by Joshua Shaw
In our last installment we gave a brief introduction to Eusebius of Caesarea and his writings, ending with a very brief look at the purpose of Eusebius’ apologetic work the Praeparatio Evangelica (PE) and the beginning of his treatment of Plato (Book XI). In this post we will look further at that treatment, observing his methods as he both promotes and demotes Plato to win new converts to Christianity.
Since it leads into the first citation we will be looking at, the Preface to the thirteenth book of the PE, where Eusebius pauses to tell where he has been and where he is going, will conclude our introduction.
Since Platonic philosophy has been shown to agree with that of Moses for the most part (κατὰ πλεῖστα) in the writings before this (i.e., Books XI-XII) and to contain a commentary in the Greek tongue, as it were, on the sacred words of the Hebrews, I come now both to render what the account still lacks and to go through the things said by those on our behalf in their own places as well as to resolve the reasonable charge of any who should address us and say, ‘why therefore, if Moses and Plato philosophized so harmoniously, should we have recourse to the philosophy of Moses rather than Plato, since in fact the opposite is necessary, that, since the doctrines are equal, the Greek rather than Barbarian philosophy befits us as Greeks?’ Out of hesitation to meet this charge because of my sense of shame before the Philosopher, I put this account off till later and shall first examine in detail those things first proposed. Take up therefore and read what kind of opinion Plato held concerning the Hellenic ‘theologians’ (θεολόγων) and poets and how he athetized the ancestral suppositions about the gods and refuted the absurdity in them.
Before looking at the citation which immediately follows, it is worth remarking on three things here:
1) The “for the most part” agreement includes the two (for Eusebius) theological cornerstones of Christianity: a) the confession of one God who is good and the source of all good and b) the surpassing worth of the human soul. As justification for this recourse is often made to the Shema for the former (Deut. 6:4) and Jesus’ call to discipleship given in all the synoptic Gospels for the latter (Mark 8:34-38), whose sense is “The human soul is worth more than the whole world” (Herman Bavinck, The Christian Family, 1912 trans. 2012, 132). (For more discussion of Bavinck at RF, see here and here.)
2) Eusebius’ “sense of shame” before Plato is sincere, though this is not always assumed in the modern scholarship. It is often thought a mere “ploy” to win respect from his pagan readers, and though of course possible, we should not carry out such a “spectral operation” on Eusebius, but instead, at least until no longer possible, take him at his word. Dempf again makes an obvious but important point (Der Platonismus des Eusebius
3) “Take up and read” is a common command Eusebius gave to his reader, which some have seen as, in addition to guiding the reader, also guiding Eusebius’ assistants at the great Caesarean library: we are thus “picturing Eusebius sitting in the middle of the library and giving the same orders to his assistants who go to the shelves, pull out the works and read them aloud while stenographers copy it down” (Ridings, Attic Moses, 1995, 148, from Karl Mras’s edition of the PE, Einleitung, 1956, lviii).
Plato and the Traditional Gods of Greece
Turning from introduction to Eusebius’ citation methods, it is worth asking ourselves how seriously we are to take them in any given case? Is the PE simply a “catena,” “performance of erudition,” a mass of quotations whose very bulk compels its readers to accept its conclusions? A careful reading of one passage from Plato’s Timaeus twice-cited in Book XIII of the PE will give us a chance to think through these questions. In the rest of this post we will just look at his first use of the passage from Plato’s Timaeus.
To speak of and know the origin of the rest of the gods is beyond our capacities, and so we must believe those who have spoken before, since they are the offspring—as they say—of the gods, clearly then, I suppose, they must know their own parents. It is therefore impossible to disbelieve the children of the gods (θεῶν παισὶν), even though they speak without reasonable and necessary proofs, but as claiming to report domestic affairs (οἰκεῖα), and so, for those following custom, it is necessary to believe them (Plato, Timaeus 40d-e).
In these words encouraging us to believe the myths about the gods and the makers (ποιητὰς) of the myths themselves, on the grounds that they are the gods’ offspring, first by saying that the poets (ποιητὰς) are offspring of the gods he seems to me to be mocking them, since the gods too were men and (thus) are like their offspring in nature.
He next accuses the theologians (θεολόγους) outright, whom he claimed were the offspring of the gods, in that he follows with the saying ‘although they speak without reasonable and necessary proofs,’ in addition to which he adds the ‘as they said.’ He seems to me to make fun of them saying, ‘clearly they must in any case known their own parents’ and also by saying ‘it is impossible to believe the children of gods (PE 13,1.3; following scholarly tradition I italicize his own words when quoted with other material)
There are at least two interesting aspects of Eusebius’ interpretation here: first, that he (possibly unique among ancient interpreters) sees Plato’s irony, and second, that he gets there by circuitous paths.
Platonic Irony
Concerning the first, Eusebius’ perception of Plato’s irony, we will only be struck by the strangeness of Eusebius’ interpretation when we look at some of his predecessors and contemporaries; as moderns we take for granted Plato’s tongue-in-check manner. As A. E. Taylor (writer of one the great English commentaries on Plato’s Timaeus) says, “This passage is purely, though politely, ironical” (A. E. Taylor, A Commentary on Plato’s Timaeus, 1928, 245). Yet for an ancient reading this passage, this is not self-evident; in fact, so far as I have found, no other interpreter of Plato before Eusebius (whose writings are extant) understood this passage ironically. We will take one representative of Christian interpretation and one from Neo-Platonism.
Clement of Alexandria (who, as we remarked in the last post, exerted a large influence on Eusebius), after discussing and proving with Plato’s help the need for divine grace in the attainment of virtue (Meno, 100a-c), says,
And I will present you Plato himself who gives his express opinion that the children of the gods be believed… [he quotes our passage from the Timaeus]: I do not suppose it possible that the Greeks could give clearer testimony that our savior and those anointed for prophecy—these on the one hand being called children of god (παῖδας θεοῦ), our Lord on the other hand the legitimate son—are true witnesses about divine things … but let him (the one who doubts) know that God himself heralded the scriptures through his son. And he is faithful who reports personal matters (τὰ οἰκεῖα). … [Christ] must therefore be believed even according to Plato, even if (the message) is proclaimed and spoken of through the old and new covenant ‘without reasonable and necessary proofs’ (Miscellanies V. XIII).
There are two important points we may take from Clement’s discussion of our Timaeus passage: 1) Plato’s statement about believing the gods can be easily transferred to the prophets and best of all to the “legitimate son” of God, that is, as a later apologist, drawing on Clement, explains, if we are told by Plato to believe the poets about the nebulous figures of Greek mythology without proofs, how much more the very son of God about his Father? (Theodoret, A Cure for Greek Maladies, ch. 1, a partial translation of which—and the passage I allude to—is available here); 2) Clement (apparently) detects no irony at all even when it seems most obvious to us (‘without necessary and reasonable proofs’), but instead this very idea is taken as a positive statement of the greatness of the truths therein (Proclus thought likewise, as we shall soon see). On the page before (Misc. V.XII) Clement used Aristotle to show that the highest kinds of knowledge (i.e., first principles for Aristotle, for Clement “the unbegotten”) do not admit of “proof” or “demonstration” (ἀποδείξις), and thus must be supplied by God directly (the passage from Aristotle is Posterior Analytics I.2.71b). In all the passage is interpreted as though devoid of all humor.
Proclus, the greatest of ancient commentators on Plato, gives us—unsurprisingly—yet another way of understanding this passage. Though he lived a full 150 years after Eusebius, he nevertheless preserves the ideas of earlier writers who were contemporary or near-contemporary with Eusebius (Iamblichus, Syrianus, Theodorus of Asine). In his view, Plato begins by saying “it is beyond us” to tell or know of the genealogy of gods either because he wanted to keep us from the mistake of those who thought that the gods (as, according to him, Aristotle thought) were “without soul,” were “randomly born along,” and were “destitute of providential care,” or because they (the daemones, children of the gods) were literally unable to be known by scientists (φυσιολογισταί), who, strictly speaking, only deal with matters that can be perceived by the senses (Proclus on Plato’s Timaeus, vol. 2, 299-300; 303 trans. adapted). Most important for us is the passage which follows:
The one who in general possesses knowledge, when faced with things which seem difficult to know and doubtful, runs on the paths of ease by having recourse to the divine knowledge and the inspired intelligence, through which all things become clear and knowable. For all things are in the gods. … [Plato] send[s] us back to the theologians (θεολόγους) and the origin (γένεσιν) of the gods sung of by them … [for they are] offspring and children of the gods inasmuch as they preserve the form (τὸ εἶδος) of their sponsor. … All souls are indeed children of gods, but not all recognize their own god: those who do recognize them choose a similar life and are called children of gods. For this reason he added ‘as they say,’ for they demonstrate from which order they come (by their actions) … they are filled by [the gods] with godlike intelligence, and their knowledge is indeed inspired, which lays hold of God through divine light and transcends all other knowledge—both knowledge through probability and that through proof (δι’ εἰκότων καὶ τῆς ἀποδεικτικῆς) (ibid. p. 305-6).
We do not have space here to go the length of Proclus’ interpretation (for our small passage of Plato there is a good 60 pages of commentary (!)), but in summary Proclus interprets Plato by Plato (adducing other passages from the Symposium, Phaedrus, Republic etc.) together with the aid of other Neo-Platonist commentators (Syrianus, Theodorus), and thus attempts to find a serious or deeper meaning behind each of the phrases Eusebius understands ironically. At bottom, his interpretation is found to be much like Clement’s.
In light of these representative passages, therefore, Eusebius’ reading becomes astounding: what enabled him, contrary to other ancient interpreters, to see Plato’s irony? He notes it in many of the same places a modern reader feels it, e.g., “as they say,” and “without necessary and reasonable proofs,” and that they are apparently “children of the gods” and thus must “clearly know” their own “family matters” (οἰκεῖα). By noticing that Plato “accuses the theologians outright,” he is in line with modern interpretation: “the irony in our passage is aimed, not at the pious beliefs of the common man, but at the pretensions of ‘theologians’ to know the family history of anthropomorphic deities” (Cornford, Plato’s Cosmology, Library of Liberal Arts, 1957, 139). Yet what are his assumptions and how did he arrive at this interpretation?
‘A Labyrinthine Operation’
Returning to our anecdote from Lewis’s Surprised by Joy, we may now see an aspect of the comparison with Lewis’s father—a man given to “the spectral and labyrinthine operation which he called ‘reading between the lines’”—at work: Eusebius’ labyrinthine readings are often more subtle than the author he quotes and the above-quoted passage from Plato is a perfect example. He perceived Plato’s humor, but where did he see it? One of our modern commentators finds the humor in “the sarcastic use made of the obviously false assumption that a man must know who his father was…” (Taylor, work cited, 245). This too is more complicated than it need be, for, as Cornford suggested, the humor is rather obvious: the absurdity of the very idea that poets claimed to be the children of gods is pointed up by Plato’s extension of the metaphor. ‘If they are their children, well then they must know…’
Eusebius, however, saw this passage as evidence for his theory of Euhemerism (an intellectual habit, by the way, akin to a view which Plato mocks in the Phaedrus, 229b) and from there derived the joke. That is, because Plato (supposedly) believed that the gods were actually humans in the first place, he can call the poets their children : “he seems to me to be mocking them, since the gods too were men and (thus) are like their offspring in nature.” That this interpretation is thus somewhat at odds with what follows (i.e., if the gods were men, is it so unbelievable that the poets could be their children?) does not occur to him. Since it was his program to reverse-engineer from ancient mythology to the “historical facts” that underpinned them, he naturally sees Plato doing the same, a figure he wants to be on his side. Throughout much of the PE he deploys this theory of Euhemerism. For example, consider I 9.22-23 where Eusebius preserves for us here the longest literary source for ancient Phoenician religion, written by Sanchuniathon and translated into Greek by Philo of Byblos, but especially important for us is his description of his opponents:
Having said this [Sanchuniathon] mocks the younger generations, since they violently and falsely reduce the myths about the gods to allegories and also descriptions and theories of natural phenomena (PE I.9, 25).
We may, however, turn Eusebius’ accusation of the allegorizers and scientists (those turning myths into accounts of “natural phenomena”) against him, namely, that he has done some violence to this passage in Plato by importing his own theories into his reading of Plato. Surprisingly, however, this happened despite coming closer to the original sense than his contemporaries. Here we are reminded again not to reduce Eusebius to a “false simplicity”: the complexity indeed gets more complex, as we shall see in the next post.