Valerius Maximus, purveyor of anecdotes and sayings from the Roman republic through his own day during the reign of Tiberius, recorded a curious incident in the history of Roman municipal planning. In the late third century bce a certain Marcellus was serving his fifth term as consul and decided to consecrate a single new temple to the gods Honor and Virtue. Noticing an epistemic error underlying Marcellus’s intended building project, the college of priests balked. The priests responded, “should some sign occur there [in the proposed temple], it would be impossible to distinguish to which of the two an expiatory ceremony should be performed.”Footnote ¹ If a single temple were dedicated to the two divinities, the priests argued, there would be no way to discover whether, say, a lightning bolt striking the temple precinct was a portent from Honor, or whether it was from Virtue.Footnote ² Marcellus’s error was made in good faith: he intended only to offer thanks to the gods with a gleaming new temple built in their honor. He erred, however, when he vowed a temple without having the precise scholarly knowledge which was the purview of the priestly college. In this instance we see a “Roman religion … founded upon an empiricist epistemology,” according to Clifford Ando.Footnote ³ It is difficult to draw a straight line from scholarly practices, such as those involved in augury, to the epistemology which underlie them – it is certainly the case here that what Ando means by “epistemology” is rather radically distinct from the way that the term is used in contemporary philosophical discourse. In all events, as historians, we never study ancient epistemic structures themselves, but rather their reflection in scholarly practices and intellectual expectations about what a good argument looks like and how it functions. While studies of ancient epistemology are possible, they consist in studies of practice. In this more limited sense Ando is certainly correct in his reading of Valerius Maximus, who shows us that at Rome priests expected that the content of religious knowledge was ascertained by way of rigorous spatial analysis, in order to determine the identity of the god who provided a sign. Whether this expectation is “epistemic” is a matter of reasonable debate, and I will not wade into it here. What is clear is that in this case an expectation about the proper production of scholastic knowledge – an argument over practices – translated into intentional interventions in the shape of the city’s institutions so that divine communication could be exactingly identified.

According to Valerius Maximus the content of cultic knowledge is just one determining factor on the structuring of the built environment. Another factor, at least as determinative as the need to respond properly to portents, is knowledge of the scholarly basis upon which such interpretations are made. Marcellus’s fundamental misunderstanding when proposing an intervention into the architectural environment of Rome was not that he failed to acknowledge that signs from the gods require a response. Rather, he failed to understand the way that pontiffs go about the business of determining that response. Marcellus knew what could be true – that there could be a sign and that it would require a response – but he did not know how such scholarly knowledge was produced: the way in which a priest would make an argument about which god to propitiate. In this case the formal basis of scholarly knowledge structured the physical environment, with scholars trained in the science of “portents (prodigii)” acting as a check, on the basis of their specialized methodological knowledge.

This chapter explores Christian scholarly practice from the Antonine Age through the end of Severan dynasty. This book as a whole is concerned with the ways in which scholastic shifts motivate changes in knowledge production in Roman scholarship of the fourth and fifth centuries. In the story of Marcellus’s temple we see that already, 600 years prior, methodological concerns impacted not only the obscure scholarly literature of the college of priests but the space of the incipient Roman metropolis. In order to contextualize the seismic shifts caused by the rise of Christianity in the late fourth century, this chapter surveys the tradition of knowledge production within Christian scholarship in the centuries before Christians came to be a ruling elite. I hope to demonstrate that before the fourth century, these traditions of specialized knowledge evince little overlap in how they think a theological argument can be proved. The relative independence of earlier Christian ways of knowing contrasts starkly with the substantial convergence evident among fourth-century Christians adjudicating the Nicene controversy, and the peculiarly Christian scholastic methods underlying and motivating the great scholarly productions of the Theodosian Age. Subsequent chapters will show relative uniformity among Christian scholars concerning the proper way to make a theological argument; this chapter focuses on diversity.

I do not present a totalizing, teleological, or internally coherent account of Christian knowledge formation before the fourth century, however. To tell a coherent story that assimilated all of these writers to a trajectory would be an anachronism, and a historical failure. Such an attempt would presuppose the backward gaze of a fourth-century orthodoxy like Jerome’s, whose On Eminent Men assimilates a bewildering variety of theological methods into a coherent tradition through the dual operations of assimilation and exclusion. Jerome assimilates the work of scholars like Tertullian and Irenaeus, for instance, who approached theological argumentation with fundamentally opposite methods, as I argue later. By placing these two early Christian thinkers together in apparent harmony, their methodological incompatibility elides into a teleological story of the development of Nicene Orthodoxy. Tertullian and Irenaeus might well have agreed with the pronouncements of the Council of Nicaea, had they lived long enough to see them. However, I argue that they would have adjudicated the question of the relationship between the Christian Father and Son in a fundamentally divergent manner. As told by Jerome, the development of Orthodoxy is a story weaving together the lives of great men who held to theological precepts with which the Palestinian theologian agreed. These men, however, often arrived at “proto-Orthodox” positions through radically different methods. Different methods – and perhaps different epistemologies – often undergirded complimentary theological precepts.

In addition to assimilating antithetical methods, Jerome excluded traditions of Christian theological speculation that did not reach his preferred dogmatic conclusions. For instance, Marcion’s work was an important and generative part of Christian theological history, though he appears in Jerome’s catalogue only as a villain. The Gospel of Truth, too, is part of Christian theological history, whether Jerome considers it to be part of the patrimony or not. In this chapter I detail its radically anti-textual approach to truth as a way to focalize the textual fetishism of many late ancient Christian traditions.

Epistemic and Preceptual Knowledge in Antiquity

My analysis focuses on the scholarly method of ancient texts rather than trying to expound precepts which these texts hold to be true. Scholastic methodology – how one goes about the business of producing valid knowledge – can be displayed in any number of ways. One’s method may be expressed in absolute terms through an excursus, as I performed in Chapter 1. Alternatively, method can be read from the structure of scholarly argumentation, investigating the underlying precepts of scholarly practice by watching the argument “in action,” as it were.

For the purposes of my discussion, “epistemic knowledge” refers to truth claims that are methodological or procedural: it defines the way that truth can be produced. “Preceptual knowledge,” on the other hand, refers to the results of epistemic knowledge: substantive knowledge or the-truths-themselves.Footnote ⁴ I use both types of evidence here, but the distinction between “epistemic” and “preceptual knowledge” is not my own, nor an invention of modernity; we share the distinction with distinguished philosophical minds of antiquity. Plato posited a formal opposition between knowledge that is “preceptual (δοξαστικός)” and knowledge that is “epistemic (ἐπιστήμων),” and as I demonstrate later, Clement of Alexandria repeated the distinction.Footnote ⁵ To study “preceptual” knowledge is to study doctrines. To study “epistemic” knowledge, on the other hand, is to study scholarly practices themselves. A distinction between knowledge of precepts and knowledge of philosophical method continues in Latin with the work of Seneca, the first-century Stoic philosopher and advisor to the emperor Nero. He urged Lucilius, the procurator of Sicily, not to forsake “epistemic” knowledge in order to focus entirely on precepts, as some mistakenly commend:

Seneca here expresses a typical tenet of Stoic thought: proper knowledge is foundationally coherent. He claims that the three classical divisions of Stoic philosophy – physics, ethics, and logic – are so interconnected that one might reasonably debate which topic to teach first. The Stoic system cannot be disaggregated and cashed out in terms of either preceptual or epistemic tenets.Footnote ⁷ The Stoic teacher Aristo took it one step further, Seneca continues, arguing that preceptual knowledge was utterly useless, “being nothing but advice from old women. In his view, the greatest help comes from the actual doctrines of philosophy and the structure of the ultimate good. ‘Once someone has thoroughly understood and learned the structure of the ultimate good, he can prescribe to himself what should be done in each situation.’”Footnote ⁸ The rest of Seneca’s substantial letter on philosophical method takes up Aristo’s points one by one, and the philosopher returns the topic of epistemic and preceptual knowledge in his next letter to Lucilius:

Epistemic and preceptual knowledge, in other words, are separable in concept but not in practice. Clement of Alexandria likewise espouses an intellectually and morally relevant distinction between preceptual and epistemic knowledge, or put differently, between doctrines and the method through which doctrines are properly contrived. It is likely that Clement came to this position through the direct influence of Stoic tradition – perhaps from Seneca himself, or perhaps through the mediation of Musonius Rufus.Footnote ⁹ In any event, the point is not unique to Stoic thought. Clement writes forcefully in his Patchworks (Stromateis) that scripture itself has a will which imposes itself on a reader, and bids her toward “the highest form of study, the supreme revelation, the foundational episteme that becomes irrefutable through reason”:Footnote ¹⁰

Clement here describes the difference between epistemic and preceptual knowledge, which are conceptually distinct but nevertheless combine to undergird the credibility of theological arguments. The language is playful, and exploits the lexical flexibility in which the roots πιστός and πίστις can describe both the “faith” of a person and the credibility of their argument. Clement is nevertheless clear that epistemic knowledge guides the production of truth, and is ultimately foundational:

We are lucky to have extant from antiquity not only traditions of preceptual teaching but also dedicated, philosophical discussions of proper, rigorous scholarly practice. Clement is probably the most eloquent writer and sophisticated theorist that I discuss in this book. But his concerns about the production of knowledge, and the conceptual categories that he uses as tools to instruct and to edify, are not his alone. His question, “how should one go about the business of finding truth,” is shared by Ignatius, by the author of the Gospel of Truth, by Justin, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Constantine, Athanasius, Hilary, and by others. There are accordances between Christian scholastic thinkers of the second through fourth century, but there is no story to be told of unity or progression. These questions were live, foundational, and boisterously disputed.

Christian Scholastic Practices

Before the fourth century, Christian scholars took a bewilderingly broad range of approaches to authorizing their claims. Of course, diversity is to be expected; the ground rules of orthodox theological discourse were very much in contention during the second and third centuries, and the locus of Nicene Christian authority under Theodosius – creeds – arose in this capacity relatively late in the tradition. The spectrum of scholarly practice was as diverse as the theological spectrum of early Christianity; for hundreds of years followers of Jesus were as divided over the content of theological propositions (“preceptual knowledge”) as they were over the manner in which a theological proposition could possibly be justified (“epistemic knowledge”). A spectrum is visible from Marcion, perhaps the first Christian scholar to define a New Testament canon as intertextually coherent and theologically binding, to the Gospel of Truth, which offers a vision of Christianity wholly removed from exegetical concerns.Footnote ¹² Between these positions we find Ignatius of Antioch, whose interest in Septuagint material is significant, but who explicitly rejects the authority of purely textual arguments in favor of inspired speech. Some early Christians, such as Irenaeus of Lyon and the author of First Clement, considered Septuagintal texts to be central loci of authority. Others such as Tertullian rejected the idea that truth could be read out of a text whatsoever, even if the text in question was undeniably scripture. Even among Jesus followers interested in scriptural interpretation as a method of accessing truth we find significant disputes over what “scripture” is and how it might be deployed.

The idea that scriptural interpretation can produce theological truth is not obvious, and it should not be taken for granted that “Christianity” in the second and third centuries was at any point coterminous with reliance on textualized forms of authority.Footnote ¹³ Christians were not always “people of the book,” and even those in the second and third centuries who were interested in textual interpretation vary drastically in what they think scripture is and for what it is properly used. Thus, studies of Christian scholarly methodology should not be constrained to studying explicit citational practices – doing so would occlude a vast swath of early Christian material whose producers found little reason to base their arguments in texts at all. The proto-Orthodox movement of the third and fourth centuries (often in response to the work of Irenaeus) homed in on scriptural interpretation as centrally authoritative, but even that status did not last.Footnote ¹⁴ The late fourth century witnessed a move to what Mark Vessey has called “patristic commentary (retractatio patrum),” in which scripture no longer held center stage. Rather, scriptural texts were sublimated to creeds and statements of doctrine that had been distilled from scripture, but that were worded by councils and the great doctors of the church: Athanasius, Basil, Gregory, Jerome, Cyril.Footnote ¹⁵

There is a sense in which the Nicene controversy was the last scriptural controversy, in which the proper interpretation of New Testament texts was the crux of the issue. Chapter 3 turns to the controversy itself, where I argue that the dispute played a significant role in the promotion of credal statements over biblical texts when asking questions of doctrinal orthodoxy. I intend to show that no trajectory or story of development is visible in the productions of Christian scholars from in the second, third, and fourth centuries. Rather, each waypoint offers a glimpse at distinct book cultures and epistemic frames within which early Christians moved and breathed. Chapter 4 culminates with the definition of “Orthodoxy” in the Theodosian Age as adherence to a tightly policed statement of faith that was intended to distill a proper reading of scripture within a framework of traditional authority and undergirded by a form of Christian encyclopedism. By the ascension of Theodosius I in 379 ce, the Orthodox movement no longer looked primarily even to scripture in order to adjudicate questions of doctrine. Rather, they looked to an authorized, universal statement of truth. I argue that the “code” form that became ubiquitous in the Theodosian Age resulted from a Christian scholastic worldview that considered a particular theological method to be coterminous with Orthodoxy. Chapters 3 and 4 trace the development of that method, using brief examples to show the variety of Christian scholastic methods. My aim is not just to show that variety of method preceded the coalescence of scholarly practice at Nicaea, and the overhaul thereof in its aftermath. Rather, I want to denaturalize the idea that Christians, in antiquity, were always and singularly interested in text, and that there is any central coherence even among proto-Orthodox thinkers regarding what texts were and how they were to be used. Christians on both sides of the Nicene controversy were textual fetishists, and by the late fourth century their particular and ultimately peculiar approach to books came to define scholarly practice far removed from the theological domain. It is hard to understand just how radical the scholastic revolution of the Theodosian Age was without a background upon which to see its contours. I turn to that background now.

Ignatius

Ignatius was bishop to a community of Jesus followers in Antioch around the turn of the second century, and he knew that he was going to die.Footnote ¹⁶ A collection of his letters survives in three recensions of varying lengths and coherence, portraying the bishop making one final publicity tour through Asia Minor on his way to execution in Rome: stopping to visit with communities along the way and dispensing advice as an official representative of Jesus, inspired by the Holy Spirit.Footnote ¹⁷

Of chief importance for Ignatius was that parishioners obey their (single) bishop and the hierarchical structure of elders underneath him in the same way that they would follow apostles, and, in his words, in the same way that they would accede to the “council of God and the league of apostles.” In fact, he contends that “without these [officials of various ranks], a group cannot be called a church!”Footnote ¹⁸ Ignatius’s concept of authority is institutional and prophetic – he finds dispositive authorization only in inspired speech, and his strong conviction is that divinely inspired speech is found only in a few places: in the words of the prophets as recorded in the Septuagint, in the traditions authentically spoken and handed down by apostles, and in the words of a duly chosen bishop.Footnote ¹⁹ According to Ignatius the words of a bishop are precisely the voice of God. He scolds the Philadelphians, “I cried out among you, speaking in a great voice – the voice of God: ‘Pay attention to the bishop and the presbytery and the deacons!’”Footnote ²⁰ Ignatius claims that he had no previous knowledge of divisions among the Philadelphian community, but that he writes and speaks under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, who told him directly to instruct them, “Do nothing apart from the bishop!”Footnote ²¹ Of particular note here is that Ignatius, who occasionally quotes from the SeptuagintFootnote ²² and has demonstrable knowledge of a corpus of Pauline letters, nevertheless witnesses a form of argumentation wholly removed from exegetical concerns.Footnote ²³ Paul’s own letter to the Romans stands transparently in the background of Ignatius’s as a stylistic exemplar, and while he shows some interest in prophetic writings in so far as their messages “anticipated the good news,”Footnote ²⁴ he explicitly rejects the notion that “ancient records” such as these hold any authority of their own. Attempting to skewer his opponents, Irenaeus exclaims: “For I have heard some saying, ‘If I do not find it in the ancient records (τὰ ἀρχεῖα), I do not believe in the good news.’”Footnote ²⁵

While the identity and theological method of Ignatius’s opponents remains unclear, they were apparently interested in textual interpretation, and in investigation of “the ancient records.” When Ignatius offers the standard citational formula that he uses elsewhere in the corpus to introduce Septuagintal texts (“as it is written,” ὅτι γέγραπται), his opponents respond cryptically with “that is the question at hand (ὅτι πρόκειται).” Ignatius continues “But for me, Jesus Christ is the ancient records. (Ἐμοὶ δὲ ἀρχεῖά ἐστιν Ἰησοῦς Χριστός) The inviolable ancient records are his cross and death, and his resurrection, and the trust that comes through him.”Footnote ²⁶ Here Ignatius states explicitly what remained implicit in his other letters: while scriptures may be interesting and valuable in so far as they foreshadow Christ, they are not interesting in and of themselves, and they cannot be mined for reliable, or even relevant, theological truth. For Ignatius a theological argument can be true only when offered by an inspired interpreter, and proof of inspiration is found atop an institutional structure. The only “archives” that are relevant are nontextual, and access to them is available at the foot of a duly chosen bishop. I turn now to Justin Martyr, whose interest in authoritative text was provisional, at best.

Justin Martyr

Justin Martyr’s method varied with his audience. He believed in a singular truth, and that sound philosophy would lead a person to god even though they may take a bewildering variety of paths to get there.Footnote ²⁷ Justin’s extant writings are filled with this idea, that the λόγος suffused the world with knowledge of itself, and ultimately of a singular god.Footnote ²⁸ This epistemic conviction allowed Justin to produce bespoke knowledge: arguments tailored to his audience, and intended to persuade by any means necessary. In contexts where his interlocutor found tradition or text to be valid sources of truth, Justin engaged him on those textual or traditional grounds. But Justin did not believe that truth is so impotent as to require human intervention, and he refused to grant that a tradition or a text could act as anything more than witnesses to a truth that is pre-textual, and unable to be bound by a single mode of discovery or path of attainment. Regarding texts, Justin found interpretation a sometimes-useful method, not an aim in and of itself, and certainly not a guaranteed avenue of enlightenment.

Justin lays out his approach to truth at the beginning of his two most famous works: the Dialogue with Trypho the Jew and the First Apology. Two main threads are visible in his prefaces. First, the terminus of true philosophy is knowledge of the deity, though paths to that knowledge vary. Second, Justin holds a negotiated view of traditional authorities, whether traditions of the Jewish prophets or traditions of Platonic philosophy. Such texts point to an original genius and may well inspire awe in their readers, but truth itself is not bound within them.

The most significant meditation on method in Justin Martyr’s body of work comes in the opening chapters of his Dialogue. He claims to be a philosopher, and that “the work of philosophers is to scrutinize things relating to the deity.”Footnote ²⁹ Justin recounts learning this method from an old man while he was still on his philosophical journey to Christian Platonism. “I don’t care … if Plato or Pythagoras or anyone else had such teachings. What I have is the truth; here is how you may learn it (τὸ γὰρ ἀληθὲς οὕτως ἔχει· μάθοις δ’ ἂν ἐντεῦθεν).”Footnote ³⁰ Justin learned from this old man that there are ancient writings of Jewish prophets which have the same sort of status as the writings of Plato: they are original works of truth telling. “In their writings they make no dispositive arguments (οὐ γὰρ μετὰ ἀποδείξεως πεποίηνται) at the time of their statements, for, as reliable witnesses to the truth (ὄντες ἀξιόπιστοι μάρτυρες τῆς ἀληθείας), they are superior to argumentation (ἅτε ἀνωτέρω πάσης ἀποδείξεως).”Footnote ³¹ The old man argues that these texts should be believed because they accurately foretold the future (7.2), and because of the miracles that the prophets were able to perform (7.3). He asserts that these texts are divinely inspired, but even so, for him and Justin both, textual interpretation is not a reliable scholastic tool; even divinely inspired text does not necessarily succumb to interpretation, and thereby offer up reliable insights on the deity. Texts like the records of the Hebrew prophets or the writings of Plato are relevant to Justin not because the arguments of either are wholly dispositive nor because the texts contain the truth in its entirety. Scripture is relevant because it speaks to a singular truth – the same truth that can be found in the writings and doctrines of Plato. Both traditions act as a gateway to Justin’s new life as a philosopher.

Justin’s Dialogue is replete with quotations from the Septuagint, as he argues with a Jewish interlocutor over the possibility of truth, the error of philosophical schools, the relationship of gentiles to Mosaic law and later biblical prophecy, and a variety of other topics covered in the course of 142 chapters. Justin’s interaction with “Christian scripture” has obscured, however, his negotiated relationship with biblical material as a source of truth. The very fact of Justin’s engagement with scripture has been confused with his reliance on scripture as an ultimate source of truth, and interpretation as the singular relevant scholastic method. Irenaeus and the author of the Gospel According to Luke, for instance, certainly thought that as a method, proper exegesis of authoritative texts could lead to reliable truth. This concept is nowhere to be found in the Justin Martyr’s extant writings. Justin used biblical material, but that fact should not lead us to presume that he held a similar understanding of biblical material as his predecessors or contemporaries. Justin’s use of scriptural texts in the Dialogue is, by his own admission, only one method of argumentation among many. He takes a very different tack in the First Apology, which I discuss later. Justin’s seemingly shifting methodology between the Dialogue and the two apologies has led many to suggest that Justin Martyr was two people, or at least that he evidences a fundamental epistemic change between his Dialogue and the rest of his extant works.Footnote ³² This intuition will not stand; Justin is only inconsistent if readers fail to take seriously his own discussions of epistemic methodology that accompany each of his works.

In the Dialogue, Justin engages overwhelmingly with extracts from prophetic texts, claiming explicitly that the “law of Moses” is incumbent only upon Jews – both conceptually and textually – and that the Christ event rendered it wholly obsolete (11.1–2). Rather, Justin’s method mirrors that of his interlocutor, an imaginary Jew.Footnote ³³ When making arguments, prophetic texts are superior to the narrative or legal parts of the Hebrew Bible because they witness to truth and they offer a firm starting point for anyone wishing to live a philosophical life: a life that leads to happiness.

To Justin, the prophets spoke truth, but they were not its fountainhead or its sole source. They are older than the Greek philosophers, but they and Plato spoke of the same singular truth. The prophets are credible “because of the miracles which they performed,” and because their writings inspire awe and spoke to the singular truth long before the advent of the Greek philosophical tradition (7.3). Under inspiration of the Holy Spirit prophets grasped the truth themselves, and point to it in their writings. The only way for Justin, or anyone else, to reach the telos of philosophy is through a similar gift of inspiration from the deity. “No one can perceive or understand these truths unless he has been allowed to understand by God and his Christ” (7.3). As Ellen Muehlberger argues, “In the Dialogue, Justin did not persuade his character Trypho to read different texts, but to read the same texts differently.”Footnote ³⁵ Justin speaks in the First Apology of the “enlightenment (φωτισμός)” which comes to a person as a by-product of baptism,Footnote ³⁶ and he invokes this framework again in the Dialogue, asserting that the unbaptized person reads scriptures in vain, able to grasp the words but not their spirit (29.2).

Justin finds great power and solace in the “sayings of the savior,”Footnote ³⁷ just as he does in the words of the prophets. There is power in Jesus’s words, which have an uncanny capacity to transform lives. He wishes that others would follow his lead, and “never fall away from the sayings of the savior (μὴ ἀφίστασθαι τῶν τοῦ σωτῆρος λόγων). For they have in themselves something awesome (δέος γάρ τι ἔχουσιν ἐν ἑαυτοῖς), and they can instill fear into those who have wandered from the correct path” (8.2). But for Justin, “the sayings of the savior” are not textual – he does not refer to books.Footnote ³⁸ In other instances where he speaks explicitly of textualized Jesus material, he doesn’t use the term “λόγοι,” but rather “ἀπομνημονεύματα” – “memoirs” called “gospels.”Footnote ³⁹ Even if Justin did have textualized Jesus material in mind here (“gospel/s”), neither his argumentation in the Dialogue nor his sustained reflections on philosophical method find ultimate authority in scripture or epistemic value in thoroughgoing exegetical engagement. Justin has no concept of a written, authoritative gospel, whether scriptural or otherwise. Scriptures are useful because of what they point to, and because they can transform the lives of those who come into contact with them. But these textual sources are to be trusted solely because they have proven to be a reliable historical record.

This approach to textual authority leaves Justin open to the charge of incomplete engagement with the text – with “cherry-picking” those passages of the Septuagint that appear to foretell things that had come to pass.Footnote ⁴⁰ In chapter 27 of the Dialogue he responds just such an accusation by Trypho: “Why do you quote only those passages from the prophets which prove your point, and omit those quotations which clearly order the observance of the Sabbath?” (27.1). Justin’s response demonstrates further his ambiguous relationship with textual interpretation as a reliable method. His claim is that parts of the biblical prophetic texts, as well as the Mosaic law as recorded, have been abrogated (27.2). In other words, scripture is not a repository for preceptual knowledge and textual interpretation is not a sufficient or even necessary epistemic operation. Truth, for Justin, is pre-textual. Even the bible teems with error and outdated dogma.

This leads to a more fundamental concern that animates Justin’s approach to the search for truth: he is skeptical of tradition. The opening of his Dialogue (2.1) explains that philosophy has become so “fractured (πολύκρανος – lit. many headed)” because of the failures of traditional authority. Justin does not distrust processes of handing down knowledge from previous authorities because of failures of the knowledge handed down; it is not that Plato’s students did not know what he taught or that Plato’s teachings were not valid. Rather, Justin claims that any philosophy based solely on tradition is destined to fail. In time, the earnest learning of “holy men” necessarily becomes reified as dogma and handed down from teacher to student in the name of the source rather than in service of the truth:

Philosophy became fractious because philosophical schools embraced their founding philosopher rather than the doctrines that he taught. Justin repeats this attack on the authority of tradition in his First Apology, which was addressed to the emperor Antoninus Pius. In fact, the beginning of his address calls on the emperor to forsake “the teachings of the ancients (δόξαι παλαιῶν)” when they are of no value and to follow instead the council of “sound reason (ὁ σώφρων λόγος)” (2.1). Only if the emperor is willing to do this are his subjects correct in counting him among the “pious and philosophers and guardians of justice and lovers of learning” (2.2). At the beginning of his plea to the emperor, Justin reiterates his contention that tradition cannot vouchsafe truth, even when the tradition in question has been passed down without error (2.1). Rather, there is one truth that can be accessed through many different means: sometimes by searching the scriptures to find what they point to, sometimes through the guidance of “sound reason,” and sometimes through the tradition of philosophical investigation. For Justin, the audience and their preexisting methodological commitments determine the relevant path.

To suggest that Justin’s approach to the authority of scriptural traditions is anything like an exegetical concern is a failure to read his own rationale for proceeding in the way that he does in these two different contexts. Even when debating an imaginary Jew, Justin’s locus of truth is not scripture. Biblical material proves the antiquity of his claims but not their veracity. Similarly, in the First Apology he uses Septuagint and New Testament material to prove sociological points about how Christians act, not theological points about what they should believe.Footnote ⁴¹ This structure of knowledge, in which a teacher is a fountainhead of true knowledge but not its guarantor, is confirmed both by Justin’s citations of scriptural texts and his citation of philosophical predecessors. Justin discusses the capacity of philosophers to gain knowledge of the deity in chapter 3 of the Dialogue. He cites Plato to constrain even his own ability to teach truth, or to bring the mind of a student to perceive god.

Justin is committed to the idea that truth is singular even though a wide range of sources witness to it. The commitment allows him to practice a sensitivity to the methodological commitments of his interlocutors and to tailor arguments to their approach. When speaking to a Jew he says: “Since I base my arguments and suggestions on the writings and on examples (ἀπό τε τῶν γραφῶν καὶ τῶν πραγμάτων) you should not hesitate to believe me, despite the fact that I am uncircumcised” (28.2). Justin “bases his suggestions on the writings and on examples” because, by his own admission, he knows that scriptural proofs are useful in the context of debate with Jews. But scriptural interpretation is not a bedrock principle; it is a method. By contrast, biblical material is hardly ever cited in the First Apology. When Justin does cite biblical or New Testament texts, he uses them not to prove a theological point but almost always to prove a sociological one: he first mentions what Christians do and the rationale for it and then brings a citation, usually from the sayings of Jesus, to show that Christian tradition prescribes their actions. These are “citations” in a very different sense from what we see in the Dialogue with Trypho – Justin uses texts simply to show that there is an external source for the teaching which he claims is common among Christians; his citation of New Testament texts does not suppose that the teaching is authoritative.

Justin’s method is context specific: he switches codes depending on his audience. Sometimes texts constitute an authoritative witness to truth while sometimes they are, at best, a sort of secondary documentation that back up claims that Justin makes on philosophical grounds or on the basis of his own personal authority. I argue that this is the fatal flaw in analyses that focus on Justin first and foremost as an interpreter of scripture.Footnote ⁴² Neither his own statements about method, nor an analysis of his work, reveals him to be interested in scriptural interpretation as anything other than a proximate method.

Irenaeus

Irenaeus wrote in Greek during the last two decades of the second century, and he was the first major Christian polemicist to receive widespread and enduring acclaim.Footnote ⁴³ His intellectual project is centrally focused on fabricating a new Christian epistemology able to withstand the arguments of his “gnostic” opponents: Christians who claim to have found truth, but whose gnōsis is “falsely so-called.” According to Eric Osborn, “Irenaeus follows Justin but with wider vision, for he is the first writer to have a Christian bible before him.”Footnote ⁴⁴ He thus serves as a fitting place to continue my investigation of the varied scholastic methods that early Christian scholars employed. While Justin and Ignatius found the central node of authority not in scriptural texts but in institutional structures and in philosophical reasoning (respectively), Irenaeus is the first significant proto-Orthodox voice to consider exegesis to be at least notionally dispositive as a method. At its core, Irenaeus’s opposition to heresy was a project of methodological construction. I argue that he was able to “overthrow” heretical doctrines only by articulating for the first time a structure of knowledge, and a process for knowledge creation, that was immune to the subversions of his “gnostic” opponents.

Josef Hoh argued that there is a central aesthetic quality to Irenaeus’s citational practices that is best described with the rule “it is fitting, it is possible, therefore it is.”Footnote ⁴⁵ In this sense, Irenaeus’s method is not fundamentally dissimilar from that of Marcion, who apparently believed that the plan of salvation can be discerned from the structure of salvation; both men agree that when approaching textual sources the central aim is to understand god’s intention based on god’s actions in the world.Footnote ⁴⁶ For Irenaeus, there was a singular universal plan for salvation that was simultaneously indicated in scripture and passed down from Jesus to the apostles, and ultimately to their followers. In this way, Irenaeus’s hermeneutic allows for no variation, no expansion or evolution, and certainly no contradiction. In fact, as will become clear, Irenaeus claims that allowing the possibility of contradiction among sources is the animating methodological error among gnostic Christians.

Irenaeus’s Against the Heresies claims a dual intention: it is both an “uncovering” (detectio/ἔλεγχος) and an “overthrowing” (eversio/ἀνατροπή) of heretical doctrines.Footnote ⁴⁷ Surprisingly, in book one Irenaeus hardly relies on textual interpretation at all. This circumstance is curious because elsewhere, Irenaeus leans heavily on scripture as a central locus of authority. In this case, the relative dearth of citations appears to be the result of the opponent that Irenaeus thinks he is arguing against in book one: “gnostics.” His aim in book one is to “uncover” rather than to “overthrow.” Irenaeus saw scripture as a repository from which one could read doctrine, but his opponents found only glimmers of truth in text; doctrine was part of the story but did not encapsulate its entirety. (Rather like Justin’s method, it turns out.) In so far as the aim of book one is an “uncovering” of heretical doctrines and a destruction of “evil interpreters,” Irenaeus apparently thought that scripture was not a particularly potent ally.Footnote ⁴⁸ Beginning in book two, however, and especially in book three, Irenaeus changes tack, using two distinct but intertwined categories as tools to “overthrow” gnostic doctrines: scripture and tradition. Irenaeus defines scriptural texts as “that which was once oral and was handed down by the apostles,” and thus according to his method, scripture and tradition are opposite sides of the same coin.Footnote ⁴⁹ “We received the knowledge of the plan of our salvation through no others than those through whom the gospel (euangelium) was handed down to us. This gospel they first preached orally, but later, by god’s will, they handed it down to us in the writings (in scripturis nobis tradideruntFootnote ⁵⁰) so that it would be the foundation and pillar of our faith.”Footnote ⁵¹ Scripture is relevant only because it is guaranteed by, and guarantees, a certain apostolic succession; Irenaeus places tradition and text together in order to find truth at their intersection. This is possible, he claims, because the scriptures are in harmony with the teaching of the apostles and because each of the apostles unequivocally taught the same thing:

Biblical material is an ally for Irenaeus in “overthrowing” his heretical opponents because it is consistent. This is the central tenet of Irenaeus’s hermeneutical approach: the apostles taught one message among themselves, and that message is repeated as a single, coherent message in scriptures as well. His opponents, for their part, apparently did not assent to the premise. Irenaeus commands that:

Through this hermeneutic Irenaeus was able to build a scholastic method capable of “overthrowing” what he considers to be perverted uses of scripture. Scripture speaks from the position of the apostles, and the apostles’ teaching did not vary according to their audience.Footnote ⁵²

So far as surviving material attests, Irenaeus was the first Christian scholar to suggest that Jesus’s message was fully intact only in four distinct “pillars” called gospels, the first to suggest a name, date, and place for “publication” of the gospels,Footnote ⁵³ the first to offer a thoroughgoing analysis of biblical material based on the premise of scriptural coherence, and the first to connect definitively the interpretation of scripture with the patrimony of apostolic teaching as a check on reading and the production of valid knowledge. According to Hansjürgen Verweyen, this is the true, lasting impact of Irenaeus’s intellectual project.Footnote ⁵⁴ He is certainly correct: Irenaeus’s hermeneutical methodology came to define the boundaries of Orthodox reading and the production of Orthodox truth in a way that no previous method had. But Irenaeus’s method did not appear de novo. It was articulated in the context of an opposing position, and arose as an antidote to a “gnostic” threat. As Elaine Pagels demonstrates, Irenaeus was not concerned simply to root out heretical doctrines. Rather, “what Irenaeus identified as ‘heresy’ among Valentinian Christians was hermeneutical teaching communicated in ritual – and specifically any form of initiation that could constitute distinct groups within Christian congregations.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Irenaeus defined a method for the proper production of knowledge in response to, and as a foil for, opposing (“gnostic”) approaches to truth production. His opponents claimed that the apostolic teaching which appears in written texts stems from the period before the apostles had received “perfect knowledge.”Footnote ⁵⁶ For Irenaeus’s (perhaps real, and perhaps imagined) opponents, proper theological method required a knowledge not only of the scripture but also of the keys to unlock scripture’s true meaning, which were passed down orally.Footnote ⁵⁷ Irenaeus agrees with his opponents in part: both hold that scripture is insufficient without tradition. He adds, however, that it is impossible for scripture and tradition to diverge; they work together, with one as a check on the other:Footnote ⁵⁸

Methodological error precedes and animates heresy, for Irenaeus. Fortunately, errors of this type are not particularly hard to uncover – a believer can identify it through the preceptual truths that it produces by comparing the results of faulty exegesis with the “rule of truth” that they received at baptism. In book one of Against Heresies he takes aim at Valentinian exegetes who behave like Homerocentones: splicing and dicing bits of text to make them say whatever the reader has already decided them to mean:

For Irenaeus, theological speculation is perfectly acceptable, as is some degree of disagreement within the orthodox community.Footnote ⁶⁰ There are, however, a set of precepts and scholarly methods that are nonnegotiable. The most important of these is the notion that scripture and tradition cannot diverge and that scripture is incapable of contradicting itself.

Irenaeus’s scholastic methodology became the dominant approach to theology among subsequent proto-Orthodox thinkers. In fact, the very definition that contemporary scholars use to delineate the “proto-Orthodox” tradition is indebted to this scholarly system: those who held to Irenaeus’s methodology carry on the “proto-Orthodox” patrimony.Footnote ⁶¹ It is immaterial whether this particular approach to scripture and tradition preceded Irenaeus’s engagement with gnostic heretics; subsequent theologians encountered and appropriated Irenaeus’s method through his hereseological account, not through his direct teaching. The theological method that defined boundaries of Orthodoxy in antiquity was founded on, and perpetually reinscribes, the idea that heresy can be substantive, but that it fundamentally proceeds from methodological error.

Irenaeus’s intellectual project was as much epistemic as it was preceptual, and certainly his effect on later Christian theological scholarship was overwhelmingly epistemic. The outsized importance of Irenaeus’s methodological contribution to the patrimony of fourth-century Orthodoxy is underscored by the fact that, from book three, only these statements on proper theological method, as well as records of the tradition’s “chain of custody,” were quoted and thus remain extant in Greek. Irenaeus’s specific arguments against “heresies” faded into the domain of historical knowledge as the specific groups at whom they were aimed were no longer considered a threat. But his method of producing knowledge lived on remarkably intact in the work of subsequent Christian theological thinkers at least through the fourth century, when “apostolic tradition” was refigured around credal statements rather than networks of intellectual patrimony.

Irenaeus focused his critical aim and intellectual energies on refuting opponents who approach scripture illegitimately. These people, “having been refuted by the scriptures, turn around and accuse the same scriptures as if they were neither correct nor authoritative, and assert that they are inconsistent (varie) and that those who do not know the tradition are not able to find truth in them” (3.2.1). Irenaeus’s heretics assert that the truth “was not handed down through written texts (litteras) … but through the living voice.”Footnote ⁶² When he wrote this, perhaps Irenaeus had the long-departed Valentinus in mind, or was taking aim at members of the Valentinian “school.” But one opposing voice who believed that “those who do not know the tradition are not able to find truth” in the scriptures was assimilated into the same canon of proto-Orthodox thinkers as Irenaeus – the voice was Tertullian’s. I turn now to Irenaeus’s younger contemporary, who espoused a fundamentally opposite methodology. It was his preceptual commitments, rather than his scholastic method, that earned Tertullian space under the umbrella of “proto-Orthodoxy,” in antiquity as well as today.

Tertullian

All of Tertullian’s extant writing is occasional and polemical; extended discourses on method are few and far between. The first Christian literary figure of the Latin West spent the majority of his writing career batting down heresies rather than constructing a systematic theological program.Footnote ⁶³ The question of the relationship between scripture, tradition, and heresy, however, gave Tertullian occasion to articulate a theological method on positive terms. His position is found most clearly in Concerning Exemptions against Heretics (De praescriptionibus adversus haereticos). For Tertullian, heresy is the name that one gives to an epistemic failure, not a preceptual position. He argues that texts are at least notionally capable of expressing truth, but that the text of scripture is underdetermined and authoritative exposition of scripture requires a pre-textual knowledge of truth to which scripture is, at best, a faulty witness. Heretics are precisely those who look to scripture, or anywhere else, in order to discover truths beyond the “rule of faith (regula fidei)” received through the apostolic tradition; the act of theological speculation itself is heresy, not the form of the questions or the content of the answers. Tertullian argues, therefore, that heretics should not be engaged on the basis of scripture. They are the recipients of a praescriptio, an exemption.

Around the time of Tertullian’s birth the jurist Gaius defined the legal term praescriptio as a clause or document that precedes a legal formulary. It constrains the authority of the judge and the validity of the proceedings to a particular aspect of a case, for instance the validity of a contract.Footnote ⁶⁴ Whatever Tertullian means by praescriptio, it is not precisely the legal use of the term from Roman formulary procedure.Footnote ⁶⁵ Rather, Tertullian’s own use of the term should be understood as a praescriptio, a discussion before one gets to interpretative questions regarding scripture with heretics. The point of the argument is nicely summed up in its appellation: truth itself is prae-scriptio – it is to be grasped before one accedes to, or even approaches, text. In a very real sense, truth is “pre-scriptural.” It cannot be found in books, and thus there is no use in debating interpretive method with heretics who do not come to scripture having already assented to a set of preceptual commitments. Tertullian does not offer such an absolutist position as we will see in the Gospel of Truth, which denies the capacity of text to contain or express truth in any useful sense. For Tertullian, the text of scripture serves as an exemplar of behavior but it is not a depository of truth. Scriptural texts could clearly state answers to metaphysical and Christological questions answered (wrongly) by heretics, but they do not. Tertullian is the earliest extant writer to espouse this position regarding the relationship between textuality and truth. By the advent of the Theodosian Age this position was dominant and coterminous with Orthodoxy – at least with the Orthodoxy of which Athanasius is an exemplar.

Tertullian’s conception of heresy is, at base, etymological: it is a “choice,” derived as it is from the Greek word αἵρεσις.Footnote ⁶⁶ The existence of heresies was foretoldFootnote ⁶⁷ both by “the sayings of the Lord and … the letters of the apostles” (4), but true Christians are not permitted to make theological choices in any capacity:

Wherever there is dissension among Christians heresy has arisen, and it has arisen out of vain and ill-considered speculation beyond the bounds of “the rule of faith (regula fidei).” Tertullian argues that the “rule of faith” comprises preceptual knowledge and not epistemic method. While his position appears to be quite a bit more absolutist than Paul’s, here Tertullian echoes and extends the apostle’s own admonition to the Galatians that any message which deviates from his own, original teaching – whether from him or even an angel – should be disregarded and the messenger accursed.Footnote ⁶⁸ In Tertullian’s estimation, the truths that have been revealed are the only truths to which Christians are privy, and they comprise those truths which were spoken by Christ to the apostles and passed from the apostles onward. This knowledge should be considered an end in and of itself, and not a stepping stone for progressive revelation or ever more fine-grained theological analysis. His position is clear: theological speculation itself is heresy:

The most surprising piece of Tertullian’s excursus on methodology in Concerning Exemptions against Heretics is his use of scriptural texts to discount the validity of textual interpretation as an epistemically valid maneuver. It is the heretics, Tertullian stresses, who quote Matthew 7:7, which says: “Seek and you shall find.” But this message was preached by Jesus at the beginning of his ministry and was aimed at Jews. It does not apply to gentiles, who are Tertullian’s audience, and constitutes only an “example (exemplum)” (8). The apostles were told to seek and find. Tertullian argues that they sought, they found, and importantly, there is no longer a need for anyone to continue the process of seeking. Truth has already appeared in the world, it is the “rule of faith” that can be laid out in the space of 116 words, the final sentence of which reads: “This rule was instituted by Christ. It raises no questions among us other than those than those which heresies introduce and which make people into heretics.”Footnote ⁶⁹ Textual interpretation, as an epistemic method, was relevant only before the advent of truth, brought by Jesus. In the wake of the Christ event searching the scriptures for truth became nonsensical because the texts are not a depository for the preceptual truths to which all Christians must properly accede. Theological seeking beyond the revealed rule of faith is like trying to fit letters into the black blocks of a crossword puzzle after the answer key has been published. A clever person might be able to squeeze some characters in here or there, but doing so contravenes the design of the game and serves only to move them further away from the correct solution.

For Tertullian, true faith is preceptual and tightly bound. But this is not to say that it comprises the extent of possible preceptual knowledge – knowledge beyond the “rule of faith” is at least notionally possible. The act of seeking anything beyond that which was received in faith, however, is a rejection of that faith. Seeking is epistemic heresy, no matter the preceptual outcome. Tertullian is explicit in claiming that Jesus’s admonition to “seek” is categorically disallowed to anyone who would call themselves a Christian (11). Tertullian repeatedly points to scriptural stories as a way of stressing that scripture is not a repository for truth and that the act of searching for answers beyond the “rule of faith” is itself heresy (11). Tertullian’s method, then, is to deny access to the scriptures for anyone who will not come to the scriptures already agreeing to the rule of faith. When heretics “use” the scriptures they mutilate them by way of their very interaction, because any attempt at theological speculation beyond the “rule of faith” is itself heretical, no matter what the outcome.Footnote ⁷⁰ For Tertullian, there is no such thing as Christian theological speculation.

This is the fundamental distinction between Tertullian’s “rule of faith (regula fidei)” and Irenaeus’s “rule of truth (κανὼν τῆς ἀληθείας)” or “doctrine of faith (πίστεως ὑπόθεσις).” Both Irenaeus and Tertullian would assent to the preceptual positions set forth in Tertullian’s regula fidei. Irenaeus, however, is willing to wrestle with heretics. For instance, he will take on heretics over the resurrection of the body, as he does in Against Heresies 5.31, attempting to convince “evil exegetes” that their position is wrong because it is falsifiable within the framework of scripture. Tertullian, on the other hand, will not. Unless someone is willing to assent to the “rule of faith” that already answers the question of whether or not Christians are resurrected in bodily form, then wrestling with them over the interpretation of scripture is not just futile, it renders both parties heretics. Paraphrasing an apocryphal saying of Mark Twain, Tertullian might offer, “never argue with a heretic. They will drag you down to their level and beat you with experience.”

For Irenaeus, on the other hand, truth is fractal: it can be continually refined, further and further into the minutiae, and even so it remains precisely the same:

For Irenaeus, the true message remains the same even when messengers possess different levels of rhetorical ability and theological skill, and proper theological method allows further cosmic truths to be uncovered. In one sense Tertullian agrees: one could speculate more into the nature of the cosmos and the divine, but the act of doing so is contradictory because it is predicated on a rejection of revealed truth. According to Irenaeus, there are scholarly methods which allow practitioners to delve deeper than Tertullian’s regula fidei. Though these methods can lead to the appearance of divergent messages, it is sometimes the case that the appearance is merely the same message presented in greater or lesser detail. Different presentations of doctrine are not the result of a mutable truth but of scholarship: some undertake properly guided theological speculation and arrive a new truths even beyond the bare reading of scripture, and beyond the “doctrine of faith” that they received at baptism:Footnote ⁷³

All of the verbs that Irenaeus uses are verbs of extrapolation: προσεπεργάζομαι, ἐκδιηγέομαι, σαφηνίζω. His list continues, detailing theological propositions that proper epistemic method, rooted in a novel hermeneutic, can successfully adjudicate. The “doctrine of faith” allows one to “search out (ἐξερευνᾶν)” the answer to “why ‘God consigned all things to disobedience, in order that he may have mercy on all (διὰ τί συνέκλεισε πάντα εἰς ἀπείθειαν ὁ Θεὸς, ἵνα τοὺς πάντας ἐλεήσῃ),’” as Paul says in Romans 11:32. Some things will remain a mystery, but many answers are available, even as the fundamental truth stays the same.

It was Irenaeus’s notion of epistemic possibility that lived on, and not Tertullian’s. Irenaeus’s method motivated disputants at the Council of Nicaea some 100 years later; everyone in attendance believed that the proper scholastic methods, applied to the right set of texts, could yield an abundance of theological truth beyond that which is stated plainly in scripture. While all disputants would accept the content of Tertullian’s “rule of faith,” neither faction would agree with his method. Put differently: Tertullian would be aghast to see the type of theological speculation engaged by Alexander, Arius, and their partisans in the beginning of the fourth century. He would call the whole lot “heretics” because they were asking questions beyond that which was revealed and looking to scriptural interpretation to adjudicate their preceptual differences.Footnote ⁷⁴ Truth is not fractal, says Tertullian; a pox on both their houses. They were heretics the moment they stepped foot in the door.

Irenaeus argued that even when the truth is expounded, it is not changed. I turn now to the Gospel of Truth, which points to a secret teaching beyond the message preserved in scripture.Footnote ⁷⁵ It is an oral teaching passed down from the apostles and constitutes the “true gospel.” Importantly, this gospel is fundamentally a-textual. The Gospel of Truth witnesses no exegetical concerns whatsoever, and its author apparently conceived of a Christianity wholly removed from authoritative text.

The Gospel of Truth

The Gospel of Truth may seem to be the odd-source-out in my discussion of early Christian theological method. It seems that way because it is. Of the seven traditions of Christian truth-making surveyed in this chapter, the Gospel of Truth is the only one for which no author is known or claimed.Footnote ⁷⁶ If we did know the author, they would certainly not have made the cut for Jerome’s famous catalogue On Eminent Men, which is as good an indicator as any of the intellectual lineage claimed by Nicene Christian scholars of the Theodosian Age, even when the examples were negative. The Gospel of Truth presents a conceptual counterpoint to Christian scholastic tradition claimed by the likes of Athanasius, Arius, or Constantine. It speaks to an ancient conception of Christianity wholly devoid of exegetical concerns. While the other case studies in this chapter index a variety of approaches to truth and its proper construction by early Christian scholars, each example nevertheless defines its own authority with reference to, and often by direct invocation of, textual sources. But these are only instances of one kind of Christianity: a Christianity predicated on the ability of text to possess authority. They speak to threads visible in the Christian scholastic methodology that “won out,” so to speak, but the imperial court’s eventual embrace of Catholic orthodoxy was not historically necessary, nor is it obvious that a text could be imbued with meaning. One can easily imagine a nontextual Christianity spreading in the second and third centuries in the same way that an exegetically minded set of communities did. The Gospel of Truth reminds us that the decision to cite scripture is just that – a decision – and it already forecloses a wide variety of approaches to the creation of truth by ancient people equally as Christian as Ignatius, Tertullian, or Justin.

Almost nothing certain is known about the Gospel of Truth. It has been described as “a homiletic reflection of the ‘Gospel’ or the message of salvation provided by Jesus Christ,” though if it is a homily, it is of very different sort from any other ancient example of the genre.Footnote ⁷⁷ We know nothing about a community that might have held this text in regard and nothing certain about the reaction of any ancient reader to its contents. The most that anyone can claim definitively is that this text appears to have been copied at a monastery in the fourth or fifth century, perhaps one that was part of the Pachomian network.Footnote ⁷⁸ But neither ownership nor composition of a text suggests that the readers or writers considered the Gospel of Truth an authority. A. J. Berkovitz and I have written elsewhere of the historiographical fallacy by which texts like the Gospel of Truth are supposed, a priori, to index rival Christianities that were subverted by an ascendant Orthodox Church in Late Antiquity.Footnote ⁷⁹ I will pass over, then, ongoing arguments as to whether this text is a work of “Valentinian” Christians or not, and whether it is the same “Gospel of Truth (evangelium veritatis)” mentioned by Irenaeus.Footnote ⁸⁰ To date, all of the theories adduced on the authorship of this text, its ideological forebears, its social location, and even its title, fail by virtue of circularity and, at best, explain little about the context or content of the Gospel of Truth itself.

My chief concern is to explore the text’s epistemic method: how it conceives of human access to truth. The Gospel of Truth is centrally concerned with questions of truth – who can access it, what it entails, where it came from, and what its relationship is to other discourses of humans – and yet it cites no text, carries the name of no author, and claims to speak only to those who already know the message which it conveys.Footnote ⁸¹ In this sense it is not wisdom literature, if wisdom literature is meant to impart wise words to people in need of instruction. It is something quite apart, and although it may reflect some literary relationship with the Gospel according to John, for instance, intertexts must be searched out in the gaps: nothing in the Gospel of Truth suggests that the text is presented as anything but a self-contained revelation.

The Gospel of Truth is called as such by modern scholars because of its incipit, which reads: “The message of the truth [or gospel of truth] (ⲡⲉⲩⲁⲅⲅⲉⲗⲓⲟⲛ ⲛ̅ⲧⲙⲏⲉ) is joy for those who have received grace from the Father of truth.”Footnote ⁸² By calling this literary production the Gospel of Truth we have already suggested what the referent is of the clause “the Gospel of Truth is joy”: it is the text that we are reading.Footnote ⁸³ But what follows explicitly, repeatedly disavows that truth could be found in a text, or that truth is even discoverable by anyone other than those who have been chosen to receive such knowledge. A better name for this text might be About the True Message; while this text points to “the true message,” it is not “the true message” – at least it doesn’t claim to be.Footnote ⁸⁴

The Gospel of Truth/About the True Message begins with a prologue followed by a story: a return to the beginning, before creation. The story goes like this: “the Totality went out searching for the one from whom they had come forth” (17.5–6), and succumbing to fear because it could not find the Father, the Totality gave rise to Error, which became powerful because it did not know the truth. With this new-found power, Error, “set about with a creation” (that is, the world as known by and to humans) and offered “power and beauty” as a “substitute for truth” (17.18–20). The text goes on to offer its first adjuration, one of many which are motivated by a central cosmological epistemology: everything that is made, is made by Error. “For this reason despise error” (17.28–29). “Knowledge” in this text is referred to as ⲡⲓⲥⲁⲩⲛⲉ, the Lycopolitan spelling of the Sahidic ⲥⲟⲟⲩⲛ with a semantic range equivalent to that of ἐπιστήμη. The Gospel of Truth argues that knowledge came into the world though the agency of Jesus (18.16–21), and that Jesus offers knowledge of the Father only to those who are preordained to receive the truth: those whose names are “in the living book of the living – the one written in the thought and the mind of the father … that (book) which no one [but Jesus] was able to take” (19.34–20.6).

This, then, is the core of the epistemic system that undergirds the Gospel of Truth: the “true message” is available only to those to whom it has been revealed; “the living who are inscribed in the book of the living” are given instruction “about themselves” (21.4–5). The text describes this return to knowledge in a series of arresting poetic images that resonate even today. Those who are given knowledge grasp the truth as “one who, having become drunk, has turned away from his drunkenness, and having returned to himself, has set right what are his own” (22.16–20). As in Seneca’s Stoicism, in the Gospel of Truth, cosmology, epistemology, and ethics are radically coherent; the system is self-referential, and preceptual knowledge is useless without a correlative epistemic outlook.

The Gospel of Truth goes out of its way to clarify that this knowledge is not textual. While textualized metaphors are used – “book (ϫⲱⲱⲙⲉ) of the living” (19.35), “a will (ⲇⲓⲁⲑⲏⲕⲏ)” (20.15), or “the edict (ⲇⲓⲁⲧⲁⲅⲙⲁ) of the Father” (20.26) – the content of the “true message” cannot be bound in language:

Here the author uses playful, bookish metaphors to stress precisely that no text could possibly contain truth. The “knowledge of the living book” may refer either to truth itself or to the names of those selected to know the truth. In either case, the knowledge itself is “neither vowels nor consonants” – literally, “they are not places of sound nor are they letters lacking their sounds” (23.3–5). The message cannot be contained in textualized form nor spoken in audible words. The Gospel of Truth has remarkably little to say positively about either preceptual truths or how one gains access to the “true message.” The message, it stresses repeatedly, is known only to those who have been elected. The text is clearest only in a negative sense: books do not contain truth. One possible epistemic corollary to texts as repositories of truth – that the proper hermeneutic, applied to the right corpus of texts, could produce theologically defensible statements – is ruled out from the start.Footnote ⁸⁵

In this sense, the Gospel of Truth forms an almost perfect contrast both with the traditions discussed in this chapter and with another text known from Nag Hammadi: the so-called Gospel of the Egyptians, written originally in Greek and preserved in two different versions in Codices 3 and 4.Footnote ⁸⁶ Quite apart from the Gospel of Truth’s self-effacing textualizing metaphors, the Gospel of the Egyptians ends by declaring that the text was written by Seth himself in primordial times – literally “in letters” ($\overline{ϩⲛ}$ ϩⲉⲛⲥϩⲁϊ 3.68.11) – “in order that, at the end of the times and the eras … it may come forth and reveal this incorruptible, holy race of the great savior” (3.68.14–22). Here, the Gospel of the Egyptians presents the preceptual knowledge which “comes forth” as that knowledge stored away in texts written by Seth, similar to the antediluvian knowledge that is recorded in Nag Hammadi’s The Three Steles of Seth. In other words, a rejection of texualized, universal knowledge is not fundamentally “gnostic,” nor is it found throughout the Nag Hammadi codices.Footnote ⁸⁷ But it is visible in bits and pieces, and represents a Christian epistemic tradition just as sophisticated as anything in Tertullian, Irenaeus, or Justin.

It is not clear whether the Gospel of Truth constituted “scripture” for any community in antiquity. The text is self-effacing; it stresses over and again that truth is not so feeble as to require the written word, and that no language has the power necessary to express truth, let alone convey its meaning to those who do not possess it already. The text does not engage in a mere apophaticism, in which the mystery of truth will always outstrip any description, nor does it express a negative theology, in which only negative statements can be made with confidence, as a sort of precursor to the late ancient theological outlook attached to the name of Dionysus the Areopagite. Rather, it presents an epistemic system that purposefully repudiates the idea that a book could reveal knowledge that is anything more than an emanation of Error. As I move on to discuss other Christian epistemic systems it will be important to keep in mind that the seeming inevitability of textual interpretation, even among Christians, is a mirage; the great doctrinal controversies of the fourth and fifth centuries played out on a field of Orthodox construction. The fact of textual interpretation as theologically foundational is neither obvious nor uncontroversial – even among Jerome’s “eminent men.” Nor was it universal, as we see in the system of knowledge supposed and promulgated by the Gospel of Truth.

A misplaced textualism runs through the history of scholarship on the Gospel of Truth. Geoffrey Smith cites ten separate studies considering what he calls the text’s “unwavering commitment to biblical interpretation,” to which we can add Smith’s own article as well.Footnote ⁸⁸ There is at least one problem with this characterization of the Gospel of Truth, however. In regard to biblical interpretation, this text is neither. Put differently, if “biblical interpretation” is to remain a category of critical use whatsoever we must say that the Gospel of Truth does none of it. There are no citation formulae. There are no quotations. There is no discussion of written authority. There are, at best, allusions to topics, words, and concepts that are also discussed in scriptural texts.Footnote ⁸⁹ But it would be difficult to discuss the generation of the Son as Platonic logos, for instance, without language that sounds like the Gospel according to John 1:1 and 1:18. Likewise, the relationship of a personified Error to its source, framed in almost any way, will look like an oblique reference to Ben Sira 24:3 to a sufficiently motivated critic. There may be “scriptural resonances” in the Gospel of Truth, and the text as we have it might be a meditation on texts that would eventually become part of the Orthodox Christian canon.Footnote ⁹⁰ In other words, it might engage in allusion as defined by Devorah Dimant: “a device for the simultaneous activation of two texts.”Footnote ⁹¹ However, if similar language, or even purposeful allusion to a biblical text constitutes “an unwavering commitment to biblical interpretation”Footnote ⁹² even in the absence of an epistemic method in which authoritative knowledge could be found in a text, then the concept of “biblical interpretation” has lost all utility as a scholarly tool. If “biblical interpretation” indicates simply that a text uses biblical language, we have already allotted a linguistic primacy to the bible which can only be defended on theological grounds. Further, we have emulsified our sources such that every text, no matter what its generative epistemic method, necessarily “interprets biblical text” if the text has anything to say about Jesus. This would be an absurd position to take, of course. Whatever it is that the Gospel of Truth is doing – even if there are purposeful biblical allusions, invocations, or resonances strewn throughout the text – it is a far cry from what Irenaeus means by biblical interpretation or from the operations that Athanasius performs in reading New Testament texts as an anti-Arian cudgel.

The only thing that can be said with certainty concerning the Gospel of Truth is that a Christian community in Egypt was interested in preserving it in the fourth or fifth century. This is especially intriguing because known Christian communities in late ancient Egypt were, so far as we can tell, more or less uniformly interested in scriptural exegesis, and in textualized forms of truth production. The Gospel of Truth stands in stark contrast, and appears to be inexplicable within a late ancient Egyptian Christian context. And yet, there it was: preaching a message of epistemic certainty that text is no container for truth and espousing an epistemic position that explains in simple terms why it cites no text, carries the name of no author, and appears as a wholly self-contained revelation that is, nevertheless, not Truth.

Conclusion

Marcellus’s error, with which this chapter began, was epistemic. He failed to understand the Roman augur’s methods, and therefore his proposed temple was religiously unacceptable because he did not distinguish between the preceptual truths which he knew – that gods sent signs – and the epistemic truths by which the source of such signs were identified. Some of the authors investigated in this chapter, such as Irenaeus and Tertullian, held to remarkably similar theological precepts even when their opinions differed dramatically about why such precepts were true. With the addition of Justin, these three authors found authoritative text to be a useful ally in making theological arguments, while Ignatius and the author of the Gospel of Truth rejected the idea that textual interpretation could serve as a vector for the production of reliable knowledge. Of those surveyed who reject scriptural interpretation as a central locus of truth production, only the author of the Gospel of Truth was omitted from Jerome’s late fourth-century catalogue of influential Christian men.

I have argued throughout my survey of second- and third-century Christian sources that in the period before the Nicene controversy, those calling themselves “Orthodox” (ὀρθόδοξοι) distinguished between correct and heretical theologies on the basis of preceptual (δοξαστικός) knowledge. Jerome’s list of “eminent men” who contributed to the Orthodox patrimony demonstrates that even in the waning years of the fourth century methodological diversity among “Orthodox” fathers was acceptable, at least among those who lived before the Nicene controversy. In his biography of Ignatius, for instance, Jerome pointedly demonstrates knowledge of the bishop’s letters themselves rather than just stories about the martyr.Footnote ⁹³ But he offers no methodological censure of Ignatius, even though he knew Ignatius’s rejection of scriptural interpretation, and even though he willingly criticized eminent men like Tertullian for theological, preceptual lapses.Footnote ⁹⁴

I turn now to the Nicene controversy, in which the underdetermined nature of scripture led to a schism among Christians who called themselves Orthodox (and “Universal”/καθολικοί). In response to the crisis, Christian scholars came up with new ways of making arguments, and over the course of a generation came to define Orthodoxy in a more expansive manner. Scholars such as Athanasius redefined Orthodoxy not only as a series of preceptual truths, but as a set of preceptual truths arrived at through a newly articulated scholastic method. It was not enough to arrive at common precepts by way of different scholarly practices, as Irenaeus and Tertullian had done generations before. Diversity of method came to the fore as a theological problem among Catholic Christians. Chapter 3 describes the redefinition of Orthodoxy to include both preceptual and epistemic knowledge.

Constantine’s Idealized World Order: Universality through Unity

Constantine was obsessed with unity. We know this because of the archive attesting to his guidance in adjudicating the Nicene controversy, comprising letters from the emperor to his subordinates trying to diffuse an increasingly tense battle of minds and wills.Footnote ¹ But Constantine’s concern with unity was epistemic rather than preceptual. The first Christian emperor was ultimately unconcerned with the subject upon which his subordinates agreed, as I argue later in this chapter. Rather, he was interested chiefly in the fact of their agreement, and with the relationship between intellectual unity and the bestowal of divine favor on the empire.Footnote ²

In the early years of the Nicene controversy Constantine wrote a letter to its two central disputants: an Alexandrian presbyter named Arius and Alexander, the metropolitan bishop of Alexandria:

As will become clear, Constantine took his role as mediator seriously. In this letter, dated to 324Footnote ⁵ (and thus immediately before the Council of Nicaea was convened), the emperor stakes out his initial position on the question that Arius and Alexander disputed, and which they had formed intellectual alliances to defend.Footnote ⁶ To Constantine, the question was inane – asked out of foolishness and answered in haste. “Now forgive one another for both the careless question and the ill-considered answer,” orders Constantine, and let the clergy behave as a philosophical school.

The emperor made clear that there was no discernible difference between Arius and Alexander regarding matters of cultic import and thus ordered them to reestablish communion.Footnote ⁸ Constantine held that as long as divergent theological viewpoints were justifiable under the umbrella of Orthodoxy they were to be tolerated by the clerical elite. This is a position from which Constantine did not sway, even as he ordered the banishment of Arius and two members of his party less than a year later. The question, then as ever, was how wide the umbrella of orthodoxy cast its shadow, and whether it should be assumed to cover mostly matters of practice or primarily matters of belief.

At first glance, the emperor’s fragmentary letter to the church at Nicomedia after the Council of Nicaea sounds like an abrupt departure from the conciliatory tone taken in the previous letter to Arius and Alexander:

This letter appears to present a stark divergence from the letter of Constantine of the previous letter, where he urged the disputing factions to set aside their differences for the good of the community because their differences were neither cultically actionable nor, to his mind, particularly interesting. The question of the precise relationship of the Son to the Father, adjudicated in excruciating detail at the council under Constantine’s own aegis, was “a careless question” that elicited “an ill-considered answer.”

How can it be that Constantine appears to have changed his mind so drastically on the substance of the question while remaining convinced that his actions aimed only at unity in the church? On a cursory reading it might seem that Constantine’s rhetoric is expedient and duplicitous: he has sided with the “winners” of the council. But this answer is too easy, and it fails to account for the fact of the Council of Nicaea itself. Before the Council of Arles in 314 that was similarly called by Constantine, there was no precedent for imperially sanctioned meetings whose aim is to hammer out theological points and arrive at a state of unity.Footnote ¹⁰ There is no reason to think that the pronouncements of ecclesiastical councils would have come to represent the primary node of authority within later Christian theological disputation without Constantine’s own initiative.Footnote ¹¹ Rather, it was Constantine’s lifelong obsession with unity that led to his calling for councils in the first place.Footnote ¹² We cannot then say that his seeming “change of position” relies on the authority of the Council of Nicaea – the authority of the council is a direct result of Constantine’s sanction, a patronage borne of his singular concern for unity regardless of the particular, preceptual content of that singular faith.

By his own admission the emperor’s obsession with ecclesial unity overlies a traditional Roman concern for the “peace of the gods (pax deorum)”; human beings please the gods under the direction of the emperor, and the gods bestow gifts upon the empire in return. When Constantine called for unity among the Catholic community he did not invoke some internal theological need as justification. Rather, he warned that dissension may lead the Christian god to withhold favor from his reign.Footnote ¹³ His letter to Alexander and Arius quoted earlier, composed on the eve of the Council of Nicaea, begins as follows:

Here Constantine claims two interrelated purposes: the unity of doctrine and the prosperity of the empire. These are not separate issues, he clarifies, but two sides of the same coin: only doctrinal unity guarantees divine favor – the divine favor that undergirded his own claim to imperial authority, as it had for his Tetrarchic predecessors.Footnote ¹⁵ He expressed the same purpose in a general letter to Catholic communities written just a few days after the Council of Nicaea’s close:

A traditional interpretation of this letter would agree with James Stevenson, that Constantine simply misunderstood the significance of the dispute.Footnote ¹⁷ Seen in the context of Constantine’s broader interest in unity and the material consequences of dissent, and taking the emperor’s own assertion of intent at face value, we can say that the traditional interpretation is woefully inadequate. Rather, in this letter Constantine shows that his concern for doctrinal unity was simply not preceptual: he didn’t much care what it was that the theologians agreed upon, at least in principle – unity is necessary in the first instance because it is unity that guarantees the general prosperity of the empire.Footnote ¹⁸ Later in this letter he demonstrates the mechanics of this Christian epistemic commitment in the same way that Valerius Maximus’s story at the beginning of Chapter 2 displays the mechanics of Traditionalist Roman epistemology. In Constantine’s eyes, it is inappropriate a priori for one group to be fasting while another feasts. “As I am sure you all are already aware, it is for this reason divine Providence desires that this matter should achieve the proper settlement and be brought under a single regulation.”Footnote ¹⁹

Constantine’s concern for proper cultic performance as guarantor of divine protection is not unique to him, nor is it peculiarly Christian. Susanna Elm showed in Sons of Hellenism that the pax deorum, and by extension the pax Romana, was always bound up in the discovery of universal philosophical precepts. “[I]ntegration, especially of things divine, was dangerous, since false teachings of false gods – wrong innovations – threatened the security and longevity of the oikoumenē. Greek and Roman history provided sufficient examples of the divine wrath called forth by such mistakes. Who, then, was innovating correctly?”Footnote ²⁰ Imperial stability was always an epistemic concern. Cicero makes precisely the same connection in his Laws.Footnote ²¹ The logic was not unique to Constantine even among early fourth-century Catholics. In his oration to honor the emperor’s thirty years in the purple, Eusebius of Caesarea echoed back to Constantine the connection between doctrinal unity and imperial prosperity, which began already with Augustus:

Roman Traditionalists of the later fourth century did not desert the classical understanding of the pax deorum, either. Symmachus, one of the last truly influential Traditionalists in the Roman aristocracy, famously scolded the boy emperor Valentinian II in 384. “Who is so friendly with the barbarians that he doesn’t need an Altar of Victoria? … Those who it doesn’t benefit – let them disdain this power. Don’t you go and abandon a patronage that favors your triumphs (Vos amicum triumphis patrocinium nolite deserere)!”Footnote ²³

Constantine’s concern with intellectual unity was a traditional Roman anxiety over the pax deorum refracted through Christian theological commitments.Footnote ²⁴ The emperor’s focus on universality, predicated on the empire’s need of divine favor, defined his approach to truth. His desire to identify and promulgate a statement of universal truth, in turn, determined the shape and focus of the Catholic Christianity that flourished in his wake. This is not to say that before the reign of Constantine, Christian scholars were not interested in doctrinal unity. Rather, before the blending of Christian theology with imperial ideology that occurred under the patronage of Constantine, the impetus toward unity among Christians was never chiefly the general prosperity of the Roman empire. Constantine was a Christian, but he was a Roman Christian, and he brought Roman ideologies of religion and state to bear on his adjudication of the Nicene Controversy. It was the first time that Christian theology was being done with an army at its back. The fact that Nicene Christians insisted so assiduously and violently on doctrinal uniformity cannot be separated from a Roman ideology of state laid over theological disputation during the reign of the empire’s first Christian sovereign.

The preceding has been an analysis of the scholarly method of early Christians who were actively forging new ideas about scripture and scriptural interpretation. A young Athanasius was present at the Council of Nicaea, intending to apply his keen exegetical skills to scripture: excising biblical language to construct a new statement of faith that could unite factions and bring the unity – and thereby the prosperity – that Constantine so desperately desired. By the end of his life Athanasius had shifted away from his youthful contention that scripture and scriptural interpretation was chiefly important for clarifying doctrine, and so had his Catholic peers.

Athanasius of Alexandria

Athanasius always punched above his weight. He was enduringly controversial during his life, earning both five imperial exiles and an oration of praise by the bishop of Constantinople, who called him “the pillar of the Church” some eight years after his death.Footnote ²⁵ He spent a long life in service of the Nicene definition of faith, which was conceived just three years before he succeeded his patron and mentor Alexander as bishop of Alexandria. Over the course of Athanasius’s public life, which spanned almost precisely the period between the Council of Nicaea and the beginning of the Theodosian dynasty, Orthodox disputants on either side of the Nicene controversy shifted their defensive tactics.Footnote ²⁶ Along with his interlocutors and contemporaries, Athanasius moved dramatically away from the interpretation of scriptural text, focusing rather on doctrinal positions that began and terminated with credal statements of faith. Athanasius’s career reflected, and more often catalyzed, the shift in scholastic method that underlies the Theodosian embrace of creeds and codes explored in Chapter 4. For this reason his literary oeuvre, and his impact on the rules and contents of debate in the aftermath of the Council of Nicaea, deserves special attention. The rise of the code perhaps wouldn’t, perhaps couldn’t, have occurred without him.

We see a bit of the young Athanasius, maybe in his mid-twenties, in a letter referred to by the first two words of its incipit: One Body. The letter is ascribed to Alexander of Alexandria but was likely written by Athanasius himself sometime between 318 and 324.Footnote ²⁷ This circular letter to all bishops was one of the “opening shots” of the Nicene controversy, and in it we see two strategies of truth production working together in support of Athanasius’s polemical ends. First, the letter begins by claiming to be centrally motivated by the Constantinian trope of divinely ordained unity:

That is, this public-facing document from the chancery of Alexander begins with an argument sure to find receptive ears in the imperial court; Athanasius told Constantine what he wanted to hear. Second, in One Body, scripture is used as check on credal statements. Specifically, scripture is invoked to falsify a negative creed that (Athanasius asserts) comprises “things that they assert upon discovery, going beyond scripture” (Urk. 4b.7). While the faulty “creed” states, for instance, that “the Word of God was not always in existence, but came into being from nothing” (Urk. 4b.7), Athanasius responds: “Who that hears John saying, ‘In the beginning was the Word,’ does not condemn those who say, ‘There was a time when the Word did not exist?’” (Urk. 4b.12).

The ultimate aim of One Body is to condemn heresy and to ostracize those who had been condemned, not to interpret scripture or to offer a positive statement of faith for the Universal (“Catholic” καθολική) community. According to Athanasius, the doctrines attributed to “those around Arius” cannot be true because their statements are falsifiable within the framework of scripture (Urk. 4b.11). He appeals to the authority of scripture for falsification but not for interpretation. In the words of Ellen Muehlberger: “In a way, [Athanasius’s] writings from the 320s and 330s ventriloquized his thoughts through Scripture, taking on the voice of Paul or the voice of the gospels to better say what his own exposition might also have expressed.”Footnote ²⁸

Athanasius wrote One Body as a young man, when battle lines of the controversy were still being drawn. At that point there was not even a common term to denote “Arius and those around him.” Thirty years had passed by the time that Athanasius penned the first full account of the Council of Nicaea, and in that interval the polemical and citational outlook had radically shifted.Footnote ²⁹ The struggle between Athanasius and George was so well known in Egypt that it filtered even into the rural areas, at least according to Constantius II’s letter to the Alexandrians in 357: “Even among those living on the frontier, who is ignorant of the rivalry in the events that have taken place?”Footnote ³⁰ The emperor wrote another letter that same year, addressed to coregents Aezenes and Sazanes, and claiming that news of Athanasius’s disgrace and exile had traversed the length of the Nile, all the way to the Kingdom of Axum.Footnote ³¹

The situation was dramatically different in the Latin West, where thirty years on, the Creed of Nicaea was still little known – even among the some of the most outspoken theological minds of the day.Footnote ³² As late as 359 the necessity of credal statements was not obvious, when Hilary’s exile led him to learn of the theological strife in the East and to write an extensive letter to Western bishops informing them of the dispute, apparently for the first time, and staking out his position on it.Footnote ³³ But in the Greek East, questions about it were hotly debated. “How was the Nicene Creed created? What is the nature of its authority? What is an Orthodox understanding of the relationship between the Nicene Creed and the scriptural texts that simultaneously interprets and constrains?” Answers to these questions had earned Athanasius two imperial exiles already. By the time another twenty years had passed, however, a Christian senator claimed confidently in a Latin treatise for the emperor that the Nicene Creed was not only universally applicable, but that it was written at a council attended by Christ himself!Footnote ³⁴ The story of Christian scholasticism over the fourth century is the story of the Nicene Creed’s rise from a distillation of scripture, to a check on scriptural interpretation, and finally to a universal statement by which all exegesis could be judged.

I turn now to Athanasius’s Letter Concerning the Decrees of the Council of Nicaea: the first full account of the council, composed likely during the bishop’s third exile (356–362).Footnote ³⁵ The main concern of Athanasius’s letter is to construct a new form of argument, one that is able to deal finally with the problem of “Arian”Footnote ³⁶ exegetes who justify heretical positions through exegesis of an underdetermined scriptural canon – a canon incapable of refuting Arian arguments once and for all because Arius’s supporters continually find new scriptures upon which to base their theological convictions.Footnote ³⁷ Athanasius knew the problem already in the 320s when he wrote One Body, and nevertheless intended to construct a creed based solely on the words of scripture. “We have often shamed these men by stating these things, and by opening up the divine scriptures for reading. But like chameleons, they morph themselves again” (Urk. 4b.16).

According to Athanasius, forty years later the problem was not solely the machinations of Arian interpreters. The problem, rather, was the nature of scripture itself. He begins his Letter Concerning the Decrees with a screed against those who focus on scriptural interpretation as a central site of theological contestation, and as a central framework for producing truth. These “chameleons” focus on scriptural interpretation “in extreme perverseness.” When they complain that the creed from Nicaea used terms not found in scripture, they “mutter like the Jews.”Footnote ³⁸ In typical style, the preface crescendos with Athanasius throwing scripture back at his enemies, paraphrasing Ezekiel 11:2. Heretics indeed do something “according to scripture,” he claims, “they have come to an inane conclusion” (1.2).

The problem was that Arians looked to scriptural interpretation as a primary scholastic tool and were, as such, “latter-day Judaizers” (2.1). They come to their position through both “ignorance of the truth and inexperience in divine scripture” – a phrase that is not simple hendiadys, or merely a rhetorical flourish (17.1). Rather, Athanasius argues that proper knowledge of the truth is pre-scriptural, or that truth is at least conceptually separable from scriptural interpretation. The truth, according to Athanasius, is the teaching handed down from the patrimony of the tradition with a unity of message, beginning with Moses and ending with the very wording of the Nicene Creed.Footnote ³⁹ Patrimony and scripture go hand in hand; one cannot exist without the other. This is not a position that Athanasius had always held, however – he came to it only later in life, in the 350s. Nor was it the position of the bishops attending the Council of Nicaea, upon entering the chambers in 325. Richard Vaggione summarized the situation succinctly:

According to Athanasius, the assembled bishops at Nicaea intended to compose a universally binding creed on the basis of scripture alone:

In this passage we see Athanasius admit the failure of scripture. As a scholastic method, textual interpretation alone was not sufficient to guarantee the production of true knowledge.Footnote ⁴¹ In light of this failure, Athanasius turns for the rest of his letter to the creation of a patrimony to support the language of the council, language that in the words of Lewis Ayres had become “verbal talismans” in the polemical debate that raged after the Council of Nicaea. “A term [ὁμοούσιος] originally chosen for polemical purposes and without any dense, well-established theological meaning was gradually identified as a key marker of pro-Nicene orthodoxy.”Footnote ⁴²

It is important to remember that this document, written in the mid to late 350s, contains the first significant use of the term “of the same substance (ὁμοούσιος)” by Athanasius – the word that would become the central point of contention for years to come, and that formed the battle line over which opposing factions were drawn up.Footnote ⁴³ Again in the words of Lewis Ayres:

It is important also to remember that Concerning the Decrees is polemical and creative. It is tempting to read Athanasius’s scholastic method in line with the modes of argumentation accepted by a later, more established orthodoxy, but his rhetorical strategy was radical and innovative; the treatise shows Athanasius inventing a new scholastic method by polemicizing against a group that, until very recently, was well within the bounds of “Catholic” Christianity. Éric Rebillard’s warning is apt: “scholars interested in Christian polemical debates in late antiquity must … be careful not to accept as a commonly held rule what was in fact being constructed as a polemical tool.”Footnote ⁴⁵

With the concluding twenty-one chapters of Concerning the Decrees, Athanasius responds to the failure of scriptural interpretation to answer the questions posed by the council, he briefly defends the metaphysics of the new credal language of “the same substance,” and he showcases extended quotations from Theognostus, Dionysius of Alexandria, and Origen that use the term “substance (οὐσία)” with his preferred valence. The reader is supposed to understand through Athanasius’s presentation that an Orthodox patrimony stretching back nearly two centuries stands behind the seemingly unprecedented language of the Nicene Creed. The apparent novelty of the definition is a mirage. “It is in this same sense that those gathered in Nicaea decreed these terms. But let us now prove that they did not invent these things and manufacture them on their own, as these ones allege, but spoke what they received from those before them. So this excuse also will be snatched away from them.”Footnote ⁴⁶

In Concerning the Decrees, Athanasius moves beyond his earlier position in which textual interpretation served as a check on and means of falsifying heretical doctrines. Here he marshals evidence of an orthodox patrimony in order to create a paratext for the scripture in a way that justifies the language of the council, most importantly the term “of the same substance (ὁμοούσιος).”Footnote ⁴⁷ He does this by offering calques on terms in scripture. For instance, he decrees that whenever the phrase “of the Father” refers to Jesus in a scriptural text, the reader should interpret as if it said “from the substance of the Father.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Bart Ehrman’s 1993 monograph The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture detailed editorial changes to the text of the New Testament in which late ancient scribes emended manuscripts to say what Orthodox readers knew them to mean. Already in the late 350s, however, Athanasius insisted that valid textual interpretation required an Orthodox corruption in the reading of scripture. His exposition of the Nicene Creed uses the rhetoric of scriptural interpretation and traditional authority to propose a radically new hermeneutic dogma, contriving an Orthodox patrimony for an utterly novel theological position and implementing a new scholarly method, along the way.

Athanasius and the “Canon”

Around fifteen years after he wrote his first full defense of the work of Nicaea in Concerning the Decrees, Athanasius wrote a festal letter laying out the “canonized” texts which constituted the “divine writings that we have for salvation.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Athanasius claims that he wrote the letter in response to the problem of “Melitians boasting about books that they call ‘apocryphal.’”Footnote ⁵⁰ The letter was written on the heels of Athanasius’ fifth (and final) exile, and sent to clerics as instruction regarding the manner in which scripture is to be used in their communities – a matter that required the bishop’s intervention, apparently.

Two observations will prove useful at this juncture: first, the extent of books that Athanasius deems “useful” includes books that are not within his canon.Footnote ⁵¹ At least one of these scriptures, the Shepherd of Hermas, was useful enough that Athanasius quoted it approvingly alongside the Letter of James in Concerning the Decrees, intending thereby to prove the Orthodox patrimony of his message (4). Second, Athanasius’s refutations of Arius from the 310s and 320s don’t evidence any confusion as to what group of texts are considered authoritative by all disputants involved; there is merely a dispute about how various statements in those texts are to be subordinated to one another. That is to say, already fifty years before Athanasius’s 39th Festal Letter, Christian theologians knew what constituted the “canon within the canon,” or passages and books of scripture that hold greater or lesser weight than others. The “canon” that Athanasius described in 367 is a corpus of quite a different sort; one that is permeable. There are books outside of the canon that are useful for newcomers, and books on the inside that are apparently not particularly useful for technical, elite theological debate.

This distinction helps me get at something central to the way that the Catholic scholars of the mid-fourth century interpreted text. In the wake of the decrees of Nicaea, the struggle over orthodoxy moved away from finding authoritative statements of doctrine within scriptural texts and instead toward justifying the language of the council’s pronouncements with reference to scriptural texts. The “canon” that Athanasius describes in his 39th Festal Letter comprises texts that are capable of being brought as evidence to check a credal statement. But by the time that he “defined” the canon in 367, he was doing quite the opposite in his polemical and protreptic scholarship: he was using credal statements – and above all the Nicene Creed – as a paratext and necessary precondition for authoritative interpretations of canonized scripture. The paratext that he offered had become the text.

This movement from paratext to text served to “canonize” not a particular set of scriptures, which had effectively already been done by the 320s at the latest, but rather to authorize a set of technical calques on scripture that govern its Orthodox interpretation. In the years after writing Concerning the Decrees, Athanasius regularly reaffirmed the apparently paradoxical position that all canonical texts were equally scripture, but that there was nevertheless a necessary, pre-textual understanding that served to guide any reading – and especially the reading of seemingly contradictory passages. For instance, in his Letters to Serapion, written during the course of his third exile (perhaps around 360) and thus at around the time that he composed Concerning the Decrees, Athanasius wrote:

The “distinctive character of Christianity” for Athanasius is pre-textual; interpreters must know the Orthodox tradition of interpretation in order to produce trustworthy knowledge. Part of that patrimony is to know that even when scripture says “the Lord created me,” the “me” that “was created” (ἐκτίσθη) is not “a created being” (κτίσμα). The semantic point may seem nonsensical, but for Athanasius, the Christological point stands.

Here we see that Athanasius is indebted to scholastic positions traceable to both Irenaeus and Tertullian. His definition of Orthodoxy stands in the gap between the two, and exploits strengths from each system, even though they are fundamentally incompatible. As I demonstrated in Chapter 2, Tertullian did not see scripture as a repository for truth, and held that its proper interpretation required assent to the regula fidei. In order to understand what scripture says, in other words, the exegete must already know what scripture means: for Tertullian this knowledge was the 116 words of the regula fidei, and for an older Athanasius, it was the Creed of Nicaea. But Athanasius also inherited a position from Irenaeus which Tertullian fundamentally rejected. Namely, Athanasius holds to the idea that truth is fractal: if the seeker is equipped with the right tools and hermeneutic strategies, truth can be continuously refined and examined to ever greater precision. For Irenaeus and Athanasius alike the question of the relationship between the Father and the Son is discoverable, and even while theological knowledge is progressively refined the nature of the message remains singular.

Concerning the Decrees

A newly minted theological method crystallized in and through Athanasius’s scholarly work. In Concerning the Decrees, Athanasius argues that an authoritative text has been distilled into the language of Nicaea and that the language of the distillate must be imposed as the authoritative framework for all subsequent reading. Credal language was reimposed on the authoritative text itself, rendering the words of scripture a simulacrum. Scriptural interpretation had become epistemically subsequent and methodologically ancillary. Through his polemics Athanasius achieved the irony of ironies: scriptural interpretation put itself out of business.Footnote ⁵⁴

Concerning the Decrees aims to construct a patrimony for the language of Nicaea and to justify the use of nonscriptural terms within a creed that claims to distill the language of scripture into an authoritative statement. Athanasius’s treatise includes a section of significant quotations of previous theological thinkers who use the “substance” language to speak of the relationship of the son to the father. He ends this section: “See, we are proving that this view has been transmitted to you from father to father. But you – latter-day Jews and disciples of Caiaphas – how many fathers can you assign to your phrases?” (27.4).

In Concerning the Decrees, Athanasius extensively cites previous authorities to demonstrate patrimony for the Nicene “substance” language, modeling a form of aggregation that would become the scholarly norm in decades to come. But the material form of Athanasius’s text also models a new scholastic method based in aggregation. His work was not solely a Christological treatise, it was the cover letter for a dossier. Athanasius appended a number of primary sources to the methodological exposition that we call Concerning the Decrees, beginning the text that was his main polemical adversary: Eusebius of Caesarea’s Letter to the Caesareans.Footnote ⁵⁵ A valid demonstration of theological truth, in Athanasius’ estimation, required first the sublimation of scripture to its distillate, along with a demonstration of the Orthodox patrimony of one’s ideas. But truly valid scholarship required one more step, as well: the aggregation of polemical referents, along with any material supporting or otherwise relevant to the question at hand. I argue that Athanasius’ creative work in treatises such as Concerning the Decrees set the standard for the production of valid theological knowledge.

It is precisely in this period, and in these letters, that Athanasius forged the polemical use of Nicene language, and it is only in the later fourth century that “Nicaea’s terminology gradually comes to be equated with Nicaea’s judgments.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Athanasius’s polemic was predicated on the failure of scriptural interpretation and the need to contrive an authoritative patrimony of unified, Orthodox voices in order to justify his own attachment to novel, nonscriptural language, and in order to respond to criticism that seemed to be coming at him from all sides.

The period between 350 and 367 was the most prolific of Athanasius’s life. In these years he forged not only a new mode of argumentation but also a literary reputation that led to his outsized influence on Nicene theological scholarship, and to his eventual canonization. Timothy Barnes lamented:

While I cannot chart with a Barnesian granularity the comings and goings of Athanasius during his most prolific period, I can say something about the work that he produced while he was on the lam: Athanasius’s constant rumination on the past, looking grievously backward on the Council of Nicaea and all of the perceived slights in the intervening years, shaped not only the Athanasius that was in exile but the Athanasius who was remembered in the Theodosian court as a “pillar of the church.” There may be no more consequential sense of bereavement in the history of the book than what is visible in the literature, and the structure of argumentation, that crystallized during the years when Athanasius first became a formidable literary figure. Athanasius’s dogged defense of the language and theology of Nicaea during this period set the standard for Christian theological disputation in the years that followed. His scholastic method quickly became customary.

Theologians defending the Nicene Creed were not the only polemicists who employed the method for which Athanasius’s Concerning the Decrees is our clearest example. There was an explosion of credal creation in the fourth century, on all sides of the debate, utilizing the same scholastic method of (1) aggregation of a scholastic patrimony, (2) distillation of the patrimony into a creed, and (3) sublimation of further dispute to the newly minted creed. The spate of creeds recorded in Athanasius’s Concerning the Councils in the early 360s – nearly a dozen – all reflect this same scholarly practice even when making opposite substantive claims. Add to this the fourth-century creeds extant in the later works of Socrates, Hilary, Theodoret, Epiphanius, and the various late ancient and early medieval collections, and it becomes clear that this method, which was created in defense of the Nicene Creed, quickly took over as the gold standard of scholastic methodology in fourth-century theological disputation, at least among theologians claiming Catholic identity.

Within seventy years the argumentative format that Athanasius pioneered in Concerning the Decrees, and reflected in the flurry of credal disputation in the 340s, 350s, and 360s, was wholly naturalized for theological disputation. In 434, Vincent of Lérins wrote matter-of-factly about the proper production of theological truth:

Conclusion

Athanasius’s work reflected and eventually catalyzed a shift across the domain of fourth-century theological scholarship, at least within the group of theologians disputing the legacy of Nicaea. He and his opponents agreed that the ultimate arbiters of truth were credal statements that had been distilled from authoritative archives, but that it was not sufficient simply to report the distillation of truth. Proper scholarly practice required that universal knowledge which was the result of aggregation be transmitted along with the aggregated sources themselves so that readers could “check the work” of the scholar, so to speak. In the early years of the Theodosian dynasty this mode of argumentation came to be the standard scholarly tactic for knowledge production – first in theological domains, and then everywhere. Pitched and often violent battles over Nicene orthodoxy during Athanasius’s lifetime set the stage for a new kind of scholastic tribalism in which Nicene Christians insisted that a scholastic method, born of polemic, was both true and universal.

It is no secret that the Theodosian dynasty was vehemently Nicene, and that the greatest influx of Christians into the ruling elite of Rome – the Old Rome and the New – occurred not under Constantine’s auspices but under Theodosius’s.Footnote ⁵⁹ The tenacity with which Theodosian dynasts patronized Nicene Christianity is evidenced not only in the building of churches, the elevation of senators, or the changing social mores regarding sex, family life, and Traditionalist worship. Even in the structure, motivations, execution, and reception of “secular” Theodosian scholastic productions we can trace a new scholarly method, born of the Nicene controversy.

By way of analogy, let’s engage with the judicial legacy of Antonin Scalia, the instigator and popularizer of a novel form of jurisprudence dubbed “originalism.” Imagine that Antonin Scalia served fifty years on the Supreme Court under a single president who packed the courts with originalist judges: jurists who take up Scalia’s scholastic method even when they disagree with his opinions. Twenty or thirty years later, it would not be terribly surprising if the “originalist” manner of argumentation found its way into new domains that have nothing to do with law.Footnote ⁶⁰ In such a world, “originalist philosophy,” or “originalist history,” or even “originalist journalism” might not seem so strange. Similarly, during the Theodosian dynasty, a powerful patronage system led a set of scholastic practices born of theological controversy to become embedded in the broader society. I argue that these practices are visible in Theodosian productions ranging from theological tractates to legal codifications to the Palestinian Talmud. In this sense, “Christianization” exists in practices. Even when Athanasius’s opponents disagreed with his theological claims, they mirrored back his argumentative method. As I argue in Chapter 5, even when some influential scholastic productions of the Theodosian Age reject or are ambivalent to Christian theological propositions, nevertheless we can see the effect of Christian scholastic methods in their form, content, and stated intentions. I turn now to the “rise of the code,” and to the changing shape of scholarship across the ideological spectrum during the Theodosian Age.

Tools of the Trade: Aggregation, Distillation, and Promulgation

Leontius of Jerusalem was a strict defender of the theological advances of the fourth and fifth centuries. Writing from the Judean hills in the mid-sixth century, he inherited from his elders a Chalcedonian Orthodoxy along with a manner of argumentation that focused on compiling excerpts of authoritative theological scholarship from the past. He admits that his opponents find this to be an aggravating tactic. “Here are exactly the kinds of things they’ll offer in opposition to what we’ve said: ‘Why do you, when you buzz around patristic texts like bees, harvest honey from whatever example pleases you, and continually bombard us with your buzzing about them, but fly right over others that are hostile to your purposes, darting away from them in silence?’”Footnote ¹ The bee metaphor is intriguing. Leontius describes his search for certainty as dramatically aleatory, predicated on the aggregation and distillation of authorized voices from the past – a sort of sentimental antiquarianism meant to lead the careful reader through a maze of scholarly material to an ultimate truth at the path’s end.

Leontius was no innovator. In fact, his style of argumentation was already traditional by the time that he wrote in the sixth century.Footnote ² The metaphor of following the example of a bee when reading and digesting information transparently invokes Lucretius’s On the Nature of Things 3.11, a perennial favorite among the Latin literary elite, evoking an eclectic pattern of reading and borrowing from sources in a variety of genres.Footnote ³ More importantly, already for nearly a century and a half Christian scholars of the Nicene tradition had engaged in a practice of aggregation as foundational to the adequate demonstration of truth.

Scott Johnson recently described the move to collections of authoritative and/or discursive scholarly material in Late Antiquity, specifically in the fourth through sixth centuries, as “an aesthetic of accumulation.”Footnote ⁴ Another way to describe the increasing centrality of aggregation as a precursor for valid scholarly work is to say that such scholarship takes part in “the rise of the code.” Both will suffice as a description of the strange contours of a shifting late ancient book culture. But the description of an “aesthetic” should not be confused with an explanation for the shift to aggregation as a central scholarly method. With this chapter I describe the material and intellectual framing of Theodosian Age scholarship. I also explain why aggregation came to be more than just an aesthetic choice commonly held across the Roman empire. Aggregation, in the Theodosian Age, was an expectation held by producers of technical literature about what it looks like, and means, to do rigorous and worthwhile work. These changes compounded from a shift in theological argumentation that I detailed in Chapter 3. I argue that the move to aggregation as a foundational tool did not long remain strictly within the purview of Christian theological scholarship. Rather, the rise of aggregation accounts for the rise of the code as a nexus of power and truth, as well as the shifting facets of Theodosian book culture outlined later. The Council of Nicaea blazed a path that led to the possibility of an authoritative and generative canon of scripture that yields to a tradition of interpretation, and even, ultimately, to the possibility of a text like the Theodosian Code.

Interpretation and “Patristic Commentary”

Vincent of Lérins wrote for himself two commonitoria: aides-mémoires which lay out in unadorned language the method “how and by what sure (so as to say general and common [quasi generali ac regulari]) rule I might distinguish the truth of Catholic faith from the falsehood of depraved heresy.”Footnote ⁵ Surveying the field of “men eminent in sanctity and in learning” he came to the conclusion that he could detect heresy and remain pure in his own faith with reference to two resources: first, the “authority of divine law (divinae legis auctoritate)” and “second, the tradition of the Catholic community (deinde ecclesiae catholicae traditione).” Vincent insists that the latter – orthodox patrimony – is necessary to consult because the former, which he defines as “the canon of scripture,” is dangerously underdetermined.

By the time of Vincent’s late life literary floruit in the 430s ce, scriptural interpretation had long since faded as a central and sufficient locus for the production of theological truth. In Vincent’s estimation, as many interpretations could be extracted from scripture as there were people to perform the task, and if one’s aim was to produce authoritative knowledge it was necessary to adjoin patrimony of the Catholic tradition to any textual argument. Vincent’s contemporary Augustine, too, considered the strength of intellectual patrimony to lie precisely in its ability to account for, and exploit, the indeterminacy of scripture.Footnote ⁷

A generation before Augustine, Hilary of Poitiers understood the indeterminacy of scripture as the reason that Christian theologians of his generation fundamentally changed their method. It was precisely the failure of scriptural interpretation and the proliferation of heresies in the years following the Council of Nicaea, that Hilary saw as the central, motivating factor underlying the remarkably new manner of scholastic argumentation among Christians on the eve of the Theodosian Age. He writes in his treatise Concerning the Synods that in generations past “you didn’t long for a scribe to write what you believed in your heart and professed unto salvation. As bishop you didn’t need to read the things that you held as new converts.”Footnote ⁸ According to Hilary, an age of interpretative flexibility had not arisen before the upheavals of the 320s. As such, there was no need for the collection of interpretations and their distillation into creeds. He continues: “Necessity, however, introduced the custom of defining the faith and of signing on to the definition (exponi fides, et expositis subscribi)” (63). Textual interpretation failed to settle debates about the relationship between the Christian Father and his Son, and creeds were introduced to perform the task that scripture was incapable of performing.

Hilary saw the production of truth as a project involving two primary operations: first aggregation of a patrimony and then distillation of a universal statement of truth. And he understood that this new form of argumentation arose because of new concerns following the Council of Nicaea:

Hilary continues admonishing his reader: “You must not be surprised, dear brethren, that so many creeds have recently been written. The frenzy of heretics makes it necessary” (63). In Hilary’s estimation, this structure of knowledge – aggregation of material followed by distillation into a creed or universal statement – is the baseline operation of any fight against heresy. As we saw earlier in the works of Vincent and Augustine, and as we will see later in the works of Ambrose and Jerome, this change was predicated on the indeterminacy of scripture exposed by the Nicene controversy, resulting in the need to join the patrimony of the Catholic tradition to the results of scriptural interpretation.

Late ancient Christian scholars knew about the shift in Christian scholastic methodology described in Chapter 3 and they actively reflected upon it in the later fourth century and the beginning of the fifth. Hilary wrote his Concerning the Synods from the Latin West at almost precisely the same time that Athanasius wrote Concerning the Decrees from the Greek East. Each offers a genealogy for the shift to the “code” format that begins with the proliferation of false interpretations – readings predicated on the interpretative art itself without recourse to the history of scholarship. In the work of Hilary and Athanasius alike we see a coherent statement of the method that would come to dominate nearly every piece of scholarship in the Theodosian Age. Both argue that truth can be found only by compiling the great diversity of opinions and distilling from that collection a universal statement which supersedes and governs the subsequent interpretation of its sources. We see, in other words, the invention of aggregation as a central scholarly tool. I turn now to the development and deployment of this tool.

Christian Aggregation

Among Christian scholars from the 350s through the Theodosian Age, aggregation was more than a method: it was an epistemic operation. What I mean by this is that aggregation was not simply one method out of many by which an argument about universal truth could be made. Rather, aggregation was the necessary precursor to any such knowledge. It was the only way to produce universal truth reliably.

For example, it is theoretically possible to produce a final statement of universal truth in theology, or in law, simply by fiat. If it were considered to be a reasonable method of accessing truth, then a final, unimpeachable statement could be handed down without supporting documentation from an accepted authority, like an emperor or a metropolitan bishop. It is simply the case, however, that no one in the Theodosian Age did so. Rather, among Christians and eventually in “secular” domains, statements of universal truth were predicated on a collation of sources and on the aggregation of previous opinions about the subject at hand.

Jerome, writing in 415 ce, expresses an expectation that truth is predicated on aggregation in the strongest of terms – calling it among the “laws of commentary writing.”

We likely will never know what comprises the full content of Jerome’s proposed leges commentariorum. He does gloss the term briefly in Against Rufinus 1.16, but never reflects on these “laws” in an extended manner. It is clear that he does not have in mind norms like those laid down by the contemporary theologian Tychonius, which have to do with the process of exegesis. Rather, the “laws of commentary writing” define scriptural commentary’s proper textualized form. Jerome here is concerned with the structure of a proper commentary. His chief expectation is that many diverse opinions are offered in addition to that of the author so that the discursive and commentarial tradition which forms the basis for authoritative statements of Orthodoxy can be investigated.

Jerome restated his expectation that proper argumentation cites many diverse opinions in his commentary on Isaiah. Writing in 410 ce, he claims:

Here, Jerome voices an expectation that aggregation is the proper method for scriptural commentary, but he also shows a concern for the eventualities brought about by this method of argumentation. While he clearly expects that scholastically valid commentaries aggregate previous opinions and display them for the benefit of the reader, he is aware that writing a commentary in the form of an aggregative code involves promulgating false opinions that are not approved or endorsed by the author of the collection.Footnote ¹¹ I return to this and other concerns stemming from the centrality of aggregation in the Theodosian Age in Chapters 6 and 8. For now I simply note that fourth- and fifth-century commentators were cognizant of issues of discernment related to their chosen form of argumentation, where it may not be immediately apparent to a reader which of the many opinions presented was endorsed by the author of a work.

For Jerome, the function of a commentary is to collate interpretations and present them so that the reader, “like a good banker, can reject the money of spurious mintage” – opinions supported by poor evidence or insufficient reason.Footnote ¹² As Jerome states, and as I argue later, by the time that Jerome wrote his Apology against the Books of Rufinus in the early fifth century, this was a common expectation of scholastic work even among Traditionalists and scholars working in “secular” domains.

This method, which “is the custom and the rule of exegetes,” is schoolboy stuff, according to Jerome – the classical rhetorical education through which Jerome, Rufinus, and their scholarly peers were all trained necessarily included reading “Asper’s commentaries on Vergil and Sallust, those of Vulcatius on Cicero’s Orations, of Victorinus upon his Dialogues and the Comedies of Terence,” etc. (3.11). The inclusion of a variety of opinions has a long and august history, according to Jerome, even if the underlying rationale for doing so had shifted fundamentally in the preceding generation.

Jerome’s long-form attack on Rufinus was occasioned by the latter’s edition of Origen’s On First Principles, which Rufinus claims to have purged from heretical interpolations in order to return Origen’s text to its original, Orthodox state. Continuing from the previous quotation, Jerome clarifies that Rufinus’s error was not that he has included heretical opinions in his edition of Origen’s On First Principles: including such material would be perfectly in line with the task of a commentator, or that of a translator. Rather, Rufinus’s sin was cutting the heretical bits out! According to Jerome, what remains in the work, “whether good or bad, must be held to be part of the work – not of the author whom you are translating, but of you who has made the translation” (3.11). Rufinus opened himself up to the charge of heresy by failing to stick to commentarial practices accepted by Theodosian Christians and Traditionalists alike. Methodological aberration is not just gauche; it is spiritually risky.

Writing in the early 440s, Socrates “the Scholar (scholasticus)” considered aggregation to be a scholarly tool useful and necessary precisely for “searching out the truth (τὴν ἀλήθειαν ἀνιχνεύσαμεν).”Footnote ¹³ He produced two editions of his Ecclesiastical History. The first was intended for a general readership. It picks up on Eusebius of Caesarea’s own Ecclesiastical History and emends errors introduced in Rufinus’s Latin translation, offering “the unadorned facts (γυμνὰ τὰ πράγματα) in order that the history might not become verbose, and weary the readers with tedious matters of detail” (2.1.5). The second edition, however, had a higher aim and a nobler audience: it was a work intended for a scholar. As such, Socrates claims that this second version used current scholarly methods, by which he meant that it was a work of aggregation: it brought together a variety of sources without alteration, because this was the only way that Socrates thought the work might be useful for another scholar.

Socrates worked in the budding discipline of Ecclesiastical History. He had a few examples upon which to base his own contribution to the genre, but there was no fully articulated methodology of the discipline, especially where it differed from “history” as classically conceived and practiced. Eusebius self-consciously invented the genre in which Socrates worked, and claimed to bring together bits and pieces quite literally as a συγγραφεύς – one who collects facts into a narrative. Eusebius’s introduction offers that “we shall attempt through historical narration to create a body (δι᾿ ὑφηγήσεως ἱστορικῆς πειρασόμεθα σωματοποιῆσαι)” from such scattered sources as he is able to lay eyes upon.Footnote ¹⁴ Now, Eusebius’s aims and his results are distinct: his work is not a coherent tapestry, in fact, but rather a messy patchwork, often presenting archival sources stitched into a narrative frame in a way that struck his readers as original and methodologically savvy.Footnote ¹⁵ But his stated aim was “to create a body” from such distinct sources. As with the work of other scholars engaged in this book, Eusebius’s and Socrates’s methods, at times, appear to be identical, and in more than a few instances their results significantly align. But in this case and others, scholars working in the same discipline performed similar tasks for different reasons, with distinct aims calibrated to the intellectual culture of their generation.

Socrates claims to have produced a first edition for the masses, one that has clear methodological resonances with Eusebius’s History and following similar aims. His “second edition,” on the other hand, is no such work. Rather, this new version of the Ecclesiastical History is steeped in the scholastic trends of the Theodosian Age, involving methods and aims foreign to the early fourth century but right at home in the fifth. Furthermore, not only does Socrates diverge from Eusebius’s method in favor of a Theodosian mode of aggregation, he also faults his own sources for failing to do the same. He castigates Sabinus of Heraclea for putting together a dossier of conciliar material that is both impudentFootnote ¹⁶ and – worse yet – incomplete, because it failed to bring together both heretical and orthodox material.Footnote ¹⁷ According to Socrates, Sabinus’s book was scholastically useless because it was methodologically flawed: it did not aggregate.

Sozomen wrote his own Ecclesiastical History in the 440s, dedicating it to Theodosius II. He, too, echoes the notion that proper knowledge production is fundamentally based in aggregation. He had intended to “trace the course of events from the beginning” – meaning from the time of Jesus’s life – but upon reflection that such luminaries as Clement, Hegesippus, Africanus, and Eusebius had already treated such matters exhaustively, he decided rather to offer only an abridged version and to focus on events beginning with the reign of Constantine.Footnote ¹⁸ Sozomen’s work integrates much of Socrates’s account and adds to it a host of documents and oral sources, especially relating to ecclesiastical affairs of the mid-fifth century, in many of which Sozomen had been personally involved. Sozomen’s approach to the production of an authoritative history wrestles both with the need to aggregate archival material in its original form and with the exigencies of the method itself; namely, if he were to bring together all the material which he surveyed, as was his original intent, the work would be too cumbersome to be useful. His response to this problem builds on the method that he learned from Eusebius, but the direction that Socrates took shows that he was intimately familiar with what was expected from him as a Theodosian scholar.

Here we see Sozomen’s extraordinary attention to documents, his intention to offer as many and as wide-ranging views as possible, and his conviction that on disputed topics, the range of documents should be allowed to speak in their fullness. It is clear that he has in mind the particular necessity to aggregate both orthodox and heretical opinions in disputed areas, because he moves on directly to criticize the failure of partisans – lesser historians – to do just that. Heretics fail to employ proper methods of knowledge production.

It is of course inevitable that such dossiers will skew to one ideological pole or another, and Sozomen’s own “collection” has a thoroughgoing partisan agenda. At stake for my argument is not whether Sozomen, Socrates, or anyone else successfully lived up to their ideals; this is a history of their ideals themselves. The acceptable form of scholastic truth production, for Socrates, Sozomen, and others in the Theodosian Age, was based in impartial aggregation.

The Proceedings of the Council of Ephesus (431)

Like Athanasius’s Concerning the Decrees and Hilary’s Concerning the Synods some seventy years earlier, the Proceedings of the Council of Ephesus (431) were constructed to make a point. The acta from July 22, 431 appear to supplement those from a month previous and, like Concerning the Decrees, constitute a dossier intended to establish a set of criteria: technical calques – not on scripture this time, but on the Nicene Creed itself – in order to secure the condemnation of Nestorius, the bishop of Constantinople. The proceedings begin with a full presentation of the Creed of Nicaea before turning to the impetus for the meeting in the first place:

The First Council of Ephesus was held in 431, and its main task was to deal with the problem of unauthorized interpretation of the Nicene Creed. Even in the run-up to the council it was clear that heretical readings of the Nicene Creed could not be defended on the basis of the text of the creed alone. Cyril’s Third Letter to Nestorius, written in late 430 immediately after a papal judgment against the latter and laying out the terms of his reconciliation, urges Nestorius to follow the “royal road” of patristic interpretation of the Nicene Creed, because his exposition of the text itself was heretically faulty. As Mark S. Smith put it: “A ‘bare’ confession of Nicaea, Cyril contended, was no longer sufficient for the authentic articulation of Nicene orthodoxy.”Footnote ²⁰ In the proceedings from June 22, Cyril went so far as to suggest that his own Second Letter should be “clearly established as the authoritative and necessary lens through which the Nicene Creed must be read, and the Creed itself rather drops out of view.”Footnote ²¹ The Nicene Creed itself was intended as a distillate of scripture, as a guide which dealt with the problem of scripture’s underdetermined nature. After 100 years, however, the creed had become so central to theological disputation that a new council was convened to deal with its own underdetermined nature. “The simulacrum is true.”Footnote ²²

Over the course of the fourth century, and into the fifth, we see a movement from primarily scriptural citation as central to the production of truth to a form of argumentation based in the aggregation of various, sometimes competing interpretive voices. This movement has been described variously as “patristic citation”Footnote ²³ or “patristic retractation.”Footnote ²⁴ The change defines the fundamental shift in Orthodox theological scholarship after the Council of Nicaea, and especially in the Theodosian empire. But the move to “patristic retractation” is not merely a modern scholarly interpretation: late ancient scholars also noticed that book forms, and forms of argumentation, underwent a revolution in the years after the Council of Nicaea. Returning to Vincent’s Commonitorium with which this chapter started, we find a Theodosian scholar struggling with the change in citational forms and the relationship between a new, Theodosian scholastic methodology producing new theological truths and an ancient, and (notionally) unchanging message.

Here Vincent impresses upon his reader that the methods of scholarly disputation may change as theologians polish the interpretive lens to reveal new, deeper truths, but that the underlying message remains constant and universal. Hilary, too, thought that the Nicene Creed was timelessly true but that it would require ongoing support and new arguments. Writing in 359 from the East, and addressing primarily Western bishops, he offered to send an account of all the creeds between Nicaea and Sirmium in hopes that he would have their support at “councils to come (futuri synodi),” the need for which was inevitable.Footnote ²⁷

Throughout the late fourth and fifth centuries, Christian scholars were preoccupied with negotiating new book forms and new styles of argumentation, and attempting to square these radical changes with an ancient tradition of interpretation that is supposed to undergird invariable, universal truths. When Christian scholars thought back on the changing forms of knowledge production in their generation and those before – from Hilary in the 350s to Vincent in the 430s – they saw the indeterminacy of Scripture as a motivating factor for the change. While the change was new to Hilary, and required both a genealogy and explanation, for Vincent the structure of knowledge in which aggregation is pivotal to the production of trustworthy knowledge was already an ingrained facet of his intellectual environment. Hilary, along with Athanasius, was an innovator in the movement to patristic rather than scriptural citation, and to aggregation as a fundamental tool. By the 430s, however, this ideology of knowledge production could be read from just about any randomly selected product of scholarship. This is to say that a particular facet of Christian book culture in the mid-fourth century came to be a generalized facet of elite book culture by the early fifth century. Or, put differently: when Christians came into a ruling elite for the first time, Christian book culture became Roman book culture.

Ambrose considered himself a poor man’s Cicero. While reading the gospel, the holy spirit confirmed to Ambrose that speaking of “duties” should not be the sole purview of philosophers (1.25). His work On Duties (De officiis) comprises the patrimony of Traditionalist and Christian learning placed within a Ciceronian literary frame, in order to offer a new scholastic production capable of superseding the classical treatise. Philosophers, he explains, devised a method of deciding between two things – those which are honorable and those which are beneficial – but Christians should not countenance an action unless it is satisfies both criteria.Footnote ²⁸ Ambrose reveals the reason for his digression only thereafter: his discourse deals explicitly with the manner in which philosophers weigh the moral virtue of actions, but in truth he speaks proleptically about a proper Christian relationship with the classical tradition of which philosophers are a part – and, importantly, the value of Ambrose’s own book On Duties standing in the gap. “From now on, those who choose not to read the works of these people will be able to read ours if they so wish – those who are looking not for ornate language or verbal artistry but for the simple grace of things as they really are” (1.29). Here Ambrose argues that his and similar works by Christians replace the classical tradition not by expunging them, but by incorporating and distilling them to present a product that is fit for Christian use, placed alongside Christian materials of superseding value, if lesser artistry. This is not a repudiation of the classical tradition, but neither is it an embrace.Footnote ²⁹ Rather, Ambrose argues that his and similar works collect the best of the tradition, doing the work of scholarly aggregation that is expected of him and producing a manual of practice so that readers have no need to consult those old books. He does not seem to think that this point needs belaboring, however – his methodological statement is dropped into the narrative of book one, after which he returns to a discussion of Panaetius, Aristotle, Pythagoras, and their relationship with the teachings of the biblical king David. On Duties presents an early example, from the late 380s, of a framework for scholastic production that became quite common in the Theodosian Age, which we see present from Macrobius to Servius to Martianus Capella, as detailed later.Footnote ³⁰ All of these authors purposefully invoke a classical style, topic, or even particular work as a container for the aggregation of a patrimony, and for the creation of a resource of superseding – and universal – value.

Aggregation beyond Theology

Christian theologians were not the only scholars who saw aggregation as central to accurate knowledge of the world. In fact, we see the extraordinary interimplication of scholastic domains in the Theodosian Age by looking at the way that aggregation underlies scholastic productions across the ideological spectrum. A scholarly method that gave aggregation pride of place is visible everywhere from legal compilations to miscellanies during the Theodosian Age.

I want to be perfectly clear: I am not claiming that any of these methods are fundamentally new. Rather, my claim is that aggregation, distillation, and promulgation took a central position in scholarship during the Theodosian Age, and the centrality of that position is novel. These methods became the scholastic lingua franca – the most available and widely used tools for answering questions of knowledge production and governance. This does not mean that everyone, everywhere, in all domains used them exclusively. Of course, there are polemicists from the period who did not use the methods, and some Christian disputation did not involve these methods, either. I do not argue that there are no detractors from the method: later I detail a number of them. Nor is my argument that the theory presented here can neatly explain every bit of Theodosian scholastic production. What I describe here is a trend, visible across the ideological spectrum and in different scholastic domains, that appeared in a wide variety of sources at about the same time. My explanation for this trend is that a set of scholarly practices contrived for theological disputation became generalized and central during the late fourth through the mid-fifth century as a result of Nicene Christian dominance. Other explanations may be possible, and I encourage other proposals be made. The sheer magnitude of the change in scholarly method across disciplines in this moment demands explanation. This book offers one.

I begin my discussion of the particularly Theodosian nature of aggregation outside of theological scholarship with Macrobius’s Saturnalia. It is reasonably certain that Macrobius himself was a Christian, or at least that he was not an outspoken Traditionalist in the vein of his text’s principle characters: Praetextatus, Symmachus, and Flavianus.Footnote ³¹ Nevertheless, he worked in the “secular” domain of Miscellany, a genre with an august history, and was keenly interested in what Alan Cameron has called “pre-Crisis paganism … more the paganism of Vergil than the paganism of Symmachus and Praetextatus.”Footnote ³² In this sense he presents an interesting case of an apparent Christian explicitly using a method developed for Christian theological disputation in a nontheological scholarly domain, and with the aim of exploring themes of a long-lost Traditionalist past.

Macrobius composed his work of staggering antiquarian learning sometime in the 430s, reflecting a dramatic setting in the 380s.Footnote ³³ But his text does not stand alone: its exemplar, and in many instances its direct source, is Aulus Gellius’s Attic Nights. Gellius pioneered the form of Roman miscellany during the Antonine dynasty, and some 200 years later Macrobius picked up his rhetoric and even the specific wording of Gellius’s preface. Opening to a random page in either Attic Nights or Saturnalia reveals remarkably similar material in a similar form: extracts, culled from a wide variety of sources, placed together under (what intend to be) useful headings. But, as I argue later, the reason that each scholar took up his task could not be more precisely at odds. Leontius of Jerusalem is not the only scholar to envision the search for truth as an apiary endeavor. Macrobius, too, introduced his work with an exhortation: “We ought to imitate bees, if I can put it that way: wandering about, sampling the flowers, they arrange whatever they’ve gathered, distributing it among the honeycomb’s cells, and by blending in the peculiar quality of their own spirit they transform the diverse kinds of nectar into a single taste.”Footnote ³⁴

Saturnalia is presented within a consciously literary frame as dialogue between three great Traditionalist thinkers of the late fourth century – contemporaries of the likes of Ambrose and Jerome, and men of great wealth and imperial rank. The content of the book, however, is a series of extracts, things “initially noted down in a jumble” that were collated in order under headings useful for a reader in order that they “might come together in a coherent, organic whole” (Pref.3). Macrobius’s aim was to take the raw material of previous scholarship and collate it into an authoritative whole for his son. It is worth quoting him here at length; his justification for undertaking the project at hand should sound strikingly familiar:

Macrobius uses poetic and playful language to express the same sentiment over and again in rapid succession, impressing on his reader that the ultimate aim of his seven books of miscellany was to allow for a single, universal truth to proceed from the raw, aggregated material of an antiquarian’s selection. The metaphor of diverse instruments which produce a single sound is not Macrobius’s own: it appears throughout classical literature, from Pseudo-Aristotle’s On the Cosmos (396b), to Plutarch’s Moralia (96e), and even in Philo’s Life of Moses (2.256–257), as noted by Robert Kaster.Footnote ³⁵ Even in his choice of learned metaphors Macrobius innovates within tradition, as none of his forebears use the analogy in the same way: Pseudo-Aristotle invokes it to explain the consonance of the universe, even though it includes materials of different types, Plutarch speaks on the nature of friendship, and Philo the nature of worship. Macrobius uses a traditional metaphor to explain the nature of his own work, and what his son, as an idealized reader, is intended to hear amid the cacophony. All of Macrobius’s extracts combine to express “a harmony” and “a single flavor (unius saporis)” with a single underlying truth.Footnote ³⁶

Nevertheless, Macrobius was no Heroditean. He hoped that as a result of his aggregative method his reader could find, eventually, the unius saporis of truth which underlies them all, but both in his explicit methodological statement and in source critical analysis Macrobius comes across as a rather faithful copyist of his sources. As argued at length by Alan Cameron, “Macrobius himself never lays claim to any originality, and where we are in a position to check, he did indeed follow single sources closely for long stretches. Notoriously, he follows Gellius so closely that in many places the Macrobian text has the authority of a manuscript of Gellius.”Footnote ³⁷ The question has been asked before, whether speeches in Macrobius’s narrative reflect the opinions of the historical character who speaks in the text, that of Macrobius’s source, or Macrobius’s own personal view.Footnote ³⁸ The debate would be rendered less fraught if the broader intellectual culture of the Theodosian Age were taken into account, including both theological and secular works. Cameron wouldn’t have had to go to such great lengths to show, rightly, that Macrobius did not necessarily share the opinion of his sources.Footnote ³⁹ When placed next to Jerome, Ambrose, Hilary, or even the Theodosian Code, as argued later, it becomes apparent that the contemporary scholastic norm was to include material with which you disagreed, or to which you did not at least wholly assent – not ‘the norm’ as in normal, but positively normative.

Comparison with Aulus Gellius’s Attic Nights magnifies Macrobius’s novel aims in assuming Gellius’s format and rewriting his preface, and clarifies the conceptual overlap between Saturnalia and other Theodosian scholastic productions. Like Macrobius, Gellius wrote a preface explaining the form and goals of his work. While it is clear that Macrobius knew Attic Nights and patterned his Saturnalia on it, each author’s rationale for aggregation could not contrast more starkly. Unlike Macrobius’s miscellany, which aims to access ultimate truth through carefully chosen excerpts from past authorities, Gellius claims that his books are intended “not so much to instruct as to give a hint, and that content with my, so to speak, pointing out of the path, they may afterwards follow up those subjects, if they so desire, with the aid either of books or of teachers.”Footnote ⁴⁰ As Joseph Howley argues, “juxtaposition and open-endedness [are] typical of the [Attic Nights]’s functioning as a book not of answers, but of questions; though founded on scholarly research, its literary and interactive mode is not encyclopedic but protreptic, often demanding its reader finish the work it has begun.”Footnote ⁴¹

Macrobius used Attic Nights as a source, and he goes to great lengths to mimic Gellius’s preface.Footnote ⁴² But Macrobius repudiates the other aims of Gellius’s work – including, most importantly, his rationale for undertaking such a production in the first place. Both authors produced a miscellany by compiling diverse material from a variety of sources, but only the Theodosian scholar considered the format to be conducive to an aim beyond the virtues of miscellany itself. Macrobius’s aim is truth, made visible through the scholarly process of aggregation, distillation, and systematic presentation, and he rewrote Gellius’s preface to stress these aims. On the other hand, Gellius warns his reader, “I have not made an excessively deep and obscure investigation of the intricacies of these questions, but I have presented the first fruits, so to say, and a kind of foretaste of the liberal arts.”Footnote ⁴³

Macrobius’s contemporary Martianus Capella wrote his nine books, The Marriage of Philology and Mercury, in the early fifth century, and quickly gained notoriety as an encyclopedist.Footnote ⁴⁴ He was notable as a Neoplatonist and his book is, in the estimation of Alan Cameron, “a treasure house of pagan lore” placed within the literary frame of a Greco-Roman novel, in the vein of works by Petronius or Apuleius.Footnote ⁴⁵ Martianus’s is an aggregative work of diverse learning placed within the narrative frame of a wedding feast. His first two books concern attraction (broadly conceived) and detail the narrative by which Apollo played matchmaker between Mercury and Philology, the latter of whom was adopted as one of the gods. During the nuptial celebration Apollo brings forward each of the seven liberal arts, and Martianus devotes a book to each: Grammar, Dialectic, Rhetoric, Geometry, Arithmetic, Astronomy, and Harmony. By way of conclusion, Martianus calls his nine books a miscillo, and claims the true author, Satire, “has intermixed (immiscuit)” materials of all sorts. “Our garralous Satire has heaped learned doctrines upon unlearned, and crammed sacred matters into secular.”Footnote ⁴⁶

In the words of Beatrice Bakhouche, the work “borrows from every previous literary genre. The grandiose meets the comic.”Footnote ⁴⁷ It is indeed true that Martianus’s novel mixes tales together, but the parallels that Bakhouche suggests in attempting to understand the Martianus’s generic frame – Petronius and Apuleius, above all – do not include the seven books of technical learning explaining, inter alia, which words in Latin have an A as an ending in the nominative or the number of miles between the Arsia and Drina rivers, to choose two examples (quite literally) at random. Martianus’s work is fundamentally aggregative, in distinction from earlier examples of the novelistic genre. If Martianus had worked solely within a traditional genre, is hard to imagine that such an apology as he offers at the end of his nine books would be necessary.

There is another difference between the generic features of The Marriage and the apparent aim of other novels, such as those of Petronius and Apuleius which have most often been used to contextualize the work: Martianus presents his own work as more than either a satire or an encyclopedia – and, as Jason König and Greg Woolf rightly note, “[e]ncyclopaedism was never a genre within classical antiquity” to begin with.Footnote ⁴⁸ Martianus’s work is a true “encyclopedia,” invoking explicitly the enkuklios paideia (grammar, dialectic, rhetoric, geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, and music), placing him in an intellectual tradition boasting the likes of Cato, Varro, and Celsus,Footnote ⁴⁹ and suggesting that his aim, again like those of his forebears and similar to Macrobius’s production, was something like universal knowledge – an aim that can be squarely situated in the intellectual culture of the Theodosian moment, but which is found nowhere in Martianus’s preceding stylistic exemplars. And, like other writers of the Theodosian Age, he writes an aggregative work that is precisely not a manual of practice. Like his contemporary Macrobius and Gellius before, Martianus wrote a book of aggregative learning for the benefit of his son, who stands in for a general reader. His fatherly message, again in the words of Bakhouche, is this: “The liberal arts make sense only if they allow us to account for the world, to render the cosmos intelligible.”Footnote ⁵⁰ Exploration of the seven subjects in this aggregative format is the first step toward universal and ultimately divine knowledge.Footnote ⁵¹ Here again we see a Theodosian author taking up the framework of an august genre and reshaping it, inserting heaps of antiquarian learning and, ultimately, appropriating an old format with the aim of universality and knowledge of the divine. In this sense, the relationship between Martianus and the work of Apuleius and Petronius is similar to the relationship between Macrobius and his exemplar in Aulus Gellius: both attended to traditional topoi of the genre in which they work, while adding new features rooted in encyclopedic learning and explicitly claiming to create a resource capable of leading the discerning reader to universal truth. Further, both Macrobius and Martianus offer a rationale for their innovation within a literary tradition – apologies for a perhaps startling format which diverged from classical examples of the genre, but which hewed instead to the methodological trend of their day.

Aggregation, distillation, and systematic presentation are the central aim of another great scholastic production by Macrobius and Martianus’s contemporaries. The compilers of the Theodosian Code, however, had even loftier aims. In 429 ce, emperors Theodosius II and Valentinian III tasked seven men of high imperial rank to aggregate, distill, and systematically present the tradition of legal pronouncements and the tradition of legal scholarship from the time of Constantine’s conversion through their present day.Footnote ⁵² Unlike Macrobius, their aim was not just truth, nor did they intend merely to create a resource for jurists strewn across an empire that stretched some 3,000 kilometers, though this was certainly a feature of the finished product. The imperial constitution calling for the creation of the Theodosian Code makes clear that the initial intention of this collocation and distillation of the patrimony of classical law was the production of a magisterium vitae – a comprehensive “guide to life.”

In an Appendix I discuss the peculiarly Christian usage of the term magisterium that frames the aims of the second code as ordered in CTh 1.1.5; I hope that the influence of Christian language and conceptual frameworks on the Theodosian Code is clear. Here I want to focus on the motivation for the Theodosian Code as initially ordered in 429, and on its method. The project was intended to comprise two steps: the creation of a scholarly resource, and the distillation of that resource into a universal statement. The first step was to use the method of aggregation to create a resource for scholars, or in its words “more industrious people (diligentiores).” The second step was to distill that scholarly resource into a “guide to life (magisterium vitae).” The first step was envisioned as follows:

Here the Eastern and Western emperors suggest that they could have ordered the Theodosian Code to include only statutes which had not been superseded by later legislation, but that the aims of the text require a different method. Namely, given that the text is intended as a legal repository for “more industrious people” engaged in scholarly work (scholasticae intentioni), the aim of creating a scholastic resource dictates the aggregation of both valid and invalidated laws. It is perhaps worth dwelling on this fact for just a moment. If the Theodosian Code were meant simply as a manual of legal practice or a resource for working jurists, then there would be little reason to include invalidated laws. As William Turpin put it: “One of the oddest things about the Roman law codes is that their contents could be inconsistent or out of date. This is most obvious in the case of Theodosian Code, which is more or less open about it.”Footnote ⁵⁴ The technical nature of the document defined expectations regarding its form because it claims to be intended as a resource for scholars. The document itself was novel – never before had a Roman law code been created as a universally valid statement of legal praxis, as I discuss in the Appendix – and the method prescribed, by law, to create this novel resource was the same method that contemporary scholars used in other disciplines. Scholars across the disciplinary spectrum expected that a technical resource or scholastic production should rightly aggregate all relevant sources, their validity notwithstanding. The Theodosian Code aimed not simply to offer an authoritative statement of what law is, though that was certainly part of the project, but also to codify a discursive and commentarial tradition into a clear statement of that tradition’s past; how the tradition got from one place to another, from the old laws “consigned to silence” to the statutes that superseded them.Footnote ⁵⁵

The second step envisioned by the Theodosian Code project was never undertaken. The same men tasked with creating the scholarly resource were intended to distill that work into a universally valid “guide to life (magisterium vitae).” It is not obvious that a legal codification could possibly serve such a noble goal; it is, at least, a strange choice of genre. Caroline Humfress argues persuasively that “the Codex Theodosianus does not lay down the law; instead it provides its elite, specialist readers with the tools – epistemic and material – to produce their own ‘valid’ legal knowledge as defined by and through the Codex itself.”Footnote ⁵⁶ As I explore in the Appendix, the term magisterium vitae only makes sense if the term “magisterium” is understood with its peculiarly Christian meaning, as a moral exemplar in the guise of the Christian saints. In light of this I would modify Humfress’s statement only slightly. The Codex as it comes down to us provides specialists with tools to produce their own valid legal knowledge, but the Codex as intended was meant to give all people the tools to produce their own valid knowledge in any domain of life. The idea that aggregation could serve as a method to produce a magisterium vitae would seem utterly foreign to someone like Aulus Gellius, whose aim in aggregation was simply “a kind of foretaste of the liberal arts.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Much more proximate is the work of Macrobius or Socrates, who saw in aggregation the possibility of universal truth.

The two-step process envisioned by the Theodosian Code is precisely the two-step process that we saw as early as Athanasius’s Concerning the Decrees, and which had become de rigueur throughout the landscape of scholarly production in the eighty years since. The first step, for both Athanasius and the Theodosian Code, is aggregation of previous scholarly material, regardless of its validity or authority. It is this scholastic operation that Macrobius explicitly claims to be performing in his Saturnalia. The second step is distillation of that material into a work of universal truth. In the case of Athanasius this distillate was the Nicene Creed, while the Theodosian Code envisioned a magisterium vitae: after “men … of singular trustworthiness [and] most brilliant genius” had “exclude[d] every contradiction,” the laws were meant to be consulted as a “guide to life” in the same way that Christians were urged to pattern themselves after the lives of the saints (1.1.5). The content and material of each of these projects is unique, but their aims and methods proceed from a coherent set of scholastic practices.

It was only the Theodosian Age when this structure of knowledge, born of theological controversy, first found its way into secular domains. The example of Oribasius helps to make this clear. Oribasius was a contemporary of Athanasius, and a doctor and a medical historian working from the court of Julian, serving as the emperor’s personal physician about two decades before Theodosius I ascended to the purple. One of his tasks was similar to Athanasius’s: bringing together scholastic patrimony within his own discipline of medicine. Unlike Martianus Capella, Macrobius, and the compilers of the Theodosian Code, however, Oribasius chose a method wholly different from that of Athanasius. His Medical Compilations compiles a scholastic patrimony, but it is not aggregative in a full sense. That is, his reason for bringing together patrimony is radically different from that of Theodosian Age scholars.

In the introduction to his Medical Compilations, Oribasius relates that the emperor Julian instructed him to compile a corpus of epitomes from the works of Galen alone, and thereafter to strike out on a more expansive second project. The emperor ordered “that I should search for and collect the principal writings of all the best physicians and everything that pertains to the entire medical profession,”Footnote ⁵⁸ and he claims to be “zealously determined to carry out this task [of compilation], as far as [he is] able,” because such a dossier would be “extremely useful, when people who are reading it readily discover that which in each case of efficacious for those who are in need” (1.pref.2.). Oribasius created a scholarly tool at the behest of the emperor, bringing together previous sources of scholarship into a dossier meant to help the future practitioner of the medical arts. The language that he used around compilation, and even some of the compiler’s peculiar self-referential phrases, mirror strongly the method of Sozomen detailed earlier, and Oribasius’s method resembles that used by the compilers of another imperially ordered scholarly production: the Theodosian Code.Footnote ⁵⁹ But Oribasius’s aim in creating a compilation could not diverge more radically. The doctor intended to create a scholarly resource but he had no expectation that a good argument, or worthwhile scholarly knowledge, required bringing valid and invalid sources together. (Such a method would be no use to the invalid, in search of a cure.) He continues: “Thinking it superfluous and altogether absurd to include in the work the same things multiple times, both from the authors of the best treatises and of those who treated the subject without a similar degree of accuracy, I will gather together only the works of the better sources” (1.pref.3). For Oribasius, scholarship is a work of curation more than a work of compilation. His stated intent is to create a resource for other doctors that separates the wheat from the chaff. We see here no evidence that the aggregation expected from Christian theological arguments in the mid-fourth century had found its way into the methodological presumptions of a medical scholar writing from the imperial court of the last “pagan” emperor. As I argued earlier, this separation did not last long.

Traditionalist Rejection

Three texts from the Theodosian Age appear to reject aggregation as a scholarly method: the Res Gestae of Ammianus Marcellinus, the Historia Augusta, and Proclus’s Ten Questions Concerning Providence.Footnote ⁶⁰ Each author’s discussion of aggregation as a method is fraught, and none offer such an unimpeachable statement of rejection as one would hope. My contention, offered with due reservation, is that each of these authors seems to know of aggregation as a scholarly method, and that each rejects it in their own way. My argument is that we can see the prevalence of aggregation, distillation, and promulgation as a scholastic linga franca through pointed rejections of the methods from both chronological ends of the Theodosian Age. By militating against aggregation, each of these sources underscore the prevalence of a widespread scholarly method requiring that raw material remain part of the final scholarly product.

Ammianus completed his administrative and political history of the Roman empire in the early 390s, initially intending to write only twenty-five books covering the period from the accession of Nerva in 96 ce to the death of Valens in 378, continuing on where Tacitus’s own Histories left off and in a similar style. He chose not to write about the most recent events “partly to avoid the dangers which are often connected with the truth, and partly to escape unreasonable critics of the work which I am composing.”Footnote ⁶¹ These “unreasonable critics (intempestivos),” in Ammianus’s estimation:

The historian’s exasperation at what he is being asked to do is palpable. There are two ways to read Ammianus’s concern about criticisms that he is loath to incur by leaving out what he deems to be trivial details.Footnote ⁶² Ronald Syme and Guy Sabbah each offer a traditional understanding, reading Ammianus’s statement at the beginning of book 26 as nothing more than a rejection of the idea that minor details are anything more than trivialities, while his own aim was to illuminate the character and actions of major players in the imperial orbit.Footnote ⁶³ Here, Ammianus defends the Tacitean historiographical method’s factual remit, rejecting biography – the writing of “Lives” – which had long been a viable vehicle for the writing of imperial history, invoked most famously by Suetonius and more recently by Eusebius and the author(s) of the Historia Augusta. Ammianus complains that his critics require him to record heaps of details, which “are not in accordance with the principles of history (praeceptis historiae); for [history] is wont to detail the highlights of events (discurrere per negotiorum celsitudines assuetae)” (26.1). A passage in the Historia Augusta’s Life of Opilius Macrinus makes a similar point:

Read together, Ammianus and the Life of Opilius Macrinus simply make statements about the proper writing of history, against their predecessors within the genre of historiography. But such a reading of Ammianus Marcellinus fails to account for the historian’s own explanation for his methodological choices. Suetonius and other historical biographers may be implied in Ammianus’s critique – I am persuaded that Ammianus considered himself to be a continuator of the Tacitean project, and therefore sticks to Tacitean methodology, more or less. But this is not what Ammianus says. Rather, he complains that “unreasonable critics (intempestivos)” in his own day will inevitably accuse him of failing to write a proper history precisely by virtue of sticking to an older tradition of historiography, which focuses on “the highlights of events.” Ammianus’s method is traditional, but his exasperation is timely. The intellectual context which makes sense of his concern, that people would criticize him for failing to include what he deems “trivial details,” is the intellectual context of the Theodosian Age in which aggregation was the most immediately available and widely used tool for scholastic productions, and especially historical accounts. It would be irresponsible to read Ammianus as reacting solely to trends within historiography without attending to the wider intellectual and scholastic climate in which he worked – the same failure that causes scholars of Roman law to trace every innovation in legal ideology to a wholly internal process of juristic evolution. Ammianus lived in a society and interacted with scholars working in other disciplines. When placed in the intellectual climate of the Theodosian Age of which he was but a small part, his reaction against aggregative methodologies appears in a new light. That he complains about an intellectual culture which “cries out as if wronged” when he fails to aggregate is only further evidence that what he responds to is a contemporary scholastic trend. It may be easier to ignore this fact, and one can read Ammianus profitably without placing him beside contemporaneous scholars involved in different fields. But doing so renders his text less rich, and outbursts like the methodological winging at the beginning of book 26 less rational.

An obsession with aggregation, in Ammianus’s estimation, is an affectation of the inscitia vulgari: the ignorance of the masses, who require such trivial details (26.2). On the other hand, “Julius Capitolinus,” the putative author of the Life of Opilius Macrinus collected in the Historia Augusta, has a specific polemical target in mind. “Capitolinus” argues that the form of history writing that Ammianus calls “vulgar” is a method undertaken by a historian named Junius Cordus, who is otherwise unknown outside of this citation in the Historia Augusta:

Again, in his preface the author of the Life of Opilius Macrinus invokes a debate familiar to anyone working within the ancient discipline of history. The author seems to suggest that his opponent, Junius Cordus, styled himself as a latter-day Plutarch. In his famous introduction to the Life of Alexander, Plutarch claims precisely to focus on small moments, seemingly trivial details, because he aims to understand the character (ἦθος) of his subjects and “a slight thing like a phrase or a jest often makes a greater revelation of character than battles where thousands fall.”Footnote ⁶⁵ The issue, for Julius Capitolinus, is that a biographer should include only such trivial details when they shed light on the mores – character – of the subject, as Plutarch did. Cordus’s error, according to Capitolinus, was searching out trivial details in the hope of being able to illuminate the character of his subjects therewith, but failing to do so. Cordus has created a dossier of information that is beside the point.

It is possible that these concerns of Ammianus and the author of the Historia Augusta are simply aesthetic – they’d prefer not to read trivialities or burden their own literary inventories with useless knick-knacks. It is certain that Ammianus’s attack on the ignorant masses and Capitolinus’s attack on Cordus are expressed within the bounds of long-held scholarly discourse about what proper historiography comprises. But the vitriol and the specificity of their polemic suggest a more precise aim in decrying aggregation of material as an acceptable format for historiography. The fact that during the period when each of these texts were written just such a format was in vogue in the circles of elite Roman historiographers suggests that Ammianus and Capitolinus were reacting against a wider culture in which the expectation of aggregation was a central facet of the dominant scholastic method. It was perhaps not lost on outspoken Traditionalists, either, that the trend was embraced widely by the most visible and vitriolic sect of Christians.

Further, the Historia Augusta claims to be a composite work, and does not witness a singular historiographical method. A very different method is evidenced in Life of the Deified Aurelian. The preface to this biography discusses precisely the type of aggregation to which a wide variety of Theodosian Age scholars would happily accede:

For Flavius Vopiscus, the putative author of this Life of the Deified Aurelian, the validity of his “little book” was based on its status as a distillation of a great mass of material. The authority of the distillate, furthermore, did not depend on blind acceptance of the author’s account, but it was underwritten by the ongoing availability of the raw archival material. Aggregation is the necessary precursor to valid knowledge. It is telling that Vopiscus felt compelled to stress this point, and that his method was consonant with the dominant scholastic framework of his age.

In his study of prefaces in the Historia Augusta, Daniël den Hengst concluded that “the dominant impression after reading through the [Historia Augusta] from beginning to end is one of bewildering variety.”Footnote ⁶⁶ Not only does the text comprise an eclectic mix of styles and details, but it claims to be the work of six authors, each with his own methodology. Within the Historia Augusta as a whole we find some historians, like Vopiscus, who claim a quintessentially Theodosian form of aggregation as central to their work, placed side by side with the work of others such as Capitolinus, who reject such an operation out of hand – apparently with specific polemical targets in view. Whether the Historia Augusta is the work of one author or six, with one underlying generative framework or many, one thing is clear: the effect of the compilation as a literary product is comfortably at home in Theodosian book culture, with all its variety of voices, opinions, aggregation of the admirable with the censurable, compilation of documents and archival material, etc. What we see in the sum total of the Historia Augusta as a literary product is a form of historiography that is explicitly disclaimed at some points within the text itself and embraced elsewhere. We see the type of historiography that Ammianus despised as “vulgar,” and rejected as beneath the dignity of his project. In these literary products of the 390s we see reflected exactly an elite discussion about, and perhaps embrace of, the scholastic method of aggregation and distillation that is positively endorsed by the likes of Hilary, Jerome, and the compilers of the Theodosian Code. The Historia Augusta itself is aggregative. It is interesting that we see this clearly in a text that is, in the words of Arnaldo Momigliano, “a first-class document of the reformed paganism of the fourth century.”Footnote ⁶⁷ It is interesting, in other words, that explicit rejection of aggregation as a valid scholarly method is most often found in the writing of Roman Traditionalists.

A thread of Traditionalist resistance runs the length of the Theodosian dynasty. Proclus was a Neoplatonic philosopher, a practicing lawyer, and one of the few outspoken Traditionalists in the orbit of the court of Theodosius II. He is known mostly for copious commentaries on Plato, but it is his Ten Questions Concerning Providence where he betrays most clearly the wider intellectual environment in which he was writing, in the period around the death of Theodosius II (c. 450 ce). He begins his text with an apology:

Proclus appears to respond to an expectation of aggregation – precisely that he should “discuss what has been said by previous thinkers” on the topic or providence as a part of his own argument, and his own search for philosophical truth. As in the cases we have already covered, there are two ways to read this comment by Proclus. In their commentary on this passage, Jan Opsomer and Carlos Steel suggest that here he offers nothing more than “a kind of apology for having copied [Plutarch’s] text almost shamelessly.”Footnote ⁶⁹ Perhaps this is an explanation for this comment, which forms the last piece of Proclus’s preface. But ancient writers in general, and Proclus in particular, express little compunction about copying from their predecessors. Additionally, the passage doesn’t discuss culpability for copying one author in particular, but disclaims a requirement to “discuss what has been said by previous thinkers” writ large. A more proximate explanation for the comment is that he is responding to typical scholarly practice at the time. Like the Historia Augusta, we may reasonably read this passage as a response to typical practice of the dominant scholastic culture into which Proclus speaks: Proclus knows that others will expect him precisely to “discuss what has been said by previous thinkers,” and he retorts not only that he won’t be doing so, but that an argument structured as such would be beside the point because, as he continues, “after all, we all have ‘common Hermes’ as our leader (communem Mercurium ducem habentes), the same who is said to place in every soul the untaught preconceptions of the common notions.”

During the Theodosian Age, scholars from across the disciplinary spectrum engaged with a set of scholastic practices which were dominant and visible across the ideological and disciplinary spectrum and, importantly, which included an expectation of aggregation. Some scholars embraced these new practices while others rejected them. Even in their apparent rejection, Proclus and Ammianus Marcellinus speak to the expectation of aggregation that permeated their scholarly environment, while the Historia Augusta embraces the method as a whole, even while one of its “authors” dissents.

Post-Theodosian Collection, or the Shift to Florilegia

While the centrality of aggregation as a scholastic tool continued intact through the extent of the Theodosian Age, the post-Theodosian West saw yet another shift: this time away from the notionally dispassionate aggregation of competing voices to the collection of sources with explicit polemical and ideological aims. To reiterate: aggregative scholastic productions are never truly nonpolemical. Every source that I’ve engaged has subtle and overt polemical aims which shape the selection and presentation of sources. Aggregation is never dispassionate in actuality – how could it be? Nevertheless, in sources where aggregation is discussed as a scholarly practice by Theodosian writers, overwhelmingly they claim that their method comprises dispassionate selection; the good with the bad, the orthodox with the heretical, good law alongside that which it supervened. The scholarly ideal was that reliable knowledge could be produced through the unbiased collection of sources on all sides of an intellectual debate, followed by their distillation.

As a scholarly ideal, dispassionate aggregation did not last. This distinction, between aggregation as a scholastic practice and collection of sources for admittedly polemical aims, is what separates the Theodosian order of books from what came after. The florilegia that so define the literary output of the post-Theodosian West are not intended for “more industrious types,” as the Theodosian Code might phrase it: collections of raw material from which truth may be distilled. Rather, they were intended as the distillation of truth itself. Whereas for a Theodosian scholar such as Ambrose or Macrobius claims of universality necessarily involved the aggregation of a wide variety of conflicting material, the “century of florilegia” that began in the Ostrogothic period involved scholastic production of a very different type. Leontius of Jerusalem, with whom this chapter began, inherited a focus on aggregation from his Nicene and Chalcedonian forebears. But he wrote nearly a century after the end of the Theodosian dynasty, a context which alone suggests that his opponents might have been correct when they accused him of sampling tendentiously from the patrimony of the tradition rather than presenting a wide range of opinions as befits the scholar in search of universal truth. As is the case with Macrobius and Gellius, who perform a similar operation of aggregation for divergent purposes, Theodosian scholars aggregating scholastic patrimony produced texts that look like later florilegia materially, with radically divergent stated intentions.

There was a durable shift in the material form of Christian scholarship toward end of the Theodosian Age, and especially the controversy around and leading up to the Council of Chalcedon in 451. The rather abrupt arrival on the scene of what Eduard Schwartz dubbed “curated collections” began with the so-called Collectio Novariensis de re Eutychis.Footnote ⁷⁰ Pope Leo’s chancery collected materials from Roman archives in order to create a dossier that marked a new phase in Christian scholastic production, extended analysis of which is beyond the scope of this book.Footnote ⁷¹ Other examples of the trend include Leo’s own collection of letters known now as the Leonis Papae I epistularum collectiones,Footnote ⁷² and the more famous Collectio Avellana, a lacunose mid-sixth-century collection of imperial and ecclesiastical letters and documents ranging from the year 368 to 553 which offers a “a unique perspective on the history of the early sixth century” through selective presentation of documents relating to the papacy, the Ostrogothic court in Ravenna, and the Roman court in Constantinople.Footnote ⁷³ The dossier that Athanasius proposed, produced, and appended to his Concerning the Decrees, for instance, looks materially like these later “curated collections,” and of course Athanasius collected and curated the material. But pre and early Theodosian productions have stated intentions fundamentally distinct from the catenae, “curated collections,” and florilegia that came to dominate in the post-Theodosian Age. The Theodosian collections were notionally dispassionate.

This shift did not go unnoticed during the Theodosian Age, either. Writing for the Eastern court of Theodosius II in the early 440s, Sozomen recounts that his own access to the truth of matters surrounding “the dogmas of Arius and subsequent proposals” were obscured by purposeful failure to aggregate conflicting materials.Footnote ⁷⁴ He complains, “in order to demonstrate the orthodoxy of their own dogmas, the partisans of each sect respectively formed a collection of epistles that favored their own heresy, omitting all hostile documents!” (1.1.15.8–1.1.16.1). Sozomen explicitly groups such texts together as a class, what I have been calling “curated collections,” and complains in the first chapter of his Ecclesiastical History that he was forced to busy himself with analysis of these faulty dossiers nevertheless, in order that he might have at least some access to the truth. “Still, as it is requisite, in order to maintain historical accuracy, to pay the strictest attention to the means of eliciting truth, I felt myself bound to examine all writings of this sort according to my ability” (1.1.16.2–4). The shift to curated collections was a lamentable trend, according to Sozomen. And again, it was a trend with a center of gravity in theological productions.

A shift to curated collections in support of one creed or another was of course not inevitable, but this historical movement was perhaps overdetermined already by the shift from scriptural interpretation to a focus on credal language. By the middle of the fifth century, even the creeds which were intended to be a distillation of scripture and its interpretative key had undergone the same transformation that scripture underwent in the aftermath of the Council of Nicaea: they became hermeneutically impotent. As discussed earlier, by the convening of the Council of Ephesus in 431, creeds had become so central that new scholastic productions were necessary which aggregated not the patristic disputation that led to the dogmatic affirmations held in the creed, but rather compilations which attested the history of credal interpretation itself. In a supplement to the Proceedings of the Council of Ephesus condemning Nestorius, the Nicene Creed is presented and followed not by general theological disputation, as in Athanasius, but by credal disputation, and extracts from the Orthodox fathers detailing how it is that they interpreted the creed itself. In the words of Richard Price:

And, while the appeal to the fathers and the creation of scholarly resources to support particular readings of the Nicene Creed was effectively accomplished by the creation of this dossier, it was also formally legislated in canon seven of the Council of Ephesus, which declares that “no person may propose or even write or support a faith diverging from that created together with the holy spirit by the holy fathers assembled in Nicaea.”Footnote ⁷⁶

Conclusion

The assumption of aggregation, distillation, and promulgation as central scholarly tools spread from the wake of the Council of Nicaea, first among Christians and eventually across the entire spectrum of Theodosian Age scholarly production. Evidence of a dominant scholastic mode, inflected by Christian theological debates, is visible from the works of Athanasius to those of Proclus. Even when scholars reject the basic methodology of aggregation and distillation, they witness its presence as a form, and perhaps the dominant form, of scholastic production.

Interconnections between disciplines are visible in every facet and corner of the great Theodosian Age scholastic productions: from theology to law to historiography, medicine, and miscellany. One glance at the pioneering work of Raban von Haehling detailing the “[r]eligious persuasion of high office holders in the Roman Empire” shows that the accession of Theodosius I was the turning point, at which Nicene Christians came to power as a ruling elite for the first time.Footnote ⁷⁷ Even given the rightful criticisms of Barnes and Salzman regarding specifics of von Haehling’s prosopography, the trend is clear: Christians, and specifically Nicene Christians, came to majority power only in the late fourth century (Figure 1).Footnote ⁷⁸

Figure 1. Religious identification of Western senate high-office holders at time of highest office.

Chart data from Salzman, The Making of a Christian Aristocracy, 228.

Armed with a set of scholastic practices whose development I treated in Chapter 3, Nicene Christians came to power during the Theodosian Age, and brought their peculiar structure of knowledge with them. One’s approach to proper knowledge production may be context specific to a certain extent, but in broad strokes it remains intact as individuals code switch between domains of knowledge and modes of interaction – already forty years ago, Ramsay MacMullen demonstrated that by the late fourth century a significant convergence in religious vocabulary and ideology had taken place between senatorial Christians such as Ambrose and Traditionalists such as Symmachus.Footnote ⁷⁹ As Nicene Christianity proliferated through the ranks of the elite, we see a simultaneous shift in the way that arguments are made within domains of knowledge production that do no obvious theological work. I offer this analysis as a novel way of tracing what it means for elite Roman society to “become Christian.” Macrobius was a scholar working in a traditional discipline, and a rather lonely one at that, far removed from the bustle of theological disputation undertaken by broad swathes of his contemporaries. Yet his reformulation of the antiquarian format adopted from Gellius and his redeployment of the format with new intellectual aims points to the new and predominantly Christian scholastic environment in which he lived and to which he spoke. Each of the examples in this chapter could be multiplied, and each speaks to a coherent shift in practice among works of Roman scholarship in the years after Nicene Christians first came to hold significant political power. The widespread assumption of a mode of scholastic production which began as a set of theological practices was not a one-off event, and the shift did not occur in the same way in all domains. But a gradual change is a change nevertheless; in fits and starts, the acorn does eventually become an oak tree.

The assumption of aggregation and distillation as central methods in knowledge production led to downstream changes in the way that scholars approached books: what they thought books did, how works of scholarship ought to look, how they were best encountered, and the manner in which readers assessed their contents. These changes were not merely intellectual, confined to discussion in statements of purpose and programmatic methodological musings. We can see the effect of shifting scholarly practices in the pages of fifth-century manuscripts and in the innovations in style and format meant to deal with the fact that scholarship in the Theodosian Age looked different than it had before. A new order of books is visible beyond the methodological statements and intellectual productions of Theodosian writers; it is visible perhaps most clearly in the pages presented to Theodosian readers. I turn now to trace the effect of shifting scholarly practices in manuscripts of the Theodosian Age. This project has an epigraph: “New readers of course make new texts, and their new meanings are a function of their new forms.”Footnote ⁸⁰ Chapter 4 has profiled the new readers; Chapter 5 begins to investigate their new texts.