Demons and Pollution in the Ancient Mediterranean: Early Christian Perspectives

Moshe Blidstein

p. 299-313

Note de l’auteur

I thank the participants of the conference for their comments, as well as the comments of those who heard earlier versions of this paper at the Conference of the European Society for the Study of Religion, Utrecht, 2012 and the St. Andrews Graduate Conference for Biblical and Early Christian Studies, 2011. I am indebted to the editors of the volume and to Amit Gvaryahu for their insightful criticism. I am grateful for this opportunity to mark the seminal contribution of Prof. Robert Parker, which has inspired much of my own work.


Texte intégral

Introduction

1Demons and impurity seem to have a lot in common. In what has now become a classic statement of the relationship between the demonic and the impure, J.Z. Smith suggested that when approaching both impurity and demonology

we are not attempting to interpret substantive categories; but rather situational or relational categories, mobile boundaries which shift according to the map being employed. Demons serve as classificatory markers which signal what is strong and weak, controlled and exaggerated in a given society at a given moment.1

2Smith is explicitly following Mary Douglas when he argues that like impurity, “the demonic” is a label attached to things that “escape place” or that are “just outside the place where they properly belong.”2 Given this formulation, an overlap between the two categories may be expected. This, in fact, is usually not the case in Greek and Roman antiquity. As we shall see below, although pollution is sometimes attributed to evil spirits, it is more frequently the result of crimes, injustices, ritual errors, and liminal events such as birth and death. Evil spirits, in turn, usually cause mischief (or worse) rather than pollution. The situation in Judaism of the Hellenistic and Roman eras was similar, notwithstanding some counter examples. For Christians of late antiquity, however, impurity was quite frequently associated with demons, to the extent that impurity almost ceases to exist as a separate, non-demonic status or entity. My main questions in this article are, first, why this change took place, and second, what was the significance of this change for ancient experiences of impurity and the demonic and for ancient perceptions of evil, body, and agency more broadly.3

3Both “the demonic” and “impurity” are tricky concepts. Their meaning was both broad and under constant flux in the periods under study. Ancient Mediterranean writers knew of a wide range of “lower” spiritual beings, and assigned them varying functions, characteristics, and moral roles. These can be divided into two main groups: spiritual beings which are intermediaries between gods and humans, and souls of persons, living or dead.4 This article cuts across the two categories, focusing on spiritual beings perceived to be in some sense evil and external to the person, and yet capable of interacting with people and even invading them.5 An evil spirit, however, is not necessarily “impure”, and I shall attempt to understand why spirits are sometimes described as such.

4“Impurity” is no less difficult: “purity,” “defilement” and “purification” cover a diverse and ill-defined range of phenomena, which is not easily categorized. A number of scholars have noted two major types of impurity in both Greco-Roman religions and Judaism: bodily impurity, linked to everyday occurrences such as birth, death or sexual relations, and moral impurity, which accompanies (severe) crimes, such as adultery, incest, deceit, murder, sacrilege, and, in the Judeo-Christian traditions, idolatry.6 However, the texts in all traditions commonly use similar terminology to refer to all types of impurity. Frequently, in Jewish, Greek, Roman, and Christian texts, impurity has both moral and bodily aspects. Therefore, the ethical and ritual ramifications of impurity must be decided in every case on its own merits.

1. Greek and Jewish models

5In Greek culture, impurity is typically expressed as a personal status and as a direct consequence of a crime or bodily situation. Purification therefore rarely required an exorcism or banishment of a spirit, but was usually a ritual performed by the person as an undifferentiated entity. The temple regulations calling for purification after various polluting experiences rarely turn to spirits as an explanation and the pollutions deriving from murder and incest, most developed by the tragedians, are only occasionally seen as related to spirits. In this, Greek ritual differs from the usual situation in the ANE, where demons are frequently said to enter the person, and the person is healed and purified by banishment.7 It is not necessarily the spirits of the dead that are identified as themselves impure and defiling others.

6Nevertheless, examples for evil spirits playing a defiling role do exist in Classical Greece. Some examples are Aeschylus’ Erinyes, which Robert Parker characterized as “the animate agents of pollution who embody the anger of one slain by a kinsman”,8 the alastoros in Euripides’ Hippolytus (820), and (perhaps) the elasteros from the well-known law from Selinous.9 These polluting spirits were typically a result of a violent death, which had to be appeased and thus purified. The Hippocratic treatise On the Sacred Disease points to a common view that disease is impurity: both are induced by the invasion of demons, and can therefore be solved through the appropriate rituals.10 In these cases, the focus of the texts is less on the existence, personality and actions of the demons, and more on how to get rid of them, that is, on the ritual aspect.

7When pre-Roman evil spirits did play a role (as, for example, in many magical texts) they attack rather than invade a person.11 In other words, evil demons are usually not integrated with a person’s psyche and body, remaining essentially independent agents. Sometimes, apotropaic rituals and purifications were required as protection from the actions of demons, or in order to propitiate them.12 In these cases, however, the demons are not themselves categorically impure but independent beings who can decide whether to send ills or not according to the actions of humans regarding them. Although external spirits are frequently depicted as interacting closely with humans and their internal organs and spirits, these are not only evil, and generally not marked as impure.13

8In the Roman Period, however, there is a partial shift to indwelling rather than external demons as sources of disease, and to exorcism as a form of healing, an idea which probably originated with Jewish communities in the eastern Mediterranean.14 A number of Middle- and Neo-Platonic authors argued that blood sacrifice is offered specifically to lower deities, sometimes called daimones, who were evil and impure, absolutely or relative to the higher deities.15 Porphyry, in the third century, developed this theory by appealing to a connection between the impurity of meat eating and the impurity of demons.16 However, when Porphyry comes to explain at length the essence of impurity as an admixture with the corporeal, external spirits are not mentioned.17

9A number of Jewish texts of the second and first centuries BC link evil spirits with the pollution of sin, though not, it seems, to ritual impurity. The Book of Watchers (1 Enoch 6: 1-7: 1; 9: 7-8; 10: 11-12) speaks of the defilement of certain angels and of the earth as a result of the angels’ (presumably forbidden) sexual contact with women. Jubilees 10 recounts how the impure spirits misled the sons of Noah, causing them to sin, though they were also “blinding and killing” them. Among the texts found at Qumran, 11Q5 (XIX, 14-16) and The Rule of the Community 1QS (IV, 22) mention “spirits of impurity,” though it is quite unclear in what this impurity consisted.18 Other Qumran texts use various terms to speak of purification and protection from demons and evil spirits.19 But evil spirits are a marginal part of a large and varied symbolic system of purity and defilement, most of which does not invoke evil spirits; actual rituals of purification in Second Temple literature are rarely explained as a removal of evil spirits.20 Thus, while evil spiritual beings of various types are central in Qumran texts, and ritual impurity is also amply discussed, an overlap between the two subjects is quite rare.21 Rabbinic texts of the second and third centuries, closely contemporary with the Christian texts discussed below, likewise rarely speak of spirits or demons as defiled, or link ritual or moral impurity to demonic influence.22

10Thus, in the majority of Jewish and Greco-Roman texts, impurity was a personal status, a force of nature or a direct consequence of a crime, rather than a manifestation or characteristic of a being with agency such as an evil spirit. Demons and their actions existed as one of a number of Greek, Roman and Jewish pollution conceptions, but were not the dominant paradigm.

2. Christianity: the first century

11The early Christian conception of impurity had a different focus, as can be seen already in Paul’s Epistles and in the Gospel accounts. Paul speaks out several times against the observance of certain dietary purity rules (Romans 14, 1 Cor. 8). In the Gospels, Jesus is portrayed as attacking certain Jewish traditions concerning food purity (Mark 7: 1- 23, Matthew 15: 1-20), and by the end of the century as attacking Jewish dietary laws in general (Mark 7: 19). This attack was cast as a traditional moralistic critique: purity of food is only an external act, which draws attention away from the truly important purity of the heart and defilement created by sins (Mark 7: 21). The critique as of itself was unremarkable, a normal aspect of moralizing religious discourse current in both Jewish and Greco-Roman literature;23 what was radical was the rejection of Jewish dietary and purity rules in many and perhaps most of the Christian communities of the late first and early second century, despite their ostensible loyalty to the Jewish scriptures. The rejection of specific Jewish purity and dietary rules was not a rejection of purity and defilement as religious markers in general. In fact, the role of purity and defilement became even more central in Christian discourse of the first three centuries concerning sex and sexual sin, certain dietary abstinences, and church rituals such as baptism, penance and the eucharist. This discourse drew from earlier scriptural traditions as well as from Greco-Roman purity rituals and discourse, but brought these together in innovative ways. One aspect of the Christian innovation was the central role given to evil spirits in the creation and transmission of impurity.

12In the Gospels, Jesus exorcises “impure spirits.”24 The narratives do not explain this epithet, and do not link it to better-known types of impurity, indicating that the expression was commonly used. The main import of the use of impurity in this context is that Jesus is superior to the destructive power of the demonic.25 In these narratives, impurity does not denote a deviation from normalcy, but is rather an evil force, which can only be eradicated by an opposing force stronger than it. In this view, purity and impurity are not statuses, part of a ritual or moral system moving to and fro between normalcy and deviation from it through daily actions of defilement and purification. Rather, the relationship of pure and impure is envisioned as a battle of forces of cosmic proportions, in which Jesus, the believers, various types of spirits, and, later, martyrs and saints take part. In this scheme, demons were the main representatives of the evil, impure camp. The portrayal of demons in the Gospels’ exorcism narratives raises a question, however: what is the meaning of the adjective “impure” in “impure spirits”? Perhaps, for the Gospel writers, it is just a synonym for “evil”, and thus does not reflect a significant transformation of the role of demons in impurity but just a variation in expression? This suspicion is strengthened by the interchangeability of “evil spirits” and “impure spirits” in many of the narratives.26 Indeed, in the Gospels (as well as the few Qumran texts cited above), it is unclear what makes such spirits specifically “impure”, rather than simply evil.

13Jews between the second century BC and the first century CE developed a notion of a link between impurity and the demonic, which appealed to the early Christian communities. Demons were seen on the one hand as the instigators, the reflection, or the embodiment of sin, and, on the other hand, as beings who cause illness and bodily mischief, and who therefore should be exorcised by those who have the power to do so. The overlap of these two notions presumably produced the concept of the “impure spirit”. However, there was as yet no ritual structure that reflected and reified this conception. Such ritual and social structures, together with a new model of the person, developed in the Christian communities of the second and third centuries.27 Impure spirits were highly convenient instruments for the conceptualization of these new rituals and anthropologies. They were therefore not only linked to sin and exorcised from the sick, but also stood at the basis of the connection between sin and body in church rituals. The impurity of the spirits meant, on the one hand, that their evil influence was somehow implicated in the physical objects to which they adhered, but, on the other hand, that the proper ritual (baptism) could purify the person from such spirits, or at least protect from their influence. At the same time, the spirituality of impurity meant it was intimately linked to the human soul, and to the sinful or righteous choices it made. Thus, Christian writers in this period elaborate on how spirits contact and influence persons, casting the believing, sanctified individual as a pure space, with the demons (strengthened by sins) as those responsible for polluting it.

3. Christianity: the second and third centuries

14Already in the early second century, a number of Christian texts speak of the sanctified individual, and especially the individual’s core (heart, consciousness or soul) as a temple or space, susceptible to defilement and purification.28 This individual therefore requires continual management of borders to keep evil from invading. Specifically, several texts speak of the heart as a receptacle for external spirits, whether good or evil, using purity terminology. Thus the Shepherd of Hermas, written in Rome, expresses the importance of the control of anger using terms of pneumatology and defilement. The person is described as a “vessel” (σκεῦος) or a “place” (τόπος), which may be inhabited by either a holy or an evil spirit. The holy spirit only remains inside the person if this “place” is pure (καθαρόν), that is, if it is not “obscured”, “oppressed” or “choked” by the evil spirit, and not polluted (μιαινόμενον) by quick temper (ὀξυχολίᾳ), which will lead to its departure (Mandates 5.1).29 The Shepherd illustrates this notion: “For if you take a very small portion of wormwood and pour it into a jar of honey, is not all the honey spoiled? A great deal of honey is ruined by the least bit of wormwood.” A similar idea, though more colorfully illustrated, is found in a fragment from Valentinus, an enigmatic early second-century Christian leader:

… the many spirits dwelling in the heart do not allow it to become pure (πολλὰ γὰρ ἐνοικοῦντα αὐτῇ πνεύματα οὐκ ἐᾷ καθαρεύειν): rather each of them performs its own acts, polluting it in various ways with improper desires. And in my opinion the heart experiences something like what happens in an inn. For the latter is full of holes and dug up and often filled with dung by indecent guests who have no consideration for the place, since it does not belong to them. Just so, a heart too is impure (ἀκάθαρτος) by being the habitation of many demons (δαιμόνων), until it is cared for.30

15Personal religious change and salvation are explained through a mechanism of pneumatology and defilement. This serves to express a specific anthropology: the human heart is essentially good, and both sin and salvation are not only personal issues but involve an interplay of cosmic forces and the human will.31

16These theoretical perspectives provide the backdrop for more practical concerns. Demons were identified in second- and third-century writings as one of the main factors behind defilement in three areas of Christian practice: the prohibition of food offered to idols, the transformation of the person in baptism, and, to a lesser extent, the impurity of genital emissions. In all of these, the ritual or prohibition was explained by the presence and action of demons, as I shall detail below. It may not be a coincidence that demons were an explanatory category especially in rituals which managed the relationship of Christians with the pagan world: whether Christians were allowed to eat food which had been offered to the pagan gods, and how the transformation from pagan to Christian in baptism occurred. This indicates that for early Christians, defilement was essentially a mechanism of “othering”, a definition of pagans and all that is connected to them as foreign. Non-Christians and their worship were not simply seen as defiling, however; their defilement was mediated through demons. This mediation suited Christian conceptions of defilement for a number of reasons. First, it gave defilement a place in the natural, created world, and yet did not implicate the good God in the creation of evil. Second, it distanced defilement from the persons themselves to a third party, and so eased the process of purification and transition of believers into the Christian church. Third, it allowed Christians to differentiate their own practices of purity from those of Jews, cast as lacking efficacy and moral value.

17The case of food offered to idols, that is, to the gods of the ancient world, provides the earliest Christian link between demons and defilement. That the worship of foreign gods is a polluted practice is a trope found in many passages of the Hebrew Bible and later Jewish literature, though this is usually a rather general and undefined type of pollution, without any clear mechanism of transmission of impurity or of purification (as opposed to many other more down-to-earth defilements detailed in the Bible). The link between foreign gods and the demonic is also ancient: already the Septuagint translated various Hebrew terms designating idols and the gods of the nations as “δαιμόνιον”.32 Both Enoch and Jubilees, texts of the second century BC, say that “impure spirits” seduced mankind into worship of idols, or indeed that impure and evil spirits are among the objects of such worship.33 This conception is mirrored in Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, in which he points to the dangers of eating food offered to idols. He claims that eating such food may defile the consciousness or conscience (ἡ συνείδησις… μολύνεται) of the weaker members of the community (1 Cor. 8: 7). Furthermore, he says that idolatrous food offerings are actually offered to demons, and thus lead to the formation of a partnership between the offerer and the demon (κοινωνοὺς τῶν δαιμονίων); it is not clear in what this partnership consists, beyond Paul’s further claim that it is all-demanding: one who participates in it cannot in parallel partake of the cup and bread of the one true God (1 Cor. 10: 20-22).34

18The rather ambiguous Pauline statements on the matter are sharpened by later writers. The first to dedicate a significant discussion to the issue was Clement of Alexandria, writing at the end of the second century. Clement says that he considers food offered to idols to be “a pollution and an abomination” (Μιαρὰ… καὶ βδελυρὰ).35 He explains that the ghosts of the dead alight on the blood of idol-offerings, citing a line from the scene in the Odyssey in which Odysseus draws the ghosts by a blood-sacrifice,36 and adds that Paul commanded not to associate with such demons. Even though the physical act of eating is morally indifferent, he explains, abstaining from such food “keeps our consciences pure (ἁγίαν) and shows our contempt (βδελυρίαν) of the demons.” Furthermore, those who are judged worthy of partaking of the divine food, that is, the eucharist, should not share the table of demons.

19Clement’s challenge is to explain how food sacrificed to idols can be polluted, if both the Gospels and Paul claim that eating certain foods has no moral meaning. To meet this challenge, Clement builds on the foundations laid by Paul, with significant expansions and adaptations. Clement uses more language of purity, explicitly saying that food sacrificed to idols is polluted. For Clement, the possibility of defilement of conscience as a result of sacrifice, which Paul saw as a danger only to the weaker members of the community, is expanded to all Christians. He also points to demons or ghosts as physically linked to the sacrifice. While Paul claimed that one offering the sacrifice is thereby in an ill-defined “partnership” with demons, here the demons physically hover around the sacrifice. This physicality is further augmented by the description of the blood of the sacrifices and the divinatory scene from the Odyssey. Clement’s demons are not “the false gods of the nations,” as Paul uses the term, but rather ghosts of the dead which can be raised through divination. All of these elements—blood, the dead, and divination—have a well-established history as polluting and dangerous substances, beings or practices, especially in the Hebrew Bible and later Jewish sources.

20In the mid-third century, Origen gave demons an even more central place in his cosmology, anthropology, and theories of sin and ritual.37 He too explained that blood, and especially the odour arising from blood, is said to be the food of demons; and that if we eat animals with blood or sacrificed to idols, “we might have such spirits feeding along with us”.38 This stark physical image is attenuated somewhat in Origen’s other discussions of the question. Thus, in the Commentary on Matthew Origen emphasizes that a person becomes polluted by eating sacrificed meat only if he or she believes that this food was indeed sacrificed. What pollutes the person is this knowledge, not the sacrifice itself. However, the demons are still essential for this mechanism to work: “one who knows that food has been sacrificed to demons and nevertheless uses it, enters into a partnership with the demons, and his imagination (or: perception, φαντασίας) is polluted (μεμολυσμένης) on account of the demons participating in the sacrifice.”39 Paul’s principle of defilement of conscience is totally integrated with the principle of the presence of demons, and becomes a defilement of imagination or of thoughts by the demons. For Origen, the pollution can only occur if two elements are present: awareness of the source of the meat and action of the demons. The sacrificial meat itself is of course essential too, but it is neither the pollutant nor is it polluted. It only serves as bait for the demons, who pollute the person’s mind directly.

21Clement and Origen bring the demons center stage and identify them as the pollutants of the food. They can thus distance themselves from the kind of impurity they ascribe to the Jewish food laws, an impurity inherent in created nature. Here, the food is naturally indifferent, but it is the action of a moral agent, the demon, that makes it impure. Clement also emphasizes the moral and rational freedom of the person: Christians are to abstain from food sacrifices to idols “not because of fear,” he says, “but to keep our consciences pure and to show our contempt to the demons to which they had been dedicated.” This pollution is built upon rejection, a rational, clear-headed decision of a free agent, and not upon fear, an irrational response. Nevertheless, physical impurity is created not just from the decision of the free agent—if this was enough, the demon would be superfluous—but by the physical proximity of the demons to the sacrifice, which creates a defilement both physical and moral.

22In the hands of Clement and Origen, the demon becomes a highly useful instrument through which the dangerous materiality of the purity laws can be circumvented. The freedom of the human agent remains unsullied, no longer imposed upon by a corporeal, material impurity lacking any spiritual dimension. The sacrificed animal is “resurrected”—instead of only a dead body, it is now a union of body and soul, the body provided by the animal and the soul by the demon. As a union of body and soul, it can now legitimately interact with humans to produce morally valenced results. A person eating sacrificial meat is not actually eating food, not only incorporating new matter into his or her body. Rather, this person is taking part in a social interaction with beings who are essentially similar to humans as unions of body and soul. Even if the demons themselves are also a union of body and soul, their body is apparently too ethereal so as to allow interaction with them to take place without the physical basis of the sacrificed animal.

23It may be argued that the demonological theories of Clement and Origen were a philosophical discourse, paralleled in part by those of contemporary neoplatonists such as Porphyry and Iamblichus, and perhaps not corresponding to common practice and belief.40 However, the importance of purification from demons in second- and third-century documents on baptism indicates that this a more than a philosophical construct.

24Paul, John the Baptist in the Gospels, and Acts all speak of baptism as removing sins committed by the person in the past, but rarely use terms of purification to describe the ritual. Hebrews and 1 Peter, however, do use such terms.41 It is only in the second century that Christian authors clearly describe baptism as a process of purification, though there were differing articulations of what exactly was purified in the process.42 Several authors link baptismal purification to the removal of evil spirits, whether as a central objective of the ritual or as one of the stages surrounding it.43

25Already the Epistle of Barnabas, an early-second century text, says that before baptism, “the dwelling place of our heart was perishable and feeble (φθαρτὸν καὶ ἀσθενές)… full of idolatry and a house of demons” (16: 7-9); elsewhere, the author describes the removal of “sins and filth (ἁμαρτιῶν καὶ ῥύπου)” in baptism. Thus, baptism is implicitly portrayed as purification of the heart from demons—equated with sin in general and idolatry in particular—drawing on the same pool of images as the Shepherd of Hermas and Valentinus, cited above. Another document, the Excerpta ex theodoto from mid-second century Alexandria, speaks of the ritual as protecting from various evil powers. Thus, pre-baptismal exorcism is essential, because of the danger that impure spirits will go down into the water together with the person baptized and be sealed within him or her (ch. 83-84). The water and oil used in the ritual were also exorcised separately. Clement of Alexandria, at the end of the second century, says that baptism is a purification of the soul, a “straining off of the impure spirits that have got mixed up with the soul from the new and spiritual creation”.44 By the early third century, a text from the Roman community known as the Apostolic Tradition speaks of multiple exorcisms incorporated into the baptismal process, both in the days of preparation for baptismal immersion and immediately preceding it. In the comprehensive descriptions of baptism in the fourth century, exorcism is likewise embedded in several points of the process, and theologians such as Cyril of Jerusalem, Theodore of Mopsuestia, John Chrysostom, and Gregory Nazianzus explain at length how baptism works against demons.

26The characterization of baptismal purification as an exorcism of demons is most salient in texts coming from Jewish-Christian communities, that is, communities which observed both Jewish and Christian rituals.45 The Ps.-Clementine novels, widely considered to originate from a Jewish-Christian milieu, are of the opinion that baptized Christians should not eat together with the non-baptised, an unusual position in this period.46 The prohibition is explained by an appeal to demonology and purity:

Anyone who has at any time worshipped idols… is not free of an impure spirit; for because he has become a companion of demons, one of those who dwell with them has seized and afflicted him, and so he cannot be free from an impure spirits… but if he repents… after purification we baptize the worthy ones so that the impure spirit concealed in them may leave.47

27More evidence for a demonic understanding of baptismal purification comes from sources on the Elchasites, a Jewish-Christian sect in second-century Syria. This sect appeared to have practiced a number of types of purificatory washings, both initiatory and apotropaic. A complex ritual, including baptism, an oath, and a renunciation of sin is enjoined for the healing/purification of rabies and demonic possession.48

28Writers from Jewish-Christian circles may have also been the first to create a significant link between demonology and the impurity of genital emissions (specifically, menstrual blood and seminal emissions). Sexuality is certainly the sphere which most attracted language and imagery of defilement in early Christian literature. The description of sexual sin as defiling is certainly not a Christian innovation, being common throughout Greco-Roman culture in the first and second centuries. Much more unique is the idea, which became popular in the second and third century, that sexual relations per se are defiling and that therefore only virginity can be pure, as found for example in the Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles.49 Furthermore, some Christians thought that the origin of sexuality was in sin, and that this sin was instigated by evil spiritual beings.50 This complex of ideas, however, coalesced into a clear picture of sex as both defiling and as demonic with ritual consequences only in the late fourth century, under the influence of early monasticism.51

29A sub-section of Christian sexual defilement discourse concerned genital emissions, male or female. As genital emissions are frequently involuntary, they involve defilement which is not directly linked to sinful thought or action. Several texts, starting from the third century, raise the question of men or women participating in eucharist or baptism after such emissions, and the need for purification.52 One of these texts links such defilement with demonic influence. This is the Didascalia Apostolorum, a document including instructions and admonishments to church leaders, thought to originate in a Christian community in third-century Syria in which Jews and Jewish ritual were highly influential. The author of this document engages in a polemic with various groups in his community which give more credence to Jewish rituals than he believes is required. Much of his polemic is dedicated to what he believes is an erroneous observance of purity laws regarding genital emissions.53 According to the hostile witness of the Didascalia’s author, his opponents held to a number of closely connected customs: first, abstinence from prayer, reading Scripture and participation in the Eucharist during the “seven days of menstruation”; second, before prayer, bathing after the seven days of menstruation (for women), seminal emissions (for men), or intercourse (for both); third, prohibition of intercourse during menstruation. The Didascalia’s redactor imputes to his opponents two main reasons for these observances: first, loyalty to the biblical Levitical laws, and second, a belief that the Holy Spirit departs from them during menstruation, emissions or intercourse, and returns only with washing. The latter belief, argues the Didascalia’s author, cannot be true:

For if you think, O woman, that in the seven days of your menstruation you are empty of the holy spirit, if you die in those days, you will depart empty and without hope… if the holy spirit is not in you, how can you work righteousness? For the holy spirit abides with those who possess it; but from whom it departs, to him an impure spirit joins himself… A believer is filled with the holy spirit, and an unbeliever with an impure spirit: and his nature does not receive an alien spirit. He therefore who has withdrawn and separated himself and departed from the impure spirit by baptism, is filled with the holy spirit… and the impure spirits depart not even a little from the heathen, while yet they are heathens, even though they imagine that they do good works; for there is no other power whereby the impure spirit may depart save by the pure and holy Spirit of God… You then, O woman, according to what you say, if in the days of your menstruation you are empty, you shall be filled with impure spirits. For when the impure spirit returns to you and finds itself a place, it will enter and dwell in you always: and then will there be entering in of the impure spirit and going forth of the holy spirit, and perpetual warfare.54

30The only things that can cause spirits to enter or depart a person are baptism, and, to a lesser extent, good works. Menstruation and other natural occurrences that do not have a moral aspect cannot cause the holy spirit to depart. For the Didascalia’s author, the most important point was that pneumatology and the physical world can only mix through church rituals. The author attributes to his opponents an opposition between the defilement of genital emissions and the holy spirit, reflecting a system of purity and defilement which integrates both the bodily and the spiritual without any mediation of impure spirits.55 But for the Didascalia’s author the main opposition is between two kinds of spirits, in accordance with a pneumatology already familiar to us from the Shepherd of Hermas: a person can never be “empty” of a spirit, he or she must always be possessed by either a holy or an impure spirit. This pneumatology can be influenced by bodily phenomena only through the mediation of certified rituals, such as baptism.

31This text reflects a face-off, in one community, between two perceptions of defilement: the first, more traditional type, in which it is the persons involved who are the main creators of defilement or purification through their actions, and the second, more innovative type, where spirits are the main agents, and only through them can true defilement and purification come about. The opposition of impure spirit to the holy spirit links the world of purity and defilement to that of church rituals, as baptism, eucharist, and penance were all thought to operate through the agency of the holy spirit.

Conclusions

32Christians of the first centuries CE held to notions of defilement and purification which were not only a symbolic or metaphoric way of speaking of sin and repentance but reflected beliefs in demons, specific physical realities. Such beings could be manipulated through bodily dispositions, asceticism, and rituals. For most Christian authors, defilement of the person meant the defilement and corruption of the soul or the heart, the interior core of the person. Evil spirits were the most suitable image for understanding and manipulating this defilement, since they could invade the interior of the person and be manipulated through ritual actions and moral decisions. They were also morally valenced as their powers ultimately came from sin or disobedience of God, and thus allowed defilement to be morally valenced as well. The link between demons and defilement is clearer in issues relating to pagans and their gods, and probably originated there. This reflects not only the traditional equation of demons to the pagan gods, but also the role of purification and defilement in Christianity as a means for managing contact with non-Christians and for incorporating them in the community. Thus, the demonic imagery that Christian writers used to define impurity is reflective of the social situation of early Christian communities as minorities in a hostile world.

Notes de bas de page

1 Smith (1978b), p. 430.

2 Ibid. p. 429; see Douglas (2003) [1970], p. 38-41; for demons as ambiguous beings, see also Brown (1978), p. 20-21; Johnston (1999), p. 171-175.

3 The question is seldom put in these terms. For a thorough investigation of the significance of the impurity of demons in the New Testament, see Wahlen (2004); Wahlen discusses later writings briefly on p. 59-68.

4 Sfameni Gasparro (2015).

5 Therefore, I am not studying the term daimōn per se: For Greeks, “daimōn” did not at all designate evil beings, but rather divine powers in general or more specifically certain types of divine beings, frequently (especially in later texts) those lower in the hierarchy of the divine (LSJ s.v.). Even looking only at the Platonic tradition, a diversity of positive views on the character of the daimonic is found: as an external spiritual being assisting persons, as the divine part in the person, or as an intermediary between the human and the divine (Timotin [2012]). For the daimōn in Stoic thought, see Algra (2009).

6 For “ritual” vs. “moral” typologies of Jewish purity practices and discourse, see Klawans (2000), p. 3-42; this typology is criticized in the New Testament context by KAzen (2002), p. 214-222. Such clear distinctions are rarer in scholarship on the discourse of Greek purity: see Padel (1992), p. 54; Chaniotis (1997); Thomas (2010).

7 Longrigg (1993), p. 6-25.

8 Parker (1996) [1983], p. 107; and see Vernant (1980), p. 132-134; Padel (1992), p. 102-106, 162- 192; Johnston (1999), p. 129-133, 250-287; Geisser (2002). For criticism of earlier scholarship that assigned impurity in Greek culture to demons, see Parker (1996) [1983], p. 55.

9 For interpretation of the difficult Selinous text, see Jameson, Jordan and Kotansky (1993), p. 73- 76, 116-120; Robertson (2010), p. 213-228; Salvo (2012a) with bibliography.

10 1.44-46; see Van der Eijk (1990); Martin (2004), p. 36-50. Theophrastus’ Superstitious Man (δεισιδαιμονίας ισ᾿, Characters 16) is excessively fearful of divinities (τὸ δαιμόνιον), and this is expressed by a fear of various pollutions. Only one of these pollutions, however, is linked to invasion by a deity—the purification (καθᾶραι) of his house for fear of Hecate (16.7). Martin (1995), p. 139-162, argues that many Greeks and Romans believed in pollution (which he equates with disease through invasion) by demons or divinities. While some such beliefs must have existed, there is in fact little mention of pollution in the sources he adduces (the magic spell mentioning a “demon immunditiae”, p. 158, is late and may have originated with Jews or Christians, see Horsley [1982], p. 46).

11 As argued by Smith (1966), Faraone (2011b); for examples, see Hom. Od. 5.396; Plu. de Stoic. repug. 1051c.

12 E.g. D.L. 8.24-33.

13 See, for example, Heraclit. fr. 119 ( “A man’s character is his daimon”); Socrates’ famous daimonion; and explanations of oracular mechanisms (Plu. De def. or. 437c-438e), where the spirit contacting the Pythia may lead to prophecy or death.

14 Kotansky (1995).

15 Plu. De esu car. 996b-c; Cels. Alethes Logos 8.60; Porph. Abst. 2.33-34; Iamb. Myst. 5.14.

16 This idea may date back to Emp. fr. 115; however, the reading of the fragment is fraught with difficulties, see Picot 2007.

17 Abst. 4.20. Porphyry’s explanation is in line with the usual Middle-Platonic position that the human soul is necessarily lower, and hence less pure, than that of the any other spiritual being. Demons may be impure and mixed relative to the higher divine beings, however; see e.g. Plu. De Isi. et Osi. 25.360e. And see the rejection of the (Christian) idea that divination is linked to evil and impure spirits by Iamb. Myst. 3.31; compare also Corp. Herm. 9.3.

18 Wahlen (2004), p. 41-49; Ibba (2009); Alexander (1998); Stuckenbruck (2006); Brand (2013). The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs is the only Jewish text of the period which devotes significant attention to demons and characterizing them as a source of impurity (see Rosen-Zvi [2006], MArcus [2010]); however, the dating of this text, and the ascription of its components to Jewish or Christian writers, is difficult.

19 See Stuckenbruck (2006).

20 One Qumran text—4QTohoraa—may indicate that the impurity associated with skin disease is conveyed or even created by a spirit, though it may equally be speaking simply of a breath or wind rather than a demon. See Milgrom (1995), p. 66; Baumgarten (1990).

21 Thus I find it difficult to accept the statement of Fröhlich (2013), p. 25: “it was [the Qumran community’s] strict demand for purity that served as a basis for their attitude to demons, considered impure beings,” and prefer the thesis of Birenboim (2003) and Kister (2009), that for the Qumran sectarians ritual impurity was a result of the lowly, fleshly character of humanity.

22 One story found in later Rabbinic sources explicitly rejects the suggestion of a similarity between impurity and the demonic; see Pesikta de-Rav Kahana 4.7, with Neusner (1973), p. 115; Noam (2010), p. 72-73. For some counter-examples, see Sifre Deuteronomy 173 (where a “spirit of impurity” is said to assist one who attempts divination by sleeping in a cemetery); Babylonian Talmud, Sukka 52a.

23 See also the contributions of A. Chaniotis and I. and A. Petrovic in this volume.

24 Especially in Mark, 1: 23-27, 3: 11, 3: 30, 5: 2-13, 6: 7, 7: 25, 9: 25; but also in Luke-Acts (Luke 4: 33-36, 6: 18, 8: 29, 9: 42, 11: 24; Acts 5: 16, 8: 7), and to a much lesser extent in Matthew, 10: 1, 12: 43. See Wahlen (2004), p. 177 for a summary of the vocabulary used in the New Testament documents to describe evil powers.

25 Kazen (2002).

26 Wahlen (2004), p. 87 n. 94.

27 See Stroumsa (1990).

28 Matthew 5: 8; 1 Corinthians 3: 17, 6: 19; 2 6: 14-18-7: 1; Epistle of Barnabas 16: 7-9. The idea of the person as a dwelling place for God is a commonplace in Stoic thought, see Sen. Ep. 87.21; 41; Ph., De cherubim 98, De sobrietate 62-68, and esp. De somniis 1.148-149; Epict., Discourses 2.12-14; Aur. 2.13. However, for these writers the pure soul is not defiled by external spirits but by the person’s actions and thoughts.

29 Fredrikson (2001); Bucur (2006); Bryant (1998).

30 Trans. in Thomassen (2006), p. 451-452. For discussion of this text and its antecedents, see Markschies (1992), p. 54-83; Whittaker (1979).

31 For this transformation in Rabbinic texts see Rosen-Zvi (2011), with pp. 36-43 for patristic parallels.

32 De. 32: 17; Ps. 90: 6, 95: 5, 105: 37; Is. 13: 21, 34: 14, 65: 3, 65: 11.

33 An idea doubtless related to the impurity of gentiles (and not only their gods) as developed in these and other Second Temple Period texts: see Hayes (2002). However, it is not said in these texts that gentiles are impure because they are possessed by demons, as Christians would later claim.

34 For the Pauline discussion of idol-offerings, see the studies of Tomson (1990), p. 189-221, Cheung (1999) and Still (2002). For a recent survey of scholarship see Fotopoulos (2003), p. 1-37.

35 Paed. 2.1.8.

36 Hom. Od. 11.37.

37 For Origen’s demonology, see Ferguson (1989); Castagno (1992); Crouzel (1994); Marx-Wolf (2010).

38 Cels. 8.30.

39 11.12.

40 See also Valantasis (2001), who studies the Authoritative Teaching, a document found at Nag Hammadi which mingles demonological and impurity terms, and is not clearly Christian or pagan. For the prevalent demonological theories of the period and their cultural and religious significance, see Smith (2008); Timotin (2012), esp. p. 163-242; Cancik (2003).

41 Mark 1: 4-5, Matthew 3: 6, Luke 3: 3, Acts 2: 38, 22: 16; Hebrews 10: 21-22; 1 Peter 3: 21. There is much discussion in scholarship on the possible links between the development of baptism and contemporary conceptions of conversion to Judaism as purification; see Hayes (2002); Freyne (2010); Rouwhorst (2009). In any case, demons do not seem to feature in the Jewish sources on conversion or the impurity of gentiles.

42 Benoit (1953); Jensen (2012), p. 7-52.

43 For the development of these traditions, see Kelly (1985), Leeper (1990).

44 Prophetic Eclogues 7.

45 For demonology in the Ps.-Clementines, see Schoeps (1950); for baptism, Gianotto (2008); Wehnert (2010); Cirillo (1988).

46 Ps.-Clementine Hom. 13.4-11; Rec. 7.29.

47 Ps.-Clementine Rec. [Syriac] 2.71.

48 Hippol. Haer. 9.15.4-16.1. For the character of baptism in this sect, see Nicolotti (2008).

49 See, e.g., the Acts of Paul of Thecla, 5, 12, 17; Acts of Peter, 33-34; Acts of John, 113, and especially the Acts of Thomas, 12-14, 51-52, 54-55, 84, 85, 88, 94.

50 See especially gnostic writings, e.g. The Apocryphon of John, 22.12; 24.26-32; The Reality of the Archons, 89-91; Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 1.24.1.

51 For the relationship of demonology and impurity in fourth century and later monasticism, see Valantasis (1992); Bitton-Ashkelony (2003); Brakke (2006); for the Middle Ages, see Elliott (1999).

52 The earliest sources are Clem.Al. Paed. 2.92; Origen Selecta in Ezechiel 7.22 (PG 13.793); Dionysius of Alexandria, Letter to Basilides.

53 For the Didascalia’s position on purity, see Brakke (1995), p. 424-433; Stewart-Sykes (2009); Fonrobert (2000), p. 172-182; Zellentin (2013).

54 Text: Vööbus (1979), vol. III, p. 256-258; trans. adapted from ibid, vol. IV, p. 239-241.

55 There is no way to know if the women indeed thought the holy spirit departs from them during menstruation; we have only the author’s word for it, and this belief appears suspiciously well suited for the redactor’s refuting argument that only baptism and sin affect the spirit. The Ps.-Clementine Rec. 9.9, also speaks of demons who produce defects in children born from intercourse performed “while lust is wholly gratified and no care is taken in copulation… because they have not observed the law of intercourse”, i.e. abstinence during menstruation.


Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence Licence OpenEdition Books. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont « Tous droits réservés », sauf mention contraire.