American Society of Church History

Philosophies of Language, Theories of Translation, and Imperial Intellectual Production:

The Cases of Porphyry, Iamblichus, and Eusebius
Author(s): Jeremy M. Schott
Source: Church History, Vol. 78, No. 4 (Dec., 2009), pp. 855-861
Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Society of Church
History
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 Church History 78:4 (December 2009), 855-861.
? American Society of Church History, 2009
doi: 10.1017/S0009640709990564

Philosophies of Language, Theories of

Translation, and Imperial Intellectual
Production: The Cases of Porphyry,
Iamblichus, and Eusebius
Jeremy M. Schott

Postcolonial theorists have often examined the ways in which intellectual

practices are conditioned by and contribute to imperial systems of
knowledge and power. Scholars of late antiquity, for their part, have
pointed to the ways in which late-ancient religious and ethnic identities were
constructed linguistically and textually. This paper examines the works of
three contemporaries?the Neoplatonic philosophers Porphyry of Tyre and
Iamblichus of Chalcis and the Christian bishop Eusebius of Caesarea?in
order to explore the ways in which ancient linguistic theories and practices
served as a kind of border-post in which late-ancient intellectuals constructed
and contested imperial subjectivities.

I. Egyptian Fictions: Porphyry, Iamblichus, and

Philosophy of Language
In the late third or early fourth century, the philosopher Porphyry sent a letter to
an otherwise unknown Anebo, purportedly an Egyptian priest. The letter is an
example of the popular genre of er?tapokrisis, or "question-and-solution
literature." Porphyry poses a series of metaphysical and theological z?t?mata,
"questions," that anticipate a reply on the part of Anebo that will supply
luseis, "solutions." Although "Anebo" did not respond to Porphyry, his letter
was answered by Anebo's teacher, "Abamon," in the form of a long treatise
that has come to be known by the title On the Mysteries of Egypt (Myst.
I.1-2).1 The fifth-century Neoplatonist Proclus easily recognized that

1 All references to De Mysteriis are to the Greek text and English translation in Emma C. Clarke,
John M. Dillon, and Jackson P. Herschbell, eds. and trans., Iamblichus: On the Mysteries (Atlanta:
Society of Biblical Literature, 2003).

Jeremy M. Schott is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North

Carolina-Charlotte.

855

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 856 CHURCH HISTORY

"Abamon" was really none other than Porphyry's former pupil and present
disputant, Iamblichus. In Porphyry's letter and "Abamon's" reply, then, we
have a polemical exchange between two scions of Greek philosophy written
in the form of an elaborate epistolary fiction that was as transparent to their
contemporaries as it is to modern scholars. How are we to understand the
odd ethnic play in these texts?
Porphyry's letter and Iamblichus's response mark a critical debate in late
ancient Platonism over the value of theurgy. As practiced by Iamblichus and
others, theurgy consisted of ritual incantations and other practices held to
purify the philosopher's soul and assist its ascent from the realm of matter
and becoming to the realm of Intellect and Being. Porphyry objected to
theurgy for a number of reasons: it seems to presume that the gods are
passible and subject to human cajoling; ritual offerings suggest that the gods
experience sense-perception; and theurgical divination smacks of the
laughable excesses of the devotees of Cybele or Magna Mater (Myst.
1.11.37.4-5; 15.48.11-12; III.9.117.10-12, 118.1-2).
One of Porphyry's objections concerns late-ancient philosophy of language.
First, Porphyry questions the use of "meaningless names" (sequences of
nonsense syllables) in the ritual invocations that theurgists practiced (Myst.
VII.4.254.11-12). Iamblichus answers that "meaningless" names do not
signify conceptions in the human intellect, but are rather "united" with the
gods non-discursively (Myst. VII.4.255.13-256.2).2 Next Porphyry asks,
"why, of meaningful names, do we prefer the barbarian to our own?" (Myst.
VII.4.256.3-4). Why should Greeks use Egyptian, Persian, or other non
Greek names when invoking divine beings rather than "Hellenizations" of
those names?why should a Greek invoke "Thoth" rather than "Hermes"?
Iamblichus responds that certain barbarian languages use names that are
better fitted to the nature of the gods they name. To translate the barbarian
names into Greek would be to dilute their imaging of divine essence.
Porphyry's critiques assume a "conventionalist" theory of language,
developed from his reading of Aristotle's On Interpretation, which holds that
words signify the mental images we form of perceived objects. The
relationship between signifier and signified depends only on the agreement
of a community of language users.3 On this view, words can be translated
into another language without losing any of their meaning or power. Thus
Porphyry inveighs against the theurgists: they must assume that certain gods
understand only Egyptian, while the idea that foreign names possess special

2For an excellent discussion of the theurgic function of divine names in Iamblichus, see Gregory
Shaw, Theurgy and the Soul. The Neoplatonism of Iamblichus (University Park: Pennsylvania State
University Press, 1995), 110-11, 179-88.
3Aristotle De Int. 16a3-8.

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FORUM: POSTCOLONIAL THEORY AND CHRISTIAN HISTORY 857

power is a flight of fancy (Myst. VII.5.258.1-2;5;8-10). Iamblichus's

responses, in contrast, assume a "naturalist" theory of language based on his
reading of Plato's Cratylus. According to this theory, different languages use
different combinations of sounds, all of which stand as better or worse
versions or materializations of putative ideal signifiers.4 Thus Iamblichus
argues that the Hellenes' desire to translate everything into their native
tongue contributed to the "decline" of ancient theurgical language and the
necessity of its "restoration" by theurgists {Myst. VII.5.259.4-12).
In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it was common to read
Iamblichus and Porphyry as symptomatic of the late-antique miscegenation
of classical Greek culture. Late-ancient philosophers' dabbling in irrational
barbarian religious and cultural traditions tainted the purity of classical
Greek rationality, in this reading.5 More recently the debate between these
two philosophers has been read as an example of "multi-culturalism," or at
least a tempering of Greek chauvinism.6 Each of these assessments miss a
larger point; namely, that the manner in which these philosophers handle the
difference between Greek and barbarian reflects the discursive systems of
power that condition the imaginative geography we find in these texts. Late
ancient Platonists inhabited a system of knowledge and power that situated
the philosopher/philologist as an active knowing subject and Egypt and the
barbarian (or the Orient and the Oriental) as the passive object of scholarly
analysis and academic production. Edward Said's description of nineteenth
century Orientalist philology is apt: "what was the philologist on the other
hand if not ... a harsh divider of men into superior and inferior races, a
liberal critic whose work harbored the most esoteric notions of temporality,
origins, development, relationship, and human worth?"7
Iamblichus's "naturalist" theory of language claims for theurgists a
privileged heuristic and hermeneutic position in relation to all linguistic
expression. "Meaningless" names bear value not as embodied sounds but as
terms of ontological connectedness to transcendent universals. To speak this
most potent, authentic type of language is to occupy a privileged subject

4See, for example, Plato Cratylus 43 Id; 439a.

5E. R. Dodds, for example, considered theurgy symptomatic of a late-antique "age of anxiety" in
Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965); J. B.
Bury remarked of Neoplatonism, "it is a fall or failure of something, a failure of nerve" quoted in
Gilbert Murray, Four Stages of Greek Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1912), 7-8.
6See, for example, Mark Edwards, Culture and Philosophy in the Age of Plotinus (London:
Duckworth, 2006), 117-19; Garth Fowden, Empire to Commonwealth: Consequences of
Monotheism in late antiquity (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), 38-40; John J.
O'Meara, "Indian Wisdom and Porphyry's Search for a Universal Way," in Neoplatonism and
Indian Thought, ed. R. Baine Harris (Norfolk, Va.: International Society for Neoplatonic Studies,
1982), 5-25. (Porphyry's interest in barbarian wisdom "may be an interest peculiar to Porphyry
or of a developing or weakening Neoplatonism" [my emphasis, 22].)
7Edward W Said, Orientalism, rev. ed. (1978; repr., New York: Vintage, 1994), 133-34.

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 858 CHURCH HISTORY

position that lies outside the parameters of anything one would normally
consider linguistic or semantic; it thus transcends ethno-cultural particularity.
"Meaningful" ethno-culturally specific phonemes (for example, Egyptian and
Persian words), on the other hand, are valorized to the extent they image the
essence of transcendent being. Iamblichus claims the power to mine these
native languages for elements of the ancient, sacred language. It is not
Egyptian or Persian language as Persian or Egyptian that Iamblichus values,
but putatively ancient phonemes that have been removed from their ethno
cultural and syntactic contexts and situated within the theurgist's incantations.
Insofar as it offers a theoretical basis for universal translation, Porphyry's
"conventionalist" theory of language is also a powerful tool for extracting
and constructing ethnological knowledge. The possibility of secure
translation is, after all, an implicit theoretical basis for the Letter to Anebo;
Porphyry can pose Greek philosophical questions in Greek to his putatively
Egyptian addressee about Egyptian theology and, in turn, expect an
intelligible response in Greek, because foreign, Egyptian signifiers must be
unproblematically translatable.
We are now in a belter position to reconsider the "why" of this
correspondence. Why do these two philosophers conduct this elaborate
Egyptian pantomime? What does it mean for the Letter to Anebo and On the
Mysteries to be about Egypt? The place in which Iamblichus and Porphyry
interact with Egypt is emphatically not Egypt. At least it is not any Egypt
that Porphyry or Iamblichus could have visited in 300 ce. "Abamon" and
"Anebo" help Porphyry and Iamblichus conjure an imagined Egyptian past.
This epistolary fiction creates temporal and spatial distance between an
esoteric, venerable Egyptian past and any contemporary, embodied Egyptian
reality. As Porphyry and Iamblichus each establish a privileged position in
relation to Egyptian traditions that are putatively ancient and foreign, these
rivals are also competing for dominance and prestige within late-third and
early fourth-century Platonism.
There are homologies here between the practices of empire and the practices
of philosophy.8 The periphery is a source of raw materials for imperial

8Here I adopt the concept of "homology" from Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural
Production, ed. R. Johnson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). Bourdieu describes
cultural production as a field of social relations in which agents compete for symbolic capital
and power. The field of cultural production is structurally homologous to other fields, all of
which are homologous to the prevailing "field of power," or dominant set of power relations in a
society at a given moment in history (44-45). In the later Roman Empire, the field of power
would be constituted by imperial relations of domination and subjugation; the homologous field
of cultural production in which Porphyry and Iamblichus write is shot-through with the same
relations of power. Bourdieu's concepts are also helpful because they account for the fact that
'"symbolic capital' is to be understood as economic or political capital that is disavowed,
misrecognized," although it derives its ultimate value from the fact that its accumulation within

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FORUM: POSTCOLONIAL THEORY AND CHRISTIAN HISTORY 859

production?and these Greek philosophers mill the raw material of Egyptian

tradition into usable philosophical products much as the grain of Egypt was
milled to feed Rome, and later, Constantinople. The provinces are also
convenient theatres of war. Much as the great battles that led to the
foundation of the Roman Empire were fought far from Rome and often with
Egyptian proxies, Porphyry and Iamblichus fought a key battle of late
ancient Platonism in an imagined Egyptian territory and with imagined
Egyptian surrogates.

II. Eusebius: The Library as

Imperial Border-Post and Marketplace
The same discourses of (imperial) knowledge and power at work in Porphyry's
debate with Iamblichus also conditioned early Christian intellectual production.
In the beginning of his Gospel Preparation, Eusebius considers the questions
that may be put to the Christians: "In all likelihood someone may raise the
aporia: who are we who propose to take up the pen, that is, are we Greeks or
Barbarians, or what might there be between these?" Christians might be said
to "cut out for themselves a new, trackless desert path, that keeps neither the
ways of the Greeks nor of the Jews" (PE 1.2.1-4).9 Christianity is an
ethnological quandary that demands resolution and clarification. Eusebius
exploits this limbo between Hellenism and Barbarism, Jew and Greek.
According to the Preparation, Christianity is precisely what others might
fear?a people identified by the explicit rejection and erasure of ancestral
identities.
To carve out this imagined territory between Hellenism and Judaism,
Eusebius sets up a synkrisis, or formal rhetorical comparison, of Hebrew
theology with that of the Greeks and other gentiles (PE 7.11.13). But
Eusebius faces a conundrum?Hebrew theology is found in Jewish
books. Eusebius solves this problem by making his Hebrews reside in a
territory between Jew and Gentile (PE 7.8.20). Hebrewness (and
Christianity) is defined by adherence to a timeless, universal, transcendent
theology, in contrast to the embodied, parochial customs of Jews and other

the field provides material, economic, and political benefits within the larger field of power (75).
Thus relating the philosophy of language to the politics of a larger field of imperial power does
not reduce the practice of philosophy to the practice of empire; rather, it helps to set into relief
aspects of cultural production (indeed some of the very ground of the possibility of that
production) that often go unrecognized (or are denied) by the producers themselves.
9Text: Karl Mras, ed., Eusebius Werke Bd. 8: Die Praeparatio Evang?lica. GCS 43.1, 43.2
(Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1954, 1956).

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 860 CHURCH HISTORY

ethn?.10 As I have suggested elsewhere, this simultaneous affirmation and

denial of ethnicity is a site of productive ambivalence in which Eusebius
constructs Christianity as an ethnos descended from the Hebrews and
understands membership in that group as the transcendence of ethnicity and
embodiment.11 The category "Hebrew" creates a tear in the ethnological
fabric, exposing a gap between the warp of Judaism and the woof of
Hellenism?a gap within which Eusebius can assemble Christianity.
Eusebius's construction of Christianity requires a physical space as well?
the locus of readability and interpretability constituted by written language.
In being written, theologies become readable, making it possible to remove
them from their ethno-cultural contexts and place them in the arena of
rhetorical comparison, synkrisis. Thus the Caesarean library lies like a
tantalizing palimpsest behind the whole of Eusebius's work. Though he does
not discuss the history or role of his library explicitly in the Preparation, he
does reflect on another?the library of Alexandria. He provides extensive
quotations from the Letter of Aristeas, well-known to Eusebius and to
modern scholars for its account of the origin of the Septuagint. Eusebius
prefaces these selections with his own brief account: God, foreknowing the
ascendancy of the Romans and the role their empire would play in making
possible the transmission of Christianity to all peoples, prompted Ptolemy to
commission Greek translations of the Hebrew Bible for "public libraries"
(PE 8.1.6-8). The Ptolemaic library figures as the place in which traditions
become readable through translation into an imperial koine (Greek), and in
turn, in which theologies become available for circulation and comparison.
The universal (oikumenikos) library and the empire (oikumene) are
homologous; the Ptolemaic library (like Eusebius's own) is a collection of
different nations' books, much as the empire is constituted by diverse
peoples. The library is a marketplace where Eusebius can acquire the textual
raw materials that serve as fodder for the mill of his own intellectual
productions. The library is also a border-post where Eusebius can orchestrate
the intertextual migrations and incursions that constitute texts such as the
Gospel Preparation and the Ecclesiastical History.

10On Eusebius's distinction between "Hebrews" and "Jews," see Jean Sirinelli, Les vues
historiques d'Eus?be de C?sar?e durant la period pr?nic?enne (Dakar: Universit? de Dakar,
1961), 147-63; J?rg Ulrich, Euseb von Caesarea und die Juden: Studien zur Rolle der Juden in
der Theologie des Eusebius von Caesarea (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1999), 57-132.
11 Jeremy M. Schott, Christianity, Empire, and the Making of Religion in Late Antiquity
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 153. See also Aaron Johnson, "Identity,
Descent, and Polemic: Ethnic Argumentation in Eusebius' Praeparatio Evang?lica," Journal of
Early Christian Studies 12:1 (2004): 23-56, and Andrew Jacobs, Remains of the Jews. The
Holy Land and Christian Empire in Late Antiquity (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press,
2004), 29-32.

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FORUM: POSTCOLONIAL THEORY AND CHRISTIAN HISTORY 861

III. Conclusions: Syncretisms and Fractured Subjectivities

We should not conclude that Iamblichus's and Porphyry's Egyptian drama or
Eusebius's construal of Christian identity is as successfully or securely
hegemonic as the foregoing reading suggests. "Abamon" undoes Iamblichus.
The authorial subject of On the Mysteries is fractured and unstable.
Throughout, Iamblichus/Abamon vacillates between the first person plural
("we Egyptians") and the third person plural ("the Egyptians, they"),
signaling the anxiety that accompanies any attempt to "go native."12
Iamblichus's Egyptian persona destabilizes the very hermeneutic privilege he
seeks to secure by adopting it in the first place.
Eusebius's intertextual construction of Christianity is also fraught with
anxiety. The greatest threat to his construal of Christian identity is the
Caesarean library itself. Its collection of texts represented a tangible
deconstruction of Eusebius's Christian text, a text that is itself a bricolage of
quotations from Greek, Jewish, and other nations' books. As border-post and
marketplace, the library is a site of ethno-cultural contact and synthesis. But,
the library is also marked by all of the anxiety and tension of a market or
border crossing. At a border crossing, contact and synthesis stand a hair's
breadth from miscegenation. Eusebius must manage his inventory, making
sure that the ethno-cultural identities of his books are marked clearly.
Both the later Platonism of Porphyry and Iamblichus and the Christianity
offered in Eusebius's Preparation are often seen as evidence for ethno
cultural "relations"?either Neoplatonic "eclecticism" or the Jewish-Greek
"syncretism" of Alexandrian-Caesarean Christianity. A postcolonial reading
of these texts, however, suggests that syncretism is not something that
happens "out there" in the realm of inter-religious conflict and that finds its
way into written texts. Syncretism is an intertextual effect?the traces of
specific modes of reading and writing and the imagined ethno-geographies
and ethno-histories (and attendant politics) that these practices assume.

12Evident throughout the De Myst, but some excellent examples occur in VII. 1.249.10-11
(... boulomai t?n Aigypti?n ton tropon tes theologias dierm?neusai; houtoi gar ... ["... I
would like to explain the mode of the theology of the Egyptians; for they ..."] and X.7.293.1
(Auto de tagathon to men theion h?gountai ... ["Good itself they consider ..."]). At Myst.
1.1.5-10, Iamblichus signals, in effect, the kaleidoscopic tendencies of his masquerade: "I am
presenting myself to take up the discussion; and you, for your part, if you will, imagine that the
same person in now replying to you as he to whom you wrote; or, if it seems better to you, posit
that it is I who discourses with you in writing, or any other prophet of the Egyptians?for it
makes no difference. Or better still, I think, dismiss from your mind the speaker, whether he be
better or worse, and consider what is said, whether it be true or false, rousing up your intellect
to the task with a will."

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