Spiritual Taxonomies and Ritual Authority. Heidi Marx-Wolf
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that make his adoption of a predominantly Christian view of blood sacrifice plausible. In fact, it is more than likely that Christian ideas would also have been shaped, to some degree, by the same intellectual currents. For instance, Origen frequently drew on medical ideas in his theological and philosophical works.86 Placing Porphyry’s works within this larger context—namely the Greek intellectual heritage shared by both Christian and non-Christian philosophers, as well as the educational milieu to which both Origen and Porphyry belonged—helps explain why Porphyry, to all appearances a staunch defender of Greek religion, especially against its detractors, the Christians, would have excised from religious practice a whole set of rituals considered for centuries to be absolutely vital to the well-being of states, communities, families, and individuals.
The allegorizing mode of Porphyry’s philosophical reasoning in On the Cave of the Nymphs and On the Styx also presents modern readers with a viable solution to the apparent contradiction in Porphyry’s stance on the association of evil daemons and sacrifice Eusebius accuses him of in the Preparation for the Gospel. As mentioned earlier, when Porphyry cites the Apollonian oracle on sacrifice, he is likely doing so in order to deal in figural terms with the literal sacrifices the oracle lists. Each of the sacrifices enumerated in the oracle may have been the subject of a figural interpretation that posited a hidden meaning and explicated it. Porphyry himself says that this oracle contains “an orderly classification of the gods.”87 One finds Origen doing something very similar with regard to Hebrew sacrifice in his Homilies on Leviticus. In some of these sermons, he carefully and systematically interprets away the need for the literal slaughter of animals for the expiation of sins in ancient Hebrew cult and instead gives them a new allegorical and explicitly Christian meaning.88
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 that is obscured by Eusebius’s polemics but also by the assumption of many modern scholars that the positions philosophers tended to take on issues both theological and ritualistic 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 C.E. But scholars sometimes treat traditional Mediterranean polytheism as a static monolith, when in fact “Hellenic” or traditional Greco-Roman identity was itself very much in flux and under construction, especially among the non-Christian Platonists under discussion in the current study, as we will see.
By focusing on key points of conceptual parallelism and evidence for dialogic exchange between people such as Porphyry and Origen, this study does not deny that Christians and non-Christians were at odds 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 that focuses on difference and assumes fixed and static religious identities and group boundaries.89 Highlighting moments of shared understanding across religious boundaries, as well as 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 deemphasized. Rather, it frequently allows scholars to relocate these points of difference in a more representative and illuminating fashion.
Ritual, Theurgy, and the Status of Matter in Porphyry and Iamblichus
There is one related issue on which Porphyry did differ from Christian writers. That is in his prognosis concerning the chances of the ordinary person 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 the consumption of meat were polluting activities. Given that the vast majority of people at the time would not have shared 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.90 He himself indicates that he contends with other philosophers.91 In particular, Porphyry was involved in an ongoing debate with his fellow Platonist and former student, Iamblichus, a debate that, 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 Iamblichus’s On the Mysteries.92 In fact, Iamblichus wrote his On the Mysteries in response to Porphyry’s Letter to Anebo, and scholars generally agree that the letter was somehow aimed at Iamblichus.93
In particular, Porphyry disagreed with Iamblichus about the role of ritual, and specifically blood sacrifice, in the reunion of the philosopher’s soul with the divine. In spite of the fact that Iamblichus 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. Iamblichus, 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 Iamblichus 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 Iamblichus. It is difficult to gauge the tone of Porphyry’s missive, because it exists only in fragments embedded in the work of his opponent. But it may very well be that Porphyry was genuinely hoping to query Iamblichus concerning a series of questions about which Porphyry had not entirely determined his own position. Ritual was not unimportant to Porphyry, as we will see in subsequent chapters. And Iamblichus is likely simplifying and overstating Porphyry’s view for effect. But what is certain is that Iamblichus set more store by rituals and their efficacy for uniting the soul with divinity than did Porphyry.
Indeed, Iamblichus’s response to Porphyry’s letter involved a thoroughgoing defense of ritual. He used the term “theurgy” to represent his theorization of sacrifice, emphasizing the importance of theurgy, above theology and philosophy.94 The term “theurgy” (θεουργία), meaning “god work,” originated with second-century Platonists who used it to refer to the “deifying power of Chaldean rituals.”95 Porphyry seems to have been the first person to use this term after the Chaldaean Oracles, and Porphyry and Iamblichus were actively defining it in the course of discussing it.96 Iamblichus’s definition of theurgy was comprehensive and all-encompassing. He argued that the traditional rituals of ancient polytheisms 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.97 The human soul, according to Iamblichus, was the lowest of divine beings (ἔσκατος κόσμος) and the one most entangled with matter. Hence, it needed to be freed from the body to realize its true nature.98 Theurgy was, in part, the ritual process of loosening the bonds between the human soul and matter. But Iamblichus also held the view that there were ritual actions appropriate to every stage of the soul’s re-ascent.99 Furthermore, as Gregory Shaw has noted, one of Iamblichus’s 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 vision of embodiment of the Timaeus tradition and exported the “demonic” from within the soul out into the cosmos.100 According to Iamblichus, the Plotinian/Porphyrian vision denied the soul’s participation in the demiurgic project of creating the material cosmos. This demiurgic work was mirrored in the work of the theurge, both being forms of “god work.”101 Everyone who practiced religion