lian the Theurge. Much of its content is quasi-philosophical,
and its account of the first principles shows affinities with
the thought of the Pythagorean philosopher Numenius, who
was teaching around the middle of the second century. It also
contained, however, prescriptions for theurgic rites and indi-
cations of the “sights” that they produce, for example, “a
formless fire whence a voice proceeds” (frag. 146).
Concerning the value of such practices, there was signif-
icant disagreement among Neoplatonist thinkers. Plotinus
himself, it is now agreed, either knew or thought nothing of
the Chaldean Oracles. His way to human fulfillment in the
divine was the way of theoria (“contemplation”), not that of
theourgia. It was his disciple Porphyry who was the first
among philosophers to give some status to the practice of
theurgy. In spite of the severe criticisms of it that he had lev-
eled in his Letter to Anebo, Porphyry came, according to Au-
gustine (City of God 10.9f.), to acknowledge a theurgy whose
aim was purification of the soul and that produced “appear-
ances of angels or of gods.” At the same time Porphyry insist-
ed that the value of such practices was strictly limited. What
they purified was not the intellectual soul, but only its lower,
pneumatic adjunct, which is adapted to visions of spirits, an-
gels, and inferior deities; they had no power to bring people
into the presence of Truth itself. Presumably Porphyry con-
tinued to believe, with Plotinus, that it is only the practice
of virtue and of philosophical contemplation that raises the
soul to fellowship with the supreme God.
This conviction was not shared, however, by Porphyry’s
own disciple, the Syrian Iamblichus (d. 325), who, in his
long treatise On the Mysteries, replied to the strictures ex-
pressed by his teacher in the Letter to Anebo. According to
Iamblichus, there exists, in theurgy, a mode of fellowship
with the divine that is independent of philosophical thought
and that “those who philosophize theoretically” do not
achieve. “What effects theurgic union is the carrying through
of reverently accomplished actions which are unspeakable
and transcend any intellectual grasp, as well as the power of
mute symbols which only the gods understand” (On the Mys-
teries 2.11).
This debate, however, did not end with the exchange
between Iamblichus and his teacher. In his youth the emper-
or Julian was a disciple of the philosopher Eusebius, who
taught that “the important thing is purification [of the soul]
through reason” and who condemned wonder-working. Ju-
lian, however, was more impressed in the end by the teaching
of one Maximus, who, by burning incense and reciting a for-
mula in the temple of Hecate, caused the statue of the god-
dess to smile and the torches in her hands to blaze; the em-
peror-to-be accordingly adopted Maximus as his teacher
(Eunapius, Lives of the Philosophers and Sophists 474).
What the practice of theurgy involved becomes plain
from the text of Iamblichus’s treatise itself. There he defends
and interprets a variety of rites and practices that involve ei-
ther the use of offerings or tokens of some sort or the various
phenomena that accompany divine possession. It is plain,
however, that in his mind the practices he explains can be
understood and entered into—and indeed function—at
more than one level. True theurgy, he suggests, is, “the sum-
mit of the priestly art” and is reserved “to a very few”—those,
indeed, who “share in the theurgic gods in a way which tran-
scends the cosmos,” because they “go beyond bodies and
matter in service of the gods, being made one with the gods
by a power which transcends the cosmos” (On the Mysteries
5.20–5.22). For all this, however, there is little new or unfa-
miliar in the phenomena he alludes to, from the “enthusi-
asm” of the Corybantes to the sacrifice of animals. He refers,
for example, to levitation as one manifestation of possession
by a god. He is also familiar with situations in which the the-
urgist makes use of a medium (ho dechomenos), and both he
and the medium—and sometimes the assembled specta-
tors—see the “spirit [pneuma] which comes down and en-
ters” the one who is possessed (3.6). In another vein, he refers
to theurgic use of hollow statues that are filled with “stones,
herbs, animals, spices, [and] other such holy, perfect, and
godlike things,” so as to create a receptacle in which the god
will be at home (5.23). Though this practice seems to have
been especially favored by late classical practitioners of theur-
gy, it clearly draws on widespread and ancient practices of
sympathetic magic.
What is interesting and new, then, in Iamblichus’s ac-
count of theourgia, as over against theoria, is precisely the
terms in which he understands and defends it. For one thing,
it is plainly his conviction that theurgy is not a matter of ma-
nipulating the gods. Over and over again he denies that ma-
terial objects or circumstances, or psychological states of
human subjects, can supply the explanation of theurgic phe-
nomena, which by their nature transcend the capacity of
such causes. Similarly, he denies that the power of the gods
is compelled by human agency. The presence of the human
soul with the gods is effected through a gift of divine agen-
cies—through their universal self-bestowal. It is this self-
bestowal that empowers the invocations and actions of the
theurgist, which reach out to the transcendent by reason of
“assimilation and appropriation” to their object (3.18). Be-
hind this conception there lies, of course, a rationalized con-
cept of universal sympathy, which emphasizes not merely the
interconnectedness of things at the level of the visible cosmos
but also the presence and participation of all finite realities
in their immaterial ground, the divine order. At the same
time, however—and somewhat paradoxically, in view of this
insistence on the mutual indwelling of the various levels of
reality—Iamblichus insists that “the human race is weak and
puny... possessed of a congenital nothingness,” and that
the only remedy for its error and perpetually disturbed state
is to “share as far as possible in the divine Light” (3.18). Thus
the practice of theurgy, through which the gods themselves
bestow their light and presence, is the one hope of humanity.
Iamblichus had lost not the philosophy so much as the faith
of a Plotinus.
In Christian circles, the term theourgia and its deriva-
tives came into use in the writings of Dionysius the Areopa-THEURGY 9157