a conversation...took place in the late classical world, a conversation about spirits, both good and malign. At times, this conversation was heated, combative even, but at other moments it was surprisingly pacific [pacifist] given the contentious nature of the subject matter and the temperaments and ideological commitments of those involved. This conversation took place across important sectarian boundaries among a group of intellectuals whom we might loosely categorize as late Roman Platonists of one variety or other. Although this group includes a wide array of intellectuals, from writers of certain Nag Hammadi texts to the producers of Greco-Egyptian ritual (or “magical”) handbooks, the central figures are Origen, Porphyry, Iamblichus, and to a lesser extent, Plotinus.
... in the late second and third centuries CE...these philosophers began to produce systematic discourses that ordered the realm of spirits in increasingly more hierarchical ways. These “spiritual taxonomies”...were part of the overall theological and philosophical writings of these thinkers and were projected onto and ordered more “local” or “popular” understandings of spirits, which, although totalizing in their own right, were less concerned with hierarchy and precise ontological and moral distinctions between different kinds of spirits. 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 ...
... many of the texts found in the Nag Hammadi codices contain very complex cosmological narratives that elaborate systematic, ordered accounts of the emanation, creation, and proliferation of all kinds of spirits. Individuals and groups who read and disseminated these texts at times earned the scorn of figures such as Plotinus, Origen, and Porphyry for a number of reasons. However, as recent scholarship has demonstrated, the narratives found in these texts serve as an important missing link for understanding what motivated these intellectuals to develop their own cosmological and taxonomic discourses and to refine their thinking on the kinds of beings that populated the spiritual realm. [Chapter 3] argues that despite their critiques of various facets of the “Gnostic” worldview, Plotinus, Origen, and Porphyry drew much of their inspiration and thinking from texts such as those found in the Nag Hammadi codices and their adherents. By making this argument, this chapter is also involved in re-thinking the marginal status of these texts and the groups who used and treasured them, bringing them back into the center of late Roman conversations about spirits in philosophical circles.
Chapter 4 continues to answer the question of why these philosophers created their taxonomies when they did. Part of the answer to this question emerges when we take seriously the concern of these thinkers about proper ritual. The discourses that they constructed were one aspect of their efforts to demote and discredit ordinary priests. This chapter demonstrates that by associating these priests with the worship of lesser and even evil spirits, Origen, Porphyry, and Iamblichus were able to reserve the title of high priest for themselves. These thinkers used their ability to discern, locate, and delimit spirits and to interact with them to give weight to their own authority. Even Iamblichus, the champion of blood sacrifice and defender of traditional rites as part of his theurgic system, was involved in minimizing or excluding the importance of certain other ritual experts in order to establish himself as the highest authority on divine and cultic matters. In other words, the taxonomic discourses of these philosophers served as a textual basis for their claims to expertise and authority. This chapter also links their efforts to establish this kind of hieratic identity with their soteriological concerns and commitments around the question of universal salvation.
Conclusion
The third century has been the subject of a great deal of scholarly attention with respect to a few circumscribed topics: economic hardship, political up-heaval, Christian expansion and persecution. It has frequently been referred to using the language of crisis. And yet it was a century of intense, rich, and diverse conversations, all of which took place in a highly flexible, mobile, permeable social landscape. This study attempts to illuminate the bold, innovative, and entrepreneurial maneuvers of a small group of philosophers working to carve out a unique niche for themselves and their associates using a rather peculiar strategy, namely, the production of comprehensive discourses, ontological, moral, and sometimes even mythical, that ordered the realm of spirits.
The third century has often been treated as a kind of “Middle Age” of the postclassical world, a “Dark Age” mediating between Roman glory and Christian triumph. Putting aside the fact that humans don’t live according to ages and centuries, and focusing on the aforementioned intellectual richness and creativity of the decades during which Plotinus, Origen, Porphyry, and Iamblichus were in dialogue with each other and with a wide range of interlocutors who have tended to fade into the shadows, this study hopes to demonstrate that their conversations about spirits are critical to understanding what came before and after them.
Although when we imagine these figures, we may be inclined to see them whispering quietly among themselves in the sunny rooms or porticos of their patrons’ urban homes and extra-urban villas, murmuring about the bodies of angels and the salvation of demons, talking to no one but their most intimate associates, they themselves sought out much greater audiences, placed themselves more squarely in the center of things, and worked very hard to jostle their competitors out of the center and into the periphery, a place where many of them have stayed until rather recently.
Heidi Marx-Wolf (2006) Spiritual Taxonomies and Ritual Authority: Platonists, Priests, and Gnostics in the Third Century C.E., University of Pennsylvania Press; pp. 1, 9-11.