BMCR 2009.02.51, Response: Ramelli and Konstan on Wolfe on Ramelli

Ramelli and Konstan on Wolfe on Ilaria Ramelli, David Konstan, Terms
for Eternity: aio^nios and ai+dios in Classical and Christian Texts.
Response to BMCR 2009.02.16


Response by Ilaria L.E. Ramelli and David Konstan, Catholic University
of Milan, Italy; Brown University, Providence
([email protected]; [email protected])
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To read a print-formatted version of this response, see
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/bmcr/2009/2009-02-51.html
To comment on this review, see
http://www.bmcreview.org/2009/02/20090251.html
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We are grateful for the reviewer's appreciation of our work.  However,
since the review was so brief and somewhat perfunctory, it inevitably
omitted mention of many of the themes and conclusions that we reached
in our book, Terms for Eternity, and so, to help orient the reader of
BMCR to its contents, we thought of providing the following summary and
observations.

Although the review states that "it has been widely noted" that only
life and beatitude is called ai+dios in the Bible, but not death,
punishment, and fire, this has, in fact, never been previously pointed
out and demonstrated.  Equally important, this same distinction holds
for many Christian authors, as we show in detail.

While it is true that our conclusion is brief, we provide individual
conclusions and comments not only in the general conclusion to the book
but also at the end of each section and author; the reader will, we
trust, find these useful.  At the same time, it obviated the need to
repeat these critical remarks at the end of the book.

The organization of the material is far from being simply
chronological; in our systematic investigation we treat each of the
philosophical schools in turn, pointing out, for example, the
exceptional use of the terms for eternity in the Platonic tradition,
and in the Bible (LXX and comparison with Hebrew background, plus the
Greek New Testament), and then the reception of both biblical and
philosophical language and concepts in Philo and the Patristic authors
-- most of whom, as we point out, maintain the terminological
distinction found in the Bible, and most rigorously those who supported
the doctrine of apokatastasis.  We could hardly have done otherwise,
beginning with Patristic philosophers without investigating their main
sources of inspiration, namely the Bible and the Greek philosophers,
who in turn display very different uses of ai+dios and aio^nios
according to their schools.

Among the points that may interest readers of BMCR, we note that
aio^nios is never used by Aristotle, but ai+dios over 300 times: he was
clearly rejecting the thesis of an atemporal eternity, for which his
teacher, Plato, had invented the new term (we show that all
attributions of aio^nios to presocratic philosophers are late and
probably not original); what is more, Simplicius and other commentators
on Aristotle never use aio^nios either.  The Stoics use aio^nios only
in reference to the repeated aio^nes, never for time, space, or other
infinite quantities, and the Epicureans use only ai+dios for matter and
void, the only things that they regarded as eternal.  As for the Old
and New Testaments, ai+dios appears only twice in each, in contrast to
hundreds of uses of aio^nios.  This is a remarkable distribution, and
we explained why it might be so. We also illustrate how all this forms
the linguistic background to the Fathers.

We did not make this study into an argument concerning universal
salvation, as the reviewer would have liked, for a reason that we
indicate in the introduction and the conclusion, for we wished to
concentrate on the linguistic evidence independently of doctrinal
evidence (though of course we show where the linguistic evidence
supports certain doctrinal conclusions).  To do otherwise might have
convicted us of circular reasoning.  One of us (Ilaria Ramelli) is now
preparing a fullscale study on apokatastasis, in which the thesis of
the destruction of the wicked is also examined, along with the reasons
that led Origen and his followers to reject it; but to do so in the
present monograph would have rendered it tendentious, whereas we wished
rather to provide a basis for many kinds of scholarly research.

We hope that these supplementary remarks will be helpful to the reader,
even as we express our gratitude once again for the reviewer's kind
assessment of our work.  We very much hope that our research will prove
useful to scholars in ancient philosophy, Patristics, ancient Greek,
and classical and Christian thought generally.