Since the nineteenth century when Schleiermacher and others retrieved an ‘original’ Plato from the supposed mists of superstition that had shrouded the Platonic dialogues and Aristotle's testimony for centuries, mists that then came to be known as ‘Neoplatonism’, we have seen successive reassessments of the thought and culture of ‘Late Antiquity’: out of the common view that this somewhat amorphous period was a period of decline and irrationality, Plotinus came to be accepted as ‘philosophical’ even if Iamblichus and subsequent Neoplatonism were for some time considered to be a ‘retrogression to the spineless syncretism’ from which Plotinus had supposedly tried to escape (E.R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational [1951], p. 286). More recent scholarship, however, has rightly rehabilitated Iamblichus and later Neoplatonism, but other currents prominent in Late Antiquity have not fared so well – the ‘Gnostics’, for instance, and the ritual handbooks and other artefacts manifest in the Greek Magical Papyri (Papyri Graecae Magicae or PGM), with which it has been commonly assumed the well-defined ‘orthodox’ Platonists were in conflict. Gnosticism, a much debated and problematic category, has received enormous attention, but old divisions between ‘proper’ Platonism and degenerate ‘religious’ Gnosticism persist strongly today. Nonetheless, these broader decline and conflict models have recently come under increasing attack, but no one, as far as I know, has argued in such a comprehensive way, as does M.-W. in this book, that some of these principal groups of Late Antiquity of the third century ce should not be viewed as various stages of decline from rationalism to degenerate subcategories of religion or as conflict between clearly defined confessional groups but rather as competitors with interrelated claims to authority in philosophical, religious and ritual matters. Her book is a refreshing reappraisal of the complexities of life in the third century ce and a reminder that twentieth- and twenty-first-century boundaries might be just as artificial and porous as those of earlier centuries.
The book consists of an introduction, four chapters and a conclusion – brief, concise and eminently readable. Chapter 1 (with its catchy title: ‘How to Feed a Demon’) explores the common Greek heritage of Porphyry and Origen (from the cosmology of the Timaeus to Galen's model of humoral medicine) in thinking about blood sacrifice and evil spirits that makes Porphyry's stance on animal sacrifice at odds with his Platonist colleague, Iamblichus, but in tune with the Christian rejection of animal sacrifice and yet at the same time plausible and consistent with his general Platonic outlook. In particular, M.-W. examines spiritual taxonomies (namely, attempts to systematise and rank the world of superhuman agents from demons to angels and archangels) in Origen's Concerning Demons (via fragments of Porphyry in Proclus’ Commentary on the Timaeus), On First Principles, Homily 5 on I Kingdoms 28; in Porphyry's On Abstinence, fragments from Commentary on the Timaeus, To Gaurus, What is in our Power, Letter to Anebo; and in Iamblichus’ On the Mysteries.
Chapter 2 shows how, in constructing comprehensive systematic hierarchies of spirits, Porphyry, Origen and Iamblichus were not part of some monolithic or pure philosophical tradition, but were rather compelled to take account of pre-existing popular traditions as a way of establishing a broader and more popular form of authority – traditions that crossed over our modern conceptions of religious and social boundaries. All this resulted in a disruption of tidy order, partly because of the process of translation across boundaries itself and partly because of what M.-W. and others call ‘agentic matter’, that is, the fact that all spirits – demons, angels and archangels – have bodies based on elemental matter that possesses motive force on its own. There is therefore no tidy distinction between the incorporeal and the corporeal, the immaterial and the material. All of these thinkers were not just doing ‘philosophy’; they were thinking ‘within a lived social, cultural, and religious context … responding to traditional religion, but also to social, cultural, and religious changes’ (p. 61).
Chapter 3, ‘The Missing Link’, examines Plotinus, Origen and Porphyry's critique of the so-called Gnostics and argues that Gnostic texts serve as a missing link for understanding what motivated the supposedly orthodox thinkers to develop their own systems. M.-W. therefore rejects the marginalisation of Gnostic thinkers in favour of drawing them back into late Roman conversations about spirits in philosophical circles. In other words, Origen, Plotinus and later Platonists were profoundly influenced by the Gnostics; or more broadly still, the Gnostics are crucial for understanding early Christian apologetic, Neoplatonic philosophy itself, and the production of spiritual taxonomies in Late Antiquity. M.-W. supports her thesis with admirable familiarity with recent scholarship on this question (see especially p. 81 and n. 35) – together with unresolved dating problems of the Nag Hammadi texts (p. 80 n. 31) and apparent difficulties in the classification criteria for Sethian or Classical Gnosticism (pp. 81–4).
Finally, Chapter 4 argues that Origen, Porphyry and Iamblichus refashioned the identity of the ‘philosophers’ in order to claim authority as High Priests with special ritual expertise and access to divinity, picking up where Middle Platonism had left off, providing totalising taxonomies to trump both their Christian counterparts (p. 123) and their other competitors such as the Gnostics and disenfranchised Egyptian priests (p. 124), and in order to meet the needs of a new urban tourism that provided an emerging market-driven environment (p. 124).
In this chapter M.-W. adopts the much-contested view that Ammonius Saccas (the mysterious teacher of Plotinus) was likely a Christian who taught both Plotinus and Origen (p. 142 n. 57). And in relation to the PGM, she argues, against the older nineteenth- and twentieth-century view, that ritual handbooks, amulets, curse tablets, oracular and divinatory apparatuses, and healing formulas are not representative of illicit, marginal practices performed by marginal ‘magicians’ (p. 114) but should rather be seen, with a growing number of contemporary scholars, as an invaluable resource for understanding the ways in which a majority of people ‘both viewed and approached their interactions with divinity and the realm of spirits’ (p. 114). M.-W. associates these texts with hereditary Egyptian priests disenfranchised in the Hellenistic and Roman periods, and she argues that all the rituals practiced by theurgic experts are represented in the PGM artefacts; and so priestly competition in the third century probably arose from its appropriation of Greek philosophical patrimony and its ‘self-fashioning as experts in small-scale ritualizing … that may have brought these priests to the attention of … Porphyry and Iamblichus’ (p. 119).
In her conclusion, M.-W. proposes that the efforts of third-century figures to establish themselves not only as philosophers but as ritual experts with theoretical and practical knowledge in daily life make comprehensible the efforts of Christian bishops in the fourth and fifth centuries to fashion their own clerical authority as a similar form of expertise (p. 127). If we want to stress the difference between the former as magical and the latter as involved in imperial politics, we should nonetheless recognise, on M.-W.’s account, ‘interesting continuities’ in both traditions in the political connections of a shadowy figure like Pythagoras, but more concrete in the cases of Plotinus and Origen, and also attested for Porphyry (p. 130). Third-century Platonists were not important political actors like many later bishops, but they did act in advisory capacities to politically active persons, and their spiritual, cosmological and demonological expertise ‘was also the basis of their ability to deliberate on social order’ (p. 131).
I might make three minor points: (1) ‘Cosmic Soul’ (p. 52) is not identical to Plotinus’ third hypostasis. (2) The section on hereditary Egyptian priests (Chapter 4) needs development to be more convincing. (3) The question of a Platonist ‘political’ commitment from Pythagoras to Plotinus and Origen, broached in the conclusion, would have been strengthened by mention of Plato's Republic, Laws and Aristotle's Politics, but I can understand M.-W. not wishing to introduce another galactic commitment at this point. Overall, this is a refreshing and compelling work that makes us read Late Antiquity in a new, down-to-earth and yet more open-ended way.
