From Clement to Origen

The Social and Historical Context of the Church Fathers

David Ivan Rankin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317132424
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

From Clement to Origen addresses the engagement of a number of pre-Nicene Church Fathers with the surrounding culture. David Rankin considers the historical and social context of the Fathers, grouped in cities and regions, their writings and theological reflections, and discusses how the particular engagement of each with major aspects of the surrounding culture influences, informs and shapes their thought and the articulation of that thought. The social and historical context of the Church Fathers is explored with respect to the Roman state, the imperial office and imperial cult, Greco-Roman class structures and the patron-client system, issues of wealth production and other commercial activity, the major philosophical thinkers in antiquity, and to rhetorical theory and practice and the higher learning of the day.

Chapter 1

Introduction

‘[Christians] dwell in their own fatherlands, but as if sojourners in them; they share all things as citizens, and suffer all things as strangers. Every foreign country is their fatherland, and every fatherland is a foreign country. … They pass their time upon the earth, but they have their citizenship in heaven.’ (Epistle to Diognetus 5,5f.)

It would seem that only a few scholarly writings on the Fathers have included in their bibliographies significant numbers of monographs or journal articles either on the world - as a particular socio-cultural entity in which those Fathers lived and wrote - or on the particular engagement or interface of those Fathers with that world. Few patristic scholars evidence much conspicuous interest in the secular world of antiquity, and the compliment is largely repaid by historians of that ancient world.1 The only major exception to this would seem to be the attention given by some scholars to the philosophical background of or influences upon a particular Father or group of Fathers. There are, of course, those who do give some attention to social and cultural matters, but more often than not scholars who employ sociological models, for example, do so to better understand the nature of the particular Christian community from which an individual Father emerges than particularly to place that community in a wider socio-cultural context. Yet the early Church Fathers did live, work, think and engage - consciously or unconsciously, explicitly or implicitly - in particular social, political, historical, religious, economic and cultural contexts. Clement of Rome writes from Rome at the end of the rule of Domitian, Theophilus from Antioch during the reign of Commodus. Irenaeus, a bishop of Gaul but in all probability Smyrnaean in origin, cannot have been untouched by the fact that he was leader of a religious community which only very recently had come into violent and bloody conflict with both the power of Rome itself and a hostile and suspicious local population.

The world into which the Christian Gospel came - the world of the Roman Empire and of Greco-Roman culture and society - was one which had only recently emerged from a long series of civil wars - those between Marius and Sulla, Caesar and Pompey, and Octavius and Mark Anthony in particular. This was an empire which stretched at the time of Octavian/Augustus’ establishment of the Principate around 27 BCE from Armenia in the East to Lusitania in the West, and from Germania Inferior in the north to Egypt in the south. Over the next two or three centuries it knew at least two further major periods of civil war - from 68-69 CE following the death of Nero and the end of the Julio-Claudian dynasty and from 193-197 CE following that of the Commodus and the Antonines - and increasing persecution of Christians - in Rome under Nero in 64, occasionally under Marcus Aurelius (see Lyons in 177), in Alexandria and Carthage under Septimius Severus in 202-203, the first truly universal persecutions under Decius in 250-1 and Valerian in 257-8, and finally the Great Persecution under Diocletian and others from around 297 until before the first edict of toleration in 311. The early empire saw a mix of absolute rule and constitutionalism, the latter a mere shadow of the old Republic. The Augustan settlement actually provided no new office of emperor formally established and consequently there was no particular legal basis for the selection of an emperor, that is, as distinct from the powers formally granted an emperor on his accession by the Senate (see the lex de imperio). It also saw the growth of the cult of the emperor (which involved not worship but homage and prayers for the safety of the emperor and the imperial house), quite naturally in the East, but by way of governmental determination in the new Roman colonies of the West (though not in Rome itself). It was a world in which, though emperors were not normally deified until after death, it became common from the early second century CE (Vespasian in the 1st century CE had represented himself as the elect of Serapis, and Domitian Isis), and increasingly so from the early third, to regard the emperor as the elect of God (Jupiter). The Greco-Roman world was deeply disturbed, even terrified, by the prospect of civil strife, disorder and anarchy, and accorded a high value to the qualities of peace, order and harmony (homonoia/concordia). Society was divided by clear class boundaries (the ‘orders’ were those social categories defined through statute or custom) - senatorial, equestrian, provincial decurian, the humble free (freeborn and freedperson), and the slave, patrician and plebeian, citizen and non-citizen. This last distinction, however, lost significance throughout the course of the Principate and was effectively replaced in time (emerging principally during the reign of Hadrian) by that between honestior (comprising the three elite classes, senatorial, equestrian and decurion, and army veterans) and humilior (the remainder of the free).2 This latter distinction was most obvious in the treatment of parties before the courts, where the advantages enjoyed by one class and the disadvantages endured by the other were first a matter of convention and finally of legislation. Such social structures reinforced the commitment of many to the maintenance of order and harmony.

Brown declares that ‘what makes the second century significant is the frequency with which the domestic concord associated with the nuclear family was played up symbolically, as part of a public desire to emphasise the effortless harmony of the Roman order’.3 Examples of this may be found in the emphasis given on coins of the period to the concordia evident in relations between emperor and spouse and the notion of the settled married state as a paradigm for social order. Plutarch declared that ‘a man who had “harmonised” his domestic life with such elegance and authority could be trusted to harmonise state, forum and friends’.4

It was a world in which some ex-slaves (freedmen) accumulated great wealth - four of the ten richest individuals known from the Principate were from this class - as well as considerable political influence if not outright power. It was a world in which systems of patronage (reaching all the way to the emperor himself) - Seneca described the exchange of favours and services which constituted this patronage system as that which ‘most especially binds together human society’5 - dominated relationships between people of different class levels as patrons and clients.6 It was a world in which wealth and the pursuit of material possessions and the concomitant status of having accumulated these counted for much. It was a world in which piety (pietas) comprised loyalty to family, to class, to city and to emperor and was demonstrated, by way of example, by a loyalty to the old ways of religious ritual in which patriality, territoriality and mutual (but not absolute) tolerance were highly regarded.

It was a world in which education, particularly higher education, was directed towards ‘the achievement of the fullest and most perfect development of the personality’.7 It was a world where paideia was understood as not only education in the conventional sense but also as ‘culture’ in the modern.8 In this Greco-Roman classical culture, but particularly in the specifically Greek, Homer was the dominating figure - he was, for Plato, the ‘educator of Greece’ - and with Euripides, Menander and Demosthenes its main pillars. The seven liberal arts of late antiquity - the so-called ‘encyclical paideia’ - were grammar, rhetoric, dialectic, geometry, arithmetic, astronomy and music theory, but rhetoric was queen and the particular focus of Greco-Roman education and of the highest notions of culture. In both Greek and Roman society and education rhetoric generally triumphed in a broad contest with philosophy for the most desirable intellectual pursuit (much as today many parents may prefer schooling in information technology than the humanities for their children).

There was no strictly autonomous Roman education, though there were distinct Latin characteristics within the broader Greco-Roman context. Roman education was for the most part derivative, an adaptation of Hellenistic education to Latin circumstances. While there was some opposition9 to Greek scholarship from ‘old Romans’ like Cato the Censor, ambitious Roman parents enthusiastically sought a Greek education for their children. Even in Latin-speaking districts of the empire the educated person was understood to be the one who knew Homer and Menander. Cicero was himself a Latin hellenist, proficient in both the Greek language and Greek learning. Yet after him the knowledge of Greek in Rome went into decline as a specifically Latin culture developed and the educated Latin emerges who knows also his Cicero and Virgil.10 This trend can be observed in the writings of the rhetorician Quintilian at the end of the first century CE, and by the time of the Late Empire a common Greco-Roman culture had largely disappeared and been replaced by two distinct cultures, a Latin one in the West and a Greek in the East. In Rome Augustus set up public libraries and Vespasian funded chairs in rhetoric both Latin and Greek, and Marcus Aurelius chairs for each of the major philosophical schools in Athens. A Latin quadriga emerged11 comprising Virgil, the poet Terence, the historian Sallust and Cicero, the ‘Roman Demosthenes’. As with its Greek counterpart Latin rhetoric, which was itself a mere derivative of the Greek, dominated grammar and philosophy. Within Roman higher education the teaching of law was alone the one original feature.

Much of ancient discourse, particularly in the Greek and Roman worlds, was shaped by the demands of rhetorical forms and structures. Training in rhetoric provided the basic core of ancient education and even when political and judicial life no longer in any real sense provided the context for the formal exercise of these skills it remained at the centre of a quality education. In the Greek world Aristotle’s rhetorical writings, particularly his Rhetoric, formed the basis for Greek practice and while Plato was often heard to challenge its value, seeing it at its lowest as sophistry, even his writings, or at least the constructed speeches within them, were themselves often shaped by the demands of rhetoric.12

Around 330 BCE Aristotle composed his Rhetoric in three books, what George Kennedy calls ‘the most admired monument of ancient rhetoric’.13 In books 1 and 2 he deals with the matter of ‘invention’ (Lat. inventio or Gk. euresis), establishing the subject matter of the speech, the question (the status or stasi

and the arguments for proof or refutation. He identifies at 1356a the possible means of persuasion (remembering that normally the formal audience is a jury or magistrate or political assembly):

• the ethical (or character of the speaker)

• the pathetical (or state of mind of the hearer)

• the logical (or rational argument)

At 1358a he identifies three particular kinds of oratory:

• the deliberative (exhortatory/symbouleutic or dissuasive)

• the forensic or judicial (for accusation or for defence)

• the epideictic (for praise or for blame)

In book 3 Aristotle discusses issues of style (elocutio or lexis) and arrangement (disposition or taxis). His rhetorical structure - its arrangement - provides for four parts:

• the introduction (exordium or prooimion) in which the speaker seeks the interest and the goodwill of the audience;

• the statement (prothesis) or narration (narratio or diēgēsis) which provides an exposition of the background to the case and its factual details (it should be clear, brief and persuasive);14

• the proof/s (probatio or pistis), always the longest part of a speech, in which arguments are led for the confirmation of one’s own case and/or the refutation of one’s opponent’s;15

• the conclusio...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Rome and the Fathers
• 3 Carthage and the Fathers
• 4 Antioch, Asia Minor and the Fathers
• 5 Alexandria and the Fathers
• 6 Conclusions
• Bibliography
• Citations from the Fathers
• Subject Index