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Logos and Trinity: Patterns of Platonist Influence on Early Christianity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 November 2010

John Dillon
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Extract

I think it would be generally agreed that the two surest ways of getting into serious trouble in Christian circles in the first three or four centuries of the Church's existence were to engage in speculation either on the nature of Christ the Son and his relation to his Father, or on the mutual relations of the members of the Trinity. While passions have cooled somewhat in the intervening centuries, these are still now subjects which a Classical scholar must approach with trepidation—partly, at least, because the two disciplines of Classical Philology and Patristics, which were for so long so intimately connected, in the persons of a series of great scholars, are now so far removed from one another. I propose on this occasion to stick mainly to what I profess to know something about, that is the development of Platonic doctrine over the first few centuries AD, but I will inevitably be led from time to time into more dangerous speculations, and I trust I will receive due tolerance, as well as proper correction, where it is necessary.

Type
Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 25 , March 1989 , pp. 1 - 13
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 1989

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References

1 I think of such names as Erasmus, Robert Estienne, Lachmann, Friedrich Blass, and even of Dr S. T. Bloomfield, Fellow of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, early in the last century—though their contributions were largely philological.

2 Stoicism was influential as well, of course, and Christian polemicists also derived benefit from Epicurean and Sceptical arguments against traditional Greek mythology and religion, unsympathetic though they otherwise were with those philosophical schools.

3 Speusippus, Fr. 61 Taran; Xenocrates, Frs. 154–158 Isnardi Parente/Fr. 54 Heinze.

4 Ps.-Plut. Epit. I, 3; Stobaeus, Ecl. I, 10, 16=Aetius, Placita I, 3 (Diels, Dox. Gr., 287–288.

5 As I have mentioned earlier, the influence of the ‘three kings’ passage of the pseudo-Platonic Second Letter (312E) is either a stimulus to, or itself a symptom of, this development, as is, later, the metaphysical interpretation of the latter part of the Parmenides.

6 I have written on this principle more extensively elsewhere, in ‘Female Principles in Platonism’, Itaca: Quaderns Catalans de Cultura Classica, I (1985), 107–123.Google Scholar

7 Oracles Chaldaiques, ed. Places, E. Des (Bude ed.) (Paris, 1971).Google Scholar

8 Cf. e.g. Enn. V, 4, 2; V, 5, 1; V, 6, 6; VI, 6, 8; and Hadot, Pierre, ‘Etre, Vie, Pensee chez Plotin et avant Plotin’, in Les Sources de Plotin (Entretiens Fondation Hardt V) (Vandoeuvres-Genève, 1960), 107–157.Google Scholar

9 A notable passage illustrating Porphyry's use of this schema occurs in his Timaeus Commentary, Fr. 79 Sodano (=Procl. In Tim. III, 64, 8ff. Diehl). But cf. also Anon. Comm. in Parm. XIV, 16ff. Hadot (probably Porphyry; certainly doctrinally concordant with him), and Marius Victorinus, Adv. Arium. I, 57, 9ff. (certainly dependent on Porphyry).

10 See, however, the good discussion by Hadot, Pierre, ‘La metaphysique de Porphyre’, in Porphyre (Entretiens Fondation Hardt XII) (Vandoeuvres-Genève, 1966), 127–163.Google Scholar

11 De Princ. I, 86, 9ff. Ruelle.

12 I leave out of account the remarkable figure of Marius Victorinus, though he is actually the best evidence for Porphyry's trinitarian doctrine (cf. e.g. Adv. Ar. I, 56–60; IV, 19–29), since he cannot be regarded as a ‘mainline’ Christian theologian, useful though he was to St Augustine in many respects. Augustine, I think, actually recognizes this Porphyrian Trinity, though he pretends, at least, not to grasp its significance, in an important passage in the City of God (X, 23), where he is quoting from Porphyry's Philosophy from Oracles on the question of what are the proper agents of purification. Porphyry, it seems, declared these to be, not the Sun or the Moon, but the archai, or ‘first principles’. ‘We know’, says Augustine, ‘what Porphyry, as a Platonist, means by the “principles”. He refers to God the Father, and God the Son, whom he calls in Greek the Intellect or Mind of the Father (i.e the nous tou patros or patrikos nous). About the Holy Spirit he says nothing, or at least nothing clear; although I do not understand what other being he refers to as holding the middle position between the two. If, like Plotinus in his discussion of the three “principal substances” (i.e. Enn. V, 1), he had intended it to be inferred that this third entity was soul, he would certainly not have said that this held the middle place between the two others, the Father and the Son’ (trans. Henry Bettenson). One might be forgiven for regarding Augustine here as indulging in deliberate obtuseness. Porphyry is plainly, in giving an exegesis of the Oracles, presenting a trinity of Father, Power of the Father (or Life), and Intellect of the Father. His system is not to be assimilated to the three hypostases of Plotinian metaphysics (though he also accepted them). If Augustine had cared to enquire more deeply, instead of indulging in polemics (as he does again below, at X, 29), he might have learned something to his advantage, but he is incurious, as he plainly was also about the higher theological flights of Marius Victorinus, preferring to believe that the Platonists have only dim reflections of the Truth.

13 I use the edition, The Five Theological Orations of Gregory of Nazianzus, Mason, A. J. (ed.) (Cambridge, 1899).Google Scholar

14 Cf. also Theol Orat. V, 9–10, where this is emphasized.

15 See Rist, J. M., ‘The Identified Dyad and Intelligible Matter in Plotinus’, CQ n.s., 12 (1962), 99–107.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

16 See I. P. Sheldon-Williams's useful chapter on Maximus in The Cambridge History of Later Greek and Early Mediaeval Philosophy, 492–505.