The Routledge Handbook of Early Christian Philosophy

Mark Edwards

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781134856053
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Teaching Arts & Humanities

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.

1
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, Trypho 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 affronts 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 parrhêsia, 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).

Parrhêsia, 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 True 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 b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of contributors
• 1 Introduction
• Section 1 Themes
• Section 2 Doctrines
• Section 3 Schools
• Section 4 Individuals
• Bibliography of primary texts
• Index