C. Clement and Origen

Although the chronology of the second- and third-century Platonists is by no means firmly grounded, we may say with some certainty that the careers of Clement and Origen roughly bridge the period between Numenius and Plotinus. This would make Clement a much younger contemporary of Numenius and not far distant in age from Ammonius Saccas, the teacher both of Plotinus and of Origen.^[103]

Clement and Origen have a great deal in common with Philo and Numenius, but as Christians they were alienated from these forerunners, and the purpose of their writing is quite distinct. They will occupy us here only to the extent that they throw light on attitudes toward Homer among philosophically inclined Christians at a time when the mystical allegorization of Homer was clearly becoming a characteristic part of pagan Platonism.

The attitude of Clement toward Homer is far from simple, and indeed appears fraught with contradictions. The influence of Philo's hermeneutics is everywhere apparent,^[104] but Philo discussed only scripture, and the status of the Homeric poems for Clement was not that of scripture (though he cites the Iliad and the Odyssey over 240 times in his preserved works). In Clement's view, Homer and the other early Greek poets, perceived as dependent on the Hebrew prophets, philosophized cryptically in their poetry

.^[105] Correct (that is, Christian) doctrines were available to Homer, and some at least of his mythic elaborations are viewed as shields for hidden, more acceptable, truths. Nonetheless, Clement's attitude is far from the enthusiastic acceptance one might anticipate from some modern accounts.^[106]

In his use of pagan culture, Clement has two central points, to which he returns incessantly, and these are largely determinative of the picture of Homer he presents. First and foremost, he is concerned to demonstrate the unworthiness—indeed, the nonexistence—of the pagan gods.

[103] Ammonius Saccas must have had a long career, presiding over the education of Origen in the first decade of the third century and then over that of Plotinus in the third. This is Dillon's chronology (Middle PIatonists , p. 382).

[104] See R. B. Tollinton, Clement of Alexandria , vol. 1, pp. 165-66, and vol. 2, pp. 212-13, on Clement's debt to Philo, but note also Henri de Lubac's position on the relationship between Philo and the Alexandrian Christian exegetes, discussed in ch. 6E below.

[105] Clem. Strom . 5.4.24.1 = GCS 2.340.26.

[106] See Hugo Rahner, Griechische Mythen in christlicher Deutung , pp. 243, 289.

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Secondly, he wants to enhance the prestige of the Christian tradition and the texts on which it is based by showing that this same revelation penetrated, however dimly, to the most perceptive and authoritative of the pagans.

Taking the negative side first, in the Protrepticus of Clement we find a coherent portrait of Homer the poet, one clearly and rather surprisingly harkening back to Herodotus. Here again we find Homer the fashioner of gods (Protrep . 2.26.6), but now, of course, the purpose of the account is to discredit those gods and to undermine belief in them. The gods depicted by Homer were no gods at all—he himself calls them

(Protrep . 4-55.4), insults them (Protrep . 7.76.1), and shows them to be wounded by mortals (Protrep . 2.36.1-2), committing adultery (Protrep . 4.59.1), and even acting as servants to mortals (Protrep . 2.35.2). Many of the offending passages are those singled out by Socrates, but the enumeration also seems occasionally to anticipate Proclus's somewhat expanded list of passages that must be explained through theurgy or allegory.^[107]

The poet described in the Protrepticus is not himself in error, but the very nature of his account of the divine undermines belief—it is a poetic fantasy riddled with unacceptable notions. By contrast, the Homer of Clement's Stromateis (who is "said by most people to have been an Egyptian," Strom . 1.14.66.1) has glimmerings of truth. He erroneously claims that gods are perceptible to the human senses, and yet he simultaneously betrays a contradictory knowledge that this is not the case (Strom. 5.14.116-27 on Il . 22.8-10). He knows such doctrines as the sanctity of the seventh day (Strom . 5.14.107.3), the justice of God (Strom . 5.14.130), and the creation of man from clay (Strom . 5.24.99.4-6), and he even echoes Genesis on the separation of earth and water and the emergence of the dry land (Strom . 5.14.100.5 on Il . 14.206-7). Yet this Homer with his echoes of revealed truth remains essentially in darkness, a distant witness to the true revelation. He refers to Zeus as the "father of gods and men," but he is merely mouthing a formula, "knowing neither who the father is nor in what sense he is the father."^[108]

These samples of Clement's treatment of Homer demonstrate that for this most Hellenizing, most receptive of the Fathers of the early Church,

[107] A knowledge on Proclus's part of Clement's Protrepticus seems quite likely, and I do not doubt that a strong argument could be made that Proclus is responding indirectly to such critiques as this in his defense of Homer, though his ostensible and main goal is always to answer Socrates.

^[108]

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Homer was both an allegorical poet whose prestige might add to that of the Christian tradition and a participant in the revelation lying behind Christianity. But the limitations of Homer are crucially important. Homer perceived only dimly the truth of the revelation to the Jews. His poetic fictions are a "screen"

: the term, so characteristic of Proclus, is used in Clement (Strom . 5.4.24.1) to refer to the poetry of Homer, Hesiod, Orpheus, Linus, and Musaeus. But that "screen" is misleading, false, and for all its beauty and ingenuity, Homer the allegorical poet, a visionary by heathen standards, is in fundamental points of doctrine profoundly wrong.

Clement is necessarily central to any understanding of the role of Homer in the thought of the early Christians, and although his Greek culture was certainly exceptional, and although the interpretive and philosophical traditions of Alexandria provided him with tools and attitudes not so readily accessible to Christians elsewhere, his combination of respect with criticism may be taken as typical. He saw in Homer an authoritative theological source for an inimical tradition who might be turned against that tradition and mustered to the new cause.

Origen, who appears to have learned much from Clement, nevertheless expresses a hostility to the pagans that contrasts markedly with Clement's own characteristic liberalism. The source of this may have been his experience of the persecutions of 202 in Alexandria (which Clement fled), but whatever its origin, it pervades his writings, and particularly the polemic Against Celsus , where allegorical interpretation of the obscenities of Homer and the other pagan theologians is denounced.^[109] Still, the influence of Clement is inevitably felt. Homer is "the best of poets" (

, Contra Cels . 7.6), an author who may be taken as an authoritative source for the (benighted) pagan tradition, but Origen echoes Socrates' rejection of Homer and explicitly denies that Plato considered such poets inspired (

, Contra Cels . 4.36). Origen mentions the writings of an unnamed Pythagorean who wrote on the hidden doctrine of Homer and apparently used a complex demonology to explain some of the Iliad's statements about the gods.^[110] Since in other contexts he mentions Numenius several times with approval, it is tempting to identify the unnamed Pythagorean commentator as Numenius, but this identification remains far from certain. Numenius does, however, provide Origen with a valuable example of a pagan who

[109] Origen Contra Cels . 6.42.

[110] Origen Contra Cels . 7.6. On the identity of the Pythagorean, see Henry Chadwick's note ad loc . (Origen: Contra Celsum , p. 400, n. 2).

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(in contrast to the "Epicurean" Celsus) read and studied the Hebrew and Christian scriptures and held them in respect "as writings that are allegorical and are not stupid" (

,
Contra Cels . 4.51). This is an interesting position, and one that in part anticipates Augustine. Origen and Augustine both find Pythagoreans and Platonists useful and, among the pagans, sympathetic. It is clear to Origen that, in Numenius's circle as in his own, to judge a piece of writing worthy of allegorical reading is to lend it dignity and importance—and he accepts this compliment to the scriptures. And yet, like Augustine, he is hostile to the defensive allegories of obscene myth, which he connects with the materialist Stoic/Epicurean tradition.

Origen is the only early Christian author known to me who makes explicit the analogy between the reading of Homer and the reading of the Gospels. He considers Homer to be largely historically accurate, but to incorporate fantastic elements that are to be interpreted allegorically. This sort of reading is simply a matter of open-mindedness for Origen, and he demands the same open-mindedness of pagan readers of the Gospels:

He who approaches the stories [i.e., the Greek myths, including Homer's account of the Trojan War] generously and wishes to avoid being misled in reading them will decide which parts he will believe, and which he will interpret allegorically, searching out the intentions of the authors of such fictions, and which he will refuse to believe, and will consider simply as things written to please someone. And having said this, we have been speaking, in anticipation, about the whole story of Jesus in the Gospels. We do not urge the intelligent in the direction of simple and irrational faith, but wish to advise them that those who are going to read this story need to be generous in their approach and will require a great deal of insight and, if I may call it that, power of penetration into the meaning of the Scriptures in order that the intention with which each passage was written may be discovered.^[111]

^[111]

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The analogy between the reading of pagan mythic tales and the reading of the scriptures turns on the quality of

(which I have translated as "generosity"), a right-mindedness that is also an openness to the text and a willingness to acknowledge levels of meaning within it, and at the same time to withdraw belief from that which is entirely unacceptable without rejecting the rest.

Origen stands at a considerable distance from Philo in his assessment of the Hebrew scriptures. For Origen, the literal meaning was at times unacceptable, with serious consequences for the credibility of the Jewish tradition.^[112] He thus faced a problem precisely analogous to that of his younger pagan contemporary Porphyry with respect to Homer. The pagan exegesis of Homer and the Christian exegesis of scripture (and particularly the Hebrew scriptures) developed in parallel from this point, until several centuries later the author of the Dionysian corpus applied to the Hebrew scriptures precisely the methodology (based on precisely the same philosophical presuppositions) that his own pagan model, Proclus, had applied to the Iliad and Odyssey .^[113]

[112] See Chadwick in CHLGEMP, p. 183.

^[113]

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Date: 2015-12-17; view: 755