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Introduction

THIS BOOK IS about a conversation that took place in the late classical world, a conversation about spirits, both good and malign. At times, this conversation was heated, combative even, but at other moments it was surprisingly pacific given the contentious nature of the subject matter and the temperaments and ideological commitments of those involved. This conversation took place across important sectarian boundaries among a group of intellectuals whom we might loosely categorize as late Roman Platonists of one variety or other. Although this group includes a wide array of intellectuals, from writers of certain Nag Hammadi texts to the producers of Greco-Egyptian ritual (or “magical”) handbooks, the central figures are Origen, Porphyry, Iamblichus, and to a lesser extent, Plotinus.

This book explores a moment in the late second and third centuries C.E. when these philosophers began to produce systematic discourses that ordered the realm of spirits in increasingly more hierarchical ways. These “spiritual taxonomies,” as this book calls them, were part of the overall theological and philosophical writings of these thinkers and were projected onto and ordered more “local” or “popular” understandings of spirits, which, although totalizing in their own right, were less concerned with hierarchy and precise ontological and moral distinctions between different kinds of spirits.¹ Most people in antiquity thought about and encountered gods, angels, daemons, heroes, souls of the dead, and other intermediate spirits as relatively diverse, indeterminate, unclassified, and at times, capricious, ambiguous, and even ambivalent.² Their virtues or detractions tended to map onto whether or not they were helpful or harmful with reference to specific conditions or circumstances. In other words, for most people at the time, these spirits were not ordered according to a clear and stable ontological or moral taxonomy. “Popular” thinking about spirits was “situation-specific, embedded in the world—part of the larger endeavor of an individual, family, or community to negotiate the immediate environment and its margins.”³ This book argues that it is important for scholars to pay attention to historical moments when intellectuals or experts (whether generally recognized or self-proclaimed) create taxonomies of these sorts. It demonstrates that this philosophical exercise is often one strategy in more global attempts to establish various kinds of authority, garner social capital, and wrest these from other contemporary cultural entrepreneurs and experts.

Generally speaking, taxonomic discourses about spirits are seldom purely academic exercises undertaken by intellectual elites who distinguish themselves in some thorough manner from the rest of society on the basis of education and social class. As David Frankfurter notes, the creation of systematic discourses, in particular discourses that define and situate malign spirits (i.e., demonologies), is a strategy often used by both individuals and religious centers to bolster their authority, prestige, and reputation by establishing themselves as sites of expertise on sacred, ritual, and doctrinal matters.⁴ This is precisely what we find Origen, Plotinus, Porphyry, and Iamblichus doing in their writing and in their lives. All of these philosophers, with the possible exception of Plotinus, made claims to ritual expertise and called themselves high priests of the highest god.⁵ In other words, in the third century, some philosophers added a new, hieratic dimension to their identity. We find evidence of this in a number of places in the subject matter of their philosophical writings, in their biographies of their predecessors, and in the stories told about them by subsequent biographers.⁶ These philosophers also asserted that they were in a unique position as experts to broker salvation for others. In making these claims, they were completely in earnest, being motivated by deep religious or spiritual experiences. Additionally, they saw themselves as the heirs of a philosophical patrimony that gave them a more universal (i.e., totalizing) perspective than that of anyone else in late Roman society. Hence, part of their dialogue concerned the role of the philosopher-priest in the salvation of the souls of others.

Plotinus, Origen, Porphyry, and Iamblichus were not the only ones making the aforementioned soteriological claims at the time. Given that these writers lived in a highly competitive and uncontrollably diverse world, culturally speaking, in a period when philosophical schools proliferated, opportunities for social mobility were expanding, and the religious landscape was shifting rapidly, it should come as little surprise that these thinkers had to contend with each other and with other intellectuals with diverse backgrounds and training. This study takes a closer look at the individuals or groups that these late Roman Platonists sought to malign in the course of establishing their own authority over the realm of spirits. Using the lens of spiritual taxonomy, this study explores the precise nature of this competition, demonstrating that the philosophers under consideration were, in fact, competing for the intellectual and social upper hand with two main groups, priestly experts such as those associated with the Greek magical papyri, and so-called Gnostics.⁷ Members of both of these groups were also involved in identifying and ordering the realm of spirits and in providing the ritual means for dealing with this realm. By looking at these groups in tandem with third-century philosophers, this study demonstrates that all of them were much closer—far more interconnected socially, educationally, and intellectually—than previously recognized. Hence, although Origen, Plotinus, Porphyry, and Iamblichus give the impression that the individuals and groups they critique are clearly distinct from their own circles, these philosophers were, in fact, in direct competition for social and intellectual capital with other priests, ritual experts, and producers of taxonomic discourses.

This intimacy has been difficult to observe not only because of the rhetoric of these ancient writers themselves, but also as a result of the lingering effects of older scholarly models, models that have tended to see both religion and philosophy in a state of decline and devolution in the late Roman world. Although these models have, for the most part, been challenged and replaced, they still continue to influence the terms of a number of scholarly debates regarding late ancient religion and philosophy. The tendency to classify the ritual handbooks and other artifacts published together as the Papyri Graecae Magicae (PGM) as “magical” or as some problematic and degenerate subcategory of “religion” has meant that until very recently it has been difficult to entertain, much less trace, concrete connections between the priests behind these texts and contemporary philosophers and other intellectuals.⁸ A similar scholarly framework has tended to view so-called Gnostic myth and theology as either a devolved Christianity or a devolved Platonism, or both.⁹ This study rejects the decline and devolution framework, and in so doing, foregrounds connections that both labels, “magical” and “Gnostic,” have tended to obscure.

It also highlights the fact that in their efforts to establish their authority in theological and ritual matters, Origen, Porphyry, and Iamblichus frequently shared views on the realm of spirits that cut across religious boundaries. For instance, at first glance, the figures under consideration here belong to different ancient “religious groups”: Origen was a Christian, and Plotinus, Porphyry, and Iamblichus were Greco-Roman polytheists of one sort or another.¹⁰ In the fourth century, one sees increasing tension between these two groups as religious boundaries become more clearly drawn and violently enforced. Yet, one of the key questions this study seeks to answer is whether in the third century, a century punctuated by sporadic, infrequent violence against Christians, religious identity was the primary category determining the positions philosophers and intellectuals took on specific ideological issues. It also asks whether the interactions across this boundary were universally or even predominantly hostile, or whether we find evidence of productive dialogic exchange and shared conceptual categories. Indeed, the spiritual taxonomies of such thinkers as Origen, Plotinus, Porphyry, and Iamblichus force us to rethink how we conceive of religious identity in late antiquity. As will become clear, the evidence indicates that religious identity, both Christian and non-Christian, was under construction in the third century. Hence, it is impossible to fit thinkers as complex as the ones under consideration here into clearly defined religious groups. This is because there is little evidence that such groups existed in the ways in which we tend to think of religious or ideological affiliation today.¹¹ Hence, efforts to delineate clear, impermeable, and inflexible boundaries between such groups as Christians, Jews, Hellenes, Gnostics, and so forth are, by their nature, problematic and anachronistic.

By engaging this set of questions, this study challenges a model that has informed many late ancient studies for some time and has only recently been called into question by the work of scholars such as Miriam Taylor, Daniel Boyarin, Harold Drake, and Elizabeth DePalma Digeser. Miriam Taylor calls this model “conflict theory,” a model that sees most exchanges over religion in late antiquity through the lens of conflict and hostility between clearly defined confessional 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 book, while drawing on much 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, they themselves sought out much greater audiences, placed themselves more squarely in the center of things, and worked very hard to jostle their competitors out of the center and into the periphery, a place where many of them have stayed until rather recently.