Imperial Dictionary of Universal Biography/Volume 3/Porphyry

by James Frederick Ferrier

PORPHYRY, originally named Malchus, a philosopher of the Alexandrian school, was born in Syria in 233. He was initiated in the doctrines of neo-platonism at Athens by Longinus, the author of the treatise On the Sublime. In his thirtieth year he went to Rome, where he attached himself to the school of Plotinus. Being of a melancholic temperament, and holding, according to the tenets of this sect, that a life in the flesh was a life of bondage, he resolved to commit suicide, but was diverted from his project by the good advice of his master who, by sending him to travel in Sicily, gave a more salutary direction to his thoughts. From this time forward, the ascendancy of Plotinus over Porphyry was complete. The latter became a devoted adherent and able advocate of the Alexandrian philosophy. He wrote a highly eulogistic biography of Plotinus, and superintended with much care the arrangement and publication of his works.—(See Plotinus.) On the death of Plotinus in 270, Porphyry became the head of the Alexandrian school of philosophy at Rome. Besides the life of Plotinus, he wrote a work, "On Abstinence from Animal Food." In those days there were total abstainers from flesh, just as in these there are total abstainers from wine. His other compositions are—a "Life of Pythagoras," which is largely interspersed with the fabulous; "Starting-points leading to the Intelligible;" "The Cave of the Nymphs," as described in the Odyssey; "A Letter to the Egyptian priests of Anubis" on the gift of prophecy. The most useful and intelligible, and best known of his writings, is the treatise "On the Five Predicables," which is frequently printed as an introduction to the Organon or logical works of Aristotle. The arbor Porphyriana, in which genus and difference are laid out as constitutive of species, is known to every student of logic. Many of the writings of Porphyry have perished, and among them a violent attack on the christian religion, which excited much controversy in its day. To this work the wide-spread celebrity of Porphyry in his own day was mainly due; and the tradition of the powerful impression which it made, and of the rejoinders which it called forth, has been instrumental in keeping his name alive down to the present time. It was publicly burnt by the orders of the Emperor Theodosius II. in 435; and only a few fragments of it remain, preserved in the writings of the early fathers of the church. In the extant writings of Porphyry there is not much that is original. He is little more than a commentator on Plotinus; it is therefore unnecessary to characterize his compositions further than by saying that they echo faithfully, and sometimes emphatically, the tones, frequently rather inarticulate, of the older sage. Their general tenor, like that of all the other philosophers of this school, is mystical and obscure. What they chiefly inculcate is a fantastical pietism consisting in an ecstatic union of the human soul with the divine reason, or with something still more transcendant and ineffable. Porphyry relates that Plotinus had succeeded four times in effecting this mystical union; but that he himself, in his considerably longer life, had succeeded only once. The morality which these philosophers enjoined was an ascetism and mortification of the flesh, which bordered on insanity, and which was practically carried considerably beyond the border by the Indian gymnosophists and by numberless Egyptian fanatics, of whom Simeon Stylites (although he appeared at a somewhat later period) may be accepted as a prominent example. Porphyry died at Rome in 306.—J. F. F.