Scholars of antiquity will not be surprised to learn that the boundaries between philosophy and religion are rather porous. How to think about that porousness, however, is a more difficult question, and that is the subject of this volume. Philosophical schools, Hellenistic Judaism and early Christianity share a habitus, and only by seeing their commonalities can their differences be appreciated. Summarising all the articles of this collection is beyond the scope of this review. Instead, I will highlight a few strategies that the volume deploys to approach the relationship between religion and philosophy.
The editors of the volume organise its readings into four categories. The first seeks to loosen philosophy's hold on Plato by highlighting ‘the religious nature of Plato's philosophy’. Lars Albinus’ brief genealogy of the concept of the daemon challenges simple definitions of philosophy as a movement from mythos to logos. Myths (which include ritual narrative-making) are not set against ‘reason giving’, but the two form a dialectical relationship aimed at awakening and shaping the soul's daemon.
Frisbee Sheffield argues that eros is the key to understanding the role of piety in Plato's dialogues. Eros bridges a gap between piety toward the gods (an ‘other-directed’ aim) found in the Euthyphro and the Apology and an ‘ethical ideal of god-likeness’ brought about through contemplation, posited in later dialogues such as the Theaetetus and the Timaeus (p. 38). This essay centres on the account of eros in Socrates's speech in the Symposium. Eros mediates an ‘other-directed’ view while also emphasising the transformative effects of contemplation. It at once demands focus on the desired object and an ability to direct others toward the work of eros, which includes ‘binding the whole realm of the mortal and the immortal together’. The paper might have considered Catherine Zuckert's argument that Socrates and Timaeus offer different modes of eros; instead it attempts to harmonise the dialogues in order to show a broader religious and ethical framework in which they function.
The second approach examines the emergence of a common discourse among pagans, Jews and Christians. Helen Van Noorden's study of the Sibylline oracles shows that while traces of Stoicism appear in the text, the Oracles represent more of a bricolage than an ‘internally coherent’ school of thought (p. 124). Sibyl is a ‘magpie’, cobbling together what was ready to hand – Stoicism but also Judaism – to write ethical instruction, theology, eschatology and cosmology.
Christoph Jedan suggests that we view the relationship of philosophy and religion as a continuum and argues that Seneca's Ad Marciam ought to be placed in the middle of this sliding scale, as the consolation shares a basic framework with other consolatory texts, including Paul's letters.
Part iii places Jesus within the context of Graeco-Roman philosophy. Just because Jesus was Jewish does not mean that his Judaism was not thoroughly embedded in the Roman Empire. To this end Bernhard Lang argues that ‘Without his having had some knowledge of Greek and contact with Cynic thought, and without the Greek culture of Galilee, neither Jesus nor his followers can be understood’ (p. 211). Lang also argues that not only are the parallels of teachings similar, but also that the Greek-speaking theatre of Sepphoris is where Jesus and his followers likely came into contact with the philosophy of Diogenes.
The final section challenges the assumptions that Greco-Roman philosophers were uniformly opposed to Christianity. Simon Gathercole and Niko Huttunen show how second-century philosophers made rather nuanced and varied critiques of Christianity. Ilinca Tanaseanu-Döbler's reading of Iamblichus and the Emperor Julian shows how fourth-century Neoplatonism, like Christianity, insisted on the embodied divine presence. Only against this shared background do Julian's critiques of Christianity take on their full force.
Two ambitious essays by Anders Klostergaard Petersen are worth mentioning. While most essays in this collection perform close readings of focused texts to break down ill-advised walls separating religion and philosophy, Petersen attempts to get past ‘the religion and philosophy debate’ by zooming out. Petersen places Plato's corpus and 4 Maccabees in a larger process of ‘cultural evolution’ as told by the neuroscientist Merlin Donald. This 150,000-year story subsumes debates between philosophy and religion into a larger evolutionary process, climaxing in what Karl Jaspers defined as the Axial Age, in which there is a ‘Eurasian’ trend toward self-reflexivity; attention to epistemology; monotheism; awareness of competing world views; imitation of the godhead; askesis; attention to inner disposition (as opposed to ritual); and dissociation from the ruling elite. 4 Maccabees, then, becomes not a convergence or even a competition between ‘Greece and Israel’, but part of a much longer trend. Scholars who already see the Axial Age as a helpful periodisation may appreciate how Plato is decentred from the origin of philosophy. Others will see in it a level of abstraction that makes parallels too easy to find, and that obscures the historicity that would make for useful comparison. It may raise more questions than it answers to see Plato's corpus as ‘an integral element in a process of cultural evolution’ (p. 35), or as ‘representative’ of the ‘basic structure [of] those forms of religion that have undergone the Axial Age development – that is, the so-called world religions, including Judaism, which strictly speaking is not a world religion’ (pp. 35–6).
The question up for debate for scholars of antiquity is not: Are religion and philosophy separate enterprises? But, how do they relate? When are categories such as ‘religion’ and ‘philosophy’ useful, and when are they anachronistic or obscuring? The essays in this volume are varied. Some miss important bibliography, others suffer from a lack of theoretical method. But the most successful articles emphasise the permeability and mutually constitutive nature of philosophical schools, Roman piety, Judaism and Christianity. This volume will be helpful to scholars interested in the rapidly shifting debates about ancient philosophy and religion.
