Spiritual Taxonomies and Ritual Authority. Heidi Marx-Wolf
hierarchy and precise ontological and moral distinctions between different kinds of spirits.1 Most people in antiquity thought about and encountered gods, angels, daemons, heroes, souls of the dead, and other intermediate spirits as relatively diverse, indeterminate, unclassified, and at times, capricious, ambiguous, and even ambivalent.2 Their virtues or detractions tended to map onto whether or not they were helpful or harmful with reference to specific conditions or circumstances. In other words, for most people at the time, these spirits were not ordered according to a clear and stable ontological or moral taxonomy. “Popular” thinking about spirits was “situation-specific, embedded in the world—part of the larger endeavor of an individual, family, or community to negotiate the immediate environment and its margins.”3 This book argues that it is important for scholars to pay attention to historical moments when intellectuals or experts (whether generally recognized or self-proclaimed) create taxonomies of these sorts. It demonstrates that this philosophical exercise is often one strategy in more global attempts to establish various kinds of authority, garner social capital, and wrest these from other contemporary cultural entrepreneurs and experts.
Generally speaking, taxonomic discourses about spirits are seldom purely academic exercises undertaken by intellectual elites who distinguish themselves in some thorough manner from the rest of society on the basis of education and social class. As David Frankfurter notes, the creation of systematic discourses, in particular discourses that define and situate malign spirits (i.e., demonologies), is a strategy often used by both individuals and religious centers to bolster their authority, prestige, and reputation by establishing themselves as sites of expertise on sacred, ritual, and doctrinal matters.4 This is precisely what we find Origen, Plotinus, Porphyry, and Iamblichus doing in their writing and in their lives. All of these philosophers, with the possible exception of Plotinus, made claims to ritual expertise and called themselves high priests of the highest god.5 In other words, in the third century, some philosophers added a new, hieratic dimension to their identity. We find evidence of this in a number of places in the subject matter of their philosophical writings, in their biographies of their predecessors, and in the stories told about them by subsequent biographers.6 These philosophers also asserted that they were in a unique position as experts to broker salvation for others. In making these claims, they were completely in earnest, being motivated by deep religious or spiritual experiences. Additionally, they saw themselves as the heirs of a philosophical patrimony that gave them a more universal (i.e., totalizing) perspective than that of anyone else in late Roman society. Hence, part of their dialogue concerned the role of the philosopher-priest in the salvation of the souls of others.
Plotinus, Origen, Porphyry, and Iamblichus were not the only ones making the aforementioned soteriological claims at the time. Given that these writers lived in a highly competitive and uncontrollably diverse world, culturally speaking, in a period when philosophical schools proliferated, opportunities for social mobility were expanding, and the religious landscape was shifting rapidly, it should come as little surprise that these thinkers had to contend with each other and with other intellectuals with diverse backgrounds and training. This study takes a closer look at the individuals or groups that these late Roman Platonists sought to malign in the course of establishing their own authority over the realm of spirits. Using the lens of spiritual taxonomy, this study explores the precise nature of this competition, demonstrating that the philosophers under consideration were, in fact, competing for the intellectual and social upper hand with two main groups, priestly experts such as those associated with the Greek magical papyri, and so-called Gnostics.7 Members of both of these groups were also involved in identifying and ordering the realm of spirits and in providing the ritual means for dealing with this realm. By looking at these groups in tandem with third-century philosophers, this study demonstrates that all of them were much closer—far more interconnected socially, educationally, and intellectually—than previously recognized. Hence, although Origen, Plotinus, Porphyry, and Iamblichus give the impression that the individuals and groups they critique are clearly distinct from their own circles, these philosophers were, in fact, in direct competition for social and intellectual capital with other priests, ritual experts, and producers of taxonomic discourses.
This intimacy has been difficult to observe not only because of the rhetoric of these ancient writers themselves, but also as a result of the lingering effects of older scholarly models, models that have tended to see both religion and philosophy in a state of decline and devolution in the late Roman world. Although these models have, for the most part, been challenged and replaced, they still continue to influence the terms of a number of scholarly debates regarding late ancient religion and philosophy. The tendency to classify the ritual handbooks and other artifacts published together as the Papyri Graecae Magicae (PGM) as “magical” or as some problematic and degenerate subcategory of “religion” has meant that until very recently it has been difficult to entertain, much less trace, concrete connections between the priests behind these texts and contemporary philosophers and other intellectuals.8 A similar scholarly framework has tended to view so-called Gnostic myth and theology as either a devolved Christianity or a devolved Platonism, or both.9 This study rejects the decline and devolution framework, and in so doing, foregrounds connections that both labels, “magical” and “Gnostic,” have tended to obscure.
It also highlights the fact that in their efforts to establish their authority in theological and ritual matters, Origen, Porphyry, and Iamblichus frequently shared views on the realm of spirits that cut across religious boundaries. For instance, at first glance, the figures under consideration here belong to different ancient “religious groups”: Origen was a Christian, and Plotinus, Porphyry, and Iamblichus were Greco-Roman polytheists of one sort or another.10 In the fourth century, one sees increasing tension between these two groups as religious boundaries become more clearly drawn and violently enforced. Yet, one of the key questions this study seeks to answer is whether in the third century, a century punctuated by sporadic, infrequent violence against Christians, religious identity was the primary category determining the positions philosophers and intellectuals took on specific ideological issues. It also asks whether the interactions across this boundary were universally or even predominantly hostile, or whether we find evidence of productive dialogic exchange and shared conceptual categories. Indeed, the spiritual taxonomies of such thinkers as Origen, Plotinus, Porphyry, and Iamblichus force us to rethink how we conceive of religious identity in late antiquity. As will become clear, the evidence indicates that religious identity, both Christian and non-Christian, was under construction in the third century. Hence, it is impossible to fit thinkers as complex as the ones under consideration here into clearly defined religious groups. This is because there is little evidence that such groups existed in the ways in which we tend to think of religious or ideological affiliation today.11 Hence, efforts to delineate clear, impermeable, and inflexible boundaries between such groups as Christians, Jews, Hellenes, Gnostics, and so forth are, by their nature, problematic and anachronistic.
By engaging this set of questions, this study challenges a model that has informed many late ancient studies for some time and has only recently been called into question by the work of scholars such as Miriam Taylor, Daniel Boyarin, Harold Drake, and Elizabeth DePalma Digeser. Miriam Taylor calls this model “conflict theory,” a model that sees most exchanges over religion in late antiquity through the lens of conflict and hostility between clearly defined confessional groups.12 Taylor compellingly calls into question the usefulness of this model for understanding late antique Jewish-Christian relations.
Taylor is joined in her views by Daniel Boyarin, who argues that Christian orthodoxy and rabbinic Judaism were born at the same moment in history as a result of a protracted period of exchange and contest.13 Harold Drake has demonstrated that a similar delineation of boundaries took place in relations between Christians and others in the fourth century, which obscured earlier Christian efforts to emphasize points of commonality and agreement between Christians and non-Christians.14
In her book A Threat to Public Piety, Digeser illuminates points of contact, influence, and agreement between Christians and non-Christians in the third century. Digeser clearly demonstrates that figures such as Plotinus, Origen, Porphyry, and Iamblichus were in regular and enthusiastic conversation with each other, in particular, in the informal school settings