groups.12 Taylor compellingly calls into question the usefulness of this model for understanding late antique Jewish-Christian relations.
Taylor is joined in her views by Daniel Boyarin, who argues that Christian orthodoxy and rabbinic Judaism were born at the same moment in history as a result of a protracted period of exchange and contest.13 Harold Drake has demonstrated that a similar delineation of boundaries took place in relations between Christians and others in the fourth century, which obscured earlier Christian efforts to emphasize points of commonality and agreement between Christians and non-Christians.14
In her book A Threat to Public Piety, Digeser illuminates points of contact, influence, and agreement between Christians and non-Christians in the third century. Digeser clearly demonstrates that figures such as Plotinus, Origen, Porphyry, and Iamblichus were in regular and enthusiastic conversation with each other, in particular, in the informal school settings of Alexandria and Rome. Her careful excavation of evidence for the interconnections and conversations among these philosophers provides much of the important background for my study. Hence, her work serves as one starting point in my efforts to focus on what these writers and teachers had to say to each other on the topic of spiritual taxonomy.15
Drawing on the insights of these historians, this book demonstrates that third-century intellectuals, including Platonists, “Gnostics,” Manichaeans, Hermetists, and Chaldaeans, wrote and thought using a common cultural coin in answer to a common set of questions and concerns about divinity. The questions shared by philosophically engaged members of these groups coalesce around the following issues: the nature of the highest divinity and how to “protect” God from any possible responsibility for evil; the appropriateness of animal sacrifices as a central component of both traditional Greek and Roman, but also Jewish, cult; the source, nature, and efficacy of divination and prophecy; the difficulty of specifying the soul’s relationship to matter, and the range of acceptable ascetic practices for assuring the soul’s release from matter, that is, its salvation.
If we take the first of these intellectual problems as an example, we can see that thinkers of the third and fourth centuries inherited their questions from common philosophical predecessors. The concern about divinity’s potential responsibility for evil is part and parcel of the question of its relation to the created order, and in particular, to matter. Writers were exercised by the problem of not only the degree to which the most supreme being had contact with the material cosmos, but also how this contact occurred, through what kind of mediation and what sort of mediating entities. Philosophers of various schools were at pains to preserve divine goodness by distinguishing and even distancing the highest god(s) from what most philosophers at the time thought of as a realm of becoming, and therefore a realm characterized by imperfection, corruptibility, and, in some cases, evil.16
As we will see, even the question of animal sacrifice is related to the problem of divinity’s relationship to this realm of becoming, and in particular to matter. These philosophers asked: why would gods, supremely spiritual beings, desire the blood and burnt flesh of dead animals as part of their worship? If these offerings are not, in fact, appropriate for the highest God/gods, then to whom are they offered? Hence, by focusing on the way in which a small but important group of late Roman intellectuals attempted to answer these sorts of questions, this book opens a window onto a number of relatively obscured and ignored relationships and conversations across religious and social boundaries.
Although this study doesn’t address this point directly, it is important to note that the taxonomic discourses produced in the third century failed to eradicate the local sense of the realm of spirits, and people continued to interact with this realm in the same ways and to the same ends as they always had in the ancient world. Hence, I do point to the places within the spiritual taxonomies produced by these Platonists where this more local understanding reasserts itself despite their best efforts to enforce precise ontological and moral differences. I also argue that the materiality of spirits, the nature of their bodies, and ancient elemental thinking about matter help to account for the failure of these discourses to overcome the ambiguity and ambivalence of intermediate spiritual beings in the late ancient world. In attempting to account for this ambiguity, this book engages work in the area of posthumanist studies that explores various instantiations of embodiment and hybridity in the premodern world.
Although scholars have noted all three late ancient trends mentioned thus far—namely that philosophers produced supernatural discourses with increased frequency, that they emphasized priestly facets of their identity by making claims to saving knowledge and expertise, and that they at times sought to enact their visions of a social order that would facilitate their work as brokers of salvation—no one as yet has attempted to address these trends together.17 Furthermore, few scholars have undertaken a comparative treatment of Christian and non-Christian taxonomy. Many studies have focused on late ancient demonology, that is, on discourses about evil spirits, possession, and exorcism.18 Peter Brown has explored facets of early Christian demonology in a number of influential publications.19 More recently, David Brakke has highlighted the role demons played in shaping the identity of Egyptian monks in the early Christian period.20 Cam Grey has used anthropological studies of spirit cults and psychosomatic illness to interpret episodes in saints’ lives as “examples of individuals consciously or subconsciously expressing anger at or anxiety about the world in which they lived and their place in that world.”21
David Frankfurter’s book Evil Incarnate, as well as a number of his articles, addresses late ancient demonology.22 And like Brown and Grey, Frankfurter relies on anthropological and ethnographic studies that investigate the construction of evil spirits, possession, and healing in “traditional” societies and complex colonial situations.23 Frankfurter writes: “as in modern local religion, so in the village worlds of antiquity: the ‘demonic’ is less a category of supernatural being than a collective reflection on unfortunate occurrences, on the ambivalence of deities, on tensions surrounding social and sexual roles, and on the cultural dangers that arise from liminal or incomprehensible people, places, and activities.”24
Other scholars have focused on more particular facets of late ancient demonology. Gregory Allan Smith has noted that Christian intellectuals inherited key notions from their non-Christian predecessors about the materiality of malign spirits.25 This insight is vital to an understanding of how the philosophers under investigation in this study thought about spirits more generally. Smith’s thinking about demons and embodiment intersects with late Roman ideas on medicine, the body, and matter more generally. The intersections Smith suggests are explored in this book in more detail.
In her recent book, Dayna Kalleres discusses the way urban bishops used their authority over spirits through practices of discernment and expiation such as exorcism to transform the sacred landscape of the late Roman city.26 Kalleres brings into relief the role that ritual activity played in the authority of these bishops, an aspect of their activities that until now has been largely ignored and undertheorized. In many respects, the chapters that follow provide the third-century background for understanding the fourth-century situation Kalleres seeks to illuminate, as they shed light on the way late ancient philosophers and theologians engaged in discerning, locating, and interacting with spirits, including through ritual.27
This scholarship, as indicated, focuses on the meaning of demons and demonology in late antiquity. Recently, Ellen Muehlberger has turned her attention to the other end of the spectrum of late ancient spirits, namely angels. In her book, Angels in Late Ancient Christianity, she demonstrates the great differences among Christian intellectuals writing on the topic.28 Some, for instance Origen, Evagrius, and others in this lineage, affirmed maximal mutability between spirit species. Augustine, on the other hand, argued for a fixed and stable spiritual order. Although Muehlberger’s topic is Christian angels, much of what she has to say about fourth-century theorizing in this area reflects attempts to construct stable spiritual taxonomies in earlier epochs.
This
