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Chapter 2

Everything in Its Right Place: Spiritual Taxonomy in Third-Century Platonism

[D]ivine appearances flash forth a beauty almost irresistible, seizing those beholding it with wonder, providing a wondrous cheerfulness, manifesting itself with ineffable symmetry, and transcending in comeliness all other forms. The blessed visions of archangels also have themselves an extremity of beauty, but it is not at all as unspeakable and wonderful as that of the gods’ divine beauty, and those of angels already exhibit in a partial and divided manner the beauty that is received from the archangels. The pneumatic spirits of daemons and heroes appearing in direct visions both possess beauty in distinct forms…. If we are to give them a common denominator, I declare the following: in the same way that each of the beings of the universe is disposed, and has its own proper nature, so also it participates in beauty according to the allotment granted to it.

THE ENDEAVOR TO assign a moral valence to various cosmic beings by both Christian and non-Christian Platonists in the third century was but one step in a more comprehensive philosophical project, namely the creation of complex discourses that mapped and ordered the realm of spirits in more systematic, universal terms.¹ The most extensive and detailed work we have of this sort is Iamblichus’s On the Mysteries. But, as this chapter will demonstrate, both Origen in On First Principles and Porphyry in a number of his fragmentary works were likewise involved in this taxonomic enterprise.² Given the shared cultural and educational context of these thinkers highlighted in the previous chapter, it is not surprising that they should all participate in this common undertaking. This chapter will focus on the efforts of these thinkers to emplot spirits in a larger cosmic framework while attending to the sorts of intellectual concerns that drove this project. It will also consider moments in each of their writings where their respective discourses fail to preserve proper order, moments where moral and ontological taxonomy cease to map tidily onto each other and spirits refuse to stay put. For instance, key distinctions between various orders of spiritual beings are at times subverted or rendered ambiguous in the works of these philosophers. In other cases, the line between good and evil spirits is blurred such that good spirits are characterized by rather ambivalent qualities, or evil daemons fulfill important soteriological roles. In other words, this chapter will demonstrate that the act of creating and enforcing difference leads these thinkers to conclusions that at critical junctures call difference into question in radical and interesting ways.

This chapter will offer a number of suggestions for why these taxonomic discourses go astray. First, these philosophers, in their efforts to provide theological and philosophical rationales for specific ideas about spirits and particular religious rites, were engaged with traditional or “popular” beliefs and practices in ways that limited or resisted their endeavors.³ In other words, their taxonomic thinking crossed not only religious boundaries, as the previous chapter demonstrated, but social ones as well. 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 and with whom they interacted via well-established rites, a tendency already evident in the writings of earlier thinkers such as Plutarch, Numenius, Apuleius, and even, to some extent, Pausanias.⁴ Subsequent chapters will discuss why Origen, Porphyry, and Iamblichus paid heed to this landscape by situating these thinkers in their third-century social context and its complex of ritual practitioners and intellectuals.

Second, the more crucial factor that accounts for disruption in these discourses is the way in which matter was theorized in antiquity. I will argue that the materiality of spirits, as conceived of in this period, accounts, in part, for some of the resistance encountered by Origen, Porphyry, and Iamblichus in their attempts to construct a totalizing perspective on the spiritual realm. Drawing on the insights of writers such as Jane Bennett and Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, both of whom pay attention to the way in which matter in antiquity had an agency all its own, including movement and desire, we may be able to better assess the significance of the materiality of spirits, the nature of the matter in which they were embodied, whether they were evil daemons addicted to moist, damp vapors, or the fixed stars inhabiting bodies of ethereal fire. These two explanations for discursive rupture are interrelated insofar as most people in antiquity thought of divine and daemonic beings as material in some key sense. Furthermore, when we speak of a spiritual landscape in this period, we are speaking of space that was not distinguishable from everyday landscapes connecting earthly and heavenly realms.

All the philosophers under consideration here were certainly interested, as Plotinus was, in the nature of the very highest cosmic beings and their interrelations. Origen, Porphyry, and Iamblichus all engaged in extended reflection and heated debate either among themselves or with others over the relationships between the first three levels of being. All three also used a range of triadic nomenclature to refer to these hypostatic levels.⁵ They also reflected on the precise nature of the relational bond between the first two levels, and whether or not and how this bond was mediated. And the terminology used in some instances was shared or borrowed across religious boundaries. For instance, Origen equated Christ with the Demiurge in his Commentary on John.⁶ And both Plotinus and Porphyry seemed to have adopted a number of insights on the first hypostases from those Christian sectaries Porphyry calls “Gnostics,” who attended Plotinus’s school in Rome, as we will see in Chapter 4. Scholars have discussed the similarities and differences between these philosophers on the question of the triadic nature of their hypostatic/emanational visions of the highest orders of the cosmos in great detail.⁷ Hence, it is not necessary to repeat these discussions here. However, the attempts of these third-century Platonists to identify, locate, and define spirits mediating between human souls and the highest gods has received far less scholarly attention.

Origen’s Concerning Daemons

We begin with Origen. It is unfortunate that we do not have his Concerning Daemons (sometimes translated as On Spirits). The closest we get to this work is via some Porphyrian fragments included in Proclus’s Commentary on the Timaeus, as well as certain passages in On Abstinence. The difficulty with the fragments in Proclus, in addition to the usual problems associated with fragmentary works, is that in them Porphyry tells us that he has combined the views of Numenius and Origen in order to formulate his own taxonomic schema. Hans Lewy, who thought that the Origen in question was a Neoplatonic philosopher distinct from the Christian theologian, was confident that he could distinguish between the ideas of Numenius and those of Origen adopted by Porphyry. The passage from the Timaeus under consideration in the sections of Proclus’s commentary in which we find Porphyry’s account concerns the battle between Athens and Atlantis.⁸ This battle was the subject of numerous Platonic interpretations. According to Lewy, Numenius “identified the Atlantics with the psychical passions, by which the irrational (hylic) soul is dominated.”⁹ Therefore, Numenius was not the source of Porphyry’s thinking on different classes of daemons, which is how Porphyry interprets the battle between the two ancient cities. Thus, Porphyry takes his view from Origen that this war was the “combat of a class of demons ‘who were better and stronger in number’ with another class of demons ‘who were worse, but superior in strength.’”¹⁰ And as Ilaria Ramelli has recently pointed out, it is typical of Origen to allegorize cosmological descriptions in reference, not to physical realities, but to spirits. For instance, she notes that Origen interprets the upper and lower waters of Genesis along the same lines as Athens and Atlantis, namely as good and evil spirits.¹¹ We will discuss Porphyry’s spiritual taxonomy in On Abstinence in more detail shortly, but if his views there, which he says derive from “some Platonists,” indeed stem from Origen’s Concerning Daemons and/or That the King Is the Only Creator, we can get some sense of Origen’s teachings on cosmic hierarchy, at least in terms of how he classified those beings inhabiting the space between earth and the moon. Although we will discuss these classifications in more detail when we turn to Porphyry directly, it seems that Origen divided good daemons into three species. The first group are guardians of animals and plants who also govern climate and weather, the second govern humans and impart to them knowledge of various arts and sciences, and the third are messengers of the gods in the Platonic sense.¹² We do not hear about other supralunary beings, for example, angels or the fixed stars, in this context. However, we can turn to other works by Origen to fill in these cosmic gaps. Furthermore, in Origen’s time there was still a great deal of flexibility and ambiguity regarding terminology with reference to spiritual taxa.¹³

The argument that these views stem from Origen raises a number of rather obvious difficulties for those who affirm a single Origen. The most pressing of these difficulties is that we must figure out how Origen’s ideas in Concerning Daemons relate to his taxonomic discourses in other works, in particular in his On First Principles, where daemons are classed as more or less evil and obstructive, those beings that fell farthest from their initial unity with their Creator. The other difficulty is that Origen seems to have, at some point, interpreted Platonic texts, such as the Timaeus, without fundamentally challenging their polytheistic framework. The fact that, at some point, he entertained the idea that not all daemons were evil, that some were, in fact, divine messengers, calls for further reflection. This requires us to think further about Origen’s teaching activities and his philosophical interactions with Porphyry (and Longinus, who was another student). If, as Elizabeth Depalma Digeser argues, Porphyry went to study philosophy with Origen, as did a number of other non-Christians, it is likely that Origen was presenting himself as a teacher of philosophy, giving lectures on core texts in the ancient philosophical canon, commenting on them, interpreting them, and so forth.

The best place to look when searching for a text that brings the two Origens together, Origen the teacher of philosophy and Origen the Christian theologian and scriptural commentator, is in Origen’s Contra Celsum, a work written to a Middle Platonic non-Christian polytheist. As Ramelli points out, it is in this work that Origen refers to Homer more than thirty times, many of his references being entirely positive.¹⁴ Furthermore, given the fact that even within Plato, terminology regarding intermediate spirits is sometimes ambiguous, it should come as no surprise that across Origen’s works we encounter imprecision and context-specific usage of names and terms referring to spirits that aid or obstruct humans in their quest to achieve salvation. If Porphyry is using Origen’s Concerning Daemons in his own Commentary on the Timaeus, it may well be that Plato’s use of the term “daemon,” for instance, in the Symposium, is at the basis of Origen’s treatise. Porphyry himself uses terminology for intermediate spirits in very context-specific, inconsistent ways.¹⁵ In other words, the fact that Origen may have propounded views on daemons that appear to differ from what he says elsewhere about them does not necessarily involve him in self-contradiction. Rather, he was likely commenting on the various meanings of the term in Plato’s works, an activity one could reasonably expect from a teacher of philosophy, Christian or otherwise.¹⁶

Spiritual Taxonomy in Origen’s On First Principles

Origen makes his most explicit statements concerning cosmic order in On First Principles.¹⁷ Likely written sometime between 218 and 225, when Origen was still in Alexandria, On First Principles was an experimental work, one of the first sustained attempts at a systematic Christian theology, and one that addressed issues of cosmology and cosmogony, soteriology, Christology, theodicy, and, of course, what I have been calling spiritual taxonomy.¹⁸ Origen himself describes his purpose in On First Principles as an attempt to construct a “single body of doctrine,” discovering the truth about particular points that Christ and the apostles left obscure or unexplained and doing so using “clear and cogent arguments.”¹⁹ One of the main questions left unelaborated in scripture concerned intermediate spiritual beings, good and evil angels, as well as the devil himself. Origen notes, “the Church teaching lays it down that these beings exist, but what they are or how they exist it has not explained very clearly.”²⁰ Origen makes the claim that the apostles left certain doctrines unelaborated in order to “supply the more diligent of those who came after them such as should prove to be lovers of wisdom, with an exercise on which to display the fruit of their ability.”²¹ Origen obviously considered himself to be one of those who were uniquely qualified to participate in this exegetical project, one of those “who train themselves to become worthy and capable of receiving wisdom.”²² Part of what initially incited Origen to address these particular questions was the emergence of “conflicting opinions” among those professing belief in Christ, “not only on small and trivial questions, but also on some that are great and important.”²³ Given his view that much of Christian doctrine remained unelaborated in scripture, it is not surprising that such conflicts developed.

One of these conflicts emerged around the views of a group of early Christian thinkers who, like Origen, came to be labeled “heretics,” writers such as Marcion, Valentinus, and Basilides.²⁴ According to Origen, these thinkers held the view that human souls were “in their natures diverse” and hence had different origins and different opportunities for salvation.²⁵ Origen developed his taxonomic framework, in part, in response to this view, a view that, for our purposes, bears relevant similarities to that of Porphyry on the question of universal salvation.²⁶ Furthermore, the debate between Origen and these other Christians bears interesting similarities to the debate between Porphyry and Iamblichus on the soteriological potential of ritual. On Origen’s interpretation of Marcion, Valentinus and Basilides, these different orders of human souls were the direct result of distinct creative agents in the universe—one good, the other deceptive and defective. The main problem that Origen had to address in response to his doctrinal opponents was “how it was consistent with the righteousness of God who made the world” that he should make some souls of higher rank and others of “second and third and many still lower and less worthy degrees,” a problem that, for them, was solved by positing multiple creative agents in the cosmos.²⁷ Origen countered this particular conception of a hierarchy of souls with what some have called his “universalism” or the idea of apokatastasis, the idea that all created intelligences, even those that have fallen the furthest away from God, will someday be restored to their original created nature.²⁸ We find his spiritual taxonomy embedded in Origen’s answer to the proponents of the view that there are different spiritual species of human beings.²⁹ And although this takes up most of Chapters 8–10 of Book 2, Origen cautions his reader that he “must not be supposed to put these [ideas] forward as settled doctrines, but as subjects for inquiry and discussion.”³⁰

One of Origen’s main concerns in these three chapters was to explain why some rational souls happen to be angels, others evil daemons, and still others humans. Furthermore, within these general categories, he also notes many finer-grained distinctions. He is also concerned about why some humans have better lives than others, and why nonhuman spirits are ranked according to different orders. He is responding to those who ask “how it is consistent with the righteousness of God who made the world that on some he should bestow a habitation in the heavens, and not only give them a better habitation, but also confer on them a higher and more conspicuous rank, favoring some with a ‘principality,’ others with ‘powers,’ to others again allotting ‘dominions,’ to others presenting the most magnificent seats in the heavenly courts, while others shine with golden light and gleam with starry brilliance.”³¹ On his view, human beings could not hold God responsible for these differences, because that would imply that God either created deficient beings or participated in the fall of good ones.³² In order to resolve this problem of theodicy, Origen asserted that all rational souls were created equal and each made a primordial choice with regard to its Creator that subsequently situated it in the cosmic order.

In Chapter 9 of Book 2, Origen states that in the beginning, “God made as large a number of rational and intelligent beings” as “he saw would be sufficient.”³³ In Chapter 8, Origen called these “minds” and distinguished them from “souls.”³⁴ He claimed that before these creatures were souls, including the souls of angels, celestial bodies, and humans, they were minds. He uses the designation “soul” to indicate what these intelligences or minds became after they fell from their primordial state. Unfortunately, in all cases but one, namely Christ’s, these intelligences, using their God-given capacity for free and voluntary movement, “began the process of withdrawal from the good,” on account of their “sloth and weariness of taking trouble to preserve the good coupled with disregard and neglect of better things.”³⁵ Origen describes this fall in terms of “becoming lost” and also in terms of a cooling process, drawing on key Platonic ideas that associate divinity with fire. In the cosmos of the Timaeus and Heraclitus, for instance, divinity was associated with the element of fire. And as we saw in the previous chapter, cold and moisture are associated with grosser forms of matter, body, and generation.³⁶ In his discussion of this cooling process, Origen identifies God as fire, angels as flames, and saints as “fervent in spirit,” clearly drawing the analogy between divine ardor and elemental thinking.³⁷ According to Origen, the degree to which each created intelligence had cooled determined its subsequent place in the cosmos as a rational soul. Intelligences then acquired some kind of body reflecting the degree to which they had given in to “sloth and weariness,” and they subsequently became subject to both feeling and motion.³⁸ One of Justinian’s anathemas included in the Second Council of Constantinople’s (553) condemnation of Origen summarizes these positions and highlights the taxonomic implications of Origen’s suppositions again in elemental terms. According to this statement, Origen supposedly held the view that as souls cooled to varying degrees, “they took bodies, either fine in substance or grosser, and became possessed of a name,” and this accounts for the difference in both name and embodiment that one finds among “the cherubim,” “the rulers and authorities, the lordships, thrones, angels and all the other heavenly orders.”³⁹ These heavenly orders also include, as they do for so many of Origen’s contemporaries, the stars and planets. Unsurprisingly, he does not refer to them as gods, as Porphyry and Iamblichus will, but they are living, ensouled beings. Origen raises a series of what he refers to as “daring” questions about these creatures. He asks “whether their souls came into existence along with their bodies … and further whether we are to understand that after the consummation of this age their souls will be released from their bodies” and whether “they cease from the work of giving light to the world.”⁴⁰ In the end, Origen chooses to include these beings in the larger cosmological story he tells by arguing that their preexistent souls entered their bodies at a later time, and leaves it up to his reader to conclude that they will also dispense with these bodies after the “consummation of this age.”⁴¹ In other words, the stars and planets are akin to species of angels in certain important respects.

Origen extends the logic that informed his systematic ordering of different kinds of spiritual beings to specific differences between the characters and circumstances of individual humans. He discusses how humans as both larger groups, such as Greeks and “barbarians” (ethnoi), and as individuals partake of very different fates, many living in diminished and difficult circumstances, some “from the very moment of their birth” being in a “humble position, brought up in subjection and slavery,” while others “are brought up with more freedom and under rational influences.”⁴² Origen once again bases these distinctions on the degree to which, as created intelligences, the ardor of these individual beings for the contemplation of their Creator was cooled prior to embodiment.⁴³ He uses as his case study the tension between Jacob and Esau over their birthright, asking how God’s justice is preserved in the case where “the elder should serve the younger” and God should say, “Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated” (Romans 9:11–13).⁴⁴ According to Origen, Jacob’s supplanting of Esau in the womb was only just, “provided we believe that by his merits in some previous life Jacob had deserved to be loved by God to such an extent as to be worthy of being preferred to his brother.”⁴⁵ And this situation mirrors the more general order of spirits prevailing in the cosmos: “so also it is in regard to the heavenly creatures, provided we note that their diversity is not the original condition of their creation.”⁴⁶

As mentioned earlier, Origen constructed his framework in response to his interpretation of the cosmologies of individuals such as Marcion, Valentinus, and Basilides. Origen rejected the implications of the view that differences in character and circumstance could be accounted for in terms of multiple creative agents and distinct orders of human souls, and he felt compelled to provide an alternate theodicy. In contrast to the explanation that posited multiple parallel cosmoi, Origen provided a single narrative that encompassed all spiritual beings—various classes of angels, humans, and evil daemons—and in important respects, he elided the differences between them by positing a single primordial ontological equality. Thus humans, angels, and evil daemons all share in the same cosmogenesis. And the difference between them is one of degree and not ontology in some important sense. Furthermore, this framework not only encompassed their original state and disintegration into diversity; it also had important soteriological implications.

Although scholars continue to debate whether Origen definitively held the view that all souls, including those of evil daemons, would eventually be restored to their original, created condition, a state of union with and contemplation of God, there is strong evidence that Origen entertained this idea seriously at a number of junctures, On First Principles being the main place where he alludes to this notion.⁴⁷ In Book 3, Chapter 6, for instance, Origen interprets the destruction of the “last enemy,” “not in the sense of ceasing to exist (non ut non sit), but of being no longer an enemy and no longer death (sed ut inimicus et mors non sit),” and that the “hostile purpose and will which proceeded not from God but from itself will come to an end.”⁴⁸ Butterworth notes that at this juncture in the text, Rufinus appears to have omitted some of Origen’s statements about “the final unity of all spiritual beings,” and directs the reader to the last four anathemas of the Second Council of Constantinople to fill in the lacunae.⁴⁹ According to these anathemas, Origen was supposed to have taught that the devil and the spiritual hosts of wickedness “were as unchangeably united to the Word of God as the Mind itself” (i.e., Christ).⁵⁰ In other words, despite the tragic choices of the primordial intelligences, the connection between the fallen souls and their Creator was never permanently severed.⁵¹ Furthermore, the anathemas accuse Origen of holding the view that “all rational creatures will form one unity” once again when these intelligences abandon their bodies and their names, ostensibly as the result of a purificatory process, making the beginning the same as the end, and the end “the measure of the beginning,” such that “the life of spirits will be the same as it formerly was.”⁵²

This process of restoration is, in fact, how Origen conceives of the afterlife, the resurrection and judgment in On First Principles. In Book 2, Chapter 10, Origen outlines a universal path of salvation for all souls. He does this by turning to the question of the “contents of the Church’s teaching to the effect that at the time of judgment ‘eternal fire’ and ‘outer darkness’ and a ‘prison’ and a ‘furnace’ and other similar things have been prepared for sinners.”⁵³ Using Isaiah 50:11 as the basis for explaining the idea of eternal fire, Origen interprets this fire as purgative and restorative, part of a purifying process commensurate in intensity and duration with both the original fall and subsequent actions of each rational soul. It is interesting that the element Origen associates with divinity is also part of the curative process whereby souls are purified. The verse itself reads, “walk in the light of your own fire, and in the flame which you have kindled for yourselves.” Origen argues that these words mean “that every sinner kindles for himself the flame of his own fire, and is not plunged into a fire which has been previously kindled by someone else or which existed before him.”⁵⁴ This interpretation, of course, helps to mitigate the problem of theodicy in that it absolves God of any responsibility for tormenting souls. For a mere infliction of pain without remedial effect would be unworthy of God.⁵⁵ According to Origen, the soul’s sin, “the history of its evil deeds, of every foul and disgraceful act and all unholy conduct,” will be exposed to each soul, and the conscience, “harassed and pricked by its own stings,” will become “an accuser and witness against itself.”⁵⁶ Origen explains to his reader the way in which these torments already accompany evil deeds almost like shadows: “The soul is burnt up with the flames of love, or tormented by the fires of jealousy or envy, or tossed about with furious anger, or consumed with intense sadness.”⁵⁷ In other words, the motions and feelings that accompany such deeds already prefigure and indicate the sorts of punishments that will work to purge the soul of the effects of these deeds after death. Their pain signals their harmfulness.