ELIZABETH DEPALMA DIGESER. A Threat to Public Piety: Christians, Platonists, and the Great Persecution.

Abstract

This book is an example of the best kind of intellectual history. It shows how philosophical ideas drove events in imperial history: specifically, how emergent Neoplatonism in the third century a.d. resulted in the Great Persecution under the Emperor Diocletian. The Platonists' ideas about hermeneutics, ritual, and metaphysics usually fall under what a colleague of mine calls “the view from nowhere,” while historians of the persecution have only gradually made room for some role played by Porphyry (he may have given a lecture at the court against Christianity). This book offers a more robust thesis, a delight to ponder and wrestle with. Elizabeth DePalma Digeser reconstructs the history of the school of thought that stemmed from Ammonius, the teacher of both Origen and Plotinus, and that was represented at the time of the persecution by Porphyry and Iamblichus; by that time many Christians were closely watching its internal developments, including Methodius, Arnobius, and Lactantius.