ΦΙΛΩΝ ῬΗΤΩΡ (Philôn Rhêtôr). A Study of Rhetoric and Exegesis

cenLeR ber, xaT~ orpc~ouTES,

20The most relevant citations are DH Isaeus 3; Hermogenes Peri Ideon 2.1; Anon. Seguer. 38 Sp (the greater part of Anon. reports the views of Alexander Numenius, Apollodorus, and Neokles--all roughly contemporary with Philo); AdH 3. 9.19, 3.4.25; Cicero De in~. 1.22.32-23.33, Topica 5.28-8.34. It ought to be point-

ed out that these citations do not present us with a very coherent picture. This is due, I think, to the difficulties the ancients had in distinguishing the figurative from the structural functions of enumeratio/ xarLapCe~noLs (the distinction is not clear, in fact), or between dialectical and rhetorical division and enumeration (also not clear). This is evident in the often tortured searches for clarity in the terminology which one can see in the passages I have cited.

21 0n £vapyELa cf. Quintilian 7.3.65ff.; DH Lysias 7 (where it is discussed along with ouvTo~Ca); Longinus 15.2; Demetrfus 4.209-20; Plutarch Glor. Ath. 347A, Ciaero 4, etc. Apparently, the followers of Theodorus of Gadara placed great emphasis on £vapyE~a. See M. Schanz, "Apollodeer un Theodoreer," Bermes 25 (1890), 36ff. See also Anon. Seguer. 371 Sp; Tiberius 3, p. 54 Sp; ibid. 78.12 (n.b. n xar& xo~~a ELS tvapyELav n xar& Tonous ELS J.a~npornTa). See also the remark in Sahol. De:nosthen~s na;e> _21.72, p~ 5?3 Dindorf: ... a.l.~a ~b ~~V Ol.nynu~ ~n:>.iiv Ha\. Q)(aTaOMEUOV

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Philo

says, summing up the first section of his development of the theme of the soul as oikos. He then continues (once again, I abridge): (101) i:va M:

B€Ba~os Hat nEpcMo.U(onno,; dn

o ot•o~,

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45 Cf., e.~., LegAll 1. l-18 (Gen 2:3); Cher l-38 (3:23); Mig 45ff. (12:1); CoriiJ 1-14 (11 :l-9), etc. 46 See M. Hengel, "Proseuche und Synagoge," Tradition und Glaube: Festgahe fUr K.G. Kuhn (Gottingen, 1971), pp. 157-84.

22 and after the period in which Philo was active. What we see in the apparent community of concern, I would suggest, points to more than mere coincidence, Let me try briefly to expand on this point. To begin with, we should remember that Philo did not consider his text to be a translation but saw the LXX as an inspired text in its own right. And, like Aristoboulos and Pseud2-Aristeas before him, Philo was dedicated to the ratification of the text he had. 7 It is of course one of the characteristics of Alexandrian Judaism that Jews there held on to the conviction that the Greek of the LXX represented the authentic text of the Bible. At the same time, it was also a strongly held conviction among Alexandrian Jews that Jerusalem was the seat of authority and learning. The strength of that conviction may be inferred from the custom among Diaspora Jews of making pilgrimages to Jerusalem, as Philo himself had done. 48 Now this was precisely the time when some Palestinians were engaged--for reasons which are not altogether clear--in producing their own translations, wrestling with the same kinds as the LXX translators encountered. It seems hard to believe that the Targumim could have failed to affect the development of the versions of the Bible used by Diaspora Jews. Visiting representatives of Diaspora communities, charged with the task of instructing the people in the Law and in its exact understanding and interpretation, must occasionally have seen fit to bring certain renderings into harmony with current interpretation. 49 Among those Diaspora Jews for whom the LXX was the Law, the almost constant revision and reint~rpretation going on among the targumists must have been particularly relevant because it was not possible to stablize the LXX text by means of recension to an archaic "~riginal."so Given the tensions created by the social and political pressures exerted by their Greek environment, on the one hand, and their sensitivity to the authority of the Palestinian exegetes on the other, it is possible to see why there was such a variety in Alexandrian exegetical approaches to Scripture, and why Alexandrian Jews might with justice have felt anxious. It is also possible to surmise why Philo so often takes a middle course: "allegorizing" in order to save the text before him, universalizing the message of Moses in order to get a particular community of Jews to continue to adhere to the Law, even to argue, on non-Jewish premisses, for the maintenance of the customs which set the Jewish community apart-47 Cf., e.g., E. Bickerman, "The Septuagint as a Translation," PAAJR 38 (1959), pp. 9-40; and D. Barthelemy, "L'ancien Testament a muri Alexandrie," ThZ 21 (Basel, 1965), pp. 358-70.

a

48 churgin, op. cit. pp. 42ff,; V. Tcherikover CPJ 1.45. is own pilgrimage at Prov 2.64.

Philo tells us of

49 Cf. Churgi n, op. cit. ; S, Brock, "The Phenomenon of the Septuagi nt," Oudtestamentiche Studien 17 (1972), pp. 11-36; and see also, e.g., B. Malina, The Palestinian Manna Tradition (Leiden, 1968), pp. 43ff., 9lff. 5 °Cf. Barthelemy, op. cit.; E. Bickerman, "Sume Notes on the Transmission of the Septuagint," A. Mcw:c JubiZee VoZwne (New York, 1950), pp. l49ff.

23 circumcision, observation of the Sabbath, and keeping the traditional holy days. By working that way, Philo could perhaps have helped to resolve some of the tensions pulling Alexandrian JewrY apart. The context of the debates, both explicit and implicit, in Philonic exegesis was therefore not just a scholarly one. If it is sometimes tempting to make of Philo a solitary lover of wisdom who found content in Scripture and form in Greek philosophy to construct the substance of a world system--that is, to envision a Philo sp1:nosistiaus (or neo-pZatoniaus)--we ought to remind ourselves that the issues with which he dealt were not primarily speculativ·e but intensely practical. Ill. Hermeneutic as Rhetoric At this point we can try to fill out the sense in which Philo's hermeneutic can be seen to be fundamentally rhetorical. That hermeneutic must, above all, be understood as having to do with--as being itself--what the Greeks call hermeneia,51 "expression." Such a rhetorical hermeneutic consists in turn of three subsidiary arts of invention, arts which work in concert to produce the finished discourse that constitutes Philo's "Allegories." The first is an art of recovery, a study of the questions raised in the interpretation of texts and experiences, and in the interpretation of facts stated and meant in discourse. This art is characterized by a disciplined sensitivity to the significance of language and to the connections bet1~een thoughts. Philo' s confrontation with the text of Scripture, like that of his predecessors (Aristoboulos, for instance) and that of the Church Fathers and the rabbis after him, called for such a sensitivity and demanded as well techniques for extending interpreted facts to illuminate other similar facts, for making some irrelevant facts relevant, and for making dubious facts divergent aspects of established facts. Such techniques are the techniques of the ancient art of grammar, as exemplified in the work of exegetes from the Alexandrian critics of Homer to Augustine. The second art is an acquired art similar to the art of invention outlined by Cicero in hfs De inventione, an art which modifies or abandons "certainties" of prior interpretation when they become involved in inconsistencies and when they themselves present problems. It is an art of discovery demanding a disciplined originality, an ability to uncover new "facts" by the heterogeneous combination of concepts and terms and by transforming them into places or relating them to common places. The third art enables one to trace the consequences of any thesis, to move from thesis to thesis by finding ways of treating different accounts as variations 51 0n the meaning of hermeneia, see (as against the standard references in, e.g., TWNT) J. Pepin, "L'hermeneutique ancienne, "P01hique 23 (1975), pp. 291-300; and A.C. Thiselton, "The 'Interpretation' of Ton9ues: A New Suggestion in the Light Greek Usage in Philo and Josephus," NTS 30 (1979), pp. 15-36. These writers make a number of observations which have convinced me that hermeneia in Philo describes an activity not of "interpretation" but of communication, principally (not exclusively

24

of a theme. This art is an art of presentation founded on the study of the connections between propositions, somewhat akin to the ars disserendi of the Middle Ages. It is an art which enables one to set forth and analyze sequence and consequence, using methods which establish connections between theses and the problems of life and action. Presentation in this context must be understood as addressed and as motivated by the need felt mutally by speaker and auditor for coherence, clarity, and consistency. Such needs are felt keenly in communities where decisions and judgements are made by reference to a text, as was the case among Jews. whether Palestinian or Oiaspora, of Philo's times. All of these may be subsumed under the title of Rhetoric, broadly conceived as the ars bene diaerzdi, an are which locates or constitutes issues, supplies the means for setting out arguments and conclusions, and shows the way toward resolution. It is not easy, I grant, for those of us who are the children of Hegel and Schleiermacher and Bultm~n to understand how a hermeneutic can be described as an art of rhetorical invention. Nevertheless, Philo's hermeneutic can and should be so understood, as reflection on how he does what he does, and why, should make clear.

Appendix: I provide here some translations of the longer passages in Greek and Aramaic which I cite. For many of the Greek passages, I have found Colson's Loeb transl.ations helpful; but I have tried to render the English--as he does not--to reflect as nearly as possible the structure of the Greek composition. In most cases, this results in some rather awkward English. Deter 72 {p. 3):

They {the sophists) make our hearts ache as they declaim about righteousness, and how common it is; about moderation, and how advantageous it is; about self-control, how noble it is; about piety, how expedient it is; and for any other virtue, how healthy and beneficial it is. And then, next time around, it is injustice, how unsociable it is; licentiousness, how unhealthy it is; impiety, how it will make one a pariah; and about every other evil. and what serious harm it entails, they carry on. Somn 1.92 {p. 4):

Unstable are our calculations, which yield from the same objects not the same but opposite impressions; unstable, too, is the body, as is evident from the changes that occur in all ages from infancy to old age; and unstable are all things which affect us from without, tossed about as they are on the currents of Chance. ieter 58 {p. 4):

What advantage can come of a question ... 7 But it should be stated that ... Of what use, someone might say, are such expressions?

25

That the soul about to give answers ... What, then, is to be praised about the answer? "Behold the virtue," he says, ... CheP B6 (pp. 5,6):

God alone keeps festival truly; and He alone is joyful and glad; alone does He rejoice, and to Him alone is given peace unmixed with conflict ... Without sadness is He and without fear, unfamiliar with misfortune, without faintheartedness, without pain, but full of unmixed happiness.

Plant 139 (p. 7):

(n.b., The text is probably corrupt here. But the rough sense, and the shape of Philo's period, is:) About the husbandry of the most ancient and most sacred sort, which the Cause used in creating the Cosmos, most fruitful in growing things; about the husbandry that comes next in order, practiced by the asteios; and about that which (in fourth place?) has developed according to the injunctions and directions of the laws, as far as we are able, we have spoken ...

Somn 2.30lf. (p. 7):

(Colson's punctuation fails to reveal the shape of Philo's thought) These things are added in the manner of seasonings to the Holy Scripture for the betterment of those who happen upon them--or so I understand them--and let no charge of sophistical ingenuity be laid against those who ask questions (of Scripture); but rather, if they do not ask them, then there should be a charge of dereliction, since it is not with river-lore that our present inquiry is concerned, but with lives which are compared to currents in rivers and about the other lives contrasted to them. For the life of the good man is seen in his deeds, and that of the bad man in his words ...

LegAZZ 3.89 (p. 8): By nature, that is a slave, in the view of God, which is inferior and irrational; but princely and free is that which is of fine character and endowed with reason, and better; and not only when those qualities are fully developed in the soul, but even when they are still in doubt as to how they will turn out; for it is always true that even the slightest hint of virtue shows rulership, and not only freedom, while on the other hand the most random trace of wickedness enslaves the reasoning faculty, even if that soul's offspring have not reached full development. EbP 106 (p. 9):

He (Abraham) indicates in these last words, I think, the whole of creation, heaven, earth, water, breath, and both animals and plants; for to each of these he who has extended his actions with a view towards God, and hopes for help from Him, would say, as is fitting, "From none of you will I take, not from the sun its daylight, not from the moon or other stars their nocturnal light, not from the air and clouds any rain, not from water or earth drink and food, not from the eyes sight, nor hearing from the ears, nor from the nostrils smell, nor from the palate taste, nor from the tongue the power of speech, nor from the hands giving and receiving, nor moving forwards and backwards from the feet, nor breathing from the

26

lungs, nor digestion from the liver, nor from the other innards the powers proper to each, nor the yearly fruits from the trees and seedlings, but I will take all from Being alone, the Wise, who has extended His beneficent powers everywhere and through them aids me. Somn 1.122 {p. 11):

{from Colson) "In the daytime these people, when they have got through their outrages upon other men in law-courts, and councilchambers, and theatres, and come home, poor wretches, to ruin their own abode, not that which consists of buildings, but the abode which is bound up by nature with the soul, I mean the body. Into it they convey an unlimited supply of eatables, one after another, and steep it in quantities of strong drink, until the reasoning faculty is drowned and the sensual passions born of excess are aroused and raging with a fury that brooks no check, after falling upon and entangling themselves with all whom they meet, have disgorged their great frenzy and have abated."

92f. {p. 12): {from Colson) In every feast and gathering in our country what is it that men admire and seek so eagerly? Freedom from the fear of punishment, from the sense of restraint, from stress of business; drunkenness, tipsy rioting, routs and revels, wantonness, debauchery; lovers thronging their mistresses' doors, night-long carousings, unseemly pleasures, daylight chambers, deeds of insolence and outrage, hours spent in trying to be intemperate, in studying to be fools, in cultivating baseness, wholesale deprivation of all that is noble: the works to which nature prompts us are turned upside down: men keep vigil by night to indulge their insatiable lust: the day time, the hours given for wakefulness, they spend in sleep. At such times virtue is jeered at as mischievous, vice snatched at as profitable. At such times right actions are dishonored, wrong actions honored. At such times, music, philosophy, all culture, those truly divine images set in the divinely given soul, are mute. Only the arts which pander and minister pleasure to the belly and the organs below it are vocal and loud-voiced. Chel'

101 , 104 {p. 12) : {from Colson) And that the house may have both strength and loveliness, let its foundations be laid in natural excellence and good teaching, and let us rear upon them virtues and noble actions, and let its external ornaments be the reception of the learning of schools .•• From the study of introductory learning of the schools come the ornaments of the soul, which are attached to it as to a house. For as stuccoes, paintings, and tablets and arrangements of precious stones and the like, with which men adorn pavements as well as walls ...

Chel'

*

*

*

*

*

Targumic passages: TpsJ and Gen. 15:12ff.: {Underlined portions are targumic additions to the text) The.sun was about to set when a deep· sleep was cast over Abram, and behold,

27

four kingdoms arose to enslave~~: Horror--that~. Babylon; Obscurity-that is, Media; Dullness--that is, Greece; and Decay--that is, Edom (=Rome?), which will itself decay and never beable to~~ right agaTn; then, after that, the ~of the House of Israelwill rise agrn.13 .He said to Abram, ':You shOUTO know that-your sons-wrrf become emigrants-In a and wh1ch will not be the1rs, because ~have never believed, and that i~meone will enslave them and that he will mistrea~em for four hundred years. But the people they shall serve, I m~self will punish ~ith two hundred and fifty plagues; and after that, (your sons) will leave in freedom with extensive r ches.ts As for you,~ will be reunited, with· your forefathers and your soul will rest in peace. Neof. and Gen 15:17:

And the sun had set, and there was darkness; and Abram saw seats bein~ arranged and thrones erected. And he~ Gehenna, ~m. liKe~~ace, ike an~ surrounded .fu: spar~s of fire, by flames of f1re, 1nto ~ m1dst ~ ~ the w1cked fell, because ~haarehelled .aghids~ the Law dur1ng their lwes.!.!!. tfifs .~· But the righteous -;-Decause they ...!_ ~ the Law, were spared. from the affl1ct1on. ill ills was shown to Abram when he was passing through the p1eces.

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Response by John W. Leopold, Assistant Professor of Rhetoric University of California, Berkeley Professor Conley's paper on Philo as an orator is a valuable contribution to the growing recent literature on Philo, not least because it emphasizes, as few other studies have, Philo's role as an author addressing an audience. This type of study, which brings to bear the methods of classical and contemporary rhetorical criticism, can be a powerful tool for revealing the relationship between the author as he speaks through his text and the implied audience. Since history gives us so little direct evidence for the intentions, context, and institutional audience of Philo's works, an essay like Professor Conley's is all the more useful to everyone working in the field. I don't think that Philo's relationship with his audience has ever been elucidated quite so well from this perspective as in this essay. But,since this approach to the author works through the application of a kind of universal rhetorical·theory (equally applicable to Donne or Faulkner), a rhetoric sub specie aeternitatia. it carries with it certain risks. Philo almost certainly never read the Fourth Book of the Rhetorioa ad Herennium. the source of most of the Latin terms in this essay. He may not even have been familiar with its Greek sources. We may be sure that he could not have been consciously guided by the insights of any of the moderns, like Kenneth Burke, Chaim Perelman, or William Brandt, though their influence is manifest on almost every page of this essay. These modern insights make the kind of analysis Professor Conley performs possible and guide him, along with his own critical acumen, to the important observations he is able to make about 'focus,' 'presence' and 'communion.' But such an appr.oach also makes it all too easy for us to lose sight of the historical Philo and his world, to impose upon him and his text ideas which he himself might have found very unpalatable (if he had been able to understand them at all), and, especially here, to create unnecessary obstacles to interpretation by applying so much Latin terminology to an author who thought and wrote in Greek. Since I find myself in agreement with the main thesis of the paper (at least I think so), my remarks will be in the nature of caveats, quibbles, and queries relating to the risks mentioned above and some points in rhetorical theory. Would Philo have rejoiced in the title rhetor1 Modern rhetorical theory, rightly or wrongly, insists upon taking all human discourse as its field of inquiry. This is largely untrue of classical rhetoric or of the amalgam of classical and Hellenistic rhetoric that Philo knew. The traditional genre distinctions persisted, despite a tendency to apply the techniques of rhetoric to poetry or philosophical writing. It is one thing to argue that grand philosophical thoughts need rhetorical technique to lend them force and elegance (Cicero De oratore I.l4.6lff. and De natura deorum II.7.20), and quite another to treat rhetoric as the chief science and subordinate the other arts and sciences to it. As far as I know, only professional rhetoricians attempted the latter. Quintilian was capable of this, especially when philosophers as a group were suffering political persecution from the regime that paid his salary (for his attitude, see I. preface 11-20), but I see no reason to sup,pose that Philo would have agreed. For Philo, wisdom and its pursuit were the 'art

29 of arts" (Ebr. 88). When he refers to his own 1iterary activity, as in the remarkable passage at Mig. 34-34, he characterizes it as philosophical. Elsewhere, he treats rhetoric as a necessary and useful art, as long as it is kept in its p1ace among the 1ower arts, a1ongs i de granrn.Jr, music, di a1ec tic and the rest. The dangers of devoting too much attention or too much of one's life to these lower subjects are a familiar theme with Philo, and we do not need to look further than Professor Conley's paper for evidence (see Cher. lOlff. and pp. 12-13 and 15 of the paper) .

.

Philo's hostility towards merely probable arguments, towards sophistries·, and towards rhetorical pathos is evident in many passages (see D. Winston and J. Dillon, TWo Treatises, pp. 129-130). These strictures on rhetoric are among the allegorical lessons he derives from the Law itself, and are also projected on to the character of the prophet, who is emphatically not an orator of the sophistic. type (Det. 38). I doubt that the historical Philo would have regarded the title rhetor as unqualified praise. He was certainly a user of rhetoric, as he was also a studious user of grammar and numerology, and a real rhetor (in the traditional sense of "political orator") when his community needed him, but he may well have felt some discomfort at the terms in which he is praised in this essay. · Philo amid the Modern and the Roman Rhetoricians Particularly enlightening in this essay are the comments on the oral character of Philo's style and the analysis of figures in relation to modern concepts like 'focus,' 'presence' and 'communion.' The emphasis on the oral quality of style is both a modern and an ancient interest, as evident in Cicero as in a modern oral interpretation class. It is almost impossible, however, to write about these phenomena well in academic articles or books. The modern academic approach tends to computer analysis of clausulae and endless tables of frequencies rather than sensitive and intelligent reading. In a class, a seminar, or a lecture, it is much easier to include the sort of oral performance that can bring a bit of stylistic analysis to life. Since a colloquy provides such an opportunity, I, for one, would welcome a reading of one of the passages discussed in the paper, perhaps Leg. all. 3.89 (cf. note 17, with which I sympathize). As for 'focus,' 'presence' and 'communion', how exactly does one get from a detailed figurative analysis to any of these larger concepts? Do the same figures or combinations of figures always achieve the same 'ideals' or 'virtues' of style? Do they always have the same effect on an audience? These are questions that I am quite honestly puzzled about, and I am not sure that either the ancients or the moderns have given adequate answers. What if the same group of figures turns up in Dio, Philo, Plutarch, Epictetus. and Marcus Aurelius? Are their implied relations with their audiences then the same? What role do genre distinctions and traditions play in this process? On the whole, the applications of modern rhetorical theory in this essay seem to be very successful. More disturbing to me (though perhaps more trivial to the paper's thesis) are the continual references to Latin rhetorical terms and Roman rhetoricians. Are these meant to reflect the views of the original Latin sources or the modern theorists who favor Latin names for the figures (as in W. Brandt, The Rhetoric of Argumentation)? The latter case would be perfectly appropriate, provided the ancient and modern applications of the terms are distin-

30 guished. But, if the former is intended, why use the Latin terms to the almost exclusion of the Greek? Why prefer the Rhetoriaa ad Herennium to Demetrius, Dionysius, or Longinus? When we read a Greek author through the apparatus of Roman rhetoric, we add a whole new layer of interpretation and we multiply the chances for error and misunderstanding. Most Greek authors, even of Roman imperial date, simply did not bother with Latin literature, let alone Latin rhetorical theory. Even Plutarch, who was interested in Roman history and biography, knew the Romans mainly through Greek sources. I detect no special interest in the Latin language or Latin literature in Philo. Let me give a few instances. First, Latin etymologies are not likely to be much help with Philo. What relevance can the etymology of argumentatio (note 2) have to Philo, when Philo would have used a Greek word, with a very different etymology, to express this idea? And what of orare and exornare? I prefer to keep heuPisis and Zexis as separate and distinct categories for analysis, if not for writing; will I be more convinced that they cannot be kept apart by an interpretation of exornatio that could not have influenced the Greek rhetoricians who invented and persisted in using the distinction? It could be argued that even the Romans themselves, in their use of the Latin terms that translate Greek technical vocabularies, often forget the etymological meaning of the Latin words. That Cicero, for instance, clearl~ uses ornatus and ornare to refer to decorations (as in a sky decorated with stars) or embellishments with no thought of military equipment (cf. Orator 39.134 where the Zumina of style are like the insignia that decorate the theater and the forum). But I don't need to argue this in a discussion of Philo's style. Philo knew the Greek terms for this department of rhetoric, Zexis, phrasis, and hermeneia (Somn. I.205; Cher. 105; Mig. 35) and he observed, in his comments on theqry, the distinction between 'invention' and 'diction'. We do not know if he ever heard the term exornatio. The use of Latin terms for the figures may also raise difficulties, especially with terms like distributio and expeditio. No Greek sources are mentioned in note 15 (though there may be some in note 20); is it possible that these figures are less well known to the Greeks? These two terms are very often heard in the modern rhetoric classroom, but their possible Greek equivalents are largely ignored by the Greek authors on style from Aristotle Rhetoria Ill through Longinus' On the Sublime. When merismos or diairesis, the most likely Greek equivalents, do occur, it is mainly in the treatment of invention or arrangement, rather than in discussions of diction. These ideas may have been familiar to Philo as dialectical topics (Part and Whole in Rhetoria 11.23, l399a 7-10 and Division in !1.23, 1398a 30-32), as terms in a stasis system, or in discussions of how to handle the 'heads' of argument or the parts of the oration, but did he know them as figures? Most of the references to merismos and diairesis in Ernesti or in the index to Spen9el's Rhetores Graeai are to passages mentioned in note 20, Dionysius De Isaeo 3 {distribution of subject matter after a clear men/de antithesis between style and content) and Anon. Seguerianus pp. 382-383 Spengel and Hammer (1894), where the discussion of the types of diairesis comes in the context of a treatment of the argumentative topics for the proofs section of an oration. I admit that the Hermogenes passages trouble me. In his treatment of stylistic 'ideas', he does seem to refer to something like distributio, but in at least one of the passages {the one on Gorgotes in 2.1), he is discussing a narrative technique. This is also the case with one of the few mentions of merismos in Greek lists of figures. The following

31 comes from Herodian On Figures (Spengel Rhetoras Graeai III.94 [1853]): Merismos is the division (diairesis) of one action into many

with a view to the clarification of the circumstances, just as (in IZiad 9.593-594): They slay the men; and fires waste the city. And others lead away the children and the deep-girdled women.

Cleopatra having used this figure, even as she shamed and roused Meleager. For the narration of the circumstances, one by one, brought pity for the suffering of the city before our eyes. This seems to be rather different from the notion of distributio as taught in modern rhetoric classes or in Ad Herennium. Behind the Latin term, there may lie, at any particular date or for any particular Greek system, a complete vacuum, a figure quite different from the Latin one, or a similar figure. In view of the relative lateness of Hermogenes and Herodian, can we be confident that Philo could distinguish between a Platonic or dialectical division and a rhetorical distributio or e~peditio? Does Philo use these figures intentionally or not, and what do we mean when we speak of using figures intentionally? The Latin terms tend to obscure this question. The Roman rhetoricians, especially those of the date of Cicero Ve inventic and Rhetoriaa ad Herennium, have great authority in the Western European rhetorica tradition, but they are not above error and confusion. The young Cicero badly muddled a key set of subdivisions in Hermagoras' stasis system (1.9.12ff., with Quintilian III.6.57-60). The author of Ad Herennium, or his teacher, avoids the problem by leaving out the troublesome distinctions, while at the same time conflating the definitional issue with definition as a legal question. All of the Romans have difficulty with Aristotle's concept of the ethos of the speaker (Cicer Ve oratore II.43.182-184; Quintilian Vl.2.8ff.). The tendency to conflate the topics of invention with the figures of thought also seems much more pronounced in Roman rhetoric. Isn't it possible that some of these problems did not exist for Philo and his teachers? If so, how far should we rely on the account of figur in Ad Herennium in the interpretation of a Greek author? "Flowery Prose" and "Fully Equipped Argument" The style of a piece of discourse can contribute greatly to the impact of the arguments. Of this, any reader of Demosthenes or Cicero will be aware. But the texture of the prose, its rhythms, its balance (or the deliberate lack of it). do not constitute arguments, except through the fallacy of indignant language. Figures are not arguments either, even when they give the impression of bolsterin~ the proofs. No ancient orator was more "fully equipped" with arguments and well chosen figures than Demosthenes, but his best figures serve to clarify his arguments or to exploit their emotional or ethical potential to the fullest possible extent. A case in point would be Demosthenes Seeo>!ll Olynthiaa 9-10, where the series of metaphors from wrestling and riding makes the notion of the inherent weakness of tyranny vivid and graphic, and the si~ile from analogy, comparing the rise and fall of power based upon corruption and injustice to the blooming

32 and wilting of flowers in their short season, enlivens and illustrates the enthymeme in the passage. These figures are brilliant and they give perfect expression to the speaker's moral indignation, but they do not support his argument. If anything they under! ine the weakness of an appeal to moral force in the face of a mighty and vigorous enemy. If I, as a very remote audience for Demosthenes' speeches, am not to distinguish between the products of invention and diction, then I will feel quite helpless in the face of arguments embellished in this fashion, particularly when Demosthenes is being quite literally, 'flowery', not in the middle, but in the grand style. The ancients are, admittedly, inconsistent in their various treatments of the characters and levels of style, but their descriptions of these styles can still be useful. How do we distinguish between the style of a Musonius Rufus, who is certainly fully equipped with arguments, and that of a Dio or a Maximus Tyrius, who handle similar themes with less dignity and austerity and far greater charm? At least the idea of a 'flowery' style is well-grounded in the ancient tradition and gives us some notion of the categories used in criticism contemporary with the writing. And, though the 'flowery' style is only one of many stylistic variations in Philo's writing, it may help to place him in a tradition of Hellenistic philosophical writing that favored such a style. It may make more sense, for instance, to say that Philo and Plutarch are carrying on the traditions of some of the best Hellenistics writers (Demetrius of Phalerum in Cicero Orator 26.91-96; peripatetics and academics in De oratore I.ll.49 and elsewhere in Cicero; and Poseidonius in Testimonia 103-107 in L. Edelstein and I.G. Kidd, Poaeidonius I., pp, 32-33), than to say that they were not strict 'Atticists.' Much of their post-classical diction and style may come from Hellenistic philosophers whose literary achievement was ignored by 'Atticizing' rhetoricians and critic>. "On the meaning of hemeneia,...

(p. 23 and note 51).

l~ell then, this name "Hermes" seems to me to have to do with speech: he is an interpreter (tp~nv£d~) and a messenger, is wily and deceptive in speech, and is oratorical. All this activity is concerned with the power of speech. Plato Cpatylus 407E-408A, translated by Henry North Fowler, in the Loeb Classical Library, Plato IV.

The fundamentally oral character of much ancient 'translation' and 'interpretation' has been too long ignored, and Professor Conley and the authors of the two articles he cites are quite right to stress the ideas of communication and articulated speech in their discussions of the meaning of hermeneia. But this word (and the related family of words) has many shades of meaning, almost all of which are to be found somewhere in Philo. A hermeneia can be, quite literally, a written translation ( P.Oxy. 1466,3), a herm~neus can be a language interpreter (Herodotus 2.125; Xen. Anab. 1.2.17), and the verb hermeneuo can refer simply to translation from one language into another (Xen. Anab. 5.4.4). This meaning may be relevant to Philo's methods as an allegorist working with names and terms from a non-Greek language. None of the Homeric allegories use hermeneuo or its compounds as terms in their regular battery of allegorical formulae, but Philo, interpreting Hebrew names, and Plutarch, interpreting Egyptian

33 names and hieroglyphs in De Iside et Osiride, do. Since translated etymologies are important in his allegorical interpretation as a whole, this meaning for the word cannot be ignored. Philo's method embraces grammar, rhetoric, Hebrew etymology, numerology, and other techniques for revealing the meaning of a text, but all of his methods are not equally 'rhetorical', at least as he understood the term. Another connotation of hermeneia and related words, and one much favored by Plato, i•s 'mediation'. In various places, seers, poets, and demons are said to mediate between the gods and men (Polit. 290C; Epin. 975C; Ion 534E; Symp. 202E; Epin. 9358). This idea, especially as applied to demons (=demigods), plays an important role in Plutarch's interpretation of Egyptian mythology (De Iside 360361E, with explicit reference to Plato in 361C). Plutarch attributes the allegories concealed in the myths and symbols to the direct activity of Isis herself as a demigod, before her transformation into a goddess (3610-E, cf. De def. oraa. 416F for a similar theory applied to Delphi). Philo was aware of the same sources for Platonic demonology as Plutarch (both Philo and Plutarch allude to Symposium 2020E, see Bury's note on this passage and Philo Gig. 16, where the angels are npeaBevTd~ T~va~ av~pWRWV RPO£ ~cov xat ~EOU RPO> av6pwnov~ HTA.), and it seems likely that he was influenced also by the Platonic connotation of hermeneia as mediation. Indeed, in some of the passages in which hermeneia means 'expression' or articulate speech. speech itself seems to be a kind of ambassador from the world of thought to the world of human communication (cf. Cong. 33). The difficulty of applying too narrow a definition to Philo's use of these terms may be illustrated from the following passage (Leg. all. 1.74, I underline each word in the English which translates a term related to hermeneia. The English is from the loeb Philo I. pp. 145-147): · 'ET~ xat ouTw~ tow~ev T~ npoxeC~evov. ~e~awv ~p~nveu•a~

oTd~ato~ QAAoCwo~~. Eu~AaT 6( woCvovoa' xat o~d to3twv ~ ~pdvno~~ t~~aCveTa~. oL ~Ev yap noAAoL ~pdv~~ov vo~CcovoL

xat oeLvov kp~nveOoa~ t3 von~cv, autov oCoe, ~pdv~~ov o~ ouoaw~. (v aAAo~woe~ yap tou otd~a•o~. TouT€or~ Tou £p~nvev•~xou, Adyou, n ~pdvno~~ ~ewpeCtaL 6nep nv ~h tv A6yw TO ~poveCv, aAA' £v '€pyw ~ewpe~o~aL xat anouoaCaLsnpa(eo~. tov

e~peTnv

MwuoR~

o£

Adywv

oo~~OTLHWV

Aoyo~CAnv ~~v

(Now let us go on to look at our subject in this way, "Pheison" signifies 'alteration of mouth,' and "Evil at" 'in travail': and by these prudence is plainly indicated. For while most people deem the man prudent who can find sophistical arguments, and is clever at expressing his ideas, Moses knows such an one to be a lover of words indeed, bUt a prudent man by no means. For prudence is discerned in "alteration of the mouth," that is in the word of utterance undergoing a transformation. This comes to the same thing as saying that prudence is not seen in speech but in action and earnest design.) I wonder if we have really plumbed all the depths of Philo's hermeneutic or of his use of the words associated with hermeneia? Here the verb is used in one line to refer to the translation or etymology of a Hebrew name and in another to mean verbal expression. The adjective hermeneuti~also refers to verbal expression

34

but not in quite the same sense. Perhaps this question should remain open for a while, before the 'rhetorical' sense of he~eneia is accepted as the most appropriate one for interpreting Philo's intentions.

Response by L. William Countryman, Professor of New Testament Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley Being no Philonist, I cannot essay to weigh the more technical aspects of Professor Conley's discussion here, except to compliment him on threading his way so deftly and sensitively through his author's sometimes baroque Greek. Instead, I should like to draw out some implications of what is surely a wellfounded approach to literary materials from Hellenist antiquity--which also appears to me to be well-executed in this particular application of it. We are none of us strangers to the notion of historical and cultural distance between us and the writers of antiquity. Identifying wherein that distance consists, however, is always more difficult. Conley's emphasis on rhetoric and his associating of rhetoric and hermeneutic in the work of Philo is helpful as isolating an area fruitful for comparisons. Ancient rhetoric constitutes a c~ltural-social-educational-intellectual-aesthetic whole that we can approach, evaluate, and compare with our own experience from many different angles. Several particular learnin~ stand out for me at once. One is that interpretation is indeed a social as well as an individual function anPtherefore cannot be separated from communication, just as thought and language cannot be separated, even though they are not merely identical with each other. This implies that, in a sense, there is no thing called "hermeneutic," but rather a broad-based interaction between a society and its own fundamental values, beliefs, or presuppositions, often enshrined in oral or written texts. Every communication within the society is likely to refer to and interpret these texts somehow in relation to present occasions of communication. Each communication, as Conley implies, need not be limited to "persuasive designs" (p. 2) in any narrow sense, but may also be, even within the context of ancient rhetoric, deliberative or celebrative (encomiastic). The social roots of hermeneutic implied here would have been more obvious in antiquity than today because of the conditions of ancient teaching and deliberation, which were still predominantly oral. Oral communication is forced to take account of its immediate social environment in a degree that the written is not. The recognition of this fact--and a certain valuing of it--is implicit in the choice of genres with a strong oral reference by Plato (the dialogue) or Philo (rhetoric). (The surviving works of Aristotle may have done the western world no service in dissolving that connection for so many subsequent philosophical writers.) The importance of the intimate connection thus revealed between ancient hermeneutic and its social setting is not limited to the recovery of specific elements

35

in the religious-social context of Philo's arguments. Although that is an exciting possibility raised by Conley's arguments (esp. pp. 18-23), a student of the New Testament has reason to caution against its over-exploitation. To create a new academic light-industry devoted to finding an opponent under every text used by Philo will result in an unduly one-dimensional view of his writings. Our social worlds are more than a series of ~ones, however much the image may commend itself either to.us or to the Hellenists of antiquity. There is no a priori reason to suppose that our recognizing a debater in Philo should forbid our also recognizing in him an enthusiast for interpretation of Scripture; indeed, it is the latter persona that accounts largely for the success of the former. Perhaps the broader implications are of greater importance, in a.ny case. We recognize that rhetoric played a central role in determining the means and the boundaries of thought and communication for Philo; and this recognition reminds us that our own educations have given us rather different slants on the world. Whether, for us, the focus has been on philosophy or history, on philology or linguistics or anthropology, it has not for the great majority of twentiethcentury people been on rhetoric. Hand in hand with this goes the fact that the twentieth-century scholar's primary community has tended to be academically specialized in a way that Philo's could never have been, with a concomitant emphasis on written communication among widely scattered colleagues. One result of these differences has been, at least within New Testament scholarship, an astonishing tendency to ignore the aesthetic dimensions of a written work. As Professor Conley reminds us, these dimensions are ouite apt to be integral to what is being said. Certainly the ancient audience so understood th1 A writer may allow you to go to sleep in chapter three, hoping that you will resume where you left off; a speaker must en~age your attention in all ~ossible ways or lose you altogether. In these respects, much ancient written work was still understood and designed in a ~ri~arily oral context, whether rhetorical or dialectical or narrative or initiatory. . The hermeneutic issues for our day and society are necessarily somewhat d1fferent from those with which Philo was dealing. One of our pecul farities is th~t we are able to look back on the hermeneutical work of a Philo and see it as be1ng, at one and the same time, both alien and interesting to us. Perhaps this arises from a sense tha~ our presuppositions do not offer an exhaustive view of reality and that there 1s something to be gained by examining those of others even 1f ~e do not expect to accept them outright. Professor Cooley's discussion of Ph1lo s rhetoric gets us one step inside an alien world, from which we can look back and find that our own now looks a bit different.

Response by A. A. Long, Professor of Classics University of California, Berkeley

36

equately appreciated. Philo, he insists, was not an 'inept' stylist nor an 'inveterate rambler'. Such judgments ignore the fact that Philo's prose is well designed, by the criteria of ancient rhetoric, making constant use·of such standard devices as amplification, interrogation and distribution. In structuring his text accordingly, Philo achieves a prose style which, in more modern terms, can be judged 'profoundly formal' (p.l8); Philo should be seen as a writer who strove successfully to satisfy an auditor's 'cognitive and affective appetites' (p. 18). Writing, as he was doing, for the Jews of Alexandria, Philo is an exegete of texts which had aroused disturbing controversies. In order to understand the full significance of his rhetoric, we need to appreciate his aims at guiding his audience towards correct interpretations by which these controversies will be resolved. Philo's interpretative methodology or 'hermeneutic,' Professor Conley suggests, is itself 'fundamentally rhetorical' (p. 23), according to prevailing views of hermeheia: it seeks to 'recover' meaning by sensitivity to linguistic relationships, it seeks to 'discover' new facts by the heterogeneous combinations of concepts, and it is an art of 'presentation', progressively developing theses and connections between propositions. The bulk of Professor Conley's paper is devoted to the first of these claims, Philo's self-consciousness and skill as a prose stylist. My co~nents will be mainly directed at this point. I found Professor Con 1ey' s comments on Phil o' s genera 1 aims and their rhetorical form extremely interesting. But T know too little about Alexandrian Jewry and the practical deployment of the text-book rules for hermeneia to say much concerning those parts of his paper. If Philo had the standard Greek education, he would no doubt have been brought up to write according to the rules of a rhetorical tea/me. Passages such as Agr. 151, stating and replying to a real or imagined opponent, are ubiquitous in exegetical and didactic prose--in Seneca·, Epi ctetus, the commentators on Aristotle, etc. They can even be found in the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, which he probably composed without any audience in mind. Ancient rhetorical education, it is plausible to suppose, shaped the way people thought as well as how they spoke and wrote. Philo belongs within that tradition. This, however, does not tell us very much. Literary traditions accomodate writers of utterly diverse skills and fluency. Professor Conley, I think, hopes to convince us that Philo, within the constraints of his subject-matter, would have received good grades from ancient professors of rhetoric. After studying the sample of Phil o' s writing adduced by Professor Con 1ey, I confess to remaining somewhat skeptical. Some of his examples seem to me too commonplace to justify the rather grand account of Philo's interest in 'focus', 'presence' and 'communion' (p. 4). The rhetorical questions (p. 4) and the use of anaphora (p. 4} were scarcely overlooked by those who have questioned Philo's stylistic artfulness. (Is Deter. 72. quoted on p. 3, a "good example of Philo's use of anaphora to produce a sense of psychological immediacy"? I may be wrong, but I thought Philo was producing this string of virtues and vices, followed by one defining attribute, to exemplify the linguistic tedium and moral inconsistenc.Y of 'sophists'.} Tastes differ, but I do not find Plant, 139 a 'period of the first rank' (p. 7}. It strikes me as a plain, if somewhat mechanical, su~ation of the discussion over the previous pages. Ebr. 106 (p. 10) is certainly constructed according to a careful plan; the opening list of the contents of 'all creation', heaven, earth, water, pneuma (the four elements?), animals and plants, is systematically an1plified in what follows.

37

(Should we take pneuma with 'air and rain-clouds' rather than with 'animals'?) But I suspect Philo's critics recognized the system clearly enough. That hardly makes such an 'amplification' an item of skillful rhetoric. Did Philo need this kind of apparently exhaustive classification, to please the minds and sensibilities of his audience? The fact that this monstrous sentence has a method to its construction might be thought to show a misapplication of rhetoric, if rhetoric is to be invoked here. I sympathize with Professor Conley's difficulty (p. l) in making his case through a selection of examples. What has troubled Philo's critics, I suspect, is not his neglect of standard rhetorical devices, but his failure, as they see it, to write Greek that is sharply defined, elegant and in clear control of its material. Professor Conley's reply to such objections (see his pp.l4-l8) seems to me to be on the right line. Before we criticize Philo for what he has not done, or done to excess, we need to consider what he is trying to do, and how his style serves that purpose. What the canons of formal rhetoric can tell us here is, I suspect,rather limited, just because Philo and his enterprise are unlike anything for which those canons presumably were designed. The writer is more than the sum of his parts. If some of those parts look jejune or clumsy, when taken in isolation, their effect in combination may be very different. I think Professor Conley might have made his case more persuasive if he had taken us through several complete sections of Philo's work, instead of directing us to a larger number of isolated examples about whose rhetorical effectiveness we may well disagree. Let me offer two passages for consideration, and a few highly impressionistic comments on them. Leg. Alleg. 1-18: Philo begins with a plain and dispassionate explanation of Gen. ii l, "And the heaven and the earth and all their world were completed". Now he turns to the next verse: "And God completed on the sixth day his works which he had made". Adopting a more vehement tone, Philo inveighs against the stupidity of a literal interpretation of the six days of creation for divine creation. He instructs us to understand the number "six" as an image of "perfection", and he expatiates on this point at twice the length he devoted to the previous verse. Thus the audience is offered a change of pace and a change of tone. Then, before actually quoting the statement about God's resting on the seventh day, Philo elaborates Nature's delight in the number seven, leading up to this excursus with a brief sermon on God's everlasting creativity. Again, a change of pace and tone. We are invited to see the marvels of the number seven as an amplification of divine creativity in the world at large and in the construction of man. Philo is at some pains to vary the language of all the seven-fold activities, with different conjunctions and other devices of uariatio employed in the catalogue. All this evidence of God's creativity is now followed by the elucidation of the verses on his resting on and blessing the seventh day. Here Professor Conley would have made a good example, to my mind, of Philo's skill in integrating exegesis, pious sermonizing and the audience's sense of a developing argument. I am happy to call this 'rhetoric', but are the rules of ancient rhetoric competent to explain its effe~ tiveness?

Cher. 21-39: An examination of the Cherubim and the flaming sword. In the same tone with which Leg. AZZeg. l began, Philo starts here by advancing two different

38

explanations, one based on Plato's Timaeus, the other in terms of two hemispheres. At section 27 he abruptly says: "I have heard an even more exalted doctrine from my own soul, which is ... wont to speak prophetically about things it does not know". This is the prelude to a passionate sermonon divine sovereignty and goodness; imagery of horse-riding and navigation is used to picture the control or lack of control attendant on one who follows or ignores divine reason. Thus Philo can expect his attentive audience to recall his earlier allegory of Nod, symbol of salos, turbulence, and Eden, symbol of delight. But sober exegesis has given way to the prophetic voice, its effectiveness heightened by the contrast of tone and space between the first two explanations of the Cherubim and the third. What began as a comment on the Cherubim has ended in a claim to have proved the basis of human happiness, reliance on divine reason. I offer Professor Conley such passages as these. in support of his general enterprise. Philo, I am inclinded to think, can be called a rhetorical writer, provided we remember Professor Conley's interest in "a careful and open-minded study of Philo's rhetoric" (p. 1). He knows Philo far better than I do, and he may be able to show that the kind of style in Philo that interests me. is part and parcel of the standard rhetorical teclme. To me it seems something more fluid and idiosyncratic, making Philo more like an exegetical Pindar than a copy-book rhetorician, a commentator who flies now high now low, controlling his thought by transitions and progressions which, if sometimes prepared for, often involve jumps and digressions that a stricter style would not allow. But his is a highly subjective reaction. If it has point, however, it would allow us to concede that there are stylistic weaknesses in Philo, without surrendering to the view that his overall aims would have been better served if he had modelled himself more closely on Plato and Demosthenes. In alerting us to the interest of Philo the writer, Professor Conley has raised many important questions. He has shown that Philo as "rhetorician" has something to tell us about Philo the commentator and thinker. What we seem to need, following the lines he has suggested, are criteria for establishing the different styles and tones that Philo adopts in different contexts, and the devices he uses for linking his extremely complex patterns of thought.

Response by Horst R. Moehring, Professor of Religious Studies Brown University Let me state at the outset my appreciation for Professor Conley's work on Philo's rhetoric. He has identified an important subject, and his thorough knowledge of ancient rhetoric has allowed him to increase our understanding of the complex opus associated with Philo. The renewed interest in Philo, particularly among American scholars, has already produced significant results. I should like to concentrate my response on a seemingly minor point, which, however, derives from a certain lack of clarity and consistency in Professor Conley's presentation. At the same time, further discussion of this point mi~ht not

39

only actually strengthen his main thesis, but also give a wider understanding of Philo's Sitz im Leben. On the first page of his paper Professor Conley gives a very narrow definition of "rhetoric" as applied to Philo. It appears that he wished to restrict "rhetoric" to "style" or "style and composition." The first part of the paper seems to confirm the impression that "rhetoric" is to be understood in this narrow way. On pages 23ff., however, we find a broader and surely more appropriate definition. Here, rhetoric is "broadly conceived as the ars bene diaendi, an ars which locates or constitutes issues, supplies the means for setting out arguments and conclusions, and shows the way toward resolution." These words surely apply to the opus of Philo. But exactly how? On this question Professor Conley gives only an incomplete answer. He is right, of course, in stating that the data available do not permit us a definitive response. At the same time it might be possible, however, somewhat to broaden his suggestion. On pages lBff. Professor Conley expresses his reservations concerning most previous work on Philo on two grounds: (l) most authors charge Philo with either "imposing Greek philosophy upon Scripture" or "articulating some hidden truth in Scripture using Greek philosophy as a vehicle;" and (2) they have failed to appreciate "the pervasiveness of the debate setting of Philo's work." These charges may contain some rhetorical exaggeration, but they certainly have a point. Philo undoubtedly saw himself involved in a genuine controversy. Who, then, were his opponents, and what were the issues? Conley suggests three criteria which might help us to locate the controversy (pp. 19-20). He suggests "a broad context of concerns common to both Alexandrian and Palestinian Judaism" (p. 21). He may well be right, but I think we can also somewhat broaden our perspective. Without denying the possibility of frequent contacts between Jerusalem and Alexandria, a few observations appear in order. (1) The evidence for any cZose relationship is thin. True, Philo mentions that he once travelled to Jerusalem. The very fact, however, that the pious and wealthy Philo undertook exactly once the relatively quick and easy journey from Alexandria to Jerusalem does not indicate that he recognized any special need for close relationships with scholars in the holy city. Such a relaxed relationship between the two Jewish communities could also be the reason why the destruction of the temple did not seem to make much of an impression upon the Alexandrian Jews. (2) Professor Conley is correct in pointing out that behind the veneer of philosophical speculation in Philo's treatises there lies an eminently practical concern. Again, however, this need not indicate any special concern with the way Palestinian leaders handled practical problems. After all, the popular philosophic. schools whose language Philo speaks were primarily concerned with practical ethica questions. Speculations about cosmogony and cosmology, among all the Hellenistic philosophers, including Philo, merely formed the framework for the explication of practical rules. (3) Phflo, the Jew of Alexandria, was aware of an issue that had moved many authors of his time: the tension seen to exist between the particular and the universal. At first glance the Torah, written in an archaic language, given by a

40

tribal god at one specific time and place to one specific people, looks like the very essence of particularism. We know from Philo and Josephus that the Jews of Alexandria were widely viewed as a "peculiar" people with a particular way of life. Among many of the educated Jews the temptation must have been strong to desert the peculiar group and join the majority of the Greek-speaking educated population of Alexandria. (4) If we grant this possibility--and we cannot be certain--J the rhetorical, i.e., argumentative in the best sense of the term, character of Philo's writings makes sense. Important as the recognition of the rhetorical character of Philo's writings is, we must not forget that rhetoric is always a means, never (except among sheer charlatans) an end. Philo, I agree with Professor Conley, was a master in the use of rhetorical tools. What was his end? (5) We cannot be sure. A number of factors, however, lead me to think that he meant to argue for the universal validity of the Torah associated with the name of Moses. a. He accepts as authentic ("inspired") the version of the Torah in the civilized Greek language, not merely in the "barbarous" Hebrew. b. He uses every means possible to demonstrate the univeY'salUy of the teaching of the Torah, including the use of Greek mythological themes (Athena, the virgin goddess without either mother or offspring), commonplaces from the ~ellenistic philosophical schools (his "syncretism" is merely a reflection of the general breakdown of the distinction among philosophical schools at his time, although I would agree with his classification as a "Middle Platonist"), heavy use of.artthmology (he is our first and most important source for Neo-Pythagorean arithmology), and etymology. c. Philo's Op. Mundi should be used as one of the major tools for the understanding of Philo's entire opus. His reading of Gen. 1-2 through the eyes of Plato may be, or rather, certainly is, a touY' de foY'ae. But this fact, by itself, shows to what lengths he was prepared to go to demonstrate the continued "relevance" of Gen. To summarize: Professor Conley deserves our gratitude for demonstrating the rhetorical character of Philo's presentation. He has laid bare the facts. He has looked for the Sitz im Leben of the "debate." In my view, he is too narrow in his attempt to connect the work of Philo with that of Palestinian exegetes. To put it bluntly: Philo would not have been able to understand the type of work that was finally codified under the name of Mishnah. To step out of line and ignore historical factors: Elias Bickerman, as a twentieth-century Berlin scholar, was asked to write, and wrote a book on the Maccabees. He did this in spite of the fact that he strongly disliked the Macccbresand their policies [the private communication from EB]. Is it not significant that Philo does not glorify the Maccabees? Philo's main concern, and he put all his rhetorical skills to work to demonstrate the point, is this: Judaism, viewed by educated Gentiles and Jews, as particularistic, is, in reality, the most uni7JeY't~al of all schools. He uses Greek mythology, Greek rhetoric to prove his point. Finally: I do not like Philo. He uses the tricks of the trade available to him to make his point. No matter what people say about him, I find him the most soporific drug ever invented. Yet: behind his pomposity, his second-hand knowledge

41

of philosophy, his absolutely sickening moralistic stance, his desperate attempts to write acceptable Greek (C. never raised the question of hapax Zegomena in Philo), the reader is left with one impression: Philo cared--he cared for something. What exactly was it? This is our next assignment.

42

LIST OF PARTICIPANTS

Professor at the University of Illinois Thomas M. Conley {Speech and Classics) Professors at the University of California, Berkeley William S. Anderson {Classics and Comparative Literature) Joseph Fontenrose {Classics, Emeritus) James L. Jarrett {Education) Steven Knapp (English) John W. Leopold (Rhetoric) Anthony A. Long (Classics) Daniel F. Melia {Rhetoric) James Porter (Comparative Literature) Professors at the Graduate Theological Union Robert B. Coote (Old Testament) L. William Countryman {New Testament) John Endres (Old Testament) William Herzog (New Testament) Herman Waetjen (New Testament) David Winston (Hellenistic and Judaic studies) Wilhelm Wuellner (New Testament) Professors at the University of San Francisco r~arvi n Brown (PhiLosophy of Ethics) John H. Elliot (Exegeois) Professor at San Francisco State University Sandra Luft (History of Ideas) Students Brigid Merriman Andrew Porter

43

MINUTES OF THE COLLOQUY OF 30 OCTOBER 1983 THE DISCUSSION Summarized by Brigid Merriman, O.S.F. Conley: It is a pleasure to be back and see so many familiar faces. I have not seen some people for eight years, which is incredible. Regarding the responses, I find a couple of them very useful for adding to the manuscript on which I am working. The paper I present to you is a short course, as it were. My response to the responses I do not see as rebuttals as much as apologies, with a few rebuttals. The four which I saw fell into two classes. First, Professors Leopold and Long, and secondly, Professors Moehring and Countryman. Without getting overly defensive, the first one I should say something about is John Leopold's. Part of the problem is my fault, for in putting this piece together, I did a largely cut and paste job: One of the issues Leopold raises is the use of Latin terms in connection with a Greek writer. On the third and fourth pages of his response, he asks (pp. 29, 30 here), if these are meant to reflect the view of the original sources or the modern theorists who favor Latin names for the figures. I would have to say that on the whole it is the latter. It just struck me that the particular chapter of the book (or the first section of the paper) was something I did for a book seven years ago that is not yet published--so much for German efficiency. I did not intend in the present instance to make of Philo a Latin rhetorician, however. Beyond this, a more serious problem suggested by Leopold has to do with the distinction between Greek rhetoric and Latin rhetoric. I must confess that I do not know what it means to make that distinction. That is, I am not sure that there is such an animal as Greek rhetoric, or another one such as Latin rhetoric. In fact, I am not sure there is such a thing as ancient rhetoric, other than chronologically. It also struck me that Philo's generation was a peculiar one, in that it is the first generation after the active assimilation by the Latin handbook writers of a lot of Greek materials. The author of Ad Herennium complains about the difficulty of translating these terms, and in the book on exornatio eschews Greek examples and says in effect that he is going to come up with Latin ones. I wonder if such a distinction between Greek and Latin rhetoric makes a great deal of sense in Philo's generation, because in fact, in terms of the pedagogical side of it, Philo was aware of what was going on in Rome, which was being done by Greeks too. Later on there is no question that what was being done in Byzantine schools was clearly different from what was being done in medieval schools with the trivium. With regard to Mr. Leopold's remarks here, it struck me that just because the Latin for every Greek term may be found in Lausberg, or in the Lewis and Short, or in Uddell and Scott,·or the like, we cannot conclude that the Greeks were not aware of the devices which had names in Latin but did not seem to have the same kind of names in Greek. One example that springs to mind is Gorgias' encomium to Helen. If that is not expe4itio, I do not know what is. If they did not have a word for it, by George, they still did it. Thirdly, like Cicero, Philo did not always go by the book. But for show and tell, the idiom of the book is very convenient. Other terms would do, but I guess I am too lazy to make them up. There is no question but that I have been very much influenced by writers whom Philo could not have read, like Kenneth Burke's Counte.ratatement, Then again, maybe Philo did recently but that does not change the manuscript tradition we have. Basically, the point that I wish to make is that I can use the later terms as a kind of

44

shorthand for the type of thing that Philo was doing. The same thing goes for the terms presence, focus, and communion. On the whole, I thought a lot of the references on the points brought out, and we can hash these out. In the process of putting this paper together, I discovered that I had pulled out of one copy of the manuscript the notes that had to do with that very issue, and that I took that copy of the manuscript with me to California instead of the other. If anyone wants these references, I certainly have them available. I find the whole Greek/Latin rhetor too dependent on lexicon references. The problem is that Liddell and Scott and the indexes to Spengel, among others, are just not enough. It is very frustrating, because it makes it hard for me to find, too. For instance, when I was doing work on topoi in Philo, I cameagainst the harsh realization that no nineteenth-century German had gone through Philo and traced all the topoi. Somebody had to do it. An example is the word hermeneia; in a sense, it is like the word togos in the Greek. Even when you have a careful, syste;~atic writer like Aristotle you will find the word or some cognate used five times on the same page, and you have quite a different sense each time you run across it. I think that hermeneia as the province of rhetoric becomes clear from De congressu 17 and De cherubim 105. On that kind of matter, I guess I have a beef with people who try to isolate by way of collating scattered references covering maybe a thousand years of literature, hoping to isolate a single meaning of the word. This, it seems to me, is very risky business. We certainly do not operate that way when we speak. A lot of understanding comes from context--one has to be there--and I am sure that everyone has had this kind of experience. In sum, I think that there are a lot of things which I have in the larger manuscript which would satisfy Professor Leopold's unease; on the other hand, there are some real differences related to what he and I think criticism is. I was very happy about Professor Long's con~ents He cites for us passages that appear in my manuscript, though not in the paper. As I was searching Philo, there were a lot of places where the same principles of amplification and expectation and fulfillment did in fact work for such longer chunks as well as at the level of the clause, the sentence, and two or three sentences. A couple of things suggest to me that we are seeing the same sort of thing. To answer the question asked at the end of his response regarding how Philo links things together: very often he links things together very artificially which may have no intrinsic relation to one another. If we look at De cherubim 11-20, for instance, and the passage 21-27, we would note that both of these are held together by expeditio. Much more dramatic are 28-39, where Philo hits the prophetic plane. The dramatic occurs in the loosening up of the rational structure of the sentences, and also in the use of apostrophe. I would suggest that this dramatic thing works on the basis of artistic ter.hnique for it is not just inspirational. That brings me to a couple of points which make me suspect where Long and I are not together. At one point he mentions Philo as an exegetical Pindar, in that he was fluid and idiosyncratic. That caught me by surprise. because I thought that it was recent common knowledge that Philo is a lot less fluid and idiosyncratic than people had thought before. Perhaps my knowledge of this is not as informed as it might be. The second point is the remark about whether Philo would have gotten good grades from the teachers of rhetoric. The place of the handbooks,

45

of course, was in schools; Philo graduated. I think that what one finds in Philo, as what one finds in Cicero, is very seldom any ~torking by the book. You find every sign that these writers had learned all that stuff, but that they had gone beyond it. Using rhetoric as a kind of structure of rules and conventions that you abstract a la Bultmann or Lausberg, or Joseph Martin, is using that sort of template or pasta machine. That is, you put the dough through and see what comes out the other end. One reason why Philo has come into such bad repute among Hellenists is tnat they say he did not go according to the rules. For instance, his periods are much longer that you can say in one breath. Yet we knovt there is nothing that says you cannot start a sentence and take a breath half way through it. Anyone who has read Donne's sermons will know that this is a reality. To switch now to the contributions of Hors t t{oehri n!) and Hi 11 i am Countryman, whi eh have more to do with the Sitz im Leben, This is a term which I have gro1~n to dislike intensely because of all 1ts Bultmannian connotations. If I in any way gave the impression that Philo's concerns were in any way dictated by Palestinian leaders, I did something I did not want to do. What I was pointing to was that if one looks at the 150 pri nci pa 1 texts of the "A 11 egori es," every one of ~thi eh seems in need of some sort of exegetical activity to straighten it out, it is almost always a passage which the Targumists felt the need of straightening out. Needless to say, the solutions they gave were quite different. I noticed that many passages which showed Targumic activity also excited Philonic activity. In many cases they come out with quite different things, because after all Philo was writing for Alexandrian Jews. I would imagine that the theme of the land would make Diaspora Jews a little bit nervous. That is, they would fear that they were not really Jewish if they were not in Ersez Israel. Philo assured them that they 1vere, by universalizing this business and showing that it is not inconsistent with other things that they learned in school The amazing thing is the frequency with which the passages in Philo are the same passages that Targumim treat. To turn to Professor Countryman's observations, I think that in that connection, the danger is not of developing academic light industry devoted to finding an opponent under every text, though I do think that Philo enjoys working things out. On the ~ther hand, not looking c~osely at what we would call exegetical traditions and see1n~ how they relate to Ph1lo would give us a one-dimensional view. If Philo has any l~terary art it is not that of the new critic, of the objet d'art. We know so l1ttle of ~he actual Alexandria of Philo's time, and so literally nothing much to compare Ph1lo to. But one certainly gets the sense that he is involved in a debate--not in the sense of an immediate objector in the room--but that he sees himself as he goes to scripture, compelled to make an argument for a particular interpretation. As far as light industry is concerned, I can tell you it is heavy industry. I went through at least 1.50 examples and tracked them down as much as I.could. There is a lot more to b.e done. There is one section of the last port1on of the manuscript, which is meant as a program for somebody else to research. I do not want to sound like Jim Robertson who made the assertions many years ago about t~e contents of the Yag Hammadi codices. When asked specifically about what they sa1d, he remarked that we had to wait until the book came out. But I think that my last section, which is a type of catalogue, is very boring reading, but nec~ssary groundwork.· I was going to read it to you tonight, but I do not think I Wlll.

Leopold:

I was glad to hear that you tended more to1vard the second poss i bi 1i ty.

46 If so, I have no objection, because I think it is very useful to take the template that you would find, say in Lausberg or in some other universal approach to rhetoric and apply it to the text. But I think you have to distinguish that process from looking at Philo from his own historical horizon. Conley: There is a real problem there, because we have a very small collection of the actual orations of even the best of the Attic orators. I do not know what looking at rhetoric from Philo's own horizon is. We have Philo only as we have him, and though one can make up stories about what he learned in school, we have very little evidence on that. Philo is helpful with that actually, because he does comment on the constTtUents of rhetoric and he does use rhetorical terminology from time to time. So one can form some idea of what he learned, not only in school, because a lot of "rhetorical training" does not happen from handbooks and from school. Philo has learned somewhere, and I suspect from someone who taught debating techniques similar to the ones Cicero learned from his academic teachers. At least he has some familiarity with that type of debate, which does not come from a rhetorical handbook.

~:

I guess s0. Except that what one has in the handbooks is pretty much what one has in the debate books today: explanations of how arguments ought to hang together conventionally, how to present oneself neatly and so on. Yet the actual substance of the course maybe is to get people to use the argument that the PLO should be recognized by the United States government and the instructor wants a person to argue that it should not. If the student does not agree with the propositions, too bad, and he or she had better bloody well find the arguments for his or her side.

~:

I am not thinking of debate books though. I am thinking of the kinds of teefinTques that Cicero learned from his academic teachers, and that Seneca attributes in some places to some Stoic teachers, like Poseidonius. Also, in debating of theses, teaching of exhortations, and consolations and so forth, which were not, according to Cicero, in the rhetorical handbooks, but were taught by various philosophers. ~:

~: Yes, but ~references,

my problem is that I do not know how you can operationalize so to speak, to give you some kind of framework in which to read the texts. I am simply trying to find an idiom in which to do this show and tell. Going through the texts, you notice that some of the patterns repeat. When I got to exegetical issues, what I found out may be shown by the Targum of pseudo-Jonathan as an example. I looked at the texts that had the most amplifi-. cation, and then went back to Philo to see whether he spends any time talking about those things. I found that it was almost 90% predictable that if the Targumists spent a lot of time.discussing the expansion or changing of words in a particular passage, Philo is doing it too. That is a sort of check to try to see if there was anything of Philo's concerns that one could reconstruct, not attributing influences to him necessarily. Any anthropomorphic passage, for instance, is going to cause problems. People know that it is not a literal thing, but what is the argument?

Leopold:

That is jumping outside of rhetoric as far as I am concerned.

47 Conley: This is one of the issues, you see. I long ago stopped making distinctions between philosophy and rhetoric and poetry, and thinking that these distinctions were really important to ancient writers. The lines that are drawn--these generic distinctions--get real fuzzy as soon as one looks the second time. Now, is Aristotle a philosopher? Sure he is. Does he write philosophical prose? I will leave that for you to answer. Is Cicero a philosopher? Maybe he is. He tried to be one when he was an old man, but does he write philosophical prose? I do not know. He does not'write like Spinoza, nor like Kant. Thank God he does not write like Derrida or Jacques Cazeaux. I do not understand what philosophical prose means. Much cannot be classified. It cannot be done. Leopold: I think that Philo thought it could be done. ments seem to assume that those distinctions existed.

At least a lot of his· com-

~: Yes, lip service topoi. It would be very interesting to get you and Horst Mloefirlng in the same room. You say that Philo is a philosopher and hates sophists; Moehring says that Philo is the dirtiest, most underhanded writer--

I did not say that Philo was a philosopher. I said that he sometimes 5a,YSlnfmself that he is doing philosophy, and is concerned with philosophical things.

~:

Conl~y:

Sure, just like Habermaus, who says, "I am doing rigorous thinking here," and 1t turns out to be very fuzzy. So, because he has told you that does not mean you are going to give him credit for what he did not do. I like Philo by the way; I am like Horst. I must have a taste for the baroque, for I also like James Joyce. Leopo~: Maybe I could end my response with the notion that Philo seems to think that he is doing a dithyrambic thing, more or less like Plato's dithyrambic style that was criticized by Caecilius and Dionysius. That is one of those things that comes out of the De M·igr•atione AbJ•aham '., passage. I wonder if you would comment at all on that, regarding self-knowledge or self-delusion on Philo's part.

Coryley: It seems to me that there are numerous places where he seems to have consclously constructed lists that get one caught in rhythms and so forth. He certainly says at times that something is coming from a part of his soul that he does not even know about. I do not know if it is a pose, but I think it is a s~h~na, and I think that is what those critics were talking about too. Not a Romantic mode, but a sahema which by a negative definition is a pose, and by a positive definition is something like one's attitude. Think of Martin Luther King, and his "I've been to the mountaintop", and "I have a dream." It seems that he has gone off speaking in tongues, only the tongue happens to be English. Is it calculated? Sure it is. Is it a pose? I do not think so, and I would say the same about Philo. We have a very hard time with John Donne. It is like Mark Twain going to the German opera, and falling asleep in the second act waiting for the verb. By the way, you made a suggestion about doing an oral interpretation of Philo. I wish I could do it. I have never been able to get Bill Mullen's abilities in rendering Pindar, for instance. Long: I must confess that I had been rather skeptical about getting Philo into some sort of rhetorically good category by your initial methods. Then when I tried to work it out for myself, I decided that you were quite right to argue that he

48

has got style. \~here I still remain somewhat skertical is whether the style that he has is one that 1~ill respond effectively to the standard torvi, rhetorical devices and so on. \olhat I think is very interesting is that we have terribly little Greek prose from the death of Ari s tot 1e up to this time. Just after Ari s tot 1e we have Epicurus, for example, who could write beautifully when he wanted to. We have his K:.wia·i do:rai of pointed epigrammatic sentences, clearly designed to be memorized as they were. But he also wrote his treatises, the despair of all commentators. Philodemus, a bit before Philo, writes a great deal about rhetoric. We wonder why he writes in a way that strikes us as so tortured and obscure. Philo, compared to these, is in a different class. I mean that his style seems much More elegant, more '1 iterary.' He just do not seem to have a critical framework yet, as no one has ever done the appallingly difficult work of analyzing Greek prose of this time. So we are not in a position to say what a contemporary audience coulresent any reality. 1 think that that social presuppositions are certainly not impossible, but may not be self-evident either I am glad to hear that they are not impossible. I am also glad to hear that they are not self-evident because that is precisely the problem. Nothing is self-evident. Let us all call the rhetoric of the schools rhetoric one, and the rhetoric of the courts and of public debate, rhetoric two. Or, kid rhetoric and grown-up rhetoric. respectively. What Philo was doing, as we said before, was grown-up rhetoric. My objection to the objections of other scholars about Philo's rhetoric is that they are looking at him as though he should be doing rhetoric one. That is point number one. The second thing is that there are many different modes for communication. Co~.:

Hhrzog: 1 do not follow the importance of point number one. at a little more?

Could you explain

The point is simply that rhetoric two is always embedded in the social. I do not mean that in an abstract way. People find very little reason for talking unless there is some real reason for doing it, unless there is some issue that is involved. But there is no reason to talk, except in the purely emphatic sense, unless there is something going on, where people have a reason to talk.

Con~x:

Winston: Conley:

T~10

major points that have not been mentioned--

1 am going to forget my second point.

Winston: Thomas Tobin has shown that in Philo's doctrine of the creation of man, there--rs such a dissonance between a whole group of con~ents that sound more Stoic and another group that are Platonic, and involve allegory of the soul. He conjectures that the reason for this is that Philo is so much a part of this exegetical position

57

that he could not just throw it out. He had to make use of what he had. But he shows through stylistic indications that he prefers the Platonic allegory of ·the soul. The second point that I think is very important-~: ~s.

I am going to interrupt you here, so that you forget your second point. why could he not throw it out?

Winston: ~hat is not my position, and I do not want to defend it. Actually his position, which I do not accept, is that Philo believed in the inspiration of even the literal interpretations of scripture. I doubt that very much. But in any case, that is the thesis that Thomas Tobin gives in his dissertation. But the second point I want to make, and this is a very strong impression that I get from reading Philo, the overwhelming detail of his exegesis is such that I do not believe that any one mind--not even the Philonic mind--could have produced it alone. One gets the clear impression that he is working within a very rich tradition of exegesis. Whether it was written or oral, I leave open. Co~ley: Basically there are two kinds of situations that lead to discourse. I am go1ng to get Oerridean again. They are two sides of the same coin. One of them is to get people together; communication is a sort of linking up. We are not talkin< about an atomistic situation where I have a thought in my head and you have no thoug: in yours, so I take my thought and plunk it over to you like a tennis ball, and you respond. Then you have your thought and you plunk it back over to me. Rather, what we are doing here is to find a kind of community in the diversity of opinion. The second situation is outright seduction. This is what politicians do; this is what Andrew Marvel does, that is, persuade you to do something you might not be inclined to do otherwise. As far as communication is concerned, aside from the commonalities of "How do vou do?" and the like. it is intentional. that is. it ic: 11rl dressed to people. It usually involves some of that same kind of r1tual that the "How do .vou do?" and the like have. for people interact th~t wav in order to find ou that they are friends, or that they are not friends. I th1nk that Philo is trying to find his friends.

Countrthan: Even if one were to accept that as a complete description though, think tat Philo has a friendship with the text. He drives toward this. Conley:

Why does he have this friendship with the text?

Countryman: It is in the tradition and in the community. So unless we get the two senses of rhetoric apart, we are goinq to confuse the picture. Conley:

Yes, and I think that is the second point in the paper.

Countryman:

I am in tune with your paper, but I am not in tune with your comments.

Well, I think that there is sleight of hand. If you want to describe the rnetarical process that is going on, I think that it is the kind of thing that most epideicticoratory was intended to do. I hesitate to say that, because I know that people are real hot on encomium and epideixis and so forth. The idea is that one of the functions of the latter and indeed one of the functions of what we call satire is to reconstitute, or to emphasize--in the modern sense of the term--the values that are shared. So it is not adversary at all. I got sidetracked by

~:

58

Anthony Long's remark about sleight of hand, and in a way by Horst Moehring's text. Melia: We are drawing to the end of our time, so I would like to call on those who have any final remarks to make. ~: It seems that there is a curious way in which this argument--by beginning w1th the detailed analysis of the passages and then going at the end to the sociology of the community and the argument about what happens to hermeneutics when it turns into a rhetoric--seems to be along the question of belief, in a way that I find both interesting and troubling. I think that is what is being gotten at from a variety of angles by questions about tradition, the status of the text in this community, and the sense that there is. a sleight of hand. I do not think it is a response in the naive sense that there are easy ways of sorting out rhetoric and hermeneutic. Rather, what is implied in the exegetical tradition is at least a commitment to the authority of something like the truth claims of the text. This is the real question. I just wonder when you say, "It is not easy, I grant, for those of us who are the children of Hegel and Schleiermacher and Bultmann to understand how a hermeneutic can be described as an art of rhetorical invention." [At the end of Conley's paper] That seems to imagine a distinction between on the one.hand, a tradition of hermeneutical interest which is precisely involved with questions of authority. That involves not only biblical interpretation,but presumably Homer had something like that status. That distinction is something closer to the purely performative. if that is what you were describing a moment ago in your conversation.

Conley1 Yes, this is another deep issue. I am very pleased that you picked this up. In my next incarnation, I will make this clearer. One of my own intellectual themes, the kind of thing l consider it important to do, is to protest against the tendency of a great deal of modern scholarship to assume that what you see is what You do not want to get. In other words, behind all that verbiage is a system. is a telegraphic message that one can send to somebody about what the essence of that position is. So in a way, this was a tendentious paper, as the book is tendentious. They say, here is a lot of stuff nobody has looked at and nobody has talked about, and I do not think you should look at the latent stuff before you look at what is manifest. What I tried to do is to organize the analysis in much the same way that people experience discourse. That is to say, in time. So I move from figures to sentences, to larger units, and then get to the whales. What I came out of that process with was a conviction that what is important, in a way, is not the underlying message, in the sense that most people understand it. I think that it means gist, thrust. I think I have some citations to back that up. In watching what Philo is trying to do with that audience, one comes up with a very different picture. I have a lot of passages in Philo that I object to aesthetically, impressionistically. But I think that for students of Schleiermacher, Bultmann, Freud and those people, there is a concealed latent message, whereas I do not want to make that distinction. Maybe Philo is talking about things that are not found in the actual words, but then he goes on to explain about it. It is not the same kind of latent structure that determines the manifest, whereas the manifest has nothing to say about the latent. What modern hermeneutics, starting with the nineteenth century, seems to accept as an axiom is that an author can be saying something, whether or not he or she wants to be saying it. If one gets beyond these words, one can find what

59

that is.

I do not like that.

Wuellner:

You do not like to see Philo as a first-century Derrida?

Conley:

could make a lot of money if I could show that.

Long: .I think that as we progress in this discussion, I certainly see Philo in a new way. It does seem to me that he has some of the strengths and weaknesses of, let us say, the structuralists or of Jungian criticism of literature. What they have in common is something like this: the structuralist will tell you that he interprets a text in terms of a scheme, the relationship between polarities, or in the case of the Jungian, the relationship between archetypes. It is assume that somehow we know these things, and from the texts will get to these bedrock structures or systems. In some way, Philo is doing the same thing. ~: But only very approximately, I think. If I were to do that, I would be PTaYlng both sides of the fence, because I would be saying that on the one hand Philo does have this system that he is completely convinced of, and I would be able to explain away every single inconsistency, like Jacques Cazeaux. His book is out. Cazeaux has the notion that Philo's version is one of la totalitE{, so that every line in Philo can be shown to conform to this vision. Some of these arguments of Cazeaux are virtuoso performances. A powerful mind is at work on these goofy inconsistencies and making some sense out of them. As Jonathan Smit~ asked, does this mean that Philo can never be wrong? Cazeaux answered yes, Phil< can never be wrong. I have never really quite understood this vision of la totai and can only see things in parts. That is why my next incarnation will have me looking at the special laws after I go to Hebrew Union College and get a degree in Judaic studies. It is clear to me in reading across those chunks of Philo, tl there are different things going on there about the same texts. Depending on whi one wants to find, there is an argument for it. This is not to make Philo into i Sophist. It is to make him into someone who is sensitive to what his audience n1 to have as a support for the reading of the text. If they demand Stoic distinct· then he will give them to his audience.

Winston: I do not think that Philo is afraid of minor inconsistencies at all, b1 when 1t comes to major inconsistencies, that is where the debate rages.

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18. Longel' Marok: PoJOgefl!{ Interpolation, Of' Old TJ'adition? [73 p.) LC 76-12558 Reginald H. Fuller (Alexandria. VA), 7 December 1975. ISBN.0-89242-017-0 19. Litel'ary Fashions and the Transmission of Tezts in the LC 76-26182 Graeoo-Roman WoJOZd, [51 p.] ISBN 0-89242-018-9 George D. K1lpatr1ck (Oxford), 11 January 1976. 24. Art as a Hemeneutio of NarJOative. [56 p.) LC 77- 4346 John w. Dixon (North Carolina; Chapel Hill), 14 November 1976.ISBN 0-89242-023-5 25. The Hel'O Pattem and the Life of .Jesus. [98 p.] LC 77- 4835 Alan Dundes (Berkeley), 12 December 1976. ISBN 0-89242-024-3 28. Orphism and Baoohio ~steries: New Evidwnce and Old Pf'ob~ LC 77-21825 of.InterpJOetation. [48 p,) ISBN 0-89242-027-8 Walter Burkert (Zurich), 13 March 1977, 29. Philo and the Gnostios on Man and Salvation. [60 p.] LC 77-14930 Birger A. Pearson (Santa Barbara). 17 April 1977, ISBN 0-89242-028-6 31, The Commentary He~eutically Conside~d. [31 p.] LC 78-16340 Shepherd, Con1ey, Brown. Dillon. 11 December 1977. ISBN 0-89242-030-8 32, A Te~tus Reoeptus RediviVUB? [60 p.] LC 78-15891 George D. Kilpatrick (Oxford). 12 March 1978, ISBN 0-89242-031-6 33, The PJ'oblem of Knowledge in Late Antiquity. [56 p.] LC 78-15918 Raoul Mortley (Macquarie: Sydney, Australia), 21 May 1978, ISBN 0-89242-032-4 34. The PhilosopheP and Society in Late Antiquity, [41 p.] LC 80-24136 Peter R. L. Brown (Berkeley). 3 December 1978, ISBN 0-89242-033-2 35, The Role of the Christian Bishop in Ancient Society, [47 p.) LC 80-24307 Henry Chadwick (Oxford). 25 February 1979. ISBN 0-89242-034-0 36, Soul and Boay in Stoicism. [40 p.) LC 80-22935 Anthony A. Long (Liverpool), 3 June 1979. ISBN 0-89242-035-9 37. Self-Definition in Earoly Christianity. [38 p.] LC 80-29301 Ben F. Meyer (McMaster: Hamilton, Ontario). 6 January 1980. ISBN 0-89242-036-7 38. SpenseJO's A:zocadia: The Intef'1'eZation of FiotionandHistocy. [49 p.) LC 80-28303 Wolfgang Iser (Constance), 13 April 1980. ISBN 0-89242-037-5 39. Interpretation, Meta-Interp~tation 1 and Oedipus Tyrannus. [63 p.) LC 80-28919 Barrie A. Wilson (York: Downsview, Ontario). 25 May 1980. ISBN 0-89242-038-3 40. Greek Kno!Jledge of .Jews up to Heoataeus of Abdem. [48 p,) LC 81-38463 Emilio Gabba {Pavia), 7 December 1980. ISBN 0-89242-039-1 41. Holy Sc'I'ipture and HellenistiC! Hei'mBneutics in Ale:randrian LC 82- 4361 Christology: The Arian Crisis. [92 p.) ISBN 0-89242-040-5 Charles Kannengiesser (Paris: Catholic Institute; Notre Dame), 6 December 1981. 42. The Pl'obZ.em of Mimculous FeBdi71fJB in the GN.eco-Rormn World. [52 p,] LC 82- 9676 ISBN 0-89242-041-3 Robert H. Grant (Chicago), 14 March 1982. LC 82·19907 43. A Conrnentary on Vil'gil's First Eclogue. 149 p.] 1

44.

Nt~ani.ng.

[52 p.)

LC

John R. Searle (Berkeley), 3 October 1982.

45. Thtl Dia'tDgi.ca't tmd the Dia'tecti.caZ Nev.u

a.

Ram4au:

How Di.d.l'Ot Adopud Sowatu and H•g.Z

Adoptt~d

Di.d.l'Ot,

[

p.]

83·1~

ISBN 0-89242-D4A ISBN 0·89242-04!

Hens Robert Jauss (Constance), 27 February 1983. 46.

Augwetin. and Sa:ua'ti'tJI.

[41 p.)

Peter Brown (Berkeley), 22 May 1983.

ISBN 0-89242-04E