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

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

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

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

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

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

      Origen’s Concerning Daemons

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