Unlikely Bedfellows: Porphyry in Eusebius’s Preparation for the Gospel
One point of entry to this late Platonic conversation on evil spirits is Eusebius of Caesarea’s Preparation for the Gospel.1 In this work, Eusebius was occupied with the task of constructing a distinct Christian identity out of two lineages—the Jews, on the one hand, and the Greeks and Egyptians, on the other.2 In order to distinguish Christians from Greeks, Eusebius spent much of his time demonstrating that the oracles and miracles of traditional Mediterranean cult were not merely frauds, although he points to a number of Greek authorities who say as much (for instance, Lucian of Samosata and Oenomaus); rather they were the work of evil daemons. Eusebius is far from the first Christian to make this identification between traditional deities and malign spirits. In the second and third centuries, one of the most interesting rhetorical moves developed by Christian apologists, philosophers, and polemicists was to demonize the traditional Greek and Roman gods, repeatedly associating these gods with evil spirits. It is difficult to determine when this strategy first developed, but we find it consistently used in the works of writers such as Justin Martyr, Tatian, Minucius Felix, Clement of Alexandria, and Origen to name but a few.3 So when Eusebius chose his sources for the construction of his own demonological conspiracy his options were numerous. But Eusebius chose none of these obvious authorities. Rather he made an unlikely but potent choice—he used the works of Porphyry to make most of his key points on this issue. This is the same Porphyry whom Eusebius identified as Christianity’s most rabid critic; the Porphyry who, according to Eusebius, attacked Origen on account of his form of biblical exegesis and who wrote many books against the Christians.4 What is even more remarkable is that Eusebius finds so much of use in Porphyry. Indeed, Eusebius has little need to quote anyone else. For Porphyry, at certain junctures in his philosophical writing, had reason to comment on the nature, location, and work of evil daemons in the cosmos, and in particular, on their association with animal sacrifices.
Although Eusebius cites Porphyry to make his own argument associating evil daemons with the rites of traditional Mediterranean polytheism, he also accuses Porphyry of being inconsistent in his views on blood sacrifice. Eusebius presents Porphyry as confused or self-contradictory by contrasting what the Platonist says in two different places, one suggesting that sacrifices are acceptable only to evil daemons, and the other detailing the sacrifices that should be made to all the gods.5 In On Abstinence, Porphyry clearly comes out on the side of those who held that blood sacrifices were improper offerings to good daemons and gods and were, instead, the preferred victuals of evil spirits. But in one excerpt from On Philosophy from Oracles included in the Preparation, Porphyry cites certain divine instructions from a lengthy oracle describing which animals ought to be offered to various deities.6 Eusebius appears not to have preserved any of Porphyry’s commentary on this oracle, which raises the question of whether Porphyry was in fact confused on the matter of sacrifice, or whether he was doing something else in his interpretation of the oracle in question, something that Eusebius may have found inconvenient to relate. Indeed, there is reason to believe that Porphyry was probably presenting the oracles he had carefully collected as sacred texts in order to interpret them in a figural way. And in the case of the oracle on sacrifice, he did so to “interpret away” the literal blood sacrifice he so vehemently opposed elsewhere.7
Blood and Daemons in Porphyry’s On Abstinence
In On Abstinence, Porphyry pursues a wide range of strategies in order to convince his wayward friend, the Roman politician Firmus Castricius, that his recent lapse into carnivorous habits is unhealthy and one with all kinds of dire moral and soteriological consequences for those who wish to live a philosophical life and assimilate themselves to divinity.8 He highlights the way eating meat rivets the soul more closely to the body, and to its desires and pleasures, than does a vegetarian diet.9 He also argues that killing animals deprives rational beings of their souls.10 As Gillian Clark points out, the title itself, Peri apokhes empsukhon, already accords animals the status of ensouled beings.11 Porphyry also crafts arguments in response to objections he might expect from philosophical contemporaries such as Stoics and Epicureans. But most importantly, he must answer to the key religious objection that a central part of traditional ritual involves the slaughter of animals. After all, even priests and other ritual experts who occasionally abstained from meat ultimately did so in preparation for festivals and their bloody sacrifices. In response to this objection, Porphyry offers his most dramatic argument for why the philosopher should not eat meat. In Book 2, Porphyry reveals a grand conspiracy behind the carnivorous diet, a conspiracy in which humans, greedy for the meat their bodies desire, and evil daemons, likewise rapacious for blood and smoke, are both complicit.
Although it is likely that the popularity of blood sacrifices on a large scale (hecatombs of cattle, for instance) was already on the wane in Porphyry’s day, and that there was a general aversion among late ancient intellectuals to eating meat, Porphyry’s reinterpretation of the ancient practice that traditionally accompanied key venerations of the gods involved a rather extraordinary reappraisal of ancient ritual.12 Animal sacrifice was traditionally a key component of city festivals. These communal celebrations, which involved meals of sacrificial meat, were times when the proper relations between humans and gods were affirmed. They were also occasions when human hopes for security, health, well-being, and success were acknowledged and when the society’s communal identity and the individual’s place within the group were made visible and affirmed.
Porphyry introduces his “conspiracy theory” by presenting a genealogy of sacrifices, which he takes from Theophrastus, a genealogy explaining how a primordial sacrificial order became corrupted over time.13 Theophrastus is an interesting choice, because he generally seems to have argued for more philosophical or “rational” approaches to thinking about and venerating the gods.14 In Inventing Superstition, Dale Martin situates Theophrastus among a number of classical Greek writers, including Plato, Aristotle, and the writer of the Hippocratic work On the Sacred Disease, who all contributed to the development whereby normative expressions of the fear of the gods were transformed into “superstition” or irrational and excessive fear of the gods.15 On the issue of sacrifice, Martin notes that although Theophrastus “did not critique sacrifice in general,” his work On Piety did include a “substantial critique of blood sacrifice.”16 Martin also notes that Theophrastus was generally concerned about excessive expressions of piety, illustrating this point using the Peripatetic’s sketch of the “Superstitious Man” (Deisidaimōn), which paints this character as an irrational and shameful sort of man.17 Martin further argues that Theophrastus took his cues from Aristotle’s ethics of the mean in order to determine the nature of proper, that is, proportional, piety.18
According to the genealogy of sacrifice Porphyry adopts from Theophrastus, long before his time “the most learned of all peoples, living in the most holy of lands which was founded by the Nile, began with Hestia to sacrifice first fruits to the gods of heaven.”19 These were foraged items such as leaves and roots. Then these early worshippers began to sacrifice cultivated goods, crops of various legumes and grains. At the point when humans began to sacrifice animals, Porphyry’s story takes a dark turn. First he describes the way in which, during times of famine or some other kind of misfortune, humans killed each other.20 This displeased the gods, and they created a fitting penalty. Some of the offenders were turned into atheists, people who were deluded about divinity such that they thought the gods were bad. The rest were consigned by the gods to the category of “bad sacrificers,” namely those who participate in unlawful offerings.21 In other words, animal sacrifices represent the human evil of homicide and the delusion that was engendered by the gods as punishment, namely the thought that such offerings are characteristic of proper worship. But if the highest gods don’t desire the sacrifice of animals, then who does?