Porphyry and the Gnostics: Reassessing Pierre Hadot's Thesis in Light of the Second- and Third-Century Sethian Treatises (original) (raw)

2010, Pp. 81–110 in Plato's Parmenides and its Heritage: Volume 2: Its Reception in Neo-Platonic, Jewish, and Christian Texts. Edited by K. Corrigan and J. Turner. Writings from the Greco-Roman World. Atlanta: SBL; Leiden: Brill

Pierre Hadot published a series of magisterial studies in the 1950s and 1960s, where he attempted to reconstruct Porphyry’s metaphysics, and argued that instead of being simply an editor and a popularizer of Plotinus, Porphyry was in fact a great Neoplatonic innovator. Hadot’s thesis is based largely on two sets of anonymous fragments that he assigned to Porphyry: the some 89 fragments embedded in Marius Victorinus’ theological works; and the 6 fragments of the Anonymous Parmenides Commentary of the now destroyed Turin palimpsest. Recently, several scholars have raised doubts against Hadot’s influential theory, both in terms of his actual arguments, and in light of the subsequently published Sethian Gnostic evidence from the Nag Hammadi library. In fact, most of the suggested Porphyrian features that are found in Hadot’s two sets of fragments—but not always in the undisputed Porphyrian evidence—are found in these Sethian texts. This is especially the case with the Coptic translations of Zostrianos and Allogenes, whose Greek versions were read, though eventually refuted, in Plotinus’ seminars, and which were also known to Porphyry. What does this new Sethian evidence mean for Hadot’s thesis, and for our understanding of the history of Neoplatonism? I will argue in this article that Hadot’s thesis is in itself inconclusive—even problematic—and that Sethian Gnostics were probably the innovators of most of the “Porphyrian” concepts that we find in Hadot’s fragments. This seems all the more likely as many of these “Porphyrian” features are already present—some implicitly, others explicitly—in a pre-Plotinian Sethian text, the Apocryphon of John. It will be argued that advocates of Sethian Gnosticism brought with them innovative ideas, including the famous being-life-mind triad, to Plotinus’ seminars; and that a fruitful exchange of ideas between the Gnostics, and Plotinus and his students, took place before (and perhaps even after) the somewhat exaggerated Gnostic controversy in the 260s.