B. The Arabic Tradition

Greek philosophy entered the Near Eastern tradition in two major waves, the first in the sixth century (following the closing of the philosophical

[9] See E. N. Tigerstedt, The Decline and Fall of the Neoplatonic Interpretation of Plato , esp. pp. 7-12, and, on the influence of Porphyry, Pierre Courcelle, Les Lettres grecques en occident de Macrobe à Cassiodore , pp. 22-35 and 397-99.

[10] Klibansky, Continuity of the Platonic Tradition .

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schools by Justinian in 529 and doctrinal disputes within the church that later in the century drove the Nestorians and Monophysites of Edessa east to Persia), and the second from the eighth century to the tenth century, when the Alexandrian schools were revived in Baghdad and the central Platonic dialogues (including the Timaeus and the Republic ) were translated into Arabic.^[11] In the absence of translations of the Iliad and Odyssey , readers in this tradition must have been bewildered by Socrates' attacks on the epic poets and by the wealth of literary references in the dialogues. Aristotle reached the Arabs by way of the schools of Syria and intermediate Syriac translations in the eighth century. The Organon came first, and was relatively easily separable from the tradition of Greek literature, but by the early tenth century the Poetics had been translated and used by al-Farabi.^[12]

It should be no surprise that the Arab commentators tend simply to absorb from their philosophical sources traditional judgments of Greek poets, and to pass over in silence passages that demand a direct knowledge of Greek poetry. This is exactly what Avicenna does in his commentary on the Poetics (ca. 1020); he echoes Aristotle's praise of Homer and declares him the model encomiastic poet, avoiding references to the specifics of Greek poetry.^[13] There is a similarity between the dim and garbled perceptions of Homer we find among the Arabs and those that penetrate the Latin West—a similarity that is simultaneously surprising and sobering. There is, of course, no reason why we should expect the Iliad and Odyssey to have taken root in Visigothic Spain or Ostrogothic Italy but not in the cultural centers of the Arab world, but to find on either side the same rudimentary perceptions based on the same incomprehension of Homer's language and the same inheritance of judgments and interpretations encysted in the philosophical authors is nevertheless a reminder that for nearly a thousand years the undying fame of Homer glimmered only faintly outside of Byzantium.

At the same time, however, a very special aura attached to that fame and to the name of Homer (or Umirus), an aura that was the product of the transformation of Homer brought to completion by the Neoplatonists. His name appears in lists of sages that include Hesiod, Pythagoras, and various ill-matched heroes and gods.^[14] Although the first trans-

[11] Ibid., p. 14.

[12] F. E. Peters, Aristoteles Arabus , pp. 7-23, 28-30. On al-Farabi, see also I. M. Dahiyat, Avicenna's Commentary on the Poetics of Aristotle , p. 4.

[13] Dahiyat, Avicenna's Commentary on the Poetics , p. 76, n. 2, and p. 109, n. 1.

[14] Franz Rosenthal, Das Fortleben der Antike im Islam , p. 57.

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lation of the Iliad into Arabic would appear to have occurred only in 1904, there is evidence from the late Middle Ages for a Syriac version of "the two books of Umirus on the ancient conquest of the city of Ilyun" prepared in the eighth century by Theophilus of Edessa, court astrologer of the Maronite Khalif al-Mahdi.^[15] It is striking that it was thus within the Syrian Christian community, with its link to the Greek tradition by way of the Greek scriptures and the Church Fathers, that a need was felt to translate Homer into a Semitic language. The Arab translators of the period (who often worked from Syriac intermediaries) knew Homer in the original, but apparently felt no need to translate him into Arabic, beyond minor elaborations of Homeric texts found quoted in Greek philosophical authors, and even these quotations of Homer are frequently garbled, and eventually tend to be replaced by lines from Arab poets.^[16]

Jörg Kraemer's survey of the fate of Homer in Islam notes a number of isolated survivals that bear along with them the baggage of the interpretive tradition. The eleventh-century writer on India al-Biruni cites a supposedly Homeric verse on the harmony of the spheres. Whatever the lost connection between the passage quoted and Homer, one can clearly see Pythagoreanizing interpreters at work here. Another citation from the same author seems to be lifted from a commentary on Aratus and brings along a Stoicizing gloss as the opinion of the poet, interpreting Zeus as equivalent to spirit

active in matter

.^[17]

Among the varied shreds of the Greek tradition that the Arabs attributed to Homer, the most remarkable—and the most indicative of what must seem to us a chilling insensitivity to the range and richness of Greek literature—are the "Sayings of Menander" transmitted as excerpts from Homer. These were preserved independently in Greek, but other facile moral precepts and observations equally transmitted by Arabic collections as dicta Homeri are untraceable beyond the Arabic and resurface (without Homer's name) in medieval books of precepts.^[18] Homer the Sage was clearly at home in Islam, and although the Arabs, in ignorance of the development of non-philosophical Greek literature, naively

[15] Jörg Kraemer, "Arabische Homerverse," p. 261, with discussion. I am indebted to Kraemer for the bulk of the following material on Homer's fate in Islamic tradition. It is probable that these "two books" represented a work on the scale of the first-century Ilias latina .

[16] Kraemer, "Arabische Homerverse," pp. 264, 287.

[17] Ibid., pp. 275-79.

[18] Ibid., pp. 290-302. On the sententiae Menandri , see also Manfred Ullmann, Die arabische Überlieferung der sogenannten Menandersentenzen .

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incorporated into their "Homeric" corpus material from other poets and genres, the broad lines of the development of the figure of the visionary, allegorical poet remain the familiar ones. The principal difference would seem to lie in the Arabic tradition's greater willingness to go to the poets for moral precepts than for metaphysical or cosmological ones, a tendency that led them to create a Homer who was primarily a purveyor of instructions on how to live and not on the fate of souls and the structure of the universe.

The Arabic tradition, then, did not constitute an important path of communication between the Byzantine tradition and the Latin West for the "divine Homer," but our brief consideration of the Arabs here has revealed instead a pattern of cultural assimilation vividly analogous to that which emerged in Western Europe. The traditions of Homer the Sage in the Arab world and in the Latin West are siblings that have followed separate paths to such an extent that their common ancestry can only rarely be perceived.^[19]

Although the translation of Greek philosophical works from Arabic into Latin, along with the creation of Latin versions of Arabic pseudepigrapha, constituted an influential channel for Greek ideas reentering the West in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance, the importance of these texts for the Neoplatonists' idea of Homer would appear to have been negligible. The Greek texts that entered the Latin tradition by way of the Arabs were translated into Latin for the most part during the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries,^[20] a date too late to be of much help to us. The importance for the Latin tradition of the Arabic transmission of Plato is only now receiving intensive study, and until the Plato Arabus project progresses further, it would be premature to predict what might be found in these texts to illuminate our inquiry. There are already tantalizing hints. Klibansky mentions the (unpublished) preface to al-Farabi's paraphrase of the Laws , containing a discussion of "the theory of a discrepancy between the literal and the real meaning,"^[21] and this raises the possibility that the Neoplatonists' theories of interpretation may in fact have gained some currency in the Latin West by way of the Arabs.

[19] Kraemer, for example, traces both the Latin Scholia Sangermanensia on Aratus and those that are the source for al-Biruni's citation of Homer back to a Greek commentary of the third century after Christ by one "Achilleus" ("Arabische Homerverse," p. 275).

[20] Klibansky, Continuity of the Platonic Tradition , pp. 14-18, esp. 17, and 53-54.

[21] Ibid., p. 16.

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Moreover Averroes (in the twelfth century)^[22] expresses a conviction that allegorical interpretation of theological narratives is necessary, though the work in question (Fasl at-maqal , "The Decisive Treatise") was not translated into Latin along with his commentaries on Aristotle. Whatever hidden influence may lie here, it remains true that in the latter part of the twelfth century, the Latin West already knew about texts that were "screens" (

in Proclus; integumenta or involucra in the interpretive vocabulary of the School of Chartres)^[23] for hidden meanings. Whatever contributing elements may be found coming from the Arabs are unlikely to constitute more than a superfetation.

Mention should be made in this context, however, of the influence of two twelfth-century translations from the Arabic that swelled the Aristotelian corpus, the Liber de pomo and the Liber de causis . Both are pseudepigrapha of Arabic origin, the former a dialogue depicting Aristotle's last moments (and clearly an imitation of the Phaedo ), the latter (also titled De expositione bonitatis purae ) a discourse on causality and the structure of the universe, derived from Proclus.^[24] Both of these works were probably known to Dante and will be mentioned later in that context, and neither mentions Homer or interpretation as such. Their importance here relates to the position of Aristotle in late medieval philosophy. If Aristotle is the "maestro di color che sanno" for Dante, that opinion (which comes to him through Aquinas) is at least in part inherited from the Arabs, who treated Aristotle somewhat in the same way they treated Homer. That is, Aristotle was taken as a model sage, the Greek philosopher par excellence, and much that was in fact non-Aristotelian (including material from Plotinus, Porphyry, and Proclus) was attributed to him.^[25] In this form, and so attributed, it entered the Latin West, either in the late Middle Ages with the two books in question, or during the Renaissance with the Theologia Aristotelis , a compendium of Plotinian Neoplatonism. As Richard Walzer emphasizes, "The essential identity of Plato's and Aristotle's thought" was an idea "common to all the Muslim philosophers" and derived ultimately from the Neoplatonists' synthesis of Plato and

[22] See Peter Dronke, Fabula , pp. 19-20, n. 3, to whom I owe this reference.

[23] Winthrop Wetherbee, Platonism and Poetry in the Twelfth Century , pp. 38-49.

[24] For the texts and translations, see "Works Cited: Ancient Authors" under Ps.-Aristotle.

[25] Cf. Kraemer, "Arabische Homerverse," pp. 301-2 for the comparison of the Arabs' use of the two names.

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Aristotle initiated by Porphyry,^[26] but this situation was made considerably more complex by the naive attribution of a variety of extraneous texts and ideas to Aristotle himself.

If the Arabs can give us little of substance to add to our understanding of the transmission of the Neoplatonists' visionary Homer, they nevertheless set the stage for a period in which Aristotle could be imagined describing the contents of his Metaphysics as follows: "Blessed is the soul that is not infected with the corrupt works of this world and perceives its creator; this is the soul that returns to its home in great ecstasy."^[27] This Aristotle also expounds a stratified model of the universe extending from the first cause beyond all speech by way of intelligentia and anima down to the level of sensus and the physical world (Liber de causis , ch. 11). The disguise was not impenetrable; Aquinas saw through it and realized that the Liber de causis was mistakenly attributed to Aristotle, and Dante himself may have done so as well. But for those of their respective contemporaries who did not, central ideas of pagan Neoplatonism constituted the consummation of "Aristotelian" philosophy, and the model of reality the Neoplatonists had found in Homer (and indeed wherever else they chose to look) could easily be attributed to Aristotle as well.

C. The Greek East

Thus far, the Greek pagan tradition of mystical allegorical interpretation of Homer has been traced as far as Proclus, late in the fifth century. Long before Proclus's time, however, the issue of the relationship of the epics to Christian paideia (to use Werner Jaeger's term) had commanded attention. It should be no surprise that Christians taught Homer to Christians in the schools of the fourth-century empire, nor should it be surprising that in doing so they made claims regarding the meaning of the text that were offensive to men such as Julian. It is impossible to generalize satisfactorily concerning the receptiveness of Christian intellectuals to Homer in this period. A wide range of attitudes toward pagan literature can

[26] Richard Walzer, Greek into Arabic , p. 240.

[27] "Beata est anima, que non est infecta prauis operibus huius mundi et intellexit creatorem suum, et ipsa est, que revertitur in locum suum in deliciis magnis " (Liber de pomo , 370-72).

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be documented, ranging from general hostility or indifference, by way of the liberal, but reserved, receptiveness of Basil of Cappadocia,^[28] to the eclectic allegorizing of Clement of Alexandria.

In his Griechische Mythen in christlicher Deutung , Hugo Rahner has brought together a substantial body of material on the assimilation of Homer to Christian thought. Perhaps the most striking revelation emerging from his historical survey is the early date at which an authoritative Homer is to be found in Christian sources. The claim that Homer had read Moses and the Prophets goes back at least to the contemporaries of Numenius, and the dependence of Homer on scripture is also asserted by Clement.^[29]

Clement and Origen have already been discussed in their proper context, that of Middle Platonism. At this point it will be useful to look briefly at some of the Greek Christian thinkers who followed them, from the contemporaries of Porphyry to those of Proclus. The logic of this presentation, and of isolating this tradition of thought from its pagan counterpart, becomes clear as we proceed. By the fourth century, there was a manifest alienation of the two intellectual communities. Certainly the later Athenian Neoplatonists had Christian students, but little of their interaction is visible in the surviving literature, which documents a radical dichotomy of concerns and interests.

A century after Clement, an attitude closely comparable to his own may be found in the writings of Methodius of Olympus (d. 311).^[30] Here again are the marks of the assimilation of an authoritative Homer and a fabricated connection between his poetry and the Hebrew scriptures; and here again Plato must stand as an authority alongside Homer (evoking the specter of the difficulties raised by Socrates in the Republic ).^[31] And

[28] On Basil's essay on the Christian use of the Greek classics, see most recently the perceptive essay by Ernest L. Fortin, "Christianity and Hellenism in Basil the Great's Address ad adulescentes. " I share with Fortin (p. 193 and n. 35) the sense that Hugo Rahner's chapter "Der heilige Homer" in his Griechische Mythen in christlicher Deutung gives a rather one-sidedly bright view of the early Church Fathers' attitudes toward Homer (see, for example, p. 284). I owe to For-tin as well the reference to V. Buchheit's article "Homer bei Methodios von Olympos," which, even if it does not develop the "critical evaluation of Rahner's thesis" Fortin claims (p. 35), nevertheless does document with care and a sense of balance the complexities of one early Christian writer's attitude toward Homer.

[29] Rahner, Griechische Mythen , p. 243, n. 7. See Clem. Strom . 5.4.24.1 = GCS 2.340.25-28.

[30] See Buchheit, "Homer bei Methodios von Olympos."

[31] Ibid., p. 35.

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yet the Homeric poems serve Methodius most strikingly as sources of warnings: the Christian will not desire to hear the Sirens' song in bondage, but to hear the voice of God in freedom. Such images and myths are ingeniously manipulated; the Hellenic myth "becomes a Christian one," with little retained of its pagan source beyond the prestige and power of Homer and his language.^[32]

Hugo Rahner's survey of the "divine Homer" in early Christian thought contains many more examples of this sort of assimilation, but perhaps the most striking point is the extent to which the Homeric source of assimilated myth and imagery recedes into the background. Clement aside, the early Church Fathers rarely praise Homer directly, though they exploit his poetry freely. One striking exception is Basil (d. 379), whose famous address On the Value of Greek Literature constitutes the central evidence for the manner in which Homer was assimilated into Greek Christian education, not in Alexandria with its rich and sophisticated literary and philosophical tradition, but in remote and pious Cappadocia. Basil echoes Socrates' criticisms of Homeric myth (Ad adules . 4.15-28), incorporating the Christian monotheistic theme already heard in Clement. Yet he reports with approval the opinion that "the whole of Homer's poetry is praise of virtue" (Ad adules . 5.25-28), and it is primarily from the ethical point of view that he advocates the reading of Homer.

Ernest Fortin has recently offered an insightful analysis of Basil's methods and goals in this essay, and he is surely correct in pointing to Basil's duplicity.^[33] The ostensible argument, as Fortin shows, is a red herring. Basil insists that the crucial issue in the use of pagan authors is selection of appropriate passages, but this is impractical and falls before Socrates' original attack. The young are unable to distinguish good from bad and the pagan texts would therefore have to be rejected entirely in order to protect the young from their pernicious passages and meanings. What Basil does accomplish here is subtly to create a predisposition in his readers to find just the sort of ethical message in pagan literature that has a place in Christian education as he understands it. "The risk involved in any contact with a pagan writer was neutralized by the superimposition of a Christian image which not only valorized certain elements at the expense of others but created the illusion of a greater kinship than actually existed between the poet's thought and the teaching of the Bible,"^[34] For-

[32] Ibid., pp. 20-23.

[33] See n. 28 above.

[34] Fortin, "Christianity and Hellenism," p. 195.

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tin writes. The observation rings true and bespeaks a sensitivity to the relationship of reader and text common to both the ancient Neoplatonists and modern hermeneutics.^[35]

This brief survey should not be cut short without mention of the thinker who is both the most important bridge between pagan Neoplatonism and Byzantine Christian thought and an equally important link between East and West—the author of the Dionysian corpus. The writings attributed to Dionysius the Areopagite, the patron saint of the Greek church, converted by Paul (Acts 17.34), have been variously dated from the time of Paul to the sixth century.^[36] Since 1900, increased understanding of the dependence of the corpus on Syrianus and Proclus has led scholars to date it to the fifth or sixth century.^[37] With regard to the interpretation of "theological" texts, the author not only uses the vocabulary of Proclus conspicuously and extensively—a fact noted by recent scholars^[38] —but even appears to adapt specific interpretations derived from Syrianus by way of Proclus.

There is no mention of Homer, indeed no mention or citation of a single pagan author or reference to a mythological figure, in the entire corpus.^[39] All but a handful of citations are from the scriptures, and even these are not numerous, given the bulk of the corpus. The visionary Homer will thus not be found here, but the hermeneutical principles lying behind that figure nevertheless have an important place.

Most of the surviving works attributed to Dionysius are concerned with negative theology and metaphysics, and this is sufficient to account for the author's relatively sparse use of texts in support of his arguments.^[40] Our evidence for the author's concern with the meaning of texts

[35] On prejudice and reading in modern hermeneutic philosophy, see Gadamer's discussion of Heidegger on the "fore-structure of understanding" (Truth and Method , pp. 235-40). Heidegger's and Gadamer's ideas on the subject provide a background against which the power of a technique such as Fortin ascribes to Basil may be understood. The passage is discussed below in the afterword.

[36] The principal conjectures are helpfully presented in tabular form by Ronald F. Hathaway, Hierarchy and the Definition of Order in the Letters of Pseudo-Dionysius , pp. 31-35.

[37] For a short summary of the Dionysian adaptation of the late pagan Neoplatonist model of reality to Christian thought, see I. P. Sheldon-Williams in CHLGEMP, pp. 457-72. Stephen Gersh (From Iamblichus to Eriugena ) has recently made substantial advances in our understanding of the complex origins of Dionysius's thought.

[38] Hathaway, Hierarchy and the Definition of Order , p. 109.

[39] See Albert van den Daele, Indices Pseudo-Dionysiani , pp. 149-54.

[40] For a brief summary of lost and surviving works, see J. D. Jones's introduction to The Divine Names and Mystical Theology , pp. 16-19.

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comes principally from two sources, the fascinating Ninth Letter and The Divine Names . In the former, he refers to a work called Symbolic Theology , which he indicates contained his exegeses of many obscure symbols from "the Oracles" (

, his consistent designation for the scriptures), beyond those related in the Ninth Letter itself. There is no reason, beyond this dubious claim, to assume that such a work ever existed,^[41] but if it did it must have contained a great deal that would be of interest to us, and quite possibly a great deal of interpretive material closely dependent on Proclus and his tradition.

Dionysius carries over from late Athenian Neoplatonism the concept of multiple modes of representation of the divine. In The Celestial Hierarchies he builds on a concept of the symbol that echoes Proclus. Symbols (such as celestial eagles and wheels) do not imitate what they represent. They represent "through the diss imilar"

and not "through the similar"

.^[42] This is the normal mode of theological discourse, "to hide beneath secret and holy riddles, inaccessible to the masses, the sacred and hidden truth concerning the hypercosmic noetic entities."^[43] The scriptures themselves constitute adaptations to our limited perceptions: "The divine discourse

has quite simply employed poetic divine fictions to designate the shapeless noetic entities, in consideration of what we may call the

in us , and in order to provide an appropriate and connatural uplifting for that

, has shaped the anagogical scriptures specifically for it."^[44] By way of John Scotus Eriugena's translations of the Dionysian corpus, the term symbolum

subsequently took on a central role in Western medieval thought.^[45]

For the author of the corpus, the Hebrew Bible constitutes an authoritative theological source nearly as remote and problematical as the poems of Homer were for Proclus. His response to this problem closely parallels the approach of the pagan Athenian Neoplatonists. Like Proclus, the au-

[41] Hathaway, Hierarchy and the Definition of Order , p. 151, n. 3.

[42] Hier. cel . 2.3. Similar distinctions are sketched out in Epistle 8 and in The Divine Names (1.6). See Maurice de Gandillac's note on Hier. cel . 2.3 (Sources chrétiennes , no. 58, p. 77, n. 3).

^[43][44]

[45] Dronke, Fabula , p. 44.

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thor lives in a world of

, simultaneously masking and (to the initiate) revealing the divine,^[46] and the most striking and disorienting of the mythic attributes of the divine are explicitly the most valuable, because they stimulate the search for truth.^[47]

Ps.-Dionysius's list of shocking attributes of God from the Hebrew Bible is indeed rather surprising even to our jaded perceptions. "The Oracles" tell us, according to our author, that God gets drunk, sleeps, wakes up with hangovers, and is subject to malicious rage (though not necessarily in that order).^[48] The passages in question, many of them in Psalms, are duly singled out for us either by Maximus the Confessor in his scholia to the Letters or by more recent editors, and the information is assembled in Ronald Hathaway's recent edition, though in many instances other equally appropriate passages could be found.

Since there is nothing Homeric here, a single example will suffice, one that clearly seems to echo Proclus. Like Philo before them, both Proclus and the author of the Dionysian corpus are greatly disturbed by claims of alterations of the state of consciousness of the divinity. Sleep or cessation of consciousness creates obvious problems. We have seen how Proclus explained away Zeus's slumber after his intercourse with Hera. Sleep was said to be appropriate "to the symbolism" of the Homeric myth because "the waking state indicates the providence of the gods projecting into the cosmos and the sleep, that life that transcends all lower things."^[49] The passage to which "Dionysius" refers in this context is (at least according to the nineteenth-century editor John Parker) Ps. 44 (43).23:

Bestir thyself, Lord; why dost thou sleep?
Awake, do not reject us forever.

Or in the Septuagint:

^[50]

[46] Hier. cel . 121b, Hier. eccl . 476b, Nora. div . 592b, Ep . 8.1098a, Ep . 9. 1108b.

[47] Hier. cel . 141a-144c, and esp. 141a-b. Compare Proclus In Rep . 1.85.16-86. 10. See Hathaway, Hierarchy and the Definition of Order , p. 209 and n. 86.

[48] Ep . 9.1105b.

^[49]

[50] Equally appropriate would be Parker's candidate for the verse on God's hangover, Ps. 78 (77).65.

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Seen in context, the claim is less shocking, the anthropomorphism easily understood in terms of the conventions of the poetry of Psalms. Ps.-Dionysius, however, approaches the passage in the spirit—very nearly in the words—of Proclus on the sleep of Zeus: "We say, the divine sleep is the transcendence of God and his freedom from participation on the part of the objects of his providence, his awakening his attention to his providence for those in need of teaching or salvation."^[51] "Transcendence"

, a characteristically Neoplatonic term central to the explanation of God's sleep here, likewise occurs in the corresponding passage in Proclus, just beyond the lines quoted.^[52] This is by no means the only Dionysian interpretation that echoes Proclus. Anne Sheppard notes that in The Celestial Hierarchies (15.9), Ps.-Dionysius interprets the rejoicing of the angels (Luke 15. 10) much the way Proclus explains the laughter of the providential gods.^[53]

The Dionysian corpus was translated into Latin during the ninth century, first by Hilduin and then again a generation later by John Scotus Eriugena. The impact of this infusion of the final form of pagan Neoplatonism into Western medieval thought was very great. Although Eriugena's writings were condemned in part in his own time and his De divisione naturae , or Periphyseon , heavily influenced by Proclus, was burned on the order of Honorius III in 1225, the influence of the Dionysian corpus remained strong, surfacing most conspicuously in the Platonism of the School of Chartres.^[54]

The final expression of the Athenian Platonists thus came to the West in Christian guise. It did not bring the divine Homer with it—indeed the total absence of references to pagan authors in the Dionysian corpus is striking and puzzling, so much so that one might suspect that the author is here deliberately suppressing all reference to paganism, for whatever reason.^[55] But it did bring with it the hermeneutics, and even some of the

^[51]

[52] Proclus In Rep . 1.135.27.

[53] Sheppard, Studies , p. 82, n. 98.

[54] On the enduring impact of Eriugena's own works after 1225, cf. Jean Jolivet ("La Philosophie médiévale en occident," p. 1259), who considers the condemnation to put an end to his direct influence, but contrast the position of Sheldon-Williams (CHLGEMP, p. 533), who insists on the continuing influence of the condemned books. Dronke notes that Abelard, accused of following Eriugena, never mentions his name: "clearly it was unsafe to do so" (Fabula , p. 60).

[55] Cf. Hathaway, Hierarchy and the Definition of Order , pp. xiii, xvii, for the suggestion that the Dionysian corpus might represent a deliberate masquerade—a Christianization (or more properly a depaganization) of the teachings of the Athenian Platonists accomplished near 529, when the future of this philosophical tradition could be seen to depend on dissociating it from the pagan ideology so central to its development down through the great synthesis of Proclus. The complete elimination of all references to pagan thinkers and poets from this corpus, which otherwise shares so much with the works of Proclus, might be considered another piece of circumstantial evidence pointing toward such a genesis for the Dionysian corpus.

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interpretations, of Proclus and the idea of texts (and the world) as

whose mysterious symbols reveal truth only to the elect.

We may take note of one last phenomenon in the Byzantine East, a link to the Christianizing allegorical commentaries of the later Byzantine scholars of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. In his Fragmente griechischer Theosophien , Hartmut Erbse published a short text ultimately dependent on the "Tübingen Theosophy" (which itself belongs to the last quarter of the fifth century) entitled The Narrative of a Philosopher Concerning the Seven Greek Philosophers on the Providence Above ,^[56] in which an oracular text, elsewhere attributed to the Sibyl, is put in the mouth of Homer. The seven philosophers (Plutarch, "Ares,"

, "Cleomedes," Plato, Aristotle, and Homer) sit down with Diogenes, who expresses concern for the fate of the Greeks and what the "higher providence" has in store for them when the end comes

. Christian prophecies are placed in the mouth of each "philosopher," concluding with Homer:

Last of all, Homer said, "At last shall come to us the Lord of the celestial sphere of the world, and he shall appear as flesh without imperfection. And he will take on flesh out of a Jewish virgin, and they shall call him "Forgiveness" and "Exultation." And he shall be crucified by the faithless race of Jews. And blessed shall be those who hear him—and woe to those who do not hear."^[57]

As we see, the incorporation of Homer into a Christian context has a sordid side. That Homer should foretell the coming of Christ is a predictable (if absurd) consequence of the patterns of thought we have been tracing, but to find Homer here the spokesman of an antisemitism elabo-

[56] Hartmut Erbse, ed., Fragmente griechischer Theosophien , pp. 220-22.

^[57]

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rated out of Johannine themes is nevertheless chilling. It may in fact communicate even to readers such as ourselves some sense of Julian's rage at the abuses of Christian interpretation and Christian assimilation of the Greek tradition as authority for a repellent ideology.

Date: 2015-12-17; view: 598