Accounts of the divorce between classical philology and theology abound. But it appears no one ever finalised the paperwork. For, as the contributions in this volume demonstrate, while classical philology purportedly established itself as an objective, scientific and secular discipline by strategically disavowing its theological connections, it was (and remains) entangled with questions of faith, revelation, religious authority and the interpretation of sacred texts. Moreover, as Conybeare and Goldhill point out in their introduction, this connection has been overlooked despite over a decade of exciting new work on the history of philology.
Classical Philology and Theology aims to correct this omission. But it is easier said than done, for illuminating this entanglement requires multiple perspectives and approaches. After all, as Conybeare and Goldhill also underscore, the title of their introduction, ‘philology’s shadow’, is intentionally ambiguous: ‘is “philology” here an objective or a subjective genitive? Is it philology that casts the shadow — or does it do its work in the shadow of theology?’ (7). Contributors stake out different positions on this question, befitting their expertise as classicists, historians and philologists, and this is a great strength of the volume. Together their chapters offer a view that is productively kaleidoscopic, providing opportunities for synthesis rather than provoking disorientation.
The volume’s organisational structure aids the reader in this by featuring paired essays, linked by common themes selected to be suggestive without being prescriptive, while a concentration of chapters on the nineteenth century provides the work with a centre of gravity. Taken as a whole, the contributions here effectively demonstrate how established narratives about the dissolution of the relationship between classical philology and theology disintegrate in the face of case studies that demonstrate, for example, how scholars have historically moved easily between secular and sacred texts.
The first two sets of essays are especially effective at addressing this in the nineteenth century. The first examines ‘the human and contingent aspects of discipline formation’ in Germany and England (7). Constanze Güthenke’s essay focuses on a pivotal moment when philology and theology were literal roommates. From 1798 to 1799, theologian-philologist-philosopher Friedrich Schleiermacher shared a Berlin apartment with the philologist-philosopher (and future Catholic) Friedrich Schlegel. Güthenke traces how their interactions stimulated Schleiermacher’s thinking on sociability, community and knowledge, while laying groundwork for his Plato translations — whose models of knowing, socialising and transcendence offered rich sources for both philological and theological reflection.
Simon Goldhill’s chapter similarly explores the lived experiences and intellectual communities of theologians and philologists in Victorian England, demonstrating that one misses a great deal when attempting to keep the theological separate from the classical-philological. In particular, his repositioning of Benjamin Jowett as a theologically engaged figure rather than simply a classical philologist drives this point home. Case and point, Essays and Reviews (1860) provoked a bigger scandal upon publication than Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859), and Jowett was a key contributor. Similarly, by noting how Lachmann’s Homer scandalised readers in the 1840s but how no outcry was provoked when Westcott and Hort’s Revised Bible appeared in 1881, Goldhill reveals how philological methods had been assimilated into theologians’ toolkit, underscoring the evolving nature of the relationship between the disciplines.
Focusing on text-critical matters, the next chapter pair further demonstrates how shared philological methods made the boundary between theology and classics permeable and productive. Theodor Dunkelgrün examines how the Jewish scholar Zacharias Frankel integrated his classical philological and rabbinic training to study ancient Greek-speaking Judaism. In particular, by studying the Septuagint as a Jewish text he not only rejected simple narratives about ‘pure’ Jerusalem Judaism and ‘assimilated’ Alexandrian Judaism, which served merely as a preparation for Christianity, but also approached rabbinic literature as a classical tradition in and of itself, which merited rigorous historical critical philological study (77). Irene Peirano Garrison, in turn, dismantles the narrative that classical philology simply adopted methods from biblical textual criticism. As she points out, theologians like Johann Jacob Wettstein (1693–1754) argued that sacred texts needed the same philological standards as secular ones (92). Turning to Karl Lachmann, she shows how he deployed identical stemmatic methods in his New Testament and Lucretius editions. In so doing, she reveals how the concept of an ‘original’ text functions in both these works while also exposing tensions between Lachmann’s claims of critical objectivity and his invocation of ‘divine assistance’ (opis divinae) for emendation.
The next two chapter-pairs examine cases from classical antiquity to the twentieth century in order to illuminate constructions of Hellenism and the Latin Tradition. These chapters reveal the deep imbrication between theology and classical philology in Late Antiquity and the persistence of this into the present. They complement the earlier chapters’ focus on co-constitution and mutual influence while offering additional theoretical and metaphilological reflections.
The Hellenisation essays demonstrate how seemingly abstract scholarly debates encode profound ideological stakes. Renaud Gagné charts five centuries of Catholic theology grappling with Christianity’s Greek heritage, from Guillaume Budé’s subordination of philology as theology’s ‘handmaiden’ to Pope Benedict XVI’s Regensburg Address declaring Hellenism constitutive of Christianity itself. Susanna Elm examines how Emperor Julian, a Christian-turned-pagan, conceived of his own divinity and the material embodiment of divinity in statues. Her analysis reveals how debates about Christ’s incarnation coexisted with ones about imperial divinity while addressing challenges of translation, as terms like divus, sacer, theios and hagios resist modern oppositions between ‘secular’ and ‘divine.’
Concerning the Latin Tradition, Mark Vessey reveals how the artificial twentieth-century classification of writers from Late Antiquity as either pagan or Christian has obscured the extent to which authors such as Boetheus produced both kinds of texts simultaneously. He also foregrounds the importance of this for our understanding of the history of literature, because this was the point at which the codex became the privileged way of communicating written texts. Catherine Conybeare offers a re-interpretation of Macrobius’s Saturnalia, dating it to the 430s rather than the 380s, which places it within in a Christianised world that the text never mentions. Consequently, her analysis reveals that while the case for identifying the Saturnalia as a ‘quasi-biblical commentary’ is not bulletproof, much is to be gained by reading the text as a response to — rather than as an antecedent of — Christian literary culture (196).
Erik Gunderson’s conclusion addresses contemporary philology directly, critiquing how the concept of a god-like author permeates the field and reveals persistent assumptions about textual stability and what he terms a ‘theology of intentions’ holding authorial intent sacred (202). His reading of Propertius 3.1. shows how this implicit theology forecloses readings that embrace textual instability, multiplicity and play.
Collectively, the contributions reveal how theological assumptions shaped classical philology in rarely acknowledged ways, and how philology in turn influenced theological considerations and practices. The volume thus shows that accounts of a divorce are self-serving rather than accurate, while demonstrating what we gain from attending to their historical connections. More ambitiously, even, this also reveals how such narratives have distorted contemporary philologists’ self-understanding, and this to the field’s detriment. This book is thus essential reading for anyone interested in the history of classical philology and its rethinking. We will also be most fortunate if this collection serves as a stimulus for future work.
