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The Routledge Handbook of Early Christian Philosophy
This volume offers the most comprehensive survey available of the philosophical background to the works of early Christian writers and the development of early Christian doctrine.
It examines how the same philosophical questions were approached by Christian and pagan thinkers; the philosophical element in Christian doctrines; the interaction of particular philosophies with Christian thought; and the constructive use of existing philosophies by all Christian thinkers of late antiquity. While most studies of ancient Christian writers and the development of early Christian doctrine make some reference to the philosophic background, this is often of an anecdotal character, and does not enable the reader to determine whether the likenesses are deep or superficial, or how pervasively one particular philosopher may have influenced Christian thought. This volume is designed to provide not only a body of facts more compendious than can be found elsewhere, but the contextual information which will enable readers to judge or clarify the statements that they encounter in works of more limited scope.
With contributions by an international group of experts in both philosophy and Christian thought, this is an invaluable resource for scholars of early Christianity, Late Antiquity and ancient philosophy alike.
Mark Edwards has been Tutor in Theology at Christ Church, Oxford, and University Lecturer/ Associate Professor in Patristics in the Faculty of Theology and Religion in the University of Oxford since 1993. Since 2014, he has held the title of Professor of Early Christian Studies. His books include Origen against Plato (2002), Catholicity and Heresy in the Early Church (2009), Image, Word and God in the Early Christian Centuries (2012), Religions of the Constantinian Empire (2015), and Aristotle and Early Christian Thought (2019).
Contributors
Allen Brent is former Professor of Early Christian History and Iconography, King’s College, London, Visiting Professor at the Augustinianum (Lateran University), Rome, and Fellow of St Edmund’s College, Cambridge. He is co-editor, with Professor Markus Vincent, of Studia Patristica and editorial board advisor for Vetera Christianorum. His most recent book was Cyprian and Roman Carthage (2010).
Dylan M. Burns holds a Ph.D. from Yale University and is a research associate at the Freie Universitat Berlin. He has published widely on Gnosticism, later Greek philosophy, Manichaeism, and their modern reception, including his books Apocalypse of the Alien God (2014) and Did God Care? (2020).
Sophie Cartwright has a Ph.D. in patristic theology from the University of Edinburgh and is author of The Theological Anthropology of Eustathius of Antioch (2015).
Kevin Corrigan is Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Interdisciplinary Humanities in the Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. His recent publications include Love, Friendship, Beauty and the Good: Plato, Aristotle, and the Later Tiadition (2018).
Scot Douglass is Professor in the Herbst Program of Engineering, Ethics & Society and Director of the Engineering Honors Program at the University of Colorado Boulder. He is author of Theology of the Gap: Cappadocian Language Theory and the Trinitarian Controversy (2005), co-editor with Morwenna Ludlow of Reading the Church Fathers (2011) and is currently working on In/Between an Event: Paul, Dostoevsky and the Christian Now.
Mark Edwards has been Tutor in Theology at Christ Church, Oxford, and University Lecturer/ Associate Professor in Patristics in the Faculty of Theology and Religion in the University of Oxford since 1993. Since 2014, he has held the title of Professor of Early Christian Studies. His books include Origen against Plato (2002), Catholicity and Heresy in the Early Church (2009), Image, Word and God in the Early Christian Centuries (2012), Religions of the Constantinian Empire (2015), and Aristotle and Early Christian Thought (2019).
Benjamin Gleede is currently Privatdozent at Zurich University and holder of a Werner Heisenberg fellowship at Tubingen University. His focal areas of research are ancient cosmology, Christology and textual criticism.
Orna Harari is a faculty member at the Department of Classics and the Department of Philosophy at Tel Aviv University. Her research focuses on ancient logic, theories of knowledge, and philosophy of mathematics in Aristotle and the ancient commentators on Aristotle.
Matya$ Havrda is a senior researcher at the Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences. He has published The So-Called Eighth Stromateus by Clement of Alexandria (2016) and studies dealing with ethical and epistemological issues in early Christian thought and Galenic medicine. In cooperation with Pauline Koetschet, he is preparing a collection of fragments of Galen’s lost treatise On Demonstration.
Isabella Image writes and teaches on patristics and Late Antiquity. Her book The Human Condition in Hilary of Poitiers, based on her Oxford D. Phil. thesis, was published in 2017.
Aaron P. Johnson specializes in the intellectual cultures of Late Antiquity and is particularly interested in the thought and legacy of Porphyry of Tyre. His books have focused on Eusebius of Caesarea and Porphyry; he is currently working on the first English translation of Cyril of Alexandria’s apologetic treatise, Contra Julianum (in collaboration with Matthew Crawford).
Fabienne Jourdan is Researcher at the CNRS in Paris (“Habilitée a diriger des recherches”). She has published on Dionysos and on Orphism in Antiquity, in Jewish-Hellenistic literature and in the Church Fathers (2003-2011). She works presently on Middle Platonism and more specially on Plutarch and Numenius. Her new translated and commented edition of Numenius’ Fragments will be published soon.
Thomas Jiirgasch is a junior professor of Early Christian Studies at the University of Ttbingen. He studied theology and philosophy in Freiburg and Oxford, and is the author of Theoria versus Praxis? Zur Entwicklung eines Prinzipienwissens im Bereich der Praxis in Antike und Spdtantike (2013). His research interests include the reception of Neoplatonism in early Christian thought (Boethius, Dionysius Ps-Areopagita), (late) ancient ethics, and semiotics.
George Karamanolis is a historian of philosophy working primarily on ancient philosophy while maintaining research interests also in Byzantine and Renaissance philosophy. He has published two monographs, Plato and Aristotle in Agreement? Platonists on Aristotle from Antiochus to Porphyry (2006), and The Philosophy of Early Christianity (2013) (revised edition forthcoming). He is Associate Professor in Philosophy in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Vienna.
John Peter Kenney is Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies at Saint Michael’s College. He is the author of The Mysticism of Saint Augustine: Rereading the Confessions (2005) and Contemplation and Classical Christianity: A Study in Augustine (2013), and co-editor of Christian Platonism: A History (forthcoming).
Dirk Krausmiller studied Greek and Latin literature at the universities of Giessen and Munich. Having held posts at the University of Birmingham, Dumbarton Oaks (Washington D.C.), Queen’s University Belfast and Mardin Artuklu University in Turkey, he now teaches and researches at the University of Vienna. He has published numerous studies of Byzantine philosophy and theology, with particular attention to the use of Aristotelian logic in Christology.
M. David Litwa is a scholar of ancient Mediterranean religions with a focus on early Christianity. His current appointment is at the Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry at the Australian Catholic University. Recent publications include How the Gospel Became History: Jesus and Mediterranean Myth (2019), Desiring Divinity (2016), and Posthuman Tiansformation (2021).
Winrich Lohr is University Professor (Chair of Historical Theology: Ancient and Medieval) at the Faculty of Theology of the Ruprecht-Karls-Universitit in Heidelberg/Germany. Publications include Basilides und seine Schule: Eine Studie zur Theologie- und Kirchengeschichte des zweiten Jahrhunderts (1996); Pélage et le Pélagianisme (2015); Reallexikon fiir Antike und Christentum (RAC; co-editor).
Josef Léssl is Professor of Religion and Theology at Cardiff University, specializing in the study of early Christianity, patristics, and Late Antiquity. He is co-editor of A Companion to Religion in Late Antiquity (2018) and executive editor of Vigiliae Christianae: A Review of Early Christian Life and Language.
Andrew Louth is Professor Emeritus of Patristic and Byzantine Studies, University of Durham. His research has largely been in patristics, beginning with a monograph of Platonism and the Christian mystical tradition (1981; 2nd ed. with afterword, 2007), and monographs on Denys the Areopagite (1989), Maximus the Confessor (1996) and John Damascene (2002).
Giulio Maspero is Full Professor at the Faculty of Theology of the Pontifical University of Holy Cross (Rome). He is a member of the Association Internationale des Etudes Patristiques (AIEP) and a full member of the Pontifical Academy of Theology (PATH). He has published mainly on Gregory of Nyssa, Trinitarian theology and the relationship between philosophy and theology.
Kristina A. Meinking is Associate Professor of Classical Studies at Elon University (North Carolina, U.S.). Her research focuses on intellectual history, religion and politics in the fourth century C.E. as well as late antique literature and historiography.
Teresa Morgan is Professor of Graeco-Roman history at the University of Oxford and Nancy Bissell Turpin Fellow and Tutor in Ancient History at Oriel College, and McDonald-Agape Professor-Elect of New Testament and Early Christianity at Yale Divinity School. Her writing spans ancient cultural history and the history of ideas, ethics, New Testament studies and patristics, and she is currently writing a three-volume history and theology of early Christian faith.
Sébastien Morlet is Maitre de conférences at Sorbonne Université (Paris). As a specialist of Greek patristics, he is the director of the series Histoire de la littérature grecque chrétienne (vol. 4-6). His main monographs are Christianisme et philosophie: Les premieres confrontations I-VI s. (2014), and Les chrétiens et la culture: conversion d’un concept I-VI s. (2016).
Carl O’Brien is a lecturer in the Department of Philosophy, Ruprecht-Karls-Universitat Heidelberg. Publications include The Demiurge in Ancient Thought (2015), Seele und Materie im Neuplatonismus/Soul and Matter in Neoplatonism (co-edited with J. Halfwassen and T. Dangel, 2016), Platonic Love from Antiquity to the Renaissance (co-edited with J. Dillon, forthcoming) and a forthcoming translation of selected writings of J. Halfwassen: Plotinus, Neoplatonism and the Transcendence of the One.
Joseph S. O’Leary studied with Pierre Nautin and Charles Kannengiesser in Paris, and brought a Heidegger-inspired hermeneutic to patristic texts in Questioning Back: The Overcoming of Metaphysics in Christian Tradition (1985) and Christianisme et philosophie chez Origéne (2011), as well as in essays on Augustine and Gregory of Nyssa. Living in Japan since 1983, he taught literature at Sophia University, Tokyo and worked on Buddhist-Christian theology at the Nanzan Institute for Religion and Culture, Nagoya.
Andrew Radde-Gallwitz is Associate Professor in the Program of Liberal Studies at the University of Notre Dame. He is the author, most recently, of Gregory of Nyssa’s Doctrinal Works: A Literary Study (2018), and he serves as editor and translator for the Cambridge Edition of Early Christian Writings.
aria L.E. Ramelli has been Professor of Roman History and of Theology, endowed Chair (Angelicum) of Theology (Hon., Durham), Member of the Centre for the Study of Platonism (Cambridge), Senior Fellow and Visiting Professor at major universities: Oxford, Durham, Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, Columbia, Sacred Heart U., B.U., Emory, N.D., Chicago, Erfurt MWK etc.
Tuomas Rasimus is Docent at the University of Helsinki and Associate Professor at Université Laval. He has published widely on early Christianity, Gnosticism and Neoplatonism. He is the author of Paradise Reconsidered in Gnostic Mythmaking (2009) as well as (co-)editor of Stoicism in Early Christianity (2010), The Legacy of John (2010), and Gnosticism, Platonism and the Late Ancient World (2013).
Mark Reasoner is Professor of Theology at Marian University (Indianapolis). He is the author of The Strong and the Weak: Romans 14:1—15:13 in Context and Romans in Full Circle: A History of Interpretation.
Christoph Riedweg is Professor of Classics/Greek at the University of Zurich. His main research areas include Late Archaic poetry and philosophy (in particular Orphism, Pythagoreanism), tragedy, Jewish-Hellenistic and early Christian literature, as well as Platonism and its reception in the Early Imperial Period and in Late Antiquity. His publications include the edition of Cyril of Alexandria’s against Julian 1-5 (2016).
Runar M. Thorsteinsson is Professor of New Testament Studies at the University of Iceland. He earned his doctoral degree at Lund University in Sweden in 2003, subsequently working as an assistant professor and researcher at Lund University and the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, before moving to Iceland in 2013. His field of interest includes Pauline studies as well as early Christian philosophy.
Chiara Ombretta Tommasi is Associate Professor of History of Religions at the University of Pisa. She is a member of LEM, Laboratoire sur les Monothéismes, UMR 8584 (CNRS, Paris, France), and was nominated Fellow of the Academia Europaea in 2019. Her most recent publications include a commentary on Arnobius’ Against the Gentiles (2017).
Panayiotis Tzamalikos is Professor of Philosophy at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. He is the author, among others, of the books The Concept of Time in Origen; Origen: Cosmology and Ontology of Time; Origen: Philosophy of History and Eschatology; Anaxagoras, Origen, and Neoplatonism — The Legacy of Anaxagoras to Classical and Late Antiquity; Origen: New Fragments from the Commentary on Matthew.
Peter Van Nuffelen is Professor of Ancient History at Ghent University, Belgium, with a particular interest in early Christianity, ancient philosophy and Late Antiquity. Recent books include Penser la tolérance durant l’ Antiquité tardive (2018).
lrini-Fotini Viltanioti is Associate Professor of Ancient Philosophy at the University of Crete and an affliated member of the KULeuven’s Institute of Philosophy.
Sarah Klitenic Wear is Professor of Classics at Franciscan University of Steubenville. She has published monographs on Platonism, as well as articles and edited volumes. She co-edits, with Frederick Lauritzen, the book series Theandrites: Studies in Byzantine Philosophy and Christian Platonism (Franciscan University Press).
Johannes Zachhuber is Professor of Historical and Systematic Theology at the University of Oxford. He holds degrees from the University of Oxford and Humboldt University, Berlin. His publications include Human Nature in Gregory of Nyssa (1999), Theology as Science in NineteenthCentury Germany (2013), and The Rise of Christian Theology and the End of Ancient Metaphysics (2020).
Anna Zhyrkova is a professor of philosophy at Department of Philosophy, Jesuit University Ignatianum in Krakow. She received her Ph.D. degree in patristic theology and habilitation degree in ancient philosophy. She specializes in the field of Neoplatonism and in Greek patristic philosophical thought. She was awarded grants of Poland’s National Science Center for studying philosophical outcomes of Christological debates of the fifth and sixth centuries and is a member of a team working on a new Polish edition of Plotinus’ Enneads within the National Program of Development of Humanities established by the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of Poland.
Introduction
Mark Edwards
Objectives
The purpose of this volume is to furnish both scholars and students with a comprehensive survey of the uses in early Christian thought of the tools, the tropes and the themes of philosophy as that term was commonly understood in the ancient world. Contributors of accredited expertise have been asked to furnish chapters on individual thinkers, on the pagan schools of thought which served as a foil or as a quarry to these thinkers, and on certain perennial topics of discourse which engaged the most philosophical minds of the church in the first six centuries of the Christian era. The value of such an enterprise must lie in its having no controlling narrative, in being as hospitable to the infantile polemics of Epiphanius as to the seminal improvisations of Clement or Gregory of Nyssa, in accommodating both the opportunistic scepticism of Arnobius and the fathomless meditations of Augustine. As the titles of the chapters explain themselves, and as the ordering of chapters within each section is either chronological or arbitrary, no editorial summary could confer a specious unity on the volume, and historians of the early church will judge it by the accuracy and completeness of its contents. Philosophers and theologians, on the other hand, may have a particular interest in the publisher’s choice of a title for this volume — not “Early Christianity and Philosophy” but “Early Christian Philosophy” — which suggests that philosophy was an intrinsic element in early Christian thought, or in other words that the characteristic engagements of believers with philosophy in the Roman world were not apologetic or polemical but constructive, not passive or sequacious but dynamic, and even at times reciprocal.
To say this is to say something more than that Christians were “influenced” by philosophy, a metaphor which could easily imply that the church was merely the last receptacle in an automatic process of diffusion. It is to say that Christianity took its place beside the existing schools as a creed with its own foundations and entailing a distinct way of life, but at the same time capable of defining and communicating its tenets in terms that entitled it to a hearing not only in courts of law but at the bar of reason. Banal as it must seem to many, this thesis has been denied by both the friends and the enemies of Christianity, both consciously and unconsciously, from antiquity to the present; on the other hand, it has sometimes been maintained, by ancient as well as by modern apologists, with a vigour that belies the insistence of all the acknowledged doctors of the church that human reason is blind without a divine revelation. This introduction therefore will attempt to explain how early Christian thinkers undertook to coordinate reason with faith without betraying either the Word of God or their likeness to God as rational creatures, with results that set them apart from the other schools without rendering them incomprehensible. The final section will argue that, although these results will not satisfy the majority of modern theologians, it remains possible to profit by the example of the first Christians even when we do not defer to them as fathers. We cannot treat them as they treated the Bible, but we can read them as patiently as they read Plato or Aristotle, and with a similar hope of gleaning the elements of a new philosophy that will at once supersede them and preserve them from obsolescence.
Why philosophise?
For more than one reason, it would be a fallacy to imagine that the adoption of philosophy was a means by which some Christians “came to terms” (Grant 1988: 9) with the ambient society. The texts that we call apologies, although this word signifies a defence in court, were not calculated to win the goodwill of readers whose religion they held up to sustained derision; they turn the charges back on their accusers with all the truculence of Socrates, and when any Christian prisoner addresses his “apology” to a Roman assize, it is with the intention of joining Socrates on the roll of martyrs (see further Frede 2006; Edwards 2009: 38-39). Plato in his Gorgias acknowledges that this is the likely fate of one who takes pleasure in baiting the sophists or teachers of political science, yet despises their forensic artifices; whereas his interlocutors warned Socrates that one day he would have nothing to say in court (Gorgias 486a-c), Christ positively enjoins his own disciples to prepare nothing for that occasion but leave all to the Holy Spirit (Luke 12.12). It might seem that the apologists have preempted his assistance by assuming the philosopher's cloak (Justin, Tiypho 1); but in doing so they were at best exchanging obloquy for ridicule, as Plato confessed in the Theaetetus (174a—-176a), with his caricature of the sage as one who does not know his way to the agora, never hears the news of the city, and fails to perceive that his welfare depends on playing toady to his political masters. Cicero, the doyen of Latin philosophy, commends it as an occupation for leisure and a source of consolation, but denies that either a Stoic or an Epicurean can serve the state if he lives strictly by his own creed (On Ends 2.60; Defence of Murena 61-62). Seneca, who professes to be a Stoic, admits without shame that “little remained” of his youthful austerities when he took up urban life (Letters to Lucilius 18.108-115). The first apologists wrote in the era of the “second sophistic”, to quote the name conferred upon it by its historian Philostratus (Lives of the Sophists), and Philostratus was at pains to distinguish the sophist, who owes his livelihood to the cities and wealthy patrons whom he flatters with recondite eloquence, from the more angular type who cherishes his philosophy with no thought of his own advancement or the public good.
Why then be a philosopher when one was already an alien? One answer might be that even those who are willing to die for their faith might wish to persuade themselves and the world that they have not died without a reason. This was the indictment brought against the Christian martyrs by philosophers of all schools in the second century — by Galen the Platonist (Differences of the Pulse 3.3), Lucian the occasional Cynic (Runaways 1), Celsus the putative Epicurean, the rigid Epictetus (Discourses 4.7.6) and his eclectic fellow-Stoic, the Emperor Marcus (Meditations 11.3): philosophers, they argued, suffer execution or suicide when they must, as a demonstration of rational fortitude, whereas Christians quit the world only because they have not learned how to live (see further Gathercole 2017). No way of life in late antiquity was more distinctive than that of the Christians, who, for all their professed indifference to dress and diet, were ostentatious to the point of recklessness in their abstinence from sacrifice, idolatry and the swearing of oaths to the emperor; proudly declaring that though they married they did not kill their children, they also commended lifelong virginity, broke up existing marriages between Christian and pagans, and gave further evidence of their unsocial tendencies by eschewing military service, condemning a number of other trades and refusing magistracies (Tertullian, On the Soldier’s Crown; On Idolatry 5; Origen, Against Celsus 8.73). If all these aftronts to the common sense of the pagan world were not to be ascribed to mere perversity or “hatred of the human race” (Tacitus, Annals 15.44.4), it was necessary to give them an intellectual foundation: this the apologists undertook to furnish by showing that the principles of Christian thought were in fact the very principles that had guided the best philosophers to their deaths.
For as we have been reminded by Pierre Hadot (1995), philosophy in the ancient world was more than an intellectual gymnastic: it was also a summons to moral endeavour, setting before the student a certain ideal of the good and equipping him to pursue it for all that the body, the world and the senses may say in mockery or remonstrance. The Stoic was known by his fortitude, the Epicurean by his equanimity, the Cynic by his indifference to precept and precedent; even the Peripatetic, who never disowned the logic, the natural science or the theology of his master as the Stoics disowned the theoretical writings of Chrysippus (Epictetus, Discourses 1.3), prized these studies only because he held that eudaimonia or happiness cannot be achieved without satisfying our natural thirst for knowledge. As Arthur Darby Nock (1933) observed before Hadot, philosophy is the true analogue in the ancient world to what we now call religion, if we understand by “religion” neither doctrine alone nor morality alone but a coinherent unity of life and thought in which each is master and servant to the other. A goal so much at odds with the vulgar craving for animal pleasures and social approval was not commonly sought, then or now, and still less commonly achieved. At the same time — and more perhaps then than now — the amusement that it inspired was apt to be tempered by admiration for the philosopher’s self-sufficiency and his dauntless freedom of speech — his parrhésia, in Cynic parlance — in the presence of those before whom most would tremble. The ancient republic of letters celebrated its philosophers as the Pharisees (according to the New Testament) revered the tombs of the prophets whom their own forefathers had slain (Matthew 23.29; Luke 11.47).
Parrhésia, freedom of speech before God and his creatures, was also the boast of the primitive church: the more successful Christians were in assimilating themselves to the philosophers, the harder it would be for pagan writers to disparage them as ignorant desperadoes. The harder it would be, indeed, to put them to death at all, for, setting aside the few infamous exceptions of which we have spoken, the norm in the pagan world was to let the Cynic go his way and to laugh at the Stoic behind his back without depriving either of his right to differ. Philostratus, though he championed the public rhetorician against the thinking pedant, assumed that every reader of his Life of Apollonius of Tyana would take the side of the barefoot sage, not only against the emperor but against his more parochial rivals, the temporising philosopher and the superstitious priest. He also assumes that the reader will agree with him that miracles are not the wise man’s currency but a bauble to be tossed now and then to the ignorant; that we make ourselves kin to the gods by attuning the mind to their inspirations, not by disavowing our natural fathers; and that when such a favourite of heaven is falsely arraigned, he will possess both the eloquence to refute the charges (8.6-7) and the power to escape at the moment of his choice (8.8). The parody of the gospels in this work, extending even to the unprecedented depiction of pagan exorcisms (3.38-39; Edwards 2006), indicates that he could no longer hope, like Galen, to dispose of the pretensions of Christianity in an aside. Half a century earlier, the Tiue Logos of Celsus had borne reluctant witness to the necessity of meeting these claims with the weapons of philosophy. Lucian of Samosata, a friend perhaps of this same Celsus, makes a similar concession when he compares the Christians to their disadvantage with the Cynics, hitherto the most maligned of the ancient sects (Peregrinus 11-14; Edwards 1989). By proxy he confers on them the distinction of being fellow-atheists with the Epicureans (Alexander 38). When Celsus taxes Christians with bad citizenship, he repeats an accusation that was levelled against both Cynics and Epicureans (Downing 1993); while the avoidance of pagan altars was mandatory for all Christians, Plotinus reveals that the Gnostics had become atheists twice over by compounding this offence with an Epicurean denial of any divine solicitude for the world.
From all of which it follows that, if the Cynic and the Epicurean are nonetheless philosophers, so is the Christian. There is no reason to suppose that in the last case, any more than in the others, the assumption of this persona was merely strategic. The recognised objects of the true philosopher were to understand the nature of the world and to live with integrity; a Christian, actuated as he must be by the same motives, would be discontented on his own account, and not only in his role as an apologist, if he failed to ground his faith on rational premises or to demonstrate its logical cohesion. In the novel entitled the Clementine Recognitions, the vision which converts the young protagonist fulfils his desire to understand his own origins and that of the universe that he inhabits. Both the Apostolic Constitutions and the Catechetical Oration of Gregory of Nyssa suggest that the instruction of a neophyte in the fourth century included a proof that the world was the product of a single creator; in the second century, most apologists took the complementary approach of exposing the patent absurdity of polytheism and the efforts of pagan sculptors to distinguish one counterfeit deity from another. Augustine in his Confessions leaves us the record of a mind that was driven from one phantasm of knowledge to another by his recurrent questioning of received opinions on the origin of evil, the nature of matter and the constitution of the soul. However skilfully Christians plied the tools of classical rhetoric, they styled themselves philosophers to show that, unlike the sophists, they valued the arts of persuasion only insofar as they led to knowledge.
On method
It is necessary to labour this point that philosophy commences with inquiry because it has all too often been deemed sufficient to stack up quotations from Plato or the Stoics to prove the adherence of an author to one of these schools. Where quotations fail, mere similarity of tenets (as perceived by the modern critic) will furnish a warrant for commending or denouncing him as a Middle Platonist or an Aristotelian; since, in many instances, the argument leaps from one prooftext to another, taking no account (for example) of the crude facts of chronology, it is hardly to be expected that the more abstruse question, “how did the author arrive at this opinion?” will be mooted, let alone answered. Yet even the Greek doxographers, superficial as they are in their juxtapositions of the dogmas held by each sect on successive items in a disjointed inventory of topics, are aware that each begins from different premises, some acknowledging only the evidence of the senses while others maintained that the intellect has access to a more permanent order of being, and some appealing first to common notions while others doubted all that they heard but advanced no dogmas of their own. We may say if we will that Plato and Aristotle both assert the primacy of form to matter, that Plato anticipates the Stoics in rejecting the necessity of external goods to happiness, and that at the same time he agrees with Epicurus in equating the greatest happiness with the maximum of pleasure. If we deduce that all thinkers in antiquity were Platonists, ignoring their disparate views on the number and nature of the gods and on the composition and destiny of the soul, we must consign to the flames every history of Greek thought that has ever been written since the first book of Aristotle’s Metaphysics.
It was Nietzsche who introduced the term “agonistic” (from Greek agén, meaning a public competition) to describe the Greek world in its creative ferment (1890/1973). When a Greek wins fame by speaking, another Greek will aspire to fame by speaking against him, all the more so if his rival be a Homer or a Plato. Nothing is more Greek than to contradict another Greek, or even, as Plato sometimes does, the Greeks at large. And thus there could be no clearer manifestation of the Greek spirit in Christian thought than to set up a new philosophy which professed to explode the errors of the others while securing the ends for which they were established and affording a more secure rationale for the truths upon which they had come by accident. Again the point needs to be laboured because the uniform response among theologians to the appearance of recent monographs contending that Origen was not a Platonist has been to accuse the authors of a polarisation of Christianity and Hellenism which, we are given to understand, is long outmoded (see e.g. Martens 2015). One assumes that it is the hasty spirit of “advocacy” (Martens 2019: 188) that has blinded them to the obvious rejoinder that if opposition to Plato is opposition to Hellenism, the true barbarians of the ancient world would not be the Christians but Aristotle, Epicurus, Diogenes and the Stoics. Classicists, of course, oppose these figures to one another all the time without denying the Hellenic franchise to any of them, and also without implying that one must be wrong and the other right. Once we have laid aside our own convictions, the judgment that Origen is not a Platonist implies no more disparagement of the Academy than of the church.
The need for light, in a controversy that Origen himself has done much to obscure, can be gauged from the most recent farrago of evidence purporting to show that Origen “rejected a literal [that is, somatic] paradise” in his exegesis of Genesis 2-3. Some of these set the Garden of Eden apart from the present world, others locate the paradise of the saints in a new earth, others merely assert the preexistence of souls (among which some assert only preexistence in the womb), and the least relevant of all give an allegorical sense to paradise, as Origen does with all historical matter in the Old Testament, without either denying or ascribing any form of corporeality to the biblical paradise of Adam and Eve. Ifa belief in a heaven of strictly disembodied souls were the diagnostic of Platonism, none of these texts, except for those in the first group, would have any bearing on the question. On the other hand, it would be easy enough to reconcile both the first and the second groups with the eschatology of the Phaedo, in which the abode of souls after quitting the body is a terrestrial place, inaccessible to the mortal element in us, where all that deserves to exist is immune to change and endowed with a purity and intensity of which our senses now grasp only the shadow (Phaedo 90b—115a). That Origen held to some form of preexistence is common ground among scholars; his arguments for the rationality of the soul in the womb contradict our one surviving treatise on the subject by a Platonist, but the mere existence of Porphyry’s Ad Gaurum testifies to disagreement within the school. The same author’s Cave of the Nymphs reveals that Platonists were no less willing than Origen to treat the same text as a record of history and as a subject for allegorical reflection. Thus, if mere coincidence between elements of Platonic thought and elements of Origen’s thought is sufficient proof, there can be no doubt that Origen is a Platonist; the price of proving the case in this way, however, is that we make it unfalsifiable, since any passage in Origen which strictly affirmed the incorporeality of paradise could be cited to show that he held to some other species of Platonism. A thesis worthy of academic discussion must be one that could be refuted, and for this reason if for no other the question of Origen’s Platonism must be canvassed with respect to first principles, not with respect to anecdotal agreements, however specious.
Avoiding the genealogical fallacy
To borrow a striking instance from philology, the French for “water” is “eau”, and the Hittite is ‘“watar”, but we do not for that reason deduce that the relation of English to Hittite is more organic than the relation of English to French. An analogue from modern philosophy may be instructive for those who are familiar with that discipline. In ethics it has been customary to distinguish deontologists, who hold that moral principles are normative without reference to any other factor, from consequentialists, who hold that an act should be judged by its consequences, which commonly (though not always) means by its tendency to increase the sum of happiness. While utilitarians measure happiness by pleasure, others appeal to an Aristotelian notion of eudaimonia, often translated as human flourishing. Among deontologists, some may invoke divine commandments, others a universal intuition; Kantians define a moral act as one that affirms our autonomy as rational beings. Opposed to all these schools are the emotivists, who contend that judgments of right or wrong are merely strong expressions of our liking or distaste. Debate between the partisans of each theory can be keen, but if one were to ask them collectively their opinion of murder, paedophilia, theft or vandalism, they would answer with one voice that these are actions to be eschewed. It would obviously be absurd to conclude that emotivism is merely a branch of intuitionism because exemplars of both agree that arson and shoplifting are crimes. It might be more illuminating to compare their views on abortion, adultery or benign deceit; but if this were our sole criterion, we might be surprised to find that two philosophers who agreed on almost everything were nonetheless engaged in ceaseless polemic because the judgments of one were based on intuition and those of the other on a calculation of social benefits. The typical question to students therefore would not be “‘is this action right or wrong?”, but “what is the premiss by which our calling it right or wrong is justified?”
This is not to deny that Origen, like Clement of Alexandria before him and like many of his future imitators, was conscious of affinities between the dogmas of Platonism and his beliefs as a Christian. In certain passages of his work Against Celsus, indeed, he accentuates and perhaps exaggerates these similarities. At the same time, throughout this lucubration he contrasts the beliefs of Christians — which to him are “our” beliefs — with those of all other Greek philosophies, and almost always with an assertion or implication of superiority. Thus Plato may speak well when he affirms that it is difficult to find out the Father and Maker of this universe, but not so well as the scriptures which declare this to be impossible without his own revelation (Against Celsus 7.42; Plato, Timaeus 28c). By this revelation the scripture means not only itself but the truth that was secretly embodied in its many words until the one eternal Word assumed our flesh and thereby rendered visible to the mind what remains invisible to the eye. Origen does not follow Justin and Clement in ascribing to Plato a surreptitious knowledge of the Old Testament; for him it is enough to note that, if a Christian quoting Moses happens to agree with Plato, only the Greek falls prey to the suspicion of plagiarism. At no point in his reply to Celsus does Origen concede that any doctrine can be accepted on the authority of Plato; at no point does he admit that the Christian has any use for pagan thought except when it contributes to the exegesis or vindication of the sacred text. In a letter to his disciple Gregory Thaumaturgus, he described the appropriation of philosophical and philological tools from the Greeks as a spoiling of the Egyptians — that is, a theft which is in fact no theft but a retrieval of those treasures which were loaned to the nations only until such time as they were required by the people of God (Philokalia 13).
The question is not in reality whether Origen subscribed to Plato’s theory of preexistence, since it is universally granted that he did not. Few students of his works would now accept the ancient charge that he taught the transmigration of souls; no one doubts that in his thought the descent of this soul, whatever occasions it, is a descent from God, and not (as Plato taught) from an independent realm of forms (Commentary on John 20.162). And if we accept, on the testimony of his Byzantine critics, that he believed all rational beings to have begun their existence as disembodied intellects, some of whom then sank to the condition of angels, others to that of souls and others again to that of daemons, we are attributing to him a doctrine that could not even have been formulated by Plato. On the other hand, it is equally impossible to deny that he held some theory of preexistence — perhaps indeed more than one theory, since he manifestly affirms a fall of angels (Against Celsus 6.43), a descent — and at times a fall — of souls into bodies, a fall of the first two human beings in paradise (whatever this name may signify at Against Celsus 7.39), and a fall of the soul from innocence in its present state of embodiment (First Principles 1.3.8-1.4.1). A Platonic origin might be proposed for the second and fourth, but not so readily for the first and third. We need not doubt that Origen was conscious of philosophic antecedents, and it is plausibly surmised that he made use of nascent Platonic speculations in his attempts to conceive the body after death. It is possible that his own conjectures informed the thinking of Platonists after him, as they clearly informed the thinking of Didymus, Evagrius and other Christian authors (see Schibli 1992; Szymanska-Kuta 2015). No one is arguing, therefore, that he refused to engage in dialogue with the Platonists, any more than anyone is arguing that he was in all respects a disciple of Plato. What then is the true subject of this controversy, the prize for which we so often appear to be fighting a battle by night?
The issue, I would suggest, is whether Origen first devised a philosophy and then looked for a cosmetic legitimation of this in scripture, or whether he turns to philosophy, as he himself avers in his letter to Gregory Thaumaturgus (Philokalia 13), as a means of elucidating the genuine problems which the scriptures have thrown in his way as an exegete. Surely the onus of proof is on those who maintain the first view, in the teeth of Origen’s statement of his own method, and in the absence of any writing in his name that admits a first principle other than scriptural testimony. Origen discusses nothing, not even the flight of birds, without appealing to a book, and it is surely his unshakable allegiance to the authority of every word in scripture that requires him to entertain some belief in the preexistence of souls and yet forbids him to hold any settled and uniform theory. Knowing that the church countenances no doctrine of transmigration, he nonetheless surmises that Esau sinned in a previous life (First Principles 2.9.6). Fear of selfcontradiction would have forced him to be more circumspect were he merely a philosopher; as an exegete, however, he must account for the decision of a just God to love Jacob and to hate Esau before either of them had performed one work that could merit reward or reprobation. Where exactly Esau had lived his previous life — in the presence of God, in paradise, in another human body or in his mother’s womb — he cannot say, because he does not have a prefabricated doctrine; he derives from Plato at most a dim intimation of a solution to a riddle that was not of Plato’s making, since Plato does not have to defend a doctrine of special providence, administered by an almighty, omniscient and omnibenevolent God.
The scriptures thus play for Origen the role that the senses play for an Epicurean and common notions for a Peripatetic: if his goal, like that of the Platonists, is the vision of the invisible, he does not identify this object with the realm of ideas or with an impersonal form of the Good, but with God himself, the very God whom we meet as Logos when we apprehend the most profound, or “mystical”, sense of scripture. No true parallel can be found in pagan literature to this apotheosis of the text. It is true, as George Karamanolis has observed (2014: 14-15), that in late antiquity the commonest mode of reasoning for Peripatetics and Platonists is commentary on a magisterial corpus which is assumed to be free of error and contradiction. For all that, the infallibility of the text was not so much a matter of faith as a working hypothesis, and hence it was required of the expositor that his reading should make not only good sense but good philosophy — that is, that he would be constantly reinforcing by his own arguments the authority of the man whom he called his master (see further Sedley 1989, 1997). It was not considered treason to avail oneself for this purpose of the best thoughts of other teachers: Plutarch wrote a treatise On the [Epicurean Maxim] “Live Unknown”, while Seneca could say of the Stoics, “we are under no king; each offers his own defence” (Letters to Lucilius 4.1.33.4; cf. Rast 1983). Since they meant by hairesis a legitimate choice of one’s own way of life from the rival schools, they would not have understood the contention of Hippolytus that philosophy is the root of every heresy; if they had said, with Tertullian, “what has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” (Indictment of Heretics 7), they would not have meant that nothing can be learned from Jews, but that nothing could be learned in the Jewish manner. To revere what is written simply because it is written was notoriously the way of both the old Israel and the new, but it was not, as Galen protested, the way of a Greek.
Christianity and philosophy in the modern era
Tertullian and Hippolytus were by no means the last to stigmatise philosophy as the nurse of error and mother of infidelity. Even Anselm, when he undertakes to prove from first principles not only God’s existence but the necessity of the atonement and the constitution of the Trinity, adds the caveat that he is writing only for the fool who does not believe, as a Christian’s faith requires no paper fortifications (Gasper 2004: 89-124). The church condemned the thesis of the Muslim Averroes that philosophy may lead us to one conclusion and theology to another (Hisette 1977); yet Scotus adopts a similar position, and even Aquinas grants that philosophy offers cogent arguments for the eternity of the world (Cross 2006). His own work helped to rescue Aristotle from the censures under which he had fallen because of his espousal of this and other heretical doctrines; and even thereafter, Aristotle’s dominion over the western mind was always contingent on his being thought to have furnished rational proofs for those things which are taught in scripture. Even before the western reformation, his supremacy was imperilled by the revival of Greek and consequent rediscovery of Plato. It hardly needed Gemistus Pletho to point out that the active role of God in creation, the immortality of the individual and the sufficiency of virtue for happiness even in the present are Christian dogmas which are written on the surface of Plato’s works but can be wrested only with brazen ingenuity from those of Aristotle (Woodhouse 1986: 192-214, 283-307). The coincidence between Plato and the scriptures had the further effect of persuading the reading scholars of Greece and Italy that a close approximation to revealed truth could be achieved by natural reason. While Ficino maintained the superiority of the church’s teaching, Pletho covertly prophesied that Christian and Muslim alike would learn to adopt a higher philosophy, while Pico della Mirandola insinuates in his Oration on the Dignity of Man that the Bible is at best one voice in the universal choir of truth.
The Protestant reformers thus had reason to abhor both Plato and Aristotle, the first as an enemy of revelation and the second as the sponsor of a counterfeit marriage between revealed and natural theology. Luther rejects both transubstantiation and the Aristotelian language of its exponents, forgetting perhaps that Aristotle himself would have found all sacramental theology incomprehensible. This is not an appeal from secularising logic to the mystery of the gospel, for there is nothing more mysterious, if we mean by this paradoxical and intractable to reason, than the Latin doctrine of transubstantiation. In his sacramental theology, as in his early defence of Augustinian predestination against the quibblers who refused to derive a consequent necessity from the necessity of the consequent, Luther is the enemy of all paradox that is not based on the plain sense of the gospel. No more than Augustine is he the enemy of reason, so long as it is understood that the lamp of reason is faith and that the pillars of faith are Paul and the evangelists, studied in the original Greek. Had the geocentric arrangement of the planets been called into question in his hearing, he would certainly have sided with Aristotle against the Platonism of Nicholas of Cusa and his own disciple Johannes Kepler; but he would have demurred had Galileo’s inquisitors given more weight to their prooftexts from the De Caelo than to Genesis 1.14-15 and Joshua 10.12.
Lorenzo Valla’s discovery that the works of Dionysius the Areopagite were pseudonymous (Luibheid 1987: 38-39) delighted Luther because it deprived the papacy of its sole apostolic witness to the sacerdotal character of the priesthood. In the eyes of his 20th-century disciples, the crime of the author was not so much his assumption of a false name as his deft but dishonest permutation of diverse texts from scripture into a system indistinguishable from Platonism; only as neighbour to the school of Proclus did he deserve the title Areopagite, but according to Adolf von Harnack he was by no means the first professing Christian to make his spiritual home in Athens. The apologists were mere deists (1888: 460), and even those who purported, as Origen does, to be on the side of the apostles against the Gnostics were complicit in this substitution of the wisdom of the schools for the Word of God (1888: 571). Arguing a similar thesis, Anders Nygren (1930, 1936) proclaims that Christian agape is a selfless and sacrificial love, which seeks the good of all creatures but itself and is therefore wholly irreconcilable with the eros of the philosophers and their Pharisaic imitators, who cultivate solitary ecstasies in the present world as a foretaste of deliverance from the body in the next. Platonism is thus for both these Lutherans a distemper from which the church has yet to rid itself; they are far from agreeing, however, on the remedy, for Harnack’s Jesus preaches the infinite value of the human soul (1900: 41-45), whereas Nygren, like his admirer Barth, maintains that no creature has any claim to worth except as an object of gratuitous divine love. Their English contemporary Dean Inge (1926: 1-27), perhaps the most zealous Protestant of the four, commends the Platonic strain in Christian thought on the grounds that it teaches us not to rely on lifeless sacraments but to seek the unmediated presence of God, as Luther himself enjoined in full accord with Christ.
Philosophy makes common cause with faith as Inge conceives it, whereas for Nygren and Harnack alike it is the antonym of a faith which they define in ways that are equally antonymic to one another. The Roman church, which looks more kindly on natural theology, has endorsed philosophy as a propaedeutic and ancillary to its own teaching, while asserting that there are also many truths which are not discerned without inspiration. So long as its preeminent philosopher is Aquinas, it cannot sever its ties with Greek philosophy, even if there is doubt as to whether the saint is more of a Neoplatonist than an Aristotelian. In the Anglican world, it seems that each new revolution has been hostile to the Greeks, whether the appeal has been made to common sense with Locke, to first principles with Bishop Berkeley, to the catholic tradition with the Tractarians, to the conscience of the nation with Arnold and Kingsley, to the power of the Cross with evangelicalism, to the wholeness of Christ with Lux Mundi, to Heidegger and Hebrew with John Robinson, to an undulant modernity with Don Cupitt or to a gilded pre-modernity with Radical Orthodoxy. Most of these movements are marked by a thoroughly English distaste for otherworldliness, which in recent times has often taken the form of polemic against the Platonic doctrine of transcendence. Whatever Plato himself may have said, this is generally understood as a denial of God’s immanence and his love for his creation, the second of which at least is a biblical doctrine. In certain quarters, Augustine is interchangeable with Plato, and his appeals to scripture are dashed aside in a manner which suggests that detailed exegesis is no more germane than the teaching of the Lyceum or the Academy to the modern standard of Christian belief (see e.g. Gunton 1993: 54-56).
Indeed, paradoxical as it may seem, the failure of western Christendom to produce a new system of thought to vie with those of the modern era may be traced to its waning belief in the authority, or at least the propositional truth, of scripture. Secure in the infallibility of the divine revelation, the Fathers and their mediaeval successors were armed in advance against all philosophical objections to their doctrines of divine freedom, the creation of all from nothing, the minute and pervasive guidance of mundane affairs or the sempiternity of the resurrection. The shaking of these foundations in the 18th century reduced much Anglican and Protestant teaching to a form that was deistic in all but name. Analytical philosophers in our own day have revived the deistic project of deducing from first principles the existence of a deity with all his classical attributes, and some have gone on, in the manner of Bishop Butler, to reason from this conclusion to the necessity, and hence the existence, of just such a revelation as is supposed by Christians to have been vouchsafed in the work of Christ and commemorated in the New Testament (Swinburne 2007). Whether or not it was true of Aquinas or Scotus, it is true of many modern controversialists that (to adapt the words of Macintyre 1990) their apologies for faith are based on reason, in defiance of the Augustinian precept that the basis of all reasoning is faith.
Even if such demonstrations have ever induced conviction in anyone but the author, it will not have been the conviction of an Augustine or an Aquinas since this very word implies to them that we are convinced not only of God’s existence but of our absolute dependence on his creative purpose and redemptive love. For them, this dependence entails that we are impotent to overcome either our finitude or our sin, and hence to know our Maker or even to know of him, without some unsolicited condescension on his part. This took the form initially of his speech through the prophets, then of the incarnation of his Word, and finally of that shaping of the first revelation in the light of the second which bequeathed to us that text which we call the written Word of God. Faith is thus essentially, and not accidentally, grounded in the disclosure of the infinite to the finite. Consequently, we cannot preserve Christianity by proceeding from some other ground than revelation once we have found that the scriptures can no longer sustain the claim to infallibility. The rejuvenation of Christian philosophy is not so likely to be achieved by slighting the canonical texts as by embracing those features of them — their obscurity, their inchoateness, their dissonance — which have hitherto been regarded as an obstacle to reasonable belief.
What modern admirers are apt to praise in the “Fathers” (as some still call them) is not their metaphysical acumen but their ability to cast speculative reasoning into a form that, however technical it may become, remains at once profoundly devotional and movingly homiletic. The divorce between exegesis and philosophy has brought with it a divorce between ordained and academic ministry, hence between preaching and teaching. Of course it cannot be otherwise, unless we can require our theology faculties once again to shut their doors to Copernicus, Darwin and the higher criticism. At the same time, it is umpossible, as David-Friedrich Strauss already saw (1902: 779-784), to proclaim one gospel in the church and another in the auditorium, if only because the ordinary believer is now educated enough to doubt the inerrancy of scripture.
Even those who are bold enough to set Holy Writ against science cannot long remain immune to the social changes, and the corresponding changes in domestic and public morality, which have been occasioned by the economic unification of the world, the increasing miscegenation of peoples and the lengthening of life. We cannot restore the patristic age of innocence, when the earth was a mere six thousand years old, the stars revolved around it and every sin under which it groaned could be traced to a single act of theft; we cannot assume that everyone has a god and that those who do not yet worship our God are idolaters who will easily be laughed out of their delusions. We cannot simply retrieve an integration of faith and gndsis from Clement of Alexandria, any more than we can use his works to justify the creation of a new gndsis to supersede the historic faith.
Between mere atavism and the surrender to alien gndsis is the way of those early Christians who, in a phrase that we are apt to employ too glibly, baptised the teachings of the Academy, the Lyceum and the Stoa (e.g. Rist 1994). Baptism in the early church, for those of a certain age at least, was performed by total immersion, signifying death to sin and rebirth to life in the body of Christ (Romans 6.4). Augustine and Origen might not have objected to expositions of the gospel that were couched in existentialist terminology — all the less so when they learned that the root of existentialism is the Lutheran, or rather Pauline and thoroughly catholic, principle that each of us stands alone in the presence of God — but they would have deplored any version of this philosophy that made us the only judges of our own conduct or appealed to a notion of personal authenticity against the authority of the prophetic word.
In their interpretations of this word, they not only borrowed the pagan device of allegory but applied it with a thoroughness and a ramified ingenuity that was never anticipated or imitated by the philosophers of their own era; if the science of hermeneutics has restored the ancient primacy of the text in the 20th century, the theologian’s appropriation of Gadamer and Ricoeur is a second spoiling of the Egyptians, a reminder that there is no Dilthey without Schleiermacher, no Schleiermacher without Augustine. Even postmodernism, grounded as it is in the veneration of the Torah as the surrogate of an absent God, is closer to patristic thought than its converse, the a priori attempt to grasp the signified in the absence of the signifier. Theology in the early church is always exegesis, but exegesis informed by philosophy, which was used with great ingenuity to shield the text from doubt. In the modern world, where doubt can be evaded only by subterfuge, and the questioning of norms has become as much a norm in life as in exegesis, the most fruitful use of philosophy may not to be extinguish scepticism and ambiguity, but to show how they can be welcomed as inseparable concomiutants of faith.
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