As we have seen (in our previous article), Ephraim used different literary genres depending on their aptitude for his present literary purposes. Moreover, he recognized the same propensity in his biblical forbearers and deployed such a hermeneutical cognizance and literary consciousness in his interpretive enterprise in that separate kinds of Semitic literature require their own special treatment.1 We have drawn attention to the textual sensitivities in Ephraim—in medias res—for two important reasons: First—per the structure of our argument—to introduce a significant contrast between this literary sensitivity and its palpable absence in Origen. But more broadly—per the substance of our argument—the Alexandrian approach represents but one vision of a fruitful confluence of Christianity and the Hellenic intellectual culture of Antiquity. This same literary sensitivity and hermeneutical sophistication was likewise possible in the thoroughly Greek intellectual culture of the classical rhetorical tradition—paideia. A tradition whose methodologies and concerns are on display in the Antiochene interpreters. Thus, this Hellenistic patrimony did not exclusively or even primarily consist of its philosophical tradition and the emergent Neoplatonism in the era in question: what we shall call the limited or lesser patrimony. As we will demonstrate, the Antiochenes possessed the fuller provisions of their intellectual culture: our greater patrimony.
The importance of paideia for Christendom in its inceptional moment as it was birthed in Late Antiquity cannot be overestimated. However, in so much theological historiography of emergent Christendom, cognizance of this larger praxis of culture creation is conspicuously absent, and the focus seems to land on how the more limited intellectual tradition of philosophy—and Platonism in particular—was transformatively appropriated by the Late Antique Church. Take for example Jaroslav Pelikan’s magisterial classic Christianity and Classical Culture.2 The subtitle however quickly disabuses the reader of any expectation of a comprehensive treatment of classical culture and emergent Christendom…The Metamorphosis of Natural Theology in the Christian Encounter with Hellenism. Far from being a thorough exploration of the like as witnessed in the Cappadocian Fathers; it is rather limited to the use and adaptations of the Neoplatonic tradition. This is of course decisively important to the history of theology, particularly dogmatic theology. But so likewise is the role of the larger contribution of the fuller equipage of Hellenic intellectual culture. Often, such wider explorations are carried out in tendential fields to that of theology such as the classics, history, and cultural studies. And though the theologian may find these treatments in other fields helpful in his discipline this lacuna somewhat obscures just how decisive this larger tradition—not just in content, but praxis and ethos—has been in the formation of Christian thought.
In contribution to this redress, we will explore the tensions between the Alexandrian and Antiochian schools in Antiquity. What salience does this rivalry between two exegetical traditions in Antiquity possibly have to contemporary scholarship or theology so often as it is read as a complementary tension or ignored altogether? It is our contention that the failure to recognize the importance of this conflict is largely due to understanding these schools as schools and thus definitionally tethered to a set of exegetical forms and procedures that are almost never exclusively held in practice. Indeed, the products of these schools in the form of sermons, commentaries, or theological treatises are all but undifferentiable to the non-specialist outside of their most characteristic exemplars. If we look at the rivalry as two theoretical methodologies that produced similar content, then the scholarly (near) consensus may be a correct one. But what was at issue to those involved in this conflict (and the wider problematic with Origenism) reveals that something more fundamental was being contested. Namely, how Hellenic intellectual culture was to be used by the Church. And it was not nearly as simple as for or against the Hellenistic patrimony. We propose a reading of the conflict not as a geographic rivalry but as witnessing different levels of appropriation of the bifurcated tradition of Antique paideia: a dual patrimony consisting of the formative program of Socrates and his philosophical descendants, and a wider rhetorical and intellectual tradition, paideia as such.
The lesser (Socratic-Platonic) and the greater intellectual traditions developed unique methods in service to the praxiological priorities of their respective hermeneutics. Both the broader paideia and the Socratic-Platonic paideia that existed alongside or within it, did different things toward different ends. The former (wider paideia) appropriated in the Antiochene school transmitted culture via careful instilment and study of its (literary) content. The latter (the Socratic-Platonic), appropriated by the Alexandrian school, sought to foster a political-ethical (and later metaphysical) specialist class within the broader high culture of Hellenism. Both of these praxiologies have fateful affordances for emerging Christendom. The greater tradition of paideia, tooled as it was for cultural transmission and reception, was decisive to this new culture (Christendom) in its inception.
The lesser tradition was likewise crucial. However, so much scholarship has been devoted to exploring this that our contribution would be quite superfluous. We shall rather focus not on the affordances of the Platonic tradition and its paideia in emergent Christendom, but on its constraints. That is, how it limited, frustrated, and theologically misdirected and preoccupied that very process of cultural emergence. In this rivalry, we can glimpse the fuller confluence between emergent Christianity and the varied tributaries of the Hellenic intellectual tradition. And in such a glimpse the very dynamics of Christian cultural inception so salient for our age which once again witnessing an epochal transition.
To better understand how paideia functioned within Late Antique culture, the certain bifurcated tension within it—what we have called the greater and lesser patrimony—and its bearing upon emergent Christendom, a more thorough exploration of the causal factors and the social and theoretical dynamism of this tradition are merited.
Cf. Sebastian Brock’s insightful introduction of Ephraim’s Hymns on Paradise (Crestwood: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1990), subsection “St Ephrem’s Concept of Paradise”, pp 49-57.
Jaroslav Pelikan. Christianity and Classical Culture: The Metamorphosis of Natural Theology in the Christian Encounter with Hellenism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993).