by Joshua Shaw
In the last two installments (here and here), we introduced Eusebius and began to look at his use of sources. Applying the sketch of C.S. Lewis’s father, we saw in the last post a typical example of Eusebius’s ‘labyrinthine’ methods of reading which nevertheless sometimes take him (much) nearer to a proper understanding of a passage than his near contemporaries (in this case, Clement of Alexandria and Proclus the famous commentator of Plato). In this post we will take up the other half of Lewis’s epithet for his father’s reading ‘operations:’ ‘spectral.’ By this I understand his assertion that, for his father, ‘It was axiomatic that nothing was said or done from an obvious motive.’ Eusebius wants to provide a motive for Plato’s inconsistency of doctrine more compelling than mere ‘development’ or ‘myth versus prose’ or the simple acknowledgement that Plato was no systematician. All these are less compelling than ‘Plato’s fear of the mob,’ which played well within the ancient values of honor and shame. (It is no accident that his final word on the shifting of weight to Moses rather than Plato is couched in terms of honor (τίμη), quoted below).
Between the previous passage and the following one Eusebius has been rather busy, citing the Epinomis (on the impiety of early Greek creation myths here), Republic (against the poets’ view of God, whom Plato argued to be the cause of all good and completely changeless here), Euthyphro (Socratic irony regarding the popular myths here), which passage is ‘clarified’ by Numenius, a neo-Platonist/Pythagorean whose writings survive only fragmentarily, four passages of the Crito (the importance of perseverance in confessed belief despite opposition here) and two sections of the Apology (bravery in the face of death ‘on behalf of truth’ here and here) and again the Republic (the worthiness of the ‘beautiful death’ here). After a flurry of Plato quotations which all cohere as proof-texts for Plato’s ‘orthodoxy’ regarding theology, myth, and bravely facing death for the truth, Eusebius interrupts this flow of argument with a quotation from Aristobulus, a Jewish Aristotelian Philosopher from the 2nd century B.C. He had argued that Plato had access to the Books of Moses through a translation pre-dating the Septuagint. This quotation from Aristobulus Eusebius follows with a massive citation of Clement from Book V of the Stromateis (‘Miscellanies’) 89-134, proving the tendencies of Greeks to steal from one another and barbarian predecessors (here).
After all this, we finally come to our passage in which Plato is officially dethroned due to his inconsistency with himself, which Eusebius attributed to his ‘fear of the Areopagus’ (the following quotations come from PE XIII.14, 2-13):
The sayings of the Hebrews…are said to be beyond all false thought (διανοίας). Indeed the ‘divine sayings’ are said to be ‘pure and refined silver, tested in the earth, purified seven-fold.’ But those sayings of Plato are not of like nature… but carried in with it a mixture of the false with the truth of nature, so that you will not discover a doctrine among them pure of deceit. If you could only—at least for a moment—retreat from self-interest…you would recognize that this very man, the wonderful philosopher, who alone of all the Greeks reached the threshhold of truth, puts to shame the name of the gods by attributing it to corruptible matter and wooden images fashioned by the hands of craftsman into human form; and after the lofty height of his grandiloquence, by which he strained to assert he knew the father and maker of the universe, from up above somewhere in the hypercosmic heights, he was forced by the people of Athens to the abysmal depths of god-abominated (θεομισοῦς) idol-worship, such that he was not deterred from asserting that Socrates went down to the Piraeus to pray to the goddess and to observe the barbarous festival the citizens were then for the first time celebrating and further admitting that he bid a cock be offered to Asclepius, and again regarded as a god the ancestral interpreter of the Greeks, the daimon who sits at Delphi. For good reason then the charge of errant superstition such as the unphilosophic mob pursues would have been ascribed to him.
So, Plato is afraid that he will get the hemlock if he is as bold as Socrates in proclaiming the one true God as the only God. Interestingly, Eusebius seems to suggest in the above paragraph that Plato made Socrates do those idolatrous things, although the real Socrates, we are to imagine, would never have done so. Gifford, the only English commentator and translator of the PE, seems to miss Eusebius’s thought when he says, “It is generally supposed that by the offering of a cock to Aesculapius, the god of healing, Socrates meant to imply that his soul was on the point of being released by death from all infirmity and disease. A less probable opinion is that he seriously wished to disprove the charge of atheism and unwillingness to worship the gods of his country” (Praeparatio Evangelica, vol. 4: Notes, p. 467). Whether Eusebius thought Socrates faithful to the one true God or not (it would work against his argument if Socrates had not been actually brave), he clearly thought Plato was not. Eusebius continues the argument by referring the reader to his foregoing citations which proved Plato’s belief in a purer monotheism and quotes again word for word the quotation we looked at in the last essay. Then he had pointed out the irony and ‘mockery’ of the poets as ‘children of the gods.’
Here he takes a different approach. He summarizes at three intervals the results of his argument:
For these reasons we must abandon the Philosopher, for he is not even coherent according to his own standard when he dissembles about the mythical genealogies of the poets. … What in the final analysis does he mean by naming the poets ‘children of the gods’ and claiming it is impossible to disbelieve them, although though he affirms they made the myths about the gods ‘without necessary and reasonable proofs’? What kind of irrational faith is this, cast headlong by fear of punishment from the laws? … How could these very poets who are in reality false and not truthful have been called the ‘offspring of gods’? So for all these reasons then he must be abandoned by us…
We can now see in hindsight that Eusebius is in fact not so far from Proclus and Clement in his reading of Plato, or at least that he is aware of that reading: yes, he reads Plato in two ways. He sees a duplicity (καθυποκριναμένος) in Plato, which allows Eusebius to read Plato in two ways. In the same passage about the ‘children of the gods,’ Eusebius sees Plato’s two halves at war with one another. On the one hand he would like to see Plato’s humor in the passage; on the other he cannot (or will not) think himself completely out of the apparent inconsistency between Plato’s sometimes playful and sometimes hostile stance toward the Pantheon. Otherwise a faithful and useful ‘commentator’ (ἑρμηευτής) on Moses, the explanation of his theological deviation, Eusebius argues, is found in fear.
Yet Eusebius is not the first to pick up on Plato’s (apparent) fear, and it is possible (though uncertain) that he borrowed the theme from Pseudo-Justin’s Cohortatio ad Graecos (‘Exhortation to the Greeks’); additionally, the collocation of these particular accusations seems to occur first in Origen (in the East). We will take a look at these and some other elements of Christianity’s engagement with Plato in the upcoming posts.