In the waning twilight of pagan philosophy, as Christianity ascended toward cultural and spiritual dominance, two formidable voices—Porphyry and Hierocles—emerged as eloquent adversaries. Their attacks, forged in the crucible of Neoplatonic rigor and Roman imperial power, revealed not only the enduring strength of Christianity’s intellectual claims but also the compelling sway it held even over those who rejected its lordship. What remains of their critiques is fragmentary, but it testifies to a moment in history when philosophy and empire made their last coordinated stand against the rising church.
Porphyry’s Philosophical Onslaught
Among the most formidable intellectual opponents of early Christianity stood Porphyry, a prominent Neo-Platonist whose polemic, composed toward the close of the third century, was regarded by the church fathers as perhaps the most insidious threat yet posed to the faith. His work, a fifteen-book treatise against Christianity, drew such profound ire and such extensive rebuttal that it provoked responses from some of the most learned Christian apologists of the era—Methodius of Tyre, Eusebius of Caesarea, and Apollinaris of Laodicea among them. In a dramatic gesture of imperial censorship, the emperors Theodosius II and Valentinian III ordered all extant copies of this work burned in A.D. 448. Thus, the text survives only in scattered fragments, preserved in the writings of its opponents.
Porphyry’s criticism, unlike that of the earlier Celsus, was distinguished by its erudition. He assailed the Christian Scriptures with sharpened intellect and a critic’s discernment, endeavoring to expose perceived inconsistencies between the Old and New Testaments and within the apostolic witness itself. His most penetrating critiques were leveled against the prophetic literature, especially the Book of Daniel, which he accused of being a vaticinium post eventum—a prophecy written after the events it purported to predict. He rebuked Origen’s allegorical method, claiming it imposed mystical fabrications upon the Mosaic texts, obscuring their plain and historical sense.
Porphyry’s rhetorical arsenal was not limited to abstract criticism. He seized upon the discord between Peter and Paul at Antioch (Galatians 2:11) as a vivid example of apostolic disunity. From this, he accused Paul of quarrelsomeness and Peter of error, concluding that the entire edifice of Christian doctrine was erected upon the unstable ground of contradiction and deceit. Nor did he spare Jesus himself: pointing to what he deemed contradictory behavior in John 7:8 and 7:14, Porphyry alleged inconsistency and duplicity.
Qualified Admiration and the Shadow of Christ
Yet despite his vigorous opposition, Porphyry did not completely reject the figure of Jesus. In a manner anticipating later rationalist thinkers, he sought to rescue the “original” teachings of Christ from what he viewed as the distortions of his followers. In his treatise on the “Philosophy of Oracles” (Περὶ τῆς ἐκ λογίων φιλοσοφίας), frequently cited by Eusebius and Augustine, Porphyry asserted that while Christ was to be pitied rather than reviled, it was folly to worship him as divine. Christ, he wrote, was a soul of profound piety, now exalted to the heavens by divine fate, but tragically mistaken by the masses for a god. These worshippers, he contended, were deluded by their misfortune and spiritual poverty.
This tension between disdain and admiration is even more palpable in a letter to his wife Marcella, rediscovered and published by Angelo Mai in 1816. Though Mai mistakenly presumed Marcella to have been a Christian, the letter nonetheless reveals remarkable thematic overlaps with Christian moral vision. Porphyry affirms that “what is born of flesh is flesh,” and urges that by “faith, love, and hope” one may ascend to the divine. He acknowledges the holiness of God, asserts that evil stems from human volition, and proclaims that the pure heart is the highest sacrifice. The wise man, he continues, becomes both the temple and the priest. Though these expressions are couched in Platonic categories, their language and imagery resonate with unmistakably Christian overtones. Yet for all this, Porphyry retained his philosophical autonomy, interpreting such terms in ways ultimately divergent from their biblical usage. Still, his words reveal the gravitational pull Christianity exerted even upon its most refined pagan critics—drawing them, willingly or not, into its moral and spiritual orbit.
Hierocles and the Final Pagan Polemic
The last significant literary adversary of Christianity during this era was Hierocles, a provincial governor under Diocletian—first in Bithynia, later in Alexandria. His opposition was not confined to the pen; he enforced the emperor’s persecutions with unflinching brutality, subjecting Christian women to torments more dreadful than death. Like Porphyry’s work, his anti-Christian treatise, provocatively titled Truth-loving Words to the Christians, was lost to history through the zealous book-burnings of Christian emperors. Its content survives only through the counterarguments of Eusebius of Caesarea.
Hierocles appears to have borrowed heavily from both Celsus and Porphyry, rehearsing familiar objections with renewed aggression. His most notable argument lay in an invidious comparison between Jesus and Apollonius of Tyana. To Hierocles, the miracles attributed to Christ were meager and poorly attested, exaggerated by the apostolic imagination. In contrast, Apollonius—along with figures like Aristeas and Pythagoras—was portrayed as a genuine wonder-worker, a man favored by the gods and beneficent to humankind. While Christians, he contended, deified Jesus on flimsy grounds, the pagans rightly honored Apollonius without ascribing to him divinity.
A further trace of this critique may be found in excerpts from a now-anonymous pagan philosopher, likely either Porphyry or Hierocles, quoted in the apologetic writings of Macarius Magnes around A.D. 400. These fragments were rediscovered in 1867 at Athens and published in Paris by Blondel in 1876. They offer a valuable glimpse into the enduring hostility—and begrudging fascination—that pagan thinkers bore toward the Christian movement. Their intellectual resistance, though fierce, ultimately signaled the twilight of the classical order. In their very critiques, they testified to a faith whose ethical vision and metaphysical gravity were impossible to ignore.
References
(87) Περὶ τῆς ἐκ λογίων φιλοσοφίας. While scholars such as Fabricius, Mosheim, and Neander accept this as authentically Porphyrian, Lardner disputes its attribution.
(88) Augustine, De Civitate Dei, Book XIX, chapters 22–23. See also Eusebius, Demonstratio Evangelica, Book III, chapter 6.
(89) The apologetic work of Macarius Magnes, quoting an unnamed pagan philosopher—probably Porphyry or Hierocles—was discovered in Athens (1867) and published by Blondel in Paris (1876). See L. Duchesne, De Marcario Magnete et scriptis ejus (Paris, 1877); Zöckler, in Herzog Realencyklopädie, 2nd ed., vol. IX, p. 160.
