10/17/2016 Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2016.10.

27

BMCR 2016.10.27 on the BMCR blog

Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2016.10.27

Heidi Marx-Wolf, Spiritual Taxonomies and Ritual Authority: Platonists,

Priests, and Gnostics in the Third Century C.E. Divinations: Rereading
Late Ancient Religion.   Philadelphia:  University of Pennsylvania Press,
2016.  Pp. ix, 216.  ISBN 9780812247893.  $55.00.  

Reviewed by Heidi Wendt, Wright State University (heidi.wendt@wright.edu)

Preview

Spiritual Taxonomies and Ritual Authority offers a textured account of third-century

intellectuals, defined broadly, and makes several productive contributions to the study of
late ancient religion. Exploring how Platonically-inclined writers both known and
anonymous staked out positions about the ontology and cosmic order of spirits, Heidi
Marx-Wolf situates these figures and the “spiritual taxonomies” they produced within a
common intellectual milieu characterized by regular discursive exchange. Her detailed
literary analysis gestures far beyond the particular texts she examines, however, toward
rivalries among would-be religious experts that paid little heed to the boundaries of
putative ancient groups and continue to resist modern scholarly categories.

The book consists of four main chapters that align evidence ranging from the writings of
Origen and philosophers in the lineage of Plotinus to certain “Gnostic” tractates and
“magical” handbooks. Marx-Wolf argues that the spiritual taxonomies undergirding these
texts were “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” (2). Her methodology collapses distinctions between the intellectuals she
considers along two axes: horizontally, between Origen, Porphyry, and Iamblichus, as
well as the authors of select Nag Hammadi tractates and Greek and Coptic ritual papyri;
and vertically, between literate experts of differential skill-levels and the popular
audiences above which they sought to elevate themselves. The resulting picture is of an
intellectual climate more integrated than factional, and far from the cultural nadir implied
in much previous scholarship. Hence, hers joins other voices seeking to recast the third
century as a period not of cultural decline or mayhem—a dark ages between the
evanescence of the Second Sophistic and the triumph of Christianity —but of exchange,
creativity, and innovation, particularly in the religious domain.1

After an introduction that surveys recent work on demon- and angelology and late-
antique religious difference, the first chapter examines third-century debates about
animal sacrifice, a regular site for hashing out the ontological and moral statuses of
spirits. Porphyry’s On Abstinence from Killing Animals receives ample consideration
since his characterization of sacrifice as a demonic conspiracy clashes with the defensive
posture that contemporary Platonists such as Iamblichus, and elsewhere Porphyry
himself, typically adopted vis-à-vis traditional religion. His problem with sacrifice lay in
the particular beings sustained by it: not gods or even good daemons, whose souls control
http://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2016/2016-10-27.html 1/5
10/17/2016 Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2016.10.27

their pneuma by reason, but bad daemons, whose souls, captive to anger and appetite, are
instead controlled by their pneuma and who then compromise human bodies by inciting
their passions in turn. Precedents for the idea that animal sacrifices propitiated evil
daemons are found not in Platonic philosophy per se—Porphyry’s contentions
contravened the teaching of his own teacher, Plotinus—but the position is common,
Marx-Wolf notes, among his Christian contemporaries. This is especially the case for
Origen, whom, following Elizabeth DePalma Digeser, she takes to be identical with
Ammonius Saccas’ student of the same name, and whose theories on evil daemons
Porphyry appears to have found persuasive.2

Chapter 2 further explores the impetus of third-century Platonists, including Origen, “to
emplot spirits in a larger cosmic framework” with an emphasis on the concerns that
motivated them to undertake such a project. Notwithstanding a pervasive interest in
ordering and systematizing the realm of spirits, Marx-Wolf identifies “discursive
ruptures” in their schemes that betray obligations to popular beliefs about the materiality
of spirits. Dismantling ivory-tower expectations about ancient intellectuals, she suggests
that these writers not only grappled with widely-held ideas about divine beings, but also
accommodated such ideas in order to gain recognition as religious experts. “The
importance of this realization,” she explains, “is that we cannot maintain the view that
intellectuals such as Origen, Porphyry, and Iamblichus were thinking and developing
their taxonomic discourses in some isolated milieu apart from the society in which they
lived. They were not only in dialogue across porous and flexible religious lines . . . but
they were also engaged in dialogue across social boundaries” (63).3 Ultimately, their
legitimacy depended on how successfully they conveyed expertise to their audiences in
settings rife with others making similar claims.

Another intriguing yield of this chapter is that an author’s “identity” was less
determinative of the spiritual taxonomy he constructed than the specific writings that
informed it. This is evident in Origen’s uncritical embrace of key philosophical texts
whose polytheistic premises did not, for his purposes, outweigh their intellectual value.
Turning to On First Principles, Marx-Wolf illustrates how Origen plumbed the pages of
the Timaeus, Genesis, and other writings to construct a single body of doctrine
comprising everything from cosmogony and the ontology of daemons to the nature of
human souls and their soteriological prospects. And while it may have been Marcion,
Valentinus, and Basilides who prompted Origen to clarify his own teachings about the
soul, he was no less impelled by non-Christian intellectuals such as Plotinus and
Porphyry, whom he influenced in turn (43-4). Catechetical ambitions aside, the most
significant difference between Origen and his Platonic interlocutors lay in the particular
literary materials that sustained his purposive exegeses: a preference for biblical texts
over Homeric.4 This is in keeping with what Marx-Wolf subsequently characterizes as a
tendency among third-century “experts” to concoct synthetic wisdom from material
ranging from ancient Judean or Egyptian literature, to the writings of Plato or
Hippocrates, to various oracular corpora.

The juxtaposition of these religious actors raises questions about how to categorize them
meaningfully when their distinctiveness might amount to which ingredients they enlisted
in their proprietary programs. Is there greater explanatory value, then, in categories
adduced from the content of their particular writings or from features of the would-be
experts who produced and interpreted writings, in general, to common ends? Without
denying the importance of content—after all, it is only by examining the intricacies of
spiritual taxonomies that Marx-Wolf evinces and maps their authors’ relationships —it
may be secondary to deeper affinities that literate experts exhibited. For the same reason,
I wondered about the scope and force of “identity” in this context, for, while it captures
the constructive processes by which experts crafted their specialties and differentiated

http://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2016/2016-10-27.html 2/5
10/17/2016 Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2016.10.27

themselves from rivals, its connotation of subjectivities that are essential, passive, and
group-oriented stands in slight tension with Marx-Wolf’s depiction of individuals jostling
in a common arena, and whose discourses of difference masked the common skills and
interests that bound them together. Although she seems to employ “identity” in the
former sense, this language may for some reinscribe difference more deeply than she
intends.

Chapters 3 and 4 mark a productive transition from how third-century intellectuals

labored to locate spirits within complex philosophical and theological discourses, to why
they were so intensely interested in doing so. Turning to the elaborate cosmologies found
in the Nag Hammadi codices, Marx-Wolf argues that these writings were dialogically
enmeshed with and likely served as a catalyst for the development and refinement of the
spiritual taxonomies she treats earlier. Certain tractates might even be characterized as
spiritual taxonomies in narrative form, equally totalizing and, for their compelling genre,
all the more potent than drier theological treatises. That Nag Hammadi and (other)
Platonic writings of the second and third centuries exhibit common intellectual
preoccupations—with questions of metaphysics, ontology, cosmology, ethics,
soteriology, and so on—should be unsurprising. As Marx-Wolf reminds us, many of
these works arose, or likely did, from similar social settings: philosophical schools or
circles in large urban centers that supported expansive networks of intellectual and
literary exchange.

If the authors or expositors of so-called Gnostic cosmologies formed one set of

“theological competitors” in these environments, the priestly figures behind certain
Greek and Coptic ritual texts were another, although the designation of these artifacts as
“magical” has obscured their intellectual character and continuities with a wider
phenomenon of self- authorized expertise. The production of taxonomic discourses by
Platonic intellectuals was thus no idle academic exercise. Rather, literary composition
and interpretation were intrinsic to rivalries encompassing would-be experts of varied
affiliations—“Christian,” “Platonic,” “Hermetic,” and however else one might identify—
who were nevertheless united by claims to religious authority predicated on texts.5

It is impossible to do justice here to the disciplined exegesis that supports these larger
conclusions. Using the particularities of texts to illuminate the social webs in which they
were embedded, Marx-Wolf makes a persuasive case that the spiritual taxonomies she
considers participated in rivalries that cut across disciplinary and religious boundaries, to
the extent these existed in the third century. Rather, the elite Platonic philosopher, the
Christian intellectual, and the Egyptian priest co-existed in close and dynamic proximity.
The book conveys the intimacy of their exchanges while offering new interpretive
avenues for features of thought that have been characterized as inconsistent or
unsystematic, when they might be seen instead as predictable effects of competition and
mutual differentiation that were occurring at a time when religious identities were still
under construction.

It was in this environment, Marx-Wolf argues, that philosophical discourses became

increasingly entangled with religious practices, that many Platonists acquired a hieratic
status, taking on the persona of the priest or theurgist to become active players in the late
antique landscape of ritual expertise. While this trend may predate the third century, the
shift she identifies calls into question whether “philosopher” is the best designation for
the cluster of writer-intellectuals at the center of her study. In the third century and earlier
we find experts who made ample use of philosophical discourses, but who—unlike others
who drew a line between theorizing matters of religion and invoking divine beings
directly—enlisted these in the context of activities that actually summoned the gods and
daemons or imparted divine pneuma, and so on.

http://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2016/2016-10-27.html 3/5