Can We Speak of an “Interaction” Between Ancient Christian Thought and Classical Greek Literature? Two Case Studies (The Trinity and Gen. 1:26) ^†

Abstract

This paper tries to analyse what “interaction” with classical Greek literature may mean in the case of ancient Christian texts. Two case studies show the existence of a “hermeneutical circle” between the reception of Greek texts among Christians and Christian ideas. The Christians were influenced by the Greek texts they commented on, but, on the other hand, their reception of such texts was determined by their Christian intellectual presuppositions. The first case (the emergence of the “Trinity” among the “apologists”) illustrates a cross-reading of Matthew 28:19 and Ps.-Plato’s Letter 2. The second case shows how the term ὁμοίωσις, in Genesis 1:26, was read in the light of Theaetetus 176a-b, and vice versa.

Properly speaking, the notion of interaction implies a reciprocal influence.1 It is nowadays considerably used in academic studies, especially in Late Antique research or the History of religions, in a way that does not seem to me always legitimate. Scholars sometimes exaggerate the importance of religious or cultural interactions in Antiquity, when they do not take the concept of “interaction” as a synonym for “influence”, leaving aside the notion of reciprocity, which fundamentally defines interaction.2 For example, the presupposition of a constant interaction between Christian and Pagan cultures in Late Antiquity sometimes led scholars to analyze a few evolutions of Greek philosophy as the result of an influence of Christianity, or of a reaction to it. But, except for the specific case of antichristian polemic, very few aspects of Greek philosophy, at that time, can be accounted for by an interaction with Christianity, and most of them are better explained within the historical evolution of philosophy itself.3 Another interesting, but much more disputed case, is that of the relations between Jews and Christians in Antiquity. It is sometimes assumed that Christian writers knew some aspects of rabbinic exegesis of the Bible and, conversely, that the rabbis had a knowledge of Christian exegesis. There are a few cases in which such influences are possible, and sometimes obvious. But the exceptional cases of Christians like Origen or Jerome should not lead us to think that there was a regular and well-informed “dialogue” between Jews and Christians in Antiquity. The case of Eusebius of Caesarea and Abbahu, who lived in the same city in the same period, is a good illustration, in my view, of the fact that a Christian or a Jew could be eager to refute his “adversaries” without knowing very much about them.4 In that respect, the so-called “new paradigm” framed by Daniel Boyarin (see for instance Boyarin 2004), assuming that Christianity and Judaism are, right from Antiquity, the results of a mutual construction, certainly contributed to promoting the concept of “interaction”, but remains unconvincing (See Lanfranchi 2015).

I will not devote this paper to the general question of interaction between cultures or religions. More humbly, I would like to ask a question that may be look strange at first sight: is there an “interaction” between ancient Christian thought and Greek literature of the classical period? Due to chronological reasons, the evident answer is no. Classical Greek literature obviously influenced patristic texts, but patristic texts could not influence Plato or Thucydides. However, we may perhaps speak of a certain “interaction” between Christian thought and the reception of classical texts. As these texts were received by Christians, they influenced their way of thinking; but the patristic reception of classical texts was also influenced by Christian ideas. This intriguing hermeneutical circle will be illustrated by two examples: the way the notion of Trinity emerged in the 2nd c. AD on the background of a certain reception of Ps.-Plato’s Letter 2, and the way the text from Genesis 1:26 was explained by a certain comprehension of Plato’s idea of an “assimilation” to God in Theaetetus.

1. First Case: Ps.-Plato’s Letter 2 and the Trinity

A first remarkable example of “interaction” between Christian thought in the making and a certain reception of “classical” literature concerns the progressive construction of the concept of Trinity.5

As is well known, this concept has, strictly speaking, no basis in the Bible6, apart from the last words of Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew 28:19 (King James version: Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost7). Of course, ancient Christian writers, especially from the 3rd century onwards, would not have agreed with this contention. In their view, the Trinity was a biblical doctrine, disseminated throughout the “Old” and the “New” Testament, each time the texts speak of a “Father”, or of a “Son” or a “Spirit” of God, and this is still the kind of perspective we can find in confessional handbooks8. But this way of reading the texts is the result of a rereading, that is to say, a retrospective exegesis based on the postulate that God exists as a Trinity, and this very postulate is never affirmed in the biblical text, even in Matthew 28:19. When Jesus speaks of a baptism in the name of the Father, the Son and the Spirit, he is only supposed to establish a liturgical formula, which, in itself, does not imply any explicit conception of the divine, though this formula may well have a theological meaning that remains obscure to us.

The interesting thing is that this formula, from the 2nd century onwards, began to be understood as a definition of God. In this exegetical process, a passage contained in the letter 2 ascribed to Plato played a fundamental role: “Related to the King of All are all things, and for his sake they are, and of all things fair He is the cause. And related to the Second are the second things and related to the Third the third9” (312d-e). The notion of the Trinity emerged in Christian thought as the result of a cross-reading of Matthew 28:19 and this very passage.

As far as we know, this process began with Justin, around 150 AD. The apologist mentions the use of the baptismal formula10, but in another passage, he explicitly makes an exegesis of the letter 2 as a Platonic testimony about the right conception of God (that of the Christians, supposedly implied by Matthew 28:19):

And as to his speaking of a third, he did this because he read, as we said above, that which was spoken by Moses, that the Spirit of God moved over the waters. For he gives the second place to the Logos which is with God, who he said was placed crosswise in the universe; and the third place to the Spirit who was said to be borne upon the water, saying, And the third around the third’.11

We cannot underestimate the importance of this text. Justin is the first preserved writer to make this parallel between “Plato”’s letter 2 and the Christian notion of God. In that respect, he is at the starting point of a long tradition that will continue to compare both texts, but in doing so he also constructs for the first time the theological notion of the Trinity, and this is even more important. There is, indeed, no reason to think that such a notion, as it is conceived by Justin, existed before him. We cannot exclude that the liturgical formula put in the mouth of Jesus in Matthew was already understood in a theological way (as a definition of God) by some Christians before Justin, but as far as I know, there is no evidence of such an exegesis.12 More probably, Justin does not read “Plato” in the light of a pre-existing Christian notion. What he wants to show is that the Christians have a right conception of God, and that this is proved by their agreement with Plato. He does not have in mind a pre-existing concept of Trinity, but only the liturgical formula of Matthew. But the fact that he brings closer “Plato” and this formula retrospectively implies that Matthew’s formula contains a definition of God as a triad. But this is, in all likelihood, Justin’s own opinion, not the view of most Christians of his time.

It must be kept in mind that Justin was seen (and certainly conceived himself) as a philosopher. In the Dialogue with Trypho, Plato’s philosophy is presented as the best “pagan” school of philosophy, the one that most resembles Christian philosophy.13 And the Platonists in the time of Justin made an exegesis of “Plato”’s letter 2 that implied that God existed in three forms.14 Alcinoos, for examples, speaks of a first God who is a “father” and who “arranges the celestial intellect” (the “second”) and “awakes the world soul” (the “third”).15 Apuleius, likewise, speaks of a “first God” (primus Deus), which implies that at least a second one exists, who must be the same as the “intellect” (mens) that contains the “forms of the things” (formasque rerum), but different from the “soul” (anima).16 The philosopher Numenius, who is sometimes thought to be the Platonic master of Justin alluded to in the Dialogue with Trypho, (see Edwards 1991) also had a conception of “three” Gods17 certainly based on “Plato”’s letter 2. It is even probable that this letter was composed by a Platonist, or at least a writer who knew Plato’s philosophy,18 in order to create a Platonic testimony about the three gods (such a doctrine aiming, independently from any text written by Plato, to harmonize apparently contradictory views on God as absolutely transcendent, as an intellect containing the forms, and as a “soul” ordering matter and displaying, in the world, divine providence). If this assumption is correct, it would mean that the middle Platonic exegesis of the letter 2 would be based on an unconscious circular reasoning.

The fact that Justin also makes the same kind of exegesis of “Plato”’s text shows that he was familiar with these traditions, which means that, if he did not have in mind a pre-existing notion of a Christian Trinity, he certainly postulated, as a philosopher who was familiar with Platonic doctrines, that God existed in three forms. And, in bringing closer “Plato” and this conception of God, presented as the Christian way of defining God (though it was, in fact, a purely Platonic way of doing so), he probably aimed at showing that the Christians had not only a true, but also a philosophical notion of God. In any case, his exegesis of “Plato”’s letter 2, which is at the same time an exegesis of Matthew 28:19, consists in importing, in transferring in Christian theology, a certain notion of God that finds its basis in the Platonic philosophy of his time.

After Justin, his disciple Tatian, in his Oration to the Greeks (c. 165–172 AD) gives an exposition about the Christian doctrine of God that amplifies Justin’s short comments.19 Though it does not explicitly mention “Plato”’s letter 2 and does not speak of the spirit, this exposition resembles, in form and content, the kind of exposition we can find in middle Platonic handbooks (Alcinoos, Apuleius20). Tatian enumerates a series of predicates concerning the Father, he mentions his “will” to generate the Logos (like Alcinoos speaks of the Father’s will to awake the Soul), and he compares the Logos to the light of a torch, in order to show that the existence of the Logos does not substract anything from the Father. Alcinoos uses a similar image when he compares the First God to the sun. In Tatian, the Logos is “the beginning of the world”. In Alcinoos, the celestial Intellect (second God) “puts the world in order”.

An explicit mention of “Plato”’s letter 2 recurs in Athenagoras, who may have composed his own apology, the Plea for the Christians, around 177.21 Athenagoras often reproduces Justin’s idea, and this is notably the case when he comments on “Plato”’s letter 2:

Did, then, he who had contemplated the eternal Intelligence and God who is apprehended by reason, and declared His attributes—His real existence, the simplicity of His nature, the good that flows forth from Him that is truth, and discoursed of primal power, and how all things are about the King of all, and all things exist for His sake, and He is the cause of all; and about two and three, that He is the second moving about the seconds, and the third about the thirds;—did this man think, that to learn the truth concerning those who are said to have been produced from sensible things, namely earth and heaven, was a task transcending his powers?22

This is again another quotation of “Plato”’s letter 2, interpreted as if the philosopher spoke of a “first”, a “second” and a “third” power. In another passage, Athenagoras more clearly shows his acquaintance with the middle-Platonic tradition of reading the letter 2:

That we are not atheists, therefore, seeing that we acknowledge one God, uncreated, eternal, invisible, impassible, incomprehensible, illimitable, who is apprehended by the understanding only and the reason, who is encompassed by light, and beauty, and spirit, and power ineffable, by whom the universe has been created through His Logos, and set in order, and is kept in being—I have sufficiently demonstrated. [I say His Logos], for we acknowledge also a Son of God. Nor let any one think it ridiculous that God should have a Son. For though the poets, in their fictions, represent the gods as no better than men, our mode of thinking is not the same as theirs, concerning either God the Father or the Son. But the Son of God is the Logos of the Father, in idea and in operation; for after the pattern of Him and by Him were all things made, the Father and the Son being one. And, the Son being in the Father and the Father in the Son, in oneness and power of spirit, the understanding and reason of the Father is the Son of God. But if, in your surpassing intelligence, it occurs to you to inquire what is meant by the Son, I will state briefly that He is the first product of the Father, not as having been brought into existence (for from the beginning, God, who is the eternal mind, had the Logos in Himself, being from eternity instinct with Logos); but inasmuch as He came forth to be the idea and energizing power of all material things, which lay like a nature without attributes, and an inactive earth, the grosser particles being mixed up with the lighter. The prophetic Spirit also agrees with our statements. The Lord, it says, made me, the beginning of His ways to His works. The Holy Spirit Himself also, which operates in the prophets, we assert to be an effluence of God, flowing from Him, and returning back again like a beam of the sun.23

This passage is the first systematic exposition of the Christian Trinity in a philosophical form. It resembles Tatian’s parallel passage, but it adds the Spirit, as Justin does. In that respect, it can be seen as a mixture of Tatian and Justin, but it also has several common points with Alcinoos’s own chapter 10, not only at the formal level, but also in the very ideas that are expressed by Athenagoras. Like Alcinoos, Athenagoras thinks that the Logos orders the world. He compares the Spirit to a ray of sunlight, which echoes Tatian’s comparison of the Logos with the light of a torch, but also Alcinoos’s comparison of the Father as the sun. All these common points tend to show that Athenagoras, like Justin and probably Tatian, was acquainted with the Platonic tradition that interpreted “ Plato “’s letter 2 as a proof-text about three Gods.

The story continues in Theophilus of Antioch’s apology, the three books to Autolycos. As is well known, Theophilus is the first writer to define the three as a “triad”, τριάς, this very word that we translate as “Trinity”.24 Theophilus gives two short expositions about the Christian conception of God that look like those of his predecessors,25 but in which no precise common point can be found with the philosophical, middle-Platonic tradition, which may mean that, contrary to Justin, Tatian, and Athenagoras, he had no direct knowledge of it.

We could continue to enumerate the writers who, after the so-called “second century apologists”, compared “Plato”’s letter 2 with the Christian notion of God (Clement of Alexandria,26 Origen,27 Eusebius of Caesarea,28 for instance), but, after Theophilus, the history of the Trinity enters a new phase. From Clement onwards, Christian theologians seem to take for granted the existence of “the saint Trinity” (ἡ ἁγία τρίας29), and their quotations of the letter 2 only aim at demonstrating that Plato knew this doctrine. Before Theophilus, the work of Justin, Athenagoras, and, to a lesser extent, Tatian, more subtly consists in showing that the Christian conception of God, supposedly expressed in Matthew 28:19, is a philosophical doctrine, and thus implies that God exists in three forms. They are writing in a time when this doctrine did not really exist among Christians, or was only emerging, and we cannot exclude that they also, and maybe more fundamentally, sought to impose it onto their Christian audience.

At this point, the precise interpretation we should have of the “interaction” that is at work between “pagan” texts and Christian ideas must take into account the problem of the intentions of these writers, and of the real audience they wanted to reach. If, as I tend to think, the second-century apologies were more doctrinal handbooks for Christians than real polemical works against the pagans—despite their literary form, which may be nothing more than a formal framework30—it is possible that the primary intention of Justin, Athenagoras, and even Tatian, was not to use “Plato” as a witness of a Christian doctrine, but, on the contrary, to give a philosophical content to Matthew 28:19, and more generally to the baptismal formula, that is to say, to import, into Christian doctrines, a certain view about God that originated in Platonic circles. In any case, we here have a good example, I think, of the role played by harmonization in the emergence of doctrines in the imperial period, and also of the misunderstandings31 that can be implied by such cross-readings.

2. Second Case: Theaetetus 176a-b and Genesis 1:26

My second case, like the first one, consists in giving a philosophical meaning to a biblical text (Gen. 1:26) through a comparison of this text with a passage in Plato—this time, the authentic Plato (Theaetetus 176a-b). But the literary treatment of this comparison is a bit different. Contrary to the first case, the second one finds its roots in Jewish literature written in Greek. In Christian tradition, it does not concern the “second century apologists” but a line of thought that really began with Clement of Alexandria, in the footsteps of Philo. Secondly, the passage from Theaetetus is generally not quoted as “Plato”’s letter 2 was, with the status of a proof-text aiming at demonstrating what would be implied in the biblical text. Rather, it is most often only alluded to, or briefly quoted, which means that it is more intrinsically integrated into the commentaries that refer to it, but also that Plato’s words, in these commentaries, are more disconnected from their context than in my first case.

Once again, I shall only comment on the first phase of this example of “interaction”, that which is found in Philo and then in Clement of Alexandria.

In the Greek version read by Jewish-speaking Jews and Christians, Gen. 1:26 states (King James version): Let us make man in our image, after our likeness (Ποιήσωμεν ἄνθρωπον κατ̓ εἰκóνα ἡμετέραν καὶ καθ̓ ὁμοίωσιν). This text contains two terms, εἰκóνα and ὁμοίωσιν, that could have been interpreted as synonyms, but the story was different. From Philo onwards, they were read as referring to two distinct qualities of man. In this dissociation, once again, Plato served as a guarantor. In Theaetetus, Socrates is speaking about evil, which has his place among mortals. Considering this fact, the philosopher says: “we ought to try to escape from earth to the dwelling of the gods as quickly as we can; and to escape is to become like God (ὁμοίωσις θεῷ), so far as this is possible; and to become like God is to become righteous and holy and wise.32”

As we can see, Plato’s text contains the word ὁμοίωσις also used in Gen. 1:26, but, as the translation shows, we tend to translate it differently from its use in Genesis (not “likeness”, but “to become like”, or “assimilation”) (see Alexandre 1988, p. 177). It probably is a coincidence, since this word here renders the hebrew demût, and we can easily check that, each time it is used in the Septuagint (Ps 57:5; Ez. 1:10, 10:22; Dn 7:5, 10:16), it corresponds to the same word or at least the same root in the Masoretic Text, with only one exception (Ez. 28:1233). However, this literal and probably accidental coincidence between Gen. 1 and Plato is at the starting point of a very fertile tradition of thought that began with Philo34.

In his treatise De opificio mundi, Philo comments on Gen. 1:26. Moses, he says, speaks of a resemblance between man and God.35 But this resemblance cannot be corporal. He does not precisely comment on the term ὁμοίωσις, but writes that the “image” (the other term used in Gen. 1) should be “the intellect, leader of the soul” (τὸν τῆς ψυχῆς ἡγεμόνα νοῦν).

In another passage from the same work,36 Philo gives his interpretation of the word ὁμοίωσις: when he was created, man used to follow (ἑπόμενος) God on the paths of virtues, a task that is reserved “to the souls who think that the end is the likeness/assimilation to God who generated them” (ψυχαῖς…προσέρχεσθαι τέλος ἡγουμέναις τὴν πρὸς τὸν γεννήσαντα θεὸν ἐξομοίωσιν). We here have a clear allusion to the Theaetetus. A few lines before, Philo has written that man was “of the same race” (συγγενής) as God, which refers to another well-known idea expressed by Plato, for instance in the Phaedo 79d (see also Des Places 1964).37 The comparison of both passages, De opificio 69 and 144, tends to suggest that Philo does distinguish between the two terms of Gen. 1: the “image” would be the natural resemblance of man with God, that is to say his intellect, probably also alluded to in the term συγγενής used in Opif. 144. The “likeness” or “assimilation” (Philo says: ἐξομοίωσις) would be the fact that man “goes ahead” (προσέρχεσθαι), comes closer to God when he practices virtues. In other words, the first term would indicate a static quality of man, whereas the second one would describe a dynamic process.

As a reader of Philo, Clement of Alexandria tends to confirm this reading. In his Stromateis, more explicitly than Philo, he makes a strong distinction between the “image” and the “likeness”. “The image of God, he writes, is the divine and royal Logos, the man with no passion, and the intellect of man is the image of an image.” As to the term ἐξομοίωσις (it is remarkable that Clement here repeats Philo’s term instead of ὁμοίωσις used in the Bible), it would be defined by Moses as a “divine accompaniment” (ἀκολουθία θεία, literally “a divine way to follow God”), when he says: Ye shall walk after the Lord your God, and fear him, and keep his commandments (Deut. 13:4).38 In another passage from the Stromateis, Clement adds that the “image” was given to man right from his birth, whereas the “likeness” (or “assimilation”) is obtained later, when man becomes “perfect”, when he acquires “the science of good” that would be real happiness.39

There are many more texts which ought to be quoted and analyzed concerning the ancient exegesis of Gen. 1:26, even in Philo and Clement.40 It is particularly interesting to observe how Plato’s text, which connects the “likeness” or “assimilation” to God to the practice of virtues, is gradually interpreted, even among “pagan” commentators, as describing, not only a moral, but also an ontological process of assimilation to God, which Gregory of Nazianzus eventually called θέωσις, “divinisation”.41 But this is not the topic of this paper, and I think that the short passages extracted from Philo and Clement are already sufficient to understand what the “interaction” between texts may sometimes look like. As in my first case, it is interesting to note that the ancient commentators of the Bible drew from pre-existing Platonic exegetical traditions. Alcinoos, for instance, assimilates the ὁμοίωσις of the Theaetetus to a way to “follow” (ἕπεσθαι) God, and, like Justin, he defines it as the end, the τέλος of philosophy.42 Apuleius writes that the assimilation consists in “going ahead” (prouehatur), which echoes the term προσέρχεσθαι used by Philo. Like Alcinoos, he says that it is a way to “follow” (sequi) the lines of conduct agreed upon by gods and men.43 All these parallels show, like in my first case, that the Platonic tradition was sometimes a medium between Plato and the biblical texts that the Jews and the Christians wanted to compare. The evidence tends to show that such a tradition, concerning Theaetetus 176a-b, existed before Philo.

3. Conclusions

These two examples are significant of the way “interaction” between “pagan” texts and Jewish or Christian reflections may sometimes work. Though there could be no direct interaction between Plato and these monotheistic thinkers, there still is a phenomenon of mutual influence between the texts—more precisely, between the interpretations of the texts—that is at the core of a fundamental practice of reading in the imperial age: harmonization. When a passage from the Bible is compared to a text by Plato, the latter influences the interpretation of the former, but the former also influences the interpretation of the latter. In my first case, “Plato”’s letter 2 leads to a specific theological understanding of Matthew 28:19, but Matthew 28:19 also implies that Plato did speak about the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. In my second case, Theaetetus 176a-b enables the exegetes to give a philosophical content to the term ὁμοίωσις used in Gen. 1:26, seen as a dynamic way of “following” God and distinguished from the word “image”, but this very comparison also implies that the “assimilation” mentioned by Plato now finds its place in a new anthropological context, taking for granted the sin of Adam and Eve and its implications. In that respect, the “likeness” or “assimilation” ascribed to man right from his creation becomes his capacity to reach again what he has lost. Plato would probably have agreed to such kind of view, generally speaking, but Gen. 1:26 implies at least two ideas that are foreign to his thought: the fact that the ὁμοίωσις was potentially inscribed in man’s nature, which means that it has an ontological implication, and the connection, and, at the same time, distinction of this potentiality and the enduring character of the “image”, which would be one and the same with the συγγένεια of the intellect with God. It is interesting to see that, in giving such a meaning to Plato’s “assimilation to God”, the monotheistic thinkers sometimes bring together ideas that are scattered in the work of Plato. In that respect, the comparison with Gen. 1 also leads them, in a way, to harmonize Plato with himself (the συγγένεια of the Phaedo being contrasted to the ὁμοίωσις of the Theaetetus).44