Journal of the History of Philosophy

340 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY and Ovid to turn to Lucretius. Humphries takes to De Rerum Natura like a fish to water or a bird to the sky. The only surprise is that his translation has not already long existed and already become the classic it is certain to be. LENN EW~N GOODMAN University of Hawaii, Honolulu Porphyre et Victorinus. By Pierre Hadot. 2 vols. (Paris: Etudes Augustiniermes, 1968. Pp. 503, 174) This is an important and original contribution to the understanding of Neeplatonism and its development after Plotinus. In 1960 M. Pierre Hadot published a translation and commentary of Professor Henry's text of Marius Victorinus ("Sources chr~tiennes" nos. 68-69), and a year later an article (R. des ~t. grecques, eel 74) arguing for Porphyry's authorship of the Parmenides commentary known fragmentarily from a Turin palimpsest (ed. Kroll 1892). The studies that produced these may be said now to have converged and enabled him to identify as the unaltered metaphysics of Porphyry a whole collection of texts in Victorinus which obviously depended on some Neoplatonist source or sources. One volume of the present work c0ntains these texts, systematically classified, together with a critical edition and French translation of the Turin fragment; the other expounds the metaphysical doctrines and the motives behind their adoption by Porphyry. The bare bones of the matter are these. The "Father" of the Chaldaean Oracles who, as representing existence, should belong to the second hypostasis, is at the same time to be identified with the first One. For he is not "being" but "the One that is without participating in being" of Parmenides' second hypothesis; called there by Plato (142E) "the One alone by itself" this amounts to the Idea of being, being that is prior to what is, or pre-existence (not just unity as it would have been for Plotinus). But this in turn is nothing but the form which results from, or rather is, the selfthinking of the first One; for the first One is a triad of being, life and thought, which corresponds in Synesius' theology to that of father, will (or 'birth pangs') and wisdom (or son) and in Porphyry's and Victorinus' metaphysics to 'pure act', then 'acting' as we might say, and 'something acting'. Some of this structure had been seen by Willy Theiler in his study of Synesius and the Chaldaean Oracles, but he had to guess at its role in Porphyry; and writers on Victorinus seem either to have underestimated its difference from the Enneads or to have put it clown to Christian distortion. I shall suggest here only two hesitations, and both on broad themes of Hadot's indispensible book. He argues that these novelties were largely suggested to Porphyry by the conflicting demands made on him as expositor of the Oracles and of Plato. The argument, notably in its pin-pointing of Parmenides 142B-143A, is meticulous and convincing. But it may present only half the truth, the formal setting of the novel structure: the content may be due to the plain philosophical difficulty of Plotinus' position. In very crude terms, making sense of emanation in Plotinus tends to offer any philosopher a dilemma between a pantheistic. or rather monistic, appearance and reality, version and a more theistic, creation and will, version. Porphyry chose the former; and I think myself that there is more to be said for it than is currently fashionable. (And of course there are a number of details over which some readers will find parallels in Plotinus where Hadot does not.) In the Turin fragment as well as the Sententiae Porphyry adopts an almost Bradleyan position BOOK REVIEWS 341 in which the distinctions we attribute to reality are nothing but defects of human thinking. Hadot devotes an expository section to these "reversals of perspective": but one wonders why they are ignored when he is 'placing' Porphyry as a Neoplatonist philosopher. The subjectivism seems to me complementary to the telescoping of the hypostases. A second hesitation concerns Hadot's view--which did not of course start with him--of key concepts in Plotinus and Porphyry as transformations of Stoic concepts. Certainly the analogy between Neoplatonic procession and reversion...