Neoplatonism in Relation to Christianity

Charles Elsee

Introduction by Camille Barthélémy

Plotinus is remembered as a sage outside of time, a pure Greek mind absorbed in contemplation of the One. Charles Elsee saw a school at war.

In the third century the Church had grown in numbers and in intellectual strength until it threatened to overpower the old religion of the Empire. Persecution had failed. The struggle moved onto the ground of argument, and there, Elsee argues, Neoplatonism was never merely a philosophical revival. It was the most serious attempt of the ancient world to meet Christianity on its own ground and to prove the superiority of the old religion.

Plotinus's silence about the Christians was deliberate. He wrote against Gnostics whom his own disciple classed as Christians, and he took from Philo the doctrine of the divine Intellect while carefully avoiding the word Logos, which Christian use had claimed. The school took what it could use and fought the rest. It kept the infinite God and rejected the God who creates, wills and loves, and with him the equality of all men as creatures.

Porphyry, Hierocles and Julian carried on the same war by other means. Porphyry wrote fifteen books against the Christians. Pagan apologists set up Apollonius of Tyana as a rival to Christ, a wonder-worker drawn from the Gospels and corrected to suit the old gods. Hierocles, governor of Bithynia, backed the pen with the sword, and Julian tried to restore paganism as the religion of the Empire.

Then the tide turned. Augustine passed through Neoplatonism on his way to baptism. Hypatia's pupil Synesius became a bishop. The writings of "Dionysius the Areopagite" poured the philosophy of Proclus into the mould of Christian mysticism, and centuries later Eriugena drew his inspiration from them. The Church absorbed the philosophy that had set out to defeat it, and with it a hierarchy of being that sanctioned hierarchies on earth, a salvation of the soul alone and a Kingdom deferred to eternity. Christian theology has carried its imprint ever since.

Clear and compact, Elsee's book is at once a first introduction to Neoplatonism and a key to the history of Christian theology.

This edition: A new introduction defends Elsee's thesis against the image of Plotinus that still prevails today, that of a pure Greek sage untouched by his century. It shows that Plotinus's silence about the Christians was a strategy, that the Gnostics he attacked were Christians, and that Neoplatonism hid what it owed to Philo. It then follows the thread Elsee leaves open: the philosophy that set out to defeat Christianity ended by shaping its theology from within.

The complete text of 1908, newly typeset, with a thematic index.

Neoplatonism in Relation to Christianity - Charles Elsee

Publication: 09/24/2026

165 pages

12.7x20.32 cm (5x8 in)

ISBN 978-2-38366-077-4

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The Review That Saw Everything

Neoplatonism in Relation to Christianity — Charles Elsee (1908)

In 1910 the Classical Review gave Charles Elsee's essay a short and dismissive notice. The reviewer was R. G. Bury, the future Loeb translator of Plato. He found the book pleasant and well informed but largely unoriginal, with one exception. That exception is the whole book:

"…unless it be his contention that Plotinus 'edited and retouched Christian theology in the light of Platonic philosophy,' and that the silence of Plotinus, the plagiarist, upon the subject of Christianity 'was deliberate and intentional': Neoplatonism, in fact, was merely part and parcel of an anti-Christian plot!"

Bury added that the weakest part of the essay concerned what should have been its essential point: the differences between the two theologies and the influence of one on the other.

Bury is right about where the thesis lies, and his summary is exact. His objections, however, rest on the state of knowledge in 1908. A century of discoveries and scholarship has moved the evidence toward Elsee.

The Thesis

Elsee's claim is simple and radical. The founder of Neoplatonism knew Christianity, drew on it, and erased it.

Plotinus never names the Christians, and Elsee argues that this silence cannot be put down to ignorance. Plotinus and Origen both studied under Ammonius Saccas. Porphyry began his great attack on the Church almost as soon as his master died. Plotinus did not think the subject beneath him either, since he wrote a whole treatise against the Gnostics, whom Porphyry groups with the Christians. Elsee's conclusion: "The silence of Plotinus upon the subject of Christianity is difficult to explain until we see that it is deliberate and intentional."

Elsee finds the clearest trace in a word that is missing. Plotinus's Intellect, the principle that contains the Ideas after which the world is formed, closely matches Philo's Logos. Yet Plotinus refuses the name Logos for his second principle. Elsee explains the refusal: by then the word had become Christian.

First Objection: "A Plot!"

Bury's sarcasm turns a thesis about intellectual strategy into a conspiracy theory. Elsee's claim is more modest and harder to refute. From its beginning, Neoplatonism was a programme to rebuild paganism on philosophical foundations against an advancing rival. Its methods changed over time. Plotinus used disdain, Porphyry wrote polemic, and Hierocles, a governor in the Great Persecution, used the sword. The goal stayed the same throughout.

Later scholarship has confirmed much of this programme. H. D. Saffrey asked why Porphyry published the Enneads around 300. He argued that the edition gave paganism a scripture of its own, on the eve of the Great Persecution. Elizabeth DePalma Digeser, in A Threat to Public Piety (2012), described a shared philosophical community of Christians and pagans that grew out of Ammonius's circle. In her account, the break of that community fed directly into the persecution of 303. The remaining debate concerns when the anti-Christian turn began. Elsee answers: with Plotinus, in the form of silence.

Second Objection: The Gnostics Were "Purely Heathen"

In 1908 the standard way to separate Plotinus from Christianity was to call the targets of Enneads II.9 pagan Gnostics. Charles Bigg had done so, and Elsee rejected it in a note: "the point of importance lies not in what they were, but in what Plotinus supposed them to be."

Since then that line of defence has collapsed.

  • Nag Hammadi (1945). The discoveries yielded Zostrianos and Allogenes, two of the very texts that Porphyry (Life of Plotinus 16) says were read and refuted in Plotinus's school. We can now read what Plotinus read.
  • The Gnostic category itself. Michael Williams (Rethinking "Gnosticism", 1996) and Karen King (What Is Gnosticism?, 2003) dismantled the idea of a separate non-Christian Gnostic religion. Porphyry's own text places these opponents alongside the Christians.
  • The "Großschrift". Richard Harder showed that the treatise against the Gnostics was one long work. Porphyry divided it into four pieces (III.8, V.8, V.5, II.9). The polemic therefore runs through the core of Plotinus's metaphysics, not through a marginal pamphlet.
  • Recent research. Jean-Marc Narbonne (Plotinus in Dialogue with the Gnostics, 2011) and Zeke Mazur (The Platonizing Sethian Background of Plotinus's Mysticism, 2021) argue that Plotinus's doctrine of ascent took shape in close rivalry with these texts. Their method is Elsee's: shared content, denied kinship.

The text itself shows the fingerprints. In II.9.18 Plotinus mocks opponents who refuse to call the heavenly gods their brothers but give that name to the basest of men. "Brothers" was the Christian word.

Third Objection: The Logos Is an Inference

Elsee argued from what is absent. We now have evidence from within the school. Amelius, Plotinus's senior disciple for twenty-four years, quoted the prologue of John on the Logos, calling its author "the barbarian" (Eusebius, Praeparatio evangelica XI.19). In Plotinus's own seminar, then, "Logos" was already the Christian word, and it was discussed under that name. Elsee did not use this passage, but it supports him more strongly than anything he did cite.

The "Weakest Part": Differences and Influence

Bury wanted a table of doctrinal differences. Elsee's point is that the difference does not lie mainly in doctrine. The two systems share the One, the Intellect, the ascent of the soul, allegory, and evil as non-being. The Neoplatonists themselves drew the dividing line elsewhere, between Hellenes and barbarians. Porphyry said so of Origen in a surviving fragment (Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History VI.19). Origen, he wrote, thought like a Greek about God but had thrown himself into barbarian recklessness in the way he lived.

When two systems are this close, the rivalry is at its sharpest and the debt has to be hidden most carefully. That is exactly what Elsee's thesis predicts. Bury took the difficulty of finding clear differences as a weakness of the book. On Elsee's account, it is the phenomenon the book sets out to explain.

Why Reissue It Now

Elsee's essay is also a clear and readable first introduction to its subject: Roman religion in the third century, the Greek sources, Clement and Origen, and the history of the school down to Proclus. Its lasting value, however, is the thesis Bury singled out as its only novelty. It asks readers to treat Neoplatonism as a deliberate act of appropriation and concealment, not as the neutral culmination of Greek thought.

The reissue belongs to a larger programme at éditions localement transcendantes. In 1906 Henri Guyot traced Plotinus's debts to Philo of Alexandria (Les Réminiscences de Philon le Juif chez Plotin). Elsee traces the debts to the Christians. The two works make one argument: behind the "last flowering of Greek philosophy" lies a biblical source that has been covered over.