on earth and are known to one another only “by the particular way of thinking which they have obtained in Hades,” and no longer as humans. In other words, they are no longer identifiable by their earthly deeds or by their appearance, which manifests itself in shade-like form for those still dwelling on the other side of the river.81 Rather, their manner of reflection serves to identify and distinguish them.
As in On the Cave of the Nymphs, blood is the substance that calls forth these spirits from their forgetful state in the context of necromantic ritual. Porphyry writes: “Nor would they speak about human things to those humans still living, unless they receive a vapor of blood and thereby think human things, which those outside also think though they do not drink of the blood, since they have the condition of the knowledge that occurs in the souls of mortals from drinking blood.”82 Indeed, if they did not drink blood in this way, the souls of the blessed would remain in their state of happy forgetfulness about “human affairs” and would not prophesy to living beings about their fates.
Porphyry associates blood with the remembrance of human life because it is the substance that most clearly represents embodied existence at its basest level, the level of nutrition and reproduction. He explicitly connects what he takes to be Homer’s meaning with medical ideas about blood, attributing to the poet the opinion that “for humans the thinking about mortal things is in their blood.”83 Porphyry further harmonizes the position he attributes to Homer with one he finds in Empedocles, the pre-Socratic who most focused on medicine and the body. He quotes Empedocles as saying, “Nourished in the waves of blood opposite the semen, thought there begins especially to circulate in humans, for blood around the heart in humans is the thought.”84 In other words, when blood reaches the heart, an organ that is naturally fiery, the humor is heated to create a vapor that gives rise to thoughts related to “mortal things”—things pertaining to embodied existence, or thoughts that are connected with passions and images.85 This sort of thinking, relying as it does on sense perception and images, is related to the faculty of phantasia.
Hence, Porphyry draws on specific associations between blood and corporeal existence that he finds in currency in the Greek learning of his day, associations that make his adoption of a predominantly Christian view of blood sacrifice plausible. In fact, it is more than likely that Christian ideas would also have been shaped, to some degree, by the same intellectual currents. For instance, Origen frequently drew on medical ideas in his theological and philosophical works.86 Placing Porphyry’s works within this larger context—namely the Greek intellectual heritage shared by both Christian and non-Christian philosophers, as well as the educational milieu to which both Origen and Porphyry belonged—helps explain why Porphyry, to all appearances a staunch defender of Greek religion, especially against its detractors, the Christians, would have excised from religious practice a whole set of rituals considered for centuries to be absolutely vital to the well-being of states, communities, families, and individuals.
The allegorizing mode of Porphyry’s philosophical reasoning in On the Cave of the Nymphs and On the Styx also presents modern readers with a viable solution to the apparent contradiction in Porphyry’s stance on the association of evil daemons and sacrifice Eusebius accuses him of in the Preparation for the Gospel. As mentioned earlier, when Porphyry cites the Apollonian oracle on sacrifice, he is likely doing so in order to deal in figural terms with the literal sacrifices the oracle lists. Each of the sacrifices enumerated in the oracle may have been the subject of a figural interpretation that posited a hidden meaning and explicated it. Porphyry himself says that this oracle contains “an orderly classification of the gods.”87 One finds Origen doing something very similar with regard to Hebrew sacrifice in his Homilies on Leviticus. In some of these sermons, he carefully and systematically interprets away the need for the literal slaughter of animals for the expiation of sins in ancient Hebrew cult and instead gives them a new allegorical and explicitly Christian meaning.88
Hence, both Porphyry and Origen share in a similar culture that makes Porphyry’s adoption of a seemingly Christian position on blood sacrifice plausible, a fact that is obscured by Eusebius’s polemics but also by the assumption of many modern scholars that the positions philosophers tended to take on issues both theological and ritualistic were determined first and foremost by religious identity. The implicit corollary to this problematic approach is that religious identity in the third century was itself clearly articulated, fixed, and static. This assumption has been vigorously challenged in the case of Christian identity for at least the first four centuries C.E. But scholars sometimes treat traditional Mediterranean polytheism as a static monolith, when in fact “Hellenic” or traditional Greco-Roman identity was itself very much in flux and under construction, especially among the non-Christian Platonists under discussion in the current study, as we will see.
By focusing on key points of conceptual parallelism and evidence for dialogic exchange between people such as Porphyry and Origen, this study does not deny that Christians and non-Christians were at odds with each other at certain crucial junctures both in texts and in the world. However, part of the aim of this chapter is to challenge the conflict model, which tends to view this period in terms of predominantly hostile interactions between Christians and so-called pagans, a model that focuses on difference and assumes fixed and static religious identities and group boundaries.89 Highlighting moments of shared understanding across religious boundaries, as well as the flexibility and permeability of these boundaries themselves, serves to call the conflict model into question as an appropriate lens through which to view third-century exchanges among intellectuals such as Origen and Porphyry. The rejection of this model, however, does not mean that important points of disagreement are ignored or even deemphasized. Rather, it frequently allows scholars to relocate these points of difference in a more representative and illuminating fashion.
Ritual, Theurgy, and the Status of Matter in Porphyry and Iamblichus
There is one related issue on which Porphyry did differ from Christian writers. That is in his prognosis concerning the chances of the ordinary person for avoiding the pollution associated with evil daemons. As we saw earlier in this chapter, Porphyry held the view that participation in animal sacrifice and the consumption of meat were polluting activities. Given that the vast majority of people at the time would not have shared Porphyry’s views on the matter, from his perspective relatively few people lived a life free from demonic influence and pollution. Yet he appears to have been relatively unconcerned about the fate of these people, and focused specifically on the best conduct for those seeking to live a philosophical life. Although Porphyry’s position is most starkly opposed to Origen’s in this regard, the latter expressing a more universal concern for the spiritual well-being of all ensouled creatures, it would be a mistake to suppose that Christians were the real target of Porphyry’s argument in On Abstinence.90 He himself indicates that he contends with other philosophers.91 In particular, Porphyry was involved in an ongoing debate with his fellow Platonist and former student, Iamblichus, a debate that, at the very least, seems to have been carried on in a number of their works, from Porphyry’s Letter to Anebo and On Abstinence to Iamblichus’s On the Mysteries.92 In fact, Iamblichus wrote his On the Mysteries in response to Porphyry’s Letter to Anebo, and scholars generally agree that the letter was somehow aimed at Iamblichus.93
In particular, Porphyry disagreed with Iamblichus about the role of ritual, and specifically blood sacrifice, in the reunion of the philosopher’s soul with the divine. In spite of the fact that Iamblichus thought ritual and theurgy to be more important than Porphyry did, Porphyry’s idea of the philosophical life had a clear behavioral dimension and focus. His emphasis on a vegetarian diet and the proper order of appropriate sacrifices to the gods is evidence of such a focus. Furthermore, Porphyry did not discount the importance of ritual for ordinary people. Iamblichus, at times, presents Porphyry as holding the view that philosophers can merely think their way to unity with the god, but it is not unlike Iamblichus to highlight his differences with Porphyry in the starkest terms possible. This has often led scholars to assume that Porphyry’s Letter to Anebo
