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Plotinuss Portrait and Pamphiluss Prison Notebook: Neoplatonic and Early Christian Textualities at the Turn of the Fourth
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Jeremy Schott
Journal of Early Christian Studies, Volume 21, Number 3, Fall 2013, pp. 329-362 (Article) Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: 10.1353/earl.2013.0032
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Plotinuss Portrait and Pamphiluss Prison Notebook: Neoplatonic and Early Christian Textualities at the Turn of the Fourth Century c.e.
JEREMY SCHOTT
This article focuses on two sibling intellectual communitiesthe neoplatonic circle of Plotinus and Porphyry and the Christian intellectual circle of Pamphilus and Eusebius of Caesareato consider in what ways each developed different theories and practices of reading and writing. Porphyrys Life of Plotinus can be read as an extended and deliberate engagement with the problem of writing as elaborated in Platos Phaedrus. Porphyrys neoplatonic textuality situates writing as a problematic mimesis, and subordinates written texts to dialectical relationships within the philosophical circle. By contrast, the Caesareans advocate and practice a textuality that self-consciously embraces the use and production of written texts as a primary site for the production of orthodox discourse.
In the early fourth century, the scholar-ascetic Pamphilus of Caesarea and his circle of intellectuals found themselves caught up in an intensication of the emperor Galeriuss persecution. Beginning in 306 several members
I would like to thank helpful audiences at the University of TennesseeKnoxville and the annual meetings of the American Society for Church History and Society of Biblical Literature for their comments on earlier versions of material in the present article. I also owe gratitude to the contributors to this special issue of JECS, David Brakke, and the anonymous reviewers for comments and critiques that made this a much better article than it would otherwise have been. Support for the research and writing of this article was provided in part by a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship.
Journal of Early Christian Studies 21:3, 329362 2013 The Johns Hopkins University Press
330 JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES
of the circle were arrested and martyred.1 Pamphilus himself was arrested in November 307 and tortured by the prefect Urbanus before being imprisoned. He was nally executed by Urbanuss successor, Firmilianus, on February 16, 310.2 Pamphiluss circle had coalesced during the last two decades of the third century. Their work was what we might today term text-critical, focusing in particular on the study, correction, and copying of biblical texts. But these were not merely text-critics; the portrait of the group that emerges from Eusebiuss Martyrs of Palestine and Ecclesiastical History is of a circle of philosopher- or philologist-ascetics. The work of textual production was inextricably bound up with the work of ascetic self-fashioning. Although none had known Origen during his lifetime, the circle considered the Alexandrian scholar to be a central intellectual and spiritual progenitor. The memory of Origens life, along with copies of his books, occupied a privileged place for Pamphilus and his students. Eusebius recounts, for instance, how Pamphilus sought out copies of Origens books that the Caesarean library lacked and describes how Origens Hexapla served as a central reference work within the circle and also later in his own biblical commentaries. During his imprisonment, word reached Pamphilus that Origen was under attack as a heretic. Thus it was in prison, with the help of Eusebius, that he penned his only workan Apology for Origen in six books.3 Yet, to say that Pamphilus authored the Apology would be misleading; if, that is, we envision authoring as recording ones original thoughts or conceptions in writing. As Pamphilus puts it, the Apology would not be made with our words and claims; rather, Origen must be allowed to speak on his own behalf (Apol. Or. 19). This would be well and good, but for the fact that Origen, having been dead for over half a century, could not speak for himself. Pamphilus points to a viable substitutewhat defense
1. The rst member of the group arrested and martyred was Apphianus, a young man from Lycia who had left legal studies in Berytus against his familys wishes to study with Pamphilus. He snuck out of Pamphiluss house one day to harass the governor Urbanus as he was sacricinghe was arrested and martyred on March 31, 306 (Eus., M.P. 4.8 [GCS 2:91415]). 2. Along with four other members of the circle (Eus., M.P. 7.46; 11.7 [GCS 2:92324; 936]). 3. Pamphilus and Eusebius, Apol. Or. 1215, text and French trans. in R. Amacker and . Junod, eds., Apologie pour Origne. T.1. Sources Chrtiennes 464 (Paris: ditions du Cerf, 2002); English translation used throughout this paper, with occasional minor modications, Thomas P. Scheck, St. Pamphilus, Apology for Origen and Runus, On the Falsication of the Books of Origen, Fathers of the Church 120 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2010).
SCHOTT / EARLY CHRISTIAN TEXTUALITIES331
on behalf of the dead is stronger and more solid than the letters and writings of the dead? (Apol. Or. 20). To this end, Pamphilus and Eusebius (who remained free and thus had access to the circles library) collaborated to gather quotations from Origens books and assemble them in a work that would prove his orthodoxy. This sort of intertextual practice would become the hallmark of Christian scholarship in Caesarea under Eusebius, who, in becoming the father of church history was also the father of the block quotation. This substitution of textual witnesses for the dead, though it may seem natural to modern historians whose work depends on textual and documentary archives, was not merely a practical response to critiques of Origen. Rather, Pamphiluss and Eusebiuss textual strategies emerged within a wider intellectual culture in which the theory and practice of written discoursewhat we might term an ethics of textualitywere signicant issues within philosophical communities. In particular, the complex interplay of books, death, and writing in Pamphiluss jail cell recalls two Platonic vignettes: Socrates discussion at the conclusion of Platos Phaedrus on the relative merits of the art of writing and, roughly contemporary with the Apology for Origen, Porphyrys narration of Plotinuss writing habits. Both of these Platonic texts theorize the place of written discourse in the life of philosophical community. Reading the Apology for Origen alongside these Platonic texts reveals the Apology for Origen, as well as Eusebiuss later works such as Ecclesiastical History and Gospel Preparation, as similarly complex negotiations of authorship, writing, and textuality. From Pamphiluss Origenian circle emerged a particular textualitya particular way of addressing the practice and theory of reading and writing, a way of thinking and doing text.4
4. I venture the term Origenian-Caesarean tradition here to refer to Christian intellectuals for whom Origens works served as a key touchstone and whose own writings belong to a recognizable genealogy (in both a Foucauldian sense and in the traditional sense of a set writers and works among whom we can reconstruct positivist historical relationships). Origenian is an attempt to eschew the heresiological connotations of Origenist, while Caesarean aims to signal the geographical trajectory of this tradition via Caesarea Maritima. In this essay I am limiting myself to an examination of the tradition of textuality at work in Caesarea Maritima in the century between Origen and Eusebius (roughly 230s330s). It would be particularly fruitful to explore the trajectories of these textualities in the Origenian-Caesarean tradition more broadlynamely, among the Cappadocian Origenians (e.g. Gregory Thaumaturgus, Basil, Gregory of Nazianzus, Gregory of Nyssa) and Latin Origenians, especially Runus and Jerome, on whom see the recent work of Catherine Chin, for example: Through the Looking-Glass Darkly: Jerome Inside the Book, in The Early Christian Book, ed. W. Kligshirn and L. Safran (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2007), 10116 and Runus of Aquileia and Alexandrian Afterlives: Translation as Origenism, JECS 18 (2010): 61747.
PLATOS PHAEDRUS AND PLOTINUSS PORTRAIT At the same time that Pamphilus was devoting his career to Origens books, Porphyry of Tyre was at work on an edition of Plotinuss Enneads. When Porphyry nally completed this project at the turn of the fourth century c.e., he prefaced the Enneads with a short treatise he titled On the Life of Plotinus and the Order of his Booksthis was a biography of the master, but also an apology for Porphyrys editorial project.5 The biography opens with a curious story about the masters refusal to sit for a portrait.
And he objected so strongly to sitting to a painter or sculptor that he said to Amelius, who was urging him to allow a portrait of himself to be made, Why really, is it not enough to have to carry the image in which nature has encased us, without your requesting me to agree to leave behind me a longer-lasting image of the image, as if it was something genuinely worth looking at?. . . Amelius, who had a friend, Carterius, the best painter of the time, brought him in to attend the meetings of the schoolthey were open to anyone who wished to come, and accustomed him by progressive study to derive increasingly striking mental pictures from what he saw. Then Carterius drew a likeness of the impression which remained in his memory. Amelius helped him to improve his sketch to a closer resemblance, and so the talent of Carterius gave us an excellent portrait of Plotinus without his knowledge. (Plot. 1)6
Porphyry presents this story as evidence of Plotinuss shame that he should be in a body (Plot. 1). It was bad enough, Plotinus used to say, to have to carry around the image in which nature has encased us, without your requesting me to agree to leave behind me a longer-lasting image of the image, as if it were something genuinely worth looking at (Plot. 1). Porphyrys account of Plotinuss portrait makes a dual gesture, pointing to the problem posed by his own writing of Plotinuss life and his editing of the Enneads, on the one hand, and situating that problem in terms of classic Platonic speculation on the nature of written communication, on the other. The well-known Platonic locus classicus on writing, for ancients and
5. The date of the Life of Plotinus, as well as the approximate date of Porphyrys birth, can be inferred from Plot. 4, where he writes that he was thirty years old in the tenth year of Gallienus (i.e. 26263 c.e.), thus placing Porphyrys birth in 23233 c.e., and Plot. 23, where he describes experiencing union with the One when he was sixty-eight, thus providing a terminus post quem of 3012 c.e. for the Life. 6. Edition and English translation in A. H. Armstrong, Plotinus vol. 1, LCL 440 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966, rev. 1989), 23; I have followed Armstrongs translation of the Life of Plotinus and the Enneads throughout, unless otherwise noted.
moderns, is Socrates discussion of the dangers of writing in the latter part of Platos Phaedrus.7 Socrates asks his young conversation partner, Phaedrus, to read from a written copy of a speech on eros by the orator Lysias that the young man carries with him in the hopes of memorizing (Phdr. 228de).8 The speech prompts Socrates to discuss eros, the soul, and the superiority of dialectic to rhetoric, before nally returning to the copy of Lysiass speech to examine the question of propriety and impropriety in writing (Phdr. 274d). Socrates broaches the problem of written discourse through an Egyptian myth (Phdr. 274c275b). Theuth, the inventor of the arts and sciences, presents writing to King Thamus, claiming that it will serve as an aid to memory () (Phdr. 274e). But King Thamus corrects Theuth: writing is no true mnemonic. It is merely a reminder () (Phdr. 275a). Authentic memory-work is a recollection of what is already within, and authentic philosophical communication consists of teaching (), not writing. Earlier in the dialogue, during his speech on eros and the soul (Phdr. 244a257b), Socrates argues for the centrality of anamnesis in philosophic practice. Socrates famously likens the soul to a winged charioteer who drives a team of horses, one noble and good and another wicked, on its cyclical journeys from the realm of becoming to that place beyond the heavens . . . where true being dwells (Phdr. 246ab; 247bc). The philosophic pursuit of truth, according to Socrates, consists in the souls recollection of what it has seen (the Forms) during its previous journeys in the realm of Being (Phdr. 249c). Writing, as external to the soul, threatens to short-circuit this organic relationship between the souls memory of true being and the object of its knowledge. Hence, reading the written word cannot be a genuine mnemonic activity. It is a substitute or imitation of the discipline of anamnesis that properly resides in the soul itself (Phdr. 275a). Platos Socrates further elaborates on the myth of Theuth by explaining that writing is just like painting (Phdr. 275d). Written texts, like paintings, are mute when interrogatedthey go on telling you
7. Among the many important treatments of writing in the Phaedrus the two that most inform my reading in this article are Jacques Derrida, Platos Pharmacy, in his Dissemination, trans. B. Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983) and Giovanni Ferrari, Listening to the Cicadas: A Study of Platos Phaedrus, Cambridge Classical Studies (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 8. Text: J. Burnet, ed., Platonis Opera T. II. Oxford Classical Texts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1901), 22395. Translation: R. Hackforth, trans., Phaedrus, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, Bollingen Series 71, ed. E. Hamilton and H. Cairns (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963), 475525.
the same thing forever; worse, both paintings and books, as portable, can get awaydrift all over the place, getting into the hands not only of those who understand it, but equally of those who have no business with it (Phdr. 275de). These passages are crucial intertexts in Porphyrys account of Plotinuss portrait. Just as Carteriuss paintingan image of an imagestands at two removes from Plotinuss noetic self,9 Porphyrys written account of Plotinus is also a tertiary substitute for Plotinuss living mind. In so far as Porphyrys story of Plotinuss portrait construes writing (and its analogue, painting) as dead or mute in relation to living words, it seems to read the Phaedrian evaluation of writing as a total or near total disparagement of writing as a philosophical discipline. As Derek Krueger astutely notes, Porphyrys application of the same phrase could not bear to describe Plotinuss attitude to autobiography, reading his own writing, and enemas reveals writing as embarrassingly bodily and connects this textual form of embodiment with shit.10 At the same time, however, it is clear that neither the Phaedrus nor the Life of Plotinus are so absolute in their attitude towards written communication or textual embodiment. Plato obviously writes the very text in which Socrates critiques writing, and Porphyrys story of Plotinuss portrait is equally ambivalent. Although Plotinus objects to painting and writing, his students paint and write anywayAmelius lies to his master in order to get a portrait and Porphyry gives his readers exactly what the story of Plotinuss portrait seems to warn against: a written embodiment of Plotinuss life and thought in the Enneads and the Life. Unlike Plotinus, who at the time of Porphyrys writing has ascended to the company of heaven (Plot. 23), Porphyry and his readers remain subject to the vicissitudes of embodiment. Having lost their wings, as
9. Porphyrys statement that Plotinus regarded a portrait as an image of an image, recalls at least two passages in the Enneads: 6.4 (22) 10.119 and especially 6.3 (44) 15.2937, where the perceptible Socrates is said to bear the same derivative relationship to the noetic form Socrates as the portrait of Socrates bears to the perceptible Socrates: And the rational form of man is the being a something, but its product in the nature of body, being an image of the form, is rather a sort of something like. It is as if, the visible Socrates being a man, his painted picture, being colours and painters stuff, was called Socrates; in the same way, therefore, since there is a r ational form according to which Socrates is, the perceptible Socrates should not rightly be said to be Socrates, but colours and shapes which are representations of those in the form; and this rational form in relation to the truest form of man is affected in the same way (trans. Armstrong). 10. Derek Krueger, Writing and Holiness: The Practice of Authorship in the Early Christian East, Divinations: Rereading Late Ancient Religion (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 137.
Socrates puts it in his Great Speech, souls have forgotten themselves. Their attentions are directed outside themselves, towards the alterity that is becoming. Therefore writing, according to Socrates, has a place in philosophical practice: if a person makes right use of reminders () and even approaches full vision of the perfect mysteries, he and he alone becomes truly perfect (Phdr. 249c). For human beings immersed in becoming, the prompt to anamnesis must likewise come from outside the soul from something like the art of writing that Theuth offered to Thamus. By guring writing as an image () of speech, the Phaedrus positions writing within a Platonic ontological hierarchy in which representation is subordinated to that which is represented, just as becoming is subordinate to being. Writing has a place in this ontology, albeit a tertiary one. Platos Socrates, then, is not afraid of writing as such; rather, the written word is problematic in so far as it distracts from or becomes a fetish at the expense of that of which it is an image, namely living and ensouled discourse ( ) (Phdr. 276a). Giovanni Ferrari, moreover, has argued convincingly that neither the myth of Theuth nor Socrates warnings against writing mean that philosophy should not be written . . . only that it should not be written (or read) without awareness of the dangers of writing, together with the sense that what ultimately matters is neither writing nor speaking, but the way of life in which they can nd a worthy place.11 Platos answer to the problem of writing, Ferrari suggests, is not the rejection of written discourse in favor of speech; rather, the best prophylactic against the dangers of writing is the location of all discoursewritten and spokenin a community of ethical subjects. Socrates likens a teachers dialectical communication with his student to farming: The dialectician selects a soul of the right type, and in it he plants and sows his words founded on knowledge . . . words which instead of remaining barren contain a seed whence new words grow up in new characters (Phdr. 266e277a). Anamnesis, the process of recollection by which the soul comes to contemplate itself, know itself, and in so doing ascend to the realm of true being depends, at least initially, on the (ontologically inferior) discursive activities of a community of embodied souls in the world of becoming. The title of Porphyrys treatiseThe Life of Plotinus and the Order of his Booksbetrays a similar concern. The order of Plotinuss books are intrinsically embedded in his life and the life of his philosophical circle. Thus, Porphyrys periodizes Plotinuss books: The power of the books
11. Ferrari, Cicadas, 221.
varies according to the period in which he wrote them: in early life, in his prime, or in his illness (Plot. 6). Plotinus, moreover, paid no attention to the artices of writinghis handwriting was all but illegible and he paid no attention to orthography (Plot. 8). Nor, Porphyry claims, did Plotinus ever revise. The Enneads, he suggests, are an all but exact copy of Plotinuss thoughts. The manuscripts from which Porphyry has made his edition, moreover, bear the peculiar traces of Plotinuss thought and speech patterns: he never reread his work, his handwriting was poor, as was his spelling (Plot. 8). These are more than endearing anecdotes about the eccentricities of ones teacher; again, Porphyrys narrative situates his own and Plotinuss writing in Phaedrian terms. Plotinuss neglect of the physical act of writing, of the process of externalizing his mind, serves to ensure a close connection between his mind and his writinghe was wholly concerned with the mind () of the text . . . he worked out his train of thought from beginning to end in his own mind, and then, when he wrote it down, since he had set it all in order in his mind, he wrote as continuously as if he was copying from a book (Plot. 8). Porphyry also describes Plotinuss reticence to produce written texts. He wrote nothing until the age of forty-nine and only at his dearest students urging (Plot. 4). When Plotinus did write, distribution of the texts was an anxious matter, with great care taken to judge those who received them (Plot. 4). Writings tendency to wander is also a problem that surfaces at the center of the Phaedrus. Much as the title character of the Phaedrus furtively carries around the text of Lysias speech under his cloak, readers tend to abuse the portability and seemingly unproblematic legibility of written texts. In contrast to the good seeds that a living teacher plants in the soul of his students, written texts possess a dangerous fecundity or infectiousness in their tendency to acquire status beyond the communities in which they originated and distinct from the ethical subjects on which they depend. As Socrates worries in the Phaedrus, writing drifts all over the place, even among those without the necessary training and knowledge to understand them (Phdr. 276e). Because authentic discoursespoken and writtenis constituted in and by a community of ethical subjects seeking to foster anamnesis, circumscribing writing within that community is also a prophylactic against this kind of textual infectiousness. The later neoplatonist Hermias articulates this clearly and succinctly in his commentary on the Phaedrus: Books must be written for those who already have knowledge.12
12. Hermias in Phdr. 258.28 (text: P. Couvreur, ed., Hermeias von Alexandrien. In Platonis Phaedrum scholia [Paris: Bouillon, 1901, repr. Hildesheim: G. Olms, 1971]).
Plotinuss words were the centerpiece of the living, dialectical community constituted by the circle of pupils around him. Thus Porphyrys special concern in the Life of Plotinus to narrate the social networks upon which his edition of the Enneads depends. The publication of Porphyrys edition, in a sense, seeks to re-constitute, or better, perpetually constitute, the ethical community that is the condition for the edition itself. The Life and the Enneads are not a static memorial to the founder of a philosophical tradition. Rather, they further the memory-workthe ongoing discipline of anamnesisof Plotinuss circle. Read according to the letter of their philosophy, writing is a condition of embodiment and reading serves as a prod to the souls native memorywork. Yet, Plotinuss Life, as well as Porphyrys practice as embodied in the Life, suggests that writing and its transcendence are much more enmeshed than this. According to Porphyrys Life, Plotinus may have had what we would term a speech impediment: he pronounced lambda as rho. In the Life, however, this verbal infelicity is not an impediment, but a key to noetic truths. Plotinus pronounced the name of his closest disciple, Amelius Gentilianus, as Amerius, because Plotinus deemed it right to call him Ameriuss by substituting the rho, saying that it was appropriate for him to be named from (indivisibility/partlessness) than (negligence/indifference) (Plot. 7). Thus even at the height of his powers, before his body gave out and he struggled with fatal disease of the bowels, Plotinus wrestled with the eructation of his utterances. Yet, he taps his misshapen, poorly embodied words as an index of intellectual truth: in mispronouncing Amelius Plotinus reveals a truth about Amelius. Porphyry makes a point of mentioning another of Plotinuss verbal/ scribal infelicitiesPlotinus mispronounced and misspelled the word as (Plot. 13). Reading the Phaedrus shows that Porphyrys example is especially well chosen. The verb that Porphyry remembers Plotinus misspeaking and mis-writing, is the very word that Socrates uses when discussing the souls recollection of the divine realm and one of the key terms at stake in the myth of Theuth (Phdr. 249c). Anamnesis also has a particularly important place in Plotinuss philosophy. At the opening of Ennead 5.1, Plotinus asks, What can it be that has brought souls to forget the father, God, and though members of the Divine and entirely of that world above, to ignore at once themselves and It?13 The cure for the souls amnesia is a double-discipline; the rst aspect of this regimen is to teach the soul the folly of its immersion
13. Enn. 5.1 (10).1; text and English translation in A. H. Armstrong, Plotinus vol. 5, LCL 444 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 1011.
in the things of the world of becoming, the second, more fundamental aspect teaches or recalls (Plotinuss verb here is precisely the verb Porphyry reports him misspeaking and misspelling) to the soul its nature and worth.14 Within the Life, then, Plotinuss misspeakings and miswriting show how the tertiary incompleteness of embodied discursivity can, in fact, direct one to higher noetic realities. Porphyry writes of Plotinus that (Plot. 13.56). Plotinuss can be translated as certain mistaken words, but the adjective can also describe notable or notorious words, that is, words that call conspicuous attention to themselves. The verb , moreover, means to preserve, but also suggests an intentionality, a taking care to maintain or preserve something. We have a description that can be translated, after Armstrong, but [Plotinus] also [made] certain slips which he also constantly committed to writing, and but [Plotinus] also [used] certain other notorious words which he also took care to preserve in writing. Hence the signicance of /. It is an error embodied in speech and (deliberately?) textualized that calls attention to the usage of the verb in a passage that aims to direct the nous away from embodiment. It calls attention to the problematic vicissitudes of textualized embodiment by means of those vicissitudes. And nally, Porphyry explains that he has corrected these errors in his edition of the Enneads, which suggests that the textual work of editing may itself be something akin to anamnesis. PAMPHILUSS PRISON NOTEBOOK: THE APOLOGY FOR ORIGEN The immediate prompt for Pamphiluss and Eusebiuss defense of Origen appears to have been accusations of heresy leveled against Origen by Egyptians imprisoned at the mines at Phaeno.15 Relations between Egypt and Caesarea were a crucial axis of ecclesiastical and theological politics from Origens time there through Eusebiuss episcopacy. Origen himself had gured as bone of contention in relations between Egypt and Palestine.
14. Enn. 5.1 (10).1 (trans. Armstrong, 1213). 15. For an excellent new study of the copper mines at Phaeno and the harsh realities of being condemned to them (including a discussion of evidence from Eusebius), see David Mattingly, Metals and Metalla: A Roman Copper-mining Landscape in the Wadi Faynan, Jordan, the seventh chapter of his Imperialism, Power, and Identity: Experiencing the Roman Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010).
Bishop Demetrias of Alexandria saw Origens ordination to the presbyterate by bishops Theoctistus of Caesarea and Alexander of Jerusalem as a challenge to his own episcopal sovereignty.16 And of course, in the 320s, Eusebius found himself defending another Alexandrian presbyter, Arius, who had run afoul of his bishop, Alexander. Although Pamphilus considered himself a disciple of Origen, he had not in fact been his student. Born in Berytus, the closest he came to contact with anything like a living was the short time he spent with the Alexandrian teacher Pierius. Pierius, for his part, would have had only tenuous claims to be a successor to Origen.17 It may have been during this period in Alexandria that Pamphilus developed his devotion to Origen. He then moved to Caesarea; it is tempting to see in this an imitation of his intellectual hero, though as a native of Berytus, Pamphilus may simply have been moving closer to familial interests or estates. During the last two decades of the third century, Pamphilus established himself as the master of his own circle of Christian ascetic-intellectuals. Eusebiuss Martyrs of Palestine suggests a tightly-knit group of men who lived in Pamphiluss household and shared a philosophical life of ascetic renunciation coupled with philological, and perhaps philosophical and theological, study. Eusebiuss Martyrs of Palestine offers poignant vignettes of life in Pamphiluss circle during the persecution. He describes how Apphianus, a young man of twenty who had deed his familys plans for his legal career to study with Pamphilus, slipped away from Pamphiluss house and assailed the governor Urbanus while he was offering a libation. Apphianus was interrogated by having his feet set on re before being drowned in the sea; his body washed up miraculously after a storm.18 Other members of the household were martyred along with Pamphilus. Eusebius makes special mention of Pamphiluss slave Porphyrius, a teenager trained in letters who served as Pamphiluss amanuensis. He was tortured and executed when he asked for his masters remains.19 Pamphilus seems to have a been a man of means and used his wealth to expand his remarkable library, the centerpiece of which was an early
16. Eus., H.E. 6.8.16 (accusations concerning Origens castration); 6.19.1619 (dispute with Caesarea and Jerusalem). 17. Eusebius (H.E. 7.32.2526) records that he was a learned presbyter and scholarascetic in Alexandia, while Jerome (de Vir. Inl. 76) adds that he was called Origen Junior because of his eloquence and erudition. Photius (Bibl. 119) notes that he is said to have been the martyr Pamphiluss teacher in ecclesiastical learning and to have headed the school in Alexandria. 18. Eus., M.P. 4.215 (GCS 2:91218). 19. Eus., M.P. 11.1; 1520 (GCS 2:932).
ecensionperhaps even an autograph copyof Origens Hexapla.20 Euser bius also describes how he and Pamphilus worked to collect additional works of Origen from beyond Caesarea.21 In Pamphiluss circle, then, we nd a late-ancient textual economy in miniature. Traces of the groups text-critical work can be found in a number of ancient and medieval manuscripts, with notices such as Copied and corrected from the Hexapla of Origen, as corrected by his own hand. Antoninus, the confessor, collated; I, Pamphilus, corrected the volume in prison.22 As the contents of Apology for Origen itself make clear, the circle also read and critically studied literary and theological treatises. Works like Eusebiuss General Elementary Introduction, moreover, show that the group produced some original teaching texts of their own.23 Thus Pamphilus was a textual disciple of Origen, positioning himself as a kind of Origenian diadoch by reading Origens works and practicing Origenist textual criticism. In the Apology for Origen, Pamphilus portrays his opponents as claiming that he accords Origens texts an inordinate status (Apol. Or. 35.19).
Finally, they have enmity against many men whose life is humble and conforms to piety, in whom they can nd nothing worthy of reproach, for the sole reason that they have seen among them a marked interest in the books of the man in question, and they invent with malevolence that they hold him and his words in the place of the holy apostles and prophets (Apol. Or. 35.19).
Critiques of Origen were nothing new in the early fourth century; Origens orthodoxy had been called into question during his own lifetime by bishop Demetrias of Alexandria,24 and Eusebius quotes part of a letter he claims Origen wrote to defend his use of Greek philosophy against detractors.25 The late third and early fourth centuries, however, witnessed a spate of antiOrigenism on several fronts, from neoplatonic polemics to intra-Christian dispute within Origens native Alexandria.26 Later, in the immediate after20. Eus., H.E. 6.16.4. 21. Eus., H.E. 6.36.3. 22. The notice appears at the end of II Esdras in Codex Sinaiticus; translation of this passage and detailed discussion in Anthony Grafton and Megan Williams, Christianity and the Transformation of the Book: Origen, Eusebius, and the Library of Caesarea (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 18485; 340n.21, n.22, n.23. 23 Aaron Johnson, Eusebius the Educator: The Context of the General Elementary Introduction, in Reconsidering Eusebius: Collected Papers on Literary, Historical, and Theological Issues, ed. S. Inowlocki and C. Zamagni (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 99118. 24 Eus. H.E. 6.8.15 (GCS 2:53436). 25 Eus. HE 6.19.1115 (GCS 2:562). 26 In his polemic Against the Christians, Porphyry of Tyre charged Origen with apostasy from Hellenism and critiqued his allegorical reading practices (Porph., Con-
math of Nicaea, Eusebius himself fought a pamphlet war with Eustathius of Antioch in which Origens thought gured prominently.27 It is certainly possible that at least some of these real anti-Origenists objected to the reading of Origen per se. The extant writings of anti-Origenists of the rst three decades of the fourth century, however, do not articulate such a wholesale ban on the mere reading of Origen. More signicant for the present essay, however, is Pamphiluss perception and characterization of his opponents polemic as an accusation of the inordinate and incorrect valorization of Origens texts. Pamphilus argues that Origens critics are guilty of a variety of errors in reading, and in his characterization of the various inadequacies and errors of his anti-Origenist opponents we can uncover some explicit and implicit theories of textuality. Some anti-Origenists are simply unable to read Origen: they lack knowledge of Greek, or are simply incompetent (Apol. Or. 13). Others know Origens work only from hearsaythey have learned from others to consider Origen heretical, but have never themselves made an investigation of his texts (Apol. Or. 13). This most basic critique demands literacy as a basis for ethical textuality. But this ought not be taken primarily as an
tra Chr. apud Eus. H.E. 6.19.48 [GCS 2:55860]). Scholars continue to debate the exact date of Porphyrys Against the Christians; a date circa 300 c.e. seems likely, though good arguments can be made for the 270s c.e. as well. In either case, Porphyrys critique of Origen would have been circulating in Pamphiluss milieu, as the presence of the text in the Caesarean library makes clear. Andrew Carriker may be correct in suggesting that it was probably persecution that prompted Eusebius (and perhaps Pamphilus) to acquire Porphyrys works so that a suitable response could be made (The Library of Eusebius of Caesarea [Leiden: Brill, 2003], 123). Among Pamphiluss contemporaries, bishop Peter of Alexandria may have exhibited some ambivalence towards Origens notions of the souls preexistence and the resurrection; the fragments of Peters De Anima reject the doctrine of preexistent souls and the allegorical interpretation of the tunics of skins (Gen 3.21); see detailed discussion in Amacker and Junod, tude, in their Apologie pour Origne T.2, Sources Chrtiennes 465 (Paris: ditions du Cerf, 2002), 9293. Methodius of Olympus expressed outright hostility to Origen in his De Resurrectione; see detailed discussions in Amacker and Junod, tude, 9498; Henri Crouzel, Les critiques adresses par Mthode et ses contemporains la doctrine orignienne du corps ressuscit, Gregorianum 53 (1972): 681714; Lloyd G. Patterson, Who are the Opponents in Methodius de Resurrectione? Studia Patristica 19 (1989): 22129 and Methodius of Olympus: Divine Sovereignty, Human Freedom, and Life in Christ (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1997). 27. Socrates, H.E. 1.23.6; see also the helpful new translation and study of Eusta thiuss explicitly anti-Origenist exegesis of 1 Kgs 28 (On the Belly-myther, Against Origen) in Rowan Greer and Margaret Mitchell, The Belly-myther of Endor: Interpretations of 1 Kingdoms 28 in the Early Church, Writings from the Greco-Roman World 16 (Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Literature, 2007).
accusation that some anti-Origenists simply cannot read, though it certainly is effective ad hominem mockery as well. Pamphiluss complaint, rather, is against critics who can read but refuse to read responsibly: if it happens that they do read [Origen], they do not do so in a connected way and with sufcient instruction to be able to pursue the heights of his meaning (Apol. Or. 13). Worse yet, though these critics can read, they do not, but instead merely have heard others saying that they ought to despise Origens writings. At its heart, the critique advocates a literacy dened not (primarily) by the ability to read written language, but that assumes and is embodied within a community of scholastic-ascetic practice (like that of Pamphiluss own circle) within which one is trained to read in the correct manner together with other responsible readers.28 Pamphilus also criticizes the way that some anti-Origenists treat the body of the text. If you give these critics one of Origens works but remove his name from the title, Pamphilus complains, they will approve of what they read, but when they nd out that they have read a work by Origen these critics immediately declare it heretical (Apol. Or. 12). Others, Pamphilus continues, cut-up Origens worksobjecting to certain suspicious passages, but ignoring the remainder of his body of work (Apol. Or. 14). Those Pamphilus nds most offensive are , food-critics or those who criticize what they eat. Their own discourse is a patchwork of Origenian material, but they deny and condemn the source of their ideas (Apol. Or. 1215). These reading-mistakes represent something like the fetishization of written discourse feared by Plato and Porphyry. In Pamphiluss characterization, the anti-Origenists make a mere object of Origens written works. Like the speech of Lysias that Phaedrus carries about under his cloak, these objectied pieces of writingthe author-less manuscript, the bits of heretical material excerpted from the body of Origens work, the unacknowledged quotation or textual inuencehave come to circulate apart from their author and drift all over the place (Phdr. 276e). And of course, Pamphiluss accusation that the anti- Origenists can be duped by manuscripts from which Origens name has been removed, or that they will extol the virtues of a piece of writing until they learn it is written by Origen (Apol. Or. 12), also implies that members of a proper community of intellectuals do not fall victim to such ridiculous things (Apol. Or. 12).
28. Compare Rebecca Krawiecs article in this volume, which emphasizes that the literacy advocated by Evagrius is similarly embedded in community (Literacy and Memory in Evagriuss Monasticism, JECS 21:3 [2013]: 37577).
Pamphiluss textual ethic also depends on the kind of author function that Michel Foucault traced to Jerome and that Mark Vessey notes is found already in Pamphiluss student Eusebius. The theological and philosophical value of a text is ineluctably bound within the matrix of an authorial subject and texts are valorized based on the putative holiness of their authors.29 Like Porphyry, Pamphilus insists on a natural connection between an authorial subject and his living discourse embodied in the written text. The location of a texts origin in its authors mind (or intention), signied by the authorial genitive at the head of a manuscript, is a necessary condition for authentic reading. Likewise, to excerpt Origens work without attribution or to reject an otherwise-approved work based solely on Origens by-line does violence to the integrity of the authorial subject. Put most basically, Pamphilus suggests that one cannot evaluate a text without knowing its author. The anti-Origenists, according to Pamphilus, dont know how to read because, while they may attempt to evaluate a mans writing, they fail to know the man. Thus orthodox textuality is, for Pamphilus, also a network of Christian subjectivity. The orthodox reader (e.g. Pamphilus) enacts his own orthodox subjectivity in the recognition of Origens, and this community of orthodox subjectivity is effected through the work of reading and writing. But Pamphiluss objections to the practices of the anti-Origenists should give pause, given that the Apology is itself a bricolage of quotations cut from Origens works. Like his opponents, Pamphilus commodies Origen. And Pamphilus seems to diverge from the Phaedrian ideal of living dialectic as well. In the Phaedrus, Socrates warned Phaedrus that writing and reading are inferior philosophical practices precisely because texts resist questioning, because they do not admit interrogation and thus threaten to short-circuit dialectical community. Instead, Pamphiluss explicit metaphor
29. Foucault: . . . the traditional methods for dening an authoror, rather, for determining the conguration of the author from existing textsderive in large part from those used in Christian tradition to authenticate (or to reject) the particular texts in its possession. Modern criticism, in its desire to recover the author from a work, employs devices strongly reminiscent of Christian exegesis when it wished to prove the value of a text by ascertaining the holiness of its author (What Is an Author? in Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. with an intro. by Donald F. Bouchard, trans. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 11338 at 127. Mark Vessey remarks that Jeromes De viris inlustribus, the prompt for Foucaults reections, contain little if anything that would have struck an Alexandrian critic of an earlier age as methodologically new and nothing for which precedent cannot be found in Eusebiuss Ecclesiastical History (The Forging of Orthodoxy in Latin Christian Literature: A Case Study, JECS 4:4 [1996]: 495513 at 508).
for Christian reading in the Apology is not dialectical questioning but the exchange of coinage. Like the money-changer of the agraphon be approved money-changers,30 orthodox readers are to test the mettle/ metal of each piece of writing.
. . . they who peruse the secular books of the Greeks and not infrequently those of the hereticsthey think it is to them alone that one ought to grant competence in testing utterances, as if they know how to keep what another has said rightly and they know to abstain from all that is said badly. They imagine that those who read Origens books completely ignore the rule that orders money changers to be credible, knowing what it is good to keep and to abstain from everything of a bad sort. But, on the contrary, if someone is seen to read his books, from this he is immediately drenched with the infamy of heretics. (Apol. Or. 1 [SC 464.34])
In this passage, Christian reading is a fundamentally differential (and ascetic) processthe orthodox reader should test (probare) each text. This testing is also an act of approbation; the reader should approve, or retain (retinere), what accords with orthodoxy and reject, or abstain (abstinere), what does not. Indeed, Pamphiluss textual ethic might best be described in metallurgical terms. The Apology textualizes tension between an author function and its incorporation within orthodox discourse. Put simply, Origens words are legitimate reading to the degree that they harmonize with a transcendent orthodox voice. Yet the orthodox voice is authentic to the degree it is comprised of legitimate orthodox authorial subjects. The resultant orthodox textuality is a sort of alloy, the integrity of which depends on the interplay among its constituent elements. Thus the quotation to which Pamphilus gives pride of place in the Apologya creedal summary of the points which are unambiguously handed down in apostolic preaching (Apol. Or. 23). Precisely as a creedal statement, Origens dogmatic summary (a well-known passage from the preface of De Principiis) is not, in effect, Origens, but could (or should) be voiced just as well by any orthodox Christian subject. The quotation from De Principiis, however, goes on to explain that the constraints of orthodoxy do not prevent continued discourse. On the contrary, the apostles left some matters open, so that the most zealous of their successors, as lovers of wisdom, might have an exercise in which to demonstrate the fruit of their talents (Apol. Or. 23). Orthodoxy is not merely a repetition or imitation; it is rather a discourse produced in and through practices of
30. For other examples of this agraphon compare Clement, Str. 1.28.177.2; Origen, Comm. in Mt. 17.31; see also 1 Thess 5.2122.
reading and writing that are iterative, not mimetic. An orthodox text does not, to borrow a phrase from the Phaedrus, go on saying the same thing forever (Phdr. 275d). Tradition, for Origen, like Scripture, has both a plain (manifestum) sense and a deeper (latentem) richness, a richness that must be produced by the exegetical work of later readers.31 This process is not dialectical in a Phaedrian sense; one does not engage the voice of living teachers in questioning. According to Origen, orthodox discourse is produced in and through an ongoing process in which skilled readers interrogate the scriptural letter of tradition and, by improvising upon the spirit of it, in turn produce further iterations of tradition. This process is scribal, not vocal. Origens image for it is that of a student at work upon elementary handwriting exercises: Everyone, therefore, who is desirous of constructing out of the foregoing [basic dogmatic principles] a connected body (seriem et corpus) of doctrine must use points like these as elementary and foundational . . .32 Pamphilus also insists on Origens humility and circumspect attitude towards this scribal engagement with Scripture. He quotes from the preface to Origens Commentary on Genesis.
. . . we glory in being his [Jesus] disciples . . . we do not have the audacity to say that the understanding he has given us of those things that are related in the divine books is something we have received face to face; things of which, indeed, I am certain that not even the world itself could contain the meanings because of the power and majesty of the things they signify. For that reason we dare not utter as pronouncements the things about which we speak, as the apostles were able to do; but we give thanks for the fact that we are not unaware of our ignorance of the great realities and of those things beyond us. This we do in contrast to the many who are unaware of their own ignorance, and of the fact that their own inspirations are confused and disordered, [inspirations] which are not infrequently both ridiculous and fantastic as well, with (in their view) the gravest sense of purpose, as if they were declaring absolute truth with condence. (Apol. Or. 7 [trans. Scheck, 42])
A Christian textual ethic consists in humility, in contrast to others hubris. The nal lines of the quotation refer to heretics, both Christian gnostics against whom Origen, in part, directed his exegesis of Genesis, as well as those whom Pamphilus wishes to position as heretics with his quotation of this passage.
31. Origen, Princ. 1.8. 32. Origen, Princ. 1.3; see also 1.10 (trans: G. W. Butterworth, On First Principles, being Koetschaus text of the De Principiis [London: Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, 1936, repr. Gloucester, MA: P. Smith, 1973], 6).
But, more signicantly, the foregoing passage calls the possibility of a Phaedrian model of orthodox dialectic into question. True understanding is not something Origen (or Pamphilus) can know face to face. This is, of course, an allusion to biblical passages such as Deut 5.45 and 1 Cor 13.12, yet it also situates Christian dialectic outside the possibility of the kind of master-disciple relationship imagined in the Phaedrus or the Life of Plotinus. Origen (and Pamphilus) do not have a Platonic relationship in which to situate their texts. Jesus and the apostles did not establish a dialectical community. They instead left written traces to prompt a scribal activity among their successors. The place of writing in Pamphiluss construal of writings place in the Origenian tradition can be contrasted with that of another Caesarean Origenian, Gregory Thaumaturgus. Gregorys Thanksgiving Oration for Origen, delivered upon Gregorys taking leave of his teacher around 238 c.e., provides a stylized portrait of reading and dialectic within Origens circle of the 230s c.e.33 The oration engages the Phaedrus overtly and offers a useful foil against which we might compare and contrast the theory and practice of Pamphilus and Eusebius. Gregory paints Origen as an exemplary Platonic philosophical master and likens him explicitly to the Socrates of the Phaedrus. Like the Phae drian Socrates, Origen encourages his students to eschew empty rhetoric (pan. Or. 1068) and teaches them to rein themselves in, like the Phaedrian charioteer who controls the wicked horse of the passions (pan. Or. 97).34 Origen, unlike Phaedrus who made a fetish of his copy of Lysiass speech, did not recite memorized formulas and thus commodify philosophical discourse; rather, like an authentic Platonic master, he was a pure paradigm of the philosophic life for his students (pan. Or. 135). Hence Gregory subordinates texts and reading to the living dialectic of the circle. Origen encouraged eclectic reading, making sure that there be no Greek
33. On the dating of Gregorys Thanksgiving Oration see Richard Klein, Einleitung, in Oratio prosphonetica ac panegyrica in Origenem. Dankrede an Origenes, Fontes Christiani 24 (Freiburg: Herder, 1996), 1315. 34. More precisely, Gregory likens Origen to the charioteer and his students to horses, though it is difcult not to see a deliberate allusion to the Phaedrus: On occasion he would trip us up in speech, challenging us in thoroughly Socratic fashion, every time he saw us ghting the reins like unbroken horses, veering off the road and running aimlessly every which way, until by persuasion and coercion, as by the bit which was the word from our own mouth, he made us stand quietly before him (Text and German translation: Oratio prosphonetica ac panegyrica in O rigenem. Dankrede an Origenes, Fontes Christiani 24 [Freiburg: Herder, 1996]; English translation: Michael Slusser, St. Gregory Thaumaturgus. Life and Works, Fathers of the Church 98 [Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1998], 107).
doctrine with which [his students] would be unacquainted, but this textual foraging was carefully situated within the context of master-disciple relationsHe himself went in with us, going ahead and leading us by the hand as if on a hike (pan. Or. 17071). The occasion for the Thanksgiving Oration was Gregorys departure from Origens circle to return to public life (pan. Or. 189). He takes consolation, however, in the fact that he carries in his soul the seeds of anamnesis: We have the seeds, those which you showed us we already had (pan. Or. 201). With this deliberate echo of the Phaedrus, Gregory associates Origens circle with a textual ethic much like that Porphyry describes within Plotinuss circle. Written communication plays a role within both philosophical circles, but is deliberately subordinated to an idealized oral communication between the master and his disciples. Unlike the living speech between master and disciple that Socrates describes in the Phaedrus and that Porphyry and Gregory claim were practiced in their respective philosophical circles, Pamphilus practices a mode of discourse that is embodied in a primarily textual relationship between readers/writers and texts. Pamphilus, in effect, regures the philosophical community as a textual/scribal community. The Christian dialectician questions the written word, not a living master. In reading Origen, Pamphiluss conversation partner is the page and his Academy the lisable space of the book. Where Origen imagined the orthodox writer improvising upon the dogmatic alphabet, Pamphilus riffs off Origen. Pamphilus must dismember Origens textual corpus and re-member it in a univocal, orthodox utterancethe discourse of his circle as well as the text of the Apology. Within Pamphiluss circle, an ethical textuality involves the reading/writing of a new (orthodox) text woven from the fabric of other (orthodox) texts. As noted already, this textual ethic depends on a dynamic tension. On the one hand, written texts can function within an authentic orthodox dialectic between text and reader only if they can be ascribed to individual ethical subjectsauthors. On the other hand, the orthodoxy of texts depends on the erasure, or perhaps more accurately erasability and interchangeability, of authors. Individual orthodox utterances must be incorporable into the larger text that is the orthodox (biblical/patristic) canon. To understand how this tension between authorial individuation and orthodox univocality is resolved, or perhaps more accurately contained, one must not forget where Pamphilus is reading and writing. The Apology is Pamphiluss prison notebookwritten while he is awaiting a martyrs death. As it is presented in the Phaedrus, the Platonic problem of writing is also a problem of the authors physical death. The Phaedrus, in so far as it would embed writing within dialectical relationships, suggests that physical
death ends, or at best severely limits, the value of written discourse. Porphyrys Phaedrian improvisations in the Life of Plotinus would make an end-run around death by situating the Enneads within Plotinuss deathless nous. In the act of martyrdom, however, the death of the martyr-author guarantees the possibility of an orthodox discourse. Martyrdom reduces all particular utterances to one univocal phrase: Christiana/us sum.35 The centrality of martyrdom in stabilizing orthodox discourse helps to explain the concern of Runus and Jerome over the authorship of the Apology at the end of the fourth century. If, as Runus asserted, the Apology for Origen was composed by Pamphilus, the martyr of blessed memory, then Origens voice is secured, woven seamlessly with Pamphiluss orthodox utterance.36 If, as Jerome countered, the Apology for Origen was the work of the wretched Arian heretic Eusebius,37 it is nothing more than a crafty subterfugean effort to embroider heretical material onto the fabric of orthodox discourse. The formation/incorporation of orthodox subjects within and through orthodox discourse is also enacted materially in the incorporation of authors written corpora within the Christian library. In this sense, the most orthodox texts in Pamphiluss collection were the , or tablets, cataloging the texts of Origen that he had acquiredlists that Eusebius later proudly recapitulated in the Life of Pamphilus and the Ecclesiastical History.38 EUSEBIUSS ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND GOSPEL PREPARATION
The Ecclesiastical History At some point not long after Pamphiluss martyrdom, Eusebius, the Apologys co-author,39 inherited Pamphiluss library; he became bishop at or
35. In Eusebiuss own martyrological writing compare M.P. 11.16.4 (GCS 2:940, short recension: . . . . . .) and M.P. 4.12.15 (GCS 2:916, long recension: , , , , , , , ). 36. Runus, Prol. Apol. pr. Or. 1 (SC 464:24.56): et quamuis non meam de eo sententiam sed sancti martyris Pamphili sciscitatus sis . . . . 37. Jerome, Apol. Contr. Ruf. 1.9 (SC 303:2729). 38. H.E. 6.32.3. 39. Eusebius remarks on his co-authorship at H.E. 6.33.4; but note Runuss (deliberate?) ignorance of this at Prol. 1 (SC 464:24).
around the same time, in 313315.40 Having lost many of his hetairoi in the persecution, Eusebius was left to negotiate Origens and Pamphiluss literary remains: both Origens writings and the rest of the formidable collection of other works in the Caesarean library. During the next two and a half decades, Eusebius adopted and further developed the textual ethic he had practiced with Pamphilus in the Apology for Origen. The Ecclesiastical History stands close to the Apology for Origen in its approach to quotation, as history in this work unfolds as a diachronic account of authors and their texts. The work is structured around two basic scaffolds: the chronology worked out in his own Chronicle, on the one hand, and the librarys , or catalogs, on the other.41 When Eusebius interrupts his narrative to remark: and we have many books of his besides these, or now it is likely, indeed, that other memoirs also, the fruit of Serapions literary studies, are preserved by others,42 we can see the scaffolding of the library catalog poking through the fabric of narrative he has hung upon it. Certain stylistic elements within Eusebiuss work embody and encourage a textual practice energized by the dynamic tension between authorial individuation and orthodox univocality that drove the Apology for Origen. On several occasions, Eusebiuss compositional vocabulary invites imagining the practice of writing and bookmaking in terms of embodiment. The best-known example comes from the opening of the Ecclesiastical History.
We pray that God give us his guidance, and that we may have the help of the power of the Lord, for nowhere can we nd even the bare footsteps of men who have preceded us in the same path, except only for those slight suggestions by which some in one way, some in another have left us partial accounts of the times through which they have passed, raising their voices () as one holds up a torch from afar, calling to us from on high as from a distant watch tower, and telling us how we must walk, and how to guide the course of our work without danger or error. We have therefore collected from their scattered memoirs whatever we think we will useful for the present subject, collecting the useful utterances () of the ancient writers themselves, gathering, as it were, the owers of verbal () elds. We shall endeavor to incorporate them by means of an historical pattern ( ). . . .43
40. He must have become bishop in or before 315 c.e., the likely date of an oration he delivered for the consecration of a new basilica in Tyre; he was a bishop when he gave the oration (Eus., H.E. 10.4.1). 41. The Chronici Canones: H.E. 1.16; the : H.E. 6.32.3. 42. Eus., H.E. 7.26.2 (on the works of Dionysius of Alexandria); H.E. 6.12.1 (on Serapion of Antioch). 43. Eus., H.E. 1.1.34, trans. Lake (LCL), with modications.
Eusebius also uses the verb (incorporate or make into a body) to describe the writing of his polemic Against Marcellus. Eusebius writes: Therefore I will use brief quotations by themselves, incorporating () his text in sequence and in order and indicating only the unreasonableness of what is quoted.44 It is important to note the visceral quality of incorporation. One of the late-ancient terms for a volume or codex of text was ; Constantines famous letter ordering fty biblical codices, for instance, commissions fty easy-to-read volumes () in ornate leather covers.45 Thus, to capture better the somatic metaphors in this vocabulary we might translate the previous instance of as incorporating his text within the body of my text in sequence and in order. The Greco-Roman vocabulary of books anatomy was decidedly somatic (e.g.: , /membrane, , , , etc.).46 In the Phaedrus, Socrates famously likens good discourse to a well-structured body: . . . every discourse must, like a living being, have a body of its own, so that it is neither headless or footless, but has a middle and extremities which are composed proportionally to one another and the whole (Phdr. 264c).47 Composed here translates , and while most translations render it with the more general composed or arranged it connotes both writing and, particularly in the context of the Phaedrus, painting. By likening effective discourse to the painting of a living being, Socrates is setting the stage for his warning, discussed above, that written discourse is like a mute painting of a person that cant answer those who would question it. At the same time Phaedrus would encourage a somatization of speech, it also casts serious aspersions on incorporating words within the bodies of written pages. In comparing Eusebiuss and Platos vocabulary, then, I am not suggesting that these vocabularies are unique to or originate with them. Indeed, the verbal, both oral and written, was over-determined as somatic in Greek. Rather, the comparison reveals the valorization of different verbal embodiments; the living body of discourse and the noetic tablets within listeners minds, for the Phaedrus, the book of Plotinuss nous, for Porphyrys Life of Plotinus, and the written and bound , for Eusebius.
44.Contra Marcellum 1.1.6, my translation. Eusebiuss phrasing here can be compared with Origen, Contra Celsum prol.6.13. 45. Eus., V.C. 4.36.2: . 46. For each of these terms see relevant entries in LSJ. 47. . . . , , , (Phdr. 264c).
The Eusebian , moreover, for its part, is constituted by the incorporation of multiple authorial voices into a unied, orthodox text. Signicantly, in his short treatise On Pascha Eusebius uses the same verb, , to describe orthodox unity: We are reaped by the rational sickles of the apostles, the churches of the whole world being gathered together under one as if on a threshing-oor; we are made into one body through a harmonious disposition of faith ( ) and seasoned with the salt of the teachings derived from the divine oracles.48 Eusebiuss citation formulae in the Ecclesiastical History function within this somatized textuality. Here are a few illustrative examples:
1) Hear, then, what this [man/author] makes clear in the second book of The Jewish War, saying in these very words: [quotation from Josephus follows]. (H.E. 2.6.4) 2) And about the Septuagint translation of the divinely inspired writings hear what he writes verbatim: [quotation from Irenaeus follows]. (H.E. 5.8.10) 3) But hear, then, what he says verbatim: [quotation from Porphyry follows]. (H.E. 6.19.4)
These second-person singular imperatives function as elements of forensic rhetoric. Orators would often adduce the evidence of proof-texts, such as a pertinent law, to support the legal arguments. This was often done with second-person imperatives ordering a court ofcial to read documentary evidence or the text of a law.49 Eusebiuss quotational device thus imagines readers as the judges of his historical argument, of which the extensive quotations are the evidence. In terms of the texture of the work, though, the formulae are seams between Eusebiuss authorial voice and the voice of the quoted author(s). The demand to hear the words of the quoted
48. Eusebius, De Solemnitate Paschali (PG 24:700:811), trans. Mark DelCogliano, The Promotion of the Constantinian Agenda in Eusebiuss of Caesareas On the Feast of Pascha, in Reconsidering Eusebius, ed. S. Inowlocki and C. Zamagni (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 63. 49. See, for example, the many instances in the Demosthenian corpus; a by no means comprehensive list of the lemmata yielded by search of the complete TLG corpus by the terms * and * within one-lines proximity includes: de Cor. 118.2, 305.7; de falsa legatione 270.7; adv. Leptinem 35.6, 153.5, in Midiam 46.9, 52.1; in Timocratem 32.8; Pro Phormione 62.1; Contra Boeotum 136.8; Contra Eubolidem 31.6, etc. Among classical Attic orators see also Isocrates, Orat. 15 65.6; Isaeus, De Pyrrho 38.4; De Apollodoro 22.7, etc.; Aeschines, De falsa legatione 19.6.
author verbatim asks the reader (or, given communal reading practice, hearer) to differentiate the authoritys words from Eusebiuss, to recognize that the orthodox text consists not of the authors words but those of evidentiary texts. The same demand, though, asks the reader/hearer to take the others words as the words of Eusebiuss globalizing, authoritative argument. The tension between authorial individuation and orthodox univocality hangs together in the of the History, while the command to hear (signicantly, in the second person singular) asks the reader to act as the unifying container or space of that tension, to embody it in the somatic act of hearing.
The Gospel Preparation Eusebiuss other quotational masterpiece, the Gospel Preparation, is also a negotiation of authorial individuation and orthodox collectivity. But where the Ecclesiastical History weaves the voices of its source-texts into a linear narrative that ows diachronically, the Preparation is a more jarring experience. Rhetorically, the Preparation is a piece of forensic rhetoric. The fteen-book work is written to answer the accusation that Christians deserve punishment.
To what punishments may fugitives from ancestral customs, who have become zealots for the foreign mythologies of the Jews which are slandered by all not be subjected? How is it not extremely depraved and reckless to exchange native traditions casually and take up, with unreasonable and unreective faith, those of the impious enemies of all peoples?50
The work singles out the aporia that drives such accusations: Who are we, he writes, that is, are we Greeks or Barbarians, or what might there be between these?51 Eusebiuss answer is to work-over the holdings of his library. Eusebius cuts and sutures the Jewish and pagan books in his collectionseparating Hecataeuss voice from Josephuss in quotations from his Against Apion; obscuring the distinctions between the voice of Alexander Polyhistor and his Hellenistic Jewish sources; masking Josephuss voice within a quotation from Porphyry, and so forth, to weave a polyphonic text in which Jewish, Greek, and other voices resonate antiphonally and contrapuntally.52
50. Eus., P.E. 1.2.3 (GCS 43:9). 51. Eus., P.E. 1.2.3 (GCS 43:89). 52. For a detailed study of Eusebiuss citational and quotational poetics as it relates to his use of Hellenistic Jewish literature see Sabrina Inowlocki, Eusebius and the Jewish Authors: His Citation Technique in an Apologetic Context, Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity 64 (Leiden: Brill, 2006).
As a compendium of lengthy quotations from such a wide range of books the Preparation is not, of course, sui generis in classical and late-ancient literature. It lies at the nexus of a number of related genres and forms. Already in the second century, collections of scriptural proof texts served as the basis for apologetics against Jews and pagans.53 Eusebiuss own Prophetic Eclogues, a compendium of biblical proof-texts, is one of the earliest extant examples. The Gospel Demonstration developed this genre further, offering a fteen-book collection of proof-texts together with Eusebiuss apologetic exegeses. As a collection of noteworthy passages from a wide selection of works, the Preparation is also a variation on the tradition of the commonplace book or miscellany. Collections of interesting, odd, or otherwise note worthy selections from Greek and Latin literature were a well-known genre in antiquity. The second-century Latin writer Aulus Gellius lists works with titles like: The Muses, Rough Cuts, Athenas Mantle, Honey combs, Meadows, Readings from the Ancients, Flori legium, Problems, Handbook, and Stromateis.54 Eusebiuss assertion in the Ecclesiastical History that he has plucked useful words from the ancient writers themselves, as if from literary meadows, gestures explicitly towards the tradition of classical miscellany.55 Aulus Gellius describes his own miscellany (titled Attic Nights because it was begun to keep away boredom during the authors imperial assignment in Attica) as both an entertainment and a rst fruits of the liberal arts; he hopes his excerpts will prompt active and alert minds to a desire for independent learning.56 As a collection of excerpts copied in writing as an aid to memory (ad subsidium memoriae) and as a kind of literary storehouse (quoddam litterarum penus),57 the commonplace book represents, perhaps, an approach to written discourse most contrary to Phaedrian warnings against the short-circuiting of memory and the fetishization of the written word. The most direct inuence on the Gospel Preparation, however, was the
53. For a good overview of early Christian testimonia collections see Martin C. Albl, And Scripture Cannot Be Broken: The Form and Function of the Early Christian Testimonia Collections (Leiden: Brill, 1999), 97158. 54. Aulus Gellius, Noctes Atticae praef. 69 (Rolfe, xxviiixxix). 55. Eus., H.E. 1.1.4 (GCS 2:8). See also Ecl. 1 (PG 22:1024), where he uses the same phrase to describe his collection of extracts: a bouquet [or orilegium ()] from the literary meadows of God and likens himself to a bee itting from ower to ower. 56. Aulus Gellius, Noctes Atticae praef. 1, 1213 (Rolfe, xxvii, xxxxxxiii). 57. Aulus Gellius, Noctes Atticae praef. 12 (Rolfe, xxvixxvii).
tradition of Stromateis, or Patchworks. Eusebius knew the Stromateis of Plutarch (P.E. 1.7), but more importantly, he had read the Stromateis of Clement of Alexandria and Origen. Eusebiuss description of Clements book, moreover, gives a sense of how he understood such works.
Now in the Stromateis he has composed a patch-work, not only of the divine Scripture, but of the writings of the Greeks as well, if he thought that they also had said anything useful, and he mentions opinions from many sources, explaining Greek and barbarian alike, and moreover sifts the false opinions of the heresiarchs, and lays out much history, giving us a work of much learning. (H.E. 6.13.45 [trans. Oulton with slight modications])
He goes on to characterize Clements work as full of useful material (H.E. 6.13.8), an assessment borne out when we compare the Stromateis and the Preparation. Many of the authors and works mentioned or quoted by Clement are the same as those quoted by Eusebius, though Eusebius does appear to have gone back to the original sources himself, rather than quoting them directly from Clement.58 In the preface to the Stromateis, Clement explains that his choice of genre is prompted by his wrestling with the problem of writing precisely as it is posed in Platos Phaedrus.59 The entire rst chapter of the Stromateis is replete with allusions to and quotations from Phaedrus. Clement styles the work as a aid to my recollection (); his writing is merely an image and outline of those vigorous and ensouled words of those blessed men I was deemed worthy to hear.60 Clement nds space for Christian writing in his prefatory agon with the Phaedrus by submitting, in effect, to the Phaedrian subordination of writing and reading to speech and living dialectical relationships.61 But unlike Clement, Eusebius does not subordinate writing to a dialectical ideal. Instead, like the Apology for Origen, the Preparation embraces the practice of the miscellanyreading, excerpting, and rewritingas constitutive of Christian discourse. The Preparation, so to speak, acknowledges itself as a produced through material practices of reading and writ58. K. Mras, Einleitung, in GCS 43.1:LVLVIII. 59. Here I would agree with Andrew C. Itter (Esoteric Teaching in the Stromateis of Clement of Alexandria [Leiden: Brill, 2009], 11315) against John Ferguson (Clement of Alexandria [New York: Twayne Publishers, 1974]) that Clements invocation of the Phaedrus and his positioning of Christian writing in terms of the Phaedrian discussion of writing is deliberate. 60. Clement, Str. 1.14.1; 1.11.1. 61. See further Andrew C. Itters excellent comparison of the Stromateis and Phae drus in Esoteric Teaching, 11521; he does not go too far in suggesting that it is not difcult to imagine that the Stromateis represent an attempt by Clement to carry out the methodology espoused in Platos Phaedrus (121).
ing, rather than as a textually embodied conversation between master and student. Eusebiuss citation formulae are the spoor of his textual practice and, in turn, prompt a mode of reading that asks the reader to reproduce these interactions between reader and text. On nine occasions, Eusebius introduces quotations with second-person imperatives similar to those used in the Ecclesiastical History: You, taking [this book], read . . . ( . . .); Taking [the book], read to me from this rst [writer] these very statements ( ).62 The formulae do not embody a dialectic between master and student, but the instructions between author and amanuensis that were part of the practice of reading/writing. In turn, they encourage the reader, in his or her act of reading, to embody the practices of excerpting that produced the Preparation. The theory and ethic of textuality in the Preparation is much the same as that of the Apology and Ecclesiastical History. Each text that Eusebius inserts as a block quotation is ascribed to a distinct, individuated author. Eusebian authors are historically situated subjectshence the Preparation, as a reading of the Caesarian library, is also a reading/writing of history. Gentile authors are situated in lines of genealogical descent.63 Christian/ Hebrew authors are also related genealogically, but in a line of descent that is at once linear (at the level of embodied history) and non-linear (in so far as all Hebrew/Christian authors are Hebrew/Christian by virtue of their iteration of the transcendent, ahistorical truth.64 The engine driving this at once historical and transcendent genealogy is the same space of tension between individuation and transcendence within which Pamphilus and Eusebius crafted Origens orthodoxy in the Apology. In these Caesarean works, Christian textuality is simultaneously embodied (in historical works and their authors) and transcendent (assumed within an ahistorical intertextual network that exists beyond the bounds of individuation and history).
62. The 9 instances are: Eus., P.E. 3.praef.4; 6.7.43; 8.10.19; 9.1.4; 10.1.9; 13.praef.1; 13.18.18; 14.4.16; 14.22.17; see also two instances at H.E. 3.8.1; 3.23.5. 63. On ethnic reasoning in the Preparation see Aaron Johnson, Ethnicity and Argument in Eusebiuss Praeparatio Evangelica (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 64. On Eusebiuss distinction between Hebrews and Jews see further Jean Sirinelli, Les vues historiques dEusbe de Csare Durant la period prnicenne (Dakar: Universit de Dakar, 1961), 14763, Jrg Ulrich, Euseb von Caesarea und die Juden. Studien zur Rolle der Juden in der Theologie des Eusebius von Caesarea (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1999), 57132, Andrew Jacobs, Remains of the Jews: The Holy Land and Christian Empire in Late Antiquity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 2932, and Jeremy M. Schott, Christianity, Empire, and the Making of Religion in Late Antiquity (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 14954.
The Preparation composes a Christian subjectivity through its contrapuntal orchestration of myriad voices. The aporia from which the Preparation emerges (what could there possibly be between Jew and Greek?) troubles the Aristotelean logical principle of non-contradiction (how can something be both X and not X and still be?). The Preparation answers by constructing Christianity textually, within and through the tensions of that contradiction. This Christian text works because it exploits the fact of its own its ongoing deferment of stability and xity. The authorial/authoritative voice, present in the text as Eusebiuss glosses, chapter headings, and citation formulae, make up about twenty-ve percent of the printed GCS edition. This authoritative voice is squeezed between (sometimes all but buried under) the diverse body of quotation that makes up the majority of the text. The answer to the aporia of Christian identity, then, is answered not as much by Eusebius as compiler/author as by the assonances and dissonances among this multitude of copied voices.65 Read in terms of the letter of their argument, Eusebius and Pamphilus summon the words of the Fathers and other authorities to support a monological orthodoxy.66 The Apology for Origen, Ecclesiastical History,
65. My vocabulary here (e.g. polyphony, monologism, orchestration, etc.) is drawn in large part from the work of Mikhail Bakhtin. For Bakhtin, languageparticularly written languageis an embodiment of the fabric of the social text, and every utterance, every word, is shot through with the tension, conict, and competition that are the warp and woof of the social text. Thus language is always a multiplicity made up of different socially located languages: national languages (i.e. standard American English), dialects of different social strata, professional jargons, . . . languages of generations and age groups, . . . languages of the authorities, of various circles and passing fashions (Discourse in the Novel, in his The Dialogic Imagination, trans. C. Emerson and M. Holquist [Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1981], 26263). Indeed, each seemingly unitary utterance is many, and it is possible to give a concrete and detailed analysis of any utterance, once having exposed it as a contradiction-ridden, tension-lled unity of two embattled tendencies in the life of language (Discourse in the Novel, 272). Bakhtin presents the history of written art as a history of the ways in which different poetic modes (epic, satire, lyric, novel, and so forth) represent or embody language. In this account, certain nineteenth- and early twentieth-century novels (epitomized for Bakhtin by the novels of Dostoyevsky) manifest a poetics that embodies the inherent intertextuality of language. Such compositions, he argues, do not seek to obscure or clamp down on languages multiplicity, but embrace it as the very basis of novelistic aesthetics. 66. Bakhtin casts the drive to suppress languages multiplicity as monologism or authoritative discourse. His vocabulary recalls the vocabulary of early Christian orthodoxy: The authoritative word demands that we acknowledge it, that we make it our own. . . . The authoritative word is located in a distanced zone, organically connected with a past that is felt to be hierarchically higher. It is, so to speak, the word of the fathers. It is therefore not a question of choosing it from among other possible discourses that are its equal. . . . Its language is a special (as it were, hieratic)
and Gospel Preparation are progenitors of what would become the tractatio patrum, the tradition of authoritative quotation and citation of the Fathers,67 and its most developed embodiment, patristic orilegia. In so far as their method consists in adducing authoritative fathers whose words demand . . . unconditional allegiance,68 Pamphilus and Eusebius certainly appear exceptionally monological. Their habit of extensive verbatim quotation would be symptomatic of their submission to the hegemony of the authoritative word. Read this way, the Caesareans seem to foster a decidedly inert, calcied (monological and authoritative) textuality.69 Read in terms of their poetics, however, these texts are quite conscious of the tensions and competition through and within which they are produced. At the same time it insists on unequivocal orthodoxy, the Apology for Origen is a prison notebook addressed, in part, to other imprisoned confessors, and viscerally aware of the contingency of embodimenthuman and verbal. Begun shortly after the end of the persecution and before the battle of Chrysopolis, the Gospel Preparation is likewise tension-lled. The text opens knowing that the monological Christianity it seeks to construct may merely be a trackless desert path and closes with another question: why, indeed, when we are foreigners and aliens, do we use their books, which, as they would say, have nothing to do with us?70 The Preparations quotational poetics look to construct an orthodox discourse that is constituted, as we have seen, by calling conspicuous attention to the aporia of its own intertextuality. Quotations are read primarily in terms of rhetorical workmanship on the part of an author/compileras sites where we can observe the author deploying sources to build his argument. But the works of the Caesareans ought to prompt us to consider text as a productivitynot simply as a place in which questions are answered and identity secured, but rather
language. It can be profaned. It is akin to taboo, i.e., a name that must not be taken in vain (Discourse in the Novel, 342). 67. For two seminal treatments of patristic quotation in the Latin tradition see Mark Vessey, The Forging of Orthodoxy in Latin Christian Literature: A Case Study, JECS 4 (1996): 495513 and ric Rebillard, A New Style of Argument in Christian Polemic: Augustine and the Use of Patristic Citations, JECS 8 (2000): 55978. 68. Bakhtin, Discourse in the Novel, 343. 69. As Bakhtin puts it, describing authoritative discourse in terms that could quite easily describe the Caesarian quotational habit: Authoritative discourse cannot be representedit is only transmitted. Its inertia, . . . the impermissibility of any free stylistic development in relation to itall this renders the artistic representation of authoritative discourse impossible (Discourse in the Novel, 344). 70. Eus., P.E. 1.2.4 and 15.62.18.
as an agon in which subjectivity is always en procsin process and on trial.71 Such a reading would decenter texts as singular products of authorial writing and instead focus on the text as productive of various subjectivities. To enter the textual space of the Apology or the Preparation, written works must be valorized through ascription to authorial personae. On the other hand, the orthodox textas an orchestration of voicesdepends on a simultaneous erasure and re-inscription of authorial subjects.72 The polyphonic possibilities of the Preparation are evident to anyone who has ever read selections from it aloud. When we approach the event horizon of a Eusebian quotation do we inect our tone? How far and in what ways does Eusebiuss authorial voice blend with the voice of the quotation? Things are complicated further in cases where quotations lie embedded within quotations. One faces a similar problem in editing or translating the Preparationwhat are we to do orthographically? Typeface shifts? Quotes, embedded quotes? Footnotes along with an index of sources?73 In antiquity, moreover, reading and writing were social processes. Eusebius and Pamphilus, like other ancient writers, would have dictated to secretaries, instructing others when to fetch and quote a source. The traces of this process are evident in Eusebiuss formulae ordering the reader to pick up and read.74 In the Ecclesiastical History, moreover, Eusebius
71. Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. M. Waller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 58. 72. Kristeva contends that writing inevitably calls into question the unity and identity of subjects denoted in a text. Writers are never straightforwardly present in a text; rather, they are present only as, in Kristevas terminology, subjects of utterancein the Apology, Ecclesiastical History, and Gospel Preparation these are the pronominal subjects of citation formulae (he says), the authorial I, magisterial We, and you in imperatives like taking this up, read . . . . (Word, Dialogue, Novel, in her Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, trans. T. Gora, A. Jardine, and L. Roudiez [New York: Columbia University Press, 1980], 7475). Subjects of utterance, the Is, shes, hes, wes, and yous of a text, are transpositional. For Kristeva, it is this transposability that catalyzes intertextuality at the same time that it marks its inherent instability (Revolution in Poetic Language, 60). 73. In antiquity, there were several ways of distinguishing quotations in a manuscript typographically, either by placing sigla in the margins, indenting the margins (similar to our block quote), or by using different inks or fonts. See discussion in Sabrina Inowlocki, Eusebius and the Jewish Authors (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 36 and nn.2022. 74. From this, Karl Mras imagines a vignette of Eusebian writing: Eusebius sits on his Episcopal throne, surrounded by his deacons, who are also amanuenses and tachygraphoi (secretaries and shorthand writers), in the diocesan library at Caesarea. Commands like taking this, read it are naturally directed at the reader. But nothing stops us from assuming that they also applied to the deacons who surrounded Eusebius. What one deacon read aloud, the next one copied down. And at the conclusion
provides a description of Origens circle of copyists and note-takers that likely also presents an idealized picture of his own writing process.
For as he dictated there were ready at hand more than seven shorthandwriters, who relieved each other at xed intervals, and as many copyists, as well as girls trained in beautiful-writing. (H.E. 6.23.2 [Oulton, 69])
The writing of a work like the Preparation involved a veritable chorus. The text would quite literally have been produced out of different socially located voices: that of Eusebius the author/bishop as he dictated, but also those of his amanuenses as they read back the text for correction and editing. Seated on his bishops throne Eusebius imposes monologic unity on the orthodox text. Yet, how might the taking and reading of different quoted texts be voiced differently by Eusebius? By Theodotus, bishop of Laodicea, to whom Eusebius dedicated the Preparation (or, more likely, one of Theodotuss secretaries as he read it aloud to Theodotus and his presbyters)?75 Eusebiuss amanuenses? His female scribes?76 And, of course, ourselves, as in our scholarly practice we consider what voicings and subjectivities may yet be possible in the space of this text, in its production and reproduction? Eusebius recognized, as it were, the productive possibilities of his quotational poetics. A great throng of ancient and recent witnesses pours down upon me, Eusebius remarks within the Preparation, but since I am anxious about the length of my text, I leave their utterances for students to search for and study.77 In such a textuality, the engagement between reader/writer and text is not dead, as the Phaedrus would have it; rather, it demands constant interrogation of anothers words and forces the reader/writer ever deeper into the text to consider the positions she/he will take in relation to his or her words and the words of others.
of each reading, Eusebius offered his own commentary . . . which [was] also written down (Einleitung, in GCS 2:lviii [trans. in Grafton and Williams, Transformation, 21213]). 75. For the dedication to Theodotus see Eus., P.E. 1.1.1; for the dedication of the Gospel Demonstration to Theodotus as well see D.E. 1.proem.1. Theodotus was part of the Eusebian alliance during the theological controversies surrounding Arius of Alexandria; for an excellent recent study of Theodotuss role among the Eusebians see Mark DelCogliano, The Eusebian Alliance: the Case of Theodotus of Laodicea, ZAC/JAC 12 (2008): 25066. 76. For a discussion of Eusebiuss mention of female scribes or girls trained in beautiful writing ( ) (H.E. 6.23), and the tendency among scholars to domesticate them within modern historical narratives of late-ancient literary culture see Kim Haines-Eitzen, Guardians of Letters: Literacy, Power, and the Transmitters of Early Christian Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 4243. 77. Eus., P.E. 9.42.
CONCLUSION: PORPHYRIAN AND CAESAREAN TEXTUALITIES Estranged siblings, the Origenist and Plotinian traditions were born in Alexandria but reared abroad. And both the Porphyrian and Caesarean trajectories of these traditions sought and practiced an ethic of textualityways of thinking and doing reading and writing that made sense within their broader metaphysical and theological schemas. Within both communities, written embodiment existed in a dynamic relationship with master-disciple relationshipsthe basis of two . By treating neoplatonic and Caesarian textualities as, in part, negotiations of the Phaedrian problem of writing highlights what Porphyry, Pamphilus, and Eusebius all came to confront in their own experience: embodiment within living dialectical communities is limited by physical death in ways that embodiment in written texts is not. In Socrates myth of Theuth, writing is offered as an aid to memory; Platos Phaedrus, being the textualization of Socratic relationships, suggests that it is also a solution to the physical death of masters and disciples. The difference between the Porphyrian and Caesarean textualities, then, is not a stark and absolute distinction, but of the varying ways each tradition embraced the possibilities and aesthetics of textuality. For neoplatonists like Porphyry, writing was a condition of embodiment. Reading served as a prod to the souls native memory-work. As Sara Rappe has pointed out, however, the insistence of neoplatonists that genuine knowledge consists in the identity of the subject and object of knowledge serves to subordinate all discursive activityoral and written.78 The achievement of true being depends on the erasure of the subject/object dichotomyin the transcendence of difference/diffrance that is the condition for discourse itself.79 Thus Plotinus describes the souls coming to knowledge of the One: being one by being one with it, . . . because [the soul] is not other than that which is being known.80 According to Porphyry, this state of self-actualizationwhich is, by denition, the erasure of difference upon which self dependsis attainable by the embodied soul: Plotinus, he claims, reached this state of transcendence four times; he claims to have achieved it once himself (Plot. 23.1317). One might argue
78. Sara Rappe, Reading Neoplatonism: Non-discursive Thinking in the Texts of Plotinus, Proclus, and Damascius (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 79. As Sara Rappe has suggested, Plotinian Platonisms insistence on the immediacy and non-discursivity of Intellect stands in contrast to the Platonic tendency toward the ontological deferment of meaning critiqued by Derrida (Reading Neoplatonism, 11214). 80. Enn. 6.9 (9) 3.1013 (trans. Armstrong, 31011, with slight modications).
that the neoplatonic tradition did not seek to embody itself in a literature. Instead emphasis in face-to-face teaching and personal transmission from master to student is altogether in keeping with the neoplatonic contemplative praxis that purported to cultivate a wisdom existing outside the parameters of language.81 The neoplatonists imagined themselves as a community that subsisted in relationships with philosophical masters, not their books. Thus the only extant late-ancient commentary on the Phae drus, that of the fth-century Alexandrian philosopher Hermias, reads in the Phaedruss valorization of living dialectic evidence for the institutional legitimacy of the Platonic , or succession.82 But, as we have seen, within Porphyrys philosophical community writing and living relationships were inextricable. This interlacing of writing and living dialectic is what makes the Life of Plotinus an ironic meditation on the Phaedrus. It is the portrait of a living dialectical community, but it is a portrait painted with the spoorletters, polemical treatises, and Ploti nuss literary corpusof a community subsisting in written communication.83 As shown above, however, Porphyrys careful reading, editing, and reinscription of Plotinuss verbal errors (Amerius/Amelius; / ) points to the value of writing as a paideutic and ascetic exercise. By working at the text, like Porphyry working over the Enneads, we can learn to transcend embodiment and teach or recall to the soul its nature and worth.84 As a trajectory or vector, the Life of Plotinus is a circular, recursive textuality.85 The motion that the Life encouragestextualizing the transcended Plotinus, then leading the reader into the text in order to transcend itis akin to the trajectory of souls in the Phaedrus, cyclically transcending embodiment and becoming, only to descend again into matter.
81. Rappe, Reading Neoplatonism, 235. 82. Here (Phdr. 276a) he [i.e. Plato] compares soul-less and ensouled discourse. I call soul-less that which he calls illegitimate written discourse, but [what he calls] its legitimate brother, [I call] ensouled, namely, discourse sown in the soul of the learner, whenever someone is able to take a student, as Socrates took Plato, Plato Xenocrates, Xenocrates Polemon, and so we have the succession (Hermias, in Phdr. 258.30259.1; text in P. Couvreur, Hermeias von Alexandrien. In Platonis Phaedrum scholia [Paris: Bouillon, 1901, repr. Hildesheim: Olms, 1971], my translation). 83. Perhaps because it is most often read as a rst-hand account by a student of his teacher, a detailed study of the works that help comprise the Life of Plotinus remains a desideratum; these sources include a letter of Cassius Longinus and the preface of his treatise Against Plotinus and Gentilianus Amelius, On the End (Plot. 19.742; 20.17104), a letter of Amelius (Plot. 17.1644), and an oracle of Apollo (22.13 63), as well as references to other works written within and outside Plotinuss circle. 84. Enn. 5.1 (10).1 (trans. Armstrong, 1213). 85. Plotinuss metaphor for the epoptic knowledge of Intellect is similarly ironic: it is as it were like the human mind instantly cognizing what is signied by hieroglyphs carved on temple walls, without the intermediary of phonemes (Enn. 5.8 [31] 6.19).
Pamphiluss circle, too, valued living community; the bulk of The Martyrs of Palestine is nothing if not a eulogy for Eusebiuss lost hetairoi and their shared literary-ascetic labors. Yet, with the Apology for Origen, we catch glimpses of a different negotiation of writing and death upon the eve of Pamphiluss martyrdom. In the Apology, and to an even greater extent in the Ecclesiastical History and Gospel Preparation, to be orthodox, Christian, is, in effect, to embody and be embodied in reading and writing. This textual ethic motivates Jeromes well-known comment about his copy of Origens Commentary on the Twelve Prophets copied by Pamphilus: I hug and guard [them] with such joy, that I deem myself to have the wealth of Croesus. And if it is such joy to have one epistle of a martyr how much more to have so many thousand lines which seem to me to be traced in his blood.86 Eusebiuss fate in the history of Christian visual culture, where gurative representations of Eusebiuss human body are absent in the iconographic tradition, also embodies this ethic. Instead of icons, Eusebius is visually present in so many medieval and Byzantine manuscripts as the Eusebian Canon Tables and their associated cross-referencing notations. For Byzantine and western medieval readers, Eusebiuss textualized body energized or facilitated the intertextual network or system of relations that held together and aided a reader in entering ever deeper into the Gospel texta text at once individuated and unitary. Eusebiuss and Pamphiluss work is seen as unoriginaltheir compila tions preserve voices from the past, but that is all. Such evaluations depend on notions of authorship (Phaedrian notions) that see writing as a substitute for living speech and measure the worth of written discourse by how successfully it imitates or represents the original thoughts of an authors soul. Pamphiluss and Eusebiuss approach to writing and authorship stems, in part, upon Platonic speculation on writing and authorship, bequeathed to them largely through the Alexandrian/Origenist tradition. Indeed, after the death of Pamphilus and his in the Great Persecution, the process of writing may have served Eusebius as a substitute for the living community of discourse prized by Platonists like Porphyry and their own Origenian predecessor, Gregory. This substitute, importantly for the history of Christian textuality, posited Christian discourse in the space of the text. Jeremy Schott is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Indiana Univesity, Bloomington
86. Jerome, De viris inlustribus 75 (trans. NPNF2 3:377).

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