Porphyry of Tyre on Worship #1: Statues and Powers

I speak to those who lawfully may hear:
Depart all ye profane, and close the doors. (On Images, 351F Smith, transl. Gifford)

Porphyry (ca. 233 – between 301 and 305 CE), a Phoenician from the city of Tyre (in the Roman province of Phoenice), was the great polymath of Greek learning in his generation. The historian Eunapius said he was “like some chain let down to humanity from Hermes”, the god of culture and eloquence. But modern scholars have somewhat pigeonholed him as a Neoplatonic philosopher, a follower of the philosophy of his teacher Plotinus. This is true enough—Porphyry was a Neoplatonist (cf. Glossary). But he was already a Platonist, in modern terms a Middle Platonist, before he came to Plotinus, and many of his strongly held opinions were drawn from very different sources. What he thought about the world and the gods really did not diverge that much from the received (non-sectarian) wisdom of the Roman period.

It is in the light of the assumptions intellectuals of all stripes shared that we should see two (early?) works extant through copious quotations: On Images, which offers interpretations of the iconography of the gods, and On the Philosophy to be derived from Oracles, which was a kind of collected edition of many oracular texts – all of them, it seems, produced close to his own time –, with paraphrases or explanations attached to each one. The former will be the subject of this post, the latter, of a subsequent one, before I turn to his more Plotinian compositions.

On Images, a work of Theologia

“The world and the gods”, as I just put it, is not a synonym for “the natural and the supernatural”. In the philosophical koine (commonly shared discourse) current in the Roman empire, which was fundamentally shaped by Stoicism, the world itself was regarded as a god and a living being. This is an idea, incidentally, that the Stoics derived from Plato’s dialogue, the Timaeus. The other gods were part of the world, or part of the world god, just as everything else was. Middle Platonists also posited at least one god outside, beyond or above the world, the demiurge or creator. But like the idea of the world god, that of the demiurge was somewhat obscure or unknown to most people, and there are more than a few texts that gloss over the distinction between the Stoic world god and the Platonic creator god above the world – both were simply called “The god”* (ho theos). In either case, one did not address a hymn or prayer to the world god or demiurge, i.e. to divine roles or functions, but generally to a named god. In other words, these philosophical conceptions served to flesh out and enrich invocations of the known gods, not to replace them. The opposition between “traditional gods” and the “God(s) of the philosophers” that scholars like to draw is almost never a useful heuristic.

(*I capitalize “The” here to show that these meanings are a historically contingent idiom, and do not just follow from the concept of a god or theos, any more than the meaning of ‘The Man’ can be guessed from knowing the meaning of ‘man’.)

The later Neoplatonists often distinguished three subdivisions of theoretical philosophy: physics (also physiologia or natural philosophy), mathematics, and theologia (metaphysics/first philosophy). But this is a division with Aristotelian origins. Porphyry uses theologia in a (Stoic?) Hellenistic sense for “discourse/knowledge about the gods”, and Eusebius, whose Preparation of the Gospel is the source of the quotations we still have, introduces the work as containing a physiologia, a “natural account” of the gods. Not a naturalist account in contrast to a supernatural, mind, nor a natural theology in the modern sense, i.e. as opposed to revealed theology. The contrast Eusebius has in mind is rather to mythologia, “narrative/fabulous/historical (!) account”. The Church father believes that “the ancients and those who first devised anything about the gods did not refer this to physical tropology, nor did they allegorize the myths about the gods, but preserved the histories literally” (2.pref.2), albeit with implausible exaggerations.

Now, this is not Porphyry’s view. He writes:

“The thoughts of a wise theology, wherein men indicated God and God's powers by images akin to sense, and sketched invisible things in visible forms, I will show to those who have learned to read from the statues as from books the things there written concerning the gods. Nor is it any wonder that the utterly unlearned regard the statues as wood and stone, just as also those who do not understand the written letters look upon the monuments as mere stones, and on the tablets as bits of wood, and on books as woven papyrus.” (351F. Gifford’s “God”, ho theos, here could refer either to The god or to all the gods as a group, including The god.)

Nevertheless, I do believe that, at the time he composed On Images at least, he would have been happy enough to call it “physiological”, since he could largely accept a Stoic, materialist view that identifies the world, The god, and Nature (Physis). That the gods had immaterial souls and intellects alongside their material bodies was an addition to this picture, and is only a part of what he means by “invisible things”. It had become widely accepted in the Hellenistic period that most gods and daemons had fiery or aerial bodies ordinarily invisible to humans.

Porphyry on Zeus

With this context in mind, we can understand how Porphyry, even though he was one of the Platonists (famous for their much-misunderstood “dualism”) and a follower of Neoplatonism at that (which was so much concerned with things we call “transcendent”), came to make so little of a distinction between the demiurge and the world:

“Now look at the wisdom of the Greeks, and examine it as follows. The authors of the Orphic hymns supposed Zeus to be the mind of the world, and that he created all things therein, containing the world in himself. Therefore in their theological systems they have handed down their opinions concerning him thus:  

Zeus was the first, Zeus last, the lightning's lord,
Zeus head, Zeus centre, all things are from Zeus.
Zeus born a male, Zeus virgin undefiled;
Zeus the firm base of earth and starry heaven;
Zeus sovereign, Zeus alone first cause of all:
One power divine, great ruler of the world,
One kingly form, encircling all things here,
Fire, water, earth, and ether, night and day;
Wisdom, first parent, and delightful Love:
For in Zeus' mighty body these all lie.
His head and beauteous face the radiant heaven
Reveals, and round him float in shining waves
The golden tresses of the twinkling stars.
On either side bulls' horns of gold are seen,
Sunrise and sunset, footpaths of the gods.
His eyes the Sun, the Moon's responsive light;
His mind immortal ether, sovereign truth,
Hears and considers all; nor any speech,
Nor cry, nor noise, nor ominous voice escapes
The ear of Zeus, great Kronos' mightier son:
Such his immortal head, and such his thought.
His radiant body, boundless, undisturbed
In strength of mighty limbs was formed thus:
The god's broad-spreading shoulders, breast, and back
Air's wide expanse displays; on either side
Grow wings, wherewith throughout all space he flies.
Earth the all-mother, with her lofty hills,
His sacred belly forms; the swelling flood
Of hoarse resounding Ocean girds his waist.
His feet the deeply rooted ground upholds,
And dismal Tartarus, and earth's utmost bounds.
All things he hides, then from his heart again
In godlike action brings to gladsome light.

Zeus, therefore, is the whole world, animal of animals (zôon ek zôôn), and god of gods (theos ek theôn); but Zeus, that is, inasmuch as he is the mind from which he brings forth all things, and by his thoughts creates them. When the theologians had explained the nature of god in this manner, to make an image such as their description indicated was neither possible, nor, if any one thought of it, could he show the look of life, and intelligence, and forethought by the figure of a sphere.But they have made the representation of Zeus in human form, because mind (nous) was that according to which he wrought, and by generative laws (spermatikois logois) brought all things to completion; and he is seated, as indicating the steadfastness of his power: and his upper parts are bare, because he is manifested in the intellectual (noerois) and the heavenly parts of the world; but his feet are clothed, because he is invisible in the things that lie hidden below. And he holds his sceptre in his left hand, because most close to that side of the body dwells the heart, the most commanding and intelligent organ: for the creative mind (dêmiourgikos nous) is the sovereign of the world. And in his right hand he holds forth either an eagle, because he is master of the gods who traverse the air, as the eagle is master of the birds that fly aloft----or a victory, because he is himself victorious over all things.” (354F)

The marvellous thing about this passage is that Stoics, Platonists and Roman-period Aristotelians (who had read the pseudo-Aristotelian De mundo) could all agree with it, each by taking some parts more literally and others more metaphorically. For Aristotelians, it would admittedly be a dubious thought that the First Mover was a living being made up of living beings or a god made up of gods, but this formulation was acceptable to a Platonist so long as only the bodies of the gods were meant. Meanwhile, the Stoics could accept that the demiurgic mind ruled the cosmos, because they would take it for granted that this mind is nevertheless a part of the cosmos. Even more marvellous is that this all but non-sectarian theology – an Epicurean certainly could not agree with it – also coherently integrates a hymn that was by Porphyry’s time some 700 years old. This Orphic hymn to Zeus seems to me to have played a significant role in the development of Greek philosophy, by translating Babylonian ideas about the creation of the world and about the ruler of the gods into a Greek idiom. (At this point, this is still quite speculative, but I am not the only one to believe it.) It is a testament to the continuity of Greek ideas about the gods that, for all the changes in intellectual fashions that had come about since, this hymn could still be read and made sense of without great distortion.

The Divine Powers

We have now seen how Porphyry describes The god; but he promised us “the god and the god’s powers”. What exactly are these powers (dynameis)? The first time I read On Images, I did not know much about ancient allegory yet, and thought that this was his way of, as Eusebius puts it, “refering” the accounts of the gods back to natural phenomena:

“The ruling principle of the power of earth is called Hestia, of whom a statue representing her as a virgin is usually set up on the hearth; but inasmuch as the power is productive, they symbolize her by the form of a woman with prominent breasts. The name Rhea they gave to the power of rocky and mountainous land, and Demeter to that of level and productive land. Demeter in other respects is the same as Rhea, but differs in the fact that she gives birth to Koré by Zeus, that is, she produces the shoot (koros) from the seeds of plants. And on this account her statue is crowned with ears of corn, and poppies are set round her as a symbol of productiveness.” (357aF)

This reads as if he were positing nothing beyond what a modern atheist could accept. In some cases, he even calls the gods symbols of concrete objects rather than of their powers:

“Attis is the symbol of the blossoms which appear early in the spring, and fall off before the complete fertilization; whence they further attributed castration to him, from the fruits not having attained to seminal perfection: but Adonis was the symbol of the cutting of the perfect fruits.” (358F)

But while this is an interpretation Eusebius wants us to follow – that all these gods are inanimate things –, other passages clearly show that this is not the case. For example, in what sense does Porphyry say that “[o]f the sweet waters the particular powers are called Nymphs, and those of the sea-waters Nereids” (359F) if not because he really means deities of water? That Porphyry associates Demeter and Kore with the Moon as well as the Earth (also 359F) also seems to suggest that these powers have some degree of independent existence, as does the notion that Pluto and Sarapis are two powers, separately worshipped, but in the same temple (still 359F). The text in that last case is in fact somewhat unclear, and could mean either that Pluto and Sarapis are powers of the sun, or Pluto of the sun and Sarapis in turn of Pluto.

The advantage of this language of “powers”, which is by no means limited to Porphyry, is precisely this kind of ambiguity, which can account for the way that the Greeks associated and “combined” their gods, without necessitating that these combinations reduce the number of gods. The way that “identifications” of gods are usually discussed in modern scholarship, one would think they are conflations – but by that account, it is impossible to say both that Demeter is the Earth and that she is the Moon, since the non-identity of Earth and Moon is a settled question (but see below). But rather than reductive, these combinations are really productive, explicating the nature of a deity by relating it to others, sometimes in startling ways. But in order for them to mean something, the differences must always be maintained. To use an analogy, the sentence “life is pain” is meaningful only because life and pain are not the same. Just so, “Demeter is the Earth” is insightful only in a context where everyone knows that Demeter is quite different from Earth in terms of mythology, in how they are worshipped, in what things they are thought to accomplish. The language of powers is flexible enough to account for this non-conflationary sort of identification/combination. And it is another non-sectarian feature of this text, which can be best appreciated by comparison with non-philosopher authors like Servius and Lactantius Placidus.

There is a recent essay on the role of powers in On Images by Irini-Fotini Viltanioti, “Divine Powers and Cult Statues in Porphyry of Tyre”, contained in the volume Divine Powers in Late Antiquities (2017), which she co-edited with Anna Marmodoro. The first few pages of this article are certainly useful, as e.g. when she observes that “beyond the general Platonic criticism of art, there is no hint in the fragments that Porphyry considered traditional iconography and religious art as problematic.” (p. 62). Indeed, Porphyry, who was a philologist as well as a philosopher, by his own explanations wants to “read” these symbols, not to criticize them. But the entire volume suffers from a one-sided focus on philosophy and Christian theology, ignoring the vital non-philosophical (and non-sectarian) evidence, and Viltanioti imposes a highly speculative Neoplatonic framework on the work for which there is no evidence or justification in the fragments.

Most problematically, she relies on what Smith, the modern editor of On Images, counts as fragment (or rather testimonium) 353. Here Eusebius says that Porphyry deified the invisible powers “of the God who is over all”, and interprets this as a reference to the Neoplatonic One, a principle higher than the demiurge. But the less violent reading is that Eusebius identifies the Christian God with the demiurge, and thinks that there is ultimately only one divine power. The fragments do not show any Neoplatonic ideas, anything that must be owed to Plotinus, and to read Plotinian philosophy into them is necessarily circular. To deny that there is a reference to the One, on the other hand, costs us nothing: it could still be a work written after Porphyry became Plotinus’ student, but for a wider audience.

This is as much as has to be said about On Images, I think, for anyone to read the rest of it with the appropriate caution. As almost all of the extant fragments are contained in Eusebius’ Preparation of the Gospel, the most accessible way to read them is in Gifford’s 1903 translation of Eusebius, which is online on Tertullian.org; more precisely, the translation of book 3 contains all the Eusebian fragments of On Images, although he quotes from other works of Porphyry’s in other books. But a new English translation of the fragments, with commentary, would be an important addition, not only to Neoplatonic Studies, but to the study of ancient religion more broadly. The Greek is given in the magisterial edition of the collected fragments of Porphyry by Andrew Smith.

Before closing, I would like to mention just two further points of interest: one, that On Images also includes a fascinating interpretation of the iconography of Egyptian gods, thought to be adapted from the work of the Stoic philosopher and Egyptian priest Chaeremon; and the other, that in this Egyptian section, we are given an alternative solution to the problem of how one goddess can be identified with both Earth and Moon:

“The power of the earth, both the celestial and terrestrial earth, they called Isis, because of the equality (isotêta), which is the source of justice: but they call the moon the celestial earth, and the vegetative earth, on which we live, they call the terrestrial. Demeter has the same meaning among the Greeks as Isis among the Egyptians.” (360F)