SOURCE: “Clement: The New Song of the Logos,” in Allegorical Readers and Cultural Revision in Ancient Alexandria, University of California Press, 1992, pp. 183-234.

[In the following excerpt, Dawson describes Justin of Flavia Neapolis's method of interpreting allegorically the word of God in Biblical and non-Biblical texts, and contends that Clement applied Justin's ideas in his own reading.]

Like Valentinus, Clement (Titus Flavius Clemens) was an independent Christian intellectual and teacher in second-century Alexandria. He was born around 150 c.e. of pagan parents, probably in Athens. Following a topos of Hellenistic intellectual autobiography, he tells us that after travels to Italy, Syria, and Palestine in search of teachers, he finally discovered the finest teacher of all in Egypt.¹ Upon arriving in Alexandria around 180 c.e., Clement began a vigorous teaching and writing career in the city that lasted until 202/203 c.e., when the violent persecution of Christians by the emperor Septimius Severus forced him to leave Egypt. He fled to Cappadocia, where he joined a certain Alexander, who later became bishop of Jerusalem. Clement died in Cappadocia before 215 c.e., without seeing Egypt again.²

Clement was a prolific author, and a good portion of his literary production has survived.³ His major extant works are often referred to as a trilogy, though only the first two treatises are clearly related to one another. There is first an appeal to pagans to embrace the new Christian philosophy (Exhortation to the Greeks; Protreptikos pros Hellēnas), then a handbook of social and personal ethics (The Tutor; Paidagōgos), and (apparently in place of a projected, but unwritten, third component of the trilogy that would have been entitled The Teacher, or Didaskalos) a lengthy, rambling series of obscurely arranged ruminations on Christianity as the true gnōsis (The Carpets or Miscellanies; Strōmateis). The other complete extant work is a homily on Mark 10.17-31 entitled Who Is the Rich Man Who Is Being Saved? (Quis dives salvetur; Tis ho sōzomenos plousios). We also have considerable portions of two collections of Clement's quotations from other writings and notes: extracts from the work of Valentinus's student Theodotus (Excerpta ex Theodoto) and comments on selected passages from Hebrew scripture (Eclogae propheticae). The rest of Clement's works have perished, except for a few fragments.⁴

We have now examined in some detail two strikingly different forms of allegorical reading for the sake of cultural revision. Philo read scripture allegorically on the assumption that Moses was an original author who had re-inscribed cultural and philosophical wisdom in the form of the Pentateuch. Valentinus read his precursors (especially Gnostic myth) allegorically, expressing his revision of culture in the form of his own creative allegorical composition. Clement illustrates yet a third mode of allegorical reading and cultural revision. He specialized in what he called the traditions of the “elders”—teachers who were thought to have transmitted by word of mouth the inner secrets of the Christian gospel, derived ultimately from Jesus himself. Following earlier Christian traditions, Clement identified Jesus as the divine Word or logos—a divine entity that, according to the Middle Platonic philosophy prevalent in Clement's day, mediated between the transcendent God and the material world. The first part of this chapter examines the distinctive hermeneutical application of this Middle Platonic concept of logos by Clement's immediate predecessor, Justin of Flavia Neapolis (Justin Martyr). Justin claimed that this logos or preexistent Christ was the voice of God, to be discovered in the pages of Hebrew scripture and certain works of pagan philosophy. With Justin as his model, Clement reads his precursor texts and traditions allegorically to discover beneath the surface of the words an original Word or divine voice.

In the second part of the chapter, I turn to a discussion of Clement's various applications of this voice-based hermeneutic. Prior in time and authority to all other sources of meaning and truth, this divine voice “speaks” wisdom through all sorts of writings, including, but not limited to, the texts that Christians call “scripture.” Just as a ventriloquist “throws” his or her voice, making it appear as though any number of other objects are speaking, so Clement construes scripture and other texts as expressions of a single divine voice, the discourse of God's own speech. The logos speaks the allegorical “other” meanings of scripture and pagan classics, and the clarity and intensity of that voice determine the relative authority of those texts. Clement's mode of reading consequently relativizes all texts—whether classical literature, the Septuagint, or the New Testament—by subordinating them to an underlying divine discourse. Because he discovers the same speaker everywhere, he is able to relate very different texts to one another as he sees fit, avoiding when necessary or convenient their lexical details or historical interrelations. Clement's appeal to a divine voice allows him to relate diverse texts as “scripture” and “canon” in a bewildering variety of ways.

Although I have used the terms “scripture” and “New Testament” throughout this study, we must always bear in mind that in the second century c.e. the boundaries of both were not clearly defined, but fluctuating and permeable. Unlike Valentinus, Clement holds a conception of the New Testament as a literary category, but that category does not match contemporary or later collections denoted by the same label. Furthermore, works such as the “prophetic and poetic” Sibylline oracles stand somewhere on the vague borderline between “scripture” and nonscriptural Greek literature. Rather than trying to decide on “independent” grounds which texts are part of Clement's “scripture” and which are not or—and this is a different question—which texts are “canonical” and which are not, I have taken a broadly pragmatic and functional approach that relates the revisionary capacity of “scripture” to existing texts that are treated as though canonical. When one text is subordinated to a second in an interpretative reading, the subordinated text may be said to have a certain functional “canonicity” because it has sufficient authority to attract commentary. The subordinating text may in turn be said to function as “scripture” in the sense that—at least for that moment—it exercises hermeneutical authority over the first, canonical text. Of course, this labeling does not decide whether the subordinated “canonical” text also functions as “scripture” in other interpretative contexts; on other occasions, it may indeed exercise authority over another “canonical” text, in which case it too “functions scripturally.” “Canonicity,” then, simply denotes the role of being the object of revisionary interpretation, while “scriptural” status denotes a measure of interpretative authority exercised over canonical texts. Neither category has any necessary relation to collections of texts later gathered together under the title New Testament. Only by broadening traditional categories in this way—which in fact is what Clement's logos-based allegorical revision demands—will we be able to appreciate the nature of the hermeneutical struggle in which Clement was engaged.

Finally, Clement's allegorical readings of classical, Jewish, and Christian texts also serve a number of social purposes. In the third part of the chapter, I examine Clement's hermeneutic as part of his social role as a theological teacher and ecclesiastical advocate in Alexandria. In particular, I analyze his use of allegorical interpretation to define the character and limits of his own Christian community in relation to a number of alternative Christian groups. This process of communal self-definition and social boundary maintenance grows directly out of Clement's own ambivalent sensibility; attentive to the authoritative claims of an emerging Christian “orthodoxy,” he is equally responsive to the appeals of an esoteric and speculative Christian gnōsis. However, in the end, the desire for orthodoxy gains the upper hand, and Clement offers readers a domesticated version of the radical Christian gnōsis represented by Valentinus.

LOGOS THEOLOGY AS ALLEGORICAL HERMENEUTIC

Even though both Philo and Valentinus drew on current speculation about the divine logos, neither gave it the sort of thoroughgoing hermeneutical emphasis that Clement did. Clement's consistent emphasis on a theology of divine voice distinguishes his allegorical hermeneutic from both Philo's and Valentinus's. Because Clement understands scripture as a kind of tape recording of divine speech, he tends to characterize Moses as a divine spokesperson, rather than as Philo's divine scribe.⁵ Through Moses and the rest of the prophets, the logos as the divine pedagogue speaks (Paed. 1.2.5.1; 3.11.75.3), and the varieties of that speech result in a wide range of rhetorical tones and modes of speech in the Septuagint. New Testament writings also display varied rhetorical modes. For example, Paul's declaration in 1 Corinthians 3.2 “I have given you milk to drink” is not simply a straight forward statement; the rhetorical scenario is more subtle—these words are spoken “mystically” by “the Holy Spirit in the apostle, using the voice of the Lord” (Paed. 1.6.49.2).

Just as scripture is the recorded speech of God, so faith—as both goal and presupposition of scripture reading—comes from hearing rather than reading:

But as the proclamation [kērygma] [i.e., of the gospel] has come now at the fit time, so also at the fit time were the law and the prophets given to the barbarians, and philosophy to the Greeks, to fit their ears for the proclamation [kērygma]. (Strom. 6.6.44.1)

Thus Abraham at the oak of Mamre “through hearing believed the voice” (Strom. 5.1.4.1). “We ought not to surrender our ears to all who speak and write rashly,” writes Clement,

for cups also, which are taken hold of by many by the ears, are dirtied, and lose the ears; and besides, when they fall they are broken. In the same way also, those, who have polluted the pure hearing of faith by many trifles, at last becoming deaf to the truth, become useless and fall to the earth. (Strom. 5.1.12.4)

In a passage stressing the unity of a God who makes the same promises to Christians as to Hebrew patriarchs, Clement insists that Christians, as the seed of Abraham, are Israelites “convinced not by signs, but by hearing” (Strom. 2.6.28.4). He then quotes Isaiah 54.1 (= Gal. 4.27) as evidence for the application of Hebrew prophecy to Christians. However, Clement did not invent this notion of a divine voice speaking through the texts of both Christian and non-Christian literature. Before we turn to an examination of Clement's distinctive use of this voice-based hermeneutic, it will be helpful to consider his principal Christian hermeneutical model.

The notion of a divine voice speaking through scripture and other texts was the basis for the two “apologies” of Justin (ca. 100-ca. 165 c.e.), a Christian Platonist active in Rome in the middle of the second century c.e.⁶ Justin combined a Christianized interpretation of the biblical concept of the “Word of God” with Middle Platonic speculation about the logos as an entity that “mediated” the relationship between the transcendent high God and the material world. This synthesis resulted in a conception of the logos as a divine voice that spoke through the mouths of Hebrew prophets like Moses and Greek philosophers like Socrates, and that through a paradoxical act of incarnation finally became physically embodied as the teacher Jesus of Nazareth. Upon the death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus, the divine voice reappeared as the spirit of the risen Jesus in the preaching of the apostles. Justin's first apology, written about 156 c.e., was addressed to the Roman emperor Antoninus Pius and his adopted sons, Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus. The second apology (perhaps originally part of the first) was written about 161 c.e. and though addressed to the Roman Senate in the extant manuscript, was probably originally addressed to several emperors.⁷ We have no indication that these works were read by any of the addressees, but they were widely read in Christian circles and became extremely influential in subsequent Christian theology.

Although Clement does not refer to Justin by name, it is virtually certain that he was familiar with Justin's writings.⁸ Even in the unlikely event that Clement had not read Justin's works directly, he could have learned about Justin's ideas from the writings of Irenaeus, bishop of Lyons. In his work Against Heresies (ca. 180 c.e.), Irenaeus had adopted and transformed Justin's theology as it had been expressed in Justin's earlier work of the same title (now lost). Clement was familiar with Irenaeus's Against Heresies, which, as a papyrus fragment of the second century c.e. attests, was available in Alexandria soon after it was written.⁹ He also had access to many of the same examples of early Christian biblical interpretation and Middle Platonic philosophy with which Justin was familiar. Indeed, if one were a philosophically literate person in the second century c.e. and lived in any of the major centers of the empire, such as Rome, Athens, or Alexandria, Middle Platonism would be virtually inescapable. It was especially easy for Clement to assimilate this philosophical tradition, for it was well represented both in Athens, where he grew up and was educated, and in Alexandria, where he later wrote and taught. The Middle Platonists Calvenus Taurus and Atticus were active in Athens, and the shadowy Eudorus as well as Philo (who was as much a Middle Platonist as he was an allegorical exegete) were based in Alexandria.¹⁰ Clement also preserves a fragment from a work by the Middle Platonist Numenius of Apamea, a pagan contemporary of Justin who will be important in our analysis of Justin's hermeneutic. Numenius flourished in the mid-second century and provides a very close philosophical parallel to Justin.

Clement set aside or minimized many of Justin's cruder formulations (in particular his demonology) and, unlike Justin, drew extensively on Aristotelian logic (especially in his discussions of the nature of faith). But he followed Justin's basic model of a hermeneutic of the divine voice.¹¹ Consequently, just as it proved useful to examine the works of Aristeas and Aristobulus as precursors of Philo's more far-reaching interpretation of scripture, so Justin's two brief apologies provide a helpful introduction to the sort of revisionary hermeneutical perspective that Clement was to extend to a much wider range of literature. We will begin our investigation of Justin's logos theology by commenting first on its biblical and philosophical roots. We will then examine his transformation of this essentially philosophical and theological formulation into a hermeneutical principle. In particular, we will want to observe in some detail how Justin turns a concept representing a divine being into one representing the meaning and interpretation of texts.

In the Hebrew Bible, the “Word of God” generally refers to divine agency in all its forms: speech, action, and other modes of self-revelation. For the most part, this “Word” does not become a distinct entity or hypostasis of its own but remains a metaphor for expressing the deity's self-extension into the nondivine realm. But in later Jewish speculation, the category “wisdom,” functioning virtually as a synonym for “Word,” did begin to assume a quasi-distinct status of its own. In the Book of Proverbs, for example, wisdom says of itself: “The Lord created me at the beginning of his work/the first of his acts of old./Ages ago I was set up,/at the first, before the beginning of/the earth” (Prov. 8.22-23). In some circles of Jewish speculation, wisdom was even identified with the preexistent Torah itself, and both were understood to represent God's plan for, and instrument of, creation.¹² In early Christian literature, especially the Pauline epistles and the Gospel of John, the “Word” and/or “wisdom” was sometimes identified with the preexistent Son of God, who became incarnate, taking the form of Jesus of Nazareth (see, for example, 1 Cor. 1.18ff., 2.6ff.; Phil. 2; John 1.1-18).

Philo had already combined elements of Jewish speculation about the divine Word or wisdom with Middle Platonic ideas about the logos. In fact, he used Proverbs 8 as biblical support for his belief in an intermediary logos with quasi-independent status.¹³ Providing a similar, but specifically Christian, variant of Philo's interpretation, Justin brought together reflection on the Word of God as Christ with aspects of Middle Platonic logos conceptions.¹⁴ He too appealed to Proverbs 8, in this case to prove the preexistence of Christ (Dial. 61.3). This assimilation by Hellenistic Jews and Christians of the biblical discussion of the divine “Word” with philosophical conceptions of the logos was facilitated by the Septuagint's translation of “Word of God” as logos theou.

Justin also drew extensively on prevailing philosophical ideas about a divine logos. By the second century c.e., Middle Platonism had largely displaced Stoicism as the dominant philosophical world view in the Greco-Roman world. Middle Platonism was a form of Platonic philosophy that drew upon other philosophical systems in order to address questions that Plato had left unanswered, to explore further ideas that he had suggested, and, in general, to make Platonism an attractive philosophy for the contemporary era. On the basis of an essentially Platonic philosophical framework and vocabulary, Middle Platonists embraced certain features of Stoic ethics and physics, Aristotelian logic, and Pythagorean metaphysics and number speculation as ways of giving fuller and more accurate expression to their understanding of Plato.¹⁵ Middle Platonists were especially preoccupied with the nature and activity of the supreme principle or highest divine being. Despite having significant differences among themselves regarding the characterization of this being, most Middle Platonists emphasized its utter transcendence. They were convinced that the ultimate realm of true being could never come into direct contact with the ordinary realm of becoming. The realm of being was atemporal, immutable, and imperishable; the realm of becoming was subject to time, change, and decay. In order for such a transcendent God to have relevance for the world and human beings, the relationship between God and the world needed to be “mediated” by another entity. This entity would provide a “buffer zone,” connecting God with, while protecting God from, the world. Various entities played this role, sometimes Plato's demiurge, sometimes his world soul; the principal mediator was often aided by a host of lesser intermediaries, including angels, demons, and disembodied souls.

Many Middle Platonists added to this mediating figure features characteristic of the Stoic logos. We have already seen that logos was the term used by Stoic philosophers to refer to God, that is, the divine, physical energy that permeated reality in the form of a fiery ether. By Philo's time, some Middle Platonists had taken up this Stoic notion of the logos and integrated it in their system. This integration naturally required the elimination of the materialistic features of the Stoic idea. The Middle Platonists reinterpreted the material energy of the Stoic logos as an immaterial force, which they then identified with the mediating entity, sometimes referred to as the “second” god. Meanwhile, they continued to speak of a first or high God, who remained uninvolved with the world and whose only act was the self-reflection that gave rise to the second, mediating god. The result, despite a variety of terminology, is essentially a two-tiered system: a first God, completely transcendent and unknowable, and a second god (the logos), responsible for all divine contact with, and action upon, the material realm.¹⁶ Sometimes the second god was further divided, producing a third divine entity. In such cases, the second god was characterized by closer association with the first God, while the third god (or “lower” dimension of the second god) concerned itself more directly with the material realm.

Both the Christian Middle Platonist Justin and the Pythagorizing Middle Platonist Numenius reflect many of these Middle Platonic ideas.¹⁷ While a detailed comparative analysis of the two figures would exceed the scope of this book, a few observations of similarities and differences will give some idea of just how much these two Platonists share. Justin speaks of a first God who is eternal, immovable, unchanging, nameless and unbegotten, utterly detached from the material realm. As a result,

you must not imagine that the unbegotten God himself came down or went up from any place. For the ineffable Father and Lord of all neither has come to any place, nor walks, nor sleeps, nor rises up, but remains in his own place, wherever that is. (Dial. 127; cf. Dial. 56)

There is also a second god or logos, who mediates between the high God and the world, and a “spirit” that occupies the third place.¹⁸ Numenius also spoke of three divine entities: a first God, who exists in himself and is devoid of agency, a second god or demiurge responsible for all motion, and a third entity (which Proclus mistakenly identifies as creation—“what was fashioned”—but which almost certainly refers to a lower aspect of the second god).¹⁹ There are, however, differences: Justin's high God is both Father and creator, while Numenius restricts creation to the second god or demiurge.²⁰ This difference probably reflects Justin's basic monotheism, as well as his identification of Plato's father and maker (Pl. Tim. 28C) with biblical descriptions of the creative action of God. Justin goes on to stress the close association between the first God and the second: the second god is emitted without any diminution in the being of the first God, as one fire is generated from another. Numenius uses the same analogy to stress the participation of the second god in the first.²¹

Both Justin and Numenius use a passage from an alleged Platonic epistle to endorse their views of multiple divine entities. In the Second Epistle, the author writes: “All things are about the King of all and exist for him, and he is the cause of all is good. The second things are about the Second and the third about the Third.”²² Justin quotes the second sentence, interpreting Plato as referring to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit (Ap. 1.60.7).²³ Numenius used the same passage as a warrant for the three gods of his system.²⁴ And just as Justin equated the Holy Spirit with the spirit hovering over the waters in Genesis 1.2 (Ap. 1.60.6), so Numenius allegorized the same verse for his own purposes.²⁵ Thus we see that Justin and Numenius share much the same Middle Platonic theology, especially the distinction between a first God and a second.

The Middle Platonist first God had one further characteristic: it was “generative” or “productive” (spermatikos). This idea was taken from the Stoics. Although in borrowing this Stoic idea, Middle Platonists necessarily eliminated its materialistic aspects, they preserved its generative character. According to the Stoics, the divine logos had fragmented itself into the logoi that constituted human minds; the human mind was literally part of the divine ether that pervaded the cosmos. Like that cosmic fire, the logos of human reason was productive: it was able to generate “seeds,” which were the principles and concepts of human thought. Hence, the Stoics called the logos the logos spermatikos or “generative logos.” Middle Platonists preserved this link between the second god (or logos) and human reason by thinking of the logos as a kind of cosmic mind in which human minds were now said to “participate.” Through its illumination of the human mind, the Middle Platonic logos was thus the ultimate source of human thoughts.

This Middle Platonic notion of an immaterial, productive second god or logos was well in place by Justin's time; versions of it were prevalent in both Hellenistic Jewish and pagan metaphysical speculation. For example, in the preceding century, Philo had spoken of the logos as a divine hypostasis, separated from the divine intellect, and he had given it various names: Power, Second God, First Born of God, Son of God, Angel, and Apostle.²⁶ In two instances, Philo refers explicitly to the logos spermatikos—once as the transcendent creator of physical and spiritual life and once as human reason.²⁷ Justin may well have drawn on Philo's works and certainly drew on New Testament texts in formulating his own version of the logos spermatikos.²⁸ But it is also likely that he was familiar with Numenius's use of the conception. Numenius had described the relation of the first God to the second god or demiurge by drawing on an analogous relation between a farm owner and farm laborer. The farmer himself is responsible for the initial sowing of the crops, but the laborer then takes over the cultivation of the field. Numenius writes:

Just as there is a relation between the farmer and the one that plants, so in just the same way is the first God related to the demiurge. The former, as farmer, sows [speirein] the seed [sperma] of every soul into all the things which partake of it; while the lawgiver plants and distributes and transplants what has been sown from that source into each one of us. (Frag. 13)²⁹

As we shall see, Justin holds a similar view of a divine logos mediating the productive activity of God vis-à-vis individual human souls. Although Justin's notion of the logos spermatikos owes something to Philo and Numenius, he goes his own way by following the Gospel of John and other Christian literature in identifying this logos with Christ alone.³⁰ For the Christian Middle Platonist Justin, the divine, generative logos was Christ or the preexistent Son of God, as well as the incarnate Son, Jesus of Nazareth. Such an assertion of the divine demiurge's direct association with matter would have been totally unacceptable, not to say repugnant, to Numenius.³¹

According to Justin, this divine logos was the single source of prophetic revelation (Ap. 1.12.7-10) and philosophical illumination (Ap. 1.5 and passim); it was also the essence of the words, and, finally, the person, of Jesus (Ap. 1.14ff.). Justin's hermeneutical application of the logos concept appears in three interrelated themes that dominate his writings: the logos's spermatic or generative character, the battle between the logos and the demons, and the plagiarism of scripture by pagan philosophers. All three themes appear in Philo, and all three (especially the first and third) were developed by Clement as part of his own allegorical revision of pagan and Christian competitors.

Justin's basic claim is that Hebrew scripture is a transcription of divine speech. When scripture is properly read, one hears the voice of God: “When you hear the utterances of the prophets spoken as it were personally, you must not suppose that they are spoken by the inspired themselves, but by the divine logos who moves them” (Ap. 1.36.1). Understanding what the divine voice is saying requires a certain hermeneutical sophistication, however, for the voice adopts different points of view, depending on the character through which and the circumstance in which it speaks:

For sometimes he [the divine logos] declares things that are to come to pass, in the manner of one who foretells the future; sometimes he speaks as from the person of God the Lord and Father of all; sometimes as from the person of Christ; sometimes as from the person of the people answering the Lord or his father, just as you can see even in your own writers, one person being the writer of the whole, but introducing the persons [prosōpa] who converse. (Ap. 1.36.2)

The prophetic voice of Hebrew scripture continues in the person of Jesus: when Jesus opens his mouth to teach, the divine logos speaks. This divine speech endures even after Jesus' death, in the preaching of the apostles: “by the power of God,” the apostles “proclaimed to every race of human beings that were sent by Christ to teach all the logos of God” (Ap. 1.39.3). The apostles are able to express the logos of God precisely because that logos, in the form of the risen spirit of Jesus, entered into them and enabled them to interpret Hebrew prophecy: through the apostles, the logos has become the authoritative interpreter of its own message (Ap. 1.50.12).

It is interesting to note that Numenius seems to have held a similar view of the way literature could be designed to convey a message through various rhetorical modes of speech.³² In a fragment from his lost work On the Secrets in Plato, he observes that Plato has intentionally conveyed certain points of view through the construction of the dramatic dialogue of the Euthyphro. In particular, Numenius notes that Plato dramatizes his criticism of Athenian religious orthodoxy by using Euthyphro as his spokesperson:

Since speaking the truth was more important to him than life itself, he saw that there was a way he could both live and speak the truth without risk: he made Euthyphro play the part of the Athenians—an arrogant twit and a remarkably bad theologian—and set Socrates against him in his usual character, confronting everyone he met just as he was accustomed to do. (Frag. 23.12-18)³³

It seems that Numenius, like Justin, was as much a hermeneutician as a philosopher. Like Justin, he seems to have been attentive to the way the basic message of a single author could be conveyed in various dramatic and rhetorical forms. And according to Origen, Numenius also did not refrain from “using in his own writings the words of the [Jewish] prophets and treating them allegorically [tropologein]” (Frag. 1b.6-8).³⁴ It seems likely, then, that Numenius, as a Platonist interpreter of literature, brought to his own work a hermeneutical sensibility similar to Justin's.

For Justin, the divine voice that speaks in Hebrew scripture, in the teaching of Jesus, and in the kērygma of the apostles also speaks in at least some pagan philosophy. He makes this clear when responding to the pagan challenge that Christian revelation had irresponsibly neglected the fates of those who lived before Jesus:

We have been taught that Christ is the firstborn of God, and we have declared above that he is the logos of whom every race of human beings partook [metechein]; and those who lived with logos [meta logou] are Christians, even though they have been thought atheists; as, among the Greeks, Socrates and Heraclitus, and those like them; and among the barbarians, Abraham, and Ananias, and Azarias, and Misael, and Elias, and many others whose actions and names we now decline to recount, because we know it would be tedious. (Ap. 1.46.2-3)

Such persons who lived before Christ but who nevertheless shared in the logos (meta logou) are de facto Christians (Ap. 1.46.4).

By the same token, those who lived before Christ but who did not share in the logos (aneu logou) are de facto persecutors of Christ (Ap. 1.46.4). The presence of the persecutors of the logos/Christ indicates that history was not a divine monologue; from the outset (i.e., from the fall of those angels who became demons), divine speech had to assert itself in the face of stringent opposition from demonic forces. According to Justin, the demons were originally angels, who subsequently turned against God. His account of this angelic fall assimilates Genesis 6, which describes the attack on the “daughters of men” by the “sons of God,” to contemporary Middle Platonic speculation about demons:

God, when he had made the whole world… committed the care of human beings and of all things under heaven to angels whom he appointed over them. But the angels transgressed this appointment, and were captivated by love of women, and begat children who are those that are called demons. (Ap. 2.4[5].2-3)

The demons, who coerced human beings into worshiping them, are responsible for “murders, wars, adulteries, intemperate deeds, and all wickedness” (Ap. 2.4[5].4). The mythmakers became the unwitting tools of demonic self-expression, and the poets became equally deluded accomplices of the mythmakers. Both attributed demonic activity to deities and their offspring:

Whence also the poets and mythmakers, not knowing that it was the angels and those demons who had been begotten by them that did these things to men, and women, and cities, and nations, which they related, ascribed them to God himself, and to those who were accounted to be his very offspring, and to the offspring of those who were called his brothers, Neptune and Pluto, and to the children again of these their offspring. For whatever name each of the angels had given to himself and his children, by that name they called them. (Ap. 2.4[5].5-6)

Whether before or after the appearance of the logos in the person of Jesus, the demons constantly opposed its voice, wherever it appeared. This demonic opposition could take direct, violent forms, such as the persecution of Socrates, the crucifixion of Jesus, or the attacks on Justin and his Christian contemporaries. But the demons could also attack indirectly, through subversive literary representations and the willful misinterpretation of scripture. They were able to gain power over human minds through the images of themselves that they created; in effect, the demons personified themselves and generated mythical narratives in which they took leading roles. Those accounts frightened human beings into calling them “gods”:

Since of old these evil demons, effecting apparitions [epiphaneiai] of themselves, both defiled women and corrupted boys, and showed such fearful sights to men, that those who did not judge with logos [logōi] the actions that were done, were struck with terror; and being carried away by fear, and not knowing that these were evil demons, they called them gods, and gave to each the name which each of the demons chose for himself. (Ap. 1.5.2)

But demonic mythology does not consist in wholly novel literary productions. On the contrary, demons are essentially parasitic—they create myths that distort or parody scripture in order to neutralize its effect:

Before he [the logos] became a human being among human beings, some [mythmakers] under the influence of the evil demons just mentioned, told through the poets as having already occurred the myths they had invented, just as now they are responsible for the slanders and godless deeds alleged against us, of which there is neither witness nor demonstration. (Ap. 1.23.3)

Here Justin explains that the demons first corrupted the original makers of myths, and then the poets simply compounded the problem by incorporating those myths into their poetry. It is interesting to compare Justin with Cornutus. Both writers have a view of the corruption of original theological wisdom, but Cornutus holds a much more sanguine view of the mythmakers than Justin, for he has no theory of demonic corruption at the very origin. But for Justin, the demons corrupted truth and generated falsehood from the outset, and the poets who use pagan mythology only pass along the deciet.³⁵ Unlike Cornutus, Justin does not recommend the separation of pure original myth from contaminating additions: at their worst, the myths are entirely corrupt; at best, they are perversions of the true accounts of scripture that should entirely displace them.

When properly read, scripture prophesies the coming full appearance of the logos that will destroy the demons. But in a preemptive strike, the demons seek to erode the credibility of scripture and its proper interpretation by creating myths that look like scripture. The idea is that when the pagan myths are then criticized as fiction by Christians or other devotees of the logos, scripture itself will fall under the same critique of being fiction because of its similar mythical appearance:

But those who hand down the myths which the poets have made adduce no proof to the youths who learn them; and we proceed to demonstrate that they have been uttered by the influence of wicked demons, to deceive and lead astray the human race. For having heard it proclaimed through the prophets that the Christ was to come, and that the ungodly among human beings were to be punished by fire, they put forward many to be called sons of Zeus, under the impression that they would be able to produce in human beings the idea that things which were said with regard to Christ were marvellous tales [teratologiai], like the things which were said by the poets.

(Ap. 1.54.1-2)

Justin insists that the Jews, like the demons, also misread Hebrew scripture. Either they fail to recognize the messianic prophecies or, having recognized them, fail to refer them to Jesus as the true Messiah. In particular, the Jews did not understand the theory of multiple speakers that Justin presents: consequently, “although the Jews possessed the books of the prophets,” they “did not… recognize Christ even when he came” (Ap. 1.36.3). The Jews are not directly to blame, however; for like the Greek mythmakers and poets, they too were the unwitting instruments by which the demons continued their assault on the logos. Consequently, Justin can link Jewish hermeneutical failure (in this example, Jewish failure to see that the logos, not the ineffable high God, appears to Moses in the burning bush) and their persecution of Christ by associating both with the work of the demons:

[Theophanies like the burning bush] are written for the sake of proving that Jesus the Christ is the Son of God and his apostle, being of old the logos [proteron logos ōn], and appearing sometimes in the form of fire, and sometimes in a bodiless image; but now, by the will of God, having become a human being for the human race, he endured all the sufferings which the demons instigated the senseless [anoētoi] Jews to inflict upon him; who, though they have it expressly [rhētōs] affirmed in the writings of Moses, “And an angel of God spoke to Moses in a flame of fire in a bush, and said, I am that I am, the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob,” yet maintain that he who said this was the father and maker [dēmiourgos] of the universe. (Ap. 1.63.10-11)

For Justin, then, the proper interpretation of scripture and all other literature requires attending to the authentic divine speech in the text and resisting a variety of distorting interpretations and competing literary alternatives promulgated by the demons.

From time to time, those who lived with a share of the logos did seek to resist the mythology of the demons, but the demons were quick to fight back; this cosmic battle lies behind the career of Socrates. Socrates deserves the admiration of Christians because he

cast out from the state both Homer and the rest of the poets, and taught human beings to reject the evil demons and those who did the things which the poets related; and he exhorted them to become acquainted with God who was to them unknown, by means of rational investigation [dia logou zētēseōs], saying “that it is neither easy to find the father and maker [dēmiourgos] of all, nor, having found him, is it safe to declare him to all.” (Pl. Tim. 28C, altered, in Ap. 2.10.6)

But the demons quickly counterattacked:

When Socrates skillfully endeavored, by true reason [logōi alēthei], to bring these things to light, and deliver human beings from the demons, then the demons themselves, by means of those who rejoiced in iniquity, brought about his death, as an atheist and an impious person, on the charge that “he was introducing new divinities.” (Pl. Ap. 24B in Ap. 1.5.3)

Justin argues that he and his Christian contemporaries are suffering the same attacks because they are simply carrying on the Socratic protest in a more intense form (more intense since, unlike Socrates, they enjoy the full presence of the logos in the form of Christ):

For not only among the Greeks were these things condemned by logos [hypo logou] through Socrates [dia Sōcratous], but also among the barbarians by the logos himself [hyp' autou tou logou], who took shape, and became man, and was called Jesus Christ. (Ap. 1.5.4)

Whenever one detects similarity between pagan and biblical descriptions, there are, then, only a few possible explanations: we have already discussed two of them—either pagans who have been enlightened by their share of the logos have expressed an insight similar to scripture's or the evil demons have produced a distorted version of scripture. There is, however, a third possibility, which Justin probably took from Philo: that pagans have simply plagiarized the Bible directly. Justin argues, for example, that Plato takes his account of creation in the Timaeus from the opening verses of Moses' Genesis and that Hesiod derives his discussion of Erebus from Moses as well (Ap. 1.59.1-6). Similarly, Plato's idea in the Timaeus that the power of the high God was placed “crosswise” in the universe was in fact a misinterpretation of a biblical prophecy of Christ in Numbers 21 (Ap. 1.60). Like Philo, Justin is sure that Moses lived and wrote long before any of the Greek philosophers, but he is also sure that the logos existed before Moses. The key point, of course, is not that Christians “hold the same opinions as others,” but that all others who share the logos “speak in imitation of ours” (Ap. 1.60.10)—or, as Justin more audaciously announces, “whatever things were rightly said among all persons, are the property of us Christians” (Ap. 2.13.4).³⁶

Despite the fact that his use of logos theology as a hermeneutical principle enables him to bring together biblical revelation and philosophical illumination as a single act of divine self-manifestation and production of textual meaning, Justin firmly maintains the distinctiveness and superiority of the specifically Christian revelation. Even with his share of the logos, Socrates does not attain to the fullness of Christian insight. Justin tells his readers that he himself turned from Platonic philosophy to Christianity “not because the teachings of Plato are different from those of Christ, but because they are not in all respects similar, as neither are those of the others—Stoics, and poets, and historians” (Ap. 2.13.2).³⁷ It is true that “each one, by having portions of the divine generative logos [apo merous tou spermatikou theiou logou], spoke well, whenever he saw what was congruent with it” (Ap. 2.13.3) and that “all the writers were able to see realities [ta onta] dimly [amydrōs] through the spore of the implanted logos that was in them [dia tēs enousēs emphytou tou logou sporas]” (Ap. 2.13.5). But Justin immediately spells out the implication of his qualifications (i.e., “a share” and “dimly”). There is, he insists, a vital distinction to be made between “the seed and the ability to imitate it by one's own capacity” (sperma tinos kai mimēma kata dynamin dothen) and “the thing itself, of which there is participation and imitation by virtue of its own favor [kata charin tēn ap' ekeinou]” (Ap. 2.13.6).

Justin thus makes it clear that Christians, not pagans, enjoy the full presence, and, indeed, possession, of the logos itself. Socrates, we saw, performed his critique “by rational investigation” (dia logou zētēseōs) (Ap. 2.10.6), but Christ performs the same critique “through his own power” (dia tēs heautou dynameōs) (Ap. 2.10.7). Justin claims that this qualitative, not quantitative, distinction was well recognized by persons from all walks of life and of all degrees of education:

For no one trusted in Socrates so as to die for this doctrine, but in Christ, who was partially known even by Socrates [hypo Sōcratous apo merous gnōsthenti]—for he was and is the logos who is in every person, and who foretold the things that were to come to pass both through the prophets and in his own person [di' heautou] when he was made of like passions, and taught these things—not only philosophers and philologians believed, but also artisans and people entirely uneducated, despising both glory, and fear, and death: since he [or it—i.e., either Christ or his doctrine] is a power [dynamis] of the ineffable Father, and not the mere instrument of human reason [anthrōpeiou logou kataskeuē]. (Ap. 2.10.8)

In the end, Justin's voice of the logos drowns out the voices of all cultural competitors by absorbing them into its own divine fullness. This voice is the original voice of truth. As Justin points out, truth at its origin was one, and religious sects developed only because human beings turned away from the one truth to cultivate their own idiosyncratic opinions (Dial. 2.1-2). Thus Justin provided a chronological account of heresy in his lost work Against Heresies, in which heretical error was portrayed as a progressive deviation from original, single religious truth, handed down from misguided teachers to misguided pupils. Justin's notion of heresy as deviance from original truth set the pattern not only for Irenaeus's Against Heresies, but for most subsequent Christian heresiologists. Once again, Numenius provides a parallel idea, in his work on the Infidelity of the Academy toward Plato. Just as Justin insists that heretics corrupt the pure divine truth, so Numenius contends that Plato's successors fell away from the teaching of the master into sectarian division because they “did not hold to the primitive heritage but rapidly divided, intentionally or not” (frag. 24: cf. frags. 25-28).³⁸ Hence the pagan Middle Platonist, no less than his Christian contemporary, sought to recover an ancient and original wisdom, which was still spoken forth in the pages of ancient literature, despite the efforts of heretics and sectarians to corrupt it.

Notes

1. Cf. Justin Dialogue with Trypho, a Jew 2 (in Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 1, ed. Roberts and Donaldson).

2. Johannes Quasten, Patrology, vol. 2: The Ante-Nicene Literature after Irenaeus (1953; reprint, Utrecht-Antwerp: Spectrum, 1975), 5-6.

3. I have used the standard critical Greek text, Otto Stählin, ed., Die griechischen christlichen Schriftsteller der ersten drei Jahrhunderte, 4 vols. (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1905-36). In general, English translations are from Roberts and Donaldson, Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 2: Fathers of the Second Century (1884; reprint, Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1979). When necessary, however, I have modified this translation or simply retranslated the text. I quote also from Henry Chadwick's translation of Strōmateis 3 and 7 in John Ernest Leonard Oulton and Henry Chadwick, Alexandrian Christianity: Selected Translations of Clement and Origen with Introductions and Notes (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1955) and from Clement of Alexandria, Christ the Educator, trans. Simon P. Wood (New York: Fathers of the Church, 1954). Quotations from the Eclogae propheticae are based on an unpublished translation by Alan Scott. References to Clement's works will be to treatise, book (when applicable), and chapter. Paragraph and sentence numbers as given in Stählin's right-hand margin are included as well, thus Strom. 1.10.22.4-5. This system of reference has been used instead of the more customary volume, page, and line of the Stählin edition in order to provide easy access to the English translations as well as to the standard Greek text.

4. The lost works include a lengthy commentary on Hebrew and Christian scripture (The Outlines or Sketches; Hypotypōseis) as well as the following titles: On the Pasch, Ecclesiastical Canon or Against the Judaizers, On Providence (Clementine authorship uncertain), Exhortation to Endurance or To the Recently Baptized, Discourse on Fasting, On Slander, On the Prophet Amos (Clementine authorship uncertain) (from Quasten, Patrology, vol. 2, 6-19).

5. Moses, writes Clement, “who was after the law… foretold that it was necessary to hear in order that we might, according to the apostle, receive Christ, the fullness of the law” (Strom. 4.21.130.3). Clement takes the proclamation of Deuteronomy 18.18, “I will put my words in his mouth, and he shall speak to them all that I will command him,” as a clear indication of Moses' prophetic (and decidedly oral) role.

6. I have used the Greek texts in A. W. F. Blunt, ed., The Apologies of Justin Martyr, Cambridge Patristic Texts, ed. A. J. Mason (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1911). I have largely followed the English translation in Roberts and Donaldson, Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 1, though I have also made modifications, especially in light of Edward Rochie Hardy's translation, “The First Apology of Justin, the Martyr,” in Early Christian Fathers, ed. Cyril C. Richardson, The Library of Christian Classics 1 (New York: Macmillan, 1970), 242-89, as well as Blunt's suggestions. I will designate the first apology by Ap. 1 and the second by Ap. 2. References to the second apology will give both the chapter numbers of the original manuscript (preserved by Blunt) and, in brackets, the chapter numbers according to the reordering adopted by the Ante-Nicene Fathers translators.

7. Robert M. Grant, Greek Apologists of the Second Century (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1988), 55.

8. Henry Chadwick, Early Christian Thought and the Classical Tradition: Studies in Justin, Clement, and Origen (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1966), 40; also “Clement of Alexandria,” in The Cambridge History of Later Greek and Early Medieval Philosophy, ed. A. H. Armstrong (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1967), 170-71. Clement does refer to Justin's pupil Tatian: see Strom. 1.21.101.1-2 for Clement's appeal to Tatian to prove the antiquity of Moses and Strom. 3.12.81 for his rejection of Tatian's encratism.

9. POxy. iii. 405, cited by Roberts, Early Christian Egypt, 14.

10. The standard discussion of Middle Platonism, which has the virtue of resisting generalizations and describing the specific systems of individual philosophers, is John Dillon, The Middle Platonists: 80 B.C. to A.D. 220 (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1977). I have also made use of the summary discussions in R. A. Norris, Jr., God and World in Early Christian Theology: A Study in Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Tertullian, and Origen (New York: Seabury, 1965), 41-68, especially 52-53. Clement draws upon Philo's exegetical works frequently, often in the form of direct quotation and without attribution. My discussion of Justin's apologies in the context of Middle Platonism draws on the detailed studies of Carl Andresen, “Justin und der mittlere Platonismus,” Zeitschrift für die Neutestamentliche Wissenschaft und die Kunde der Älternen Kirche 44 (1952-53): 157-95; Ragnar Holte, “Logos Spermatikos: Christianity and Ancient Philosophy According to St. Justin's Apologies,” Studia Theologica 12 (1958): 109-68.

11. Chadwick, Early Christian Thought, 40-41.

12. Holte, “Logos Spermatikos,” 122-23.

13. Ibid., 123.

14. Justin himself reports that he studied with Epicurean, Stoic, Aristotelian, and Platonic teachers, though this autobiographical account may be shaped according to his general claim for the absorption of all useful pagan philosophy by Christianity (see Dial. 1-9).

15. Dillon, Middle Platonists, xiv-xv, points out that what is commonly, but misleadingly, referred to as Middle Platonism's “eclecticism” is an anachronism. These philosophers saw themselves not as eclectics, but as drawing on the insights of competing philosophical systems to help give coherent expression to their own unified and systematic vision of Plato's “authentic” philosophy.

16. Dillon, Middle Platonists, 367, notes that this distinction between the supreme God and the demiurge may be found in Numenius and all other Pythagoreans, as well as in Albinus. He adds that Platonists who do not make a complete separation between the two gods nevertheless make a very strong distinction, which is functionally equivalent.

17. I have used Numenius, Fragments, ed. and trans. Édouard Des Places (Paris: “Les Belles Lettres” [Budé], 1973). See the discussion of the relevant fragments of Numenius in Dillon, Middle Platonists, 367ff.

18. Cf. Ap. 1.13.3:

    Our teacher of these things is Jesus Christ, who also was born for this purpose, and was crucified under Pontius Pilate, procurator of Judea, in the time of Tiberius Caesar; and that we reasonably worship him, having learned that he is the Son of the true God himself, and holding him in the second place, and the prophetic spirit in the third, we will prove.

19. Cf. frags. 11, 12, 15, 21. At one point, Justin also conflates the second god or logos with the third entity, the spirit: “It is wrong, therefore, to understand the spirit and the power of God as anything else than the Word, who is also the first-born of God” (Ap. 1.33.6).

20. See Dillon, Middle Platonists, 367-69.

21. Dial. 61:

    For he [the logos] can be called by all those names [Holy Spirit, Glory of the Lord, Son, Wisdom, Angel, God, Lord, Logos, Captain] since he ministers to the Father's will, and since he was begotten of the Father by an act of will; just as we see happening among ourselves: for when we give out some word, we beget the word; yet not by abscission, so as to lessen the word [which remains] in us, when we give it out: and just as we see also happening in the case of a fire, which is not lessened when it has kindled [another], but remains the same; and that which has been kindled by it likewise appears to exist by itself, not diminishing that from which it was kindled.

    Compare the same analogy used by Justin's pupil, Tatian (Oration 5) and by Numenius (frag. 14).

22. Pl. Ep. 2.312E (quoted by Grant, Greek Apologists, 62).

23. Grant, Greek Apologists, 215 n. 46, records other early uses of the Plato passage: Athenagoras Leg. pro Christ. 23.7; Clement Strom. 5.14.103.1; Celsus in Origen c. Cels. 6.18. Hippolytus charged that Valentinus used the passage in his invention of the plērōma (Haer. 6.37.5-6).

24. Frag. 15.

25. Frag. 30.

26. Holte, “Logos Spermatikos,” 123.

27. Cf. Her. 119: aoratos kai spermatikos kai technikos logos; L.A. 3.150: ho spermatikos kai gennētikos tōn kalōn logos orthos (cited by Holte, “Logos Spermatikos,” 124 n. 54).

28. Holte, “Logos Spermatikos,” 128, suggests that he may have been especially influenced by Matthew 13.3ff., Jesus' parable of the sower who sows the word of God.

29. See Dillon, Middle Platonists, 368, for discussion of this passage. He observes that this notion of a divine sowing is similar to Nicomachus's description of the Monad being “seminally (spermatikos) all things in Nature” and is reminiscent of Plato Timaeus 41E, where the demiurge sows souls into the various “organs of Time,” as well as of Republic 10.597D, which describes God as a “planter” (phytourgos) of physical objects. Dillon discusses the transformation of Stoic spermatikoiI logoi into the generative, but immaterial, “ideas of God” in Antiochus, Seneca (Ep 58, which preserves a Platonic source), Philo, and Albinus (95, 137, 159, and 285, respectively).

30. Holte, “Logos Spermatikos,” 127.

31. Cf. Ap. 1.13.4:

    For they proclaim our madness to consist in this, that we give to a crucified man a place second to the unchangeable and eternal God, the creator of all; for they do not discern the mystery that is herein, to which, as we make it plain to you, we pray you to give heed.

    See Dillon, Middle Platonists, 369, 373ff., on Numenius's negative evaluation of matter.

32. The following discussion of Numenius as literary interpreter is drawn entirely from Lamberton's discussion in Homer the Theologian, 64-70.

33. Lamberton's translation, Homer the Theologian, 63.

34. Lamberton, Homer the Theologian, 62, concludes that Numenius almost certainly used allegorically interpreted passages from the Christian New Testament as well as the Hebrew Bible.

35. Little can be said about Numenius's views on demons. Dillon, Middle Platonists, 378, points to Numenius's allegorical interpretation of the battle between the Athenians and the Atlantians in the Timaeus as a conflict between “more noble souls who are nurslings of Athena, and others who are agents of generation (genesiourgoi), who are in the service of the god who presides over generation (Poseidon)” (frag. 37). Dillon speculates further that the category “servants of Poseidon” might represent material demons who were “engaged in snaring souls into incarnation.”

36. Cf. Ap. 1.23.1:

    Whatever we assert in conformity with what has been taught us by Christ, and by the prophets who preceded him, are alone true, and are older than all the writers who have existed … we claim to be acknowledged, not because we say the same things as these writers said, but because we say true things.

37. Cf. Ap. 1.20.1-3:

    And the Sibyl and Hystaspes said that there should be a dissolution through fire by God of things corruptible. And the philosophers called Stoics teach that even God himself shall be resolved into fire, and they say that the world is to be formed anew by this revolution; but we understand that God, the creator of all things, is superior to the things that are changed. If, therefore, on some points we teach the same things as the poets and philosophers whom you honor, and on other points are fuller and more divine in our teaching, and if we alone afford proof of what we assert, why are we unjustly hated more than all others?

38. See Lamberton's discussion in Homer the Theologian, 54-59.…