Blood Sacrifice and Competitive Identity Creation

In the Fourth Century the battle between Christianity and traditional religion in the Roman Empire reached its final stage. The stakes were the highest they had ever been, with control over the now ailing empire, and the populations therein, as the prize sought by both groups. Extensive scholarly work has been done on this conflict and the key characters, but I would like instead to focus on how it played out within a single illustrative issue, namely blood sacrifice. Blood sacrifice was one of the most contested battlegrounds in this religious conflict, appearing continuously in the philosophical and political rhetoric of the fourth century. The fact that this particular issue roused such passion and effort strongly suggests that it is a key component to understanding the larger conflict. Numerous scholars have demonstrated how sacrifice, and discussion of sacrifice, served as a way of establishing cultural borders and claiming certain identities (Price 1980, Rives 1995). These strategies of viewing sacrifice as a cultural symbol offer a productive method for analyzing the Christian-pagan discussion of it in the early Fourth Century. My research will focus in on the struggles of three men, Porphyry, Iamblichus, and Eusebius, to use blood sacrifice to delineate the world according to their philosophical-religious beliefs. These three men were not only among the foremost thinkers in their fields (Porphyry and Iamblichus in Neo-Platonism, Eusebius amongst Christian writers), they were also in direct competition with each other: one of Iamblichus\u27 treatises is a letter responding to his former teacher Porphyry, and it seems likely that some of Porphyry\u27s philosophy was similarly aimed at Iamblichus, while Eusebius actually uses text from Porphyry\u27s On Abstinence to prove his points about blood sacrifice. In my research I will analyze specifically how these three authors use blood sacrifice to redraw cultural and cosmic boundaries and what the ramifications of these new delineations were. Analyzing the philosophical and rhetorical interactions of Porphyry, Iamblichus, and Eusebius is important because it allows us to see on a microcosmic level how Christianity and the Neo-Platonic pagan defenders interacted, and to understand fully what was at stake for both groups. Price, S. R. F. 1980. Between Man and God: Sacrifice in the Roman Imperial Cult. The Journal of Roman Studies 70:28-43. Rives, J. 1995. Human Sacrifice among Pagans and Christians. The Journal of Roman Studies 85:65-85