Platonists and high priests: Daemonology, ritual and social order in the third century CE

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UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Santa Barbara

Platonists and High Priests: Daemonology, Ritual and Social Order in the Third Century CE

A Dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in History

by Heidi Marx-Wolf

Committee in charge: Harold A. Drake, co-chair Elizabeth DePalma Digeser, co-chair Christine M. Thomas Stephen Humphreys Mary Hancock

September 2009

UMI Number: 3385766

All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion.

UMI' Dissertation Publishing

UMI 3385766 Copyright 2009 by ProQuest LLC. All rights reserved. This edition of the work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code.

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Platonists and High Priests: Daemonology, Ritual and Social Order in the Third Century CE

Copyright © 2009 by Heidi Marx-Wolf

MI

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS "Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all the others." (Cicero) I have much to be grateful for and many debts to acknowledge. This dissertation is the result of numerous collaborations, friendships, and spontaneous acts of human kindness and scholarly generosity. I have had the excellent fortune of having been surrounded by people committed to making this dissertation a solid piece of scholarly work. Hence, any blunders, oversights or glaring mistakes are solely my responsibility and likely the result of my having overlooked or ignored good advice along the way. Harold A. Drake and Elizabeth DePalma Digeser shared the burden of advising this project. Their patience and magnanimity were astounding. They proved that you can teach an old dog new tricks, namely that you can teach a philosophically-trained academic to think and write like an historian. Hal is often heard to say that his method of advising is to let students do what they think is best and to follow their own course. But in actuality, it would be difficult to find someone as involved and engaged with his students' work. His advice is invariably sage, and his sense of commitment to his students and their flourishing is patently obvious at all times. Hal is an ideal advisor, and the culture he creates among his graduate students and colleagues convinced me early on that collaboration rather than competition is the only way to proceed in academia. His methods serve as the model I adopt for my present and future interactions with students and peers. It is not surprising, this being the tone of my graduate studies, that Elizabeth DePalma Digeser was equally kind, generous, helpful and hospitable, given that she was once one of Hal's students. Furthermore, I had the great fortune of working on a topic that was close to a number of themes from her forthcoming book. Beth shared all of her work with me, and saved me from many naive assumptions and scholarly blunders by making me cognizant of the most important debates on key topics pertaining to my project. She has also been a kind and caring friend. My debt to Christine M. Thomas is great and multi-faceted. Her teaching and input made this project truly interdisciplinary. She singlehandedly taught me what it is one does in a religious studies department and how this could enrich my own approach. She did such a good job in this regard that the University of Manitoba was willing to hire me to teach Early Christianity and New Testament in their religion department. Chris was frequently willing to take on overload teaching to ensure that graduate students had access to New Testament Greek and Coptic courses, opportunities which I happily availed myself of. She also made IV

it possible for me to spend time at Ephesus on an archaeological dig, an unforgettable experience which served to attune me to the ways in which historians can and should engage with archaeological studies whenever possible. Chris is also one of the most erudite and diversely talented people I know, and among the most generous. My thanks also go to her husband Jorge Castillo for his friendship and for some of the most sublime and treasured early music in my collection. Their son Martin is also a treasured friend. Both Mary Hancock and Stephen Humphries were willing to conduct independent studies with me on possession cults, demonology and mental illness in anthropology and early Islam respectively. This dissertation is informed by anthropological methodology to a significant degree as a result of Mary Hancock's help. Furthermore, my work with Stephen Humphreys made me aware of the important parallels between late Rome and early Islam, and prepared me to teach courses at UCSB on both late Roman history and on the history of science to the Renaissance. Early on in the process of writing, David Frankfurter very generously read multiple drafts of my project proposal and offered invaluable comments. His mark on the dissertation is clear from the outset, and this study would not have been anywhere near as interesting without his input. I also wish to thank Gillian Clark who, in a workshop at UCSB and a session at the International Conference on Patristic Studies at Oxford, read papers of mine and offered rich and varied feedback. My graduate studies were funded by the generosity of a number of different departments and foundations in the University of California system. Additionally, grants from the Multi-Campus Research Group in Late Antiquity allowed me to travel to Turkey to study ancient healing shrines in 2005, and to take a course in papyrology at Berkeley. This course served as the basis for my work with the "Greek Magical Papyri" in Chapter Two. Claudia Rapp, who was the director of the MRG while I was a graduate student, has always been helpful and encouraging and I owe her my thanks. UCSB History Associates and the History Department also came through on an almost yearly basis with smaller fellowships, which allowed me to travel for research and survive the summer months. Nancy McGloughlin and Thomas Sizgorich have been unfailing friends within the academy and outside of it. Nancy read multiple versions of all my chapters, edited the ugliest prose, and is largely responsible for bringing out the "so what" of my project. And I would not have weathered the final months of writing without her constant confidence that I would finish and her encouragement to keep at it. v

My thanks also go to Monica Orozco for her friendship and her help, especially while I was settling in at UCS. I also wish to thank Olivier Dufault for reading my work and conspiring about spirits, theurgy and alchemy, Dayna Kalleres for sharing her work and insights on possession, exorcism and baptism, Emily Schmidt for great conversations on Roman religion, Hellenistic Judaism, and innumerable other scintillating topics, and Roberta Mazza for all her help on the papyrological aspects of this study. I also wish to thank fellow scholars of late Platonism, Blossom Stefaniw, Ariane Magny, Todd Krulak, Arthur Urbano, and Aaron Johnson, for their good company at conferences, and for sharing their work and insights on all things Plotinian, Porphyrian and Proclean. I am grateful to Alexander Sokolicek for teaching me most of what I know about ancient archaeology, for letting me muck about at the Magnesian Gate in Ephesus with him, and for including my novelistic descriptions of stones in the his site reports. My thanks go to him, his partner Johanna Auinger, and their daughter Marie for their friendship, for Skipbo and for Sachertorte. Janet Crisler has, over the years, been an enthusiastic and affirming friend, and I thank her for her hospitality during my time in Selcuk, and for her frequent invitations to come and spend time at the Crisler Library and Research Center near Ephesus. My thanks go to my friends on the mountain - Angela Moll, Thorsten van Eicken, the Vallino's, Stefan Miescher and Lane Clark - for meals, tea, and excellent conversation. Petra von Morstein and Evgenia Cherkasova are life-long friends whom I thank for their constancy, resolute love and care over the years. They are the sort of friends who, despite distance, are ever-present. I thanked them in the same way ten years ago when I wrote my acknowledgments for my first dissertation in philosophy, and nothing has changed. At the time I also thanked my dear friend Laura Canis who helped me through my first dissertation and whose friendship I treasured deeply. She died in May of 2006, and I miss her dreadfully. But she is still present in the small things, such as how I make roast potatoes and fruit cake, as well as in the big things such as how I endeavor to treat other people. When asked what it was about my childhood that led me to write a dissertation on demons, my mother replied with shocked incredulity, "She wrote a dissertation on demons?" Despite her best efforts to avoid any responsibility for a topic that some might consider controversial or dangerous (my last three months of writing, after all, were riddled with all sorts of minor and major mishaps, annoyances and tragedies!), my parents are very responsible for the kind of person I am and the path I've taken. I am deeply thankful to them for all their love and support. They VI

are the ones who pretended the television was broken and took me to the public library every week. They are also the ones who read to me every night from the time dinner ended to the time I went to sleep. My partner in crime, my sister Christa has been and remains my closest friend. Being an acupuncturist, she is also my doctor, and I feel very privileged to be her patient. She helped to keep me balanced and sane during the more grueling periods of this project. She is also one of the most loving people I know. Ten years ago, a week after I finished my dissertation in philosophy, I married Paul Alexander Wolf. Few people would have both understood my rationale for completing another doctorate or put up with all that entails for seven years. Paul did so with grace, humor, and generosity. He has, in the interim, put certain of his own dreams and plans on hold in a most selfless way. He has also kept me from stultifying in my manner of existence, from becoming pedantic as a human being, and from taking myself too seriously. I am a far better person than I could have ever hoped to be for knowing and loving him.

VII

VITA OF HEIDI MARX-WOLF August 2009 EDUCATION Bachelor of Philosophy, University of Calgary, Alberta, June 1993 (with honors) Doctor of Philosophy in Philosophy, Pennsylvania State University, State College, June 1999 Doctor of Philosophy in History, University of California, Santa Barbara, September 2009 (expected) PROFESSIONAL EMPLOYMENT 1994-96: Teaching Assistant, Department of Philosophy, Pennsylvania State University, State College 1996-1999: Lecturer, Department of Philosophy, Pennsylvania State University, State College 2000-2002: Lecturer, Department of Philosophy, Santa Barbara City College, Santa Barbara 2001 and 2004: Lecturer, Department of Philosophy, Westmont College, Santa Barbara 2002-2003: Teaching Assistant, Law and Society Program, University of California, Santa Barbara 2003-2006: Teaching Assistant, Department of History, University of California, Santa Barbara 2006-2009: Lecturer, Department of History, University of California, Santa Barbara

PUBLICATIONS "High Priests of the Highest God: Third Century Platonists as Ritual Experts" (forthcoming in 2010, Journal of Early Christian Studies) "Augustine and Meister Eckhart: Amata Notitia and the Birth of the Word" in Philotheos: International Journal for Philosophy and Theology (July 2008) "A Strange Consensus: Demonological Discourse in Origen, Porphyry and lamblichus," in Religion and Rhetoric in Late Antiquity (Toronto: Edgar Kent Publishers, under contract, forthcoming 2009)

VIM

"Madness," entry in the Encyclopedia of Medieval Pilgrimage (Brill, under contract, forthcoming 2009) "Metaphors of Imaging in Meister Eckhart and Marguerite Porete," Medieval Perspectives, 13 (1998), 99-108. AWARDS Fall 2008

Graduate Division Dissertation Completion Fellowship

Summer 2008

UCSB History Associates Fellowship

2007

MRG in Late Antiquity Intercampus Student Exchange Fellowship (Papyrology course at the Tebtunis Collection, UC Berkeley)

2007-2008

UCSB Graduate Opportunity Fellowship

2007

UCSB Graduate Division Research Travel Grant

2006-2007

Dick Cook Memorial Fellowship for Outstanding Service

2006-2007

Esme Frost Fellowship for Ancient History

2006-2007

UCSB Dean's Fellowship

2005-2006


2005-2006

J. Bruce Anderson Memorial Fellowship for Excellence in Teaching

2005-2006

Lead Tutorial Assistant, History Department, UCSB

2005

MRG in Late Antiquity Travel Grant

2004


2002-2003

Medieval Studies Program, First Year Award

FIELDS OF STUDY Major Field: Late Antiquity with Harold A. Drake

IX

Studies in Early Christianity and Greek and Roman Religion with Christine M. Thomas Studies in Early Islam with Stephen Humphreys Studies in Anthropological Approaches to Demon Possession and Mental Insanity with Mary Hancock

x

ABSTRACT

Platonists and High Priests: Daemonology, Ritual and Social Order in the

Third Century CE

by

Heidi Marx-Wolf In the third century, Platonist philosophers such as Origen, Porphyry and lamblichus were engaged in creating systematic discourses that ordered the realm of spirits in increasingly more hierarchical ways. All of these philosophers also made claims to ritual expertise and called themselves high priests of the highest god. My argument is that they did so, in part, to garner cultural and social capital in the forms of prestige and authority, and may have even done so in order to caste themselves in the role of advisors to local and imperial leaders. The daemonological discourses they constructed as part of their overall respective theological and philosophical projects were projected onto and ordered a more "local" daemonological perspective which, although totalizing in its own right, was less concerned with hierarchy and precise distinctions between different kinds of spirits. By comparing these two different levels - local xi

versus philosophical daemonologies - I show that the reason why these third-century Platonist philosophers expended so much effort ordering the realm of spirits and claiming to be high priests is that socially, they were much closer to the ritual experts who created and proffered the rituals and ritual objects that engaged and worked with the spiritual realm at the more "local" level. Hence, although Origen, Porphyry and lamblichus created discourses of a universal sort, if one situates them in their cultural and educational context, one sees that they were at times in direct competition for social capital with other priests and ritual experts. I also highlight the fact that in their efforts to establish their authority on theological and ritual matters, Origen, Porphyry and lamblichus frequently shared views on the realm of spirits that cut across religious boundaries, calling into question the conflict model that has informed much of the scholarship on this period and these figures in particular. Finally, I demonstrate that the philosophical daemonologies of 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.

XII

Table of Contents: Chapter One - Introduction

1

Chapter Two - Local priests and Local Spirits: The Case of the Greek "Magical" Papryi (PGM)

30

Chapter Three - How to Feed a Daemon - The Demonic Conspiracy of Blood Sacrifice and the Moral Valencing of the Realm of Spirits

87

Chapter Four - "Everything in its Right Place": Ordering the Realm of Spirits

138

Chapter Five - Priests of the God Who Rules All: Ritual Expertise and Social Order

184

Conclusion: Antecedents and Heirs - From the Second Sophistic to Christian Bishops

222

Bibliography

234

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Chapter One - Introduction This dissertation concerns the relationship between the everyday disorder of the spirit world of most ancient Mediterranean people and the ordered hierarchies of spirits produced by late antique philosophers. This relationship, however, is perhaps most strikingly illustrated and introduced with a modern and personal example. The following is a text from a piece of paper that accompanied a contemporary amulet I found a couple of years ago. The text does not specify the purpose of the amulet, but it seems it can be used to make any sort of request: Prayer to the Seal of the Crown Serpent and Magic: From the Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses On the reverse side of the picture of Moses, according to Oriental reckoning, appears the elevated, winding and crowned serpent, holding a ring in her teeth. Around the serpent may be seen the moon, the stars, planets, water and many other hieroglyphical signs. On the left side of the tail may be seen seven nails, on the right side are magical hieroglyphs making the mane [name] of Schemahamponasch. To see Jesus Christ with cross that is to say: Jesus Christ through his love, and by his seven wounds and through his death on the cross for his lobe's [love's] sake, has overcome the kingdoms of this world, and thus took again from the old serpent, the devil, the seal-ring of human omnipotence, or the happiness of man to all the eternal eternities, in order to fulfill the old covenant in the new covenant, for the eternal glorification of the eternal Father in the eternal Son, through the eternal Spirit. Amen. Make your request. On the reverse side of the paper, the same thing is written in Spanish. The amulet itself is plated with 14k gold (at least according to the

1

envelope in which it came), and although some details are clear, such as Moses, the crowned serpent and the quarter moon, many of the symbols mentioned in the piece of paper are far less distinct. I found the amulet in an unlikely place. I am very fond of swap meets and flea markets and look for them whenever and wherever I travel. Sometimes I drive about an hour north of Santa Barbara to visit the swap meet in Nipomo, a small agricultural town inland from the coast. It's a rather large and festive affair where Spanish is the predominant language and tri-tip tacos are high on the menu along with menudo and posole. Some of the stalls are under tents as one would expect. But others are housed in more permanent metal storage units. The last time I was there, I was walking by one of these storage units outside of which stood a rack displaying very pungent incense in large quantities. The door was covered by a beaded curtain. Intrigued, I entered and was immediately confronted by a wall of vials containing oils or waters for a broad spectrum of ailments and conditions, physical, existential, and spiritual. The same array of concerns was represented in powder form, in packets with photocopied pictures and explanations. Next I encountered a wall of amulets, followed by a wall of candles, some of which were very standard representations of saints, others depicting specific desires and requests. Then there were the shelves of herbs and herbal concoctions. Interspersed among these shelves were

2

smaller displays of bottles containing scenes with dolls and other objects in liquid. At the very back of the store there was a large nook with curtains and built-in benches covered with pillows, fabric, lace and dolls, innumerable dolls. What was most striking was the rich mix of spiritual traditions represented as well as the range of concerns addressed by the collection. One could find help in the form of an amulet, powder or candle for marital separation (preventative or hoped for, I could not determine); one could find a remedy for financial difficulties, and for physical ailments of all kinds; if one needed protection on a journey or against evil spirits and curses, that was possible as well. But many of the items also had a devotional element. Some addressed the individual's search for spiritual insight, wisdom and intimacy with god or saint.1

1

Around the same time that I came across this shop, I also received a piece of spam sent to my campus email with the following message reminding me of the variety of help one could find on the shelves of the store at the swap meet. It read: "The answers to your prayers are here through our divine supplications and prayers, we have come out with some spiritual rings that you are in need of, and you can now contact us to narrate your difficulties and we believe that God will help to solve your problems. We have attached samples of our rings to this mail. And you can easily contact us for more details regarding your problems, and we shall prescribe the best rings to help solve your problems. Many have come back to say thank you and believe that you are the next person to be grateful to our assistance. Below are the rings we have made to solve your problems: 1) ring for making money and uncontrollable wealth, 2) ring for people seeking political appointment, 3) ring for lovers, male attraction and female attraction, 4) ring for gambling, lottery, visa and good luck, 5) ring for disappearing when there is trouble, 6) ring for communicating and commanding the jinns of the underworld, 7) success ring, 8) business success ring, 9) exams success ring, 10) ring to boost your business and investments, it makes more customers for your business, 11) rings specially made for contractor, people seeking for job and for business, men/women, 12) ring for spiritual upliftment, 13) ring for performing miracles on a crusade, 14) ring of commandment, do as I say, 15) ring for defeating your opposition,

3

Furthermore, it was possible to purchase bulk herbs to work a strictly physical cure without spiritual intercession or intervention in the case one was more profanely inclined. Having been raised in the Baptist and Brethren traditions, I felt some hesitation about buying anything. I remember that once a dear friend had given me a silver amulet, a piece I wore often, symbolizing the cycles of the moon. I explained this to the mother of a church friend who was curious about it. Her response was to ask me whether I wasn't worried about attracting demons wearing a pagan symbol of that sort. Such memories and the scruples they represent do not fade quickly. So I decided upon my Moses amulet. After all, in Late Antiquity, the period under discussion in this study, Moses was a sort of ecumenical figure.2 I also bought a powder with the picture of Saint Cyprian. As I went to pay, the owner of the store explained that it was helpful for warding off evil

16) ring for winning a case at court, 17) ring for breaking through, 18) ring for getting pregnant, 19) ring for your wife to stick to you and for your husband not to cheat on you but to stick to you forever, 20) ring for destruction. You should kindly feel free and contact us on [email protected] for answer to your questions and for placing your order. Don't let your power or free will pass you bye, act fast and be part of this spiritual revolution. May the blessing of the supreme being protect you all. Sheik Ibrahim Niass Jrn., Spiritual Leader." 2 Claudia Rapp, "Comparison, Paradigm and the Case of Moses in Panegyric and Hagiography," in The Propaganda of Power: The Role of Panegyric in Late Antiquity, ed. Mary Whitby (Leiden, 1988), 286. "In the period of late antiquity, Moses was held in high regard by Jews, pagans and Christians alike. He was admired by the pagans for his contributions to the progress of civilization, while the Christians saw him as an earlier version either of Christ, or of the apostles, especially of Peter."

4

spirits sent by people trying to curse me. Given the topic of this dissertation, my choices turned out to be rather apropos.3 As I was paying for my amulet and powder, I commented to the proprietor, Sister Angela Galloway, a diviner and spiritualist, about the mix of spiritual traditions represented in her store, noting that it was very akin to some of the syncretistic forms of ritual and belief I study in the ancient world. She nodded her head, and replied, "They're all spirits." This succinct reply has stayed with me. Sister Galloway's Botanica Manviye, Nipomo Swap Meet A-33, is a physical representation of how many individuals in many times and places conceive of the spiritual realm and construct the sacred landscape around them. It represents an understanding of spirits in terms this study sees as a more local level of religion, the level at which ordinary people seek remedies for life's difficulties, disappointments, pains, and frustrations, as well as they seek to secure or celebrate prosperity, health, children, friendship and familial harmony; or to achieve understanding of and closeness to spiritual beings.4

3

The sixth and seventh books of Moses are a collection of pseudepigraphal texts, for which we have a number of 16th century manuscripts, which claim to explain the magic Moses used in a contest with the Egyptian priest-magicians. It also claims to reveal how he parted the Red Sea, called down plagues of locusts and frogs and so forth. The books also contain various seals for calling upon angels and other spirits. Joseph Peterson, The Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses (Berwick, 2008). 4 Other terms that could be used interchangeably with the designation "local" are "concrete," "situated," "pragmatic," or "practical."

5

At this level, thinking about spirits is more flexible and less systematic or hierarchical than the thinking academics typically encounter. Spirits are experienced as diverse, unclassified, capricious and ambiguous. Their virtues or detractions tend to be mapped onto whether or not they are helpful or harmful with reference to specific conditions, but they are not valenced according to clearly defined moral taxa: "popular demonological thinking is 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."5 Although, as noted, this kind of thinking about spirits is prevalent in many cultures and religions across time, there are certain moments in history when attempts are made to order the spiritual realm in more systematic, hierarchical and totalizing ways. These attempts to create more elaborate daemonological discourses, i.e., discourses about spirits in general, are seldom purely academic exercises undertaken by intellectual elites who hold themselves entirely apart from the rest of society on the basis of education and social class. Rather, as David Frankfurter notes, the creation of systematic discourses about spirits, in particular evil ones (i.e. demonologies)6 often functions as part of an attempt on the part of 5

David Frankfurter, Evil incarnate: rumors of demonic conspiracy and ritual abuse in history (Princeton, N.J., 2006). 30. 6 1 use the term "demonology" to refer to speech about evil spirits, a discourse that locates and defines them. The term "daemonology" is used throughout to indicate a broader discourse about spirits in general

6

certain individuals or even religious centers to bolster their authority, power and reputation by establishing themselves as sites of expertise on sacred, ritual and doctrinal matters. In his book, Evil Incarnate: rumors of demonic conspiracy and satanic abuse in history, Frankfurter highlights the way in which, at specific historical moments, certain individuals or religious associations attempt to claim authority for themselves by "appropriating and recasting local religious beliefs so as to make the temple priests and their rituals indispensable to public religious life."7 The first step in this direction often involves providing a clear moral valence for various spiritual beings. At this stage, "self-defined experts and forces, sometimes in cooperation with a central institution," transform "those unsystematic local understandings of capricious spirits and malevolent neighbors," articulating "the uniform coordinated threat posed by demons and the Devil," revealing "the evil system behind inchoate misfortune," and offering their audiences "the tangible hope of purging it."8 Frankfurter describes how these conspiratorial discourses about evil spirits function. He writes:

7

Frankfurter, Evil incarnate: rumors of demonic conspiracy and ritual abuse in history. 15. 8 Ibid. 31-32. Although Frankfurter's study mainly addresses this trend in historical contexts defined by a Christian world view, he finds interesting parallels in ancient Zoroastrianism as well as in the accusations against Christians by Greco-Roman polytheists. Thus his insights are not limited, in terms of applicability, to a Christian framework.

7

Demonologies seek to control - through order, through writing, through the ritual power of declaration - a chaotic world of misfortune, temptation, religious conflict, and spiritual ambiguity....Demonology collects from and attends to these various domains of apparent demonic action, yet its intent lies in grasping totality, simplifying and abstracting immediate experience for the sake of cosmic structures.9 Hence, in this recasting and centralization process local spirits are frequently abstracted from their context, inserted into a "speculative system," given an ethical valence that supplants their previous moral ambiguity, and generally subsumed within a totalizing, universal discourse, one that maps moral order onto specific ontological difference in increasingly complex ways.10 A number of years ago when reading the works of late secondand third-century Platonists, the successors of the elusive and mysterious Ammonius Saccas, I noticed that, with the important exception of Plotinus, a number of these thinkers - Origen, Porphyry and lamblichus in particular - seemed to be engaged in such a project, namely in the production of elaborate discourses that sought to morally valence the

9

Ibid. 26-27. Frankfurter's study focuses on the production of demonologies and the role this played at certain key historical moments when "the myth of evil conspiracy mobilized people in large numbers to astounding acts of brutality against accused conspirators" (12). These moments serve to explain late twentieth century witch hunts, particularly in Africa, as well as the Satanic abuse panics in Britain and the United States in the 1980's. His discussion of the way the identification and categorization of spirits grounds "experts'" claims to authority draws on important anthropological works from such scholars as I. M. Lewis, Mary Douglas, and Birgit Meyer. 10 "Demonology of this sort, involving the collection, classification, and integration of demons out of their immediate social contexts, arises as a function of religious centralization..." Ibid. 15.

8

realm of spirits and order it in hierarchical and systematic ways.11 These thinkers also seemed to be making strong claims with regard to their expertise on matters of ritual. And all three referred to themselves as high priests of the highest god. These Platonists were not entirely without precedents in their daemonological endeavors, for Middle Platonists, such as Plutarch and Numenius, also had much to say about daemons and other spirits. However, this trend intensified in the third century with the followers of Ammonius. I made it my task to investigate this change, something which scholars had not thus far done, by situating it in its third-century context, socially, politically, culturally and religiously. Hence, this study seeks to explore possible reasons why these thirdcentury Platonists sought to order the realm of spirits as and when they did, and to impose this order on more local understandings of the sacred landscape in currency at the time. This study also seeks to determine whether they sought to establish their hieratic identity or status at the expense of other ritual experts living, working, and participating in cultural, religious and social milieus that overlapped or intersected with the schools and circles of late Platonist philosophers, circles which many scholars have only looked at in isolation from the rest of late antique

11

Although I do not include Plotinus here, it is important to note that the emanational cosmology of the Enneads provides a framework for ordering spirits. Plotinus is less interested, however, in dividing beings along moral lines or in describing the characteristics of various spiritual orders.

9

society.12 Scholars have often proceeded in this manner in part because it is frequently assumed in the study of the history of philosophy that elite intellectuals in all times and places tend to separate themselves from many of the currents, ideas, and practices of other social and educational classes. Part of the reason for this assumption is that often these intellectual elites give this impression themselves. But, this impression is misleading, as both the ideas and lives of the third-century Platonists will reveal. Hence this study seeks, in part, to answer the following questions: First, what was the place of the philosopher in the late Roman world? How were philosophers situated with reference to religious authorities as well as participants in other intellectual traditions? How were these figures situated with reference to political authority, and the imperial court in particular? And how did these philosophers fashion their identities in this period in order to position themselves in society in a way that fit with their self-perception? This dissertation intersects with a number of other questions in late Roman scholarship. As will become apparent in the course of this study, the daemonological lens this dissertation adopts yields important new insights about religious identity and social class in late antiquity. For 12

For a discussion of how the Platonists schools and circles were structured and functioned in the period under discussion, see Garth Fowden, "The Platonist Philosopher and His Circle in Late Antiquity," Philosophia 7 (1977).

10

instance, the figures under consideration here belong to different religious groups: Origen was a Christian, and both Porphyry and lamblichus were Hellenes.13 In the fourth century, one sees increasing tension between these two groups as religious boundaries become more clearly drawn and violently enforced. Yet, some 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 which determined the positions philosophers and intellectuals on either side of the Christian/Hellene divide took on specific ideological issues, whether the interactions across this boundary were universally or even predominantly hostile, or whether we find evidence of dialogic exchange and shared conceptual categories. Indeed, the daemonologies of such thinkers as Origen, Porphyry, and lamblichus force us to rethink how we conceive of religious identity in late antiquity. As will become clear, the evidence points to the fact that, in important respects, religious identity, both Christian and Hellene, was under 13

1 avoid using the term "pagan" wherever possible, because it is a pejorative and anachronistic term which none of the non-Christian philosophers this study considers would have used in reference to themselves or others like them. "Hellene" is a term that is often used within this milieu. It sometimes refers to individuals who saw themselves as participants in the ancient Greek intellectual patrimony. Origen would certainly fit this description, but he did not adopt the title "Hellene" for himself. It is also important to note that at times lamblichus criticized people he calls "Hellenes" for religious innovation. Hence, one sees that it is difficult to find appropriate terminology to replace the problematic "pagan." However, I believe it is important to grapple with the problem. To refer to non-elite non- Christians and non-Jews, I will use phrases such as "participants in traditional Mediterranean religion" or "traditional polytheists." Although at times this may appear awkward, I would prefer not to sacrifice accuracy to a misleading succinctness.

11

construction in the third century. Hence it is impossible to fit complex thinkers such as Origen, Porphyry and lamblichus into clearly defined religious groups because there is little evidence that such groups existed in ways that characterize the manner in which we think of religious affiliation today. And efforts to delineate clear, impermeable, and inflexible boundaries between such groups as Christians, Jews, Hellenes (or "pagans"), Gnostics, and so forth, are futile and misguided. By engaging this latter set of questions, this study challenges a model which has informed late antique studies for some time and has only recently been called into question by the work of scholars such as Harold Drake, Miriam Taylor and Daniel Boyarin.14 Miriam Taylor calls this model "conflict theory," a model which sees most exchanges over religion in late antiquity through the lens of conflict and hostility between clearly defined confessional groups. Taylor compellingly calls into question the usefulness of this model for understanding late antique Jewish-Christian relations.

14

Daniel Boyarin, Borderlines: the partition of Judaeo-Christianity, Divinations (Philadelphia, Pa., 2004), H. A. Drake, Constantine and the bishops: the politics of intolerance, Ancient society and history (Baltimore, MD, 2000), Miriam S. Taylor, AntiJudaism and early Christian identity: a critique of the scholarly consensus (Leiden; New York, 1995). I would also include important work on the complexion of early Christianity that questions the division between Christian and Gnostic and prefers to see the first few centuries CE as a time when multiple Christianities flourished. For instance, see Michael Allen Williams, Rethinking "Gnosticism": An Argument for Dismantling a Dubious Category (Princeton, 1996).

12

Taylor is joined in her views by 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. His book defends the general thesis that one cannot clearly distinguish the two on the ground before the fourth century CE, and their respective characteristics are the immediate result of this contest. It is not until after this period, and even well into the fifth century that the threatening hybrid identity, Jewish-Christian, was effectively reproduced as a heretical position. Boyarin also explains how Christians, in producing their specific orthodox position, also produced the new ideological construct "religion" and attempted to apply this construct to Greco-Roman and Jewish religio. Rabbinic Judaism is the direct result of resistance to categorization as a "religion." This resistance takes place in the context of a number of specific contests: the rabbinic rejection of Logos theology, and the opposition to theological simplicity (homonoia) or the idea of orthodoxy. Instead, Rabbinic Judaism favored the 'denization' of the dialectician, i.e., the preeminence of disputation or dissensus without a telos. Harold Drake has demonstrated that a similar hardening took place in "pagan"-Christian15 relations in the fourth century, which

15

Drake uses the term "pagan" in his work although he clearly countenances the problems with it.

13

obscured earlier Christian efforts to emphasize points of commonality and agreement between Christians and non-Christians.16 These theoretical insights are borne out at the level of ritual practice in a number of different late Roman examples. For instance, we have evidence at the level of ritual artifacts of people mixing Christian, Jewish and Greco-Roman elements in healing practices (for instance, the Coptic "magical" papyri). Another example in the fourth century is John Chrysostom who was still railing against his parishioners for attending both his church and the local synagogue - a practice many seem to have found consistent with being a "good Christian." Finally, Abba Shenoute in the fifth century berated visitors to various saints' shrines for performing traditional necromantic divination at these relic sites.17 This practice indicates that the people who came to the martyr shrines saw them as places where the souls of the violently and prematurely dead could be called upon to foretell the future - a practice consistent with centuries of ancient Mediterranean divination. There is no reason to believe that these visitors thought of themselves as anything other than "good Christians." All of these examples indicate that even for periods later than the one treated in this study, religious identity 16

It is important to note that from Justin Martyr on, numerous Christian apologists endeavored to present Christianity as a philosophy in order to make it more palatable to non-Christians. For this particular reference, I rely on a presentation by David Frankfurter to the Society for Biblical Literature in San Diego (2007) entitled "Where the Spirits Dwell: Saint Shrines as Sites for Possession in Late Antique Christianity."

14

and group boundaries are difficult to draw. This is even more clearly the case for the third century and for the intellectuals under discussion here, despite the fact that a great deal of scholarship on these topics assumes the opposite. This study will demonstrate that intellectuals of various stripes wrote and thought using a common cultural coin in answer to a common set of questions and concerns about divinity. In fact, part of the reason intellectuals of all sorts in this period were increasingly concerned with hierarchical accounts of the divine order was that many people who saw themselves as heirs and participants in an ancient Greek paideia were increasingly adopting more henotheistic and monotheistic forms of religious belief and practice. This view of divinity posed a set of questions that affected intellectuals from many different backgrounds and affiliations including Christians, Neo-Platonists, Jews, Gnostics, Manicheans, Hermetists, Chaldeans, and so forth. The intellectual questions shared by philosophically or ideologically engaged members of these groups include the following: questions about the nature of divinity and how to "protect" God or the gods from any possible charge of responsibility for evil; the appropriateness of animal sacrifices as a central component of both traditional Greek and Roman, but also Hebrew, cult; concerns about the source, nature, and efficacy of divination and prophecy and the waning of

15

oracular sites; the difficulty of specifying the soul's relationship to matter and the range of acceptable ascetic practices for assuring its release, i.e. 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 CE inherited their questions from common philosophical predecessors. The concern about divinity's potential responsibility for evil is really part and parcel of the question of its relation to the created order, and in particular, to matter. Not only were writers exercised by the problem of 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. These thinkers were at pains to preserve divine goodness by distinguishing and even distancing the highest god(s) from what most philosophers at the time, with the exception of perhaps Stoics and Epicureans, thought was a realm of becoming and therefore a realm characterized by imperfection, corruptibility, and, in some cases, evil. 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?

16

This question in particular became an important focus of internecine debate among Neo-Platonists after Plotinus, as Chapter Three will demonstrate. Thus we begin to see the way in which a daemonological lens is a productive one for looking at third-century ideological and social change, as well as questions concerning late Roman religious identity. Attention to the way in which the realm of spirits is valenced and ordered has proven fruitful for late antique scholarship in general, in part because a number of studies have drawn on modern anthropological and ethnographic insights concerning, in particular, evil spirits, possession and healing in traditional societies. Peter Brown was, as usual, one of the first to recognize the fruitfulness of this approach, for instance, in his iconic article "The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity," and also in his article "Sorcery, Demons and the Rise of Christianity from Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages," an essay which was first published in a volume edited by the anthropologist, Mary Douglas.18 Recently, David Brakke has highlighted the role demons played in shaping the identity of Egyptian monks in the early Christian period.19 And Cam Grey's essay, "Demoniacs, Dissent, and Disempowerment in the Late Roman West: 18

Peter Brown, "The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity," Journal of Roman Studies 61 (1971). Peter Brown, "Sorcery, Demons, and the Rise of Christianity from Late Antiquity into the Middle Ages," in Witchcraft, Confessions, and Accusations, ed. Mary Douglas (London, 1970). 19 David Brakke, Demons and the making of the monk: spiritual combat in early Christianity (Cambridge, Mass., 2006).

17

Some Case Studies from the Hagiographical Literature," uses 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."20 All of these studies draw on important insights about the way reflection on the demonic is reflection on the normative via inversion. They also demonstrate that demons often represent key aspects of social reality. Modern anthropological studies reveal similar patterns. For instance, in his study on Buddhism in Sri Lanka, Bruce Kapferer notes that "[d]emons order disorder."21 According to him, "the culturally constituted modalities of the normal and abnormal" are "constituted by Sinhalese Buddhists through reference to demons and the nature of the demonic."22 In a similar vein, Birgit Meyers highlights the way in which Ewe converts to Christianity in Ghana used the image of the Devil and his demons "to reflect upon, and fantasize about, the problems and opportunities of their integration into a modern global political

Cam Grey, "Demoniacs, Dissent, and Disempowerment in the Late Roman West: Some Case Studies from Hagiographical Literature," Journal of Early Christian Studies 13 (2005): 40. 21 Bruce Kapferer, A celebration of demons: exorcism and the aesthetics of healing in Sri Lanka, 2nd ed. (Providence, R.I., Washington, DC, 1991). 1.

18

economy.

In other words, the demonic is a way to think about

ambivalent social and economic changes. Charles Stewart makes similar observations in his important study on demons and the Devil in modern Greek society. He writes, "demons cluster around refractory areas of experience": Incomprehensible phenomena are rendered intelligible though a recasting that could be said to humanize them; the moral foundations of the society are projected onto the unknown. The construction, representation, and dissemination of evocative images enable an understanding and a mastery of situations that escape comprehension in other terms.24 Finally, David Frankfurter sums up the foregoing anthropological insights about the demonic in his work on modern Satanic abuse panics in the following observation: And 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. This study, however, goes beyond the meaning of demons and demonological reflection and seeks to look more broadly at what the activity of constructing hierarchies of spirits, both good and evil, means, Birgit Meyer, Translating the Devil: religion and modernity among the Ewe in Ghana (Trenton, NJ, 1999). 111. 4 Charles Stewart, Demons and the Devil: moral imagination in modern Greek culture, Princeton modern Greek studies. (Princeton, N.J., 1991) 15.

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in this case in the third century, and how these dameonologies function socially. But it takes a key insight from the aforementioned studies on the demonic, namely that spiritual order can reflect ideas about social order. Even more importantly, daemonological discourse can also serve to construct new visions of social order and help to bring them into existence.25 In other words, this study builds on the key theoretical points of scholars such as Kapferer, Meyers, Steward, Frankfurter and others. As this study will demonstrate, the philosophers under investigation here were motivated by deep religious or spiritual experiences, and they saw themselves as the heirs of a philosophical An example from the ancient world will suffice to demonstrate this claim that daemonological thinking can reflect or construct social order. In his book Jesus the Magician, Morton Smith describes the intersection between the mythological worldview of the early imperial Palestinian Jews and the socio-political context. He writes: "The picture of the world common to Jesus and his Jewish Palestinian contemporaries is known to us from many surviving Jewish and Christian documents. It was wholly mythological. Above the earth were heavens inhabited by demons, angels, and gods of various sorts (the "many gods" whose existence Paul conceded in 1 Cor. 8.5, and among whom he counted "the god of this age," 2 Cor. 4.4). In the highest heaven was enthroned the supreme god, Yahweh, "God" par excellence, who long ago created the whole structure and was about to remodel, or destroy, or replace it. Beneath the earth was an underworld, to which most of the dead descended. There, too, were demons. Through underworld, earth, and heavens was a constant coming and going of supernatural beings who interfered in many ways with human affairs. Sickness, especially insanity, plagues, famines, earthquakes, wars, and disasters of all sorts were commonly thought to be the work of demons. With these demons, as with evil men, particularly foreign oppressors, the peasants of Palestine lived in perpetual hostility and sporadic conflict, but the relations were complex. As the Roman government had its Jewish agents, some of whom, notably the Herods, were local rulers, so the demons had their human agents who could do miracles so as to deceive many. The lower gods were the rulers of this age, and men who knew how to call on them could get their help for all sorts of purposes. So could women, whose favors they had rewarded by teaching them magic and other arts of civilized life. On the other hand, Yahweh, like the demons, was often the cause of disasters, sickness, etc., sent as punishments. He sometimes used angels, sometimes demons, as agents of his anger, and his human agents, his prophets, could also harm as well as help." Morton Smith, Jesus the Magician: Charlatan or Son of God? (New York, 1978). 4.

20

patrimony that gave them a more universal perspective than any one else in late Roman society. Their motivations were also, in part, tied up with considerations of a soteriological sort. Part of their dialogue with each other concerned the role of the philosopher-priest in the salvation of the souls of others. Furthermore, their experience and perspective carried with it a divine charge to participate in and even guide civic affairs. Recent scholarship by Dominic O'Meara and Jeremy Schott has shown that late Platonists were neither apolitical nor did they eschew reflection on governance and the ideal polity.26 Although few philosophers in this period used Plato's model of the philosopher-king to frame their political ideology, a model found in his Republic, they did draw heavily on his Laws which depicted the philosopher as an advisor to the sovereign - a role which was ideally suited to the imperial context of the third century. In concrete political terms, we see Plotinus accompanying the emperor Gordion III on his campaigns to Persia, ostensibly in hope of coming into contact with Persian philosophers and Indian sages.27 Plotinus also attempted to interest the emperor Gallienus in rebuilding a settlement in Campania which would become a "City of Philosophers," 26

Dominic J. O'Meara, Platonopolis: Platonic political philosophy in late antiquity (Oxford, New York, 2003). Jeremy M. Schott, "Founding Platonopolis: The Platonic Politeai in Eusebius, Porphyry, and lamblichus," Journal of Early Christian Studies 11 (Winter 2003). 27 Porph. vPlot, 3.

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called "Platonopolis."28 Julia Mammea, the mother of the emperor Severus Alexander, called Origen to her court in Antioch to talk about philosophy.29 Finally Porphyry may well have been at the court of Diocletian advising the emperor on how to deal with the growing "Christian problem" at the turn of the fourth century on the eve of the great persecution.30 All of this was happening in a time when proximity to court and the great patronus, the emperor, and not traditional social classes (senatorial, equestrian, etc.) served to distinguish individuals. Hence, we can see how reflection on theological matters, and on daemonological questions in particular, intersected with considerations of social order for these philosophers. Chapter outline:

28

v. Plot, 12. Porphyry claims that the plan was stopped due to jealousy or spite at court. But it may have been that in the end Gallienus recognized the implications of having a "city of philosophers" so close to Rome, a city purporting to be founded on Plato's Laws, and by which the surrounding countryside was to be ruled, i.e., a separate state of sorts. Indeed, its presence might call into question Rome's own "just" rule. "'ETinriaccv 5E TOV TTXCOTTVOV uaXicvra Kai ka£q>Qr\aav TaAifjvos TE 6 oarroKpdxcop Kai f\ TOUTOU yuvr) ZaXcoviva. 'O 5E TTJ 8iKr|v EiriSlEiri n]r]8Evi ••SEpaTruor

I f t o v n . o n \ir\ TOUS ApTr|Mtair| KEAUEI, OTI[...1 T O 5 E { 1 OOOTTEP T o u j A p r r i n i a i r i

KEAUEI, 6 T I [ . . , 1 T O S E I 1 obaiTEp KOUK EiTapKEoai 1 1 HE TTEPIEI8E Em8.[Efj_] Kdyoi r f j i ^coorii { 1 TTEplElSs ETTlSEff)...].

H.D. Betz, The Greek Magical Papyri in Translation, Including Demotic Spells, 2 ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 280. According to Brashear, this is one of the first ritual papyri to ever be published (3400). It was published by Giovanni Petrettini in 1826. It is also one of the oldest extant ritual papyri dating to the fourth century BCE. For bibliography on this spell see Brashear, 3554. 6 H.S. Versnel calls this a "judicial prayer" or "prayer for justice." H.S. Versnel, "Beyond Cursing: The Appeal to Justice in Judicial Prayers," in Magika Hiera: Ancient Greek Magic and Religion, ed. Christopher A. Faraone and Dirk Obbink (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 68. For general discussion on this sort of spell see Gager, Curse Tablets and Binding Spells from the Ancient World, 3-41. and Christopher A. Faraone, "The Agonistic Context of Early Greek Binding Spells," in Magika Hiera: Ancient Greek Magic and Religion, ed. Christopher A. Faraone and Dirk Obbink (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). Gager argues that "defixiones must be treated as a familiar feature of ancient Mediterranean cultures. What is more, they cut across all social categories: on this

34

formulae of this sort also cause the most cognitive dissonance for modern readers, given the fact that it is a general tenet of "Western Civilization" that one ought not harm or even wish harm on another person. "I, Abrasax, shall deliver. Abrasax am I! ABRASAX ABRASICHOOU, help little Sophia-Priskilla. Get hold of and do away with what comes to little Sophia-Priskilla, whether it is a shivering fit - get hold of it! Whether a phantom - get hold of it! Whether a daemon - get hold of it! I, Abrasax, shall deliver. Abrasax am I! ABRASAX ABRASICHOOU. Get hold of and do away with...what comes to little Sophia-Priskilla on this very day whether it is a shivering fit - do away with it! Whether a daemon - do away with it!"8 Healing amulets such as this one are more readily understandable. PGM LXXXIX.1-27 is a papyrus amulet to protect a small child against a condition, the source of which is in question. The amulet maker thus seeks to protect the girl against a range of possible dangers. Healing in antiquity, as Vivian Nutton has shown, was often a matter of pursuing diverse remedies, either simultaneously or in succession, in order to secure a positive outcome.9 Although Greek doctors from the Hippocratic writers on tended to denigrate other classes point there is virtual unanimity." Gager, Curse Tablets and Binding Spells from the Ancient World, 24. According to Versnel, "The person in antiquity who had suffered injustice and had gone to the authorities in vain - if indeed he bothered to go at all had in fact one authority at his disposal: he could lodge his complaint with the god(s)." Versnel, "Beyond Cursing: The Appeal to Justice in Judicial Prayers," 68. 8 PGM LXXXIX.1-27. Betz, The Greek Magical Papyri in Translation, Including Demotic Spells, 302. 9 For an excellent overview of the relationship between medicine and religion in Greek and Roman antiquity see Vivian Nutton, Ancient Medicine, ed. Series of Antiquity, Liba Taub (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), Chapters 7 & 18.

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of healers, this strategic diversification is well-attested and persistent. In Egypt, the priestly class itself traditionally preserved medical knowledge and was frequently involved in its dispensation.10 Furthermore, Egyptian healing involved both the application of herbal remedies and surgical techniques as well as incantations and prayers. It is also the case that even Greek writers such as Galen would have never denied the importance of the healing work of the gods in effecting cures.11 Other educational elites also recognized and utilized the long-standing connections between physicians and their patron deities, the secondcentury rhetorician Aelius Aristides being perhaps the most famous patient to combine almost constant consultation with both doctors and Asclepius alike.12 The third example is a love spell:

Jacco Dieleman makes this point using an inscriptional biography of a Ptolemaic priest, Harkhebi. This priest was known for his knowledge of snakes, knowledge which was usually associated with the priestly office of "Leader of Serket." An extant handbook for such a priest contains sections on the classification and treatment of snake bites using both drugs and incantations. Jacco Dieleman, "Stars and the Egyptian Priesthood in the Graeco-Roman Period," in Prayer, Magic, and the Stars in the Ancient and Late Antique World, ed. Scott B.; Joel Thomas Walker Noegel, Brannon M. Wheeler, Magic in History (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003), 142-43. Carol Reeves writes that the second-century Alexandrian Christian writer, Alexandrinus Clemens, noted that the priests of Early Dynastic Egypt had "written the sum total of their knowledge in 42 sacred books kept in the temples and carried in religious processions." He continues to say that six of these books were devoted to various medical disciplines such as anatomy, surgery, diseases and their remedies, ophthalmology and gynecology. Carole Reeves, Egyptian Medicine, ed. Barbara Adams, Shire Egyptology Series (Buckinghamshire: Shire Publications Ltd, 1992), 21. 11 Nutton, Ancient Medicine, 273. 12 See C.A. Behr, Aelius Aristides and the Sacred Tales (Amsterdam: Adolf M. Hakkert, 1968). For discussion of Aristides, see Nutton, Ancient Medicine, 276-79.

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Love spell of attraction, excellent inflamer, than which none is greater. It attracts men to women and women to men and makes virgins rush out of their homes. Take a pure papyrus and with the blood of an ass write the following names and figure and put in the magical material from the woman you desire. Smear the strip of papyrus with moistened vinegar gum and glue it to the dry vaulted vapor room of a bath, and you will marvel. But watch yourself so that you are not struck. The writing is this: "Come, Typhon, who sit on top of the gate, 10 ERBETH 10 PAKERBETH 10 BALCHOSETH 10 APOMPS 10 SESENRO 10 BIMATIAKOUMBIAI ABERRAMENTHO OULER-THEXANAX ETHRELUOOTH MEMAREBA TOU SETH, as you are in flames and on fire, so also the soul, the heart of her, NN, whom NN bore, until she comes loving me, NN, and glues her female pudenda to my male one, immediately, immediately; quickly, quickly."13 This third source, a spell to attract a lover, is a ritual description from a longer handbook. Love spells of this sort are as popular in the papyri as healing and curse formulae.14 Like curse tablets, they cause some

P G M X X X V I . 6 9 - 1 0 1 . A y c o y r i , E U I T U p o v {SEXTIOTOV, O U u i £ o v O U S E V . d y i 8 E d v 8 p a $ yuvEîu Kai yuvEKas dvBpsaiv Kai Trap0Evous EKTrr|8dv OI'KO6EV TTOIET. Xa(3cbv Kai Trap0Evous EiarriSav O'IKOBEV TTOIET. Xa|3cbv xapTTiv Ka9apov ypdOTEpa Hiôv Kai Eiri8ue irpos aptcxov, E'XCOV 6pEi TTEpi rf)v KE<paAr|v x p i ° u SE OOW TCJ X ^ I T ° T S oxeaoi, TO 5E ocbua auvdAeivyai OTupaKivco sAaico Kal EVTuyxavE KpaTcov Kponnuov uovoyEVEs aiyuiTTiov Kai Asys, TTEpi ou BeXeig. TTEpi£coadiiEvos OE(3EVIVOV dppEviKoG 9oiviKO$ Kai KaSioas ETTI y o v a r a Xiye TOV UTTOKEIUEVOV A o y o v lETnicaAoOuai unas, dyious, UEyaAoSuvdnous, UEyaAo56£ous, UEyaa8EVETs, dyious, auT6x6ovas, TrapESpous TOU nEydAou 8EOU, TOUS Kparaious dpxiSaiuovas, OI'TIVEJ EOTE x a o u S> £pE(3ous, d|3uooou, (3u8oG, yairis ouvE90TTTas, Kpu9iucov (puAaKas, KaraxBovicov riyEu.6vas, dTTEipoSioiKiiTds, KpaTaioxBovas, Kivriaiyaious, OTripiyuo6ETas, XaonaTUTTOupyouj, 9piKTOTraAainovas, (poPEpoBiaKparopag, OTpEvj/r|AaKdTous, XiovoPpoxoTrayETs, dspoSpouous, 6EpoKauacb8Eis, dvEUOEiraKTas, KOipavouoipous, OKOTIOEPEPOUS, dvayKETraKTas,

TTUpoTTEMV|;iV irepiExcov TCÊCOS- " In Other words, it is

the daemonological point that interests him, not the sacrifices. Although we don't have an elaborate daemonology from among Porphyry's extant works, this fragment suggests that he was interested in ordering the realm of spirits in addition to assigning moral distinctions.

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Hebrew cult and instead gives them a new allegorical and explicitly Christian meaning.81 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 which is obscured by Eusebius' polemics but also by the assumption of many modern scholars that the positions philosophers tended to take on issues both theological and ritual 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 CE. But scholars sometimes treat traditional Mediterranean polytheism as a static monolith when in fact Hellenic identity was itself very much in flux and under construction, especially amongst the non-Christian Platonists under discussion in this current study. By focusing on key points of conceptual parallelism and evidence for dialogic exchange between people like Porphyry and Origen, this study does not to deny that Christians and non-Christians were at odds 81

Origen, Homilies on Leviticus: 1-16, trans. Gary Wayne Barkley, The Fathers of the Church (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1990), 37. For instance, in Homily 1, Origen explains the meaning of each of the sacrificial animals, associating them one by one with the various orders within the Christian congregation and the kinds of transgressions they were prone to.

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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 which focuses on difference and assumes fixed and static religious identities and group boundaries.82 Highlighting moments of shared understanding across religious boundaries or 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 de-emphasized. Rather, it frequently allows scholars to re-locate these points of difference in a more representative and illuminating fashion. There is one issue on which Porphyry differed from Christian writers. That is his prognosis concerning the chances the ordinary person had 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 in the consumption of meat were polluting activities. Given that the vast majority of people at the time would not have shared 82

See the discussion in Chapter One about the problems with "conflict theory" or the "conflict model" and recent scholarship which challenges it and provides alternative models for approaching questions of religious identity in this period. 119

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. He himself indicated that it was other philosophers with whom he contended.83 In particular, Porphyry was involved in an ongoing debate with his fellow Platonist and former student, lamblichus, a debate which, 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 lamblichus' On the Mysteries. lamblichus wrote his On the Mysteries in response to a work by Porphyry called the Letter to Anebo. According to the editors of a recent translation of lamblichus' treatise, the letter was somehow aimed at lamblichus.84 In particular, Porphyry disagreed with lamblichus about the necessity of ritual, and specifically blood sacrifice, for the reunion of the

*• Porph. Abst. 2.40. 84 lamblichus, On the Mysteries, trans. Emma C. Clarke, John M. Dillon, and Jackson P. Hershbell (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2004), xxix.

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philosopher's soul with the divine,

lamblichus' response to this view as

expressed in On the Mysteries was a defense of the importance of theurgy, even over and above theology and philosophy.86 The term theurgy (eeoupyia), meaning "god work," originated with second-century Platonists who used it to refer to the "deifying power of Chaldean rituals."87 Porphyry and lamblichus were actively defining this term in the

In spite of the fact that lamblichus 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, lamblichus, 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 lamblichus to highlight his differences with Porphyry in the starkest terms possible. This has often led scholars to assume that Porphyry's Letter to Anebo was a kind of attack on lamblichus. It is difficult to gauge the tone of Porphyry's missive, because it only exists in fragments embedded in the work of his opponent. But it may very well be that Porphyry was genuinely hoping to query lamblichus about a series of questions about which Porphyry had not entirely determined his own position. 86 Ritual was not unimportant to Porphyry, as we will see in subsequent chapters. And lamblichus is likely simplifying and overstating Porphyry's view for effect. But what is certain is that lamblichus set more store in rituals and their efficacy for uniting the soul with divinity than did Porphyry. 87 Gregory Shaw, Theurgy and the Soul: The Neoplatonism of lamblichus (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995) 4. It is difficult to give a definition of the word theurgy (Beoupyia) because its meaning was a matter of debate for some of the philosophers under consideration in this dissertation, as was its importance to the philosophical life and union with God. As Charles Lewy notes, the terms theurgy and theurge/theurgist (6eoupyos) were neologisms from the Chaldean Oracles, a corpus of writings, extant only in fragments, associated with two men, Julian the Chaldean and his son, Julian the Theurgist, who lived during the reigns of Trajan, Hadrian and the Antonines (Lewy, Chaldaean Oracles and Theurgy: Mysticism, Magic and Platonism in the Later Roman Empire, xiii.) The oracles were a publication of the revelations of the gods to these two holy men. Ruth Majercik, in her masterful study of the Chaldean Oracles, notes that the extant fragments "securely locate the Oracles in a Middle Platonic milieu, especially that type of Middle Platonist which had affinities with both Gnosticism and Hermetism as well as links with Numenius." Ruth Dorothy Majercik Julianus, The Chaldean Oracles: Text, Translation, and Commentary (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1989), 3. Later Platonists, starting with Porphyry, took up this corpus, just as they did certain Hermetic works, and made use of it for their own purposes, treating the oracles as sacred texts. Hence, the definition of theurgy varied considerably in the third and fourth centuries. For instance, according to Lewy, the Chaldeans did not promise

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course of discussing it. lamblichus took this idea further and argued that traditional religious rituals were established and given to human souls by the gods and that these cult practices exemplified divine principles that provided for the deification of the human soul. The human soul, according to lamblichus, was the lowest of divine beings (eaKcn-os KOOUOS)

and the one most entangled with matter. Hence, it needed to be

freed from the body to realize its true nature.88 Theurgy was the ritual process of loosening the bonds between the human soul and matter. But he also held the view that there were ritual actions appropriate to every stage of the soul's re-ascent.89 Furthermore, as Gregory Shaw has noted, one of lamblichus' primary concerns was to redress the distorted vision of the soul's participation in embodiment depicted in the works of Plotinus and Porphyry, a depiction that their successor felt effaced the Timean vision of embodiment and exported the "demonic" deification (airoeecooij), which is what Platonists such as Porphyry and lamblichus took them to do, but rather immortality (dnra6avaTiau6s) (Lewy, 462). In general, the term came to stand for a set of rituals that would purify either the body or the soul or both and put the individual in touch with various levels of divinity. Gregory Shaw has, by far, done the most work to explicate lamblichus's understanding of the term. In particular, see Chapter Four in the work cited above, "Theurgy as Demiurgy." See also G. Luck, "Theurgy and Forms of Worship in Neoplatonism," in Religion, Science and Magic in Concert and in Conflic, ed. Ernest S. Frerichs J. Neusner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992) and Sarah. Johnston, Hekate Soteira: A Study ofHekate's Role in the Chaldean Oracles and Related Literature, American Classical Studies; No. 21 (Atlanta, Ga.: Scholars Press, 1990). 88 Shaw, 45. 89 Unlike Plotinus who held that part of the soul remained undescended, lamblichus held the view that the soul was fully descended. For a very thorough and nuanced discussion of both lamblichus' position and his differences with both Plotinus and Porphyry, see Gregory Shaw, Theurgy and the Soul: The Neoplatonism of lamblichus (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995). In particular see Part 2, "The Nature of the Embodied Soul."

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from within the soul out into the cosmos.

For lamblichus, the

Plotinian/Porphyrian vision denied the soul's participation in the demiurgic project of creating the material cosmos. For lamblichus, this demiurgic work was mirrored in the work of the theurge, both being "godwork." For lamblichus, everyone who practiced religion in the proper way and participated in god-ordained rituals practiced theurgy and could attain some measure of communion with the higher gods. lamblichus' criticisms of Porphyry's questions and positions on the issue of theurgic practices were often pointed. He frequently represents the views of his former teacher as naive and wrong-headed. But there was a great deal at stake for both participants in this debate. As already noted, Porphyry was concerned that philosophers avoid demonic pollution, and he saw participation in animal sacrifice as an impediment to the salvation of philosopher's soul, lamblichus, on the other hand, was more generally concerned about the salvation of all souls and the role cultic practices played in the soteriological process. The question of the nature of evil daemons and their association with blood served as a flash point in the disagreement between the two Platonists. Throughout significant portions of On the Mysteries, lamblichus chided Porphyry for his almost global failure to understand the nature of

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Shaw, 15. Shaw blames the exteriorization of the demonic on Numenius and claims that Plotinus and Porphyry followed their predecessor on this point. 123

daemons, both good and evil, as well as that of other kinds of spiritual beings. In Book I, lamblichus presents Porphyry as confused about whether gods and daemons have bodies and precisely how they relate to their corporeality.91 But the main bone of contention between the two on the matter of daemons arises in Book V. There, lamblichus takes issue with Porphyry's assertion that some spirits "are ensnared by the vapors of, in particular, blood sacrifices."92 lamblichus places this statement about evil daemons beside Porphyry's other assertions about the way in which terrestrial vapors nourish heavenly bodies in order to critique the view which he attributes to Porphyry that deities, and specifically daemons, somehow depend on humans for nourishment. He writes: For it is surely not the case that the creator has set before all living creatures on sea and land copious and readily available sustenance, but for those beings superior to us has contrived a deficiency of this. He would not surely, have provided for all other living things, naturally and from their own resources, an abundance of the daily necessities of life, while to daemons he gave a source of nourishment which was adventitious and dependent on the contributions of us mortals, and thus, it would seem, if we through laziness or some other pretext were to neglect such contributions, the bodies of daemons would suffer deprivation, and would experience disequilibrium and disorder.93 For an overview of the debate between Porphyry and lamblichus on the pneumatic vessel of daemonic souls, see John F. Finamore, lamblichus and the Theory of the Vehicle of the Soul (Chico: Scholars Press, 1985), 11-32. 92 lamb. Myst. 5.9. 93

lamb. Myst. 5.10. "Ou y a p STITTOU TOTS UEV EV y g Kai 6aAdTTT) iTaai Ccpois 6 Brinioupyos aq>9ovov Kai ETOIIIOV 8iaTpo<pr|v TrapE0r|KE, TOTS 5E KpEivrociv r]ucbv EvSeiav TOUTTIS EVETToiriaEV. OU8E TOTS UEV aAXois Ccpo'S &> EOUTGOV Eyqnn-ov irapEOXE TT)V Eirrropiav TCOV Ka6' riuEpav E7TiTT|5Eicov, T0T5 Sainoai 8E ETTEioaKTOv Kai Trap' rincov TCOV avGpcbiTcov

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Here lamblichus appears to misunderstand Porphyry; whether willfully or not, we cannot be certain.94 As mentioned earlier, Porphyry held the view that the pneumatic vessel associated with celestial and sublunar spirits is nourished by vapors, but he in no way makes the well-being of the deities and daemons themselves dependent on these vapors or on sacrifices. Evil daemons, in identifying with their pneumatic aspect, seek to feed that aspect through blood and smoky vapors. But this is a perversion of the proper order between soul and pneuma, this is indeed "disequilibrium and disorder." The details of lamblichus' and Porphyry's respective views on the vehicle of the soul are not of primary importance here, but lamblichus casts the debate in these terms, because he takes issue with Porphyry's interpretation of blood sacrifice as polluting and demonic. lamblichus himself does not have much to say on the nature of evil daemons and other maleficent spirits. He is generally far less preoccupied with their existence and nature, and unlike Porphyry, he does not have a speech about how they related to good daemons. He also attributes less responsibility to them for cosmic evil than does Porphyry, lamblichus does note that evil arises from clinging to the ouvTEAou|i£vr|v E'SCOKE TT)V 5iccTpo<pr|v Kai dog EOIKEV, ECXV Musi's 5i' dpyiav f\ aAAr)v Tiva irpocpaaiv KctToAiycopr|OGOUEv rfjs -roiauTTis Eioqsopas, EvBEfj TGOV Sainovcov xa ocbyaTa Eorai, dauniiETpias TE Kai axaîas HE0E£EI." 94 Like Eusebius, lamblichus likes to point out the absurdity of Porphyry's ideas if taken to what he considers their logical conclusion.

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"delusions of matter."9

But in general, lamblichus engages with

questions about evil in the context of discussing proper and improper ritual. Evil arises when a soul attempts to put certain portions of the universe into contact with other parts in such a way that it violates cosmic harmony. A different way of putting this is to say that evil arises when an attempt is made to bring the multiplicity of the realm of generation into contact with the realm of unity for some end having to do with the former. This is, of course, an impossibility, but it allows for a situation where phantoms, delusions, false images and epiphanies can arise. And in the context, in particular, of faulty "theurgic" or divinatory practices of this sort, evil daemons, those who have identified with the realm of generation, are able to deceive human beings and direct them to unjust ends. By this, lamblichus means those ends that disrupt cosmic harmony, supplanting divine philia with the illusion of divine contact, and that perpetuate the disunity that is part of the realm of generation. For instance, in Book III, lamblichus counters Porphyry's assertion that there are some who, by standing on "magical characters" are "filled with spiritual influence."96 lamblichus counters that when these amateur ritualists seek to employ such dubious divinatory techniques for questionable ends, all kinds of things can go awry. Instead of calling

lamb. Myst. 3.29. lamb. Myst. 3.13.

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forth the presence of the gods, lamblichus argues that such practices "produce a certain motion of the soul contrary to the gods, and draws from them an indistinct and phantom-like appearance which sometimes, because of the feebleness of its power, is likely to be disturbed by evil daemonic influences."97 In other words, improper divinatory techniques, faulty theurgy we might say, risks falling prey to these spirits. This is the extent to which lamblichus engages with questions about evil daemons and their cosmic effects and activities. And it is telling that his focus is on proper ritual, the main bone of contention with Porphyry. To return, then to the main point, contrary to Porphyry's view that blood sacrifices propitiate and feed evil spirits, lamblichus asserted that all sacrifices were divinely ordained.98 And these ordained practices worked in such a way as to affirm and strengthen the bonds of philia and sympatheia established by gods, heroes, daemons and other good spirits with human souls. When humans performed the divine rites, they activated relationships already built into the fabric and order of the cosmos. According to lamblichus, each cosmic level had its appropriate set of rituals.99 In the case of blood sacrifices, these rites did not

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lamb. Myst. 3.13. As we will see in Chapter Five, lamblichus is also making an argument about who is best fit to perform rites connecting the soul with higher spirits. So not only is he discrediting Porphyry's view, he is also limiting the effectiveness of the practices of those he does not consider true theurgists. 98 lamb. Myst. 5.9. 99 lamb. Myst. 5.9. "Since these relationships are numerous, and some have an immediate source of influence, as in the case of daemonic ones, while others are

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propitiate evil daemons, rather they were the "perfect sacrifice" for those "material gods" (61 OXdioi) who "embrace matter within themselves and impose order on it."100 lamblichus wrote: And so, in sacrifices, dead bodies deprived of life, the slaughter of animals and the consumption of their bodies, and every sort of change and destruction, and in general processes of dissolution are suitable to those gods who preside over matter.101 These animal sacrifices helped and healed the worshipper who was constrained by the body and suffered accordingly. They also aided in the release of the soul from its attachment to the body. Indeed, lamblichus argued that human beings were frequently involved with gods and good daemons who watched over the body, "purifying it from longstanding impurities or freeing it from disease and filling it with health, or cutting away from it what is heavy or sluggish..."102 lamblichus used fire to explain how sacrifices symbolize the way in which these spirits help human souls to become free: "The offering of sacrifice by means of fire is actually such as to consume and annihilate matter, assimilate it to itself rather than assimilating itself to matter, and superior to these, having divine causes, and, higher than these again, there is the one pre-eminent cause, all these levels of cause are activated by the performance of perfect sacrifice; each level of cause is related to the sacrifice in accordance with the rank to which it has been allotted." 100 lamb. /Wysf. 5.14. lamb. Myst. 5.14. "Kcti siri TCOV 6uoicbv TOIVUV T O vEtcpa ocbucrra Kai aiTEOTEprmEva Tfjs £cofJs, qjovog TE TCOV £cpcov Kai KaTavdAcoois TCOV acouaTcov liETaPoAq TE TravToia Kai Da, Kai oAcos "1 irpoiTTcoais < T O T $ > TTJS UATIS TTpoioTauEvoij 0eoTs •TTpooT|KEl•" TO 2

lamb. Myst. 5.16. "oTov KaSaipovTES auTO d i r o Kr|AiScov iraAaicbv f\ voocov ctTToAuovTEs Kai uyEiag irAripouvTES, r\ TO UEV (3apu Kai vcoBpov CJTTOKOTTTOVTES OTT' OUTOU T O 8E Kouqjov Kai S p a a T i p i o v auTcp irapExovTEs..."

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elevating it towards the divine and heavenly and immaterial fire."103 The burning of matter pleases the gods and daemons because it symbolizes the procedures by which souls are liberated from the bonds of generation and become more like the gods.104 This explanation of sacrifice's transformative power ran counter to Porphyry's mere propitiation of evil spirits. One sacrificed and burned animals, their flesh and blood, in order to become free from flesh and body. Instead of being a polluting practice, it was a purifying one. Given the transformative nature of sacrifice, lamblichus insisted that the order in which sacrifices were to be performed could be neither altered nor circumvented. Even the individual who had dedicated his or her life to philosophical pursuits and theological speculation, if he or she wished to be healed of the suffering associated with embodiment and generation, must perform the proper sacrifices in the correct order and manner.105 This position ran counter to the one lamblichus represented as Porphyry's, namely that one can think one's way out of the bonds of nature, regardless of one's ritual participation. Porphyry was of the opinion that the philosopher did not need theurgy but could reach God by

lamb. Myst. 5.11. lamb. Myst. 5.12. lamb. Myst. 5.12.

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virtue of the intellect.106 lamblichus, however, denied that philosophers could escape ritual practices in this way. Porphyry's position raised another concern for lamblichus. Although he fully recognized that not all human beings could become completely purified or free from the grip of matter and return to the soul's source, and although he reserved this end for the true philosopher, lamblichus did not wish to consign ordinary people to a polluted existence, laboring under the delusion that the sacrifices they performed benefited them, when in fact they contributed to their spiritual demise. He writes:

Augustine, in City of God (10.9), describes Porphyry's position on the matter of theurgy in the following way: "In fact Porphyry too puts forward a sort of purification, as it were, of the soul through the practice of theurgy, though with hesitation and a shamefaced sort of argument. He asserts, however, that this art cannot provide for any man a path back to God. So you may see his judgment wavering between alternatives, the crime of sacrilegious occult practices and the open career of a philosopher. For at one time he warns us to beware of this art as being delusive and dangerous in actual practice, as well as prohibited by law, while at another, as if giving in to those who praise it, he says that it does service in purifying one part of the soul, not, to be sure, the intellectual part, which apprehends the truth of intelligible things that have no bodily likenesses, but the spiritual part, whereby we receive the images of corporeal things. For this part, he says, after certain theurgic initiations which are called teletae, mystic rites, becomes fit and suitable for the entertainment of spirits an dangles and capable of seeing gods. Still he admits that the intellectual soul receives no purification from these theurgic teletai such as might make it fit to behold its own God and to perceive the things that truly exist." Translation: Augustine, The City of God against the Pagans in Seven Volumes, trans. David S. Wiesen, vol. Ill, Loeb Classical Editions (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988). Michael Simmons summarizes this position as follows: "The rest of humanity relies upon theurgy: it is not the intellectual part, however, but the vehicle or lower part, that is purified. Although the soul once purified in this way has communion with the ethereal gods, it cannot return to the Father." Michael B. Simmons, "Porphyry of Tyre's Biblical Criticism: A Historical and Theological Appraisal," in Reading in Christian Communities: Essays on Interpretation in the Early Church, ed. Charles A. Bobertz and David Brakke, Christianity and Judaism in Antiquity (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002).

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So if one does not grant some such mode of worship to cities and peoples not freed from the fated processes of generation and from a society dependent on the body, one will continue to fail of both types of good, both the immaterial and the material; for they are not capable of receiving the former, and for the latter they are not making the right offering.107 In other words, lamblichus objected to what he understood to be Porphyry's denial of universal salvation, a path of participation in the gifts of the gods common to both ordinary people and philosophers or theurgists. Augustine, in his City of God, claimed that Porphyry was searching for a universal way, a way to salvation for all souls, not just the souls of a few elite philosophers.108 On Augustine's account, Porphyry failed in his endeavor because he could not overcome his pride and accept that Christianity constituted the answer to his search. It is l a m b . Myst. 2.15. "TToXeoi TOIVUV KCX'I Srjuois OUK aTroAeAuuEvois xfjs yEVEOioupyou uoipas Kai Tfjs dvTexo|iEvris T U V acoudxcov Koivcoviaj E! UT] Bcboei T I $ TOV TOIOOTOV xpoTrou rfjs ayiOTEias, dnq>OTEpcov 8iauapxr|OEi, Kai TCOV duXcov dya8v Kai TCOV EVUACOV T O \IEV yap ou SwvaTai 5Eâo0ai, T0T5 5E OU TrpoodyEi TO OIKETOV. " Porphyry made it very clear

that he was not dealing with the state in his treatise {On Abstinence, 2.33): "For myself, I am not trying to destroy the customs which prevail among each people: the state is not my present subject. But the laws by which we are governed allow the divine power to be honoured by very simple and inanimate things, so by choosing the simplest we shall sacrifice in accordance with the laws of the city..." (Clark translation). (This was, of course, all well and good unless emperors, such as Decius, required people to prove their loyalty to the state by tasting the sacrificial meat offered in honor of the emperor's genius.) Elsewhere, Porphyry indicates that the reason cities sacrifice animals is because, as he has demonstrated, they are being offered to those beings who are involved with inciting human ambition and greed (i.e., evil daemons): "If it is necessary for cities to appease even these beings, that is nothing to do with use. In cities, riches and external and corporeal things are thought to be good and their opposites bad, and the soul is the least of their concerns." (Porph. Abst. 2.43. Clark translation.) 108 Aug. Civ. 10.32. Gillian Clark holds the view that Augustine misrepresents Porphyry's position regarding a via universalis. She writes: "It is much more likely that Porphyry denied any claim that there is a single way of liberating the soul." Gillian Clark, "Augustine's Porphyry and the Universal Way of Salvation," in Studies on Porphyry, ed. George E. Karamanolis and Anne D. R. Sheppard (London: Institute of Classical Studies, 2007), 136.

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impossible to determine whether Porphyry ever earnestly sought to find some via universalis. But it is obvious from On Abstinence that he felt that the salvific regimen he proposed to Firmus Castricianus was one that very few people could attain.109 Hence, Porphyry was making an argument for a form of ritual purity that he recognized openly could only be achieved by a small elite group of specially trained, spiritually devout philosophers. By upbraiding his friend for incontinence where animal food was concerned, he was not prescribing a way of life for everyone. Rather, he highlighted precisely what set him and his peers apart from the ordinary person, namely, his theological knowledge and his ascetic purity. Despite the fact that lamblichus expressed a more general concern about the spiritual well-being of people other than members of the philosophical elite and his own theurgic cast, he was equally invested in establishing his own authority as one who could lead others on the path to salvation, as we shall see in Chapter Five. However, elaborating the universal scope of his soteriological message was precisely the way in which he sought to do this. In this way, lamblichus placed his own theological and theurgical expertise in a larger context than Porphyry did. He saw himself as providing a means for the salvation of more than just 109

Porph. Abst. 2.3. Here Porphyry says that such abstinence "is not advised for everyone without exception, but for philosophers, and among philosophers chiefly for those who make their happiness depend on God and on the imitation of God."

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the philosopher. This salvation may have only been partial or truncated. But at the very least, he set the average practitioner of traditional religion on the path to salvation by participating in rituals that honored different orders of good spirits. Furthermore, the theurgist or priestly philosopher was the one who could broker this salvation effectively for others. So although both Porphyry and lamblichus admitted that few souls could become completely purified and freed from embodiment, lamblichus saw purification as a process in which all souls could participate. And he disagreed with the idea that most souls were constrained to live a polluted existence, a pollution that afflicted them not only because they were prone to enjoy a good meal now and then and participate enthusiastically in carnal pleasure, but, even more tragically, because they worshipped what they believed were gods with harmful sacrifices. Although lamblichus sought to remedy some of the difficult implications of Porphyry's views on popular religion, and although he sought to put all participants in traditional ritual on the path to purification, he still maintained with Porphyry that it was not possible for everyone to be philosophers and to achieve complete release from corporeality and generation. One aspect of Christianity that was so offensive to many intellectual elites in the Late Antique world was the view that all believers were like philosophers, not only saved and purified, but also in

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possession of true wisdom.110 This was, for those living the philosophical life, an impossibility and an affront. Without rigorous ascetic training and intense contemplation, there was no way that the ordinary person could be on a par with a Plotinus or a Sosipatra. What was equally offensive to some Hellenes was the way in which many average, everyday Christians did take up ascetic practices, and at times, with embarrassing zeal. But one must keep in mind that Christians had only one chance at salvation. For Porphyry, the idea that the average person who enjoyed sex or food was at risk of becoming possessed was not troubling in the same way it would be for Origen. Because Porphyry followed the Platonic belief in the reincarnation of souls, the average human being who had regular congress with evil daemons in this life and who lived in a state of pollution, was not eternally doomed as he or she might be in the Christian scheme of things. Rather, although the soul of such an individual might descend into Hades at the end of this life, being too moist and heavy to rise above the earth and ascend to the supralunary sphere, it might well have a chance in the next life to live a relatively un-polluted existence. This soul could dry out, so to speak,

Eusebius uses this framework throughout his Preparation for the Gospel, but in particular, in Book 12. As we will see in Chapter Five, however, Origen does distinguish between different orders of Christians based on their grasp of allegorical and mysterious meanings behind the literal truths of scripture which all believes could apprehend. 134

through ascetic and contemplative practices.111 It could be strengthened and purified. Furthermore, Platonists believed that the world was eternal and objected to the Christian view that God would act in the cosmos in a historical way.112 Origen was one of the most innovative of early Christian writers in creating an historical narrative for the soul's descent and eventual salvation, one which fundamentally undercut the cyclically of the Platonic framework. Hence, although Origen and Porphyry shared similar views regarding the polluting effects of blood sacrifices, Origen, like most other Christian thinkers, believed that this demonic pollution should and could be avoided by everyone. The principle means for doing so was to avoid participating in traditional cult.113 This chapter has mapped out a number of key similarities and differences between Origen, Porphyry and lamblichus on the nature of evil daemons and traditional animal sacrifice. It noted the surprising similarities between Origen and Porphyry on the association of evil daemons with blood sacrifice, an association which put Porphyry at odds 111

Luc Brisson, Porphyre, Sentences: Etudes D'introduction, Texte Grec Et Traduction Frangaise, Commentaire ParL'unite Propre De Recherche No. 76 Du Centre National De La Recherche Scientifique, 2 vols. (Paris: Vrin, 2005), 32. 112 Indeed, Porphyry found the idea of a non-cyclical cosmos offensive: "The idea of God acting in history was ridiculous to Porphyry, who believed in a cyclical pattern of history predetermined by heimarmene. This is the main reason why the Christian interpretation of OT prophecy was unacceptable: it was a literary invention post eventum, devoid of all historical truth." Simmons, 95. And "Porphyry describes the eschatological doctrines like the resurrection as absurd because it implies that God interrupts the eternal and logical order of his own universe." Simmons, 96. 113 Although Origen believed in a via universalis, as we will see in the next chapter, he, like Porphyry and lamblichus, was invested in distinguishing between ordinary Christians and priestly philosophers such as himself.

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with his fellow Hellene, lamblichus. It also introduced another point of similarity, this time between Origen and lamblichus, concerning the importance of discovering a universal path of salvation. This point will be explored in more detail in the following chapter. This current chapter has demonstrated that the way these philosophers ordered the realm of spirits using moral distinctions directly challenges the conflict theory by demonstrating that religious identity was not the primary determinant of the positions they took on key philosophical issues. Studying the way third-century intellectuals developed ideas about the origin, nature and place of malign spirits in the cosmos serves as a point of entry into their more universal daemonological discourses, because their efforts to valence the realm of spirits in moral terms was a key component of their more general imposition of a systematic, totalizing order on more local understandings of this realm. This chapter also demonstrated the way in which these demonological and daemonological concerns were intertwined with soteriological questions, questions which the next chapter will continue to explore. The next chapter will directly address the elaborate universal orders these Platonists created and will seek to answer why these intellectuals were so focused on the creation of these spiritual hierarchies within their particular milieu.

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Chapter Four- "Everything in its Right Place": The Universal Daemonologies of Third-Century Platonists

Besides these characteristics, divine 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 previous chapter focused on the way in which various philosophers and Christian writers began to valence the realm of spirits in moral terms, dividing spiritual beings into good and evil. The chapter also 1

lamb. Myst. 2.3. lamblichus, On the Mysteries, Emma C. Clarke, John M. Dillon, and Jackson P. Hershbell trans. (Atlanta, 2003). "TTpos Sri TOUTOIS TOTS i8icbpaoi xa HEV BETCX KaXXog oTov durixavov dTraoTpdcTTTEi, OaunaTi HEV KOTEXOV TOU$ opcovTas, BEOTTEoiav 8' Euq>poauvn.v TrapExopEvov, dppriTco 8E Tfj auupETpig dvcâivoiiEvov, E§r|pr|HEVov 8'dir6 TCOV aXXcov Ei8cbv xfjs EUTTpEirEiag. T a 8E TCOV dpxayyEXcov naicdpia 9Eduaxa UEyiOTOv HEv E'XEI Kai a u r a TO KaXXos, ou u.f)v ETI y ' 6p.oicos appr|Tov Kai 0auu.aaTOv cocnTEp TO 8ETOV Ta 8E TCOV dyysXcov UEpiaTcos fi8r| SiaipsT TO KaXov oiTEp diro TCOV dpxayysXcov Trapa8EXETai. T a 8aiu.6via SE Kai Ta ripcoiKa auTOTTTiKa irvEup.aTa EV E'I8EOI U.EV copiauivois E'XEI TO KaXXog ducpoTEpa, ou p.f|v dXXd TO uiv EV Xoyois T0T5 TTIV ouaiav d<popi£ouai 8iaicoa|ir|0Ev EOTI 8aiji6viov, TO 8' E-JTI8EIKVUU.EVOV Tr|v dvSpiav lipcoi'Kov. T a 8E TCOV

dpxovTcov 8ixf) 8iripTio0co- TO uiv y a p riyEiaoviKov KaXXog Kai auTocpuE^ ETTIBEIKVUOI, T O 8' Euuopcpiav TTEirXaoiiEvriv Kai ETTiOKEuaoTriv EncpaivEi. T a 8E TCOV VJAJXCOV EV Xoyois uiv Kai a u T a 8iaKEKoauriTai TTETTEpaauivois, 8ir|pr|u.£vois 8E u.dXXov TCOV EV T0T5 rjpcoai Kai TTEpiElXTlliliEVOlJ HEplOTCOS KOI KpaTOUU.£VOl$ Uq>' EVO$ E180U5. El 8E 8ET KOTO TTOVTCOV KOlVCOS dcpopiaao8ai, cpriul TCOV OXCOV COOTTEP EKOOTO 8iaTETaKTai Kai cos e'xE1 T fls oiKsias cpuoecos, OUTCO Kai TOW KaXXous auTa KOTO TTJV u i r d p x o u a a v BIOKXTPCOOIV u.£TEiXr|XEvai."

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demonstrated that this step is the first in the creation of more complex daemonological discourses which subsequently order the realm of spirits in more universal terms. It also highlighted the way in which thinking about spirits was often linked to soteriological reflection. This chapter will consider the ways in which Porphyry, Origen and lamblichus continued with their respective projects, creating systematic hierarchies that could subsequently be transposed upon more local understandings of the realm of spirits. It will focus mainly on the latter two philosophers, who devoted large portions of some of their most important works to the question. This chapter will also demonstrate that in the case of Origen and lamblichus, in the course of enforcing order and hierarchy, aspects of their discourses exceed their philosophical framework. This happens in a number of ways. For instance, key distinctions between various orders of spiritual beings are subverted or rendered ambiguous. In other cases, the line between good and evil spirits is blurred such that good spirits are characterized by rather ambivalent qualities, and in the case of Origen, evil daemons even become part of the larger soteriological picture. In other words, this chapter will demonstrate that the act of creating and enforcing difference leads both thinkers to conclusions that call difference into question in radical and interesting ways. Part of the reason for this was that both philosophers (indeed all three), in their efforts to provide theological and philosophical rationales for specific

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ideas about spirits and particular religious rites, were engaged with traditional beliefs and practices at the local level in ways that limited or resisted their endeavors.2 Their daemonological 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 pre-existing spiritual landscape populated by beings about which the vast majority of people held some beliefs. The next chapter will discuss why Origen, Porphyry, and lamblichus paid heed to this landscape by situating these thinkers in their third-century societal context and its complex of ritual practitioners and intellectuals. We begin with Porphyry. Although some fragments preserved in Jerome, Michael Psellus and others indicate he may have written a tract on daemons, we do not have an extant daemonological work from him.3 He was, however, interested in daemonological order, as we saw in the previous chapter, and may have even used the long Apollonian oracle 2

We saw in the previous chapter how Origen, Porphyry and lamblichus offered explanations of traditional animal sacrifices, albeit in very different ways. In lamblichus' case, he was earnest about defending traditional sacrifices as god-given rites that are an integral part of the theurgic process. He is also very critical of those "Hellenes" whom he thinks are engaged in ritual "innovation," which eschewing blood sacrifice would certainly be. (lamb. Myst. 7.5.) "For this is the reason why all these things in place at the present time have lost their power, both the names and the prayers: because they are endlessly altered according to the inventiveness (Kaivo-rouiav) and the illegality (irapavouiav) of the Hellenes. For the Hellenes are experimental (vEcoTEpo-TToioi) by nature, and eagerly propelled in all directions, having no proper ballast in them; and they preserve nothing which they have received from anyone else, but even this they promptly abandon and change it all according to their unreliable linguistic innovation." It is possible he is using the term "Hellene" here not to refer to Greeks in general but to intellectual elites such as Porphyry. 3 Andrew Smith and Devid Wasserstein, Porphyrii philosophi fragmenta, Bibliotheca scriptorum Graecorum et Romanorum Teubneriana. (Stutgardiae, 1993). 469F-474F.

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(Smith, 314F-315F) on sacrificial order as a point of departure for reflection on the order of spirits. In a number of extant works and fragments he did address the various orders of good spirits. For instance, in On Abstinence, Porphyry juxtaposes the perverted sacrificial order of traditional cult with an ideal one, the sacrificial practices of the philosophical elite. He writes: So we too shall sacrifice. But we shall make, as is fitting, different sacrifices to different powers. To the god who rules all, as the wise man said, we shall offer nothing perceived by the senses, either by burning or in words. For there is nothing material which is not at once impure to the immaterial. So not even logos expressed in speech is appropriate for him, nor yet internal logos when it is contaminated by the passion of the soul. But we shall worship him with pure silence and pure thoughts about him...For his offspring, the intelligible gods, hymn-singing in words should be added. For sacrifice is an offering to each god from what he has given, with which he sustains us and maintains our essence in being. So as a farmer offers corn ears and fruits, so we offer them fine thoughts about them, giving thanks for what they have given us to contemplate, and for feeding us with the true food of seeing them, present with us, manifesting themselves, shining out to save us.4

4

Porph. Abst. 2.34. Porphyry, On abstinence from killing animals, Gillian Clark trans.

(Ithaca, N.Y., 2000). "dTrdpxEO0ai cbv Kai 8iyydvEi. 6UOCOUEV roivuv Kai riUETs- dXXd 0UOCOHEV, cos Trpoar|KEi, 8iacp6pous T&S 0uaia$ cos &v 8iaq>6pois 8uvd|iEai TrpoadyovTES' 0Ecp piEV TCO ETTI iraaiv, cbs T15 d v i p 00965'iq>r\,UTIBEV Tcbv aia0TiTcov UTITE 0UUICOVTES \IT\T' ETTOvoiidôvTES- OUSEV y a p EOTIV E'VUXOV, 6 nr| Tcp duXco E\)0US EOTIV aKaSapTOv. 816 OU5E

Xoyoj TOUTCO 6 KctTa 9COvr|v OIKETOS, OU8' 6 i'vSov, o x a v Trd0Ei VJAJXTIS fl UEHOXUOUEVOS, 81a 8E oiyfjs KaOapas Kai Tcbv TTEpi OUTOO xaBapcov EVVOICOU BpriOKEuonev auxov. 8ET d p a ouva90EVTa5 Kai ouoicoSEVTas auTcp rf\v auTcov dvaycoyriv 0uaiav iepav TrpoodyEiv xcp 0Ecp, TTIV aurriv 8E Kai \J\IVOV ouoav Kai rincbv ocoTripiav. EV dira0Eig d p a T % Â/xfls, TOU 8E 9EOU 0Ecopig r\ 0uaia aurri TEXETTOI. TOT$ 8E OUTOU EKyovois, VOTITOIS 8E OEOTJ fiSri Kai rr)v EK TOU Xoyou uuvcp8iav TTPOO0ETEOV. aTrapxil y a p EKOOTCP cbv 8E8COKEV r| 0uoia, Kai 5f cbv

rincbv xpEcpEi Kai sis TO ETVOI OUVEXEI Triv ouoiav. cos ouv yscopyos 8payndTcov dfrapxETai Kai TCOV aKpo8pucov, OUTCOS riusTs aTrap£couE0a auroTs EVVOICOV TCOV TTEpi aurcbv KaXcov,

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Implicit in this sacrificial order, then, is a spiritual order differentiating between the highest god and the intelligible gods.5 Porphyry derives a parallel between this order and the difference between various social orders at the human level. As noted in the introductory chapter, and as will become evident in Chapter Five, daemonological order can be used to create or enforce certain understandings about social order. Here Porphyry is drawing a distinction between philosophers and farmers, a distinction which is prefigured in Plato's Republic with its distinction between guardians and producers, but is here made to mirror the divine order as well. Porphyry also addressed daemonological orders in other places. For instance, in the fragment from On the Philosophy from Oracles listing all the various sacrifices appropriate to different deities, a fragment which Porphyry likely subjected to figural exegesis, the realm of spirits is divided up between celestial divinities and chthonic ones - a very standard division maintained in both belief and practice in antiquity.6 And it may have been that Porphyry reflected at some length on this

EuxctpioTouvTES GOV rinTv SeScoKaoiv Tf|v 6ecopiav, Kai OTI rinas 5ia rfjs aurcov 9eas a\r|8ivoos rpecpouoi, OUVOVTES Kai (paivopEvoi Kai ffj riUETEpg acoTTipig EiriXdniTOVTES-" 5 There are a number of important precursors for Porphyry's idea here, the most important being the Timaeus itself. 6 Smith and Wasserstein, Porphyrii philosophi fragments. See footnote 9 in Chapter Three for the translation of this fragment.

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distinction in the portions of commentary that Eusebius failed to preserve in his Preparation for the Gospel. Porphyry also expressed curiosity and concern about the various kinds of spiritual beings that inhabit the cosmos in his Letter to Anebo. In fact, his question incites lamblichus to craft a thorough-going daemonological account in Book Two of On the Mysteries. There lamblichus responded to Porphyry's question, "what is the sign of the presence of a god, an angel, an archangel, a daemon or of some archon or a soul?"7 Indeed, lamblichus takes Porphyry's query as his point of departure for a detailed comparative analysis of these various spiritual kinds, not merely in terms of their "signs" but also, as we will see, in terms of their appearances, size and shape, the emotional impression they make, the quality of their light, the thoroughness with which their fire is able to consume matter, their swiftness, the degree of vividness of their self-revelatory images, their ability to perfect the soul, their gifts, the dispositions they create in the souls of those who invoke them, and so forth.8 Hence, Porphyry and lamblichus share an earnest interest in the distinctions between various daemonological orders. Although Origen's spiritual landscape is, at first glance, populated by fewer species of divine beings, it is no less complex. And given the influence Origen may

7 8

lamb. Myst. 2.3. lamb. Myst. 2.3-9.

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have had on Porphyry, he is a logical place to begin mapping out the more universal daemonological systems he and lamblichus created. Origen's own daemonology is most explicitly laid out in his work, On First Principles.9 Likely written sometime between 218 and 225 CE when Origen was still in Alexandria, it was an experimental work, one of the first sustained attempts at a systematic theology, and one which addressed issues of cosmology and cosmogony, soteriology, Christology, theodicy, and, of course, what I have been calling daemonology.10 Origen himself describes his purpose in On First Principles as an attempt to construct a "connected body of doctrine," discovering the truth about particular points which Christ and the We do not have a full Greek version of On First Principles. Nearly all of Origen's works perished as a result of doctrinal controversies in the sixth century and the outcome of the Second Council of Constantinople (553 CE). Fortunately, many of Rufinus' Latin translations survived this purge. These translations have been much maligned by scholars who charge Rufinus with excising or modifying controversial passages in the original text, but according to Henri de Lubac, this criticism has been unjust and insofar as it has prevented scholars from making use of these translations for studying Origen, it has proved detrimental to our understanding of this key figure in the history of philosophy and Christian thought. De Lubac writes: "Even so, more than one historian has refused to make use of these translations. Such purism would be excessive even if the translations were ten times more suspect than they are: it is too much of an invitation to laziness and simple lack of inquiry... In this case, more than elsewhere, the real cure does not lie in abstinence but on the contrary in massive utilization." G. W. Butterworth, Origen on first principles: being Koetschau's text of the De principiis (Gloucester, Mass., 1973). ix. For an overview of some of the history of the debate about Rufinus' reliability as a translator, see Alan Scott, Origen and the Life of the Stars: A History of an Idea (Oxford, 1991). Appendix A: "Rufinus as Translator"., Origen, Homilies on Genesis and Exodus, Ronald E. Heine trans. (Washington, D.C., 1982). 30-9., and Henry Chadwick, "Rufinus and the Tura Papyrus of Origen's Commentary on Romans," Journal of Theological Studies (1959). Although it is my belief that scholars working with Rufinus' translations must proceed cautiously and circumspectly, I agree with de Lubac that utilization and not abstinence is the best solution. 10 Butterworth, Origen on first principles: being Koetschau's text of the De principiis. xxviii-xxix.

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apostles left obscure or unexplained and doing so using "clear and cogent arguments."11 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 that "the Church teaching lays it down that these beings exist, but what they are or how they exist it has not explained very clearly."12 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."13 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."14 Part of what initially incited Origen to address these mysterious 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

11

Origenes, princ. Preface 9. Origenes, princ. Preface 6. "De diabolo quoque et angelis eius contrariisque uirtutibus ecclesiastica praedicatio docuit quoniam sint quidem haec, quae autem sint uel quomodo sint, non satis dare exposuit." Latin edition used throughout: Origen, Traite des Principes, Manlio Simonetti Henri Crouzel trans., Source Chretiennes (Paris, 1978-84). 13 Origenes, princ. Preface 3. "...de aliis uero dixerunt quidem quia sint, quomodo autem aut unde sint, siluerunt, profecto ut studiosiores quique ex posteris suis, qui amatores essent sapientiae, exercitium habere possent, in quo ingenii sui fructum ostenderent, hi uidelicet, qui dignos se et capaces ad recipiedendam sapientiam praepararent." Origenes, princ. Preface 3. 12

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great and important."15 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 later came to be labeled "gnostics," writers such as Marcion, Valentinus and Basilides.16 These thinkers, according to Origen, held the view that human souls were "in their natures diverse" and hence had different origins and different opportunities for salvation.17 Origen developed his daemonological framework, in part, in response to this view, a view which, for our purposes, bears relevant similarities to that of Porphyry on the question of universal salvation.18 And the debate between Origen and these "gnostics" bears interesting similarities to the debate between Porphyry and lamblichus 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 15

Origenes, princ. Preface 2. 1 use the word "gnostic" in quotation marks to signal that it is not a term that these three thinkers nor their followers would have used in reference to themselves. The best discussion of the problem of terminology with regard to these early Christian groups is found in Michael Allen Williams, Rethinking "Gnosticism": An Argument for Dismantling a Dubious Category (Princeton, 1996). 17 Origenes, princ. 2.9.5. 18 Recall that lamblichus objected to Porphyry's conspiratorial demonology in part because it condemned large numbers of people to polluting acts and focused only on the soteriological possibilities of elite philosophers. 16

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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 which, for them, was solved by positing multiple creative agents in the cosmos.19 Origen radically countered this particular conception of a hierarchy of souls with what some have called his "universalism" or the idea of apocatastasis, the idea that all created intelligences, even those which have fallen the furthest away from God, will someday be restored to their original created nature.20 It is embedded in his answer to the proponents of the

Origenes, princ. 2.9.5. "They 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..." See also Maria Barbara von Stritzky, "Die Bedeutung der Phaidros interpretation fur die Apokatastasis-lehre des Origenes," Vigiliae Christianae 31.4 (1977): 282. 20 What Origen definitively thought on this question has been a matter of considerable scholarly debate, especially insofar as Origen's position on the matter appears to extend even to evil daemons and the Devil himself in some fragments and writings attributed to Origen. Henri Crouzel, the great Origen scholar and bibliographer for scholarship on Origen studies, divides the scholarship on this question and in general between two camps - one which sees in Origen a system more conformable with later Origenism (i.e. the Origenism that was condemned in 553 at the Second Council of Constantinople), and a school which takes Origen as a totality but does not reduce his thought to a system and which respects "the continual antitheses of his doctrine and his purpose." Henri Crouzel, "The Literature on Origen 1970-1988," Theological Studies 49 (1988): 499. Crouzel includes himself in the latter camp and places those scholars who take Origen's apocatastasis as his definitive position within the former. In his important work on the philosopher, Henry Crouzel, Origen, A. S. Worrall trans. (Edinburgh, 1989)., his main aim appears to be to establish the orthodoxy of Origen on most theological issues, attributing problematic elements and ideas to the extravagances and distortions of later Origenists. Although Crouzel's work is generally indispensable for anyone working on Origen, this aim is problematic for the reason that Origen was living and thinking in a period before any sort of orthodox position had been resolved upon on

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"gnostic" position that we find his daemonology most clearly elaborated.21 And although this elaboration takes up most of Chapters Eight to Ten of Book Two, he cautions his reader that he, Origen, "must not be supposed to put these [ideas] forward as settled doctrines, but as subjects for inquiry and discussion."22 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. 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.23 In order to resolve this theodical problem, Origen asserted that all rational souls were created equal and each made a primordial choice

a wide variety of theological questions. Furthermore, as John Sachs demonstrates, the idea of universal salvation was one which Origen's teacher, Clement of Alexandria seems to have held. John Sachs, "Apocatastasis in Patristic Theology," Theological Studies 54:4 (1993): 618-20. The approach I propose to take in this chapter is to follow Crouzel in his insight that it is unwise to treat any one position of Origen's as definitive, to rather take his work as a totality and to respect the "continual antitheses" of his ideas and purpose, but also to suspend the need to bring Origen's thinking into line with later Christian orthodoxy on any one matter. In general, this project is concerned with thirdcentury thinking on daemonology, and Origen's is some of the richest and most complex we have from this epoch. For further studies on the idea of apocatastasis in Origen's writings see L.R. Hennessy, "The Place of Saints and Sinners after Death," in Origen of Alexandria: his world and his legacy, ed. Charles Kannengiesser (Notre Dame, 1988)., Cheryl Riggs, "Apokatastasis and the Search for Religious Identity in Patristic Salvation History," in Religious Identity in Late Antiquity, ed. Robert M. Frakes and Elizabeth DePalma Digeser (Toronto, 2006)., and Stritzky, "Die Bedeutung der Phaidros interpretation fur die Apokatastasis-lehre des Origenes.". 21 This conceptualization of the hierarchy of spiritual beings and its daemonological implications with regard to salvation history can also be found in a number of Origen's sermons. Below we will consider, in particular, his Homily on 1 Kings 28 in this regard. 22 Origenes, princ. 2.8.4. 23 Origenes, princ. 2.9.5.

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with regard to its Creator that subsequently situated it in the cosmic order. In Chapter Nine of Book Two, Origen states that in the beginning, "God made as large a number of rational and intelligent beings" as "he saw would be sufficient."24 In Chapter Eight, Origen called these "minds" and distinguished them from "souls."25 He claimed that before all souls were souls, including the souls of angels, of the celestial bodies and those of humans, they were minds.26 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."27 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

Origenes, princ. 2.9.1. Origenes, princ. 2.8.3. This distinction is made in Koetschau's GCS edition (1913) using excerpts from Jerome (£p. Ad Avit. 6): "vous, id est mens, corruens facta est anima, et rursum anima instructa virtutibus mens fiet." 26 Origenes, princ. 2.8.3. According to a quotation found in Jerome (Ep. Ad Avit. 6) included by Koetschau in his GCS edition (1913), Origen stated that "Mind when it fell was made soul, and soul in its turn when furnished with virtues will become mind." ("vous, id est mens, corruens facta est anima, et rursum anima instructa virtutibus mens fiet.") 27 Origenes, princ. 2.9.2. For a discussion of this account of the fall in Origen see Michihiko Kuyama, "Evil and Diversity in Origen's De Principiis," in Origeniana Octava: Origen and the Alexandrian Tradition, ed. L. Perrone (Leuven, 2003). 25

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with fire. In the Timaean (and Heraclitean) cosmos, for instance, divinity was associated with the element of fire. And as we saw in the previous chapter, cold and moisture are associated with matter, body and generation.28 The cooling process Origen speaks of is not a literal, physical process, but rather the cooling of the primordial minds' ardor for God: As therefore God is 'fire' and the angels a 'flame of fire' and the saints are all 'fervent in spirit,' so on the contrary those who have fallen away from the love of God must undoubtedly be said to have cooled in their affection for him and to have become cold.29 According to Origen, the degree to which each created intelligence cooled determined its subsequent place in the cosmos as rational soul, thereby acquiring some kind of body and subsequently becoming subject to both feeling and motion.30 One of Justinian's anathemas included in his Epistola ad Mennam summarizes these positions and highlights the

In fact, Origen makes the statement early on in Chapter Eight that the blood of living creatures is their soul, a position which mirrors closely the one we found in Porphyry's works (Origenes, princ. 2.8.1). 29 Origenes, princ. 2.8.3. Origen even supplies an etymological connection between "psyche" and "psychesthai" stating that the former may have been derived from the latter because "the soul seems to have grown cold by the loss of its first natural and divine warmth" (2.8.3). 30 Origenes, princ. 2.8.1. This subsequent moment of receiving a body also resembles the Timean creation account, not in terms of the moral reasons for it, but in terms of process. In the Timaeus, the Demiurge first creates souls, then sows them into the various celestial bodies like seeds. Then the gods create bodies for them. If they live justly in their bodies, souls return to their celestial home, an idea which has a long history extending even to Origen. See Scott, Origen and the Life of the Stars: A History of an Idea. For a more positive interpretation of embodiment in Origen's works, see Anders-Christian Lund Jacobsen, "Origen on the Human Body," in Origeniana Octava: Origen and the Alexandrian Tradition, ed. L. Perrone (Leuven, 2003).

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daemonological implications of Origen's suppositions. It attributes to Origen the following view: [T]he creation of all rational creatures consisted of minds bodiless and immaterial without any number or name, so that they all formed a unity by reason of the identity of their essence and power and energy and by their union with and knowledge of God the Word; but that they were seized with weariness of the divine love and contemplation, and changed for the worse, each in proportion of his inclination in this direction; and that they took bodies, either fine in substance or grosser, and became possessed of a name, which accounts for the differences of names as well as of bodies among the higher powers; and that thus the cherubim, with the rulers and authorities, the lordships, thrones, angels and all the other heavenly orders came into being and received their names...31

In Book Two, Chapter Nine, 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 O r i g e n e s , princ. 2.8.3. "...TrdvTcov T U V XoyiKcbv Tr|v Trapaycoyfiv voas dacoudTous Kai duXous yEyovevai 8ixa TTOVTOS dpiSnou Kai OVOHOTOS, cos Evd8a TrdvTcov TOUTCOV yEVEO0ai Tfj TauTOTHTi Tfjs ouaias Kai 8uvdu.Ecos Kai EVEpyEias Kai xfj Tfpos TOV 6EOV Xoyov EVCOOEI TE Kai yvcboer KOpov 8E a u r a s Xa(3sTv rfjs Ssias dydiTris Kai 0Ecopias, Kai TTpos TO xEipov Tpairfjvai KOTO Tf|v EKOOTOU dvaXoyiav Tfjs siri TOUTO pOTrfjs, Kai EiXricpEvai aconaxa XETTTOUEpEorepa f\ TraxuTEpa Kai ovoiaa KXripcooaa6ai Bid TO cbs OVOHOTCOV OUTGO Kai ocoudTcov Siacpopds ETVOI TCOV dvco 5uvdii£cov Kai EVTEU6EV TOUS UEV XEpouîu TOUS 8E

d p x d s Kai Eô0aias f\ KupiOTiyras f\ 9TTOVOUS Kai dyyEXous Kai o o a EOT'IV oupdvia T a y n a T a

ysyovEvai TE Kai ovoiaaoOfivai." These anathemas come from the Second Council of Constantinople (553 CE). Koetschau in his critical edition of On First Principles, included them because he was attempting to counteract what he saw as the shortcomings of Rufinus' translation, thinking that Rufinus had suppressed and rewritten certain controversial passages. Scott, Origen and the Life of the Stars: A History of an Idea. 170. As mentioned earlier in footnote 9, scholars now tend to concede that Rufinus' alterations were far less radical than Koetschau and others thought. In response, however, some scholars such as Crouzel have wanted to call into question other fragments such as the anathemas or references in Jerome on the grounds that they may represent later Origenists more than Origen himself. In order to avoid being side-tracked by this ongoing debate, I use these anathemas with caution and never as the exclusive basis for my interpretation of Origen.

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humans, how it is that 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."32 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 becoming a soul.33 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).34 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

Origenes, princ. 2.9.3. This is also the way in which Origen accounts for physical differences and disabilities: "Some have healthy bodies, others from their earliest years are invalids; some are defective in sight, others in hearing and speech..." Ibid. Although this position solves Origen's immediate theodical problem, it leads to other moral problems relating to how one ought to respond to the suffering of other human beings. The connection between physical and moral conditions with reference to birth defects and such will continue to be upheld and elaborated throughout the Middle Ages, in part as a result of the medieval reliance on ancient ideas in the domains of the life sciences, and in particular embryology. 34 Origenes, princ. 2.9.7. 33

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being preferred to his brother.

And this situation mirrors the more

general daemonological order 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..."36 As mentioned earlier, Origen constructed his framework in response to his perception 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 this dualistic explanation that posited parallel cosmoi, Origen provided a single narrative that encompassed all spiritual beings various classes of angels, humans, evil daemons, thrones, authorities, and so forth - and in important respects, he elided the differences between these by positing a single primordial ontological equality. Thus humans, angels and evil daemons all share in the same history. And the differences between, for instance, an angel and a human or a human and an evil daemon is one of degree and not genus. Furthermore, this framework not only encompassed their original state and their

Origenes, princ. 2.9.7. "...si ex praecedentis uidelicet uitae meritis digne eum dilectum esse sentiamus a deo, ita ut et fratri praeponi mereretur..." 36 Origenes, princ. 2.9.7. "ita etiam de caelestibus creaturis, si aduertamus quoniam ista diuversitas non estcreaturae principium, ..."

152

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 one.37 In BookThree, Chapter Six, for instance, Origen interprets the destruction of the "last enemy," "not in the sense of ceasing to exist, but of being no longer an enemy," and that the "hostile purpose and will which proceeded not from God but from itself will come to an end."38 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 he directs the reader to the last four anathemas of the Second Council of Constantinople to fill in the lacunae.39 According to these anathemas, Origen was supposed to have taught that the devil and the spiritual hosts of wickedness "were as

37

For a general overview of some of the scholarly thinking on this question see Ibid, xxxviii-xli. See also Riggs, "Apokatastasis and the Search for Religious Identity in Patristic Salvation History." and Sachs, "Apocatastasis in Patristic Theology." 38 Origenes, princ. 3.6.5. "Destruitur ergo, non ut non sit, sed ut inimicus et mors non sit." 39 These anathemas are used with caution here for the reasons state in footnote 31.

153

unchangeably united to the Word of God as the Mind itself (i.e. Christ). In other words, despite the tragic choices of the primordial intelligences, the connection between the fallen souls and their Creator was never permanently severed. 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."41 This process of restoration is, in fact, how Origen conceives of the afterlife, the resurrection and judgment. In Book Two, Chapter Ten, 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."42 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 40

Butterworth, Origen on first principles: being Koetschau's text of the De principiis.

250, footnote 3. "XII. o n EVOUVTOI xcp GEOU Xoyco OUTCOS dTrapaXXaKaxcos aV TE

ETTOupdviai BuvdpEis Kai TTOVTES oi av9pTroi Kai 6 SidpJoXos Kai TO irvEuuaTiKa TTJS •jrovripias, cos auToj 6 V0O5 6 XEyoiiEvos Trap' airrcbv XpioToj Kai EV uopepf) 6EO0 uirdpxcov

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