sotto voce

Fair enough, but who else is going to be certain of it?

Horatio Parker

That's interesting.

How did that happen?

stephan huller

well for starters how could clement and origen have been "platonizing christians" and rejected the phaedrus?

Horatio Parker

By retaining features of Plato that they felt were consistent with scriptures and rejecting the rest.

Christianity is a revealed system, not a reasoned one. The Phaedrus IIRC is about rhetoric vs dialectic. Christianity is itself a rejection of the Phaedrus.

What does any of this have to do with the supposed inherited homoeroticism of Christianity?

stephan huller

This should probably be a thread on its own rather than where it is right now but let's speak in general terms. To begin with - what is Christianity? The name suggests that it is a development of a Latin term meaning 'those of Christ.' Christ is a Greek translation of the Hebrew term meaning the anointed one. So already we have this bizarre identity in the middle of linguistic no man's land.

The early Patristic literature finds many other names for Christianity which seem to be developed from Hebrew or Aramaic terms. The bottom line is that we have this murky movement that doesn't have a clear conceptual origin. The Marcionites for instance argue that Jesus is the Chrestos rather than the Christ and what's more - in the writings of Clement of Alexandria especially (but also within the writings of Irenaeus) there is a consistent identification of them as 'super-Platonists' i.e. Christians where an interested in Platonism is 'off the chain.'

stephan huller

Now Marcionitism itself is difficult to define because IMO you have this bizarre work associated with a third century Latin writer named Tertullian. There are five books here which clearly come from different authors. I don't know who wrote Book One. Book Two has been argued to have been written by Theophilus of Antioch. Book Three is a bizarre world rewrite of Tertullian's Against the Jews which itself probably comes from Justin. Books Four and Five are written by the same person and probably Irenaeus of Lyons is their original author.

Irenaeus of Lyons himself in his Five Books Against Heresies mentions the Marcionites on several occasions, but in particular two groups of Marcionites especially in Book Three. There is this idea of Marcionites explicitly associated with corrupting Luke and then on several occasions a second group - not explicitly identified as 'Marcionites' - but a shadowy group i.e. as 'others' and 'also' who are associated with a longer gospel of Mark which separates Jesus and Christ, which doesn't recognize the apostle Paul and some other ideas consistently represented in this text and in Books Four and Five of Tertullian's rewrite of a lost anti-Marcionite referenced in Against Heresies.

stephan huller

This twofold division of Marcionites is important because the Marcionites themselves are accused of dividing everything - including the godhead, the gospel etc into two. While there is nothing specifically Platonic about any of this, we now arrive at Hippolytus's reference to the longer gospel of Mark associated with the Marcionites (clearly the second group) which incorporates mystical ideas from the Greek philosopher Empedocles. While Hippolytus mentions a number of Empedoclean ideas that been incorporated into narratives 'added' to the familiar narrative be focuses on the idea of Jesus as the Empedoclean concept of Philia (Love, Intimacy) - i.e. the force which counters Neikos (Strife).

While only fragments of Empedocles's writings survive it is widely acknowledged that Aristophanes's speech in the Symposium is an expression of Empedoclean mystical philosophy. Marwan Rashed writes "It is much more probable that, when he was writing the Symposium, Plato remembered Aristophanes' Empedoclean sketch in the Thesm. and that this in turn suggested the theme for the speech he puts into the mouth of the comic poet." Why is this significant? Because it helps explain the central idea in Hippolytus's understanding of Jesus as Philia in the mystical/longer gospel of Mark.

stephan huller

To this end - and without taking up too much more space - if we accept the existence of this mystical/longer gospel of Mark known to Irenaeus, his student Hippolytus and independently from the writings of Clement of Alexandria we have the idea of an expanded text developed around the Empedoclean notion of Jesus bringing together two men as one. The additional narrative referenced in the Letter to Theodore is only another very important feature of this philosophical system.

The reason I began with the question about Clement of Alexandria and the Phaedrus's homoerotic vision is that is an important intellectual problem - how could someone be so Platonic and so Christian at the same time? The fault line of this difficult runs through Socrates's praise of "pederasty in conjunction with philosophy" (249a2). The solution of course is going back to the idea of Plato using Aristophanes as a mouthpiece for the Empedoclean myth of restorative cosmic Philia. The two ideas are complimentary in essence.

So is Irenaeus's description of the Gospel of Mark in Book Three of Against Heresies. Notice the allusion to the Phaedrus in his allusion to the very opening words of Mark "point to the winged aspect of the Gospel ... [for Jesus] afterwards being made man for us, sent the gift of the celestial Spirit over all the earth, protecting us with His wings." The Gospel of Mark is the last gospel, according to Irenaeus, the one which completes the others and "which renovates man, and sums up all things in itself by means of the Gospel, raising and bearing men upon its wings into the heavenly kingdom."

I imagine that Mark is acknowledged to have taken a primitive narrative now lost and expanded it according to the principles of neo-Platonic exegesis albeit now the mystical philosophy is not part of the expanded narrative.

Is that too much of a starting point to a discussion?

outhouse

there is no possible way this could ever be substantiated with any certainty or credibility.


what if the gayer communities had there own script? it would not reflect the script as a whole.


were talking about a movement in a constant state of evolution, and I personally see no place to attribute such a thought anywhere in its evolutionary track.

stephan huller

But you already have three witnesses to the existence of the expanded text - Irenaeus, Hippolytus and Clement. What's more you have the physical intimacy of monks from as long as we know anything about monastic communities - they traveled in twos and behaved essentially as clandestine same sex couples. The problem is the effort to curb this 'gayness' in the Imperial-sanctioned Church.

I have a whole chapter on monastic twosomes at my developing work on this subject - http://stephanhuller.blogspot.com/20...-man-with.html

There is also this incredibly insightful article written by Derek Krueger which my chapter draws heavily from. In particular the figures of John Moschus and Sophronius whom scholars who study the rite of adelphopoeisis are split as to whether they were formally 'united' by a rite which has lasted to this day. Philip Booth of Cambridge University who wrote a book on this subject (Moschus, Sophronius, Maximus: Palestine and Its Dissidents in the Age of Heraclius) gave me this answer in an email - "There is no evidence for adelphopoiesis between Moschus and Sophronius, although it is not unlikely. It occurs between their patron John the Almsgiver (on whom they write a Life) and the emperor's cousin Nicetas; see C. Rapp, ‘All in the Family: John the Almsgiver, Nicetas and Heraclius’, Νέα Ῥώμη 1 (2004) 121-134."

Derek Krueger in another email just received this week to the same question - "There's no evidence that Moschos and Sophronios entered into a formal rite of adelphopoeisis. In fact, there isn't such solid evidence that monks used this rite. But as my essay in the Journal of the History of Sexuality 2011 argued, there is good evidence that some monks made promises (whether formal or informal) to remain together in pairs."