Philosophy as a way of life

From this perspective, the conflict between pagans and Christians, from the second century AD on, is highly instructive. As both pagans and Christians recognized affinities between their respective doctrines, they accused each other of theft. Some claimed Plato plagiarized Moses, while others affirmed the contrary; the result was a series of chronological arguments destined to prove which of the two was historically prior. For Clement of Alexandria, the theft dated back even before the creation of humanity. It had been some wicked angel who, having discovered some traces of the divine truth, revealed philosophy to the wise of this world. 1 1

Pagans and Christians explained in the same way the differences which, despite certain analogies, persisted between their doctrines. They were the result of misunderstandings and mistranslations - in other words, bad exegesis

- of stolen texts. For Celsus, the Christian conception of humility was nothing but a poor interpretation of a passage in Plato's Laws;12 the idea of the kingdom of God only a misreading of a passage in Plato's text on the king of all things, ll and the notion of the resurrection only a misunderstanding of the idea of transmigration. On the Christian side, Justin asserted that some of Plato's statements showed that he had misunderstood the text of Moses.1�

In this intellectual atmosphere, error was the result of bad exegesis, mistranslation, and faulty understanding. Nowadays, however, historians seem to consider all exegetical thought as the result of mistakes or misunderstandings. We can briefly enumerate the forms these alleged mistakes and deformations are thought to assume: in the first place, the excgctes make arbitrary systematizations. For instance, they take out of context passages originally widely separated from each other, nml nn11lyze thl'rn in 11 pUl'ely formal way, in order t o reduce t he texts to hl' cxpl11inl'll to 11 hoil \' 111' rnhl'rl'nt

Philosophy, Exegesis, and Crtalivt Mistakes 75

doctrine. In this way, for instance, a four- or five-tiered hierarchy of being was extracted from various dialogues of Plato.

Nor is this the most serious abuse. Whether consciously or not, systematization amalgamates the most disparate notions, which had originated in different or even contradictory doctrines. Thus we find the commentators on Aristotle using Stoic and Platonic ideas in their exegesis of Aristotelian texts.

It is fairly frequent, especially in the case of translated texts, to find commentators trying to explain notions which simply do not exist in the original. In Psalm 1 1 3: 1 6, for example, we read: "The heaven is the heaven of the Lord. " Augustine, however, started out from the Greek translation of the Bible, and understood: "The heaven of heavens is of [i.e. belongs to] the Lord." Augustine is thus led to imagine a cosmological reality, which he identifies with the intelligible world, which he then goes on to try and locate with relation to the "heaven" mentioned in the first verse of Genesis. From the point of view of the actual text of the Bible, this whole construction is based on thin air.

Cases of misunderstanding arc not always this extreme. Nevertheless, it frequently occurs that exegeses construct entire edifices of interpretation on the basis of a banal or misunderstood phrase. The whole of Neoplatonic exegesis of the Parmenides seems to be an example of such a phenomenon.

The modern historian may be somewhat disconcerted on coming across such modes of thought, so far removed from his usual manner of reasoning.