of the work of the scholars mentioned above, looks more broadly at the activity of constructing hierarchies of spirits, both good and evil. By discussing the three aforementioned late ancient trends together, namely the production of spiritual taxonomies by a range of Platonically inclined intellectuals, the emphasis on ritual expertise and hieratic identity, and the soteriological focus among these figures, this study will, I hope, make a significant contribution to the history of ideas in late antiquity.
Chapter Overview
Chapter 1 explores the close similarities between Porphyry’s discourse on evil daemons in On Abstinence from Killing Animals and his other fragmentary works, and early Christian precedents, including the works of Origen. It argues that Porphyry developed his ideas about the demonic conspiracy of animal sacrifice in dialogue with these Christian ideas based on his association with Origen. It also demonstrates that his stance on the question of animal sacrifice put him at odds with his fellow non-Christian Platonist, Iamblichus, who felt that even philosophers must sacrifice in order to move along their path to union with the highest gods. Finally, this chapter advances the argument that the close similarities between Porphyry and Origen on evil spirits is only surprising if one assumes that religion and not social or educational milieu was the primary category that these Platonists used to identify themselves. It proves that Porphyry and Origen’s participation in a common Greek paideia, in particular the cosmology of Plato’s Timaeus and Galen’s model of humoral medicine, both of which associate blood with embodiment and generation, makes Porphyry’s adoption of the Christian demonization of animal sacrifice plausible and consistent with his general Platonic outlook.
Chapter 2 considers the ways in which Porphyry, Origen, and Iamblichus created systematic hierarchies of spirits that could be transposed onto more local understandings of the spiritual landscape. It also demonstrates that in the course of enforcing order and hierarchy, there are moments when these philosophers find their taxonomic discourses getting away from them. This happens in a number of ways. For instance, key distinctions between various orders of spiritual beings are subverted or rendered ambiguous, allowing for slippage and elision between spiritual species. In other cases, the line between good and evil spirits is blurred such that good spirits are characterized by highly ambivalent qualities. And in the case of Origen, evil daemons even become part of his overall soteriological vision. In other words, this chapter demonstrates that the act of creating and enforcing difference leads these thinkers to conclusions that call difference into question in radical and interesting ways. Part of the reason for this was that all three philosophers, in their efforts to provide theological and philosophical rationales for specific ideas about spirits and particular religious rites, were forced to contend with more “popular” or “traditional” beliefs and practices in ways that limited or resisted their endeavors. Their taxonomic thinking crossed not only religious boundaries, as Chapter 1 demonstrates, but social ones as well. That is to say, these philosophers were attempting to explain and order a preexisting spiritual landscape populated by beings about which the vast majority of people held some beliefs. Many of their own working assumptions reflected “popular” ideas about the realm of spirits. Drawing on work by scholars such as Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Valerie Allen, and Jane Bennett, this chapter also argues that matter, as it was conceptualized in antiquity, was an even greater force of disruption than the intrusion of “popular beliefs.” The matter in which spirits were embodied had the “agentic capacity” to alter and subvert these philosophical attempts to create orderly taxonomies.
Chapters 3 and 4 explain why these late Platonists undertook to write their taxonomic discourses when they did, in the late second and third centuries, by placing these philosophers within their broader third-century social and intellectual context and by looking for interlocutors and competitors with more tangential and obscure ties to these self-proclaimed heirs of the Platonic patrimony. Chapter 3 explores the possible and actual interactions between Plotinus, Origen, and Porphyry and a group of interlocutors and competitors most often referred to as “Gnostics.” I postpone a discussion of this term until the chapter proper. Suffice it to say that many of the texts found in the Nag Hammadi codices contain very complex cosmological narratives that elaborate systematic, ordered accounts of the emanation, creation, and proliferation of all kinds of spirits. Individuals and groups who read and disseminated these texts at times earned the scorn of figures such as Plotinus, Origen, and Porphyry for a number of reasons. However, as recent scholarship has demonstrated, the narratives found in these texts serve as an important missing link for understanding what motivated these intellectuals to develop their own cosmological and taxonomic discourses and to refine their thinking on the kinds of beings that populated the spiritual realm. This chapter argues that despite their critiques of various facets of the “Gnostic” worldview, Plotinus, Origen, and Porphyry drew much of their inspiration and thinking from texts such as those found in the Nag Hammadi codices and their adherents. By making this argument, this chapter is also involved in rethinking the marginal status of these texts and the groups who used and treasured them, bringing them back into the center of late Roman conversations about spirits in philosophical circles.
Chapter 4 continues to answer the question of why these philosophers created their taxonomies when they did. Part of the answer to this question emerges when we take seriously the concern of these thinkers about proper ritual. The discourses that they constructed were one aspect of their efforts to demote and discredit ordinary priests. The chapter demonstrates that by associating these priests with the worship of lesser and even evil spirits, Origen, Porphyry, and Iamblichus were able to reserve the title of high priest for themselves. These thinkers used their ability to discern, locate, and delimit spirits and to interact with them to give weight to their own authority. Even Iamblichus, the champion of blood sacrifice and defender of traditional rites as part of his theurgic system, was involved in minimizing or excluding the importance of certain other ritual experts in order to establish himself as the highest authority on divine and cultic matters. In other words, the taxonomic discourses of these philosophers served as a textual basis for their claims to expertise and authority. This chapter also links their efforts to establish this kind of hieratic identity with their soteriological concerns and commitments around the question of universal salvation.
Conclusion
The third century has been the subject of a great deal of scholarly attention with respect to a few circumscribed topics: economic hardship, political upheaval, Christian expansion and persecution. It has frequently been referred to using the language of crisis. And yet it was a century of intense, rich, and diverse conversations, all of which took place in a highly flexible, mobile, permeable social landscape. This study attempts to illuminate the bold, innovative, and entrepreneurial maneuvers of a small group of philosophers working to carve out a unique niche for themselves and their associates using a rather peculiar strategy, namely, the production of comprehensive discourses, ontological, moral, and sometimes even mythical, that ordered the realm of spirits. The third century has often been treated as a kind of “Middle Age” of the postclassical world, a “Dark Age” mediating between Roman glory and Christian triumph. Putting aside the fact that humans don’t live according to ages and centuries, and focusing on the aforementioned intellectual richness and creativity of the decades during which Plotinus, Origen, Porphyry, and Iamblichus were in dialogue with each other and with a wide range of interlocutors who have tended to fade into the shadows, this study hopes to demonstrate that their conversations about spirits are critical to understanding what came before and after them. Although when we imagine these figures, we may be inclined to see them whispering quietly among themselves in the sunny rooms or porticos of their patrons’ urban homes and extra-urban villas, murmuring about the bodies of angels and the salvation of demons, talking to no one but their most intimate associates,
