Eusebius was up to a whole lot of things in his thousand-page tome, the Praeparatio Evangelica. One thing among them was to show his readers “the true tradition” of Biblical exegesis and Christian theology.[i] Eusebius was interested in origins and in the deep history of ideas; he was rarely content to get things second hand if he had access to the original. He also wanted his readers to trace the history of certain ideas to justify a specific way of reading the Bible and doing theology.
By the time of Eusebius, the break between Christianity and Judaism (on anyone’s dating) had taken place; he took it upon himself, therefore, to rescue many elements of Hellenistic Judaism to which, as he knew, early Christianity was indebted and from which it might learn. In the PE (especially VII-IX and portions of XIII), he tried to graft back in the branch which had been broken off, lest it be thrown into the fire.
There is a particularly vexing passage in Book XIII where Eusebius cites 30 pages (!) from Book V of Clement of Alexandria’s Stromateis (Miscellanies).[ii] Scholars have puzzled over the placement of this quotation here, a number of whose parts had been already cited at various junctures in the PE, yet particularly in the two books which preceded it. In addition to its length and redundance, it also seems not to flow with his argument – book XIII begins by taking a look at an ambivalent Plato, sets the stage for his self-contradiction, and then at the end brings down the hammer. But between the ‘setting-the-stage’ and ‘bringing-down-the-hammer’ comes a long-winded passage from Clement.
(We have touched on this in a number of posts, e.g., here and following for Plato; for Alexandrian Judaism here)
My suggestion, taking us back to the title of this post, is that Eusebius is trying to show us three things by this gangly quotation: 1) his own contribution to the “true tradition,” 2) what he had taken from it, and 3) what Clement himself had taken over. By rooting Clement’s observations and certain important doctrines (creatio ex nihilo, pre-existence of the Word as “Wisdom”[iii], our being an “image of the image,” etc.) in Aristobulus, a Jewish philosopher of the second century BC, he shows that Christianity is not a beginning but an end – or the beginning of the end. That is, there existed a lively tradition of biblical exegesis in light of pagan philosophy stretching back well beyond Philo of Alexandria (more on him later). Moreover, as becomes clear by comparison, Eusebius has systematized and expanded many of the traces of connections between “Plato” and “Moses” in previous writers, bringing order to the chaos of Clement’s writing.[iv]
But perhaps most tantalizing (and compelling!) is the citation of a famous passage from Aratus, a Hellenistic poet, first cited in Aristobulus. Before turning to Aratus, Aristobulus says that
Pythagoras and Socrates and Plato seem to have investigated [the doctrine that God created all things by his word] thoroughly, and have followed (Moses) in this respect, when they speak of hearing the voice of God, beholding clearly the structure (κατασκευήν) of all things as created and upheld by God ceaselessly.[v]
After quoting Orphic fragments to prove his point, he turns to Aratus, who is expounding generally Platonic (or Platonizing) doctrines:
God is where we start from, and men never leave him
Unmentioned; all the streets are full of God
and the busy markets, and full the sea
and its bays: we all long for God in every way.
For we are his offspring: his gentle right hand
directs us, and he rouses the nations to work
reminding them to seek a living, he tells us when earth
is best for bull and mattock and favorable the seasons
for planting in beds and scattering seed.[vi]
A few pages later, Eusebius’s gives us Clement’s own version of the citation, but Clement takes it further (noting certain resemblances to the creation account):
For he has established signs in heaven,
arranging the stars; and he considered the stars
a year-cycle, that they might signify what is done
for men in different seasons, that all things might grow;
and him they propitiate as the first and last.[vii]
What is missing in this tradition? One is doubtless intended to fill in here the missing-link, the version of Aratus that everyone knew:
22 So Paul, standing in the midst of the Areopagus, said: Men of Athens, I perceive that in every way you are very religious. 23 For as I passed along and observed the objects of your worship, I found also an altar with this inscription, To the unknown god. What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. 24 The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man, 25 nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything. 26 And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, 27 that they should seek God, in the hope that they might feel their way toward him and find him. Yet he is actually not far from each one of us, 28 for
In him we live and move and have our being;[viii]
as even some of your own poets have said,
For we are indeed his offspring.
Acts 17:22-28 (ESV)
This passage has not a little significance for the burning apologetics debate in the Reformed world, but for the moment it is enough to notice how Eusebius here helps his reader fill in missing pieces and thereby makes a curious argument about the “true tradition” of Christian theology. If we reformulate it as a question, it would run something like this: if Philo was extending a rich engagement with Greek philosophy and poetry already begun centuries before by Aristobulus, and Paul can be caught in the middle thinking along similar lines (indeed quoting the same text), are there not points of continuity (as well as discontinuity) between Athens and Jerusalem? Between Paul and Plato? Sure, Eusebius’s citation is suggestion, not thorough argumentation; but it is a powerful one.
Plato – Aristobulus – Paul – Philo – Clement – …
…Eusebius?
[i] This term I am borrowing (and re-purposing) from Tom Shippey’s Road to Middle Earth. 1982. 3rd ed. Appendix B. He uses it to describe Tolkien’s idiosyncratic, selective view of the right sort of English literature.
[ii] Perhaps the longest citation of the PE – quite an achievement.
[iii] This would become very important in the Trinitarian debate, namely, whether the Proverbs 8 hymn to Wisdom could be applied to the pre-existent Logos who is Christ.
[iv] Eusebius is also much more careful in establishing harmony rather than prophecy. Clement at certain moments (though he too had a strong theory of a dependent Moses) lets Plato prophecy of the coming Christianity and, without qualification, says that he borrowed this or that idea not from Hebrew, but apostolic writings. Eusebius, much more historically consciousness than Clement, generally eschews the more fanciful readings (yetnot always). He worked out the theory, however, of a ”true tradition” running through Apostolic Christianity through Hellenistic Judaism and Plato back to Moses in order to show that, should Jesus or the Apostles say something in line with Plato, there would be no cause for surprise, drawing, as they are, on a unified tradition. This is a more ”historical” way to get to the same conclusion (in a sense) as Clement had haphazardly arrived .
[v] We don’t have time to talk about another important difference, namely, that Eusebius (a signficant part of his contribution) shrinks the field from Pythagoras, Socrates, and Plato (as also Clement was wont to say) to just Plato. The reasons for this seem to have been his distrust of historical sources for Socrates and Pythagoras as well as, perhaps, the difficulty of doing the same maneuvering around these figures which he did for Plato.
[vi] Aratus. Phaenomena 1-9. I have, for obvious reasons, taken the edition which Eusebius here cites, PE XIII 12, 6 [Mras I.194, 13f.].
Ἐκθεοῦ ἀρχώμεσθα, τὸν οὐδέποτ’ ἄνδρες ἐῶσιν
ἄρρητον· μεσταὶ δὲ θεοῦ πᾶσαι μὲν ἀγυιαί,
πᾶσαι δ’ἀνθρώπων ἀγοραί, μεστὴ δὲ θάλασσα
καὶ λιμένες, πάντη δὲ θεοῦ κεχρήμεθα πάντες.
Τοῦ γὰρ καὶ γένος ἐσμέν· ὁ δ’ἤπιος ἀνθρώποισι
δεξιὰ σημαίνει, λαοὺς δ’ ἐπὶ ἔργον ἐγείρει
μιμνήσκων βιότοιο· λέγει δ’ ὅτε βῶλος ἀρίστη
βουσί τε καὶ μακέλῃσι, λέγει δ’ὅτε δεξιαὶ ὦραι
καὶ φυτὰ γυρῶσαι καὶ σπέρματα πάντα βαλέσθαι.
[vii] Ibid. XIII 13, 26 [Mras II.206 12f.]:
αὐτὸς γὰρ τά γε σήματ’ ἐν οὐρανῷ ἐστήριξεν,
ἄστρα διακρίνας· ἐσκέψατο δ’ εἰς ἐνιαυτὸν
ἀστέρας, οἵ κε μάλιστα τετυγμένα σημαίνοιεν
ἀνδράσιν ὡράων, ὄφρ’ ἔμπεδα πάντα φύται·
καί μιν ἀεὶ πρῶτόν τε καὶ ὕστατον ἱλάσκονται.
The likeness of the underlined lines to Genesis 1:14 (LXX) could not have but struck a Greek reader: καὶ (οἱ φωστῆρες = ἀστέρες) ἔστωσαν εἰς σημεῖα καὶ εἰς καιροὺς καὶ εἰς ἡμέρας καὶ εἰς ἐνιαυτοὺς…
[viii] This first line, according to the Suidas, comes from a lost work of Epimenides, but this remains debated in scholarship.