These two remarkable works indicate an intensely growing interest in early Christian epistemology and knowledge production in Late Antiquity. In retrospect, it seems that a significant game changer was Ordering Knowledge in the Roman Empire, edited by Jason König and Tim Whitmarsh in 2007, to which several contributors of The Intellectual World of Late Antique Christianity refer in their articles.
The volume of articles The Intellectual World is the result of a comprehensive cooperative project carried out in the Australian Catholic University. The volume itself is an enormous production of knowledge as the 39 articles, in around 800 pages, offer insights into early Christian intellectual life in all its diversity and in interaction with Jewish and classical traditions of knowledge. As the editors write in their introduction, the articles approach modes of knowing ‘through soundings from multiple sites of cultural production’ (11). The articles examine diverse genres of writing — creeds, anathemas, dialogues, lives, historiography, hymnody, homiletics, narratives, mirrors to princes and advice literature and technical writing — that all formed knowledge production in Late Antiquity.
Taken together, these articles show how early Christians adopted, appropriated and modified knowledge, laying the foundation for later Christian intellectual traditions. These were complex processes of reproduction and reconfiguration of Jewish and classical epistemologies. It would be impossible to do credit to all the pieces and all the variety of the case studies in the volume, encompassing the vast period from the formation of New Testament, early Christian thinkers, through the ‘golden age’ of patristic writers, to Boethius and the Venerable Bede. Instead, I highlight a few, just to show the diversity of topics.
Many of these pieces are specific case studies that challenge views of earlier research. For example, Jane Heath questions the earlier views that influentially claimed that the doctrine of the spiritual senses originated with Origen. Instead, she considers sources earlier than Origen, selected portions of the New Testament, namely from Paul, Gospel of John and Revelation, as well as notably Clement of Alexandria. Heath shows that Clement recognised the spiritual senses in a way that resembled views found in the later Christian tradition.
Justin Secord's article analyses the claims of expertise that Christian writers, especially Justin the Martyr and Justin's ‘school’, meaning Tatian and Pseudo-Justin, made about health and medicine. They aimed to portray themselves as experts in health, medicine and philosophy in the ‘medical marketplace’ of Roman intellectuals. While Justin was dismissive towards physicians as such, segregating the health of the body from the health of the mind, Tatian and Pseudo-Justin engaged more directly with medicine and bodily healing and were attentive to the physicians’ role in second-century Roman society.
Paul Saieg explores how the theory and practice of Christian asceticism was integrated with philosophical sophistication in Irenaeus’ views on learning through experience. In Irenaeus’ ‘lived’ framework of self- transformation, ‘the goal of human existence, the telos of creation, is to make never-ending progress towards being made into “the image and likeness of God”’ (66). Saieg argues that Irenaeus’ ‘theology of growth’ was perhaps the first fully developed framework for Christian askesis.
The Christian modes of knowing are compared with other late antique epistemologies. In his article on the Neoplatonist Iamblichus’ views on divination, Peter T. Struck points out that Iamblichus’ approaches are very much in line with those of Origen: they both relied on separating out divine divination (the highest form) from practices based on bodily frenzy and the material world. For both thinkers, lower divination involved demons. Thus, both expected a soteriological communion with the divine and liberation from the material world. All in all, Iamblichus was closer to Origen's views than to the classical Graeco-Roman views of oracles.
Likewise, in his article on Cyprian's sacrificial knowing, Andrew McGowan contextualises ancient Christians’ views on sacrifice. He makes excellent observations of the differences between modern and ancient understandings of sacrifice. While modern (Christian) scholars connect sacrifice to self-giving love involving violence and self-abnegation, in ancient Mediterranean understanding, sacrifices were simply offerings. McGowan rightly points out that the modern understanding of sacrifice continues in some scholarly interpretations of ancient texts and traditions. ‘Yet the modern “common sense” of sacrifice does have roots in how cultic ideas and images developed in late antiquity; sacrifice was changed, not ended’ (167).
Andrew Radde-Gallwitz analyses how the late antique sources created and interpreted creedal anathemas and treated them as integral parts of conciliar creeds. He also looks at how the documents were transmitted and how the fourth-century Christians organised, interpreted and supplemented these texts. As Radde-Gallwitz argues, bishops of the fourth and early fifth century treated anathemas as the way to tackle new doctrinal problems as they arose.
Johan Leemans discusses the dynamics between the preacher and his congregation in Greek sermons of 350–450 by preachers such as the Cappadocian Fathers, John Chrysostom, Severian of Gabala and Proclus of Constantinople. He argues that many of these sermons have traces of oral delivery and of preacher–audience communication, and therefore can offer a glimpse into ‘homiletical modes of knowing’ — the ways in which a preacher created and ordered his knowledge and channelled it to his audience. As is well known, the fourth- and fifth-century Greek Christian preachers were skilled orators, and their sermons were profoundly imbued in the rhetoric of the Second Sophistic. The result of this ‘Christianisation of classical rhetoric’ was ‘the dynamic interplay between Christian “content” and classical “form” that resulted in something new’ (284).
Jan Stenger examines how Gregory of Nyssa approached the question of Christian paideia in the Life of Moses, namely, whether there was a characteristically Christian way of acquiring, ordering and using knowledge. The Life of Moses gives an account of Moses’ upbringing at the Pharaoh's court and his education in Egyptian wisdom. In his allegorical interpretation of Moses and his Egyptian education, Gregory of Nyssa argued that likewise Christians should ‘borrow’ from Greek pagan learning what is useful and put it in the service of Christian truth. The appropriation of pagan culture is necessary, but it is acceptable only if it is done within and for the church. Thus, pagan learning has only an instrumental role.
The fascinating article by Dawn LaValle Norman explores the use of female voices in Christian philosophical dialogues — Methodius of Olympus’ third-century Symposium and Gregory of Nyssa's fourth-century On the Soul and Resurrection. In Plato's dialogues and other philosophical discussions inspired by Plato, writers used female characters to express ideas and values about the bodily processes of birth, death and physical desire. LaValle Norman argues that the new valuation of the body and the belief that body persisted after death led Christian writers to highlight the female characters in their dialogues. Gregory of Nyssa composed a deathbed conversation with his dying sister Macrina about the immortality of the soul, and this can be seen as a counterpoint to Plato's Phaedo where Socrates is waiting for his death. LaValle Norman shows how ‘women were given a new amount of power in the imaginary world of dialogues partly because men had changed what they cared about’ (365).
Augustine is understandably the focus of several articles (Carol Harrison, Michael Hanaghan, Gerald B. Boersma). For example, Hanaghan discusses Augustine's criticisms of astrological and daemonic divination from the perspective of the limits of human observation. He shows how Augustine's attack against astrology was influenced by earlier criticisms by classical and Christian authors, among others, using the argument that the minute calculations that astrology requires are beyond human sense perception. Hanaghan emphasises the rhetorical mischaracterisation of the opposing argument as Augustine's characteristics, perceivable also in his attacks against astrology: ‘Augustine was highly effective in his rhetorical attacks and was notorious for (mis)characterising the views of others, or even inventing them, as he did in the Donatist controversy, when the persistent silence of his opponents left a void that Augustine filled as their self-appointed proxy, sketching weak arguments that he could then deconstruct in detail’ (428).
Many articles discuss the modes of knowing and knowledge ordering as part of the ascetic way of life (Jonathan L. Zecher, Jeanne-Nicole Mellon Saint-Laurent, Michael W. Champion, just to mention a selection). This is understandable, as many of the intellectual works accessible to us were written (and preserved) in the context of ascetic communities. Jeanne-Nicole Mellon Saint-Laurent analyses Philoxenos of Mabbug who writes advice to the monks in his extended discourses on the ascetic life — in this case study, against the lust of the belly or On Gluttony. An ascetic's practice was a struggle against demons, one of them being gluttony. In Philoxenos’ argument, a glutton's behaviour and attitude towards food and drink are rooted in false epistemologies of the self and God, and thus gluttony leads to heresy and death. The weight of food covers the mind and deprives a person of the faculties of knowledge. Furthermore, gluttony was linked to Christological controversies. Mellon Saint-Laurent shows how ascetic bodies were cherished as symbols of holiness both in Chalcedonian and Non-Chalcedonian circles.
Bronwen Neil explores the thought-world of Gregory I, bishop of Rome, showing that for Gregory, knowledge-seeking was a communal as well as an institutional endeavour, not an issue for a small elite only. His ordering of knowledge — the exegetical, the emotional and the social avenues to knowledge — reflected various levels of social organisation, from emotional communities within the local church of Rome to the larger structures of power and knowledge in the late Roman world.
The chapters of The Intellectual World clarify not only mechanisms for ordering knowledge, but also intellectual, sensual and emotional responses of late antique people — how their minds, feelings and senses were reshaped. Articles delve into the world of sounds and voices (Carol Harrison), visuality (Robin Jensen) and liturgy with the rhetorical power of words and the performative power of ritual (Sarah Gador-Whyte). We perceive that the development of Christian knowledge systems went hand in hand with changes in institutional practices such as education, liturgy, administration and asceticism. These contributions show how Christian epistemology emerged through a complex interplay of previous traditions, especially Neoplatonic philosophy and social transformations. The Intellectual World is scrupulously edited; there are very few typographical errors (on 303 the ‘Elysian mysteries’ should be ‘Eleusinian mysteries’).
It has been fascinating to read these two books together. Whereas The Intellectual World is a collection of specific case studies, Christianization of Knowledge by Mark Letteney (University of Washington) makes an ambitious interpretation of the huge epistemic shift in Late Antiquity. L.'s starting point is the old question of what difference Christianity made, which he approaches by tracing the shifting practices of knowledge production in the fourth and fifth centuries. He argues that Nicene Christians, upon ascending to positions of power, revolutionised the methods of knowledge production for settling theological disputes, but as a consequence these methods also spread to secular domains like juristic writings and legal compendia, handbooks, historical accounts, miscellanies, grammatical treatises and even the Palestinian Talmud. L.'s study demonstrates that the intellectual tools originally devised for early fourth-century doctrinal controversies — methods of aggregation, distillation and promulgation — eventually transcended theological disputation during the late fourth through the mid-fifth century and became the lingua franca for the entire scholastic culture in Late Antiquity.
L.'s argumentation proceeds in two parts, followed by a comprehensive case study on the Theodosian Code. The first part explores the history of Christian argumentative forms before the fourth century, as well as the creation of new methods of making truth claims in the early fourth century. First, L. discusses some selected pre-Nicene Christian thinkers (Ignatius, Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Tertullian and the Gospel of Truth) in order to show the variety of methods of early Christian thinkers before the theological disputes from the council of Nicaea (325) onwards. The early fourth-century theological disputes were the catalyst for new modes of argumentation, and in this process Athanasius of Alexandria and his treatise Concerning the Decrees are highlighted as the turning point. In Concerning the Decrees, Athanasius invented a new scholastic method of aggregation, distillation and promulgation to identify ‘orthodoxy’ and refute his adversaries. He created his argumentative format in defence of the Nicene Creed, but it became the prevailing form of scholastic methodology in all fourth-century theological disputation. As L. writes, Christian thinkers believed that ‘truth can be found only by compiling the great diversity of opinions and distilling from that collection a universal statement which supersedes and governs the subsequent interpretation of its sources’ (91).
The second part of L.'s book analyses how these tools spread to different fields of late antique scholarship in the late fourth through the middle of the fifth centuries and created a new book culture. The approach not only reconfigured how arguments were structured but also how books were physically produced and used, influencing even non-theological writings. The shift is visible in the material book format, the codex, and in the evolution of methods used for textual authentication and commentary. L. argues that the shift in book format began with the Nicene Christians ‘who prized book formats such as the wide-margin codex which most readily invited commentarial intervention in the margins’ (167). L. provides a detailed examination of manuscripts in which scribes copied non-Christian works using Christian scribal tools such as supralineate contractions and symbols such as the christogram. He shows how Christian scribal practices came to be widely used in the literary and documentary products of Theodosian Age scriptoria, detached from the religion of the scribes or readers. Christian tools and symbols used in non-theological domains do not reveal the Christianity of writers or readers, but they rather tell us about the dominant ideological framework.
There are some typos in Christianization of Knowledge (on 172: Gennadius of Massila should be Gennadius of Massilia; on 248: Parmenion should be Parmenian; on 249: Cesarum should be Caesarum). L.'s narrative of the epistemic shift is detailed and persuasive. He makes bold claims such as ‘by the 430s, however, this ideology of knowledge production could be read from just about any randomly selected product of scholarship’ (100). This may sound like a totalising claim to perceive every cultural product of the period in the light of this epistemic shift. In any case, Christianization of Knowledge is a remarkable work that will start a new phase in the studies of knowledge ordering. While Christianization of Knowledge may even become a game changer, Intellectual World offers a rich and diverse panorama of current research.
