BMCR 2009.05.05: Johnson on Siniossoglou, Plato and Theodoret: The Christian Appropriation of Platonic Philosophy and the Hellenic Intellectual Resistance. Cambridge Classical Studies

Niketas Siniossoglou, Plato and Theodoret: The Christian Appropriation
of Platonic Philosophy and the Hellenic Intellectual Resistance.
Cambridge Classical Studies.  Cambridge/New York:  Cambridge University
Press, 2008.  Pp. xi, 267.  ISBN 9780521880732.  $95.00.

Reviewed by Aaron P. Johnson, Society of Fellows, University of Chicago
([email protected])
Word count:  2540 words
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In spite of a good critical edition and French translation by P.
Canivet in the Sources Chretiennes series (volumes 57.I and II, Paris,
1958), Theodoret's On the Cure of Greek Diseases (in this review named
simply the Curatio), written in the early fifth century by the bishop
of Cyrrhus in Syria, has received a near total neglect in Anglophone
scholarship.  A remedy to this ancient remedy-book's poor modern
reception had been partly provided by D. Ridings' useful The Attic
Moses (Goeteborg, 1995) and more recently by I. Pa/sztori-Kupa/n's
translated selections (London/New York, 2006).  Otherwise, the lack of
a full-scale monograph on the apologetic treatise has remained until
the book under review here.[[1]]  At the very outset, therefore,
Siniossoglou is to be commended for making the first book-length
analysis of Theodoret's apologetic treatise in English and (hopefully)
sparking greater interest in a work that is so central for
understanding the cultural and intellectual battleground between
"pagans," or rather Hellenes, and Christians in late antiquity.  Though
Theodoret may not have fallen so readily into the citational
temptations that are often seen as entanglements of Eusebius of
Caesarea's apologetic method, the fifth century therapist of Greek
intellectual and spiritual diseases seems almost wholly reliant on his
predecessors (both Clement of Alexandria and even more, Eusebius
himself) for his quotations from Greek authors, especially Plato.
While treating the issue of Theodoret's originality or dependency on
earlier apologists at key points in his analysis, Siniossoglou
primarily seeks a critical engagement with his hermeneutic method as
applied to Plato vis-a\-vis his non-Christian Neoplatonic
contemporaries.

One trend in modern scholarship is to see Christian apologetic texts as
aimed at a largely Christian audience in further solidifying their
faith and as invoking outsiders as more of a rhetorical flourish.[[2]]
But Theodoret's audience, according to Siniossoglou, consisted of
contemporary Hellenes--those who had refused to succumb to the
pressures of Christianization and who had varying levels of
philosophical training, from the Neoplatonist teachers themselves to
those imperial officials who may have had only limited familiarity with
the philosophical bases and frameworks of pagan theological reflection
(Chapter One).[[3]]  If this assumption about Theodoret's audience is
correct (and it certainly seems so, based on internal evidence alone),
then it is a fair concern to investigate the extent to which the
apologist's argument and reading strategies would have been acceptable
to such an audience.  In each of four major areas in which Theodoret
engaged with the Platonic corpus Siniossoglou offers a resounding and
emphatic answer:  the Christian apologist failed completely, in spite
of knowing better, to adopt the interpretive framework of his
non-Christian contemporaries.  Instead, he sought to "rewrite" Plato in
a persistently Christianizing manner that casually ignored the more
felicitous reading strategies of the Neoplatonists.

Even more unsettling, Theodoret not only misread Plato, Siniossoglou
argues, but also misrepresented his pagan contemporaries themselves.
Regarding the first issue, pagan monotheism, Theodoret sought to mark
out an unbridgeable gap between Plato and his philosophical heirs in
late antiquity (Chapter Two).  For the apologist, Plato had been a
proponent of monotheism and had only allowed some references to a
plurality of gods in his dialogues because he feared a backlash similar
to that of Socrates (69-70).  Platonists of later centuries, however,
stubbornly failed, in Theodoret's portrayal, to follow the monotheistic
impulse of Plato and instead perpetuated the polytheism of the masses.
Siniossoglou counters Theodoret on both contentions:  Plato accepted
polytheism in some places (especially the Laws), not out of fear of the
masses, but because polytheistic practices carried the civic function
of "enhancing mass conformity with the laws of the state" (71), and
philosophical Hellenes of late antiquity subsumed their polytheism
within deeper monotheistic tendencies, which might better be named
"cultic henotheism" (74).  This is not all:  Theodoret is guilty of a
further misrepresentation.  Not only does he misrepresent Plato and his
late antique disciples, he also obfuscates the contemporary Christian
perpetuation of polytheistic tendencies.  Following other scholars of
"pagan monotheism" (especially M. Frede), Siniossoglou contends that
the Christian veneration of saints, the Virgin Mary, and angels, as
well as their Trinitarian formulations, obviate the validity of any
apologetic claims that Christians were strictly monotheist (75-81).
While this reviewer would prefer to see further analysis of late
antique monotheism as a distinctively Jewish and Christian rhetorical
construct, which is rare if not entirely lacking from pagan religious
and theological formulations,[[4]] Siniossoglou has here brought a
number of helpful passages to our consideration, from Plato and
Aristotle (in the classical period) to Simplicius (nearly a century
after Theodoret wrote his Curatio).

The second area of engagement with Plato's thought involves asceticism
and the conception of the body in the philosopher's pursuit of truth
(Chapter Three).  Here Siniossoglou argues that Theodoret
misrepresented Plato's notion of philosophia so as to correspond with
the extreme asceticism of the Syrian hermits.  The Christian ascetics
thus become "the true heirs of Plato's ethical theory" (109).
Theodoret, according to Siniossoglou, adopts the language of Plato but
infuses the language with Christian meanings alien to the philosopher.
Whereas the flight or "escape from earth to heaven" of Plato's Tht.
176a5-b3 had originally been asserted within a context of political
despotism, Theodoret inserted the terminology of flight within the
context of the mortification of the flesh practiced by Christian (but
not Neoplatonic) ascetics (110-111).  Platonic philosophers rightly,
Siniossoglou supposes, understood the "escape" of Plato to be a way of
life within, rather than apart from, the context of social and civic
life (115).[[5]]  Along with "escape," Theodoret's misappropriation of
the Platonic language of "philosophy" and the "pursuit of death" was
part of his generally deliberate misreading, or "rewriting," of Plato's
texts.  Against the prevailing view (of P. Canivet, Ph. Rousseau and
Th. Urbainczyk) Siniossoglou contends that the bishop was the advocate
of the bizarre and strikingly unplatonic behavior performed by the
ascetic exhibitionists of the Syrian wilderness, such as Symeon and
Maron.  In this, Siniossoglou leaves the Curatio behind and focuses
almost exclusively on Theodoret's later Historia Religiosa (115-122,
131-144).  At this point, some readers may remain unconvinced by
Siniossoglou's rejection of previous claims to Theodoret as a proponent
of only a moderate asceticism.  More significantly, however, one
wonders whether it is appropriate to blame Theodoret for not behaving
with the thoroughgoing consistency valued by a modern philosopher in
two works that are so different with respect to rhetorical aims,
authorial self-positioning, and the social and intellectual contexts of
their presumed audiences.

The next area that Theodoret drops the philosophical and interpretive
ball, according to Siniossoglou, is in his misappropriation of the
cosmological and eschatological myths of Plato's dialogues (Chapter
Four).  Theodoret takes them out of context, interprets them literally
(according to lexis rather than nous), and then only appropriates those
elements that are compatible with the Bible (or rather, late antique
Christian readings of the Bible).  Significantly, in this deceptive
misreading of Plato, Theodoret is guilty of the very interpretive
blunders that he elsewhere faults heretics for performing.  While
Theodoret may have followed earlier Platonists and Christian apologists
in equating the Demiurge with the Idea of the Good (in the Republic)
and hence with the Paradigm (in the Timaeus), he goes further than his
sources and attempts to clinch his argument that the creation account
of Plato resonates with that of the Bible by tampering with the text of
the Republic 509b6-10 (a text that even Eusebius had left unaltered;
see Praep. ev. 11.21).  Furthermore, unlike his Neoplatonist
contemporaries, Siniossoglou avers, Theodoret's literalist readings
highlighted certain consistencies between Plato and the biblical text
alongside other inconsistencies within Plato himself, a thing which
would have led a Neoplatonist to adopt an allegorical approach.  Though
he frequently allowed for figurative and mystical interpretations of
his own Scriptures (albeit avoiding the word allegoria, 168), he
remained undeterred in his strict literalism toward Plato's corpus
(162-169).  As with Theodoret's discovery in Plato of an omnipotent
individual creator God who created time and the universe externally
from it, so with his discovery of an eschatological end in Plato--the
apologist maintained a disregard for the contexts and aims (the skopos)
of Plato's myths within their dialogues and within his thought
generally.

Finally, in the area of political theology Theodoret seems at first to
be adopting Platonic ideas but is again found ultimately to be putting
Platonic language to his own very Christian, very imperializing,
purposes (Chapter Five).  Plato's conception of nomos in the Laws as
divine and manifestations of Intellect, as well as his notion of the
philosopher-king governing by appeal to the higher Forms in the
Republic, appears, according to Siniossoglou, in late antique Hellenic
thought (especially Julian) as embedded within the properly run polis
(203).  And hence it may be named the "divinization of the Hellenic
polis" (207) since the "assimilation to God" of the Theaetetus involved
justice and piety. (It should be noted that most of the Platonic
passages invoked by Siniossoglou at this point are not cited in
Theodoret, e.g., none of the passages listed on 203 can be found in the
Curatio--hardly a fair move in an analysis of how the apologist
interpreted Plato since he seems to have known Plato almost exclusively
through Clement and Eusebius.)  Theodoret misappropriates these
concepts, Siniossoglou claims, using the language of assimilation to
the divine to refer to Christian piety within the context of the
oikoumene, not the polis or ethnos.  The actual laws of Plato's
Republic and Laws were rejected by Theodoret, while the philosopher's
notion of a transcendent divine law was left; this required "a
rewriting of Plato in order to diminish the obvious discrepancy between
the ideal Platonic city-state and Constantine's Christianized Empire"
(208-209; Siniossoglou conveniently avoids passages in the
Neoplatonists that are markedly similar to the Curatio, e.g., Proclus,
Comm.Tim. 1.203-204).  Oddly, in a world that was also less kind to
Jews, Siniossoglou names Theodoret's strategy the "Judaizing of Plato"
(202).[[6]]  The social order that Theodoret legitimizes is not a
pretty picture: tyrants and slavery appear as part of God's divine plan
for human society, or rather, they are God's response to human
sinfulness (disappointingly, nearly all of the material Siniossoglou
invokes here comes from works later than the Curatio).[[7]]

Siniossoglou's monograph is a sobering reflection on the ways in which
Christian apologists could be unfair to the Hellenic heritage that they
sought, awkwardly, to engage with and pass on to the Byzantine world.
What Numenius had claimed the early Academy accomplished--namely, to
rend Plato's thought limb from limb worse than any Pentheus (Num. ap.
Eus. Praep. ev.  14.5.8)--had occurred even more forcefully and
methodically at the hands of the Christian apologists, of whom
Theodoret stands as the foremost fifth-century exponent.  Yet, while
Theodoret certainly deserves to be roundly criticized from the point of
view of modern interpretations of Plato as well as from late antique
Neoplatonist interpretations, one wonders how fair Siniossoglou has
been.  Persistently favoring one side of late antiquity's culture wars
over the other (even if the one side had become the underdog) is only
partly helpful in doing the work of the history of cultural, religious
and intellectual conflict in late antiquity (though it should be noted
that Siniossoglou's work is ostensibly meant to be philosophical in
nature, not historical).  In spite of the fact that Theodoret and his
fellow Christians were adopting poor reading habits, legitimizing
social and political injustice, and undermining "true" philosophy with
their privileging of illiterate exhibitionist ascetics as the
embodiment of the philosophic life, their writings in the fourth and
fifth centuries evince a creative genius in compiling and organizing
all knowledge (including Plato's thought), and reformulating it within
a new master narrative that bore the dual tendencies of both
constraining all knowledge and all knowers and "democratizing" and
decentering the centers of knowledge and the paths that knowers might
take.

As part of this late antique intellectual and cultural project,
Theodoret's interpretive framework for Plato within the Curatio must be
located within the development of the "dependency theme" much more
emphatically than Siniossoglou allows.  Claims that Greeks were
dependent upon more ancient traditions propounded by various eastern
nations were especially prominent in Christian apologetic texts, though
it is a trend that runs back through Jewish apologetics and Hellenistic
historiography to Herodotus himself.  While Theodoret disjoins
Eusebius' earlier narrative presentation in order to offer his own
topical arrangement in the Curatio, the same narrative of dependency
informs the entirety of the latter work.  Seen from this perspective,
Theodoret is not so much "rewriting" Plato, as attempting to identify
those places where a more ancient Hebrew wisdom may be found in Plato's
corpus, like gems encrusted in rock and earth.  For Theodoret, the only
legitimate interpretive approach to any Greek philosophical work
cannot, therefore, be allegorical--it must be source-critical (see
e.g., 2.114-115; 6.29, 31, 33).

Some of his pagan contemporaries would have found his approach
unsatisfactory since they were not willing to adopt the master
historical narrative that undergirded such an approach.  Yet, at least
some Platonist philosophers who preceded Theodoret were not only open
to barbarian wisdom but were even willing to allow that Plato himself
derived some of his ideas from non-Greek sources (see Porphyry, On Free
Will, fr. 271.100-104 Smith; In Remp. , fr. 187 Smith).  Porphyry would
have been quite displeased were he to read the Curatio's polemical
handling of Plato's texts--as well as his own (see Curatio 3.65;
7.36-37).  Theodoret's dismissal of allegorical interpretation of Plato
could never have sat well with any late antique Platonist (their
disagreements were over how and when to see an allegorical referent in
the master's corpus, not whether to look for such referents at all; see
e.g., Iamblichus on Porphyry, ap. Proclus, Comm.Tim. 116.21-117.27,
though this is only one among many disagreements between the two
recorded by Proclus).

However, we (and probably even Porphyry) should not be too surprised at
a polemicist reading the texts of the opponent polemically.  At the
root of the allegory issue, for both Platonists and Christians, was the
assumption that allegorical interpretation was appropriate only in
regard to texts that were deemed by the interpreter to be authentic
(and hence, authoritative) screens concealing a deeper truth.  Most
Christians, therefore, would only rarely allow an allegorical
interpretation of non-Scriptural texts.  And likewise Platonists would
only rarely grant allegorical interpretations of the Christian
Scriptures.  One only clouds the issues if one faults Porphyry for not
allowing the Christians to allegorize their Scriptures--just as if one
faults Theodoret for not allowing the Platonists to allegorize their
authoritative texts.  At least for Theodoret, source criticism allowed
the interpreter to uncover the sources for the truths found in Plato,
while allegory would be most appropriate to those (Hebrew) source
texts, not the later and only partially accurate (Greek) text which had
copied from them.  A revealing study would be one which reads the
commentaries of Plato's (and Aristotle's) works by the Neoplatonists
alongside Theodoret's commentaries on the Scriptures (in other words,
to ask how a late antique thinker read texts treated authoritatively by
himself, rather than how he read the texts treated authoritatively by
those he sought to attack).[[8]]  It is hoped that Siniossoglou's
treatment--insightful and provocative in so many ways and which now
stands as essential reading for anyone interested in late antique
Christian engagements with the Hellenic heritage--will be a catalyst
for such studies.

------------------
Notes:


1.   It is hoped that Yannis Papadoyannakis' fine study will soon
appear in print ("Christian Therapeia and Politeia: The Apologetics of
Theodoret of Cyrrhus Against the Greeks," Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton
University, 2004).

2.   While I am somewhat hesitant to dismiss references to a pagan
audience as a "mere rhetorical flourish" (as I phrase it here), I would
otherwise count myself within this approach to (most) early apologetic
literature; see, e.g., "Eusebius' Praeparatio Evangelica as Literary
Experiment," in S. Johnson, ed., Greek Literature in Late Antiquity:
Dynamism, Didacticism, Classicism (Aldershot, 2006), 67-89.

3.   Lacking, however, is an analysis of the extent to which
Neoplatonists (or other pagans) were interested in ascribing the label
"Hellene" to themselves.  This reviewer would observe that Porphyry and
Iamblichus had rather different ways of identifying themselves in
ethnic or cultural terms than did, say, Julian or Proclus; see my
"Hellenism and its Discontents" in Oxford Handbook on Late Antiquity,
ed., Scott F. Johnson (Oxford, forthcoming), which also contains
limited discussion of Theodoret's use of the label "Hellene" and its
cognates.

4.   That is, Jews and Christians adopt a heightened rhetoric of
monotheism vs. polytheism and maintain a vocabulary appropriate to that
distinction (and thus are at special pains to explicate biblical
passages that refer to gods in the plural, such as Ps. 82:6 and Jn.
10:34); whereas pagans may adopt the title of One God and see it as
consonant with Plato's One or Good they do not reject the language of
many gods, i.e., the lesser beings below the One may still legitimately
be given the appellation of "god" (this is precisely Theodoret's point
at Curatio 3.87-88).  Christians systematically sought to name the many
"so-called gods" of antiquity as either angels or daemons; but for
pagans, angels and daemons are additional levels of the divine
hierarchy and do not necessarily replace the gods.  Of course, Julian
himself criticized Christians for failing in a strict monotheism by
their perpetuation of the cult of the martyrs (c.Galil. 201e), which he
labels the worship of daemons (ibid., 224e).  Elsewhere, he attacked
Christian belief and worship of Christ as a second god as preempting
their claims to monotheism (ibid., 253c-277a; 290e-291a) while even the
Hebrew Scriptures fall short in their monotheism by containing
references to angels as gods (ibid., 290b-d).  But even Julian asserted
that the main difference between Jews and gentiles ("the nations") is
that only the former consider God to be one (ibid. 306b).  An
anti-Christian treatise that (playfully) manipulates so many of the
topoi of earlier Christian apologetics may not be quite representative
of pagan, or Greek, thought in late antiquity.  This reviewer admits
that the issue is an especially complicated one and this note can only
gesture at what might be a fruitful approach.  We must await the
forthcoming volumes edited by S. Mitchell and P. Van Nuffelen, which
promise to provide helpful ways in which to pursue the issue of ancient
monotheisms (and in which Siniossoglou, it appears, has a
contribution).

5.    One wonders how Siniossoglou might explain the thinking of
Porphyry, who lauds the asceticism of the Essenes even in their
resistance to Roman rule (Abst. 4.11-14), and seems to interpret
Platonic "escape" as flight from this world and the cycles of
embodiment of the soul (Regr. anim. frr. 297, 301, 301a Smith).

6.   In fact, Theodoret makes seriously de-Judaizing moves in the
Curatio, e.g., at 2.58; 7.16-21; even if the Expositio rect. confess.
is not referring to the Curatio, when it mentions a book "against both
Jews and Greeks" (= Ps.-Justin, PG 6, 1208A, adopting the emendation ad
loc).  Theodoret does, of course, believe that Plato was indebted to
the Hebrew writings for those elements deemed good or true in his
philosophical thought.  The label "Judaizing," however, obscures the
identity Theodoret is at pains to construct for the Jews in this
apologetic work.

7.    Were one to attempt a defense of Theodoret against Siniossoglou's
criticisms (which this reviewer will not do), one could easily locate a
number of passages that would resonate with modern sensibilities; e.g.,
social and ethnic egalitarianism (Curatio 1.10-11, 19-25, passim; 5.55,
58-60, 68; 9.15) and even a move towards gender equality (see esp.
5.57, 68; though see 3.89-91 and 9.39-40).

8.   One would also want to confine oneself as much as possible to
those Neoplatonists who predate Theodoret (and not so much the later
philosophers like Proclus or Simplicius) so as to determine the extent
and nature of the Christian bishop's dependency on, or reaction to,
that commentary tradition.