ABSTRACT
While no extant source allows us to determine any direct link between the Gnostics and Plotinus before his arrival in Rome – due to the lack of biographical information during the 40 years or so he spent in Egypt – we know for sure that he attended the abstruse teachings of Ammonius Saccas in an environment where the Christian sectaries abounded, of which some were related to the Gnostics. Among these Gnostic sectaries emerge what are called the Platonizing Sethians, a group that relied on Plato’s dialogues to develop its own revelations (Turner 2001: 292–301; Ferroni and Narbonne 2012: xxx; Mazur in Ferroni and Narbonne (forthcoming)), as we can see in the Nag Hammadi corpus (NHC), inter alia in the Zostrian (VIII, 1) and Allogen (XI, 3), two books that, according to Porphyry’s Vita Plotini (VP 16), Plotinus was acquainted with during his teaching career at Rome. It is worth noting that Porphyry did not himself know a lot about Plotinus’s early period of teaching, during which he wrote no less than his first 21 treatises (Ferroni and Narbonne 2012: xii). Thus, one can legitimately wonder if Plotinus acknowledged these Gnostic theories at that time or at a specific moment later (that is, during the writing of the first or middle period treatises, where 33 [II 9] Against the Gnostics is situated), or even got acquainted with their doctrines back in his years in Alexandria. However, since there is no clear evidence for this last option (Ferroni and Narbonne 2012: xv–xvii) we need to turn to the Enneads (or to the Vita Plotini) to establish whether Plotinus had some connections with them at least from his first writing period (treatises 1–21), or if they occurred at a punctual point later, after a particular set of events that happened in his school (Ferroni and Narbonne 2012: xxx). We do indeed know from VP 16, 9–10 that Plotinus’s first pupil, namely Amelius, wrote at his demand 40 books against the Gnostics and that Porphyry himself addressed some refutations to them. From this information alone, one can conclude that this conflict provoked an intense debate inside Plotinus’s school which cannot be reduced to a single treatise or even to a tetralogy of treatises (treatises 30–33) but prevailed during at least the whole of Porphyry’s sojourn at Rome (thus as early as the writing of treatise 22).
