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The below biography of Porphyry is wrested, like the juice from an orange, from an essay on Greek Oracles by Frederic William Henry Myers. His object was to show how the history of Delphi parallels the history of Hellenic culture, but it is surprising that the end of each is punctuated by a single person, and so the biography of the nation includes the biography of the man.

I felt that it was worth transcribing and excerpting, not only for its literary merit but also for the sketch it draws of a fascinating person. It is, of course, impossible—given the gulf of years—to know whether such a sketch is in any way accurate, but the archetypal story it tells is one worth knowing, I think.

[...] It was destined that every seed which the great age of Greece had planted should germinate and grow; and a school was now to arise which should take hold, as it were, of the universe by a forgotten clew, and should give fuller meaning and wider acceptance to some of the most remarkable, though hitherto least noticed, utterances of earlier men. We must go back as far as Hesiod to understand the Neoplatonists.

For it is in Hesiod's celebrated story of the Ages of the World that we find the first Greek conception, obscure though its details seem—of a hierarchy of spiritual beings who fill the unseen world, and can discern and influence our own. The souls of heroes, he says, become happy spirits who dwell aloof from our sorrow; the souls of men of the golden age become good and guardian spirits, who flit over the earth and watch the just and unjust deeds of men; and the souls of men of the silver age become an inferior class of spirits, themselves mortal, yet deserving honour from mankind. The same strain of thought appears in Thales, who defines demons as spiritual existences, heroes, as the souls of men separated from the body. Pythagoras held much the same view, and, as we shall see below, believed that in a certain sense these spirits were occasionally to be seen or felt. Heraclitus held "that all things were full of souls and spirits," and Empedocles has described in lines of startling power the wanderings through the universe of a lost and homeless soul. Lastly, Plato, in the Epinomis brings these theories into direct connection with our subject [of Greek oracles] by asserting that some of these spirits can read the minds of living men, and are still liable to be grieved by our wrong-doing, while many of them appear to us in sleep by visions, and are made known by voices and oracles, in our health or sickness, and are about us at our dying hour. Some are even visible occasionally in waking reality, and then again disappear, and cause perplexity by their obscure self-manifestation.

Opinions like these, existing in a corner of the vast structure of Platonic thought, passed, as it seems, for centuries with little notice. Almost as unnoticed was the gradual development of the creed known as Orphic, which seems to have begun with making itself master of the ancient mysteries, and only slowly spread through the profane world its doctrine that this life is a purgation, that this body is a sepulchre, and that the Divinity, who surrounds us like an ocean, is the hope and home of the soul. But a time came when, under the impulse of a great religious movement, these currents of belief, which had so long run underground, broke into sight again in an unlooked-for direction. These tenets, and many more, were dwelt upon and expanded with new conviction by that remarkable series of men who furnish to the history of Greek thought so singular a concluding chapter. And no part, perhaps, of the Neoplatonic system shows more clearly than their treatment of oracles how profound a change the Greek religion has undergone beneath all its apparent continuity. It so happens that the Neoplatonic philosopher who has written most on our present subject, was also a man whose spiritual history affords a striking, perhaps an unique, epitome of the several stages through which the faith of Greece had up to that time passed. A Syrian of noble descent, powerful intelligence, and upright character, Porphyry brought to the study of the Greek religion little that was distinctively Semitic, unless we so term the ardour of his religious impulses, and his profound conviction that the one thing needful for man lay in the truest knowledge attainable as to his relation to the divine. Educated by Longinus, the last representative of expiring classicism, the Syrian youth absorbed all, and probably more than all, his master's faith. Homer became to him what the Bible was to Luther; and he spent some years in producing the most perfect edition of the Iliad and Odyssey which had yet appeared, in order that no fragment of the inspired text might fail to render its full meaning. But, as it seems, in the performance of this task, his faith received the same shock which had been fatal to the early piety of Greece. The behaviour of the gods in Homer was too bad to be condoned. He discerned, what is probably the truth, that there must be some explanation of these enormities which is not visible on the surface, and that nothing short of some profound mistake could claim acceptance for such legends as those of Zeus and Kronos, of Kronos and Uranus, amid so much else that is majestic and pure. Many philologists would answer now that the mistake, the disease of language, lay in the expression in terms of human appetite and passion of the impersonal sequences of the great phenomena of Nature; that the most monstrous tales of mythology mean nothing worse or more surprising than that day follows night, and night again succeeds to day. To Porphyry such explanations were of course impossible. In default of Sanskrit he betook himself to allegory. The truth which must be somewhere in Homer, but which plainly was not in the natural sense of the words, must therefore be discoverable in a non-natural sense. The cave of the nymphs, for instance, which Homer describes as in Ithaca, is not in Ithaca. Homer must, therefore, have meant by the cave something quite other than a cave; must have meant, in fact, to signify by its inside the temporary, by its outside the eternal world. But this stage in Porphyry's development was not of long duration. As his conscience had revolted from Homer taken literally, so his intelligence had revolted from such a fashion of interpretation as this. But yet he was not prepared to abandon the Greek religion. That religion, he thought, must possess some authority, some sacred book, some standard of faith, capable of being brought into harmony with the philosophy which, equally with the religion itself, was the tradition and inheritance of the race. And such a rule of faith, if to be found anywhere, must be found in the direct communications of the gods to men. Scattered and fragmentary though these were, it must be possible to extract from them a consistent system. This is what he endeavoured to do in his work, "On the Philosophy to be drawn from Oracles," a book of which large fragments remain to us embedded in Eusebius's treatise "On the Preparation for the Gospel."

Perhaps the best guarantee of the good faith in which Porphyry undertook his task lies in the fact that he afterwards recognized that he had been unsuccessful. He acknowledged, in terms on which his antagonist Eusebius has gladly seized, that the mystery as to the authors of the responses was too profound, the responses themselves were too unsatisfactory, to admit of the construction from them of a definite and lofty faith. [...]

Into so obscure, so undignified a region of mingled fraud and mystery does it seem that, by the admission of friends and foes alike, the oracles of Greece had by this time fallen. [...] There was not, indeed, in Porphyry's view anything inconsistent with the occasional presence and counsel of a lofty and a guardian spirit. There was nothing which need make him doubt that the Greeks had been led upwards through their long history by some providential power. Nay, he himself cites, as we shall see, recent oracles higher in tone than any which have preceded them. Yet as compared with the early ardour of that imaginative belief which peopled heaven with gods and earth with heroes, we feel that we are not sent back to "beggarly elements;" that the task of sifting truth from falsehood amid so much deception and incompetence on the part both of visible and invisible agencies, of erecting a consistent creed on such mean and shifting foundations, might well rebut even the patient ardour of this most untiring of "seekers after God." And when we see him recognising all this with painful clearness, giving vent, in that letter to Anebo which is so striking an example of absolute candour in an unscrupulous and polemic age, to his despair at the obscurity which seems to deepen as he proceeds, we cannot but wonder that we do not see him turn to take refuge in [Christianity] with its offers of certainty and peace.

Why, we shall often ask, should men so much in earnest as the Neoplatonists have taken, with the gospel before them, the side they took? Why should they have preferred to infuse another allegory into the old myths which had endured so much? to force the Pythian Apollo, so simple-hearted through all his official ambiguity, to strain his hexameters into the ineffable yearnings of a theosophic age? For we seem to see the issues so clearly! when we take up Augustine instead of Proclus we feel so instantly that we have changed to the winning side! But to Greek minds—and the glory of the Syrian Porphyry was that, of all barbarians, he became the most intensely Greek—the struggle presented itself in a very different fashion. They were fighting not for an effete mythology, but for the whole Past of Greece; nay, as it seemed in a certain sense, for the civilisation of the world. The repulse of Xerxes had stirred in the Greeks the consciousness of their uniqueness as compared with the barbarism on every side. And now, when Hellenism was visibly dying away, there awoke in the remaining Greeks a still more momentous conception, the conception of the uniqueness and preciousness of Greek life not only in space but in duration, as compared not only with its barbarian compeers, but with the probable future of the world. It was no longer against the Great King, but against Time itself, that the unequal battle must be waged. And while Time's impersonal touch was slowly laid upon all the glory which had been, a more personal foe was seen advancing from the same East from whose onset Greece already had escaped, "but so as by fire." Christ, like Xerxes, came against the Greek spirit [...] driving a Syrian car; the tide of conquest was rolling back again, and the East was claiming an empire such as the West had never won.

We, indeed, knowing all the flower of European Christianity in Dante's age, all its ripening fruit in our own, may see that this time from the East light came; we may trust and claim that we are living now among the scattered forerunners of such types of beauty and of goodness as Athens never knew. But if so much even of our own ideal is in the future still, how must it have been to those whose longest outlook could not overpass the dreary centuries of barbarism and decay? So vast a spiritual revolution must needs bring to souls of differing temper very different fates. Happy were they who, like Augustine and Origen, could frankly desert the old things and rejoice that all things were become new. Happy too were those few saintly souls—an Antoninus or a Plotinus—whose lofty calm no spiritual revolution seemed able to reach or mar. But the pathetic destiny was that of men like Julian or Porphyry, men who were disqualified from leading the race onward into a noble future merely because they so well knew and loved an only less noble past.

And yet it is not for long that we can take Porphyry as an example of a man wandering in the twilight between "dying lights and dawning," between an outworn and an untried faith. The last chapter in the history of oracles is strangely connected with the last stage of the spiritual history of this upward-striving man.

For it was now that Porphyry was to encounter an influence, a doctrine, an aim, more enchanting than Homer's mythology, profounder than Apollo's oracles, more Christian, I had almost written, than Christianity itself. More Christian at least than such Christianity as had chiefly met Porphyry's eyes; more Christian than the violence of bishops, the wrangles of heretics, the fanaticism of slaves, was that single-hearted and endless effort after the union of the soul with God which filled every moment of the life of Plotinus, and which gave to his living example a potency and a charm which his writings never can renew. "Without father, without mother, without descent," a figure appearing solitary as Melchisedek on the scene of history, charged with a single blessing and lost in the unknown, we may yet see in this chief of mystics the heir of Plato, and affirm that it is he who has completed the cycle of Greek civilisation by adding to that long gallery of types of artist and warrior, philosopher and poet, the stainless image of the saint.

It may be that the holiness which he aimed at is not for man. It may be that ecstasy comes best unsought, and that the still small voice is heard seldomer in the silence of the wilderness than through the thunder of human toil and amid human passion's fire.

But those were days of untried capacities, of unbounded hopes. In the Neoplatonist lecture-room, as at the Christian love-feast, it seemed that religion had no need to compromise, that all this complex human spirit could be absorbed and transfigured in one desire.

Counsels of perfection are the aliment of strenuous souls, and henceforth, in each successive book of Porphyry's, we see him rising higher, resting more confidently in those joys and aspirations which are the heritage of all high religions, and the substance of the communion of saints.

And gradually, as he swells more habitually in the thought of the supreme and ineffable Deity, the idea of a visible or tangible communion with any Being less august becomes repugnant to his mind. For what purpose should he draw to him those unknown intelligences from the ocean of environing souls? "For on those things which he desires to know there is no prophet nor diviner who can declare to him the truth, but himself only, by communion with God, who is enshrined indeed in his heart." "By a sacred silence we do Him honour, and by pure thoughts of what he is." "Holding Him fast, and being made like unto Him, let us present ourselves, a holy sacrifice, for our offering unto God."

And in his letter to the well-loved wife of his old age,—than which we find no higher expression of the true Platonic love (so often degraded and misnamed)—no nobler charge and counsel of man to woman in all the stores which antiquity has bequeathed,—in this last utterance we find him risen above all doubt and controversy, and rapt in the contemplation of that Being whom "no prayers can move and no sacrifice honour, nor the abundance of offering find favour in his sight; only the inspired thought fixed firmly on Him has cognisance of God indeed." It may seem that as we enter on this region we have left oracles behind. But it is not so. The two last oracles which I shall cite, and which are among the most remarkable of all, are closely connected with this last period of Porphyry's life. The first of them is found, by no chance we may be sure, on a leaf of the manuscript which contains his letter to Marcella. It is introduced to us by an unknown writer as "an oracle concerning the Eternal God."

O God ineffable, eternal Sire,
Throned on the whirling spheres, the astral fire,
Hid in whose heart thy whole creation lies,—
The whole world's wonder mirrored in thine eyes,—
List thou thy children's voice, who draw anear,
Thou hast begotten us, thou too must hear!
Each life thy life her Fount, her Ocean knows,
Fed while it fosters, filling as it flows;
Wrapt in thy light the star-set cycles roll,
And worlds within thee stir into a soul;
But stars and souls shall keep their watch and way,
Nor change the going of thy lonely day.

Some sons of thine, our Father, King of kings,
Rest in the sheen and shelter of thy wings,—
Some to strange hearts the unspoken message bear,
Sped on thy strength through the haunts and homes of air,—
Some where thine honour dwelleth hope and wait,
Sigh for thy courts and gather at thy gate;
These from afar to thee their praises bring,
Of thee, albeit they have not seen thee, sing;
Of thee the Father wise, the Mother mild,
Thee in all children the eternal Child,
Thee the first Number and harmonious Whole,
Form in all forms, and of all souls the Soul.

The second oracle above alluded to, the last which I shall quote, was given, as Porphyry tells us, at Delphi to his friend Amelius, who inquired, "Where was now Plotinus's soul?"

Whatever be the source of this poem, it stands out to us as one of the most earnest utterances of antiquity, though it has little of the classical perfection of form. Nowhere, indeed, is the contest more apparent between the intensity of the emotions which are struggling for utterance and the narrow limits of human speech, which was composed to deal with the things that are known and visible, and not with those that are inconceivable and unseen.

Little, indeed, it is which the author of this oracle could express, less which the translator can render; but there is enough to show once more the potency of an elect soul, what a train of light she may leave behind her as she departs on her unknown way; when for those who have lived in her presence, but can scarcely mourn her translation, the rapture of love fades into the rapture of worship. Plotinus was "the eagle soaring above the tomb of Plato;" no wonder that the eyes which followed his flight must soon be blinded with the sun.

Pure spirit—once a man—pure spirits now
Greet thee rejoicing, and of these art thou;
Not vainly was thy whole soul always bent
With one same battle and one the same intent
Through eddying cloud and earth's bewildering roar
To win her bright way to that stainless shore.
Ay, 'mid the salt spume of this troublous sea,
This death in life, this sick perplexity,
Oft on thy struggle through the obscure unrest
A revelation opened from the Blest—
Showed close at hand the goal thy hope would win,
Heaven's kingdom round thee and thy God within.
So sure a help the eternal Guardians gave,
From life's confusion so were strong to save,
Upheld thy wandering steps that sought the day
And set them steadfast on the heavenly way.
Nor quite even here on thy broad brows was shed
The sleep which shrouds the living, who are dead;
Once by God's grace was from thine eyes unfurled
This veil that screens the immense and whirling world,
Once, while the spheres around thee in music ran,
Was very Beauty manifest to man;—
Ah, once to have seen her, once to have known her there,
For speech too sweet, for earth too heavenly fair!
But now the tomb where long thy soul had lain
Bursts, and thy tabernacle is rent in twain;
Now from about thee, in thy new home above,
Has perished all but life, and all but love,—
And on all lives and on all loves outpoured
Free grace and full, a spirit from the Lord,
High in that heaven whose windless vaults enfold
Just men made perfect, and an age all gold.
Thine own Pythagoras is with thee there,
And sacred Plato in that sacred air,
And whose followed, and all high hearts that knew
In death's despite what deathless Love can do.
To God's right hand they have scaled the starry way—
Pure spirits these, thy spirit pure as they.
Ah, saint! how many and many an anguish past,
To how fair haven art thou come at last!
On thy meek head what Powers their blessing pour,
Filled full with life, and rich for evermore!

This, so far as we know, was the last utterance of the Pythian priestess. Once more, indeed, a century afterwards, a voice was heard at Delphi. But that voice seems rather to have been, in Plutarch's phrase, "a cry floating of itself over solitary places," than the deliverance of any recognised priestess, or from any abiding shrine. For no shrine was standing more. The words which answered the Emperor Julian's search were but the whisper of desolation, the last and loveliest expression of a sanctity that had passed away. A strange coincidence! that from that Delphian valley, whence, as the legend ran, had sounded the first of all hexameters,—the call, as in the childhood of the world, to "birds to bring their feathers and bees their wax" to build by Castaly the nest-like habitation of the young new-entering god,—from that same ruined place where "to earth had fallen the glorious dwelling," from the dry channel where "the water-springs that spake were quenched and dead,"—should issue in unknown fashion the last fragment of Greek poetry which has moved the hearts of men, the last Greek hexameters which retain the ancient cadence, the majestic, melancholy flow!

Stranger still, and of deeper meaning, is the fate which has ordained that Delphi, born with the birth of Greece, symbolizing in her teaching such light and truth as the ancient world might know, silenced once only in her long career, and silenced not by Christ, but by Antichrist, should have proclaimed in her last triumphant oracle the canonization of the last of the Greeks, should have responded with her last sigh and echo to the appeal of the last of the Romans.

To Myers' account I will simply add the brief postscript that it is similarly ironic that Christ's epigram that "he who seeks, finds" finds no better exemplar than the pagan who so vociferously argued against the faith bearing His name. Sixty-eight years did Porphyry seek, and in so doing he was not only granted Phœbus' parting gifts to His beloved people, but he also finally, finally found that unseen path that leads Beyond, following his deathless teacher thither.