A Companion to Late Antique Literature

by Scott McGill

  19.2 Origins and Development

  While the explanation of the Bible has been a preoccupation of the Christian movement from its inception (Fürst 2011, pp. 14–16; Waszink 1979, pp. 17–18), it was first used as an argument in texts of other genres, and it was not until the third century that authors produced works that had exegesis as their primary function. Christian authors borrowed from a host of preexisting practices of explaining a reference text, but it is as yet unclear whether their primary models derived from the grammatical commentaries on epics and tragedies (ter Haar Romeny 2004, p. 163), the philosophical commentaries on Platonic and Aristotelian texts (Fürst 2011, p. 16; Mansfeld 1994, pp. 10–19), or rabbinic exegesis (Dorival 2000, pp. 169–81). All these practices, however, likely played some part in the different manifestations of biblical commenting literature (Geerling 2000, pp. 201–202). Because all these types of texts shared the common purpose of interpreting another work, it is not surprising that they could draw upon and combine a range of didactic methods. Some authors, however, sought to distinguish biblical exegesis from other forms of commentary. Ambrose of Milan, for example, thought that the search for spiritual meaning alone distinguished the commentary of the grammarians from exegesis (Ep. 8.55.1; CSEL 82/1, 43). Ambrose, who is here referring to homilies, exemplifies how commentary is a classification of “professional determinacy” (Vessey 2002, p. 56), in which commenting with the aim of spiritual elevation constitutes the deciding element in the work’s categorization.

  Exegetes were, of course, well aware of the differences of forms required by various approaches to the text. Origen remarked in his Commentary on the Gospel of John that some problems cannot fit into a running commentary and would require specially dedicated treatises (πραγματεία [study], Joh. 10.16.88, or συγγραϕ [writing], Joh. 10.17.96; SC 157, 436, 440). He established a basic distinction between the nonthematic commentary and the thematic treatise. Nonthematic commenting literature has two general types: the line‐by‐line extensive commentary and the collection of notes on disconnected passages (Snyder 2000, p. 75). From a formal perspective, both allow segmentation of exegesis. In the range of disconnected notes, the collection of question and answer is the dominant form from the fourth century on. Whether this form is closer to (or even derives from) the scholia (Geerlings 2000, p. 202) or not (Volgers and Zamagni 2004) remains unanswered. Jerome, who titled such a collection Hebraic Questions on Genesis but referred to it as short commentaries (quaestionum hebraicarum in Genesin commentariolos [Ep. 155.2; CSEL 88, 132]), showed that he considered his work to have taken on a hybrid form, between scholia and commentarius (Kamesar 2001, pp. 94–96). This is a reminder, if indeed one is needed, that the definition of literary categories is not as conveniently delineated as we would wish. Moreover, “interpretation permeated practically every other literary genre…every mode of communication” in Christian late antiquity (Pollman 2009, p. 259). In that respect, it may be true that the Christian conception of the role of literature changed some authors’ approach to writing (Fontaine 1988, pp. 65–68). Therefore, trying to impose formal codification on commenting literature would reduce to a mere practice a vast body of texts more loosely unified by their exegetical intent.

  19.3 About Literature

  If we agree that “all writing from ancient Christianity belongs to literary history in a general way, but all writing is not literature” (Alexandre 1997, p. 166), one could conclude that the broken sequence of line‐by‐line commentaries aims at speed in finding the passage commented upon and holds mainly practical, exegetical, dogmatic, or catechetical merits, but no artistic originality. The form would be disregarded on account of the reverence of the matter (Kugel 1998, pp. 14–19; Basser 2008, p. 37) and on account of the example of the Scriptures themselves.

  The adoption by Christian authors of the Platonic opposition between artifice of words and truth‐bearing actions (Phaedr. 272d–e) both exonerated the literary awkwardness of the Scriptures and encouraged a Christian reading of the Scriptures focused on content. Truth and inspiration became the mark of eloquence and divine essence, but, nonetheless, men of letters were still not satisfied with the Scriptures’ simplicity and “writers interested in rhetoric found rhetoric in the Scriptures and started a tradition of commentary and teaching on their artfulness” (Ambrose, Ep. 8.55.1; CSEL 82/2, 77). For fear of a taint of artifice, however, some writers elaborated a self‐conscious argumentation about writing literature (or not) in the act of interpretation: “My task,” said Jerome, “is to explain obscure passages,” not to bring pleasure of an aesthetic nature to the reader. (Gal. 3 prol.; CCSL 77A, 158. Cf. Cain 2011, p. 101; Pelttari 2014, pp. 16–17.) Jerome further warned that his commentaries were not the place to look for eloquence. Such a protest is not so much an apology (Pelttari 2014, p. 17) as an indicator. For Jerome’s expression in this text and in at least three other instances (Eph., prol.; PL 26, 469, Ep. 29.1; CSEL 54, 233, Helu. 16; PL 23, 210) eloquentiam quaerere, “to look for eloquence,” was plucked right from Cicero (Top. 85; 2Ver. 1.29) and was most likely destined to bring an echo of the Arpinate to the ear of the reader. In case the allusion was missed, the great orator’s name was then explicitly mentioned along with those of Demosthenes, Polemon, and Quintilian, a statement of literary ambition in the guise of propriety.

  Commentators frequently invoked notions of literary self‐consciousness and framed their work as a conversation among equals. In a letter to the bishop Justus of Lyon, Ambrose rejoiced at the thought that they should devote their “conversation in absence to the interpretation of the heavenly word.” For what, asked Ambrose, is more conducive to friendship than conversation on holy subjects (Ep. 1.1.1; CSEL 82/1, 3)? Without a doubt, the bishop meant that Christianity cemented a friendship, but, in the circles of literate society, conversation on literary matters constituted an activity practiced in the company of friends among men of equal quality (Johnson 2000, 2009). Ambrose was consciously building a collection of exegetical epistles (cf. Ep. 6.32.7; CSEL 82/1, 228) that combined the tradition of epistolary collections containing discussions of literary substance with his preoccupation for scriptural explication.

  Techniques of interpretation were introduced early on in forms of writing other than a running commentary, as we will observe in the second section of this chapter, through the works of Theophilus of Antioch, Origen, Basil of Caesarea, Ambrose of Milan, Ambrosiaster, Augustine and Cyprian of Gaul.

  19.4 Survey

  We can now turn from a general discussion of the perception of Biblical commentary as literature to a survey of the range of approaches authors took. To do this, we will focus on a cross section of “commentaries” on Genesis 1:26 that run chronologically from the second to the fifth century.

  At the end of the second century, Theophilus of Antioch wrote To Autolycos, a protreptic treatise with a strong polemical flavor. In response to the assumption that the Scriptures were worthless on account that they carried no flourishes (Aut. 1.1; SC 20, 59), he retorted that, on the contrary, the Scriptures possessed the ultimate gift of speech. While the Creation is for man an inexpressible reality, he said, the Scriptures captured it in a single sentence, as God said: “Let us make man” (Gen 1:26; Aut. 2.18; SC 20, 144). Theophilus derided the idea that God is calling for help when using the plural in “Let us make,” and he explained that God is talking to his Logos and his Sophia (Aut. 2.15 and 18; SC 20, 144, 146). Their presence explains both plurals: “let us make” and “our image.” The example of Athena, presented in exercises of hymns to the gods (laudes deorum) in schools of rhetoric as Zeus’s Wisdom, may have inspired Christians to represent a wise and eloquent God (Grant 1959, pp. 41–43). Even a superficial reading of To Autolycos reveals a practiced and eloquent style, using brief cola, indirect questions, exclamations, enumerations, and popular etymologies to fight commonplace battles against the Greek pantheon, in a recognizable tradition of judicial eloquence. (On the ties between apologetic and judicial eloquence, see Dor
ival 2001; Humfress 2007, pp. 135–150). Theophilus’s incisive defense of Christianity, then, also echoes the courtrooms in its form and tone. His exegesis, however, serves his larger apologetic purpose.

  It is believed that homilies destined for Christian sympathizers and the baptized are distinct from the written commentary only when delivered orally (Dorival 2000, p. 181). If Rufinus’s translation of Origen’s Homilies on Genesis is remotely faithful to the stenographic notes taken during their oral rendering (cf. Eusebius, Hist. 6.36.1), the audience must have needed to pay close attention in order to follow his explication of Genesis 1:26. Origen’s interpretation develops out of a tapestry of citations and allusions to various passages of the Scriptures. Most of these allusions must have passed unnoticed in an oral delivery, and it would have likely been more challenging to read his commentary alongside a complete scriptural apparatus than to follow it aurally. Nevertheless, on account of the numerous citations that form the commentary itself, Origen’s homily bears a rather professorial tone. It falls somewhere between a running commentary and a text that retained a quality of immediacy.

  By contrast, Basil of Caesarea’s Hexameron captures this quality of literary immediacy more effectively. Over the course of his nine homilies on creation, Basil offered a sustained explanation of the narrative of creation in which he occasionally utilized devices to capture the attention of his audience. In the captatio benevolentiae of the ninth homily, for example, he introduced the metaphor linking feast/fast to speech in an allusion to the fast of Lent. He reminds the assembly that in church they feed not only on words, λóγοι, but also on the Logos itself by asking them, “How did you find this morning’s meal of words?” (Hex. 9.1, SC 26bis, 478), a reference both to the homily and to the Eucharist. Further questions more deeply involved the audience, encouraging it to meditate along with the bishop and adopt his explication of the Scriptures. Throughout the work, then, Basil frequently invited the audience to ponder with him on the meaning of the text.

  Despite his claim that sciences are the worthless expression of a maddened wisdom (Hex. 9.1, SC 26bis, 482), Basil developed at length a rationale for the creation of animals that combines Aristotelian ideas with teachings from the New Testament. Here, too, he sought to engage his listeners with a rhetorical objection: “We have learned what the nature of beings belonging to us is, but we ignore what we are” (Hex. 9.6, SC 26bis, 512). Basil thus awakens the disengaged attention of the listener who had remained idle during the long exposition on animals. The sentence then signalled the transition to the exegesis of “Let us make man.”

  It is here that we reach his treatment of Genesis 1:26. The bishop opens and closed his explanation of Gen. 1:26 with a touch of polemic against those who think that God speaks to himself or to angels who participated in the Creation (an interpretation found in the Old Testament apocryphal Jub. 3:4; also Philo, Op. mun. 72). Basil refuted the former with a touch of irony: “What worker would talk to himself when setting to task, while being alone with his tools?” (Hex. 9.6; SC 26bis, 515). Parallels with daily life were another common technique used in the homily, an approach recommended later by Augustine to keep the attention of a wider audience (Aug., Cat. Rud. 13.19; CCSL 46, 142–143). Basil’s homily continued with an explanation that looked to grammar: The plural (“Let us make”) indicates that the Creator was not the only person present. This other person, the Scripture tells us, was the Son.

  The varied levels of sophistication of Basil’s audience (Hex. 3.1; SC 26bis, 190) did not deter him from refuting the Anomeans’ error, denying that the Son shares an equal nature with the Father, with a grammatical answer provided by the divine eloquence of the Scripture. Since man is made “in our image,” the plural “our” and the singular “image” establish that there is one nature shared by more than one person. Angels cannot have the same image as their Creator because only the Son is born from God and not created by God. Basil’s last question, “Don’t you recognize in the Son his similarity with the Father, which he holds from his nature?” (Hex. 9.6, SC 26bis, 520–522), sent the audience home pondering the logical implications of his reasoning. If the Son shares God’s nature, he must be his equal. If the Son is God’s equal, the phrase “Let us make man in our image” then represents both the Father and the Son, because the Son participates in the act of creation. Basil thus encouraged his flock to weigh the theological implications of the Creation narrative, exhorted them to feast on his words as they went back home, and warned them against false beliefs. Biblical exegesis took with the bishop of Caesarea the guise of deliberative oratory.

  Ambrose of Milan, who crafted Latin adaptations of Basil’s homilies on the Creation, envisaged his sermons not as mere commentary but as a literary activity. In a letter to Simplicianus, Ambrose wrote about his predication in terms of imitation by implying that he had in the past emulated other renowned writers: “I will not,” he wrote, “imitate some great exegete, but myself, as I go back to my habits and not some other great ones” (Ep. 2.7.2; CSEL 82/1, 44). This is a good way to understand his approach to the Hexameron. Although Ambrose borrowed most of the argumentation and allusions from Basil, his rhetorical strategy is quite different from that of his model. In the sixth homily, while he acknowledged his audience’s fatigue (Hex. 6.1.1, CSEL 32/1, 204), Ambrose did not appeal to his listener with the sort of engaging questions Basil used. He used Basil’s rhetorical objection “When will we learn about what concerns us?” (Hex. 6.2.3, CSEL 32/1, 205) to introduce his discussion of the creation of animals, instead of a transition from it. Thereafter most of Basil’s questions disappear from Ambrose’s text. While Basil’s text abounded in philosophical references and knowledge of natural history, Ambrose’s prose is laden with allusions to Sallust and evocations of or quotations from Virgil, Ovid, or Horace. Ambrose’s written version of his sermon offers a full display of elegant writing, but it is not concerned with engaging the audience in reflection without providing all the answers.

  More and more collections in the fourth and fifth centuries of explanations of the Scriptures came, not in the form of thematic or line‐by‐line exegesis of passages, but in the form of questions and answers. Many of these lack a preface (Geerlings 2000, pp. 203–204), as if they were envisaged by their author not as a literary piece requiring proper presentation but as a useful tool for consultation that did not pretend to have any literary cohesion. One such text is Ambrosiaster’s Questions on the Old and the New Testament. Preceded by capitula for quick consultation in the manuscript tradition, it does not contain an explanatory preface. The composite character of the collection is further emphasized by the fact that, in one of its two versions (cf. Bussières 2007 on the dual tradition of the collection), it includes a series of developments announced by a theme instead of by a question. Such is the case of Question 45: On the Image, which answers an implicit interrogation, “How is man the image of God?” and comments on Genesis 1:26–28. With an anti‐Arian argument, Ambrosiaster stated that the plural “Let us make” does not include the angels, as the angels and God cannot have the same image; for in order to have the same image, it is necessary to have the same nature. Therefore, the plural refers to the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Ambrosiaster proceeded at a fast pace, each sentence serving as predicate for the next:

  Therefore the image of the three is one, because whether Father, Son, or Spirit, God is one. For this reason, man was made one in one god’s image. Man is God’s image in that, as God, from whom all heavenly things exist, is unique in heaven, similarly man is unique on earth, from whom all men have their carnal origin. (Qu. test. 45.2, CSEL 50, 82)

  This is obviously the explanation Ambrosiaster favored, yet he next embarked on the refutation of a second interpretation. Some say, he wrote, that mankind is made in the image of God because God created man (homo) to rule over animals. But if mankind rules over the animals, the woman rules too. To Ambrosiaster, this raised a question: Would she, too, be in God’s image? This is insane, he answer
ed. Woman cannot be made in God’s image because we know for a fact that she is under the dominion of man (vir) (Qu. test. 45.3; CSEL 50, 82–83). Ambrosiaster’s short chapter thus closes on what not to think, without any recapitulation of the correct interpretation. This organization may seem peculiar because of its argumentative implication. Indeed, it goes against the rules of persuasion to close with the refutation of a point after its demonstration. This shows that Ambrosiaster was more preoccupied with countering errors than he was with developing a theology. Set in the context of perceived disorder brought on by the enthusiasm for female asceticism within Roman society (Hunter 2007, p. 128), Ambrosiaster’s insistence on woman’s submission to man is hardly surprising. The organization of the text is, therefore, not the product of Ambrosiaster’s lack of sophistication or a lack of knowledge about oratorical technique. Question 45 could, instead, represent a deliberate use of exegesis so as to make a plea for social order in response to a contemporary issue vexing Ambrosiaster’s milieu or church. With the matter settled, it is not until the last chapter of the collection that the place of woman in creation resurfaces (Qu. test. 127: On Adam and Eve; CSEL 50, 399–416, cf. Hunter 1989, 1992). Collections of disconnected exegeses thus allow for freedom that was lacking in the running commentary, where the line‐by‐line structure obliged authors to refrain from developing thematic excurses or long digressions, as was pointed out by Origen (Joh. 10.17.88; SC 157, 436).