Plotinus’s Portrait and Pamphilus’s Prison Notebook: Neoplatonic and Early Christian Textualities at the Turn of the Fourth Century C.E.

Abstract

This article focuses on two “sibling” intellectual communities—the neoplatonic circle of Plotinus and Porphyry and the Christian intellectual circle of Pamphilus and Eusebius of Caesarea—to consider in what ways each developed different theories and practices of reading and writing. Porphyry’s Life of Plotinus can be read as an extended and deliberate engagement with the problem of writing as elaborated in Plato’s Phaedrus . Porphyry’s neoplatonic textuality situates writing as a problematic mimesis, and subordinates written texts to dialectical relationships within the philosophical circle. By contrast, the Caesareans advocate and practice a textuality that self-consciously embraces the use and production of written texts as a primary site for the production of orthodox discourse.