own work responding to the heretics. Porphyry, editing his master’s work following his death, entitled it Against the Gnostics; hence we consider these heretics to have been Gnostics themselves—certainly they were understood as such by Porphyry, and as will become clear, they subscribed to the myth of the fall of Sophia and her production of a faulty creator-god, to whom we can assign responsibility for the ills of the world we inhabit. He thus also assigned the work the alternative title, Against Those Who Say That the Universe and Its Maker Are Evil.¹ When we recall data culled from philosophical and sophistic sources about the sociopolitical environment of elite education, Porphyry’s remarks thus allow the closest look we can get at a particular group of Gnostics, and the sort of cultural seas they must have navigated in order to arrive at a circle like that of Plotinus. Yet while Porphyry’s testimony tells us a great deal about their background and the radical nature of their invocation of alien, oriental authorities in the context of Hellenism, it tells us little about the other doctrines to which these Gnostics—and their apocalypses—subscribed. Indeed, Porphyry says nothing about the content of the Sethian works other than their pseudepigraphic claims to ancient, alien authority.

Here we must turn to Plotinus and the Sethian texts themselves. It is worth pausing to review Plotinus’s polemic before proceeding to read it against the Sethian literature and other contemporary Platonic literature. The treatise—his thirty-third composition and the ninth tractate in the second partition of his collected works, arranged by Porphyry as six groups of nine (hence their title: the Enneads, Gk. “nines”)—is famously technical and difficult, and comprehensive scholarly treatments of it are specialized and uncommon. Yet it is also difficult to read in isolation, being the last segment of the so-called Großschrift, a hypothetical “long treatise” cut into four pieces by Porphyry to fit his enneadic schema of Plotinus’s corpus.² Even beyond the Großschrift, the entire Plotinian corpus could be seen as a witness to Plotinus’s encounter with Gnosticism, and some have thus cast his thought in toto along the lines of their interpretation of this encounter.³ In the interests of practicality, this chapter will focus only on Ennead 2.9 in particular as Plotinus’s singular address to his Gnostic interlocutors, while referring when necessary to the rest of the Enneads and especially the Großschrift. Even this relatively restricted analysis, however, shows that he was not only concerned with his opponents’ constructions of cultic identity and revelatory authority but also with very specific ideas they had about cosmology, soteriology, and eschatology. In each case, he holds, their philosophy breaks up the unity of the cosmos, introducing separation and alienation where he sees only continuity, a practice culminating, appropriately, in their own alienation from their fellow humanity and the (Hellenic) traditions that inspire them.

AGAINST THE GNOSTIC COSMOS

Unfortunately, Plotinus’s discussion of Gnostic thought often seems to hide more than it reveals. He usually states a conclusion his opponents have reached and his (angry) response to it, without stating what arguments motivate both sides; the reader, hoping for a more full picture, must then sketch in various complex philosophical arguments between the lines. Nowhere is this more so than in the first ten chapters of Ennead 2.9, which plunge the reader into the middle of a series of polemics on seemingly unrelated topics: the number of divine intellects, the eternity of produced matter, the decline of the (World)-Soul, and the story of the Soul’s creation of the cosmos.⁴ However, each of these issues circulates around the problem of the creative activity of the undescended Soul—the entity mediating the divine Intellect and the physical cosmos, of which the individual soul, mediating a person’s intellect and physical body, is a microcosm—with respect to time and narrative, the eternity of the world, and the character of its author.

This is not easy to see, because when Plotinus talks about the problem of creation, he phrases it in his own characteristic terms as the problem of the Soul’s ability to create a good world, which for him is intrinsically bound with its character as an inhabitant of heaven along with divine Intellect. The Gnostics, he says, describe a “Soul” whose creation is bad because of a “descent” into matter, thus tainting its creative activity. Yet it is difficult to tell which characters in the Gnostic cosmogonic drama he is speaking about. Sometimes, he specifies arguments commonly made by Hellenistic thinkers to criticize the anthropomorphism of the demiurge’s portrait in Plato’s Timaeus, so he has none other in mind than the ambivalent, faulty demiurge of Gnostic myth, who crafts a deficient, even evil cosmos. Yet at other times he refers to the “decline” of the Gnostic “Soul,” apparently meaning the story of the fall of Sophia, the mother of the demiurge. As we will see, he even (quite possibly in bad faith) accuses his opponents of conflating these characters in just this confusing way.

It is worth pausing here to briefly recount a classic variant of this story, presented in a particularly famous (and Sethianized) text known as the Apocryphon of John.5 The story begins with a description of the transcendent first principle, the “Father,” or “Invisible Spirit.” Gazing into himself in the primordial water, his thought produces a divine Mother, the “Barbelo,” the second, generative, principle from which the rest of reality is born.⁶ With the “consent” of the Father, the Barbelo produces two quintets of aeons (Gk. “eternities”). (Here, as often in Gnostic literature, the divisions of salvation history into periods, or “aeons,” is reflected in the atemporal celestial topography, where aeons seem to be beings or places that emanate from God as the eternal paradigm of the drama that plays out on earth as its reflection.)⁷ Finally, the Father and Barbelo produce another principle, their Son, the Autogenes (“self-begotten”), an image of its parent. The Invisible Spirit anoints him and grants him authority. The Autogenes produces the Four Luminaries common to Sethian lore (Harmozel, Oroiael, Davithai, and Eleleth), who in turn produce twelve aeons, one of which is Sophia (“wisdom”).

Sophia desires to imitate the beings from which she has sprung—she desires to produce—but, unlike the Barbelo, does so without the “consent” of the Father. Her creation is thus the misshapen, blind god Yaldabaoth, who with his angels creates the material universe and then mankind, beginning with Adam and Eve. Poor Sophia, meanwhile, repents. In order to recover the creative power that Yaldabaoth has stolen from her, she is able with the help of the superior powers to trick her son into passing this power into Adam. This spark of divinity is passed on to Adam and Eve’s third son, Seth, from whom Gnostic humanity is descended—aliens to the world of Yaldabaoth, but akin to their Father, the Invisible Spirit, itself alien to the planet they inhabit. Yet the elect have forgotten their divine identity because of Yaldabaoth’s minions, who torment them, exploiting the weakness and ignorance that accompany corporeal existence. Thankfully, a savior descends to humanity to preach the origins of man and the cosmos, expose Yaldabaoth and his powers as false gods, and thereby lend human beings knowledge of its source, the hitherto unknown, alien God. This knowledge is tantamount to salvation.

At first sight, it is then puzzling that Plotinus begins his response to this myth (and those who adhere to it) by ridiculing the doctrine of dual intellects (one unparticipatory, one participatory), one of Numenius’s odder ideas, not extant in any Gnostic text.⁸ His reason can only be that he wishes to emphasize the coherence of the three hypostases of his metaphysical system: One, Intellect, and Soul.⁹ For Plotinus, the cosmic Soul, as a direct image of the Intellect, has direct access to it and dwells with it in the heavens; in turn, the various human, animal, and vegetative souls here on earth (which together compose the hypostasis of cosmic Soul) are in direct touch with their intellects (which together compose the hypostasis of celestial Intellect). He sees the possibility of there being two or more intellects in the metaphysical world as an unnecessary introduction of intermediaries between members of this triad of hypostases, which will lead to an infinite and absurd production of intelligible entities, or worse a decline of one of the hypostases.¹⁰ Thus, the proliferation of a multitude of divine entities (familiar to even the casual reader of Gnostic texts) disturbs the hierarchy of intelligible beings and could even lead to the mistaken notion that the soul descends.

His same concern with the maintenance of the intelligible hierarchy and the undescended Soul motivates his next topic, the eternity of illuminated matter. In an especially dense passage, he argues that:

If anyone says that it will be dissolved into matter, why should he not also say that matter will be dissolved? But if he is going to say that, what necessity was there, we shall reply, for it to come into being? But if they are going to assert that it was necessary for it to come into being as a consequence of the existence of higher principles, the necessity is there now as well. But if matter is going to remain alone, the divine principles will not be everywhere but in a particular limited place; they will be, so to speak, walled off from matter; but if this is impossible, matter will be illuminated by them.¹¹

The context of this somewhat oblique argument is the proper order of derivation of the various strata of existence, and their eternity. The position that Plotinus defends at the end of the passage is the eternal generation, existence, and illumination (by Soul) of matter and its eternal, unchanging illumination by Soul.¹²

Like the discussion of dual intellect, the insertion of this difficult problem seems tangential but is in fact relevant, because it addresses the eternal creative activity of Soul and thus the production of a good, eternal world. For Plotinus, the nature of Soul is to create,¹³ so it eternally generates and illuminates matter; yet matter is an absence of being and thus of goodness and reality.¹⁴ Why would Soul (or, by extension, a demiurge), which is good, produce and illuminate something that is bad? The Gnostics argue, he says, that the badness of the created object must imply some lapse of judgment on the part of the creator. Plotinus proposes instead that the Soul’s production of something unequivocally bad nonetheless must have been in this case a positive thing; because the Soul, undescended, eternally illuminates matter and thus bestows good on it without being part of it, Plotinus can assert the positive nature of the inhabited world and the eternal nature of this goodness while acknowledging the badness of matter, instead of ascribing badness to both its creator and what is created from it.¹⁵

Keeping in mind Plotinus’s attention to preserving the undescended nature of the Soul in these opening chapters, his turn in chapter 4 to the topic of the Soul, its fall, and its demiurgic function is not so much jarring as it is tardy.¹⁶ “If,” he asks, “they (i.e., my Gnostic opponents) are going to say that it (the Soul) simply failed (σφαλεῖσαν), let them tell us the cause of the failure (σφάλματος … τὴν αἰτίαν).”¹⁷ Plotinus is determined to show that the creation and its creator are good, not an error or “failure” or fall from heaven; or in his parlance that “Soul is not a declination (νεῦσιν), but rather a non-declination.”¹⁸ He thus sets up a series of reductiones ad absurdum: a decline took place either in time or outside time; neither is possible.¹⁹ If Soul declined, it must have forgotten the intelligibles; but then it wouldn’t be a demiurge anymore, since Plato says in his Timaeus the demiurge creates with reference to the intelligible forms.²⁰ If it does remember, then it does not decline. (See Figure 1 for a visual illustration of these ideas.)

Figure 1. Plotinus on Neoplatonic and Gnostic Creation

Plotinus shifts gears, beginning to mock his opponents’ anthropomorphic view of the creator, assserting that the demiurge did not create “in order to be honored” (ἵνα τιμῷτο).²¹ More specifically, the demiurge did not create “through discursive (i.e., temporal, language-based) reasoning (διανοία).” He continues, asking, “when is he (the creator) going to destroy it (the cosmos)? For if he was sorry he had made it, what is he waiting for?”²² As is well known, Plotinus here attacks his opponents along established lines of later Platonic defense of the Timaeus from Epicurean and Skeptic critics, who mocked the dialogue’s account on the grounds of its crude anthropomorphism.²³ Middle Platonists responded by simply ceasing to read it literally.²⁴ Plotinus goes further in arguing that creative activity (ποίησις) occurs through the faculty of contemplation (θεωρία), not temporal, discursive reasoning (διανοία), which yields hesitation and, ultimately, all too human error.²⁵ Here, then, the Gnostic view of the demiurge closely coheres with the caricature of the Timaeus sketched by Hellenistic foes of Plato. However, just as with the problem of the generation of matter, Plotinus is perturbed by the problem of creation and destruction of the world in time and its implications for the character of the demiurge: why would he destroy the world unless he regretted making it, and what kind of creator is that?²⁶ Moreover, if the world was created in time, then it must have been planned with temporal, discursive reasoning, which, as we have already seen, Plotinus found unacceptable.²⁷

The same criticisms of the Gnostic conception of the demiurge lie behind his ongoing polemic about the Soul’s creative activity. He repeats many of the same points: the Gnostics do not understand (οὐ συνέντες) Timaeus 39b and thus falsify (καταψεύδονται) Plato’s account of cosmogony.²⁸ The Gnostics, he continues, confuse the identity of the maker: sometimes it is the Soul, sometimes the discursive (διανοούμενον) Intellect, again perhaps exploiting the ambiguity between the characters of the demiurge and Sophia when they are conflated as the creative, Plotinian Soul.²⁹ Censuring the director of the world, he says, they identify it with the Soul, and so attribute to it the passions of incarnate souls.³⁰ Similar critiques are levied in chapter 8: by asking why the creation happened at all, the Gnostics misunderstand the essence of Soul itself, that is, creation via contemplation (θεωρία).³¹ This misunderstanding, again, stems from the confused presupposition that the world is not eternal.³²

Plotinus’s objections—and his willingness to exploit the confusion between the characters in the Gnostic drama—are most clear in his summary of the Gnostic narrative of the “decline” of the Soul. He calls this doctrine “that one point which surpasses all the rest of their doctrine in absurdity (ἀτοπία)” (10.19–35): “For they say that Soul declined to what was below it, and with it some sort of ‘Wisdom’ (Gk. ‘Sophia’), whether Soul started it or whether Wisdom was a cause of Soul being like this, or whether they mean both to be the same thing, and then they tell us that the other souls came down too, and as members of Wisdom put on bodies, human bodies for instance.”³³ Next, Plotinus describes a different version of the Gnostic fall of Sophia, probably quoting from a version of Zostrianos:³⁴

But again they say that very being for the sake of which these souls came down did not come down itself, did not decline, so to put it, but only illuminated the darkness, and so a reflection (εἴδωλον) from it came into existence in matter. Then they fabricate an image of the image (εἰδώλου εἴδωλον πλάσαντες) somewhere here below, through matter or materiality or whatever they like to call it—they use now one name and now another, and say many other names just to make their meaning obscure—and produce what they call the Maker, and make him revolt from his mother and drag the universe which proceeds from him down to the ultimate limit of reflections (έπ’ ἔσχατα ειδώλων). The man who wrote this just meant to be blasphemous!³⁵

Plotinus counters both versions. With reference to the first, he simply disagrees that the Soul descended;³⁶ instead, it stays above.³⁷ Without a descent, then, Soul creates the world, and, with souls, enters it. This entrance is described variously in the Enneads; in one early treatise, it is a “self-willed gliding downward” that is freely made but also necessary, since the world’s body must be inhabited by a soul (Plat. Tim. 34b8).³⁸ But, he emphasizes, this is not a “descent to the below and away from contemplation,” although it does have a sense of “audacity” (τόλμα).³⁹

The second version—that Soul did not decline but illuminated the darkness—is actually largely in agreement with Plotinus.⁴⁰ Consequently, he does not have much of an answer for it, instead (somewhat unfairly) conflating the two myths, and moving on to a critique of the demiurge himself: the craftsman of the Gnostic narrative is not much of a craftsman at all.⁴¹ It works with reference to a mere “image of an image” of reality, hardly a fitting blueprint for the world.⁴² Again, the temporality of the events in the myth is an issue: why would a demiurge wait to produce with images? How would it know an image by memory if it has only just been born, an ontological level below the image?⁴³

Plotinus’s disagreement with the Gnostics in these chapters clearly stems from a disagreement about the composition of the World-Soul, its relationship to time and to matter, and the logistics of its creative activity. Plotinus’s position is unsatisfying to readers ancient and modern, but the issue strikes at the heart of his thought.⁴⁴ For Plotinus, as for Aristotle, philosophy begins with the individual soul’s wonder about the origin of the world, leading to questions about its creation that blaze the path into Intellect and ascent to its ultimate source, the One.⁴⁵ Thus, the problem of the world’s creation must be treated respectfully and produce an answer worthy of the dignity of the life of the mind. Plotinus never explicitly attacks Gnostic aetiology and eschatology, but many of his jabs clearly show that he recognizes, and disapproves of, the idea that the world has a beginning and an end. Second, like Porphyry after him, Plotinus invokes the language of literary criticism to tar the Gnostic account of creation with the lowest possible philosophical categories used for production, imitation, and image. Philosophically speaking, the central debate of the first ten chapters of Ennead 2.9 concerns the Soul; however, the argument is consistently framed with reference to creation, temporality, and narrative imagery.

AGAINST THE GNOSTIC SAVIOR

The makeup of the Soul and its relationship to creative activity and time is inextricable from matters of physics and practical philosophy.⁴⁶ Most immediate is the issue of theodicy.⁴⁷ Plotinus accuses his opponents of wishing the world to be not just an image of the intelligible but the intelligible itself;⁴⁸ this is impossible, since the One must extend itself as far as possible, even, via the Soul, into an image of itself in the spatiotemporal realm.⁴⁹ Thus, we live in the best possible world, an “image (εἰκών)” of reality without an evil origin, despite the “many unpleasant things in it.”⁵⁰ Such Panglossian indifference to inequality and human suffering, emphasized by his opponents, has surprised scholars by its “pitilessness.”⁵¹ But, for Plotinus, one must not “despise (καταφρονεῖν) the universe” but look to the whole order of beings, and, in this greater order, there is the greater good.⁵² Later in the treatise, the same argument will be deployed to defend the traditional civic cult: despising the universe is tantamount to despising the gods in it, and that is just what makes someone bad (κακός).⁵³

References to this “order in succession” (τάξις τῶν εφεξῆς),⁵⁴ contrasted with the break in the cosmos described in the classic Gnostic myth of the fall of Sophia, litter the Enneads.55 As Plotinus notes in his discussion of matter, “of necessity, then, all things must exist forever in ordered dependence on one another,” and this includes the “unpleasantries.”⁵⁶ More contested and central to the administration of the cosmos than the banal injustices of daily life are the stars, whose goodness Plotinus expends considerable energy defending.

While his opponents esteem themselves superior to the planetary deities, he proclaims that the celestial bodies are good gods, have virtue, and are irrefutable evidence of a beautiful divine order that is not to be feared but imitated.⁵⁷ “They are essential to the completeness of the All and are important parts of the All,” Plotinus argues.⁵⁸ What he means is that the stars order the cosmos; more specifically, while they do not determine our fates,⁵⁹ they transmit providential care to the subintelligible: “Every soul is a child of That Father. And there are souls in (the heavenly bodies) too, and intelligent and good ones, much more closely in touch with the beings of the higher world than our souls are. How could this universe exist if it was cut off from that other world? How could the gods be in it? But we spoke of this before, too: our point is now that because they despise (καταφρονοῦντες) the kindred of those higher realities, also, they do not know the higher beings either but only talk as if they did.”⁶⁰ Several arguments are embedded in this transitional passage. First, the heavenly beings ontologically link the subintelligible to the supramundane.⁶¹ Consequently, knowledge of the heavens is transmitted through them. Thus, by rejecting the stellar deities, the Gnostics have no knowledge of what lies beyond them.

Plotinus’s opposition to Gnostic violation of the cosmic hierarchy, both with respect to theodicy and the administration of providence, is directly incumbent on the issue of soteriology, to which he immediately turns: “Then, another point, what piety is there in denying that providence extends to this world and to anything and everything? And how are they consistent with themselves in this denial? For they say that God does care providentially for them, and them alone.”⁶² For Plotinus, this view is philosophically unpalatable because it violates the modulated hierarchy of beings: the Gnostics do not know their place. They exalt themselves, set themselves separately above Intellect, claim to be “sons of God”⁶³—but on the contrary, providence extends not to separate parts (individual, special humans) but unified wholes (all of humanity).⁶⁴ Second, this leads them to reject “the beings received from tradition (έκ πατέρων).”⁶⁵ For Plotinus, Hellenic tradition emphasizes the unity of the cosmos with all of humanity;⁶⁶ he wishes to defend the traditional, civic Greek cult, which is precluded by these exclusive claims to salvation.⁶⁷ Third, such claims presume an incoherent psychology, making an unsupportable distinction between “true,” elect souls and false, “reflections” (εἴδωλα)” of souls, the non-elect.⁶⁸ In contrast, Plotinian salvation is universally accessible to all those who imbibe Hellenic learning (παιδεία).⁶⁹ As noted by Arthur Hilary Armstrong, Plotinus’s criticism may have particular Gnostics in mind, but it extends to “all those who make the characteristic claim of Abrahamic religion to be the elect, the people of God, with a particular and exclusive revelation from him which causes them to reject the traditional pieties.”⁷⁰

Finally, Plotinus moves from physics to ethics. At first glance, it is tempting to differentiate the Gnostics of 2.9 [33] from (proto)-orthodox Christians on the basis of Plotinus’s accusations of moral libertinism and general lack of interest in ethical philosophy.⁷¹ However, his account of Gnostic libertinism is no more valid than the lurid descriptions, probably false, of a Clement or Epiphanius.⁷² Rather, his opponents’ rejection of the civic cult is tantamount in his mind to atheism. Together with the doctrine of elect soteriology (mutually exclusive with his view on providence), it thus merits a tarring with the brush of Epicureanism.⁷³ Moreover, he says that they do not compose treatises on virtue. This indifference to ethical matters puts them out of order with the hierarchy yet again, this time not with the hierarchy of the cosmos but with a philosophical approach to it: virtue precedes and even reveals God, not the other way around.⁷⁴

Much as the debate over the composition of the World-Soul and its demiurgic activity presumed a rejection of Gnostic temporality and narrative imagery, these arguments over theodicy, soteriology, and ethics presume that the Gnostics failed to ascertain the proper location of divinity, its transmission, and how people show evidence of interaction with it. Multiplying needless intermediary entities, the Gnostics reject the entities that are actually necessary for the dissemination of providence (the stars), asserting that they have a special access to God via theophanies that exist outside the proper order of the universe. The ramifications of this axiom of divine theophany extend to a criminal soteriology, empty ethics, and, ultimately, pedagogy antithetical to the philosophical enterprise and its Hellenic heritage.

AGAINST THE GNOSTIC TRADITION

The beginning and end of Ennead 2.9. [33] 6 is worthy of special attention, because Plotinus embeds his discussion of the Gnostic World-Soul in various criticisms of the relationship between the Gnostics and Hellenic philosophical tradition. Scholars generally agree he is concerned with maintaining the integrity of Hellenic pedagogy against oriental “alien balderdash.”⁷⁵ However unfairly, Plotinus here attempts to characterize the Gnostics as thinkers who initiate, not teach, and for him, this is not philosophy, but dangerous authoritarianism.

At the beginning of the chapter, he deplores the introduction of the subintelligible aeons of the Sojourn, Repentance, and Aeonic Copies (discussed in extant passages of Zostrianos and the Untitled Treatise).⁷⁶ These are “the terms of people inventing a new jargon to recommend their own school (εἰς σύστασιν τῆς ἰδίας αἱρέσεως). They contrive this meretricious language as if they had no connection with the ancient Hellenic school (τῆς ἀρχαίας Ἑλληνικῆς), though the Hellenes knew all this and knew it clearly, and spoke without delusive pomposity (ἀτύφως) of ascents (ἀναβἀσεις) from the cave and advancing gradually closer and closer to a truer vision (τὴν θέαν ἀληθέστεραν).”⁷⁷ He continues: some of their ideas “have been taken from Plato but others, all the new ideas they have brought in to establish a philosophy of their own, are things they found outside the truth. For the judgments (δίκαι)⁷⁸ too, and the rivers in Hades and the reincarnations come from Plato. And the making a plurality in the intelligible world, Being, and Intellect, and the Maker different, and Soul, is taken from the words in the Timaeus (39e)…. They themselves have received what is good in what they say (about) the immortality of the soul, the intelligible universe, the first god, the necessity for the soul to shun fellowship with the body, the separation from the body, the escape from becoming to being, for these doctrines are there in Plato.”⁷⁹ The Platonic background of the Gnostics is not in question for Plotinus; nonetheless, they have founded their own school (αἵρεσις) by coining their own terminology to supplement the venerable teaching of Plato. What they add, however, sullies this teaching: useless subintelligible hypostases, and an incoherent doctrine of the World-Soul and the Demiurge. Moreover, much of what they take from Plato they misuse, especially with respect to the human soul’s fallen nature and the worth of the body.⁸⁰ Finally, they justify the deviations from Plato by claiming that he and the “blessed philosophers” had no real knowledge of the intelligible nature (τὴν νοητὴν φύσιν), “ridiculing and insulting the Greeks … and saying that they are better than them,” and “hunting fame by censuring men who have been judged good from ancient times by men of worth.”⁸¹

Plotinus defends not only the philosophers’ teaching on the composition of the intelligible world but also their mode of speech and pedagogy. The ancient Hellenes speak in a way “appropriate for the educated (πεπαιδευμένως).”⁸² By contrast, the Gnostics need to learn to discourse courteously and philosophically (εὐμενῶς καὶ φιλοσόφως) and fairly (δικαίως), to learn with good will (εὐγνωμόνως).⁸³ Bestowing membership in the elect, they say their “gnosis” is “cultured (πεπεαιδυμένης) and harmonious,” that they alone are capable of contemplation (while deviating from Plotinus’s sense of the term) and “worthy of honor” on the basis of their souls.⁸⁴ Instead, they’re stupid (ἀνόητοι), speaking provincially (ἀγροικιζόμενος).⁸⁵ With audacity (αὐθάδεια), they make “arrogant assertions” without proofs (ἀποδείξεις).⁸⁶ Twice, he says that since they do not argue like philosophers, “another way of writing” (ἄλλου ὄντος τρόπου) would be more appropriate to respond to them, and that he will quit describing their doctrines; and, twice he breaks his resolve by denigrating them anew.⁸⁷

CONCLUSION: WITH “FRIENDS” LIKE THAT … (A THICKER DESCRIPTION)

Aside from the two versions of the Sophia myth and his paraphrases of positions on cosmology, theodicy, and other philosophical topics, Plotinus tells the reader little about what his opponents actually think or believe. He does not give any references to their extra-Hellenic sources. He does not explain who his opponents say they are or where they came from. Nonetheless, the contours of Ennead 2.9 tell us a bit about his opponents, and this is firmly in agreement with Porphyry’s evidence: they are steeped in Greek thought, and even identify with it, while deviating from it in significant ways. The most significant departure concerns the World-Soul and its demiurgic function, from which follow a number of un-Hellenic doctrines, including a cosmos created by an evil demiurge who wishes to destroy it, and which is engineered by malevolent stellar deities. Its illogical providential model transmits salvation to an elect few, who have a concept of salvation that is not earned as much as bestowed by an authority that rejects the cultic and intellectual traditions of Hellenism. It is a disordered universe, dreamt by disordered men who feel alien to it. Plotinus’s critique is that of a conservative.

Reading Plotinus’s works in conjunction with Porphyry’s evidence, scholars have hypothesized numerous sectarian identities for the Gnostics of Ennead 2.9. Valentinians have been contenders for several reasons: the prominence of the school in Rome, the similarity of Plotinus’s account of the fall of Sophia to that given by Valentinians, and perhaps most importantly the relative plenitude of evidence about Valentinians prior to the Nag Hammadi discovery.⁸⁸ The surfacing of Sethian rather than Valentinian texts with the titles of treatises mentioned by Porphyry has mitigated this hypothesis.⁸⁹ Other groups associated with Sethian tradition have also been suggested, such as the Barbelo-Gnostics known to Irenaeus or the Archontics.⁹⁰ Earlier scholarship suggested a pagan Gnostic group, reading Porphyry’s evidence as referring to “Christians and others (belonging to non-Christian groups).”⁹¹ Other contenders include the followers of one Alcibiades, who brought an “Apocalypse of Elchasai” from Syrian baptismal groups to Rome in the early third century CE, inspired by Pope Callistus I’s support for second baptism for the remission of new sins—a thesis that is revisited in the conclusion.⁹²

Based on the reading of evidence presented in this chapter, it is impossible to distinguish whether these Gnostics were Valentinians, Sethians, Barbelo-Gnostics, or Elchasaites, but it would be unlikely that they were Hellenes. An objection to this view is that if Plotinus’s opponents were Christians, why did not he simply say so, as Celsus and Porphyry did in their polemical works? Yet it is not clear that Plotinus would have been able to recognize a Christian. As a longtime resident of Alexandria, he must have been familiar with Christian intellectuals like the Valentinians or the catechetical school of Clement and Origen.⁹³ As a longtime Platonist, he could have been familiar with Celsus’s critique of Christianity or with Numenius’s quip about the “Attic Moses.”⁹⁴ Despite all this, there is no explicit evidence in his corpus of any knowledge of Christianity, and therefore such knowledge cannot be assured.⁹⁵

Another factor is the question of how well Plotinus knew his opponents. In this context, it is worthwhile recalling the following passage from Against the Gnostics: “We feel a certain regard for some of our friends (φίλοι) [italics mine] who happened upon this way of thinking before they became our friends, and, though I do not know how they manage it, continue in it.… But we have addressed what we have said so far to our own intimate pupils, not to them (for we could make no further progress towards convincing them), so that they might not be troubled by these latter, who do not bring forward proofs—how could they?—but make arbitrary, arrogant assertions. Another way of writing would be appropriate to repel (them).”⁹⁶ Did Plotinus have Christian “friends”? Apparently so, and he considered them to be “votaries of Plato”;⁹⁷ the problem is that they were also votaries of much else. If the evidence from Porphyry’s Vita Plotini chapter 16 about Aculinus can be squared with Eunapius, Mark J. Edwards is most likely correct that Plotinus here attacks the Platonism of Gnostic colleagues from the circle of his old teacher in Alexandria, Ammonius Saccas. These colleagues were with him in Rome around the same time as Porphyry (ca. 263 CE), at a time when the group focused on discussing the makeup of the Soul and the intelligible world, just the topics that occupy the bulk of Against the Gnostics.⁹⁸ Therefore, the gulf between the Gnostic and Hellenic parties extended far beyond the single issue of authority, which then turned on the Christian invocation of Jewish seers against the speculations of the divine Plato.⁹⁹

His polemic also allows us to “thicken” the description determined in Chapter 1 of his Christian “friends.” Plotinus sharply criticizes them for “despising” the world instead of engaging it politically, which in turn leads them to reject the civic cult and festivities, worship of “the beings received from the tradition of our fathers.”¹⁰⁰ Considering the close proximity of philosophers and sophists to political power (as discussed in Chapter 1), his claim that the Gnostics thumbed their noses at current events is striking. Moreover, despite their claim that their teaching is philosophical (πεπαιδευμένης), Plotinus says they are stupid (ἀνόητοι) and that they speak like bumpkins (ἀγροικιζόμενος), that is, not like Hellenes.¹⁰¹ What Plotinus means is not that they are incapable of engaging technical metaphysics (the evidence from Nag Hammadi, as we will see, demonstrates otherwise); rather, they eschew the contemporary culture of philosophy, a way of life that goes back to ancients like Pythagoras and that encourages civic and popular cultic activity.

The situation was exacerbated by the pseudepigraphic appeal to the authority of Judeo-Christian antediluvian sages in their apocalypses. Plotinus’s Gnostics seem to have adopted the auto-Orientalizing approach of the Hermetica and the Chaldean Oracles, entirely rejecting Hellenic claims to primeval wisdom. Like 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.