Perhaps, after all, there is something wrong with the popular conception of Monotheism as being opposed to the mythical; perhaps Monotheism contains room, after all, on a deeper plane, for the development of mythical lore.
~Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism Footnote 1
Introduction
At the end of his Life of Marcus Licinius Crassus, Plutarch relates the death of this Roman ruler in a way that rivals, in its grisly details, Mark's account of the death of John the Baptist. Unhappy with his territory in Syria, Crassus had, in 53 BCE, crossed the Euphrates only to lose his son Publius in battle with the Parthians. Soon thereafter, he perished at the hands of Pomaxathres. Relieved of its body, Crassus's head was sent to Armenia where the Parthian king Orodes and the Armenian king Artavasdes, newly allied through the marriage of their living children, were enjoying a production of Euripides's Bacchae. When Crassus's head was announced at the door, one of the players, Jason of Tralles, in an act of macabre improvisational genius, yielded his part of Pentheus to Crassus, and assuming the role of Agave, leader of the Asian Bacchae, grabbed the general's head and continued the play with these lines:
φέρομεν ἐξ ὄρεος
ἕλικα νεότομον ἐπὶ μέλαθρα
μακάριον θήραμα.
We bring from the mountain
A tendril fresh cut to the palace,
A wonderful prey.Footnote 2
The audience was delighted. But when Jason in persona Agauēs took dramatic credit for slaying Pentheus-Crassus, Pomaxathres, who had actually killed him, left his seat in the audience, took the head from Jason, and delivered the line himself. “With such a farce,” writes Plutarch, “the expedition of Crassus is said to have closed, just like a tragedy.”Footnote 3
I begin this Dionysian reading of Paul's Philippians hymn with Plutarch's “tragedy” of Crassus for two reasons. First, it demonstrates that in the first century of the Common Era, the Bacchae of Euripides continued to be read and performed in Greek in the eastern provinces. According to Plutarch, the Kings of Parthia and Armenia had learned Greek for this purpose, and Artavasdes the Armenian is even said to have composed tragedies, orations, and histories in Greek.Footnote 4 As such, it seems reasonable to imagine that at least some early readers of Philippians might have heard in Paul's hymn echoes of Euripides's tragic verse. Second, Plutarch's tale recognizes the anti-tyrannical, anti-Roman, and, to take a cue from Friedrich Nietzsche, anti-Apollonian political potential that bristles energetically through this particular tragedy. This, too, I will suggest, finds resonance in the counter-imperial christology of Paul's Philippians hymn.
The thesis that I will advance in this article is that Euripides's Bacchae represents a critical part of the cultural and religious matrix of early readers of Philippians—both in Philippi and in Rome. Paul's Christ would have appeared to many as a Dionysian figure, appropriating elements of his pagan counterpart, while simultaneously subverting or recasting them. Ancient readers and hearers of Philippians would thus be engaged in what Edward Said called “contrapuntal reading,” attending, as Matthew Larsen summarizes, “to both adoption of imperial perspective as well as resistance.”Footnote 5
The general importance of the Bacchae in Greek education, as well as the play's popularity in the Roman period, even among the ἀπαίδευτοι, secures its place as an intertext for a variety of Greek discourses during the first century.Footnote 6 My detection of its echoes in the Pauline letters stands within an already deep footprint in the secondary literature. Studies by John Moles, Richard Seaford, John Weaver, Doohee Lee, and Courtney Friesen make convincing cases for the influence of Euripides's Bacchae on divine, apostolic, and especially Pauline portraiture in Luke-Acts.Footnote 7 In Pauline studies, Stanley Stowers has suggested a connection between Medean monologue and the lament of Romans 7; Friesen has investigated tragic echoes in 1 Corinthians; and Ulrich Müller and Samuel Vollenweider have charted “mythic” and “epiphanic” echoes in the carmen Christi, pointing especially to the Bacchae.Footnote 8 This article draws on, significantly expands, and challenges various lines of argumentation in these studies—concluding finally that Paul is not only a tragic but also a comic thinker (in a broadly Aristotelian sense).Footnote 9
Space does not permit me to review the endless welter of literature on Phil 2:6–11.Footnote 10 This study does, however, presuppose a number of decisions about the carmen Christi, which are worth acknowledging here before advancing my main argument.
First, as regards the authorship of the hymn, I accept what is perhaps the older but still majority position that the hymn has a prehistory in Jewish-Christian worship.Footnote 11 This Jewish-Christian matrix remains the primary backdrop for understanding the hymn's christology—particularly its allusion to Isaiah 45.Footnote 12 This does not, however, absolve Paul of responsibility for the contents of the hymn,Footnote 13 nor does it preclude his role in reshaping those contents to accord with his own christological and pastoral concerns.Footnote 14 Conceding an apocalyptic Jewish substratum for the hymn, moreover, does not necessitate a rejection of pagan metamorphic resonances at either the Pauline or pre-Pauline level of the hymn's semantics—a point recently demonstrated by Vollenweider.Footnote 15 Rather, given that the Jewish matrix of the hymn may point to either Christ's preexistence or not, my analysis here adopts Euripides's Bacchae as a secondary lens and uses Paul's Roman reception to develop a new criterion for negotiating the various “Jewish” readings of the hymn.Footnote 16
Second, I agree that Paul's Gospel (and Philippians in particular) provides a political challenge or alternative to the Roman imperial ordo.Footnote 17 It may be inaccurate to call this “anti-imperial,” and in light of Rom 13:1–7, John Barclay is certainly right to curb the excesses of this view when applied in an undifferentiated fashion to all of Paul's letters.Footnote 18 But the objection that anti-Roman intertexts are not as explicitly marked as scriptural allusions here and elsewhere in the Pauline corpus simply does not grapple with the realities of literary resistance. In posing his alternative “gospel,” Paul surely had to use a hidden transcript.Footnote 19 This is especially true of Philippians, which Hans Dieter Betz has recently reasserted is Paul's last letter, written from a Roman prison under the gaze of “the whole praetorium”—a context which Betz suggests should affect one's hermeneutical approach to the entire letter.Footnote 20 If not anti-imperial, then the letter is contra- or para-imperial.Footnote 21
Third, any attempt to rehabilitate “myth” as a category in christology has to wrestle with the legacy of Rudolf Bultmann.Footnote 22 I shall have more to say about this later on; at present, I only note that by speaking of a mythic christology in the Philippians hymn, I by no means adopt Bultmann's conclusion that christological “myths” are merely projections of early Christian communal faith experience.Footnote 23
Finally, while appreciating the seminal brilliance of Nietzsche's rendering of Apollo and Dionysius as antipodal signs of rational order and inspired disorder, critics have long since recognized Nietzsche's unwarranted dependence on romantic categories and abandoned all hope that the strong form of his theory can “stand up to scrutiny.”Footnote 24 Recently, however, classicist Fiachra Mac Góráin has argued that within the mythic landscape of Augustan politics, Dionysus did in fact represent an anti-Octavianic figure, who had to be either resisted or assimilated.Footnote 25 My cautious retrieval of a Nietzschian optic follows Mac Góráin's lead.
One of the insights of Mac Góráin's work is to suggest that Nietzsche “informs the ‘intertextual unconscious’ of the modern critical imaginary.”Footnote 26 The current study asks whether Euripides might have formed part of Paul's first-century intertextual unconscious and whether Paul offers, in Phil 2:6–11, an intentional allusion to the Bacchae. Such a possibility becomes more plausible if scholars like Peter Oakes are correct that Paul has “heavily reformulated” his traditional material here—perhaps particularly, the language of μορφή.Footnote 27 Or, if this strong version of my thesis is deemed implausible, this study simultaneously asks how familiarity with the Bacchae would at least have conditioned the hearing of Paul's letter in Roman Philippi, as well as its potential “over-hearing” by Paul's friends and captors in Nero's Rome.Footnote 28 As I will argue, the net effect of this Euripidean intertext is non-negligible: it suggests 1) a pre-existence christology, 2) a para-imperial Christ, 3) an elevated place for slaves and women in Paul's ekklesia, and 4) the superficially kindred but ultimately incommensurate theological grammars of tragic and Christian fabulae.
The Form of God in Euripides's Bacchae and the Carmen Christi
Although the entirety of Phil 2:6–11 ultimately warrants an intertextual analysis,Footnote 29 I will focus here primarily on the first half of the hymn, Phil 2:6–8, which narrates the kenosis of Jesus. Crucial to this narrative is Jesus's “taking” the μορφή of a slave, despite “being” already in the μορφή of God. The precise meaning of these two “forms” remains a matter of dispute. Those looking primarily to the hymn's Jewish-Christian prehistory typically suggest one of three options: first, the μορφή may refer to God's םלֶצֶ or תוּמדְּ,with roots in biblical and apocalyptic speculations about God's body.Footnote 30 This tradition would later develop into mystical measurements of God's body, known as the Shi‘ur Qomah.Footnote 31 Alternatively, the μορφή may refer to God's εἰκών as a pre-existent hypostasis, similar to the Johannine and Philonic Logos, and may be broadly situated in the sapiential tradition. A third Jewish reading understands the μορφή to refer to God's εἰκών in a secondary adamic sense: Jesus was created, like Adam, “after the image of God.”Footnote 32 While the first two options present an “early, high christology,” the third adamic variant, in some assessments, falls short of offering a theology of pre-existence.
The debate over this passage has typically turned on the question of interpretive staging: against which backdrop ought the hymn's language of μορφή be heard? Taking a Hellenistic Jewish backdrop as a given here, along with a number of scholars, I pose a correlated question: what happens when a Bacchic mask is superimposed upon the Jewish Christ by an ancient reader, the hymn's composer(s), or Paul himself? In answering this question, Dionysus's prologue in the beginning of Euripides's Bacchae serves as a critical intertext, which would have been heard by some of Philippians’ recipients:
Ἥκω Διὸς πα
ς τήνδε Θηβαίαν χθόνα
Διόνυσος, ὃν τίκτει ποθ’ ἡ Κάδμου κόρη
Σεμέλη λοχευθε
σ’ ἀστραπηφόρῳ πυρί·
μορφὴν δ’ ἀμείψας ἐκ θεο
βροτησίαν
πάρειμι Δίρκης νάμαθ’ Ἱσμηνο
θ’ ὕδωρ.Footnote
33
I have come to this Theban land, a child of Zeus,
Dionysus, whom Cadmus's korē brought forth once,
Semele, prodded by firebearing lightning.
My form I've altered, from God to mortal,
my parousia here by the streams of Dirce and Ismenus's waters.
Although gods often introduce Euripides's plays,Footnote 34 Dionysus's direct address to the audience at the outset of the Bacchae is unique. As E. R. Dodds remarks, unlike Euripides's “other prologizing gods,” Dionysus “will not vanish . . . but will mingle unrecognized, in human form, with the actors in the human drama.”Footnote 35 None of these other gods, moreover, explicitly takes on human form and risks suffering. Apollo in particular is keen to get off stage before the dramatic action begins, lest he risk the contagion of human death.Footnote 36
Looking closely at Dionysus's prologue, we find many narrative dynamics also present in a lengthier form in Paul's prose hymn and compressed into poetic formulation. The critical line
μορφὴν δ’ ἀμείψ | ας: ἐκ θεο
| βροτησίαν
echoes succinctly the exchange of μορφαί narrated in Phil 2:6–8, with “God” and “mortal” syntactically juxtaposed in the second and third feet of the iambic trimeter and set off by a penthemimeral caesura. These poetics of condescension are present in the first line of prologue as well:
Ἥκω Διὸς | πα
ς: τήνδε Θη | βαίαν χθόνα.
Here, the narrative of vertical descent is visually framed by the poles of Διός and χθόνα in the first and third feet. This, too, structurally echoes the narrative of descent present in Phil 2:6–8.
These verses are not the only ones in the prologue in which Dionysus speaks to the audience of exchanging forms. Euripides has Dionysus reiterate this at the close of the prologue, to make plain his revelatory purposes:
ν οὕνεκ’ ε
δος θνητὸν ἀλλάξας ἔχω
μορφήν τ’ ἐμὴν μετέβαλον εἰς ἀνδρὸς φύσιν.
For these ends I took shape here as a mortal
and my own form exchanged for human nature.Footnote 37
This second reference to Dionysus's exchange of forms supplements the economic theology of the earlier passage. Like the Philippians hymn, which amplifies μορφή with τὰ ἴσα ε
ναι, ὁμοίωμα, and σχήμα,Footnote
38
Euripides here supplies two synonyms for μορφή, ε
δος and φύσις, which deepen the philosophical potential of his text for later recipients. As in line 5, so here in line 54, μορφή occupies a primary syntactic position, in a way that especially mirrors the poetics of Phil 2:7bc:
μορφὴν δ’ ἀμείψας ἐκ θεο
βροτησίαν (Bacch. 5)
μορφήν τ’ ἐμὴν μετέβαλον εἰς ἀνδρὸς φύσιν (Bacch. 54)
μορφὴν δούλου λάβων ἐν ὁμοιώματι ἀνθρώπων[-ου] γενόμενος (Phil 2:7bc)Footnote 39
There are thus strong similarities between Paul's Christ and Euripides's Dionysus.Footnote 40 The repetition of the thematics of a divine exchange of forms in the Bacchae and their significant lexical, structural, and narrative overlap with the story of divine kenosis in Phil 2:6–8 make the detection of an echo of this text almost inevitable to anyone familiar with Euripides's tragedy—and open the question of whether the original author(s) of the hymn or Paul himself consciously alluded to the Bacchae.Footnote 41 Cogent as I find this reading to be, however, I am aware that not all will be immediately convinced. Before I turn to the implications of this Dionysian intertext for the christology of Philippians, it is worth raising and responding to two potential objections to hearing echoes of the Bacchae in this letter of Paul.
First, supposing one grants that some version of a metamorphic myth is present in the carmen Christi, does this necessarily mean that the Dionysus of the Bacchae is in view? Might not the hymn, or Paul's modification of it, simply advert to the more general phenomenon of divine form exchange in popular mythology, without necessarily pointing to a particular pagan deity? This seems to be the view of Müller and Vollenweider—although both highlight the Bacchic echoes—and it is one which merits consideration.Footnote 42 To my mind, the likelihood of a particularly Dionysian echo remains more probable for a number of reasons. The first is the literary case made above. Second, one might suggest that metamorphic myths are seldom known so abstractly—in the manner of academic folklorists—but usually have some concrete referent (such as Zeus and Hermes in Acts 14:12). If one is comparing Jesus to a particular Greco-Roman deity, one must ask who other than Dionysus readily suggests himself as a better parallel to the “new God” Jesus. Euripides, moreover, was frequently read and performed in the Hellenistic and Roman eras: his writings are better represented in the manuscript evidence than any other tragedian (ranking third in an Egyptian papyri “census” only after Homer and Demosthenes).Footnote 43 His plays were likewise more “accessible” linguistically than the other classical tragedians, and they had a prominent place in Greek education at the first two stages.Footnote 44 As a result, the Bacchae was translated at least twice into Latin and arguably became the metamorphic myth par excellence, such that it influenced other form-exchange narratives (including Horace's Mercury), as Latin tragedians engaged in a “creative deployment” of Euripides.Footnote 45
Shoring up the probability that readers would hear a Bacchic intertext in Phil 2 is the fact that the God of the Jews had for some time, perhaps most prominently in the political propaganda of Pompey,Footnote 46 been identified with Dionysus. It thus remains plausible that even Paul or the Jewish author of the hymn borrowed the interpretatio Romana of Judaism as a Dionysiac religion and made a particular application of that tradition to Jesus called Messiah. This consideration, however, raises a second potential objection: would the Dionysiac interpretation of Judaism itself be strong enough to suggest a Dionysian Christ without any explicit echo of the Bacchae? Might a Dionysiac—but not a Euripidean—christology have been intended by the Hellenistic Jewish authors of the hymn? While this remains a possibility,Footnote 47 the prominence of the Bacchae in both educational and popular contexts, in conjunction with the particular metamorphic description of Dionysus in Euripides's opening lines (and their similarity to the carmen Christi), suggests that an intertextual rather than a merely interreligious comparison between Christ and Dionysus is at play.
The Metaphysics of Myth and Early High Christology
What follows from the recognition of this Euripidean intertext is a fourfold contribution to the reception of Pauline thought. The first pertains to the hymn's christology. When the Euripidean intertext is registered, the evidence begins to tilt clearly in favor of a christology of pre-existence. If one registers the echo of Dionysus's exchange of (divine) form for human nature in Bacch. 55, Christ's existence in the form of God (ἐν μορφῇ θεο
ὑπάρχων) signifies that his own nature is divine prior to kenosis. Being (ὑπάρχων) in the form of God, Christ then “becomes” (γενόμενος) in human likeness.Footnote
48
Christ, like Dionysus, is in the words of Euripides's choral ode, πα
δα θεὸν θεο
.Footnote
49
Other aspects of Christ's Euripidean portraiture in the Philippians hymn would have shored up this theological implication. Not only does Dionysus introduce himself explicitly as a son of god, born of a woman,Footnote
50
but the whole purpose of his taking on a human nature is to unveil his divinity,Footnote
51
to reveal his name,Footnote
52
and to ensure his right worship as a god among the people of Thebes.Footnote
53
Christ too, as a “new God” in human history, was not immediately recognized by all, and Paul's hearers would have detected in this intertextual connection a similar pattern of economic katabasis in the service of revealing a divine identity. Such convergences continue in the second part of the hymn, where the Christ of Philippians, like the Euripidean Dionysus, is revealed as a cosmic rather than a local lord.Footnote
54
Even Christ's τὸ ὄνομα τὸ ὑπὲρ π
ν ὄνομα echoes and surpasses Dionysus's famous Sophoclean epithet: πολυώνυμε.Footnote
55
The question looming over this analysis is how seriously Euripides and his Roman recipients treated Dionysus's taking a human nature. Are the metaphysics of myth in Greco-Roman religion deep enough to support a high christological reading of the hymn? Or would an allusion to or echo of Euripides's prologue weaken the historical force of Christ's exemplum, reducing his divinity to a pious fictionFootnote 56 and reshaping Christ's human form into a species of docetism?Footnote 57
Despite the cogency of these concerns, there are also reasons why a Dionysian intertext might have served to amplify and advance Paul's message. In Euripides's fifth-century Athens, for instance, both the divinity and humanity of Dionysus were taken seriously in their own idiom. Thus, Albert Henrichs can speak of Dionysus's real presence as “a fundamental concept of Greek religion.”Footnote 58 “Schein ist Sein,” and Dionysus is the “deus praesentissimus,” in cult and on stage.Footnote 59
It is less clear how religiously the Bacchae would have been heard in Rome or Philippi in Paul's time, either in the Greek original or in the Latin translations of Pacuvius and Accius. Dionysus had been at home on Italian soil for centuries, at least in relation to his Italian associate, Liber, and his Etruscan counterpart, Fufluns,Footnote 60 and Bacchus seems to have been worshipped in earnest from the fourth century BCE onwards.Footnote 61 His place in the Roman religion reached a nadir in 186 BCE, when the Roman Senate suppressed his cult and began systematically to hunt down initiates. Ever resilient to persecution, Bacchic worship survived; but whether his cult in the first century, as described by Livy and Tacitus, was “genuine” or had “moved into the realm of ‘purely artificial performance’” remains open to debate.Footnote 62 In Philippi and its environs, Peter Pilhofer notes that Dionysus and his counterparts enjoyed relatively uninterrupted worship from pre-Hellenic times into the life of the Roman colony.Footnote 63 A series of Greek inscriptions at nearby Drama are perhaps the most impressive evidence.Footnote 64 If one adds Latin inscriptions that reference Liber (pater) and a thiasus Maenad[um] to the scales, the case for serious popular devotion to Dionysus in mid-first-century Philippi grows stronger.Footnote 65
What matters more, however, is not Dionysus's ontological status in Greek and Roman religion but what christological implications this Dionysian intertext would have had when an ancient Christian prose hymn was sung in counterpoint with a tragic Euripidean trimeter. One effect would have been to amplify the mythic contours of the Christian narrative. Bultmann was thus correct, on the one hand, that Paul's language is mythological here; but he was wrong in suggesting that demythologizing was necessary to save its “deeper message.”Footnote 66 Better is the instinct of Gershom Scholem, who wondered whether “perhaps Monotheism contains room, after all, on a deeper plane, for the development of mythical lore.”Footnote 67 Gerd Theißen similarly suggests that only in remythologizing christological narrative can one clearly see that “myth is not opposed to the Logos, but is a first form of the Logos.”Footnote 68
Dionysus and the Roman Empire: Mercury Caesar and the Dionysian Christ
A second contribution arising from this Euripidean reading of the Philippians hymn relates to the political reception of Paul's thought: it establishes the Dionysian Christ as a rival or alternative to the predominantly Apollonian portraiture of the Julio-Claudian emperors.Footnote 69 Of course, one should not overplay the Apollo-Dionysus antithesis.Footnote 70 Nonetheless, the Dionysus of the Bacchae had long been interpreted as a symbol of civic disintegration—recalling the play's first performances in the days of the Athenian empire.Footnote 71 In Rome, the Euripidean Dionysus functioned as a similarly ambiguous cultural symbol. As Courtney Friesen writes, “The central problem [of the Bacchae] turns out also to be a perennial problem for Rome. What is to be the relationship between the Bacchic impulse toward liberation . . . and the authority and stability of the Roman political establishment?”Footnote 72
Given particularly Mark Antony's Dionysian style, Octavian's primary strategy was, in the words of Christopher Pelling, to “counter with more comfortable gods, especially Apollo with his civilized order, discipline, calm and restraint.”Footnote 73 Dionysus, for his part, would have to be rejected outright or domesticated and assimilated.
As a literary example of this imperial preference, it will be beneficial to consider Horace's Carm. 1.2. In this pro-imperial carmen Caesaris, Horace explicitly identifies Augustus with Pelling's “more comfortable gods,” while simultaneously echoing their Dionysian shadow. Horace begins with a grim, apocalyptic picture of natural upheaval and cosmic flood, staged on the banks of the Tiber in the wake of Rome's long decades of civil war. Horace prays for some emissary of Jupiter to expiate Rome's sins and avenge the wrongs of the fallen,Footnote 74 including, perhaps, the murder of Julius Caesar.Footnote 75 First among his candidates for a savior is augur Apollo, no surprise given Horace's lyric form and his pro-Augustan leanings.Footnote 76 His final choice, however, is Mercury—a favorite of Horace's, given his claim that Mercury saved him while fighting against Octavian at Philippi in 44 BCE.Footnote 77 Here, it is instrumental to recall that Octavian minted coins not only to Apollo but also to Hermes in the 30s BCE.Footnote 78 In a critical verse, Horace bids Mercury change his form (mutata . . . figura) and, imitating a youth,Footnote 79 condescend to be called the child of a human mother. Thereafter, he should be present (intersis) among the Romans, not to be put off by their sins but to expiate them. In the last verse of the carmen, Horace reveals that Mercury's human name is Caesar. His hymn thus provides a rough parallel to Paul's hymn to Christ Jesus (Phil 2:5).
While Horace's second Ode already offers a rich allusive rereading of Vergil's first Georgic,Footnote 80 as I suggested above, his depiction of Mercury-Octavian is also colored by Euripides's Bacchae, both in the original Greek and through Accius’ translation. Horace's Mercury is presented as a palatable, pro-Augustan alternative “savior god among us,” standing in for the more present but also potentially more destabilizing Dionysus.Footnote 81 Of course, Horace will go on, famously, in Carm. 2.19 and 3.25, to “rehabilitate” Dionysus and bring him into line with Augustan politics. The surprising reversal of those later odes—which may also entail Horace's own reluctant “reconciliation” with Augustus, as dramatized in the telling first line of the climactic Carm. 3.25 (“Quo me, Bacche, rapis tui / plenum?”)—depends on the more standard marginalization of Dionysus in Carm. 1.2.Footnote 82
That marginalization, however, is not total. Mercury's Dionysian shadow is evoked in Carm. 1.2 by several crucial intertexts, most importantly, in the phrase mutata . . . figura, which recalls Dionysus's change of form in the prologue to the Bacchae. While the Latin version of Dionysus's prologue is not extant among Accius's tragic fragments, we are fortunate enough to have his rendering of a later line, in which Dionysus's μορφή is plausibly rendered with figura.Footnote 83 As a brief aside, it is worth noting that the inverse Bacchic hope—that other humans might at last change either forma or figura for the better—seems to have exercised a long influence on Latin popular religiosity in Philippi. Thus, in a famous third-century funerary inscription from the region, we find a mourner stating to the deceased: “sic placitum est divis a[l]terna vivere forma,” and then, a few lines later, linking the same departed human with Bromius.Footnote 84 Other intertextual connections between Carm. 1.2 and the Dionysian prologue include the thematization of Dionysus's coming (ἥκω, venias);Footnote 85 his parousia (πάρειμι, intersis);Footnote 86 both gods’ glad willingness to stay, despite the sins of humanity;Footnote 87 and their role of vindicating past injustices.Footnote 88
This intertextual interpretation not only renders the Christ of the Philippians hymn as an alternative to Caesar, it also confirms the high christological conclusions of the previous section. While some recent studies suggest that the Roman auditor of Paul's hymn might have heard an adoptionist or exaltationist christology,Footnote 89 this Roman para-imperial reading points instead toward a theology of preexistence. The echoes of Horace's Mercury-Caesar and his Dionysian antitype in the Philippians hymn offer contrasting myths of a savior's previous existence in the form of God, which is exchanged for the sake of dwelling among human beings in order to save them, free them, and effect right worship. At the very least, Roman readings of Philippians do not suggest a clear win for apotheosis over preexistence.
Incarnation, Gender, and the Role of Women at Philippi
Paul's Dionysian staging of the para-imperial Christ in Phil 2:6–11 includes a noteworthy corollary: the christological basis for a more expansive leadership paradigm in the Christian ekklesia, particularly as regards women and slaves.Footnote 90 The importance of women in the Philippian church has long been recognized in Paul's reference to Euodia and Syntyche, and secondarily, in the figure of Lydia, mentioned by the author of Luke-Acts.Footnote 91 The explicit naming of these female leaders in a letter that begins with a salutation to bishops/overseers (ἐπίσκοποι) and deacons/ministers (διάκονοι),Footnote 92 suggests that whatever the unrecoverable contingencies of the struggle in Philippi, Philippians remains central to any reconstruction of Pauline ecclesiology and offers, in some sense, Paul's “final word” on the subject.Footnote 93
That female leadership in Christian Philippi might owe something to Dionysiac religion was already posited several decades ago by Lilian Portefaix, and the plausibility of such a reading is heightened by the presence of the inscriptional references mentioned above to a thiasus Maenad[um].Footnote 94 What remains to be seen is how the Euripidean intertext in the Christ hymn might relate to the question of gender—both Christ's and that of Christian leaders in Philippi.
In the first place, it is worth mentioning that gender is not explicitly thematized in Phil 2:6–11. When Paul does refer to the Roman social world in the hymn, it is in the phrase μορφὴ δούλου (Phil 2:7b: admittedly, this is a male slave). If one thinks ahead to the three pairs of addressees in the deutero-Pauline household codes,Footnote 95 Jesus's taking a servile form puts him in the sphere of the less powerful: women (wives), children, and slaves.Footnote 96 By opting for the form of a slave, moreover, Jesus chooses the last and lowest of these groups. While this suggests that gender may be in view, it is not directly stated.Footnote 97
Euripides's Dionysus, however, is alluded to (or at least echoed) in the hymn, and it is this point that raises the issue of gender more directly. Those familiar with the tragedy would certainly recall that Dionysus is a gender-bending god, both male and female, and the inspiration of Pentheus's cross-dressing “form” in the Bacchae.Footnote 98 If Christ is depicted in Dionysian hues, then Roman hearers of Philippians might well wonder whether this new God was also leading them into a reorganization of the social order—one in which women and men each had significant new roles to play.Footnote 99
Of course, the prominence of women in Dionysiac religion did not result from an egalitarian order. Men and women in Dionysiac religion operated in separate but complementary spheres, with men drinking wine (cf. Acts 2:14–15) and women abstaining and awaiting a more sober ecstatic possession.Footnote 100 Both, however, were accorded unique, recognized positions. Reading Phil 1:2 and 4:2–3 through this lens, it is tempting to speculate whether Euodia and Syntyche are in fact among the deacons (cf. Rom 16:1), while Clement is an ἐπίσκοπος.Footnote 101 Whatever their respective ranks, all are being called to “think the same thing in the Lord” (Phil 4:2; cf. Phil 2:2, 5) and to recall Christ's taking the form of a slave and his disregard for the Roman (and perhaps also nascent ecclesial) pecking order. On this score, it is membership in the book of life (Phil 4:3) and conformity to the mind of Christ that ultimately count. Arguments within and between ecclesial ranks are beside the point.
It is especially noteworthy that among the Pauline Christians, both men and women seem to have been counted among the deacons and probably even the apostles (Rom 16:7). This point sets Pentheus's cross-dressing as a Maenad in a more salutary light. Philo too, borrowing Bacchic language, could praise the common life and labor of male and female Therapeutae, Jewish contemplatives on the shore of Lake Mareotis, as sharing in a more sober Corybantic revelry, which involved both distinction of roles and complementary soteriological progress.Footnote 102
This spiritual and institutional unity, in Paul's case, has a christological basis—not only in the social condescension to the form of a slave but also the metaphysical assumption of a human form (Phil 2:7b–d). Here, it is worth revisiting the synopsis from the earlier section:
μορφήν τ’ ἐμὴν μετέβαλον εἰς ἀνδρὸς φύσιν (Bacch. 54)
μορφὴν δούλου λάβων ἐν ὁμοιώματι ἀνθρώπων[-ου] γενόμενος (Phil 2:7bc)
While Dionysus takes the form of a man (ἀνήρ), Christ takes the form of a human being (
46: ἄνθρωπος), both male and female—or better, the form shared by all human beings (ἄνθρωποι). While this may not amount to a full-scale revision of gender-hierarchal statements elsewhere in Paul's letters (e.g. 1 Cor 7:7), it does avoid a purely androcentric description of the incarnation, which might have seemed reasonable in light of Jesus's biological sex. Surprisingly, then, the Dionysian Christ outdoes his Euripidean exemplar in taking on human form and providing a basis, not so much for Penthean gender bending as for ecclesial gender blending. The newly formed church is led by its servant-Lord toward the discovery of a common mind and humanity.
The Death of Tragedy
As I have noted already in many places throughout this study, a Roman reader registering the Bacchic intertext with the carmen Christi would not simply hear Dionysian overtones but also their subversion. The Euripidean Dionysus is critically unlike Jesus of the Christ hymn in several important respects. The above-mentioned shift from ἀνδρός to ἀνθρώπων between Euripides and Paul serves as one example; other salient differences include Dionysus's violence, his concern to assert his own divine honors, and his personal impassibility.Footnote 103 Those who knew Euripides's last tragedy understood that failure to worship this god-among-humans ultimately results in a tragic death, as it did for Pentheus and Crassus. In the Christ-hymn, the inverse is true: the anthropomorphic God-man takes on the punishment deserved by Penthean humanity and as a result earns the worship that was denied. While Euripides's Dionysus guards the dignity of his closely-held divine form through ritualized violence, Christ relinquishes his place of honor and diverts the violent potentiality onto his own human person.Footnote 104
This subversion of certain elements of the Euripidean fabula brings us at last to the title of this essay, “The Death of Tragedy.” According to Albert Henrichs, the fifth-century CE epic poet Nonnus of Panopolis “composed a baroque death-song for Dionysus.”Footnote 105 As I have argued here, the initial strains of his funeral dirge were already sounding in Paul's redaction of this early first-century hymn. In making this claim, I contribute a footnote to a much larger literary-critical and theological conversation about the compatibility or incompatibility of Christianity and “the tragic.”Footnote 106 While my title suggests that the current evidence inclines toward the verdict that Pauline Christian and tragic grammars are ultimately incommensurate, I would like to nuance this judgment by indicating certain agreements with scholars who find a place for the recovery of “the tragic” within Christian discourse.
According to a recent study by Jeff Jay, the argument for the incompatibility of Christianity and tragedy was posed in its strongest form by Nietzsche in the first edition of The Birth of Tragedy. Footnote 107 Nietzsche has been “followed,” in the world of literary criticism, by George Steiner in The Death of Tragedy and variously, in a theological idiom, by John Milbank, David Bentley Hart, and Francesca Aran Murphy.Footnote 108 Simultaneously, however, other literary critics and theologians, like David Tracy, have demonstrated the aesthetic and humanistic affinities between Christianity and tragedy. Nietzsche himself, in the second edition of The Birth of Tragedy, describes Martin Luther as just such a tragic divine.Footnote 109 Catholic theologians like Hans Urs Von Balthasar occupy something of a middle tragic “space.”Footnote 110 Christ is “the heir of all the tragedy of the world,” but, in the words of Kevin Taylor, tragedy in Christianity is simultaneously “upheld as true and transcended by its culmination in Christ.”Footnote 111
Space does not permit me to engage these literary-critical and theological controversies at length. As indicated above, the aim of this article is more limited: to plot a single point on a line that, when viewed in its entirety, will unveil the fuller arch. More germane to the question of Paul and tragedy in the first century are the aforementioned studies by Jay and Friesen. One of the most compelling loci for the recovery of “the tragic” in the New Testament is the Gospel of Mark. Jay has recently made this case convincingly, arguing that Mark is tragic “in mode” rather than in genre.Footnote 112 As such, Mark mirrors the tragic mode of Plutarch's Crassus, whose generic similarities to Mark have long been noted. In a similar vein, Friesen has recently argued for hearing echoes of Euripides's Bacchae and Sophocles's Oedipus cycle in 1 Corinthians, which paints the “strong” in Corinth as would-be Oedipean “kings.”Footnote 113
In light of these studies, I offer the following three clarifications regarding my claim that the carmen Christi sounds a funeral hymn for tragedy. First, to speak of the death of tragedy does not mean to declare the end of “the tragic.”Footnote 114 Much depends on the distinction between these two terms. Second, by tragedy I mean not so much a literary aesthetic or sensitivity to the consequences of human ignorance, suffering, or depravity, but either a genre or a fabular structure in a broadly Aristotelian sense. Critical to determining this fabular structure is the narrative's “end.”Footnote 115 Recall here the closing of the Crassus:
εἰς τοιο
τόν φασιν ἐξόδιον τὴν Κράσσου στρατηγίαν
ὥσπερ τραγῳδίαν τελευτ
σαι.
Determining the nature of an “ending” thus requires precision: the Bacchae and Hamlet, for example, while both generically tragedies, do not represent identical tragic “ends”—especially if the latter's Anglican/Protestant context and Catholic subtexts are registered. No flights of angels sing Pentheus to his rest.
Third, with Jay, I wish to distinguish between generic identity and the accompanying modes.Footnote 116 By “mode,” however, I recall (as a heurism) the speculation on the ethos of musical modes by both early Modern and ancient Greek theorists. Tragedy and comedy, on this view, should not be heard as set in purely minor (Aeolian) or purely major (Ionian) keys. Instead, one ought to expect, among dramatic musics, a more complex modal range: echoes of the minor, for instance, in the otherwise “major” Hypolydian mode, which some humanist and Renaissance theorists would deem “tearful, suitable for lamentations.”Footnote 117 Classical music theorists, for their part, were not unaware of the psychagogical and political valence of various modes. Plato famously rejected all but the Dorian and the Phrygian modes as potentially dangerous to the ideal republic, since “the modes of music are never disturbed without unsettling of the most fundamental political and social conventions.”Footnote 118 And although the Greek Hypolydian (and its related modes) is not identical to its Western homonym—the former depending on pitch, the latter depending on intervalFootnote 119 —it is just such modes, with their “dirge-like” ethos, that Socrates declared unnecessary to sing or sound in his republic (where no words are used for lamentation), even by women.Footnote 120 Plato prizes above all the music of Apollo.Footnote 121
In this way, one can speak more clearly of the persistence of the tragic within Paul's comic fabula.Footnote 122 Christ's form exchange, on the one hand, participates in the tragic grammar of the Bacchae. Christ's lowly social status, his real suffering on the cross, and the interposition of the God-man between rightful vengeance and the guilty human being, however, transgress the tragic logic. Murphy sums it up concisely: “The kenotic Christ is a comic hero . . . so typically human that he includes everyone . . . but so much larger than life that he can give ‘himself’ away.”Footnote 123 Christ's resurrection and exaltation, which in theo-dramatic terms constitute a eucatastrophe,Footnote 124 thus signal for Paul's readers the impending death of tragedy. This death is not immanent—Christ and the saints still suffer and die—but eschatological.Footnote 125 Only in the end does the fabular structure and true meaning of suffering become clear.Footnote 126
For Nietzsche, of course, tragedy had already committed suicide in the Bacchae itself by becoming entirely Dionysian. It was followed by two degenerate epigones: New Comedy, on the one hand, and Socratic dialogue, on the other.Footnote 127 The death of tragedy heralded by Paul in Philippians utilizes elements of both of these trajectories. The Ciceronian meditatio mortis in Phil 1:20–26 and the brief period “on being a Paulinist” in Phil 4:8–9, as described in a recent study by Betz, serve, on the one hand, as prime examples of its Socratic, philosophical vector;Footnote 128 the eucatastrophic hymn of Phil 2, on the other hand, edges toward the comic and the mystical.
This death, however, was not a violent obliteration of jealousy, as others rendered to Dionysus in some quarters of the empire. Nero, for example—that most Apollonian of emperors—when he could not win the tragic contest at the Isthmus of Corinth by talent, resorted to bribing and ultimately murdering his rival tragic actor onstage.Footnote 129 At the hands of Paul, Dionysus endures a gentler death—something more like a baptism—in which the god's better qualities, including the compassion for human suffering so evident in the tragedians, overcome his propensities for epiphanic violence. In this death, the god of many names bends his knee to the name above all others.
