Porphyry in the Renaissance

14 June 2023

Porphyry in the Renaissance

I recently finished reding Renaissance Vegetarianism: The Philosophical Afterlives of Porphyry’s ‘On Abstinence.’  The author is Cecilia Muratori.  The book was published in 2020 under the auspices of the Modern Humanities Research Association, which, for the purposes of this project, was associated with an organization called ‘Legenda’ which specializes in publishing scholarly research on various topics.  All of this makes this book highly academic with large numbers of footnotes after each chapter.  In addition, quotations and titles of works are given in the original Italian and then translated into English; this is true for both long and short passages.

Overall, I found the book well-organized and well written.  Complex arguments, and disagreements involving multiple participants, are presented in such a way that I was able to follow the various lines of analysis and the divergent interpretations intellectuals had of Porphyry.  I have a great fondness for Porphyry and because of this I decided to read this book.  If you lack this affection for Porphyry (for example, if you are indifferent) the book might be more of a challenge.  Here are a few comments:

1.  Marsilio Ficino (1433 – 1499) translated Porphyry’s work On Abstinence, a treatise on refraining from harming animals by either eating them or sacrificing them in religious ceremonies.  Ficino’s translation was widely read, commented on, and translated.  In this way the treatise by Porphyry had a kind of ‘second life’, having a big impact on the discussions about diet and our ethical relationship to animals.  I was unaware of how Porphyry’s On Abstinence had been, and continues to be, so influential.  I was surprised by how often the discussion that emerged in response to the publication of Porphyry’s book is still the discussion we are having today when people talk about vegetarianism, veganism, and what is the optimal diet for human health, and what is the optimal diet for human ethics.

2.  Porphyry’s view is that a vegetarian diet is necessary for a philosopher.  In other words, Porphyry has the view that Platonism requires that its practitioners be vegetarians as part of the Platonic way of life.  There are several reasons: First, it is part of the process of purification which is the basis of Platonist spiritual practice; Second, vegetarianism assists with the practice of contemplation, an essential Platonist practice; Third, from the perspective of rebirth, killing animals and causing animals harm propels one into difficult rebirths because of what today we would call karmic consequences, thereby creating an obstacle for the contemplative ascent to the One.

It is the claim of Porphyry that vegetarianism is a necessary practice for a genuinely philosophical life that is the focus of attention for much of Renaissance Vegetarianism.

3.  The book is organized by topics rather than by individuals.  It works well.  The topics are Sacrifice, Health, Otherness, and Rationality.

In ‘Sacrifice’ the issue centers on sacrificing animals for religious reasons, which was a main focus of Porphyry’s On Abstinence.  The cultural situation of the Renaissance was very different than that for Porphyry and animal sacrifice is not practiced in a Christian context.  For this reason, the discussion in this section is, for the most part, theoretical, but still very interesting.  Several authors seek to link Porphyry’s opposition to animal sacrifice to Christianity, seeing in this argument a nascent Christian understanding.

In ‘Health’ the discussion becomes more lively as different authors stake out different positions on whether or not the vegetarian diet is healthy for human beings.  It was intriguing for me to find the full range of positions that one finds today; going from vegetarianism is unhealthy, to an omnivorous middle position, to a pescatarian perspective, to a more carnist view.  This section helped me to understand the origins of many of today’s debates on diet.

In ‘Otherness’ the focus is on whether or not the eating of other human beings is acceptable.  This surprised me.  But during the Renaissance it seems that there was a lot of discussion about cannibalism (also known as ‘anthropophagy’) and groups that were known to be cannibalistic.  The ‘Otherness’ has to do with the feeling that if someone indulged in cannibalism then they became, in some sense, non-human; they became more like animals, those animals that are also cannibalistic.

The idea, for some authors, is that cannibalism cripples the soul, making the soul coarse and that in a similar way, eating meat coarsens the soul making it more difficult for a philosopher to enter into subtle practices such as contemplation.  Other authors disagreed with this logic.  In these discussions cannibals were often contrasted with vegetarian Brahmins, a group the Renaissance had learned about through travel literature. 

The concluding section is ‘Rationality’ which centers on whether or not animals can reason, have sensation, and suffer.  There are a wide variety of views ranging from animals lacking all of these capacities to animals having all of these capacities.  The connection to vegetarianism is that if animals have reason, for example, then they are, in a sense, human (though not as sophisticated, or fully developed, as humans.)  The inference, then, is that we should not eat them.

4.  For those who are interested in the place that vegetarianism holds in Platonist views and practice, I think this is an excellent book; though it may cover a greater range of opinions than you would have suspected.  For me it helped to give some historical depth to contemporary disputes about vegetarianism and veganism as opposed to omnivores and carnists.  Often today you pick up the impression that vegetarianism, particularly in its vegan phase, is a new fad; both advocates and critics often act like that is the case.  A great virtue of this book is that it demonstrates how long all of these discussions have been going on and that many of the points raised today have precedents that go back hundreds of years.

5.  In the ‘Epilogue’ Muratori writes, “What is at stake in the Renaissance afterlives of On Abstinence that this book has explored is the meaning of vegetarianism, specifically as a philosophical diet.  The role of the philosopher, too, changed, between Porphyry’s time and the Renaissance: for Porphyry, the ascetic aspect of abstinence, and its practical realization, played a more central role than for his Renaissance sympathizers . . . As Pierre Hadot has remarked, for a Platonist like Porphyry, ‘abstract theory is not considered to be true knowledge.’  With reference to On Abstinence Hadot shows that for Porphyry contemplation needs to be fulfilled in life:

‘We must, [Porphyry] tell us, undertake two exercises: in the first place, we must turn our thought away from all that is mortal and material.  Secondly, we must return toward the activity of the Intellect.  The first stage of these Neoplatonic exercises includes aspects which are highly ascetic, in the modern sense of the word: a vegetarian diet, among other things.’

“Practical changes to one’s own life, such as adherence to vegetarianism, support the philosopher’s turn towards contemplation by providing philosophical discipline for contact with the other world.”  (Muratori, page 227)