Philosophy and Theology in Late Antiquity

Some reflections on concepts and terminologies

Johannes Zachhuber, University of Oxford

1 Introduction
The question of the relationship between nascent Christian thought in late antiquity and the
philosophical tradition is neither new nor original.1 Of the various answers that have been
proposed, however, many can be classified into a binary according to which Christian thought in
the Patristic period is either seen as primarily opposed to philosophy or as strongly, potentially
unduly, dependent on it. In this chapter, I shall query this alternative and argue that it rests on
an ultimately anachronistic distinction between philosophy and theology. Instead I will seek to
demonstrate that Patristic ‘theology’ can helpfully be understood in analogy to a philosophical
school. By carefully examining the potential as well as the limitations of this analogy, my paper
aims at an understanding of ancient Christian thought as fully embedded in its historical context
while reckoning with its sui-generis character.

The binary of what one may call the ‘dependency thesis’ and the ‘opposition thesis’ with their
many sub-options and variants has had far-reaching consequences for Patristic scholarship. The
former of the two viewpoints has led researchers to trace Patristic ideas to their roots in the
philosophies of Plato, Aristotle or the Stoics.2 More recently, scholars have also ventured
further afield and included late ancient philosophers, such as Plotinus, Porphyry or Iamblichus,
in their consideration of sources.3 Yet the question is inevitably one of origins; philosophical
passages in Patristic texts are systematically mined for their dependence on pagan
philosophical writers. A whole literature exists of articles and even monographs investigating
the Fathers’ knowledge and use of philosophical authorities, or at least their familiarity with
ideas prevalent in those non-Christian texts.

Where scholars have opted for the ‘opposition thesis’, emphasising the distance between

1 Earlier versions of this paper were presented to the Boston Colloquy of Historical Theology
and the Wednesday Club at Oxford. I would like to thank the participants of those events for
helpful questions and criticisms of my argument. Prof Mark Edwards read a draft of the paper
and offered valuable observations on its topic.
2 Classical treatments along those lines include H. Chadwick, Early Christian Thought and the

Classical Tradition, Oxford 1966; A.H. Armstrong/R. Markus, Christian Faith and Greek
Philosophy, London 1960; Endre von Ivanka, Plato Christianus: Übernahme und Umgestaltung
des Platonismus durch die Väter, Einsiedeln 1964.
3 Cf. the detailed and subtle use of the neo-pythagorean theory of numbers in Klaus Seibt’s

interpretation of Marcellus of Ancyra’s Trinitarian doctrine: Die Theologie des Markell von
Ankyra, Berlin/New York 1994, 460–476. On a grander scale this attempt is made across the
impressive oeuvre of Ilaria Ramelli.

1
Patristic authors and Hellenistic philosophy, they have consequently tended to discount
philosophical parallels and have focused instead on specifically doctrinal issues, on scriptural
exegesis, or the history of liturgy – usually from a perspective that is immanent to the Christian
tradition.

It should be immediately apparent from this rough and simplistic sketch that both viewpoints
have spawned genuinely fruitful research. In proposing a different approach, my aim therefore
is not to denounce them as wrong or unhelpful. Scholarship conducted along those lines has led
to valuable insight and provided essential knowledge and understanding of Christian thought
and practice in late antiquity. Nevertheless, there are downsides to this bifurcation; notably it
seems to me that we lose sight of something which, once again for want of a better word, I
would call the philosophical dimension that is inherent in Patristic thought itself.

This philosophical dimension of Patristic thought is most obvious in areas with a thematic
overlap between Patristic and pagan philosophical writings. Examples include debates about
first principles (ἀρχαί);4 cosmology;5 the origin of matter;6 the doctrine of the soul;7 ethics;8 and
so forth. More recently, some philosophers have shown an interest in Patristic texts dealing
with those topics; there is now a nascent field of specialisation known as ‘Patristic philosophy’
whose most impressive representative to date is arguably George Karamanolis’ The Philosophy
of Early Christianity.9 Karamanolis, on the basis of an expert understanding of Greek
philosophy, both classical and late ancient, approaches a wide variety of Patristic texts as
philosophy to encourage his philosophical colleagues, as it were, to take Christian authors more
seriously as genuine participants in the major philosophical controversies of the time.

Once again, there is a fruitful scholarly field to be explored. Yet it is arguable that this recent
embrace of Patristic philosophy has not gone far enough. In restricting itself to those areas in
which Christian and pagan thinkers shared common concerns, a philosophical reading of the
Fathers stays too much on the surface (or on the fringes) of Patristic thought and writing.
Philosophy is still seen as something extraneous to the Christian tradition with which Christian
authors happened to coincide every once in a while.

4 G. Karamanolis, The Philosophy of Early Christianity, Durham 2013, 66–72.

5 G. May, Creatio ex Nihilo: The Doctrine of ‘Creation out of Nothing’ in Early Christian Thought,
Edinburgh 1994.
6 Ch. Köckert, Christliche Kosmologie und kaiserzeitliche Philosophie, Tübingen 2009.
7 Cf. I. Ramelli (ed.), Gregorio di Nisa: Sull’anima e la resurrezione, Milan 2007; Karamanolis, op.

cit., 181–213.
8 P. Thorsteinsson, Roman Christianity and Roman Stoicism: A comparative study of Ancient

morality, Oxford 2010; H. Merki, ΩΜΟΙΩΣΙΣ ΘΕΩΙ: Von der platonischen Angleichung an Gott zur
Gottähnlichkeit bei Gregor von Nyssa, Freiburg 1952.
9 Karamanolis, op. cit. In addition, cf. R. Sorabji, Time, Creation, and the Continuum: Theories in

antiquity and the early Middle Ages, London 1983; I. Ramelli, The Christian Doctrine of
Apokatastasis: A critical assessment from the New Testament to Eriugena, Leiden 2013.

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By contrast, I would argue that philosophy extends right to the heart of Patristic thought. In
order to grasp this possibility, we need to take seriously the philosophical dimension of doctrine
itself. In a wider sense, of course, the philosophical debates Karamanolis and others have
explored are also related to doctrine, for example the doctrine of creation. Christian authors
writing on cosmology were mindful of the tenet, generally accepted at least since the third
century, that God created the world ex nihilo, from nothing.10 Similarly, Christians writing on
the soul were guided by doctrinal assumptions about the resurrection of the body and, from a
certain point onwards, the rejection of metempsychosis.11 What I have in mind, however, is the
Trinitarian and Christological dogma, the two areas on which the ancient Church sought to
arrive at a unified position and which, in consequence, took up vastly more time, energy, and
intellectual creativity than any other topic Patristic authors dealt with in their writings.
Unsurprisingly, therefore, the use of philosophical concepts in these doctrinal debates has
proved most controversial in past scholarly debates.

A classic example is the Patristic adoption of physis-terminology.12 The term is popular with
Origen already,13 becomes central to the philosophically sophisticated and proto-systematic
writing of Gregory of Nyssa14 and eventually found its place at the very centre of Christian
doctrinal identity due to its inclusion in the Chalcedonian definition of faith in 451. At first sight,
this is a paradigmatic case of what Harnack called the ‘hellenisation of the gospel’. Physis had
been a term central to the emergence of Greek philosophy in the fifth century, and its unique
ontological potency can be said to embody much that is specific or even unique about this
intellectual tradition. It is notoriously untranslatable; its Latin equivalent natura is an artificial
word coined to render Greek philosophy. It is no accident that modern European languages
have mostly simply borrowed from either the Greek or the Latin in order to express what
appears to be a specific set of notions connected with the term from its historical inception.

Unsurprisingly, therefore, there was originally no Hebrew equivalent of physis,15 and the term is
consequently absent from the Hebrew Bible. In its Greek version, the Septuagint, the word is
almost entirely restricted to those books that were presumably written in Greek without a
Hebrew original. More intriguingly, physis is also largely absent from the vocabulary of the New
Testament – in fact, strikingly so given its popularity with contemporary Hellenistic Jewish

10 May, op. cit., 177–8.

11 Gregory of Nyssa, de anima et resurrectione, PG 46, 103B–121A.
12 Cf. for what follows: J. Zachhuber, ‘Physis’, in: Reallexikon für Antike und Christentum, ed. G.

Schöllgen et al., vol. 27, Stuttgart 2016, 744–81.

13 P. Tzamalikos, Origen – Cosmology and Ontology of Time, Leiden 2005. Zachhuber, op. cit.,

762–3.
14 J. Zachhuber, Human Nature in Gregory of Nyssa: Philosophical Background and Theological

Significance, Leiden 1999; id., ‘Physis’, in: L.F. Mateo-Seco/G. Maspero (eds.), The Brill
Dictionary of Gregory of Nyssa, Leiden 2010, 615–20.
15 The modern ‫ טבע‬is first introduced in translations of Greek philosophical texts.

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writers such as Josephus.16 In a word, Patristic predilection for this kind of terminology has
practically no biblical basis while evidently harking back to a long and powerful tradition of pre-
Christian philosophy. This aspect of Patristic thought has therefore unsurprisingly often been
seen as emblematic of the illegitimate influence of pagan thought on Christian doctrine. For
example, the influential nineteenth century theologian, Albrecht Ritschl, directed some of his
most scathing attacks against the allegedly ‘physical’ tendency of Patristic theology which,
according to him, was one of the insidious instances of the falsification of the gospel message
by later Christian theology.17 This line of argument has cast a long shadow over Patristic
scholarship because it was taken up and amplified by Ritschl’s student, Adolf Harnack in his
magisterial History of Dogma.18

And yet, a more careful study of the use of this kind of language by Christian authors soon
reveals that the evidence for continuing extraneous philosophical influence on these debates is
really rather limited. Instead, a clear sense of a specific, Christian understanding of physis is
emerging early on even though this use is in itself diverse and often not without ambiguity. The
Jewish thinker, Philo of Alexandria, is arguably the most important source for later Christian
authors. For the early development of a Christian idiom Origen is then crucial, and in the late
fourth century Gregory of Nyssa develops a comprehensive conceptual framework for which
physis-terminology is central. Later theological debates draw on this foundation; their
participants develop further, more systematic and at times more sophisticated concepts and
definitions based on the work of earlier Christian thinkers.

This observation, it seems to me, is not easily compatible with either of the two standard views
I introduced earlier. On the one hand, the Patristic tradition (in which, for the sake of the
argument, I here include Philo), while not hermetically sealed off from earlier philosophical
ideas, developed its most substantial concepts on its own not by systematic dependence on
external sources. On the other hand, however, the very centrality of physis-terminology for
doctrinal development suggests that Patristic theology cannot be considered as inherently non-
philosophical or even anti-philosophical. We might rather say that the Patristic tradition itself
was or at least became a form of philosophy. It is for this reason that sooner or later Patristic
authors began to write treatises on definitions of physis and similar terms, as their doctrinal use
appeared to require careful distinctions and differentiations similar to what philosophical

16 The only occurrences in the New Testament are: Rom. 2, 14; Gal. 4, 8; 2 Pt 1, 4. For
contextualisation and detailed references including usage in Josephus, cf. H. Koester, ‘φύσις’,
in: Theologisches Wörterbuch zum Neuen Testament, ed. G. Friedrich, vol. 9, Stuttgart 1973,
263–4; 264–70.
17 A. Ritschl, A Critical History of the Christian Doctrine of Justification and Reconciliation, trans.

J. Black, Edinburgh 1872, 8.

18 A. Harnack, History of Dogma, trans. N. Buchanan et al., New York 1958, vol. 3, 297 and note

580. For the historical background cf. J. Zachhuber, ‘Albrecht Ritschl and the Tübingen School. A
neglected link in the history of 19th century theology’, in: Zeitschrift für neuere
Theologiegeschichte 18 (2011), 51–70.

4
authors were doing in their schools.19

At precisely this point the need emerges to query the categories by which we understand the
emergence of Christian thought in late antiquity. It is arguable that the two opposing theses
from which I started share the assumption that Christian ‘theology’ and ‘philosophy’ are two
categorically distinct realities. It is therefore possible, as well as necessary, to trace
‘philosophical’ sources of ‘theological’ views, critique philosophical influence on Christian
thought or investigate theology more or less in isolation from its Hellenistic environment. Is this
underlying premise, however, plausible and helpful from a historical point of view?

2. Philosophy and theology – conceptual and terminological clarifications

The distinction between philosophy and theology is today usually conceived as a duality of
disciplines. Historically, this distinction originated with the foundation of the Western medieval
university and its separate philosophical and theological faculties. It is this institutionalisation of
philosophy and theology as two faculties that has above all dominated our perception of them
as ‘disciplines’.20 The same duality cannot, however, be presupposed in the Patristic era. Part of
the reason is that the word ‘theology’, even though it is well attested in classical and post-
classical Greek, did not – contrary to our intuition – offer itself as an obvious term to signify
Christian reflection on their faith.

Let us look at the evidence.21 While the term theologia rather obviously means ‘speech’ or
‘word’ about God, in ancient usage it usually refers to poetic speech of God. ‘Theologians’,
therefore, were first of all the great poets, such as Hesiod, Homer or Orpheus.22 The term could
secondly signify those who would perform hymns to the deity at local cults, occasionally also
those doing so as part of the imperial cult.23 As there were male and female deities, there were
also male and female theologians.

Put simply, theologia was what theologians produced. In one magical papyrus from late

19 E.g. Ps.-Athanasius, Liber de definitionibus; Leontius of Jerusalem, adv. Nestorianos II 1. Cf.

Chr. Furrer-Pilliod (ed.), ῞Οροι καὶ ὑπογραφαί: Collections alphabétiques de définitions profanes
et sacrées, Studi e Testi 395, Vatican City 2000. For Maximus Confessor cf. P. van Deun,
‘Maximus the Confessor’s Use of Literary Genres, in: P. Allen/B. Neil (eds.), The Oxford
Handbook of Maximus the Confessor, Oxford 2015, 274–86, here: 281.
20 Cf. B. Geyer, ‘Facultas theologica. Eine bedeutungsgeschichtliche Untersuchung’ in: Zeitschrift

für katholische Theologie 75: 133–45; W. Pannenberg, Wissenschaftstheorie und Theologie,

Frankfurt/M. 1973, 11-2.
21 Cf. for what follows the well-informed overview in: C. Markschies, Kaiserzeitliche christliche

Theologie und ihre Institutionen, Tübingen 2009, 16-27.

22 Aristotle, met B 4, 1000a 9–11; Clement of Alexandria, protrepticus II 26,6; stromata V 78,4;

Origenes, c Celsum I 25; Damascius, de princ 67 (I 146, 15 Ruelle).

23 F. Poland, Geschichte des griechischen Vereinswesens, Leipzig 1909, 46-8. For the more

complicated use of theologos in the context of the imperial cult cf. the detailed references in
Markschies, op. cit., 18-9.

5
antiquity, the term refers to a brief formula of invocation: ‘Come in; appear to me, Lord’.24
More common was its use for hymns about the gods or for mythological speech about God or
the gods. Later Platonists, such as Iamblichus or Proclus, occasionally used the term in a more
philosophical context, but note that for those same thinkers the line between philosophy and
myth was blurred as they considered it a mark of true philosophy to make use of poetic and
mythological sources for their own philosophical reflection.

Given the strong link between theologia and pagan religiosity, Christian thinkers were
unsurprisingly reluctant to make use of the word and its cognates; throughout the Patristic
period they were only infrequently employed. Where Christian authors did use them, it should
not be assumed that ‘theology’ or ‘theologian’ is an accurate translation. St John the Evangelist
is called theologos because of the great, poetic prologue with which the gospel started,25 not
necessarily because he was deemed more of a ‘theologian’ than, say Paul (who admittedly is
referred to as ‘the theologian’ by Didymus the Blind26). It is similarly likely that Gregory of
Nazianzus owed his title of theologos to his status as a ‘poet’ of divine things.

Even where no specific reference to poetic speech is apparent, we should still expect the term
to connote the use of concrete words rather than an abstract system of thought. While, for
example, theologia was part of ps.-Dionysius the Areopagite’s idiosyncratic vocabulary, he
usually employs it to mean ‘Word of God’, i.e. Scripture.27 Eusebius of Caesarea, writing in the
early fourth century against Marcellus of Ancyra under the title de ecclesiastica theologia, does
not put forth an early version of Church Dogmatics, but targets Marcellus’ way of speaking
about God, specifically the Logos; the book title might be rendered as ‘concerning the Church’s
way of speaking about God, (the Son)’.28

This has been no more than a rough overview, but the underlying research is not, as far as I can
see, controversial. The result can be summed up without much need for circumspection or
equivocation: there is no evidence that throughout the Patristic period Christian authors
thought of their own work, or of the intellectual reflection conducted in the service of the
Church, as ‘theology’.

Instead, there is evidence for something else: that Christians think of their own intellectual
operation as ‘true philosophy’.29 The most famous, early instance surely is the opening of Justin
Martyr’s Dialogue with Trypho, in which the Christian teacher is greeted as a philosopher and,

24 Εἴσελθε, φάνηθί μοι, κύριε: Papyri graecae magici, ed. K. Preisendanz, vol. 1, Leipzig 1928,
no. IV 1000 ff. (106–8 Preisendanz). The invocation is repeated several times; it is referred to as
theologia in no. IV 1037 (108 P.).
25 Markschies, op. cit., 23.
26 Didymus, in Psalmos 71,1; 135,4.
27 Markschies, op. cit., 27.
28 Cf. for this meaning of theologia: Eusebius, hist eccl I 1,7.
29 G. Bardy, ‘”Philosophie” et “Philosophe” dans le vocabulaire chrétien des premiers siècles’,

in: Revue de l’ascétique et de la mystique 25 (1949), 97–108.

6
subsequently, describes his conversion to Christianity by an ‘old man’ as the discovery of true
philosophy:30

A flame was kindled in my soul; and a love of the prophets, and of those men who are friends of
Christ, possessed me; and whilst revolving his words in my mind, I found this philosophy alone
to be safe and profitable.31

The historicity of Justin’s account has been variously adjudicated in past scholarship,32 but be
this as it may, the salient point for my argument is that in this text Justin describes his ultimate
calling to be a Christian thinker as the fulfilment of his philosophical search for truth, which in
practice was a journey through the main philosophical schools.33

Justin’s choice of the term philosophy for his Christian insight is not an anomaly; it is echoed by
other contemporary Christian writers. According to the witness of Eusebius, Melito of Sardes
wrote of ‘our philosophy’ as ‘the philosophy that was born together with the Empire’.34 Even
authors who took a more negative view of Greek culture and philosophy, such as Tatian and
Tertullian, nevertheless claim the term philosophy for Christianity.35 The same is true for
Clement of Alexandria, for whom Christian thought is ‘barbarian philosophy’ as opposed to the
(pagan) philosophy of the Greeks.36

Passing on to Origen, things look somewhat different, at least at first sight. In his celebrated
letter to Gregory the Wonderworker, extant as chapter thirteen of the Philokalia, he describes
the educational ideal in his own school in these words:

I wish to ask you to extract from the philosophy of the Greeks what may serve as a
course of study or a preparation for Christianity, and from geometry
and astronomy what will serve to explain the sacred Scriptures, in order that all that the
sons of the philosophers are wont to say about geometry and music, grammar, rhetoric,
and astronomy, as fellow-helpers to philosophy, we may say about philosophy itself, in
relation to Christianity.37

30 Justin Martyr, dial 1-9.

31 Justin, dial 8,1: ἐμοῦ δὲ παραχρῆμα πῦρ ἐν τῇ ψυχῇ ἀνήφθη, καὶ ἔρως ἔχει με τῶν προφητῶν
καὶ τῶν ἀνδρῶν ἐκείνων, οἵ εἰσι Χριστοῦ φίλοι· διαλογιζόμενός τε πρὸς ἐμαυτὸν τοὺς λόγους
αὐτοῦ ταύτην μόνην εὕρισκον φιλοσοφίαν ἀσφαλῆ τε καὶ σύμφορον. ET: ANF, 198.
32 H. Chadwick, ‘Justin Martyr’s Defence of Christianity’, in: Bulletin of the John Rylands Library

47 (1965), 275–97; 280: […] we are being given an essentially veracious autobiography […]’. For
the opposite view see e.g. E.R. Goodenough, The Theology of Justin Martyr, Jena 1923, 58.
33 Justin, dial 2.
34 Eusebius, hist eccl IV 26.
35 Tatian, or ad Graecos 31, 1; Tertullian, de pallio 6, 2, 4.
36 Clement, Strom I 13, 57; II 2, 25; VIII 1, 1. Cf. Bardy, op. cit., 104–6.
37 Origen, ep. ad Gregorium 1, 10–8: διὰ τοῦτ’ ἂν ηὐξάμην παραλαβεῖν σε καὶ φιλοσοφίας

Ἑλλήνων τὰ οἱονεὶ εἰς χριστιανισμὸν δυνάμενα γενέσθαι ἐγκύκλια μαθήματα ἢ

7
A number of noteworthy observations can be made on this passage. To begin with, Origen is
aware that philosophy – or ‘the philosophy of the Greeks’, as he calls it – is not simply
speculation about first principles, but the culmination of all the sciences, geometry, music,
grammar, and rhetoric (ὅπερ φασὶ φιλοσόφων παῖδες περὶ γεωμετρίας καὶ μουσικῆς,
γραμματικῆς τε καὶ ῥητορικῆς καὶ ἀστρονομίας, ὡς συνερίθων φιλοσοφίᾳ). It is, one might say
in the jargon of German Idealism, Wissenschaftslehre, the science of knowledge in that it takes
all the other branches into its service and caps them off with supreme speculative insight.

Interestingly, then, Origen does not simply construct the task of Christian ‘theology’ simply in
parallel to that of philosophy, but not either does he describe it as an unrelated alternative.
Instead, he claims for the kind of reflection he sought to instil in the students of his school a
superior standpoint than that of ‘philosophy’ in general. As much as philosophy takes into its
service the insight of all the other disciplines, he writes, so Christianity integrates the insights of
philosophy ([…] τοῦθ’ ἡμεῖς εἴπωμεν καὶ περὶ αὐτῆς φιλοσοφίας πρὸς χριστιανισμόν). This is
subsequently illustrated with the celebrated analogy of the plundering of the Egyptians, taken
from the Book of Exodus.38

One might therefore think that Origen, unlike Justin, thinks of Christian theology as a separate
discipline after all, possibly even anticipating the medieval notion of philosophy as the
handmaiden of theology. In indeed it appears that the term philosophy for Origen usually
denotes pagan thought.39 Yet the close parallel he constructs between ‘the philosophy of the
Greeks’ and ‘Christianity’ suggests that ultimately his conception is not so far removed from
that of Justin or Clement. We might rather suspect that Christianity (χριστιανισμός) for him is
the name of an alternative, true form of philosophy. It is superior not merely in insight, but as
an existential commitment embedded in an institutional community; as such it guarantees the
fullest form of truth to which the pagan schools could not advance.

3. Patristic Thought as Philosophy

Given the reluctance of early Patristic writers to associate themselves with ‘theology’ and their
embrace, albeit not without qualifications, of the term philosophy for their own pursuit, the
possibility that philosophy might be a suitable category for understanding the character of early
Christian reflection on their faith deserves serious consideration. In order to gauge its
plausibility, however, it is necessary to add a number of observations on the character of late
ancient philosophy. This was rather different from how the discipline presents itself in today’s
university, or how it is generally understood. While rational reflection played a major role,

προπαιδεύματα, καὶ τὰ ἀπὸ γεωμετρίας καὶ ἀστρονομίας χρήσιμα ἐσόμενα εἰς τὴν τῶν ἱερῶν
γραφῶν διήγησιν· ἵν’, ὅπερ φασὶ φιλοσόφων παῖδες περὶ γεωμετρίας καὶ μουσικῆς,
γραμματικῆς τε καὶ ῥητορικῆς καὶ ἀστρονομίας, ὡς συνερίθων φιλοσοφίᾳ, τοῦθ’ ἡμεῖς
εἴπωμεν καὶ περὶ αὐτῆς φιλοσοφίας πρὸς χριστιανισμόν.
38 Origen, ep ad Gregorianum 2.
39 Bardy, 106, n. 38.

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philosophy was not at all purely academic. We need to consider several aspects.

First, I would want to call to mind what Pierre Hadot has called ‘philosophy as a way of life’.40
We owe to the great French philosopher the insight that in order to understand what
philosophy meant in antiquity we need to see it as affecting human life in its entirety. Without
neglecting the importance of Stoic epistemology or Platonic psychology, Hadot emphasised
what he called the ‘spiritual’ dimension of all philosophy. For a person to turn to philosophy
meant finding a way to develop one’s own humanity, a formation of one’s self and character.

Hadot himself therefore found it easy to integrate the development of Christian thought into
this bigger picture he had of ancient philosophy:

Although some Christian authors might present Christianity as a philosophy, or even as the
philosophy, this was not so much because Christianity proposed an exegesis and a theology
analogous to pagan exegesis and theology, but because it was a style of life and a mode of
being, just as ancient philosophy was.41

The alternative Hadot here seems to set up between Christianity as a ‘style of life and a mode
of being’ and Christianity’s intellectual commitments is arguably artificial. It seems to me,
however, that one does not have to accept his interpretation in its entirety in order to agree
with his observation that philosophy in antiquity concerned human existence in a broad sense;
that it therefore unfailingly carried something of what we would call a religious dimension; that
it was often practised by those committed to a particular lifestyle; and that its purpose
extended beyond abstract knowledge or insight. In fact, some of Hadot’s insight was
anticipated by Arthur Darby Nock who had emphasised this quasi-religious aspect of ancient
philosophy and its apparent parallel in Christianity in his 1933 book Conversion.42 It also bears
mentioning that Galen in the second century compared the Christians he knew in Rome with
philosophers on the basis of their commitment to a life of chastity and their adoption of strict
moral principles:

Sometimes, they [sc. The Christians] show such behaviour as is adopted by philosophers; for
fearlessness of death and the hereafter is something we witness in them every day. The same is
true of abstention from sexual intercourse. Some of them, both men and women, go their whole
life without sexual intercourse. There are among them those who possess such a measure of

40 P. Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault, ed. A.
Davidson, trans. M. Chase, Oxford 1995. It may bear mentioning that this book does not
translate the French La philosophie comme manière de vivre (Paris 2001) but is based on the
earlier Exercises spirituels et philosophie antique, Paris 1983.
41 P. Hadot, What is Ancient Philosophy, trans. M. Chase, Cambridge, MA 2004, 240.
42 A.D. Nock, Conversion: The Old and the New in Religion from Alexander the Great to

Augustine of Hippo, Oxford 1933. I am grateful to Prof Mark Edwards who made me aware of
Nock’s book.

9
 self-control with regard to food and drink and who are so bent on justice, that they do not fall
short of those who profess philosophy in truth.43

Second, let us consider what the subject matter of philosophical work was in late antiquity. This
too was much broader than what today counts as philosophy. In fact, it was much broader than
what most people now think made up ancient philosophy. This is because our canon of
philosophical works in antiquity has been adapted to suit our own sense of what philosophy is.
Therefore, we focus on Plato’s dialogues; on Aristotle’s systematic writings; even in late
antiquity we tend to prioritise Plotinus’ Enneads as they at least resemble what we think
philosophical writing should look like.

In reality, the bulk of philosophical work consisted of very different genres. Commentary,
notably, took up the vast majority of extant philosophical output, at least from the late ancient
period.44 The classical author to be commented on was Aristotle,45 but he was by no means the
only one. There were, naturally, commentaries on Plato’s dialogues, but more intriguing for my
present purpose is another group of writings that attracted commentary or at least
philosophical interest: the Chaldean Oracles,46 the Hermetic Corpus,47 passages from Homer, as
in the famous case of Porphyry’s exegesis of the Cave of the Nymphs in Book XIII of the
Odyssey.48

There was thus considerable overlap between ‘philosophical’ and ‘theological’ authors
regarding literary genres: Christian authors writing commentaries on Scripture, composing
essays on topics such as creation or the soul, or engaging in systematic exposition of doctrine
stayed formally close to what their pagan colleagues would do in pursuit of philosophy. This
state of affairs has been summarised by Pierre Hadot as follows:

In the first and second centuries, the time of the birth of Christianity, philosophical discourse in
each school consisted mainly of explicating texts by the school’s founder […]. The discourse of
Christian philosophy was also, quite naturally, exegetic, and the exegetical schools of the Old
and the New Testament, like those opened in Alexandria by Clement of Alexandria's teacher, or

43 Galen, Platonicorum dialogorum compendia. The Greek original of the work is lost; the quote
follows Ibn Abu Usaibi’ah, The History of Physicians, trans. L. Kopf, 1971, 150 [online at:
http://www.tertullian.org/fathers/ibn_abi_usaibia_01.htm#p150. Accessed on 12 February
2018).
44 G. Betegh, ‘The Transmission of Ancient Wisdom: Texts, doxographies, libraries’, in: L.P.

Gerson (ed.), History of Philosophy in Late Antiquity, vol. 1, Cambridge 2010, 25–38, here: 26–8.
45 R. Sorabji, ‘The Ancient Commentators on Aristotle’, in: id. (ed.), Aristotle Transformed: The

Ancient Commentators and their Influence, Ithaca, NY 1990, 1–30.

46 J.F. Finamore/S.I. Johnston, ‘The Chaldean Oracles’, in: Gerson, op. cit., 161–73. We know

that Porpyry, Iamblichus, and Proclus wrote commentaries on the Oracles, but they are lost (op.
cit., 161).
47 Cf. Iamblichus, de mysteriis I 2.
48 Porphyry, de antro nympharum.

10
 by Origen himself, offered a kind of teaching which was completely analogous to that of
contemporary philosophical schools. 49

Let me now turn to a third aspect. Philosophy was mostly not a matter of individuals; it was
practised in schools. In fact, this structure of ‘schools’ was characteristic for intellectual and
professional life in antiquity way beyond what we today would refer to as philosophy. There
were, of course, the famous philosophical schools, the Platonist, the Stoics, the Epicureans, the
Peripatetics, and other, smaller ones as well. Yet there were also medical schools. In fact, it
seems that the earliest references to a diversity of schools occurred in this field;50 and when
later authors, such as Origen, refer to schools they often begin with the medical schools. 51 Yet
there were even more, for example grammatical schools.

These schools had internal structures of authority, including a current head of the school, as
well as a historic dimension. The head justified his authority on the basis of his direct descent
from the founder of the school. This could, as in the case of the Platonic School, involve the
transmission of unwritten doctrine,52 but in any event the notion of tradition was key.

The relevance of this structure of philosophical schools for early Christianity was pointed out by
Hans von Campenhausen in his classical study Ecclesiastical Power and Spiritual Power in the
Church of the First Three Centuries.53 Once again, my point is not to accept tout court the
particular hypothesis advanced in this book, but to make use of one important observation it
contains. He wrote:

Ancient philosophy, quite like the Christian Church, knows of no doctrinal tradition
without the idea of a community that is its carrier, or at least the connection of the
predecessor with his successors. As in the later lists of bishops, these philosophical
‘diadochi’ are counted on the basis of their distance from the founder of the school, and
diadoche does no longer mean the content of teaching (paradosis) but the process by
which the connection of handing on and receiving is created, that is the School
(airesis).54

Von Campenhausen subsequently pointed out that this structure was first encountered in
Gnostic schools which regularly referred to the direct relationship of their school head to an

49 Cf. Hadot, What is Ancient Philosophy, op. cit., 239.

50 Heinrich von Staden, ‘Hairesis and Heresy: The case of the hiareseis iatrikai’, in: B.F.
Meyer/E.P. Sanders (eds)., Jewish and Christian Self-Definition, vol. 3, Philadelphia 1982, 76-
100.
51 Cf. Origen, c Celsum III 12.
52 On Plato’s unwritten doctrine cf. C.J. de Vogel, ‘Plato: The Written and Unwritten Doctrines:

Fifty years of Plato studies’, in: id., Rethinking Plato and Platonism, Leiden 1988, 3–56.
53 H. von Campenhausen, Kirchliches Amt und geistliche Vollmacht in den ersten drei

Jahrhunderten, Tübingen, 2nd ed. 1963.

54 Campenhausen, op. cit., 175, translation mine.

11
apostle. It was in response to these claims, he argued, that the majority church transformed
this notion into the well-known theory of apostolic succession as the foundation of
institutional, ecclesial authority based on the monarchical episcopacy.55

Whether or not this further claim by von Campenhausen is historically tenable can be left to
one side here. More important is his observation that early Christian thought much like
philosophy developed in the institutional, or at least proto-institutional context of a school in
which authority is based on the head’s historical connection with an even more authoritative
source.

Fourth, one of the notable elements by which school affiliation was recognised was adherence
to certain doctrines. Platonists, for example, would at a minimum be identified by the
assumption that the soul was immaterial and immortal; Stoics by their belief in providence;
Epicureans by their atomism; etc.56 These assumptions, which school members would accept on
an axiomatic basis, were called dogmata; in fact, not only philosophers stricte dictu but medics
and others also accepted dogmas on the basis of their affiliation with a particular school.

For the recognition that this parallel exists, we have a fourth-century Christian example.
Marcellus of Ancyra, the combative proponent of the Council of Nicaea and scourge of real or
perceived Arians, wrote in his polemic against Asterius the Sophist:

Asterius says that his own fathers made a declaration and wrote a dogma about God based on
their own proper deliberation. For the word ‘dogma’ pertains to human will and knowledge.
That this is the case is sufficiently proved to us by the dogmatics of the physicians; it is proved as
well by the so-called dogmas of the philosophers. And I think that no one is unaware of the fact
that also the decrees by the Senate are still called dogmas of the Senate.57

Marcellus’ attack on the ‘dogma’ of his opponents has played a certain role in liberal Patristic
scholarship. Theodor Zahn, who wanted to reclaim Marcellus as the ‘scriptural theologian’ of
his age, relied on it to argue that his hero saw through the dangers of philosophical influence on
Christian teaching in the fourth century.58 Subsequently, this fragment (extant only in Eusebius

55 Campenhausen, op. cit., 179–84.

56 Cf. M. Edwards, ‘Origen’s Platonism: Questions and Caveats’, in Zeitschrift für antikes
Christentum 11 (2008), 80–98, here: 97.
57 Marcellus, fr. 17 Vinzent/86 Klostermann: ἀπόφασιν ἀποπεφάσθαι τοὺς ἑαυτοῦ πατέρας

Ἀστέριός φησιν καὶ δόγμα περὶ θεοῦ γεγραφέναι ἀπὸ τῆς οἰκείας ἑαυτῶν προαιρέσεως. τὸ γὰρ
τοῦ δόγματος ὄνομα τῆς ἀνθρωπίνης ἔχεται βουλῆς τε καὶ γνώμης. ὅτι δὲ τοῦθ’οὕτως ἔχει
μαρτυρεῖ μὲν ἡμῖν ἱκανῶς ἡ δογματικὴ τῶν ἰατρῶν τέχνη, μαρτυρεῖ δὲ καὶ τὰ τῶν φιλοσόφων
καλούμενα <δόγματα>· ὅτι δὲ καὶ τὰ συγκλήτῳ δόξαντα ἔτι καὶ νῦν δόγματα συγκλήτου
λέγεται, οὐδένα ἀγνοεῖν οἶμαι. For a similar use of dogma cf. Constantine’s letter to Alexander
of Alexandria and Arius, Urkunde 17,10 (34,8–11 Opitz).
58 T. Zahn, Marcell von Ancyra: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Theologie, Gotha 1867, 52–4; 61.

12
of Caesarea59) adorned the title page of Adolf Harnack’s History of Dogma. The underlying
interpretation of Marcel’s thought has, however, since been radically criticised among others
by Kurt Seibt.60

Be this, however, as it may, Marcellus’ polemical reference to dogma – which incidentally

accords well with his broadside against the alleged Platonic influence on Origen and his school 61
– serves my present argument in an altogether more straightforward way by illustrating that a
fourth-century author could easily perceive the connection between the ‘doctrines’ accepted
by Christians and the ‘dogmas’ of the other schools.

A fifth and final point ought to be noted although it is more difficult to pin it down with exact
precision. Despite their disagreements, schools in antiquity also shared certain assumptions
between them. Perhaps most interesting – and most pertinent for the understanding of
nascent Christian thought – is the growing sense in late antiquity that Aristotle’s so-called
logical writings, first of all Categories, form a basis of intellectual activity that can more or less
be detached from specific philosophical commitment. For a while, this was not a universally
accepted position – the last Platonist who polemicized against this view was no less a figure
than Plotinus62 – but over time this is what it became.

It might be argued that the most unequivocal cases of ‘philosophical’ ideas present in the
church fathers are of precisely this kind. In the fourth century, Jerome could chide an opponent
for his ignorance of the Categories;63 Gregory of Nyssa would likewise criticise Eunomius by
insinuating that his argument contradicted this same text.64

But there are other axioms too, and at least some of them show that this area of ‘shared
assumptions’ was also something of a sliding scale or even a slippery slope, at least from a
Christian perspective. While a consensus emerged early in the imperial period that there was
truly and properly only one God,65 the common bracket in religious terms for the philosophical
schools was and remained paganism. L. G. Westerink has shown for the sixth-century
philosopher Olympiodorus, a philosopher in other words who worked during the time of
Emperor Justinian, how deeply inscribed the idea that a ‘philosopher’ was a pagan philosopher
remained throughout late antiquity:

59 Eusebius, c Marcellum I 4,15-6 (20,12–23 Klostermann).

60 K. Seibt, Die Theologie des Markell von Ankyra, Berlin/New York 1994, 35-8.
61 Marcellus, fr. 22 V./88 K.
62 Plotinus, Enneads VI 1-3. Cf. R. Chiaradonna, Sostanza, movimento, analogia: Plotino critic di

Aristotele, Naples 2002.

63 Jerome, ep. 50,1,2-3.
64 Gregory of Nyssa, Contra Eunomium I 180-1.
65 P. Athanassiadi/M. Frede (eds.), Pagan Monotheism in Late Anitiquity, Oxford 1999.

13
 To those classes of society which used to provide the students for the philosophical
schools the word philosopher must have meant what Olympiodorus implies it does, a
pagan thinker.66

It is at this point that we can begin to perceive the difficulties with, and the limits of, my
proposed theory that nascent Patristic theology can be understood in analogy to a
philosophical school. Before discussing these difficulties in more detail, however, let me
summarise my argument up to this point and lay out what I believe are its strengths and
advantages.

***

The five observations I have adduced were principally meant to indicate how philosophy as
practiced and understood in late antiquity was different from our own notion of this discipline.
At the same time, they indicate how ancient Christians as well as their non-Christian
contemporaries could have conceived of Christianity as a philosophy. The nearest analogy,
suggested already by Justin’s account in his Dialogue, is that of a philosophical school with its
distinctive ethos, texts, traditions, and doctrines. Like the members of other schools, Christian
‘theologians’ based their work on the exegesis of Scripture. Like medics and philosophers, they
accepted a number of dogmatic truths as axiomatic. Christians were not different from
philosophers in that they conducted their rational reflection within a communal structure
formed by the reception of an institutional tradition. Most of all, perhaps, it was the close
integration of Christian thought with a firm commitment to a ‘way of life’, principled and often
inconvenient, that made pagan contemporaries, such as Galen, think of them as philosophers
albeit imperfect ones.

What precisely is gained by understanding early theology in this way? First of all, we might
expect it to improve our understanding of its relationship with ‘philosophy’. As we have seen,
discussion of this question has often been conducted around the problematical alternative of
the opposition thesis and the dependency thesis. But to think of theology as a philosophical
school can help avoid this unfruitful alternative: Christian authors had as little reason to speak
highly of Plato, Aristotle or the Stoics as the respective members of these rival schools had
when it came to doctrines held by the other schools.67 At the same time, this did not exclude
the recognition that some views were more compatible with their own perspective than others.

More importantly, the critique of ‘philosophers’ does not preclude the possibility that Christian
thought was still philosophical in its own right. In my view, the notion that Christian ‘theology’
in late antiquity could be understood as an autonomous philosophy is perhaps the strongest

66 L.G. Westerink, ‘The Alexandrian Commentators and the Introductions to their

Commentaries’, in R. Sorabji (ed.), Aristotle Transformed, op. cit., 325–48, here: 336.
67 Note the existence of polemical genres in philosophical literature, e.g. the anti-Stoic writings

‘on fate’ by authors such as Alexander of Aphrodisias and Plotinus (Ennead III 1).

14
heuristic advantage of the historical interpretation presented above. It opens up a whole
programme of research as it necessitates careful interpretation of a wide range of patristic texts
on the assumption that they can reveal to us philosophical insights.

This has partly been attempted by Orthodox theologians such as John Zizioulas.68 I agree with
their principal intuition that to study Patristic authors is to detect in their writing philosophical,
ontological, epistemic, logical ideas that are germane to their Christian provenance. I am not,
however, convinced that these authors have fully done justice to the philosophical challenges
such an analysis poses.

Unlike Zizioulas, I would foreground Christology, not the Trinity. While important work for a
Patristic philosophy did indeed happen in the fourth century – and the Cappadocian
contribution can hardly be underestimated – the ‘ontological revolution’ of which Zizioulas
speaks really only happened when the Christological controversy produced intellectual
challenges far surpassing those of the fourth-century Trinitarian one.69

I cannot in the present context develop these ideas further, but I wish to flag them up for one
specific reason. They indicate, I hope, that my proposal to understand early Christian thought in
analogy to a philosophical school is not the same as blurring the boundaries between Christian
and non-Christian thought during this period.

On this point, Pierre Hadot and Étienne Gilson disagreed sharply.70 Hadot, on the basis of his
work on the spiritual character of ancient philosophy, to which I have alluded earlier,
emphasised continuities between non-Christian and Christian thought during this period:

If Christianity was able to be assimilated to a philosophy, the reason was that philosophy was
already, above all else, a way of being and a style of life.71

For him, the decisive break only occurred when philosophy was re-defined as a mostly
intellectual discipline in the Middle Ages (and, intriguingly, as part of the establishment of the
medieval university).72 Hadot therefore opposed Gilson who spoke of a Christian philosophy as

68 J. Zizioulas, Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church, New York (St
Vladimir’s Seminary Press) 2002.
69 Zizioulas, op. cit., 36.
70 The background of this disagreement lies in a major French debate about Christian

philosophy in the 1930s and 40s. For an overview of this debate and English translations of
central texts cf. now: G.B. Sadler (ed.), Reason Fulfilled by Revelation: The 1930s Christian
Philosophy Debates in France, Washington 2011.
71 Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, op. cit., 130. Cf. op. cit., 126–140.
72 Hadot, op. cit., 269-70. On the problem of Hadot’s interpretation of the role of Christianity in

the transformation of Western philosophy see: W. J. Hankey, ‘Philosophy as a Way of Life for
Christians? : Iamblichian and Porphyrian Reflections on Religion, Virtue, and Philosophy in
Thomas Aquinas’, in: Le Néoplatonisme 59 (2003), 193–224.

15
an early alternative to the Greek, pagan tradition on the basis of what he called the
metaphysics of Exodus (cf. Ex 3,14). Gilson, according to Hadot,

[…] formulated [the significance of Christian philosophy] in purely theoretical terms: Did
Christianity introduce new concepts and problematics into the philosophical tradition?
With his characteristic clarity of mind, he saw the essence of the problem: ‘The most
favourably philosophical position is not that of the philosopher, but that of the
Christian’.73

As I have made clear earlier, I am deeply appreciative of Hadot’s approach and entirely agree
with his emphasis on the broader frame within which ancient philosophy in the more technical
sense is inscribed. Yet I think he underestimates the extent to which Christian thought led to
radically different conceptions and ideas within this frame. Once again, I cannot go into details,
but while I remain unconvinced by most aspects of Gilson’s idea of a ‘metaphysics of Exodus’ as
the one Christian philosophy, I agree with him (as much as I agree with Zizioulas) that the kind
of philosophy Christianity eventually established was ultimately incompatible with the systems
of earlier Greek philosophy.

4. Patristic Thought as a Philosophical School – Difficulties and Limits

As indicated earlier the analogy of Patristic theology with a philosophical school has its limits,
and I shall use the remainder of this paper to explore those problems. These limits, I believe, do
not invalidate the analogy. Christian ‘theology’ is ultimately a sui generis phenomenon; the
point, therefore, in understanding its emergence is not to find a model that is a perfect fit, but
to identify models that approximate what we need to understand.

Perhaps the easiest way to approach the limitations of my model is to think about the word
that is used for the philosophical and other schools in Greek: it is the word hairesis, the same of
course from which our word heresy is derived. Do I think that Church Fathers thought of the
Church as a heresy and of themselves as heretics? Certainly not.

The transition from the neutral term hairesis to the pejorative term heresy is difficult to trace,
and doing so is not my task in this paper.74 In my view, it is perfectly possible that it has to do
with the fact that the Christian groups most eager to embrace the notion of themselves as a
philosophical school were soon judged as deviants – I am thinking of Gnostic schools.75

Still the term hairesis could be used without pejorative connotations even in the third century.
An interesting example for this is found in Origen’s Contra Celsum. Celsus, the Platonic

73 Hadot, What is Ancient Philosophy?, 259. The reference is to Gilson, L’esprit de la philosophie
médiévale, 2nd ed., Paris 1998, 25.
74 Cf. M. Simon, ‘From Greek Hairesis to Christian Heresy’, in: W.R. Schoedel/R.L. Wilken (eds.),

Early Christian Literature and the Classical Intellectual Tradition, Paris 1979, 101-16.
75 H. von Campenhausen, op. cit., 172–6.

16
opponent of Christianity, had used the plurality and diversity of rival groups within the religion
as an argument to discredit it as such. To this Origen offers the following rejoinder. It is true, he
concedes, that there are many schools within Christianity, but there are also many schools
within medicine and philosophy and, actually, also in Judaism. The reason is, he speculates, that
‘schools of different kinds have never originated from any matter in which the principle
involved was not important and beneficial to human life.’76 These different schools in
Christianity, then, arose, according to the Alexandrine thinker,

[…] not at all as the result of faction and strife, but through the earnest desire of
many literary men to become acquainted with the doctrines of Christianity. The
consequence of which was, that, taking in different acceptations those discourses which
were believed by all to be divine, there arose schools, which received their names from
those individuals who admired, indeed, the origin of Christianity, but who were led, in
some way or other, by certain plausible reasons, to discordant views.77

I must leave aside here Origen’s surprisingly liberal view on diversity within the Church for
which he even cites 1 Cor 11, 19 (‘Indeed, there have to be factions among you, for only so will
it become clear who among you are genuine’). More significant is how he equates Christianity
not to one school but to philosophy as a whole. The same incidentally goes for Judaism. This
does not seem to have been an isolated reference; recall how in the passage from his letter to
Gregory, which I quoted earlier, Christianity (christianismos) had also been set in parallel with
philosophy as such.

Origen does not, I believe, want to be polemical here or seek rhetorically to elevate Christianity
above its competitors. Note how he ascribes to Judaism also the property of embracing a
variety of schools – a usage well documented, incidentally, in Josephus for whom Pharisees and
Sadducees were Jewish ‘schools’.78 Origen simply seems to sense that each of those ‘religions’ –
as we would say – is too big, too complex and perhaps too autonomous to fit the mould of a
school. They themselves encompass schools and therefore operate at the level of ‘medicine’ or
‘philosophy’ rather than one of their schools.

Further limitations of my analogy can be gauged by reconsidering the criteria offered above in
support of my identification of Christian ‘theology’ as a philosophical school. In each case,
arguably, the analogy is valid but not perfect.

76 Origen, c Celsum III 12: οὐδενὸς πράγματος, οὗ μὴ σπουδαία ἐστὶν ἡ ἀρχὴ καὶ τῷ βίῳ
χρήσιμος, γεγόνασιν αἱρέσεις διάφοροι.
77 Origen, c Celsum III 12: οὐ πάντως διὰ τὰς στάσεις καὶ τὸ φιλόνεικον αἱρέσεις ἀλλὰ διὰ τὸ

σπουδάζειν συνιέναι τὰ χριστιανισμοῦ καὶ τῶν φιλολόγων πλείονας. Τούτῳ δ’ ἠκολούθησε,

διαφόρως ἐκδεξαμένων τοὺς ἅμα πᾶσι πιστευθέντας εἶναι θείους λόγους, τὸ γενέσθαι
αἱρέσεις ἐπωνύμους τῶν θαυμασάντων μὲν τὴν τοῦ λόγου ἀρχὴν κινηθέντων δ’ ὅπως ποτ’ οὖν
ὑπό τινων πιθανοτήτων πρὸς τὰς εἰς ἀλλήλους διαφωνίας.
78 Josephus, Antiquities XIII 5,9; XVIII 1,2; de bellum Judaicum II 8,14.

17
 1. Hadot’s notion of philosophy as a way of life is valuable as a bracket showing the
connection between ancient philosophy and Christianity. Yet it surely points to similarity
not identity. No philosophical school offered anything like the Christian gospel – the
idea of salvation given indiscriminately to all those willing to accept the faith. Perhaps
Hadot’s colleague at the Collège de France, Michel Foucault, was too rigid in his
emphasis on the radical distinction between the philosophical emphasis on self-
perfection and the Christian focus on religious authority due to humans’ fundamentally
flawed volition,79 but it is hard to deny that there was a difference between the two.
2. While theology is not different from philosophy in its reference back to Scripture in the
form of authoritative quotation or full commentary, the extent of the authority the Bible
holds is quite out of kilter with the respect even the most venerated classical
philosophical, literary or religious texts commanded for the pagan philosopher.
Obviously, Neoplatonists will take very seriously the dialogues of Plato, but there is no
sense that they were ever invested with infallibility in the way the Bible was for
Christians (and Jews).
3. The same goes for the institutional framework. While the role of the school head and
their inheritance of a philosophical tradition is similar to the notion of the teaching
magisterium handed down to Christian bishops on the basis of apostolic succession, one
cannot really say that the two are the same. No philosophical school ever developed a
consolidated institution resembling what the Christian Church was to become. And –
needless to say – no school head claimed authority on the basis of a tradition that went
back to God Incarnate himself.
4. It is likewise obvious that the dogmas of the Christian Church took on a significance
incomparably larger than those held by the other schools in late antiquity. Their very
wording led to controversy and institutional schism. Once sanctioned by a Council, they
were signed into the law of the Christianised Empire, and any deviation was rigidly
policed.
5. More important than any of those differences, however, was arguably the area I
indicated above as ‘consensual overlap’ between and across schools. Scholars who insist
on a sharp separation between Christianity and philosophy in late antiquity usually
stress those common assumptions as being strongly opposed to major Christian beliefs.
For example, Marwan Rashed and Riccardo Chiaradonna in a recent review article,
having stressed that ‘no Christian thinker, in the whole of antiquity, […] would have
considered himself a “philosopher”’,80 elaborate this view in the following way:

The likely explanation for this is that the great majority of the pagan philosophers upheld three
major theses which contradicted Christian dogma: they were ready to accept a plurality of
divine entities; they did not believe in the Christian Resurrection; and they thought that the

79 M. Foucault, ‘About the Beginnings of the Hermeneutics of the Self: Two Lectures at
Dartmouth’, in: Political Theory 21 (1993), 198–227.
80 M. Rashed/R. Chiaradonna, ‘Before and After the Commentators: An exercise in

periodization’, in: Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophie, ed. B. Inwood, vol. 38, Oxford 2010,
251–97; here: 275.

18
 world had existed for ever in the past.81

They add that these theories were not simply philosophical ‘theses’ but rather
‘important elements of a general ideological framework’.
I think this observation is valid as far as it goes. One cannot read Patristic texts for a long
time without encountering blanket condemnations of ‘philosophy’ or ‘the
philosophers’82 or indeed find theological opponents smeared with the accusation that
their particular views have been derived from one or the other ‘philosopher’. 83 The main
root of this rhetorical strategy was indeed, I would argue, the existence of shared
assumptions among the philosophical schools that were incompatible with basic beliefs
held by Christians.84 This is confirmed by the attitude displayed by pagan philosophers
towards Christianity which often, most notably perhaps in the case of Celsus,
emphasised Christianity’s departure from a common core of philosophical and quasi-
religious assumptions shared by all the schools and indeed all other nations; this was
what Celsus called ‘the true word or account’ (ἀλεθὴς λόγος).85
What all this amounts to, I think, is a healthy warning against any attempt to underplay
the distinctness of Christian thought. Patristic theology was not a Christianised form of
Platonism; on the contrary, many assumptions that were shared by most or all
philosophical schools were unacceptable from the Christian point of view. In some
cases, this was because of specific doctrines to which Christians were committed, in
many others because the bond that held the diverse philosophical schools together was
itself religious, i.e. pagan. For these reasons, it ultimately took many centuries for
Christian thinkers to work out quite what the underlying ontological principles were that
would establish a Christian philosophy; this process, I believe, was hardly complete until
the seventh or eighth century. When it finally had reached its provisional conclusion, the
outcome was in many ways incompatible with earlier philosophical traditions.86
What does not follow, I think, is a sharp disjunction between Christian thought and
‘philosophy’ as such. On the contrary; the sharp divisions indicate rival claims to the

81 Ibid.
82 George Karamanolis, op. cit., 31–8.
83 Hippolytus, refutatio omnium haeresium, proem 8; Marcellus of Ancyra, fr. 22 V./88 K. Cf. the

famous antitheses in Tertullian, de praescript adv haeret 7,9: ‘Quid ergo Athenis et
Hierosolymis? quid academiae et ecclesiae? quid haereticis et christianis?’
84 Though admittedly there was also the not-so-occasional anti-intellectual streak among early

Christian authors.
85 On Celsus’ conception of the ‘true account’ cf. M. Frede, ‘Celsus Philosophus Platonicus’, in:

ANRW II 36/7, 5183–213, here: 5193–8. H. Dörrie, ‘Die platonische Theologie des Kelsos in ihrer
Auseinandersetzung mit der christlichen Theologie auf Grund von Origenes c. Celsum 7,42ff‘, in:
Nachrichten der Akademie der Wissenschaften in Göttingen I Philologisch-Historische Klasse
1967, 21–55.
86 Cf. J. Zachhuber, ‘Christology after Chalcedon and the Transformation of the Philosophical

Tradition: Reflections on a neglected topic’, in: M. Knežević (ed.), The Ways of Byzantine
Philosophy, Alhambra, CA 2015, 89–110.

19
 same territory. The kind of alternative, more peaceful co-existence Rashed and
Chiaradonna have in mind in the Islamic world87 – and later on, of course, in Western
Christendom – becomes possible on the basis of a division of areas or fields. If the
absence of this division makes the participation of Christians in professional philosophy
more difficult in late antiquity, this ultimately indicates more, not less overlap between
the occupations of the ‘theologian’ and the ‘philosopher’.

***

To summarise: objections to the understanding of Christian ‘theology’ in antiquity in analogy to

a philosophical school indicate real problems, not merely rhetorical counter-arguments. It
would, without a doubt, be erroneous simply to identify nascent Christianity with a
philosophical school – were this the case, it would be hard to explain why the Church, unlike
the schools, has survived the end of late antiquity. To recognise these limits, however, is
altogether different from denying the legitimacy of the analogy. Rather, what emerges is an
even clearer sense of Christian ‘theology’ as a kind of ‘oversized’ philosophical school; a school
that ultimately bursts its category because it takes its properties to an extreme.

The more we need to understand the sui generis character of Christian thought, as well as its
continuity into the Middle Ages and eventually into Modernity, it may be necessary to focus on
the differences between Christian theology and all its rival institutions existing in the ancient
world. By the same token, however, I would affirm that a concern for the emergence and the
initial growth and development of Christian thought until the end of late antiquity requires us
to conceptualise the rational reflection generated within the Church in analogy to existing
institutions. It is for this purpose, that I believe the comparison with philosophical schools can
be of great value.

87 Rashed/Chiaradonna, op. cit., 275–6.

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