In the past three installments (here, here, and here) we looked at Eusebius of Caesarea as a reader of Plato and user of sources, noting the ways in which he came nearer to Plato’s meaning than most of his contemporaries (albeit by circuitous paths) and how he ‘saw through’ Plato’s writings to his fear of the Athenian mob to explain his lapses into idolatry. This is the linchpin in Eusebius’ argument for dethroning Plato: all other lapses (e.g., his sexual ethics, Plato’s penal code in the Laws, his division of the soul, etc.) are for Eusebius secondary. They are indeed important and serve to support his argument—we will look at this over the coming months—but they are not decisive on the question of authority.

Some Predecessors, Contemporaries, and Successors

Origen uses Paul on this point even more explicitly than Eusebius. In our passage on Plato’s fear, Gifford, the English commentator and translator of the PE, notes that almost all these passages appear to have been taken from Origen’s Contra Celsum book VI, where they are collocated and put to the same purpose. Origen first quotes Romans  and acknowledges Plato’s success in saying some things well of God—of his invisible attributes—all of which “God had revealed them (=him),” but he goes on to say that this did not lead to “pious worship and practice” (ἀξίαν…εὐσεβεία), because “the wrath of God” lay on them as a punishment (VI.III). Then fusing I Corinthians 1 and Romans 1, he condemns the hints of idolatry from the first words of the Republic (κατέβην ‘I descended’) and the last words of Socrates in the Phaedo (‘Crito, we owe a cock to Asclepius. Pay it…’):

But those who wrote such (noble doctrines, e.g. about the ‘first good, God’) ‘descend to the Piraeus’ to pray to Artemis as to a god and to see a festival newly celebrated by private citizens (= the uneducated, ἰδιῶται); and despite having philosophized about doctrines so great as these about the soul and having treated in depth the course of a life well lived, abandoning the greatness of the things God had shown them, their thinking became cheap and mean, when they render as payment a rooster to Asclepius… [Despite some noble theology,] they sometimes descend with the Egyptians to the birds or four-legged creatures or creeping things. But though some should appear to have transcended these things, they will be found out to have traded the truth of God for a lie. … Wherefore while the wise and erudite among the Greeks wandered in their works concerning the divine, God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise… (Contra Celsum VI.iv, translation mine)

A few notes on the relationship of Origen’s treatment to Eusebius’ deserve mention here: 1) Origen’s treatment of Plato himself is sparse and very possibly secondary (that is, derived from other sources besides Plato’s writings); 2) As the shuffle between singular and plural indicate, Plato is taken (as Eusebius made explicit) as the representative of the best of heathendom, 3) Origen deals directly with the New Testament (which we have seen and will further see Eusebius avoids in the PE) 4) all suggestion of Plato’s fear is absent from the discussion, though of course the moral connections are implicit. When our commentator (Gifford) therefore says, “Eusebius seems to have borrowed the whole of this censure on Socrates almost word for word from Orig[en] c[ontra] Celsum, vi.4,” (p. 467) the reader must be careful to distinguish the materials and the purposes to which they are put. Is the charge of fear a contribution of Eusebius himself?

In this connection we should turn to a couple of other contributions: one from the West, Tertullian, and one from the East, Pseudo-Justin Martyr. The former in his Apologeticum (sect. 46 here) turns Socrates’ sacrifice to Asclepius into a prideful (and subtle) nod to Apollo, the father of Asclepius and whose oracle named Socrates the wisest of all men (Apology 20e-21c here). But as Eusebius could not read Latin, it is unlikely that he was influenced by this passage, and in any case vanity is a charge different from fear. The latter, Pseudo-Justin Martyr, in his Cohortatio ad Graecos is much more interesting in consideration of our passage in Eusebius:

But while Plato accepted, as it seems, the teaching about the one and only God of Moses and the other prophets, which he learned on a visit to Egypt, but fearful on account of what befell Socrates lest somehow he too create for himself a certain Anytus or Meletus to accuse him before the Athenians and say, “Plato does more harm than good and spends his time in trifles, not reckoning as Gods those whom the city does,” from fear of the hemlock he habitually makes his teaching about the gods multifarious and cleverly fashioned so that the gods might exists to those who wish it so and vice versa, fashioning all this by his argumentation (τῷ λόγῳ), as will be evident from his very words (20.1 and further cf. 22.1, 23.1, 25.2-4 etc. here).

(For those curious about the commonly accepted reading of Socrates’ sacrifice to Asclepius, it is likely a reference to the practice of sacrificing a cock to Asclepius when one is healed: that Socrates is at the very moment dying (and leaving his body) is precisely the point.)

Like Eusebius, our author here often appeals to harmony and lack thereof as the measure of truth (7.2, 8., 13.2), to the chronological lateness of Plato to Moses (passim), and, as in the passage above, to Plato’s fear to explain the contradictions within his dogmas so that, in a sense different from Paul’s, “he might be all things to all people.” The difficulty of the relationship arises because we do not with firmness know either the author or the date of the writing. It was traditionally dated (since roughly the Renaissance) to the third century, but a more recent monumental study (from Christoph Riedwig, 1994) places it later, squarely within Eusebius’ lifetime (fourth century) and more boldly still identifies the author with Marcellus, Eusebius’ arch-nemesis (whom we will perhaps look at in a future post together with this thesis).

I personally find it unlikely, for reasons I cannot go into here, that Eusebius read our Pseudo-Justin, but this must remain an open question. Nevertheless, we have seen enough to get a sense of the broader world in which the early Christians scholar moved in relation to Plato, from light use to further one’s own argumentation (Origen), to scoff and scorn (Tertullian), bitter invective (Lactantius, see here book III sect. 20), and indeed to a more or less generous explaining away of the differences (Pseudo-Justin).

Among them Eusebius stands out for the breadth of his acquaintance with Plato’s works (only equalled in the East by Clement of Alexandria before him), his (sometimes over-) subtle readings, the broad agreement he is willing to acknowledge, and the failure which he imputes to, in the words of Pseudo-Justin, Plato’s ‘fear of the hemlock.’ 

Before stopping for observations about the ethics and nature of using foreign sources—there is much that overlaps in the manner of Christian’s citing pagans and Christians citing other Christians from other sects—we will, in my next post, look at one more aspect of Eusebius’ use of Plato, which will bring all of these points to a head.