What follows is one of my many attempts to synopsize the argument of Christian Harmonistics. None has ever been entirely successful; it is impossible for any author to describe his own work, let alone a work that is 600 pages long. But here goes…
Christian Harmonistics: The Analogy and Collision between Mythic Theology and Biblical Truth
in the Apologists, Medieval Poets, and Mythographers
Christian Harmonistics traces the survival of a late-antique mythic theology within the context of Christian biblical-historical orthodoxy, and its compensation of conventional historicist approaches to religious imagery, the truth of the sacred text, and the nature of the Divine. The argument progresses both topically and chronologically through the early Christian and medieval literary tradition, examining the writings of the second-century Apologists, Origen, the biblical and moral Latin poets, medieval literary theorists, mythographers, and commentators on Ovid.
It begins with the literary opposition between mythos and istoria, drawn by the late-antique rhetoricians, and after them, the Apologists in the nascency of the Church. From this distinction emanated fundamental theological antinomies between the pagan and Christian traditions, which continued to be rehearsed, and yet undermined, throughout the Middle Ages.
From the outset, Christianity, in competition with an incumbent paganism, advertised the categories of myth and history as moral and ontological incommensurables. Convinced that the Gospel accounts of the Incarnation and life of Christ represented an unprejudiced record of unique and spontaneous historical events, the earliest Christians rejected the idea that their sacred history or doctrine might be fecund with, or have been influenced by, antecedent pagan mythic patterns or images. In repudiating the possibility that the fancies of the poets (even when understood as provisional allegorical symbols) might remain a valid economy for the revelation of the Divine or the salvation of the human, the earliest Christians insisted that an authentic religion must be founded upon the “objective” and verifiable facts of history. Thus expelling the Divine into the empirical order (where our extroverted Western psychology continues to locate reality and truth), Christians (literally) demonized the inner processes of the mythogenic psyche, though antiquity had always identified the poetic imagination as the locus of the mediating daimon (the god within), and the source of a continuous and universally available interior revelatio.
This doctrine of an immediate, and potentially open-ended, revelation in dream or fantasy from an inner daimon (the immanent image of the transcendent God), was articulated in late-antique consciousness with the standing reservations of the mythic theologians, who had long ago conceded that the ancestral gods were only the symbolic approximations of an ultimately ineffable Godhead, or the interchangeable local names and faces of the Universal God who stands behind and transcends all the merely apparent divisions and contradictions of the regional cults. To these reservations Christians triumphantly opposed their own sectarian certitudes, and in the belief that the actual nature of God was once and for all deposited in and revealed through a temporally closed and geographically specific set of historical events, they affirmed that their biblical narratives and theology enshrined a final, exclusive, and absolute religious truth.
The history of the early Christian and medieval mind, however, testifies in a variety of ways to the reassertion of the attitudes, and indeed the content, of mythic theology. Through appeals to the testimonia of the Greek poets and sages, the second-century Apologists affected to prove that the pagan tradition itself corroborated the biblical revelation on all the cardinal points of theology. To explain these putative agreements the Apologists reverted to an eminently serviceable theory according to which the ancient poets and philosophers had plagiarized their ideas from Moses, in whose academy Orpheus, Homer, Pythagoras, Plato, et. al. had enrolled themselves during their improving travels through Egypt and the Holy Land. Under this risible pretext the Apologists conferred a biblical imprimatur upon, and blithely read the entire spectrum of Homeric themes and images, of Platonic and Stoic doctrines about God and man, creation and apocalypse, heaven and hell, fall and redemption, into the biblical salvation story. The Hellenistic idioms imported into Christianity under cover of the “loan theory” were scarcely in accord with the historical premises of biblical theology; but the presumption of the Mosaic origins of Greek wisdom only too conveniently allowed the Apologists to discover under the integument of the biblical revelation all the regnant mythological motives and philosophical ideas to which, as educated Hellenes, they subscribed. The Apologists were the apostles of Christianity to the Gentiles; they were also the apostles of Hellenism to a religion grounded in a Semitic historical milieu which became increasingly a source of embarrassment to them, and from which, under the auspices of their campaign to harmonize Moses and Plato, Christianity would became progressively alienated.
The effect of Christian harmonistics was thus, not to Christianize pagan forms, but to reassimilate biblical Christianity to the universal mythic theology of late-antique paganism. In the writings of Clement of Alexandria, the originally Semitic ideas and images of the Christian Bible were systematically transposed into their Hellenistic mythic and philosophical “equivalents”, under the pretext that they would thus be made accessible to Gentile proselytes. Clement’s hypersensitive ear detects in the fables of Homer, and the teachings of Plato and the Stoics according to which the Homeric epics were allegorically interpreted in late antiquity, echoes of every personality and motive in the Bible, and in the process transposes the entire biblical economy of Creation, Fall, and Redemption into a version of the ubiquitous late-antique Platonic Gnosis. Notably, these transcriptions are always from the scriptural into the Platonic or mythological key; their effect is to project biblical themes back into a pre-Christian milieu, to translate the Christian sacred narrative into the traditional literary and theological idioms of pagan antiquity. Clement’s reflex is to rationalize such parallels in accordance with the loan theory, but like Justin Martyr–who explained the pagan-Christian analogy by recourse to a widespread Stoic doctrine of innate and common religious conceptions implanted by the Logos spermatikos in the rational depths of all men (thus repatriating the Divine to the inner “demonic” order)–, Clement was eventually abashed by its biblically-reductive absurdity, and granted to the pagan worthies the dignity of their own unmediated encounter with the Divine. The scriptural and mythological traditions are now separate but parallel channels issuing from a single reservoir of wisdom, vouchsafed coevally to the ancient Hebrews, Egyptians, Chaldaeans, Persians, and Greeks alike, and then translated into images “appropriate” to each nation. In each case, the Word was proclaimed in a different religious dialect, but the underlying theology remained the same. And if the Word is to be heard in the Greek world, it must doff its Semitic guise and put on a Hellenistic guise; it must speak the language of Plato and Homer. With his revised theory of the cultural adaptations of the Logos, Clement effectively assimilated and relativized the Godhead’s Jewish, Near Eastern, Greek, and Christian forms, in the same way, that is, as the ancient mythic theologians had assimilated and relativized the diverse names, images, rituals, and sacred legends of the many gods as the regional manifestations and accommodationist symbols of a universal to theion.
Clement’s works illustrate another important legacy of the Apologists’ immersion in Hellenism. In a recitation of formulas culled from Albinus’ Didaskalikos or some other second-century Middle Platonist doxography, Clement admonished that God is above all the categories of space and time, and thus is “neither an historical event nor One to whom an event happens”. With the assumption of such negative-theological attitudes by the early Christian Apologists, along with the accompanying Middle Platonic method of “abstraction” (according to which all of the attributes and actions projected by the finite mind upon the Divine must be denied and all the images in which He has been represented purged from consciousness), the naive concretions and exactitudes of biblical-historical religion would inevitably be repealed.
In Origen’s writings, we observe the systematic dissolution of history into allegory (and thus, into myth). Applying to Scripture the same literary- and historical-critical techniques as the ancient rhetoricians had employed in the analysis of Homeric narrative, Origen rejected the historicity of large tracts of the Bible, and demonstrated that even the New Testament was interwoven with myths and fictions. In the Gospels, the Evangelists were not describing objective historical events but their own epinoiai or theological points of view, and such higher allegorical significances of the vita Christi as they “perceived in their minds” were then related through “historical symbols, as though they had been witnessed by the senses and actually happened”. In general, the Bible’s historical narrative is a concession to “simple believers”, written only in the “form” or under the “appearance” of history. In Origen’s view, the historical Incarnation was the signal instance of divine accommodation–a device through which the invisible mysteries of the transmundane Word could be made accessible to the sensual understanding. The “corporeal gospel” (the “mere history” of Jesus) is but a “steppingstone” to the discarnate vision of the Logos, whose meaning is “beyond history”.
Paganism’s notion of an interior revelatio, and its cognate aversion to the idea that a transmundane God might exile himself to the prison of historical transience, inform Origen’s vision (proffered as the hidden meaning of the biblical istoria) of an archetypal history unfolding simultaneously in the Divine Mind and its rational colonies in the human psyche. Origen and many other Hellenizing interpreters decocted, as the secret signification occulted beneath the integument of the biblical history, a complex of Orphic, Platonic, and Pythagorean myths which constituted what Brehier has called the universal religion of late antiquity. Here again we see, not Christian ideas allegorically imposed upon pagan texts, but traditional pagan ideas discovered as the higher truth of Christian sacred history.
A similar dynamic is discernible in early Christian and medieval biblical poetry. Readers of the fourteenth-century Ovidian commentators are aware of the soporific regularity with which they invoke scriptural parallels to the fables from the Metamorphoses (a device which is consistent with the medieval avidity to baptize Ovid in the transformative waters of imposed allegory). But the Christian reflex to analogize more often follows the opposite vector. Apparently reluctant to retail biblical events without adverting to supposedly discredited mythical parallels, the biblical poets from Avitus to Eupolemius suffered spasms of comparatism, parading biblical stories and pagan myths two by two before their readers as if discharging some Noah’s ark of sacred narrative. These symmetries present the biblical salvation story and the cycle of pagan mythology as alternate and equally dignified expressions of common religious ideas and themes, and, in the case of Ovid, ratify the medieval intuition that the Bible and the Metamorphoses are parallel and independent revelations from God. Affecting to be paraphrases of the true events of Scripture, the new Christian biblical “epics” are not only punctuated by regular excursions into a parallel universe of pagan fable, but heavily interpolated with the traditional mythic motives which are carried back from it. We see biblical episodes almost invariably described in terms of images drawn from their mythological analogues in Homer, Ovid, or Virgil. Alien mythological concepts are thus introduced into Christian historical theology. Indeed, the scriptural istoria is in this way converted into another mythic revelatio, or at least a hybrid form recounting, in double formulation, a sort of universal sacred narrative.
The entire tradition of Christian harmonistics is epitomized by the Eclogue of Theodulus, a tenth-century poem in the form of a pastoral debate between the Salemite shepherdess Alithia and the Athenian goatherd Pseustis, in which biblical “truth” and mythic “falsehood” are opposed, and yet obviously assimilated, in a series of parallel narratives paraded in pairs from the two antagonistic religious traditions. The predication of the common theme or median term that in each stanza-pair links the two opposed narratives recalls, by way of the poem’s imagery, certain late-antique and “Orphic” formulations of the Godhead as a triad, in which the central One unites, by transcending, his own hypostatic extremes.
Throughout the poetry and commentary of the Middle Ages, the comprehensive parallels drawn between the scriptural and mythological traditions affectively constellated the superordinate motives and ideas of which Christianity and Greek paganism seemed to be only cultural variants. According to Baudry of Bourgueil, Scripture and classical mythology inflect a common language (unica lingua) of sacred narrative under diverse signs (dissona signa). Nicolaus Cusanus’ formula was Una religio in rituum varietate. All such intuitions of the underlying unity of religious ideas and the relativity of regional forms go back to the Middle Platonists. The pagan antecedents of Clement’s one Word in multiform presentation, Baudry’s universal language, or Cusanus’ one religion in diverse rites, are Maximus of Tyre’s unitary God revealed under many “names”, and the “age-old doctrine” which, according to Celsus, was professed in differing versions by the wise men of every nation of the world. The consistent thrust of Christian harmonistics was to relativize the monopolistic certitudes of biblical religion, and to reassert the characteristic velleities of second-century mythic theology, according to which the contradictions and competitive differences between local rites and revelations consisted only in the finite names and images through which all religions pointed, as inadequate symbols and forms of cultural accommodation, to a common referent in the One infinite and ineffable God.
Propelled by the logical momentum of analogy, Christianity, which had originally proclaimed itself a revelation of unique and absolute historical truth, came more and more to approximate the provisional and syncretistic mythic theology of its second-century pagan antagonists. One becomes aware that the essential theological contest between paganism and Christianity took place within the Church itself, between the discrete Hellenistic and Semitic legacies of Christianity (between, that is, mythic and historical theology); and that this intramural competition unfolded quite independently of the official religious conflict and persisted long after the formal defeat and historical deliquescence of Graeco-Roman paganism. In the unconscious depths of the second-century Apologists, who as Hellenes had been thoroughly initiated in the ambient idioms of Greek negative theology, ontology, and literary culture, and yet, as followers of Christ were called upon to defend the positivist and holocaustic affirmations of biblical historicism, two autonomous and essentially antithetical religious doctrines communed. Christian harmonistics only partially succeeded in reconciling these opposites; under its auspices, nonetheless, a resurgent mythic theology provided Christians with a parallel and alternative economy of salvation that compensated all the antinomial postulates of historical revelation.