The Oxford Handbook of the Second Sophistic

by Daniel S. Richter

  Most important, then, is the posture taken in these literary works as well as the classical models on which they rested. The very adoption of the broad genre of apologia rooted itself in the Apology of Socrates, sometimes explicitly so. Purporting to be a record of the actual words spoken by the philosopher before an Athenian court in 399 BCE, Socrates’s Apology (as written by Plato) contained features that would become significant for later apologies composed by Christians. In it Socrates declares his innocence against the charges (of corrupting the youth and introducing new deities), claims that his actions were more important than words (which he claims were delivered in a simple manner anyway), preached the immortality of the soul, which entailed a consequent refusal to fear death, and argued that, in spite of the accusations against him, his activities had been for the good of his community and had only been concerned with the highest human aspiration, namely truth. His calm and philosophic demeanor when facing death after the trial made his testimony (martyrion) a powerful model for Christians who died at the hands of persecutors (or at least those who wrote about their deaths).2

  Socrates’s defense and death found explicit invocation and implicit imitation in the First and Second Apologies of Justin Martyr in the second century.3 Even if Justin only named his work “a petition and address” (not an apologia), the high number of allusions to Socrates’s Apology are unmistakable (Blunt 1911, passim, which is not exhaustive). Indeed, for the Christian apologist, Socrates was a Christian before Christ in his doctrine of the immortality of the soul, his adoption of cross-imagery,4 and his belief in absolute truth. Christians were averred to be good for the state in a manner similar to Socrates’s claims for himself. Even though the political context had changed sharply from democratic Athens to imperial Rome, Christians were beneficial in their prayers for the emperor, their philosophic witness to truth, their sober and well-ordered lifestyle, and their calling the bluff on the daemons who disguised themselves as the gods of Rome and incessantly produced deceptive imitations of truth (both in mythology and iconography). As in the case of Socrates, however, such an apologetic approach, marked as much by a critique of one’s accusers and the entire society they represented as by a defense of one’s own conduct and teachings, proved unsuccessful in garnering imperial or societal toleration. Justin, along with some of his students, faced execution for the threat that their freedom of speech and rejection of the state’s protecting gods posed to their hearers (Mart. Just. et al. Mursurillo).

  Athenagoras’s later embassy speech in defense of Christians, which exhibits a clear attempt to develop further Justin’s apologetic argument and clarify structurally the layout of a proper apologia, adopts and extends a technique of treating the emperors as philosophers that appeared in Justin’s First Apology. At various moments throughout his Legatio, Athenagoras complimented Marcus Aurelius and Commodus for their philosophic character. For instance, he could excuse himself from offering a detailed account of Pythagorean number symbolism, “for I know that, as you excel all men in intelligence and in the power of your rule, in the same proportion do you surpass them all in an accurate acquaintance with all learning [paideia], cultivating as you do each several branch with more success than even those who have devoted themselves exclusively to any one” (Legat. 6.18–1 Geffcken; trans. Pratten).5 The consistently respectful tone of Athenagoras marks an attempt to smooth over the roughness of his apologetic predecessor in addressing the emperors.

  Justin had begun his earlier petition to the emperors (Antoninus Pius and his sons) and the Senate: “Reason directs those who are truly pious and philosophical to honor and love only what is true, declining to follow traditional opinions if these be worthless. . . . Do you, then, since you are called pious and philosophers, guardians of justice and lovers of learning, give good heed, and hearken to my address; and if you are indeed such, it will be manifested” (1 Apol. 2.1, 2). Even from its beginning, Justin’s treatise adopts a somewhat patronizing tone and he avoids praising them for being true philosophers, only remarking that they are said to be so. The Christian, as a true philosopher unconcerned about the opinions of the many or the preservation of the body, speaks frankly to those in highest power. “You can kill, but not hurt us” (1 Apol. 2.4; trans. Dods and Reith). Or, more strongly: “But if you also, like the foolish, prefer custom to truth, do what you have power to do. But just so much power have rulers who esteem opinion more than truth, as robbers have in a desert. And that you will not succeed is declared by the Word, than whom, after God who begat Him, we know there is no ruler more kingly and just” (1 Apol. 12.6–7; trans. Dods and Reith).

  Like Socrates five centuries before, Justin’s freedom of speech and advisory stance toward his audience bore an independent confidence that approached the offensive. His critique of the injustice of Rome’s judicial apparatus, the identification of Rome’s gods as wicked daemons, and the advertisement of Christian willingness to engage in civil disobedience undeterred by threats of punishment would have scarcely been effective elements to assuage any feelings of uneasiness about Christians by his named imperial and senatorial addressees (Pagels 1985). This feature of the work cautions against the frequent assumption that Christian apologetics marked an attempt to “build bridges” between the fledgling faith and the outside world. The apologist certainly showed a knowledge and appreciation of the Greek philosophical and literary tradition—the pages of Justin, Athenagoras, Theophilus, and others are littered with quotations from classical philosophers and poets, many in a notably positive manner—and, indeed, their appeal to Plato, Herodotus, Homer, and the tragedians highlights the ways in which Christian intellectuals participated in the larger imperial Greek project of creating, negotiating and resignifying a classical canon (Zeegers-Vander Vorst 1972). Yet, the simultaneous conversation with the classical past and the imperial present was an unmistakably critical one. There is not a single early Christian defense of the faithful that does not engage in a task of constructing boundaries between a Christian “us” and a non-Christian “them,” based upon polarities of reason and folly, one true God and many false gods (or daemons), piety and impiety, purity and immorality, wisdom and ignorance, and so on.

  Bridges and boundaries were, however, not mutually exclusive apologetic acts. The apologists were reading the same literature and studying the same models as non-Christian pepaideumenoi of the second century. In important respects, then, they were speaking the language of their learned contemporaries. They spoke truth to imperial power (even if the emperors never read or heard their apologies, the speech act bore the same valence) and criticized Roman Hellenized culture within the philosophical diction of that culture and by means of the deployment of products of that culture (Lyman 2003; Nasrallah 2010; Perkins 2008). Countercultures—insofar as at least some early Christians were attempting to conceptualize Christianity as such—are never created sui generis. In adopting the posture of an advisor to emperors and of a social critic, the Christian intellectual was performing literary acts resonant of the Cynic-style free speech exemplified by the likes of Dio Chrysostom (Swain 1996, 192–196; Whitmarsh 2001, 181–246, 325–327).

  40.2 IN PRAISE OF THE LOGOS

  Central to the ethos of imperial sophistic culture was the celebration of the power—aesthetic, psychological, intellectual, cultural—of the spoken and written word. The classical sophistic had been heralded by the memorably ostentatious display of verbal dexterity in the Encomium of Helen by Gorgias. Even as he sought to defend Helen of all culpability in her Trojan escapade, Gorgias’s encomium of the woman became an occasion to portray and praise the power of the well-turned word (Segal 1962). The Christians, too, made significant attempts to glorify the word; in so doing, they exhibited a divergent manifestation of the revived and revised development of sophistic culture in the second century. The Christian negotiation of the word appeared in two rather distinct, but I would argue interrelated, ways. On the one hand, they adapted key elements of contemporary philosophical currents, with a
focus upon the nature of the Platonic Demiurge; on the other hand, they evinced a concern with the written words of both the classical and biblical traditions so as to transform them into integral components of their own writings.

  Drawing on Plato’s Timaeus, imperial-era philosophers of a middle Platonist or Neopythagorean persuasion had begun to explore the identity of the Demiurge with a resulting division of opinion over whether the first God was the Demiurge (Plutarch, Atticus, Nicomachus) or whether one was to distinguish the highest God from a second divine Demiurge (Dillon 1996; Opsomer 2005; cf. Moreschini 1994, 5109–5120). The precise character of this second creator was elaborated in terms of the necessity of mediating the ontological hierarchy between pure being (or even what was “beyond being”) and the material world of becoming. While Christian philosophers like Justin and Athenagoras seem to have identified the highest God (the Father) as the creator, they discovered unique ways of formulating the role of God’s Word in creation. A principal motivation lay in the presence of some of the most important biblical lines for later theological developments: the prologue of the Gospel of John had asserted that “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God . . . all things came into being through [the Word]. . . . The Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son” (John 1:1, 3, 14, NRSV). The author of these lines was himself echoing a Hellenistic Jewish conversation with Greek philosophical discourses, exhibited most clearly in the Wisdom of Solomon and the corpus of Philo of Alexandria. Ultimately, what these texts allowed second-century Christian philosophers to do was to connect the opening lines of Genesis, in which God had spoken (legein) the world into existence (“Let there be light,” etc.), with their belief in the divinity of Christ, so that God’s creative speech was seen as having become incarnate (“the Logos became flesh”), in a language that was resonant of a Platonic philosophical cosmology and ontological hierarchy (Droge 1989; Edwards 1995; Puech 1912, 103–115, 158–160, 184–190). It was a brilliant theological move that permanently opened up a space for Christian articulations (awkward and unwanted though these may have been) in the discursive fields of imperial Platonism.

  One of the reasons Socrates had proved such an amenable model for early Christian apologists was not only that he had delivered an apologia in defense of his teachings and had been willing to die for them; it was also that, as a philosopher who prized the proper use of reason (logos), he exhibited the work of God’s Logos before the incarnation (but see Edwards 1995, 278–279 for an important distinction). He recognized the superiority of a divine Mind and reason, which ordered the universe, and thus had been labeled an atheist. Christian philosophers, faced with the accusations of atheism themselves, could claim “the mind and reason [nous kai logos] of the Father is the Son of God. . . . From the beginning, God, being the eternal Mind, had the Logos in himself, being eternally rational [logikos]” (Athenagoras, Legat. 10.25–26, 28–29 Geffcken). Furthermore, the cosmological claim of a creation through the Logos of God allowed for conceiving an affiliation among all humans who recognized the Reason behind the rationally-ordered universe. It was this line of thought that allowed Justin to make the bold claim that Socrates was a Christian before Christ.

  Justin’s argument was formulated as follows. Socrates, using reason (logos), condemned the religion of the Greeks (especially as expressed in poetry—Homer and Hesiod were to be excluded from the ideal state). Driven by evil daemons, the Greeks retaliated by claiming that he was introducing “new divinities” and was an atheist. In this way, Socrates was just like the Christians. “For not only among the Greeks did Logos prevail to condemn these things through Socrates, but also among the barbarians were they condemned by the Logos himself, who took shape, and became man, and was called Jesus Christ” (1 Apol. 5.4; trans. Dods and Reith). Therefore, those who “live with logos are Christians, though they have been considered atheists;” among Greeks were men such as Socrates and Heraclitus, among barbarians men such as Abraham and Elias; this same Logos was born of a virgin, suffered, died, and rose (1 Apol. 46.3–5; Droge 1989, 65–72). If unpersuasive to modern readers (and to many ancient readers as well), such Christian explorations of the Word display a fascinating creativity and the beginnings of a pervasive intertextual movement between biblical and classical words and conceptions that would have a rich and fecund course throughout Late Antiquity.

  A second salient mode of working with words in carving out a textual space within imperial literary culture involved the direct quotation of others’ words. Justin’s First Apology contained a significant number of quotations from Plato and the poets (Zeegers-Vander Vorst 1972, 23–24, 255–256), as well as many biblical passages (especially in his survey of Christian teachings). But it is in a later work, the Dialogue with Trypho, that Justin would push quotation to new levels in a manner reminiscent of Josephus or earlier Isocrates, while at the same time exhibiting further the ways in which Plato continued to represent a model for the literary presentation of true philosophy. The opening pages of the Dialogue with Trypho possess all the indications of standing within classical philosophical channels (Edwards 1991; Hoffmann 1966, 9–40; Rajak 1999, 59–68; Van Winden 1971). A narrative of Justin’s philosophical and educational pursuits, first among Stoics, then Peripatetics, Pythagoreans, and Platonists, provided a literary extension of similar autobiographical claims made by Socrates in Plato’s dialogues, where an account was given of the ephemeral appeal of other philosophic approaches in such a way as to highlight their shortcomings and so show the viability of the speaker’s approach (e.g., Pl. Phd. 96a–100a). All of this was couched within the form of a dialogue with an interlocutor who represented a distinct position (in this case, Trypho, a Jew who advised Justin to be a good Platonist, or, instead, to be a good Jew; Dial. 8).

  Trypho suggested that Christians could not hope to be truly pious if they ignored all the rituals and festivals practiced by true God-fearers. As it is, they “are not in any particular separated from [other peoples], and do not alter [their] mode of living from the nations. . . . If you can defend yourself on these points . . . we would gladly hear from you” (Dial. 10; trans. Dods and Reith). Justin responded to this challenge in a lengthy argument comprising quotation from the Hebrew Scriptures with his own interpretive commentary (Dial. 11–142). His basic position continued that of Paul in the New Testament: Christians are the “true Israel,” for they understand the Scriptures more correctly than the Jews and find in them a true account of piety and prophecies of Christ and the church. We see clearly expressed throughout the Dialogue the demarcation of Christians from Jews as distinct identities based upon a literary severing of the true (Christian) reading of Scriptures from a false (Jewish) reading of them. Justin was, in effect, performing a “parting of the ways” between them so as to create rival identities for each as distinct peoples, even distinct nations (ethnê).6

  Fundamental to this construction of identity and conflict over right reading techniques was the quotation of large blocks of text from a source (in this case the Hebrew Scriptures) as witnesses for one’s defense. The New Testament authors and other early Christians had made frequent allusion to, and paraphrase or quotation of, the Hebrew Scriptures. Justin, however, distinguished himself from these earlier practices in the length of his quotations (some totaling roughly a chapter of quoted material) and in the centrality of quotation, rather than allusion or paraphrase, to the development of his argument. Indeed, his argument is a quotational one in that its very basis rests upon the quotation of texts. In this aspect, Justin not only participated in the broader book culture of the second century (Johnson 2010), but placed himself at the heart of the fledgling “testimonia” tradition (Skarsaune 1987). Testimonia texts collected passages of Scripture that were deemed useful for debate (either with Jews or with other Christian groups) so as to provide a practical reference tool for those who might not have had the sort of command of Scripture that would allow the
m to quote from memory the passage that would most appropriately confirm their own claim or refute those of others. A testimonia collection would contain the quoted material with little or no commentary by the collector. Because he provided his own comments on the biblical passages, Justin’s was not simply a testimonia collection; but it certainly seems to have depended upon one (possibly one of his own making). This sort of performance of excerpting passages of ancient works for the purposes of self-promotion and polemical display was scarcely unique to Jews and Christians (the “peoples of the book”). Scholarly excerpting was widespread in sophistic culture of the second century as the aficionados of quotation and philological banter in the pages of Aulus Gellius or Athenaeus show (Johnson 2010, 118–136). So, too, in Justin’s Dialogue the effect of incorporating extensive blocks of quotation displayed the power that could be garnered through mastery of ancient words: the character of Trypho himself admitted amazement at Justin’s knowledge of the writings of the Jews (Dial. 56.16; cf. 50.1, 65.1) and Justin would even declare to Trypho that the Jewish writings were “not yours, but ours” (Dial. 29.2).