The church fathers never were totally forgotten. But, more often than not, they were read with a teleological optics. Controversial theology, beginning in the sixteenth century, looked for forerunners of Catholic or Reformed dogmatics, but made high standards of philological and historical accuracy necessary.1 Neo-Scholasticism saw them as paving the way for more elaborate theological syntheses, in particular the work of Thomas Aquinas. Their works were excerpted and used as arguments, but seldom studied for their own sake.
An impressive witness of the interest of the nineteenth century for patristics, as well as a moving evidence for the high cultural level of the French clergy in the said period, is the mighty enterprise of a Catholic priest, Jacques-Paul Migne (d. 1875). His methods in dealing with former editors were seldom on the right side of the copyright laws, as the amusing biography that R. Howard Bloch devoted to him shows.2 Yet, the result is there, an impressive monument of more than four-hundred in-quarto volumes, so widely known and taken advantage of that new editions of patristic texts always refer in their margins to the columns of Migne’s Patrologia Graeca and Patrologia Latina, even if their level of scholarly accuracy is way above that of Migne’s volumes.
Special mention must be made of fathers Claude Mondésert and Henri de Lubac, both were Jesuits, and of the series Sources Chrétiennes, founded in the darkest hours of the Second World War (1942), and in the wake of which many collections were produced in several languages.
Yet, the philosophers who paid attention to the writings of the church fathers are not that many. To the best of my knowledge, there is still no equivalent of Hans Jonas’ work on the gnostics, i.e., of an interpretation of religious thinkers by means of conceptual tools borrowed from philosophy. The nearest approach we possess is Harry A. Wolfson’s huge first volume of a monograph that never was completed,3 although Wolfson’s approach was more history of ideas than philosophy. A noteworthy exception is Hans Blumenberg (d. 1996), who frequently quoted Arnobius and Lactantius, authors who are often looked down upon by his colleagues. The German philosopher Theo Kobusch has recently come up with a book that defends a bold thesis: Christianity is the full coming-to-itself of Platonism, its “truth” in the Hegelian meaning of this phrase. Furthermore, it introduced onto the philosophical stage a new object: subjectivity.4
Augustine is the exception that confirms the rule. Not to mention more or less casual references to utterances by him in Husserl (on the “inner man” as place of the truth) and Wittgenstein (on the way children learn to speak), Heidegger devoted a whole lecture-course to the Confessions.5 More recently, Jean-Luc Marion has proposed a challenging phenomenological interpretation of Augustine’s approach to subjectivity.6
In the present book, Dariusz Karłowicz chose to write as a philosopher interested in the philosophical aspects of some church fathers. He limits his research to a definite period of time. Not the very earliest period: the so-called Apostolic Fathers (Ignatius, Clement of Rome) are left out of the picture. Rather, he focuses on Tertullian, Justin, Clement of Alexandria. The anonymous “Epistle to Diognetus” and Origen are mentioned only twice, the Cappadocians never. This period can be characterized on historical and philosophical grounds.
Historically, it antedates the turning-point of Constantine’s “conversion” and of the Council of Nicea. Dariusz Karłowicz points out that the historical situation of the ante-Nicene fathers is very much the same as our own [9–10]. Whether this is a drawback or a chance is an open question. The Constantinian era may have been a parenthesis only on the backdrop of a “normal” situation of estrangement of Christianity vis-à-vis the surrounding culture. Not necessarily a persecution, although the last century has produced a number of martyrs that dwarf the victims of Nero or Diocletian. The present one might itself make it look like the botched performance of amateurs.
Philosophically, Dariusz Karłowicz chooses to focus on the crucial period of the first encounter of Christianity and philosophy. Hence, we are before the Cappadocians. With them, especially Gregory of Nyssa, Plato’s influence becomes unmistakable, although Platonism never was swallowed with hook, line, and sinker, but always corrected and completed on essential points.7 Not to mention later authors like Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, who lived around 500, who heavily drew on Proclus, or Leontius of Byzantium and Maximus Confessor, both steeped in Aristotelian logic and metaphysics.
The very first Christian writers had few contacts with technical philosophy. This must be explained, in order to correct a fallacy arising from the very way in which we perceive the ancient world. For us, this world is present first and foremost thanks to its literary legacy. The ancient world means: ancient literature and art. Hence, we spontaneously think of the ancient mind as being ancient philosophy. But philosophy was in the ancient world the privilege of a rather narrow cultural elite. Philosophers did not write for the common run of mankind.8 “Doing philosophy” was perceived as a means to escape from the vulgar.9 Furthermore, we must distinguish inside “philosophy” itself. There were several levels in the offer of philosophical goods on the ancient market. There were high-brow schools, like the Neoplatonic one that combined an elementary initiation to logic, physics, and ethics, based on the textbooks of Aristotle, and a higher revelation contained in Plato’s dialogues. This kind of philosophy was upheld by small circles of highly educated, and more often than not pretty affluent, teachers who were often related by blood. Underneath, there were popular philosophers who belonged to the Stoic or Epicurean tradition and preached for the lower classes. Those are the philosophers who got in touch with St. Paul (Acts 17:18) as well as with the rabbis of the Talmud. The latter coined the word אפיקורוס, “Epicurus,” to designate the unbeliever, more precisely the people who deny the existence of God’s providence.10 The subtleties of “higher” philosophy were not directly known by the early church fathers, who had to put up with textbooks of doxography. Now, the bulk of what we call “ancient philosophy” is for us the library of the late, decidedly high-brow Neoplatonic schools, that comprised the works of the professors (Plotinus, Proclus, Damascius) and the “classical works” they commented upon, i.e., Plato and Aristotle.
In order to better understand the stance taken by the church fathers toward philosophy, it is apposite to enlarge our ken to the whole of Greek culture and to get rid of a received wisdom, the supposed Hellenization of early Christianity. The very idea of a Hellenism superseding the supposedly purely Semitic preaching of Jesus or the primitive community, as Dariusz Karłowicz shows, has not a leg to stand on. There never was such a thing as pure “Hellenism” nor, for that matter, pure “Semitism.” When Jesus preached, Palestine had been under Hellenistic rule for three centuries, and the eastern part of the Roman Empire was administrated in Greek rather than in Latin. The Greek word for “palanquin,” phoreion, has found its way into the Hebrew Bible as ’appiryōn (Song 3:9). The Hellenization took place among the Jewish communities of the Mediterranean seaports, and first of all in Alexandria, where the Septuagint translation gives evidence of the encounter. An encounter between Christianity and Greek paideia was hardly avoidable, nay it was normal.11
According to the usual picture, the fathers adopted towards Greek philosophy contrary attitudes. Some welcomed it by means of different strategies of appropriation, whereas some bluntly rejected its claims. Those attitudes are often symbolized by two heroes: Justin and Tertullian. Now, Dariusz Karłowicz shows that Tertullian does not attack reason as such and that Justin is not so staunch a rationalist as commonly admitted. For him, philosophy sees a part of the whole truth, but only a part of it [59].There never was a frontal opposition between Christianity and philosophy as two blocks. A great diversity obtained in both camps. The Christians were not only those whom we consider at present as orthodox, like the church fathers. People whom we consider now as “heretics” were in there, too. On the side of the philosophers, schools fought with each other. There never was a common front of philosophy against its opponents, at least before a relatively late date, when Porphyry inaugurated the tradition of the harmonies between Plato and Aristotle12 that was to be taken up by Arabic philosophers like al-Fārābī (d. 950)13 and lasted in Europe till the fifteenth century, the Italian Quattrocento. The watershed may have been Gemistos Plethon’s polemics against Aristotle, which led to the grounding of the so-called Platonic Academy in Florence.
In earlier times, philosophers poked fun at each other and hardly pulled their punches. Stoics and Epicureans don’t pamper each other in Cicero’s dialogues. Plutarch launched broadsides against both schools. Now, the church fathers more often than not used the intellectual tools that had been handed over to them by the philosophers they criticized.
Dariusz Karłowicz is careful to do openly what many people recoil from doing, i.e., distinguishing the stance towards reason and the stance towards philosophy [35]. On the one hand, Christianity never was the enemy of reason. The phrase sacrificium intellectus is often misunderstood because of a faulty construction of the genitive, which is in this case subjective and, heaven forfend, not objective! The intellect is not what is sacrificed, but what sacrifices, not the victim, but the priest that offers God a “verbal cult,” the logikh latreia of St. Paul (Rom 12:1). We are miles away from a praise of stupidity. Moreover, pistis, that we translate with “faith,” is supposed by philosophers, too. Some trust is necessary for whoever wants to learn (dei pisteuein ton manqanonta):14 trust in the truthfulness and sincerity of the teacher. More basically still, trust in the truthfulness of our intellectual tools.
But, on the other hand, philosophy doesn’t possess any monopoly vis-à-vis rationality, nay it is not always the rightful heir of reason [69]. The basic concept that makes philosophy possible is nature (physis).15 Now, even this basic concept is not always adequately dealt with by philosophers [75]. Somehow blinded by the dazzling light of their discovery, the first ones mistook the autonomy of nature’s laws for self-position and made of nature some self-positing Being, to use Scholastic parlance an ens a se, almost a god.
Many centuries afterwards, Spinoza made the same kind of mistake when he defined his “substance” as what exists by itself without requiring any external factor.16 This boils down to conflating two meanings of being, the existential and the predicative in its definitional use. A substance (ousia), in the original definition of this word of art of Aristotelian philosophy, is what does not require anything else in order to be what it is, i.e., to possess the “essential” properties that it must possess in order to be what it is. It doesn’t mean that a substance should be able to exist by itself.
A more balanced view should acknowledge at least the possibility of a creation, together with the stable nature of created beings that enables them to become the object of scientific knowledge.17
It might be the case that the real intellectual fight in Late Antiquity was fought not between dogmas, but between worldviews and the ways of life that they fostered in response to them. Hans Urs von Balthasar once observed, en passant, probably in the wake of Nietzsche, that the real adversary of Christian salvation is not Greek philosophy, but the vision of life and being that comes to the fore in Greek tragedy.18 Very much in an analogous way, Dariusz Karłowicz points out that philosophy was, for pagans as well as for Christians, for its practitioners as well as for as for its enemies, less a set of dogmas (although the word is philosophic in origin) as a way of life. He thereby takes advantage of the works of Pierre Hadot who highlighted this dimension of ancient philosophy.
Possibly, the same fight is still a living issue for us and has not lost anything of its pungency. The Socratic model of life of constant enquiry is very nice, but it precludes from the possibility that the Truth is given. One knows Lessing’s parable in which the choice is between the Truth and the search for the Truth.19 The German playwright and philologist contended that we human beings should choose enquiry over the Truth, for the latter is God’s privilege. So far so good. But how could we know that we are really looking for truth and not for our own intellectual excitement. Furthermore, what if God had somehow wanted to present us with Truth?
Rémi Brague
1. See the keen observation of Ch. Dawson, “Edward Gibbon and the Fall of Rome” [1934], v, in: Dynamics of World History (Wilmington: ISI Books, 2002), 353.
2. R. Howard Bloch, God’s Plagiarist: Being an Account of the Fabulous Industry and Illegal Commerce of the Abbé Migne (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
3. H. A. Wolfson, The Philosophy of the Church Fathers, vol. 1: Faith, Trinity, Incarnation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1956).
4. T. Kobusch, Christliche Philosophie: Die Entdeckung der Subjektivität (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2006).
5. M. Heidegger, Augustinus und der Neuplatonismus (Summer 1921), Gesamtausgabe, vol. 60, edited by C. Strube (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1995).
6. J.-L. Marion, Au lieu de soi: L’approche de saint Augustin (Paris: P.U.F., 2008).
7. E. von Ivánka, Plato Christianus: Übernahme und Umgestaltung des Platonismus durch die Väter (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1964).
8. See, e.g., Porphyry, De abstinentia, I, 27, 28 & IV, 18, 7.
9. See, e.g., Lucian, Hermotimus, §§15, 21, 52, 67.
10. Mishnah, Sanhedrin, X, 1; Avot, II, 14.
11. See Werner Jaeger, Early Christianity and Greek Paideia. There is a commodious bilingual edition English / Italian (Milan: Bompiani, 2013).
12. See the pathbreaking article by P. Hadot, «L’harmonie des philosophies de Platon et d’Aristote selon Porphyre dans le commentaire de Dexippe sur les Catégories» [1974], in: Plotin, Porphyre. Etudes Néoplatoniciennes (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1999), 335–82.
13. Al-Fārābī, L’armonia delle opinioni dei due sapienti il divino Platone e Aristotele. Introduzione, testo arabo, traduzione e commento di Cecilia Martini Bonadeo (Pisa: Plus, 2008).
14. Aristotle, Sophistical Refutations, 2, 165b3.
15. L. Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 81–83.
16. Spinoza, Ethica more geometrico demonstrata, Definition 3, Proposition VII.
17. See Augustine, De Genesi ad litteram, IX, 17, ed. Zycha (Vienna: Tempsky, 1894), 291 (naturales leges); Thomas Aquinas, Summa contra Gentiles, III, 69 (Rome: Leonina, 1934), 304a (cognitio scientiae naturalis).
18. H. U. von Balthasar, Rechenschaft 1965 (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1965), 24.
19. G. E. Lessing, Eine Duplik, 1, end; Werke t. 8 (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1996), 33.