Sacrifice to Demons in Porphyry and Origen
This dissertation traces the reactions of Platonists (particularly, Porphyry and Origen) to the traditional religious belief that sacrificial gifts helped to secure answers to prayers and to appease divine wrath - a system known to anthropologists as "reciprocity." This dissertation shows that late antique pagan Platonists (in contrast to Plato) completely rejected the possibility of reciprocity with the gods - a rejection based partly on a theology of absolute impassibility, harmlessness and transcendence. This could have led them to reject traditional religion altogether, but they chose instead to reinterpret it. They proposed new functions for sacrifice and prayer to displace reciprocity and so to make these practices philosophically acceptable: for them, sacrifice was thanksgiving, aligning one's will with the divine, or uniting oneself to it. In addition, Porphyry dismissed traditional stories of reciprocity with the gods as interactions with evil daemons. The theological ideas that led pagan Platonists to reject reciprocity led some Christian intellectuals (notably, Origen) to do the same. They reinterpreted Christian practices and scriptural passages that seemed to teach reciprocity, in order to bring them into line with philosophy. They allegorized Old Testament references to reciprocal interactions with God or explained them as interactions with the pre-incarnate, semi-passible Christ. The New Testament's implication that the Father required the death of his Son as a ransom payment in return for the forgiveness of the world was, to them, philosophically unacceptable. Origen solved this problem by saying that Jesus had been a ransom, not to the Father, but to the Devil. Thus, both Origen and Porphyry used evil spiritual powers to explain troublesome examples of propitiatory reciprocity in their traditions. I argue that pagan and Christian thinkers were attempting to keep their philosophical convictions without having to reject their religious stories and practices: they wanted to have their cake and eat it. By the fourth century, the theurgic reinterpretation of sacrifice reigned supreme in pagan Platonism. In contrast, Christian thinkers were turning back towards reciprocity. As a final note, I suggest that this may have given Christians a cultural advantage.
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