# Introduction ## Porphyry of Tyre on Theology and Theurgy Introduction Fabien Muller ![Blue Rectangle](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/styles/hwp_21_9__1920x825/public/2025-01/Screen%20Shot%202025-01-22%20at%204.46.20%20PM.png?itok=0fG7fqHu) Excerpt ## General Introduction ![Painting of Porphyry](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/styles/hwp_1_1__720x720_scale/public/2025-09/Porphyrios_Sucevita_Fresco_%28cropped%29%20%281%29.jpg?itok=rNTA3f1S) Porphyry, detail of the Tree of Jesse, the left one in the row of Greek philosophers, Sucevita Monastery, 1535. SOURCE: WIKICOMMONSThis volume brings together two texts of the ancient philosopher Porphyry of Tyre (c. 234–305 AD): the *Letter to Anebo* and the *Philosophy from Oracles*. The question discussed in both texts is whether a virtuous and happy life – that is, a life determined by what Greek philosophers considered truth – is best attained through philosophy, religious practice, or a combination of both. While the original texts were written in Greek, those texts are now lost, which means that the only way for us to know what Porphyry said in them is to draw from other texts that quote them or refer to them indirectly.\[1\] The challenge posed by that loss is that the texts’ original context is irrecoverable, forcing us to rely on second-hand accounts to reconstruct their arguments and logic. To some extent, we will never be able to obtain Porphyry’s own answer to the questions that arise due to the incomplete state of the fragments. We can, however, attempt to use the extant fragments and their connection to other texts as a roadmap to the debates in ancient philosophy and religion, discover how Porphyry positions himself in those debates, and more generally, identify what he has to say about the philosophical debates on the role of religion in human life. The goal of the present introduction, as well as of the translation and commentary, is to set up a basic framework for this approach. I begin this introduction by looking at the historical origin of the questions that Porphyry addresses in the translated texts. Since these questions are connected to earlier layers of ancient Greek philosophy, it is useful to first identify some representative antecedents and reconstruct the way that Porphyry’s philosophy builds on that of his predecessors. Second, I survey the environment of late ancient Neoplatonism, the philosophical tradition to which Porphyry belongs. Third, since Porphyry’s most important influences come from Plotinus, the founder of Neoplatonism, I outline the fundamentals of Plotinus’s metaphysics as articulated in the Enneads, the texts that Porphyry himself compiled and edited. Finally, I offer a brief introduction to Porphyry’s biography and to the larger framework of his philosophy. At the very end of this introduction, I briefly summarize the topics that Porphyry addresses in the two texts, but I leave the main discussion for the translation and commentary sections. Among the many questions raised by scholarship on Porphyry, one requires particular attention: the two texts in this volume seem to arrive at different, partially irreconcilable conclusions. Porphyry suggests in the *Letter to Anebo* that religious practices such as divination and animal sacrifices are pointless. In the *Philosophy from Oracles*, however, he argues to the contrary, claiming that such practices are necessary for salvation. To explain this conflict, previous generations of scholars assumed that Porphyry wrote the *Philosophy from Oracle*s early in his life, when he was young and superstitious, and the *Letter to Anebo* after he had converted to rationalism. This thesis has been rejected by more recent scholars and superseded by more complex models of explanation. I shall mention some of these models below, but I will not attempt to resolve the issue or presume to offer a conclusive explanation. In the absence of the original texts, such an explanation will probably – as frustrating as this may be – remain impossible.\[2\] The most important contemporary scholars writing on Porphyry include Michael B. Simmons, Andrew Smith, Aaron P. Johnson, Anne Shepperd, George Karamanolis, Kevin Corrigan, Giuseppe Muscolino, and most recently, Pier F. Beatrice.\[3\] These scholars have engaged Porphyry’s work from various perspectives. For example, Simmons focuses on the idea of salvation and thinks that Porphyry’s main concern was to propose a soteriology complex enough to compete with that of Christian theology, which was gaining momentum and developing increasingly rich answers to the problems and tensions of human existence.In support of this thesis, he highlights the fact that Joseph Bidez, the first scholar to present Porphyry as a philosopher in his own right, also emphasized the central role of soteriology.\[4\] Smith on the other hand reconstructs Porphyry’s role in the history of Neoplatonism and sees in his work, in particular in his ideas on the soul, the beginning of a new chapter of Neoplatonic philosophy: post-Plotinian Neoplatonism. Beatrice’s monumental work, extensively reviewed by Ilaria Ramelli,\[5\] on whose work I will also draw, revisits the history of the transmission of Porphyry’s texts and questions the standard assumption that the *Philosophy from Oracles*, the *Letter to Anebo*, the treatise Against Christians, and other texts actually constitute separate writings. He argues that the latter texts were in reality part of the *Philosophy* that were detached from it by later authors. Beatrice advances a thesis similar to Simmons’s, namely, that Porphyry accepts that salvation can be achieved through different paths, and that one of these paths includes theurgic and embodied practices, while the other one consists in philosophical reflection and contemplation. While these approaches are viable and useful tools for understanding the history of ancient philosophy, I propose to focus – for the sake of making Porphyry accessible to the widest possible audience – on the tension between the philosophical pursuit of transcendence and concrete religious practice, as well as on the more general tension between philosophy and religion. This focus is more immediately approachable insofar as it relates to fundamental human aspirations such as the quest for universal truth, spiritual or religious insight, and happiness. Though religion and philosophy tend to address these aspirations in similar ways, they do it with different means and under different assumptions. Assessing Porphyry’s perspective on these differences will not only allow us to understand history better, but also to explore a potential answer to a perennial philosophical quest. One way to make sense of this issue and to understand Porphyry’s answer is to think about religion and philosophy as two mutually permeable and translatable practices. Philosophers can translate religious approaches into their own language and practice and vice versa. This approach was developed by Aaron Johnson, one of the twenty-first century’s greatest scholars of Porphyry, in his monumental monograph Religion and Identity in Porphyry of Tyre. In a review of Johnson’s book, Jaclyn Maxwell expresses her surprise that Johnson’s conclusion about the tensions in Porphyry’s work were not reached in earlier scholarship, despite its simplicity and clarity.\[6\] Johnson’s conclusion is that tensions arise only when we approach Porphyry’s texts with strong assumptions about his intellectual identity. If we assume that he is a rationalist philosopher, we will have to dismiss the *Philosophy from Oracles* as an irrelevant jugendschrift. If however we assume that he is fervently religious, the *Letter to Anebo* – and most of his other writings – appear unintelligible. Such disjunctive readings cannot succeed, Johnson argues. The only way to make sense of Porphyry’s writing is to read it contextually, as if he were thinking with his reader and within the context of the topics he engages. Discussing oracles, he finds a meaning in them; discussing the problems of Anebo’s allegedly Egyptian theology, he articulates objections and possible solutions; elaborating on Platonic principles, he sees no need to talk about religion at all. These are not philosophical contradictions but methodological choices, Johnson argues. However, as elegant as Johnson’s solution might seem, it does not abolish Porphyry’s commitment to a hierarchical vision of the paths leading to truth and to the superiority of what Beatrice calls “the doctrines and methods of the rational philosophy.”\[7\] Porphyry does not dismiss religious practice, but he definitely does not see it as an equivalent alternative to “rational philosophy,” either. The keynote of Porphyry’s philosophy is undeniably rational and philosophical. What Johnson brilliantly shows is that such a keynote does not necessarily lead to exclusivism but may yield productive ways of dealing with other forms of aspirations to ultimate reality. ## Ancient philosophy & the dilemma of transcendence In this section I want to take a step back and approach the problem of philosophy and religion in the context of ancient Greek thought. I offer a brief overview of various traditions that influenced the ways that ancient Greek philosophers theorized on that problem and build on these insights before proceeding to a more specific inquiry into Neoplatonism in the next section. Ancient Greek philosophy presents a profound ambiguity. Greek philosophers across many historical periods and traditions agreed that to “try to live as well as one can” – to quote Socrates’s famous confession in the Gorgias – one should make a habit of “practicing truth.”8 From early on, Greek philosophersthought the goal of human life was to cultivate the means to pursue truth, and that happiness can be found only through such a pursuit.\[9\] They did not think that this pursuit and the knowledge it generates were just one of many possible ways to attain happiness, but rather that they were something inscribed in human nature. The first statement in Aristotle’s Metaphysics – that “by nature, all men desire knowledge”\[10\] – may be read as a key idea spanning ancient traditions from early Platonism to late antiquity: Aspiring to the knowledge of truth is not a choice that one makes but a driving force inherent to the human mind – something that cannot be legitimately contested. On the one hand, this agreement on the pursuit or practice of truth suggests a certain optimism regarding the human condition. Since the essence of the human being lies in its intellect, and since nothing could exist in contradiction to its essence, there must be an essential connection between human nature, knowledge, truth, and happiness. Or to put it differently: If the human being is predetermined to pursue knowledge of truth, there must be –putting aside the pessimistic possibility that human nature is fundamentally flawed in desiring the unattainable – a certain point at which truth itself responds to that pursuit. There must be a point at which knowledge and truth converge. On the other hand, philosophers like Plato, Philo, and later Neoplatonists also agree that in its quest for ultimate truth, human intellect inevitably finds itself confronted with the realization that it remains separated from truth by an almost unbridgeable chasm. In fact, truth is not something the intellect could grasp with its ordinary tools. Some forms of truth can be discovered and articulated through discursive and conceptual means, such as empirical or scientific truth. But truth itself, or the highest form of truth – the truth of reality as a whole, as it subsists in and by itself – is not so easily identifiable. It withstands any single attempt to conceptualize it because it applies to all things at the same time, and it extends even beyond the realm of things – “beyond essence,” as Plato famously writes.11 If it is the truth abouteverything it cannot be made identical to any singular thing, and consequently, no specific act of knowledge or cognition can ever attain it. The very constitution of truth transcends any possible intentional act of understanding. Philosophers attempted to account for the elusiveness of truth by incorporating various pathways for transcendence into their systems. Heraclitus, for example, found truth in the ever-changing, ungraspable principle of the logos, which changes its shape according to the modalities of one’s approach. Plato thought of it in terms of a primordial principle conditioning reality and yet completely transcending it. In his eponymous dialogue, he has Parmenides attempt to describe that principle through a series of bewildering paradoxes. Aristotle sought it in the self-reflection of the divine mind, the thinking that is a “thinking of thinking”\[12\] – a notion with strong theological connotations that would shape, for example, medieval Christian philosophy. In the last period of ancient philosophy – a key moment in the development of Neoplatonism – the struggle to find absolute truth led to the development of a novel approach to philosophizing: the apophatic or negative method, which prefers to speak of God’s truth in terms of what it is not, i.e., through negation. Late ancient philosophers such as Damascius and Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite championed this method. Thus, while ancient philosophers were quite optimistic about the ability of the human mind to attain truth, they were also aware that the last step toward that attainment is obscure and difficult. Human knowledge can with effort access almost any singular truth about the world and particular things. But when it attempts to access more foundational forms of truth, that is – the truth about reality as a whole or the source of truth itself – it loses its grip. Truth as such is a prerequisite for all individual truths, but as it is different from all these singular truths, it must necessarily remain hidden, caught in a paradoxical state of simultaneous presence and transcendence – or, to paraphrase Heraclitus in an allusion to the Oracle at Delphi, truth is neither expressed directly nor hidden altogether but makes itself known through signs.13 The gap between signs and the singular signified truth can never be fully closed. This explains why, when ancient philosophers attempt to talk about ultimate forms of truth, they lapse into bewildering language, departing from the conventions of philosophical discourse and adopting religious or mythological language. The ambiguity of ancient Greek philosophy is that in its quest for lucidity and argumentation, it ends up verging on religion. Here I understand religion as the non-rationalizable discourse and practices to achieve a higher state of reality or ultimate form of knowledge. Using codified language, carrying out purificatory or expurgatory rites to overcome certain human limitations, explaining the world through dynamic relations of supernatural forces – these are examples of such discourse and practices. If philosophical truth requires a suprarational approach and cannot be spelled out in ordinary language, it seems that some other kind of effort – religious effort – is needed to overcome the gap between the finitude of human knowledge and the absoluteness of truth. The tension between discursive or rational practices and religion was not the manifestation of a certain zeitgeist or limited to a certain time but has characterized Greek philosophical thought throughout history.14 In their thinking and writing, Greek philosophers appear continuously haunted by the intuition that ultimately, their appeal to or knowledge of truth is rooted in something that escapes discursive assessment. I want to give just a few representative examples. As early as the sixth century BC, the above-mentioned Heraclitus compares God to a fire that “changes when it is combined with spices and named according to the pleasure each person finds in it.”\[15\] He thinks concrete forms of truth are ever-shifting and that nothing can ever be said about truth itself in a subject-independent way. Ultimately, he finds truth in the dynamic principle of relation that determines things with regard to their relation to other things, the principle he calls logos. To describe the logos, he uses obscure and occasionally poetic language. He intimates that it can be “named” (ὀνομάζεται) in various ways, according to the hypotheses one makes with respect to what it is, but that these names depend as much on the hypothetical choices one makes as on the logos itself. While Plato relies on dialectical reasoning throughout his oeuvre, he attributes the origin of that reasoning to the gods. In his dialogue Philebos, he presents the gods as models of pure intellectual life – the kind of life that humans should seek to imitate in their own realm.\[16\] Humans cannot realize this example to the full extent, however, because they are tied up with other conditions and existential limitations. In his explanation of the divine origins of dialectic, German philosopher Thomas Szlezák writes: “The mode of existence of the divine acts on the dialogue as a kind of conceptual threshold, through which the conditions that determine human existence can be more easily understood.”\[17\] The gods are capable of contemplating the eternal forms of things and thus live an accomplished life, in the shadow of which human life unfolds. Intellectual tools and labor are required to imitate that which the gods possess by nature. Plato’s dialogues abound in examples of how the limitations of human thought call for either an explanation transcending discursive or natural categories or some other kind of intervention from the gods. Diotima’s speech about the ascent to the divine in the Symposion (201d-212b), mythological narrations such as the myth of Er (Politeia 614b-621d) or the Timaeus’s “probable myth” of cosmic creation (as Szlezák translates τὸν εἰκότα μῦθον, 29d),18 and allegories using mythological images such as the soul chariot in the Phaedrus (245c-248e) blur the boundaries between the rational and the mythological language of religion. One of the most puzzling moments in Socrates’s life, as related by Plato, happens right before Socrates drinks from the cup of hemlock: He reminds his friends that they should not forget to sacrifice a cock for Asclepius.\[19\] Socrates’s last injunction does not concern philosophy but religious duty. The testimonies and fragments of Plato’s successors suggest that the first generations of philosophers in Plato’s Academy took these religious notes seriously. Speusippus engaged in a discussion around the first principles in their relation to God as intellect, beginning the long post-Platonic tradition of the theory of principles, which is inseparable from Platonic theology.\[20\] Xenocrates continued this tradition, considering the first principle to be a “Father” reigning in heaven and equating it with Zeus.\[21\] Both Speusippus and Xenocrates played a seminal role in the solidification and development of the Platonic theory of principles, and although we know little about their philosophy, certain texts from Porphyry’s time suggest that their influence extended into late antiquity.\[22\] They contributed to making the association of the theory of principles with religious categories such as God, creation, and fatherhood a common practice among Platonic philosophers. For another example of such an association from a Jewish context, about two centuries later, when Jewish thinkers in Alexandria such as Aristobulus and Philo began thinking about new ways to systematize Jewish theology, they identified the God of the Hebrew Bible with the first principle and presented biblical figures such as Moses – properly religious figures – as models of philosophical life.\[23\] Philo was the first thinker to see Moses, not only as a prophet who received teachings from God, but also as a philosopher who knew truth in the very way the Greeks had been seeking.24 In Philo’s interpretation, Moses establishes a model of philosophical knowledge that does not depend on discourse, dialectics, and reasoning, but rather on divine revelation and contemplation of the invisible principles of the world that lead to God. With Philo and the first century AD begins a new chapter in the history of ancient philosophy in general and Platonism in particular. Based on Philo’s spadework, religious traditions such as Judaism and Christianity began appropriating philosophical concepts even as Greek philosophers started developing a certain resilience against this very appropriation. From the second century on, Christianity developed its first systematic outlines of its core beliefs, in works such as Origen’s On Principles, while Greek philosophers such as Celsus started specifically targeting those core systems. Since Neoplatonism, including in Porphyry’s Against the Christians, may be understood in part as a reaction to that period of mingling and identity formation, I want to dedicate a separate section to that period, from the second century up until Porphyry’s time. ### Fabien Muller Fabien Muller is a philosopher exploring ancient Greek and Indian metaphysical and religious traditions. He investigates these traditions through the lens of idealism, a theory that posits "mind" or "intellect" as a fundamental condition of reality. His pursuit of this idea centers on Neoplatonism, Yogācāra Buddhism, and modern forms of idealism, including the work of Hegel and the Tübingen School of theology. Fabien obtained his PhD in 2022 with a thesis on a Neoplatonic-Buddhist comparative interpretation of the ancient Greek notion of logos. In 2023, he received the Mercier Prize for International Philosophy for the monograph based on his thesis. As the CSWR's Postdoctoral Fellow (2023-2025), Fabien worked on bringing together the patristic philosopher Evagrius Ponticus and the Buddhist thinker Vasubandhu, as well as on philosophical approaches to popular media, particularly music. As part of the CSWR's Texts and Translations of Transcendence and Transformation (4T) program, he focused on translating Porphyry's work on the philosophy of religion. He is now a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in PRISM, the "Program in the Study of Mysticism," hosted by Tampere University's Faculty of Social Sciences, where he is pursuing research on the role of transcendence and mystical consciousness in mystical traditions across different religions and cultures. ![Fabien Muller](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/styles/hwp_1_1__480x480/public/2025-07/Fabien%20Muller%20portrait%20%282%29.jpg?itok=w-j82Z46) ## References \[1\] Various editors and translators have attempted to reconstruct these texts based on references from other late ancient Latin and Greek texts, essentially writings of the philosopher Iamblichus and the Christian theologians Augustine and Eusebius of Caesarea. Thomas Gale, Porphyry’s first editor, attempted to extract the *Letter to Anebo* text from Iamblichus’s response and to present it as a coherent text in Gale, *De mysteriis liber*. More recently, Sodano, *Lettera*, and Faggin, *Lettera*, reconstructed and translated the *Letter* into Italian. The most recent edition of the *Letter* is Saffrey & Segonds, *Lettre*. As for the Philosophy from Oracles, Andrew Smith collected fragments from Eusebius and Augustine in Smith, *Fragmenta*, thus providing a substitute for Gustav Wolff ’s older edition, Wolff, *Reliquiae*. The Philosophy was translated into French by Feye and Thuysbaert in Kasteel (ed.), *Oracles et prophétie*, 213-246, based on Wolff ’s edition. The most complete and thorough scholarly exploration of the Philosophy can be found in Muscolino’s edition and Italian translation, *filosofia rivelata*, which serves as a basis for the author’s 2013 PhD thesis. For further details on the editions used in the present volume, see the “Note on the translation.” \[2\] At the end of his monumental work on Porphyry, Pier F. Beatrice, too, doubts that a final resolution of the problem “is even possible,” Beatrice, *Philosophy of the Few*, 492. \[3\] Smith, Porphyry’s Place; Karamanolis & Sheppard (eds.), Studies; Johnson, *Religion and Identity*; Simmons, Universal Salvation; Beatrice, *Philosophy of the Few*. \[4\] Bidez, *Vie de Porphyre.* \[5\] Ramelli, “Porphyry, Elitism.” \[6\] Maxwell, Review of: Johnson, *Religion and Identity in Porphyry of Tyre* \[7\] Beatrice, *Philosophy of the Few*, 124. \[8\] *πειράσομαι τῷ ὄντι ὡς ἂν δύνωμαι βέλτιστος ὢν…ζῆν* (Plat. Gorg. 526d6), *τὴν ἀλήθειαν ἀσκῶν* (Plat. Gorg. 526d5). \[9\] We shall see below that Porphyry considers the power to lead a person to happiness as the distinctive criterion of genuine philosophy and theology, e.g. fr. 71(11), where he criticizes “those who have nothing coherent or trustworthy to say about happiness,” (*περὶ δὲ εὐδαιμονίας οὐδὲν ἀσφαλὲς οὐδ’ ἐχέγγυον \[λέγουσιν\]*). \[10\] *Πάντες ἄνθρωποι τοῦ εἰδέναι ὀρέγονται φύσει.* (Aristot. met. 980a21) \[11\] Plato describes the Good as “extending beyond substance by its primordiality and power” (*ἐπέκεινα τῆς οὐσίας πρεσβείᾳ καὶ δυνάμει ὑπερέχοντος*, Plato *Resp*. 509b8-9). \[12\] νόησις νοήσεως, according to Aristotle’s famous statement at met. 1074b34. \[13\]“The king who utters oracles at Delphi neither speaks nor conceals but gives signs.” (*ὁ ἄναξ οὗ τὸ μαντεῖόν ἐστι τὸ ἐν Δελφοῖς οὔτε λέγει οὔτε κρύπτει ἀλλὰ σημαίνει*, Heraclitus, fr. DK B93). \[14\] In a paper on religion in ancient philosophy, Esteban Law makes the history of philosophy begin with the quest for an “absolutes Prinzip” and attributes this quest to the “philosophische Theologie” (Law, “Zur Tradition,” 106). He situates the beginning of this quest in the sixth century BC, as I do above. \[15\] *ὁ θεὸς ἡμέρη εὐφρόνη, χειμὼν θέρος, πόλεμος εἰρήνη, κόρος λιμός. ἀλλοιο- ῦται δὲ ὅκωσπερ πῦρ, ὁπόταν συμμιγῇ θυώμασιν, ὀνομάζεται καθ᾽ ἡδονὴν ἑκάστου.* (Heraclitus, fr. DK B67) \[16\] Plat. *Phileb*. 55a6-8. See in particular Szlezák, *Das Bild*, in particular 198. \[17\] “Die Seinsweise des Göttlichen spielt in den Dialog hinein als eine Art Grenzbegriff, von dem aus die Bedingungen, unter denen der Mensch steht, verständlicher werden.” Szlezák, *Schriftlichkeit*, 198. \[18\] Szlezák, R*eading Plato*, 74. \[19\] *Ὦ Κρίτων, ἔφη, τῷ Ἀσκληπιῷ ὀφείλομεν ἀλεκτρυόνα ἀλλὰ ἀπόδοτε καὶ μὴ ἀμελήσητε* (Plat. *Phaed*. 118a7-8). \[20\] Speusippus’s ideas were brilliantly synthesized by Christian Vassalo on the basis of a complex fragment, see Vassalo “Speusippus.” \[21\] See Xenocrates’s fragment 213 on the first and second principles, taken from Aetius, in Isnardi Parente, *Senocrate*, 130-1, commented on by John Dillon, “Xenocrates,” 71. \[22\] Philipp Merlan argues that Iamblichus could have known Speusippus’s theory of different types of substances, see Merlan, *Platonism*, 96. \[23\] On the Platonic first principle in Philo, see Runia, “Plato’s Timaeus.” \[24\] Philo develops this theory in his *Life of Moses*, where he describes Moses as somebody who has “exhibits the doctrines of philosophy through his everyday works” (*τὰ φιλοσοφίας δόγματα διὰ τῶν καθ’ ἑκάστην ἡμέραν ἔργων ἐπεδείκνυτο,* *vit.* *Moy.* I 29.3-4 (ed. Cohn, Opera).