Weighing their knowledge of the Orient against this Platonic tradition, thinkers reached diverse conclusions about which authorities to prize, and articulated their choice in the language of Hellenic identity developed during the Second Sophistic. Plutarch, on the cusp of this movement, eschews the language of παιδεία when talking about Egyptian mythology; Dio Chrysostom and Celsus engage the “barbarian wisdom” of the Orient while distancing themselves from it; Numenius, Diogenes Laertius, Philostratus, and Porphyry, all deeply invested in the language of Hellenism, take care to defend the priority of its canon over the Orient. “Julianus” and “Hermes,” finally, ignore the Greeks altogether, attempting to validate themselves by auto-Orientalizing. A champion of both the Oracles and Hermetica, Iamblichus auto-Orientalized within the context of discussing Greek philosophy, identifying his views on psychology and the afterlife as those of “the ancients” (as in De anima), or posing as an Egyptian ritual expert (in De mysteriis) with the same authority as the masters of Plato and Pythagoras. We might, then, ask which of this diversity of positions on the relationship between Oriental and Hellenic wisdom we see articulated by Plotinus—and which by his Gnostics.
CONCLUSION: A “THICK DESCRIPTION” OF PLOTINUS’S GNOSTICS AND THEIR TEXTS
The first of the “revelations” Porphyry mentions as read by the Christian Gnostics was purportedly authored by the famous Persian sage Zoroaster. We cannot know the contents of his “apocalypse,” but the pseudepigraphic currency of the name “Zoroaster” was strong indeed, even in Jewish and Christian circles.237 The founder of the Persian cult was at times equated with Nimrod, apocalyptic seers such as Baruch, Jeremias, and Balaam, and even Seth himself.238 Porphyry’s remarks—this Zoroaster was “spurious and contemporary”—show that the pseudepigraphic identification of authority with sources both remote and antique was, to Plotinus’s group, offensive, deceptive, and futile.239
The other four figures are associated with extant Sethian apocalypses from Nag Hammadi, and with the world of intertestamental Judaism. “Zostrianos” was known to the Greeks as the grandfather of Zoroaster.240 While the narrative pericope of the Nag Hammadi text Zostrianos (NHC VIII,1) seems to describe the eponymous sage as growing up in a community of Greeks and renouncing his paternity for another race—the “seed of Seth”—he must have been associated, by virtue of his famous grandson, with Armenia and Persia.241 An Apocalypse of Nicotheus per se is not extant, but the name of the eponymous prophet is associated (in the Untitled Treatise found in the Bruce Codex) with the name Marsanes, which does adorn a Sethian apocalypse extant in Coptic (NHC X,1). Whether this treatise was present at Plotinus’s circle is uncertain, although the copy we know from Nag Hammadi shows signs of thought from the fourth century CE.242 The characters of both Nicotheus and Marsanes are present in the Untitled Treatise, exhibiting “powers” through which they achieve visions of the “only-begotten Son” of the Father that impress even the local angelic beings in heaven.243 The figure of Nicotheus possessed considerable pedigree in the world of the Jewish apocalypses; according to Mani, he was in the same league as S(h)em, Enosh, and Enoch.244 “Hidden” and “unable to be found,” he was also associated by the fourth-century alchemist Zosimus of Panopolis with Zoroaster, Hermes, and others, as a mediator of knowledge about the celestial Adam.245 “Marsanios” (certainly another form of the name “Marsanes”) was known to Epiphanius as an Archontic (Gnostic) prophet who was “snatched up into heaven for three days.”246 Unlike that of Nicotheus, it is possible that his name is Semitic.247 Both figures thus recall contemporary Jewish traditions of rapt antediluvian seers.248
A Jewish background is also indicated for the treatises assigned to Allogenes and Messos. “Allogenes” is a common Hellenistic Jewish word for a “stranger” or “alien or foreigner,” for Seth, and apparently a common title for texts circulated by the fourth-century Gnostics known as the Archontics.249 As Epiphanius writes, “(the Archontics) have also portrayed certain books, some written in the name of Seth and others written in the name of Seth and his seven sons, as having been given by him. For they say that he bore seven <sons>, called ‘foreigners’—as we noted in the case of other schools of thought, viz. gnostics and Sethians.”250 It is impossible to say whether the treatises he mentioned are related to the Apocalypse of Allogenes known to Porphyry.251
“Messos” is a name extant elsewhere only in the Sethian apocalypse from Nag Hammadi entitled Allogenes (NHC XI,3), appearing when the eponymous protagonist addresses the reader as “Messos, my son.”252 There is no extant work entitled “Messos,” but the possibility of an existence of one in Plotinus’s circle cannot be ruled out.
For Porphyry, then, the source of the controversy between Plotinus and the local Christian “Gnostics” was the problem of how to weigh the authority of Plato against those of Jewish antediluvian sages and the apocalypses that bore their names. On the one hand, the adherents of Aculinus and others were educated interpreters of Plato. On the other hand, they thought that Plato was simply one of many teachers, some of whom were more ancient, geographically remote (i.e., Oriental), and hence more authoritative. Each of these teachers was associated with Judaism and Christianity, and, in several cases—Zostrianos, Allogenes, and Nicotheus—with extant, Platonizing Sethian apocalypses from Nag Hammadi.253
What this data shows is that the invocation of foreign, alien revelations in a group like Plotinus’s was sure to raise a few eyebrows, if not start a firestorm. Philosophers and sophists of the period, and it appears Gnostic thinkers as well, were male elites from wealthy backgrounds deeply invested in the prevailing socioeconomic order. Public participation in political affairs and observance of the civic cult were expected. Yet the framing, common to scholarship, of Gnostic mythos as inspired by (usually Jewish) revolt against the Romans clashes with the privileged social context that highly educated Gnostics moved in.254 Rather, Gnostic myth recognizes and inverts the hierarchy that nurtured such privileged groups;255 this inversion took place alongside the parallel development, within Sophistic and Platonic circles, of different ways of conceiving the Orient as a source of primordial wisdom—Platonic Orientalism. Many Orientalizing authors simultaneously fetishize and subordinate the status of Eastern sources to the authority of Plato and Pythagoras. Yet select groups, including Gnostics, preferred to “auto-Orientalize,” conjuring a visage of the East around their thought in order to differentiate themselves from, and even polemicize and rebel against, the Hellenophile environment of the Second Sophistic.256 The Gnostics with their apocalypses voiced this latter perspective, appearing hostile to Hellenism. Viewed against the backdrop of skirmishes over the value of Oriental authorities in the context of Greek thought, we see that Porphyry understood the Christian Gnostics to be firing shots in what would become a culture war.
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