Spiritual Taxonomies and Ritual Authority: Platonists, Priests, and Gnostics in the Third Century C.E by Heidi Marx-Wolf (review)

This academic, scholarly, and thoughtful book makes a positive contribution to a wide range of disciplines including philosophy, the history of religion (particularly late ancient religion), broad cultural history, esotericism, and mysticism. It is a well written, riveting, and fascinating book that many readers will be unable to put down, but it deserves careful reflection and even multiple readings.

The book focuses on how four third-century Platonic philosophers—namely, Plotinus, Origen, Porphyry, Iamblichus (POPI)—developed spiritual taxonomies (including the ordering of the divine sacred realms of angelology, the lower realms of embodied demonology, the exemplary realms of heroes, the construction of theogonies, and the cosmic ordering of spirits), theurgic praxis, and soteriologies (doctrines of salvation) in a hierarchical, moral, and ontological manner.

In our myopic age of narrow academic specialization, it is refreshing to see that Marx-Wolf widens the scope of her analysis to include how the above four philosophers fit into a broader religious third-century Mediterranean historical context. She is to be applauded for her ambitious broad scope of evidence. She marshals not only the primary texts of POPI, but ups the ante by including certain Nag Hammadi texts and Greek and Coptic ritual magic papyri. Marx-Wolf thus insightfully reveals the connections between the above four philosophers and local Christians, pagan Neoplatonists, Egyptian ritual clerical experts, and Gnostic writers (particularly Sethian Gnostics)—all at a time when these groups' religious identities were still under construction. Marx-Wolf maps POPI's relationship to other competing groups of the time, and convincingly shows (as also noted by Heidi Wendt in the Bryn Mawr Classical Review, October 27, 2016) that Platonist philosophers, Christian and non-Christian priests, Hermeticists, and Gnostics were "far more interconnected socially, educationally, and intellectually" than previously recognized (3). Thus, POPI did not develop their spiritual taxonomies in isolation, or ex nihilo, but systematized the realm of spirits within a broader social context. POPI's esoteric knowledge was thus embedded and indeed entangled in a social web that Marx-Wolf attempts to trace across disciplinary and religious boundaries.

What emerges in Marx-Wolf's portrait of the Mediterranean in the third century is an intellectual climate that is quite vibrant, and more integrated than factional—far from the stereotypical characterization of much previous historiography on this period, which saw this century as marking the onset of "the dark ages." She thus joins a trend in recent scholarship that attempts to recast the third century not as a period of cultural decline, mayhem, and descent into superstition—a dark age between evanescent philosophic speculation and the triumphant rise of the Church—but of creative intellectual exchange and religious innovation. Marx-Wolf also lets us see the familiarity of POPI with the existing medical and religious literature and other domains of knowledge of their time. In reading Marx-Wolf's wonderful book, this reviewer was reminded of Nietzsche's remark that "Christianity is merely watered down Platonism."

The book is divided into four main chapters that bring together evidence ranging from the writings of Origen (including his Biblical homilies), to the work of philosophers responsible for the transmission of Plotinus, Gnostic tractates, and magical handbooks. In keeping with her historicist method, Marx-Wolf begins with an engaging introduction that gives a survey of the recent scholarly literature on demonology and angelology, particularly as it pertains to the religious and historical contexts of late antiquity.

Chapter 1 is a tour de force that examines the ascetic impulse of thirdcentury debates about animal sacrifice, particularly with respect to Porphyry's On Abstinence from Killing Animals, as a vehicle for revealing Porphyry's understanding of the mechanism by which blood sacrifices fix or embody demonic forces in this world...