It might be thought that in five recent articles the productive ore in the mine of Theophilus of Antioch had been exhausted. On the contrary, these articles have been concerned primarily with the question of what Theophilus said. The basic problem “Why did he say it?” remains unsolved. The purpose of this article is to endeavor to analyze his thought more closely and to determine his place in the religious and philosophical movements of his time.

Few eras are more interesting and profitable to study than those in which the basic ideas of mankind change under the impact of new discoveries and ideas. Our own appears to be such a period; of previous ages perhaps only the ebullient Renaissance can equal it. At its English beginnings in the sixteenth century men reached avidly for new experiences; in the course of time they tried to codify them into theories which would do justice to the observed facts and at the same time harmonize as far as possible with the dicta transmitted from the past. These early efforts resulted in the foundation of the modern methods of science, not to mention permanent and still unchallenged achievements like Harvey's discovery of the circulation of the blood or Boyle's theory of gases. Such is the seventeenth century: the first great age of scientific generalization in English history.

Denial of the competence of the human mind for exploration of the ultimate meaning of the Universe may be associated with a serene confidence that the secret is otherwise accessible. Athenians of the fifth century, B.C., had a mystical element of which Plato speaks at times with contempt but at other times with profound respect. Careless alike of the Protagorean skepticism and of its Socratic refutation, they would withdraw periodically to Eleusis for devotional rites, from which they came back radiant about the manner in which they had been “helped.” Plotinus and his Neo-Platonists found in distrust of reasoning the basis for a surer trust. St. Augustine's Neo-Platonist youth was, as he said, a fitting preliminary for the mood of his mature Christian assurance: Non in dialectica cotnplacuit Deo salvum facere populum suum. More than seven centuries later, St. Bernard was not only distressed but alarmed as he overheard discussions at a Paris street corner among students coming from Abelard's lecture-room, where they had been actually encouraged to subject the Faith to intellectual analysis. The fourteenth century mystics of the Rhineland showed reaction on a great scale from the cut-and-dried “Natural Theology” of Aquinas. It had been too much for even Bonaventura and Duns Scotus.

According to Pausanias II 14 one of the two main differences between the cult at Phlius and that at Eleusis lay in the circumstance that at Phlius the hierophant was not appointed for life (οὐκ ἐς τὸν βίον πάντα ἀποδέδικται). The implication that at Eleusis the hierophant was appointed for life is borne out by inscriptions such as the one concerning the old man Glaucus who died as hierophant after many years in office. On the other hand, the inscriptions never mention living men as exhierophants, ex-daduchi, ex-sacred-heralds or ex-altar-priests, except such altar priests as resigned to take the higher post of daduchus. Therefore, students have long been agreed that the hierophant, daduchus, sacred herald and altar priest, i.e. the incumbents of the four great Eleusinian priesthoods, held their office for life. (See, for example, P. Foucart, Les mystères d'Éleusis [Paris, 1914], 168–206, especially 171 for the hierophant and 203 for the sacred herald.) As far as I know, this interpretation of the evidence has never been refuted. Recently, however, this interpretation of the evidence has been repudiated without argument by J. A. Notopoulos (“Studies in the Chronology of Athens under the Empire,” Hesperia XVIII [1949], 1–57, especially 1 and 23), who, asserting, in what he describes as a “systematic study,” that the hierophant and sacred herald “occupy their office for an interval of one or more years, then vacate it only to be re-elected to it later,” dresses a table of the catalogues of aiseitoi (the four great Eleusinian priests and various clerks and other functionaries entitled to public maintenance) in what purports to be a chronological order.