berzon - the problem with identity in late antiquity

8/18/2019 Berzon - The Problem With Identity in Late Antiquity

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theology (god-speak). Johnson is determined to show that Porphyry’s theory of theuniverse — the nature of the divine and the human relation to it — coalesces into acoherent philosophical system.

Johnson’s second project uses Porphyry to explore anew the concept of Hellenism andthe various other notions with which it intersects in the post-classical world. Porphyrybecomes a lens through which to view the history of Hellenism as it emerged inconversation with its others. How did a manifestly philosophical writer produce auniversal (albeit elitist) system of truth while also appropriating, praising, andcondemning the philosophical and religious contributions of various ethnic groups? Thequestion is not so much whether Porphyry used a notional “other” but how and to whatends he made use of it. Johnson’s biography of Porphyry makes him into a philosophicaltouchstone in the broader history of late antique identity formation.

Citing a letter from Petrarch written ca. 1350 to Dionigi di Borgo San Sepolcro, Johnson

uses the metaphor of translation to describe the role of ethnic identity in Porphyry’sphilosophical writings. Like Petrarch’s ascent up Mount Ventoux, Porphyry’s arduousattempt to reach God is an act of vertical and horizontal translation: “it was precisely inconsidering the paths of ascent that Porphyry would pause over the peoples of the worldand their various relationships to the mountain of divinity and truth.” Vertical translation,or universalism, gets at Porphyry’s transcendent philosophical vision, while horizontaltranslation, or particularism, makes sense of ethnic differences through the vernacular ofphilosophy. Porphyry acts as translator through his “interpretive discernment, understoodas the ability to translate multiplicity into unity.” Although his philosophical universalismis mediated through the Greek language and emerges out of the Platonic tradition,

Porphyry eschews any sort of ethnic or cultural centralism. His project is to rise above allethnic and cultural centers, including Hellenocentrism.

To arrive at this two-fold reading, Johnson considers Porphyry in two roles, as theologianand ethnographer. Porphyry the theologian was not an inclusionary universalist whofamiliarized difference through the “category of the Same,” but rather an exclusiveuniversalist who subscribed to the idea that cult “was categorized as inappropriate to thetranscendent philosophical life.” Nonetheless, he could often be accommodating; hecontinued, for instance, to call the Greek gods “gods,” even though they were low-leveldaemons. Johnson stresses Porphyry’s flexibility and coherence as a thinker. Porphyry

was not a doctrinaire philosopher, but rather an obliging thinker: He knew his work couldnot entirely do away with the theological and religious lingua franca of his day. He was acritical cosmopolitan who did not wholly reject the terminology of his era, even as heaspired to transcend it.

Porphyry the ethnographer had a protracted interest in ethnic and racial difference amongancient peoples. Religion and Identity traces the seeming disjunction between Porphyry’sphilosophical system as a way to obviate difference and as a way to understand human


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unity and wisdom, and he seeks to demonstrate how these two parts fit together. Porphyryuses the specific terms of ethnic argumentation — ethnos and genos in particular — bothto bolster specific points about his philosophical worldview and to articulate “a vision ofthe different nations … as the various purveyors of that truth.” For Porphyry, allexpressions of ethnocentrism, including Hellenocentrism, are false and misleadinginsofar as they embrace an earthly affiliation. But the wisdom of the nations nonethelessprovided him with an invaluable source of knowledge as a way to confirm and enhance,via contrast, his own theory of universal truth. As much as he would like to escape it, hiswritings are bound by the world he inhabits. He lives in “a world full of nations.”※

Religion and Identity is a monumental feat of both aggregation and interpretation. Thestaggering amount of intricate detail in this volume raises a variety of methodological,theoretical, and historical concerns for those who study late antiquity as well as thoseinterested in the ancient concepts of religion. To compound matters, the evidenceJohnson foregrounds is immensely difficult to work with because the sources heprioritizes are fragmentary. These bits from Porphyry’s lost Philosophy from Oracles , Onthe Return of the Soul , On Images , On the Styx , On Free Will , Against Nemertius ,Philosophic History , Letter to Anebo , Commentary on the Timaeus , and Against theChristians have been understudied, so it is nice to see them dealt with here, and dealtwith in such a methodologically sensitive fashion. Johnson concedes that his readings areoften speculative and, in certain cases, simply impossible to prove; it is refreshing to reada scholar who explicitly acknowledges the limitations of his sources. His use of thefragmentary evidence as his primary data nuances our knowledge of Porphyry’s intricateand sweeping philosophical opinions and complicates a facile portrait of Porphyry as an“apologist for Hellenism.” In Religion and Identity , Porphyry emerges not only as both a

critic and defender of Hellenism, but also as an inventive interpreter of human unity anddifference.

Johnson certainly does not neglect Porphyry’s (mostly) complete works, including butnot limited to On Abstinence , Letter to Marcella , Homeric Questions , On the Cave of the

Nymphs , and the Life of Plotinus . While he makes no claim to be writing acomprehensive intellectual biography, Johnson contextualizes a huge amount ofPorphyrian material in order to show that Porphyry’s writings evince a cosmopolitanism,complexity, and meticulousness that is, in his opinion, striking for an ancient author. Weare left with the insight that many of Porphyry’s supposed contradictions, especially on

the subject of sacrificial and cultic ritual, are not necessarily in tension at all. The expressaim of Johnson’s book is to find a “broad and rather elastic coherence” across the diversePorphyrian corpus.

To make sense of the tensions and diversity of Porphyry’s writings, Johnson presents hisbook as an attempt to “translate” a microscopic analysis of Porphyry into macroscopichistory of identity formation. He is quite clear that he is using the notion of translation as


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a model to bring “into a single framework of understanding both his metaphysics andtheology, on the one hand, and his cultural and ethnographic representations, on theother.” Translation enables us to see the compatibility between Porphyry’s articulation ofa theology of universalism and his description of ethnographic particularism. But inrepeatedly labeling Porphyry a translator, Johnson has offered a forced and unnecessaryoverlay rather than a critical framework. The idea of vertical and horizontal translation issimply too vague and too inchoate to make the two intricate halves of Johnson’s bookinto a coherent whole. If translation really is the language through which Porphyry’sseemingly contradictory activities as theologian and ethnographer can be reconciled, itrequires a more sustained engagement with techniques, types, and modes of translation aswell as the voluminous world of translation theory.

Terminology also proves to be a hurdle. He has a tendency to treat as self-evidentconcepts such as religion, identity, ethnography, and translation, which are in fact verycomplex and difficult to define. Do these terms remain productive analytical categories if

they are deployed so incontrovertibly and capaciously? Johnson treats ethnography andethnicity as though they are interchangeable, but ethnography is neither the study ofethnicities nor an effort to identify their fundamental criteria. If ethnography, in its mostbasic etymological sense, is “writing people” — most especially their customs, habits,and opinions — ancient authors could and did produce ethnographies (or, more often,ethnographic digressions) about groups that were never identified with the term ethnos .In that sense, a Roman author describing an Egyptian ritual would be producing a form ofethnographic knowledge just as he would be if he sought to describe members of Romanarmy, a collegia , or a priesthood.

Identity may be the most problematic category in Religion and Identity , and it is worthexploring its limitations and drawbacks as a frame of reference through which to studythe writings of Porphyry . Does the capacious, expansive, and often contradictory notionof identity substantively add to an already complex, multifaceted portrait of Porphyry?For those of us who study the ancient world, identity is a ubiquitous topic ofconversation. Libraries are filled with titles about Israelite, Roman, Greek, Jewish,Christian, and barbarian identity, among myriad other examples. There are books aboutcultural and social identity, the struggle for identity, the dynamics of identity,assimilation and identity, local identity, and still more. In searching after Porphyry’sidentity, Johnson is participating in pervasive and altogether common scholastic

discourse.Building upon his earlier work about Eusebius of Caesarea’s ethnic argumentation in hisPreparation for the Gospel , Johnson focuses his attention upon Porphyry’s use of racialand ethnic argumentation in forging his own identity. Porphyry was not only interested inthe various nations around him — their philosophical, cultic, and theological wisdom andcult traditions — but also in his ability to define and transcend his own ethnic affiliations.Johnson wonders in what sense Porphyry’s identity was defined by philosophy rather


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than ethnicity.

But throughout the book we are left to deduce what Johnson means when he invokes theidea of Porphyry’s ethnic identity. While he tells us that the Greek nouns ethnos and genos invoked ideas of kinship, language, religion, diet, territory, history, and legislativeordering, his point is that ethnic identity comprises numerous facets of living. In order toarrive at this multifaceted notion of ethnicity, Johnson rightly explains that ethnicity is aconstruct rather than an essence. And further that ethnic identity and ethnicity — anotherset of terms that appear more or less synonymous in the book — are more than theirconstituent parts. Johnson’s overarching methodological point is that scholars must attendto the “varied formulations of identity” in the late antique world. To write about identityis to trace the processes by which individuals and groups articulated a worldview. Thus tostudy Porphyry’s usage of ethnic reasoning is to study how he articulates human diversityas ethnic diversity and theological unity. But how does the category of identity advancethat agenda?

Identities, in Johnson’s formulation, emerge as fluid constructions rather than singularessences. They are adaptable, evolving expressions of a mixture of rhetoric and reality.They map negotiations of self within and against social location, political power, anddominant discourses. They express tensions and commonalities, narrowness andexpansiveness, universalism and particularism. Johnson’s emphasis on the malleabilityand adaptability of identity follows what the sociologists Rogers Brubaker and FrederickCooper call “weak identity.” In “ Beyond Identity ,” they argue that identity has become amostly unproductive and obfuscatory trope. Identity is, in their telling, a flat,undifferentiated, and contradictory analytical toolbox into which nearly every facet of

individual and collective existence in the world seems to fit. To make such flat ideaswork, however, scholars insist upon fluid, multiple, hybrid, negotiated, and constructedidentities. But if identity is a weak concept, we have to question whether it is a coherentconcept, “something that remains identical, the same, while other things are changing.” Ifidentity is always a protean formulation, is it really identity? Is it not, instead, a sort ofanti-identity or a denial of identity? Are we not better served by using terminology thatavoids generalizing and aggregating Porphyry’s specific interests into a lone sluggishcategory?

Indeed, if there really are so many ways to express identity, what value is there in

aggregating them all with a term that requires yet rarely receives precise qualification?Why not discuss Porphyry’s interest in language, diet, and kinship primarily in thosewords, rather than in terms of the capacious notion of identity? Porphyry is interested inconcepts such as human particularity, philosophical universalism, theology, and cult —concepts that are sufficiently expansive to merit language independent of and, indeed,more specific than the overly broad category of identity. Ethnicity, for example, is itself asufficiently knotty idea that to add “identity” occludes more than it illuminates, preciselybecause it fails to denote a distinction between the identifier and the identified. In its


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place, we should use terms that attend not only to issues of agency, but also to thedialectical, institutional (in the Foucauldian sense), subjective, individualistic, andcollective processes of identification.

Johnson views Hellenism as “a toolbox from which authors in late antiquity drew” inorder to craft various literary and intellectual projects. As he explains, “for Porphyry andhis late antique contemporaries, Hellenicity was a manipulable and contested identity.What it meant to be Greek and what element(s) of Greekness mattered most at any giventime and within any given social or rhetorical situation shifted” depending on the author’ssocial location, rhetorical needs, education, relation to social power, discursive channels,etc. Hellenicity is an identity fundamentally defined by its variability, fluidity, andinstability. As such, it can seemingly be all things to all authors. The very attempt toadjudicate the degree of Porphyry’s Hellenicity misses the point; imposing theframework of Greek identity situates Porphyry’s within a binary that Johnson insists isfalse. Because Porphyry oscillates between his Hellenic educational and linguistic

knowledge (his Hellenophilic identity) and his Phoenician identity — that is, he remainsneither firmly Phoenician nor Greek but seems to be both (or neither, perhaps) — he canhave multiple identities at once. But the move toward multiplicity enervates the very coreof identity and introduces a new conceptual problem: the impossibility of denyingidentity everywhere. Hence the very instability of Porphyry’s Hellenic identityproblematizes its utility as a profitable category to understand his attachment anddetachment to the heritage of Hellenism.

To fixate on Porphyry’s identity and his interest in others’ identities is, I think, not simplyto over-read the evidence but also to produce an analytical framework that reinscribes

identity as having an immutable essence (essentialism) despite the consistent refrain thatit is constructed (constructivism). There is a sense that if Porphyry’s identity can bedescribed as being fluid, then an essentialist understanding of identity has been avoided.But to say that Porphyry’s identity was fluid does not rehabilitate an essentialist notion ofHellenism. It merely circumvents the problem by conceding Hellenism’s variety even asit wishes to suggest there is something that holds the idea of Hellenic identity together.Tellingly, Johnson’s conclusion to Part II of his book strikes a much different note. Heexplains that Porphyry, in fact, did not characterize himself as a hybrid product ofPhoenician racial identity, on the one hand, and Greek cultural hegemony and Romanimperialism, on the other. Rather, he imagined a world that was divided “in terms of a

topography of wisdom and piety,” where certain peoples demonstrated a profoundcommitment to their god or gods alongside a tradition of philosophical inquiry.Porphyry’s writings are not, in this light, about identity but about the philosophical

journey to the divine. His writings reveal the process by which the philosopher canrationalize the reality of the world he inhabits. Identity becomes a blunt catchall ratherthan an agile indicator of Porphyry’s philosophical interests in the diversity of thematerial world.


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And while Johnson’s characterization of Porphyry oscillates uncomfortably betweenheurism and emic interpretation (an indigenous perspective) — Johnson claims thatmodern interpreters have gotten Porphyry wrong and then tells us what Porphyry reallythought — a more fundamental question lingers. If Porphyry really is unconcerned withhis identity in terms of its Hellenic and/or Phoenician qualities or, if he is unconcernedwith the very idea of identity, why does Johnson expend so much space parsing thecontours of a second-order category that lacks precision, one that he fails to define? I findmyself wondering if the scholarly interest in parsing ancient writers’ identities is not aninterpretive puzzle of its own creation. It necessarily presumes that identities were apersistent consideration among these writers or, at the very least, that there is criticalvalue in creating an analytical category called identity through which we can study them.Scholars give the impression that our ancient authors obsessed about their identities. Andthey do so fruitfully because the term can never be pinned down with any degree ofexactitude.

Johnson’s book clearly holds enormous value in its level of detail for those interested inPorphyry and the traditions of late antique Neoplatonism. As a book about Porphyry, it isan immensely learned, intricate analysis of the complex and seemingly contradictoryoeuvre of Porphyry. It is impossible to read this book and not come away with a muchmore sophisticated understanding of this curious, creative, and savvy Neoplatonistthinker. At the level of macroscopic theory, however, the book is less compelling. Iwould suggest that the scholarly discourse about ancient identity has reached a stagewhere it now requires serious reevaluation. Because the minutiae of Porphyry’swritings—and, indeed, many writings by other late antique authors—are defined by theirheterogeneity and variation they do not benefit from being subsumed under the category

of identity. The catchall of identity, despite the emphasis on fluidity, ultimately prizesintellectual coherence over contradiction. We might do better to treat the writings ofPorphyry as the discrete and wide-ranging interests of a thinker attempting to devise hisunderstanding of the world he inhabits and the world he aspires to reach, which werebound, in other words, to generate inconsistency. Let us embrace the tensions withinPorphyry’s writings rather than treat them as “problems” in need of harmonization.Perhaps it is time to move beyond the trappings of malleable identity

berzon - the problem with identity in late antiquity

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