by Scott McGill
Another interpretation of “let us make” in Genesis 1:26 appears in Augustine’s unfinished Literal Interpretation of Genesis. Augustine developed his thought strictly according to reason, as befitted a man trained in dialectic (Gen. ad lit. 16; CSEL 28/1, 502). The very enunciation “Let us make” illustrates the importance of the Logos, Augustine argued, because speaking is not separate from making. This very example of verbal performance would have resonated with people trained in rhetoric. The active voice of faciamus also enhances the excellence of man’s creation. Unlike man, other elements or creatures of the cosmos were created in the passive voice and, therefore, with less involvement from God. In addition, the plural form proves that the Son participated in the Creation. Man was thus made in the image of the Trinity, for he is a spiritual being made by God along with the Son.
Augustine acknowledged that his exegesis relied heavily on logic. “In order that we may not seem to be making this point by reason alone,” Augustine wrote, “we should use the authority of the Apostle James” (Gen. ad lit. 16; CSEL 28/1, 502); he then introduced the scriptural quotation, upon which the treatise is left interrupted and unfinished. This abrupt interruption and Augustine’s precaution to introduce the quotation makes it look as though the author was not yet at ease with using the Scriptures as proof and felt he ran off course from his logic‐driven explanation.
Biblical epics sit at the other end of the spectrum from the running commentary. They have definition issues of their own, as scholars do not agree on whether they are a genre, a subgenre of epic poetry, a versified form of exegesis, or even literature at all (Green 2007, pp. 74–75; cf. Pelttari 2014, p. 10, Dinkova‐Brunn 2007, p. 317). As the author reworks Scripture in epic form, however, he or she codified and rendered recognizable interpretations of the biblical text that might not be clearly stated in the original account. These paraphrases stand out in commenting literature because they tell the biblical stories at the same time as they explain them, thereby creating and embedding new meanings for the biblical text. Jerome captured the essence of the practice well when he spoke of Juvencus’s poetical endeavor: “He explicated in verses the story of our savior the Lord” (Ep. 70.5; CSEL 54, 708). As such, biblical epics constitute “exegetical narratives” (Levinson 2004, pp. 498–501), a denomination that emphasizes the literary mindset of their authors. These poems vary in the level and overtness of their exegetical content (Roberts 1985, p. 39).
The fifth‐century Heptateuchos attributed to Cyprian of Gaul shows a high tendency of embedding commentary into narrative in its treatment of Genesis. It says that, when the divine power had created livestock, he noticed that a ruler (rectorem) of the worldly things was missing. God then said out loud (memorat), “Let us make man perfectly similar to our images” (nostris faciamus in unguem vultibus adsimilem; Hept. 1.26–27; CSEL 23, 2), so that “he rule over the whole universe” (regnet toto orbe; Hept. 1.26; CSEL 23, 2). Cyprian added that once he saw him made (formatum) in his likeness (effigie sua; Hept. 1.32; CSEL 23, 2), God instilled sleep in man in order to create woman from his rib. Creation of man and woman, then, is told in just about 10 hexameters (Hept. 1.26–35; CSEL 23, 2).
Poetica licentia allowed Cyprian to neither explain the plural “Let us make” nor to specify to whom God speaks (memorat) nor even to indicate to his readers what was meant when they read God referring to “our images” (nostris vultibus). “Let us make” and “our,” which were cause for scandal in prose, had in epic language an acceptable resonance as poetic plurals. They needed no more elaboration than the nonbiblical plural “images.” Although Cyprian undoubtedly believed the similitude of man to God resided in his figure (vultibus nostris 1.26–27; effigie sua, 1.32; CSEL 23, 2), the use of rectorem defore allows us to conclude that he also understood man’s image to be destined to rule the entire universe (toto in orbe) as rector, just as God governs the universe, including man. We have seen Ambrosiaster vehemently reject this interpretation, although it is not new: Philo called God the “director of all things” (πάντων η'γεμν) (Op. mun. 75), borrowing the image from Plato (Phaedr. 246e). In classical epic, the epithet rector applied to leaders (Caesar in Lucan, BC 1.359, Romani maxime rector; a ship pilot at 5.515, rectorem dominumque) or Jupiter (Virgil, Aen. 8.572, maxume rector; Ovid, Met. 2.60 and Lucan, BC 2.4, rector Olympi). Used in the singular form by Christian authors, it not infrequently referred to God (e.g. Cyprian, Ad Dem. 5, mundi dominus et rector; CCSL 3A, 37) and in the plural form to bishops (certainly influenced by Sir. 33:19, rectores ecclesiae) or demons (rectores mundi tenebrarum, borrowed from Paul, Eph. 6:12), but it never designates man inside creation. In Cyprian’s verses rector has a familiar ring for a learned audience, referring at the same time to (the supreme) God and to the heroic leader. The epic imagery rendered recognizable the figure of a man destined by his God to rule, but it also made palatable the representation of God speaking in the plural form. Cyprian’s biblical paraphrase reveals a rhetoric that is “both epic and homiletic” (Deproost 2001, p. 450, on Arator’s Historia Apostolica), narrative and exegetical.
19.5 Conclusion
The exegesis of Genesis 1:26, because of God’s act of enunciation, gave ancient authors an occasion to expound upon their love of the spoken word. Their artistic consciousness made them depart from a more technical type of commenting literature – à la a grammarian’s commentary – to use interpretation in ways that varied in purpose, length, form, and tone. There are, however, some similarities in approaches across this creative landscape, in that even authors who professed or pretended to neglect the ars made good use of it, some in a show of learning, others with literary ambition.
The instrumental use of interpretation in Theophilus’s protreptic treatise is not too far from the ad hoc explication of Ambrosiaster in that it goes to the point and is trenchant in tone, but the two exegeses have nothing in common from a formal perspective. Theophilus’s explication is a type of proof, but Ambrosiaster’s exists for its own sake. Speaking in church, Ambrose consciously imitates Basil’s homily, but his rhetoric delivers the conclusions, while Basil’s engages the audience to participate in finding them. Despite the imitation in the points of argumentation, the organization and delivery of ideas differ starkly between the two. As for Origen, he appears to offer an exercise of “commenting the Bible with the Bible,” to paraphrase the Aristarchean maxim. The exercise of the running, exhaustive commentary was also an exhausting one, as the example of Augustine shows when, after embarking on a philosophical debate on creation, he stopped short, as if this argumentative mode did not leave space for the scriptural proof. Poetical paraphrases, meanwhile, present the Scriptures with varying degrees of (implicit or overt) commentary, and Cyprian, in fact, delivered them to the reader fully interpreted.
Each of these forms of commenting literature has an artistic quality that we do not find, for instance, in the contemporary grammarians who produced commentaries of literary texts.
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CHAPTER TWENTY
Christian Theological Literature
Josef Lössl
20.1 Some Preliminary Remarks: “Christian,” “Theological,” “Literature”
The title of this chapter is problematic, and not just as a whole (“Christian Theological Literature”); its various components (“Christian,” “theological,” “literature”), too, as well as partial combinations such as “Christian theological,” “theological literature,” and “Christian literature” require clarification as to how they might be understood and how they might inform an enquiry such as the one offered in this chapter. I will, therefore, begin with a brief discussion of these questions and then offer a brief historical outline of Christian theological literature in late antiquity, roughly from the mid‐third to the end of the fifth century, focusing mainly on the Greco‐Latin cultural sphere.
“Christian,” to begin with, is here not merely a denominational label, as in the distinction between, for example, Christian and Jewish or Christian and “pagan,” whatever the latter category may denote; it is also a cultural marker. It denotes “absence” of Classical learning (Chin 2008, p. 152). What does this mean? Perhaps a brief example might help to explain: Writing in the late 390 s, Augustine of Hippo reports that as a student of classical rhetoric in Carthage in the early 370 s he was repelled by the “low” (indigna) style of the Christian Bible, because it apparently lacked the “prestige” (dignitas) of Ciceronian Latin (Conf. 3.5.9). In other words, the Christian literary product did not reflect the degree of classical learning that he, as an educated user, would have expected from a piece of literature.
It is sometimes argued that in the Greek sphere the clash between classical and Christian literary culture was less severe (Vessey 2008, p. 46). Even there, however, Christian authors, including those, like Athanasius, who disassociated themselves from “classical education,” still aspired to (and achieved!) a classical style (Stead 1976, pp. 121–137). But Christians could not simply claim that style as their own. It originally came with a non‐Christian (“pagan”) content. The clash, therefore, was not just one of style but also one of doctrine and way of life. Pagans, such as the emperor Julian in the early 360 s, tried to claim both for themselves and to relegate Christian culture, including literature, to a lower cultural stratum, where according to Augustine’s testimony Christians might indeed have found themselves, if they ha
d had to confine themselves merely to the literary outputs of their own tradition. During that period, therefore, Christians tried to produce a “classicizing” literature of their own (cf. Markschies 2009, pp. 70–72). At the same time they protested against their exclusion from the study of pagan literature (cf. Wilson 1975).
At any rate, “Christian” literature, at least until the end of the fourth century, was quite distinct from “literature” as commonly understood at the time, namely, the products of the classical tradition. In fact, the Latin word litteratura (which translated the Greek γραμματική [τέχνη]) was used by Christian authors to refer specifically to non‐Christian (i.e. “pagan”) “literature” (cf. Jerome, Ep. 52.2.1; Augustine, Civ. 6.6; Vessey 2008, p. 53).
Thus Christian literature began in a certain sense as “nonliterature.” In order to be accepted or recognized as literature it first had to imitate the classical style, which is to some extent what it did in late antiquity. Later, when it found to its own, “humble” (humilis), style, as in the later works of Augustine or Jerome, it initiated the tradition of a new type of literature, which also characterized a whole new epoch, that of Medieval and Byzantine literature (Auerbach 1953, 1965; Curtius 1953; Vessey 2008).
When (also in the late 390 s) Jerome embarked on compiling his work De viris illustribus (or De scriptoribus ecclesiasticis), a “catalog” of Christian authors beginning with the apostle Peter and culminating in himself, he bemoaned that unlike classical literature, Christianity had not yet developed a literary canon, that might have guided his selection (Halton 2010, p. 1). His main source for the period before the fourth century was Eusebius’s Church History. In hindsight, De viris illustribus itself is now sometimes labeled the first “history of Christian theological literature” (Quasten 1983, pp. 1–2) and thought of as introducing such a canon. But this (modern) use of the expression “Christian theological literature” only highlights further its problematic nature (cf. Vessey 2008, pp. 42–43).
