Lamberton, 'Christianizing Homer, The Odyssey, Plato, and The Acts of Andrew', Bryn Mawr Medieval Review 9410
URL = http://hegel.lib.ncsu.edu/stacks/serials/bmmr/bmmr-9410-lamberton-christianizing
@@@@94.10.5, McDonald, Christianizing Homer
MacDonald, Dennis Ronald. Christianizing Homer, The Odyssey,
Plato, and The Acts of Andrew. New York: Oxford University
Press, 1994. ISBN 0-19-508722-4.
Reviewed by Robert Lamberton -- Washington University
rdlamber@artsci.wustl.edu
The Christian appropriation of Greek polytheist culture in the
second century of the common era was, on the whole, not a pretty
sight. The principal players were ham-fisted, self-styled
philosophers of the order of Justin Martyr and Tertullian, whose
claims to teach philosophy amounted to little more than the
eviction of the traditions of Greek philosophy from what they
defined as the search for truth, and their replacement by a
monotonous, scriptural rhetoric, professions of faith, and such
inane and ultimately useless equations as "Christ is the
logos". Few and far between are the Christian texts that
bear witness to any depth of knowledge of polytheist texts,
whether philosophical or literary. All in all, the century and a
half between the day Paul quoted Aratus to the Areopagites and
the time of the confrontations with Greek tradition of the
scholarly Alexandrians Clement and Origen offer little to suggest
that the nascent Church found time to read the classics or put on
a veneer of culture. It appropriated what it could and trampled
the rest--the bulk of the demon-ridden culture of its paranoid
vision--into the mire. The texts of the period are grim and
shrill, and even when we reach the richer cultural atmosphere of
Alexandria and the higher intellectual standards of Clement and
Origen, we search in vain for genuinely protreptic texts,
seductive texts that attract rather than proselytize, invite
imaginative and intellectual engagement, rather than belabor the
all-too-familiar threats, warnings, and injunctions. There is
little to give the lie to Lucian's description of his Christian
contemporaries: benighted, gullible "poor bastards
(kakodaimones) who've convinced themselves that they're
going to live forever" (Peregrinus 13). They seem to have
been the sworn enemies of any possible pleasure of the text.
They generated what is surely the most unsympathetic,
in-your-face literature in the Western tradition.
Dennis Ronald MacDonald has been working for some years on a
text that goes far to counteract this picture. If the lost
original of the apocryphal Acts of Andrew was anything
like what he claims it was, and if it was in fact composed in
late-second-century Alexandria, then we will simply have to
acknowledge that a second-century Christian could and did produce
a tale of wit, fantasy, and sophistication, weaving into it
themes, motifs, and whole episodes from Homer and Plato and
"transvaluing" them into a Christian romance, a deliberate and
self-proclaiming fiction of a richly rewarding sort. In his new
book, MacDonald presents his reasons for believing that the
Acts of Andrew was such a text. I have serious doubts
about a great deal of what he claims, but beyond the range of my
scepticism enough remains in his arguments to make this an
important book that anyone concerned with the literature of the
high Empire should read.
Let us first be clear about what we are dealing with here.
The New Testament apocrypha as a whole are a textual critic's
nightmare, and the text known as the Acts of Andrew (the
brother of Paul, an obscure figure in the canonical NT, but in
the apocrypha designated apostle to Achaea) has not been seen
intact since the ninth century. By that time, versions of it
were in circulation in Coptic, Syriac, Armenian, and Latin,
representing states of Andrew's story that predate the surviving
Byzantine Greek versions. Especially important to all
reconstructions of the original is the Latin epitome composed ca.
593 by St. Gregory of Tours (Miracula sancti Andreae).
The task of collating all of this material was undertaken by
Joseph Flamion early in this century (Les Actes apocryphes de
l'apotre Andre. Louvain, 1911), and two reconstructions of
the "original" Acts of Andrew, presenting the relevant
sources and providing translations, have appeared almost
simultaneously in the past few years: MacDonald's own (The
Acts of Andrew and the Acts of Andrew and Matthias in the City of
the Cannibals. Atlanta, 1990), and that of Jean-Marc Prieur
in the Corpus Christianorum, Series Apocryphorum (Acta
Andreae. 2 vol., Turnhout, 1989). MacDonald spells out the
relationship between the two reconstructions in the introduction
to the new volume, and at somewhat greater length in that to his
own edition. Aside from Prieur's more extensive apparatus and
more complete descriptions of the source materials, they differ
principally in their treatment of the story of Andrew's rescue of
Matthias from the khora ton anthropophagon, an anonymous
locus in the Greek versions, but in the Latin (and the
Anglo-Saxon!) traditions of the tale designated as "Myrmidonia"
or something of the sort (35). Gregory's sixth-century epitome
included the story as its opening episode and called the home of
the cannibals Myrmidonia (or Mermidona or any of five other
variants). Flamion, followed by Prieur, considered The Acts
of Andrew and Matthias in the City of the Cannibals to be
distinct from the original Acts of Andrew, an accretion
already welded onto the Acts in the Latin translation
epitomized by Gregory. Prieur therefore omits the episode (with
the result that the only recent edition of most of the Greek
text, with translation, is to be found in MacDonald's edition of
the Acts). Thus the reader of MacDonald's reconstruction
will encounter a quite different, longer, more fabulous version
of Andrew's adventures than the reader of Prieur's.
Whichever reconstruction one takes to better represent the
original Acts of Andrew, it remains the case that Andrew's
travels received more fabulous, novelistic, and esthetically
attractive treatment than those of the other apostles of the
apocrypha. It is nevertheless quite important for MacDonald's
central argument that the cannibal episode be integral to the
original work, and that their land bear the allusive name
Myrmidonia as a deliberate hint to the reader, revealing the
author's "hypertextual intentions". This is the episode that
provides the Iliadic background for the author's appropriation
and "transvaluation" of the Odyssey, and that single
toponym (absent from all Greek testimony) is perhaps the most
persuasive bit of evidence in MacDonald's large arsenal to
support the proposition that this Christian text presented itself
to its original, Christian audience as an explicit and deliberate
reworking and "Christianizing" of Homeric material. Here, Andrew
the Christian anti-Odysseus is summoned to the land of the
savage, cannibalistic, (and, of course, polytheist)
Myrmidons--remember the Myrmidons as blood-dripping wolves
(Il. 16.156-63) and Achilles' observation that he'd like
personally to devour Hector (Il. 22.346-47)--to rescue
Matthias, whose mission there has left him imprisoned and being
fattened for roasting. Circe-like, the Myrmidons give a drug to
their captives, with the result that these unfortunates accept
hay for food, facilitating the fattening process and marking
their transformation, at least for culinary purposes, into
beasts. Odysseus-like, Andrew is put ashore asleep--not by
Phaeacians but by angels, commanded by the ship's captain, who is
Jesus in disguise. Andrew liberates Matthias and the other
inmates, encounters an old man who offers the
butcher/executioners his young son and daughter in order to save
his own aging skin--his similarity to Agamemnon is clearer to
MacDonald than to me--saves the children, is arrested and dragged
(Hector-like) by a rope around his neck through town. Jesus
comes to him in prison and patches him up, allowing him to flood
out the ant-men by means of a water-spewing statue (dubiously
compared to the Scamander of the theomachia), aided by the
Archangel Michael in a fiery cloud, preventing their escape.
Andrew sends the cowardly old man, along with the fourteen
butcher/executioners, off into "the abyss" (though only
provisionally), then revives and converts all the victims of the
flood, and sets out to return (if, indeed, this is a
nostos of a sort, as MacDonald claims) to Achaea. He will
eventually be crucified in Patras (a city selected, we are told,
in the absence of supporting evidence for Andrew or any other
Christians there until a much later date, for its proximity to
Ithaca).
I hope that my rather flippant paraphrase of MacDonald (who in
turn has a tendency to proceed in much the same manner with the
texts in front of him) will not appear unfair. It is intended,
in any case, to emphasize both the strengths and the weaknesses
of MacDonald's presentation of his arguments and his claims of
"hypertextuality", each of which must stand or fall on the merits
of its details. Some of the episodes in this fabulous tale do
indeed sound a lot like echoes of Odyssey episodes, and
they are enriched, for a reader capable of making the
connections, by the reminiscence of those Homeric episodes. At
the same time, a large number of the prototypes MacDonald finds
lurking behind figures in the Acts of Andrew seem to me
suggestive analogies at best, and quite a few of them have
nothing at all to do with Homer. As has often been noted,
Homer's Circe has a lot in common with the witch in the deep,
dark forest encountered by such hikers as Hansel and Gretel--and
there's no doubt what all those little gingerbread boys and girls
are for--but at the same time, Homer's Circe is emphatically not
a cannibal, any more than his Agamemnon is a child-sacrificer.
MacDonald's book is largely made up of claims similar to those
evoked above, and as such defies adequate discussion in the scope
of a review article. He makes no secret of the fact that he
anticipates that many of his "similarities . . . may seem
strained", but insists that their occurrence "in the same order
as in the epics" (39, cf. 307) constitutes evidence of the
appropriation of specific texts by the author of the Acts of
Andrew. In fact, he comes dangerously close to claiming that
a large enough accumulation of marginally plausible
"similarities" constitutes a demonstration of his thesis, which
of course it cannot, and the arguments based on sequence are
generally open to alternative formulations and interpretations.
The verbal similarities lined up in his parallel passages are
rarely compelling and his claims regarding proper nouns as
hypertextual indicators generally fall flat. One might argue, of
course, and with justification, that ancient "etymological"
extraction of meaning has nothing to do with historical
linguistics, but MacDonald's claim (for example) that "the name
Varianus derives from the Latin participle varians and
means 'changeable' or 'unstable'", and so might be translated
"Mr. Fickle", "indeed an apt name for Zeus" (136) is a perverse
distortion of the force of the adjectival form of the common name
Varus--an equivalent hermeneutic ploy might be the claim that
every Germanic proper name ending in "-son" or equivalent endowed
its bearer with solar attributes.
The figures in the Acts of Andrew also have an alarming
habit of switching their Homeric identities in ways few readers,
I think, could possibly follow. Thus Andrew, back in Patras,
after curing the wife of the proconsul Aegeates (= Poseidon,
Odysseus' old nemesis, since Aegae is associated with the cult of
Poseidon), then converts her while Aegeates is out of town, so
that she becomes an anti-Penelope, living out the consequences of
her chastity to their (second-century Christian) limit and
refusing to have sex even with her returning husband (now himself
Odysseus). He then takes outrageous and unpopular revenge on the
successful suitor (Andrew) and crucifies him on a cross
stuck in the ground by the sea (= both Odysseus' mast and the oar
he must "stick" in the ground far from the sea in Tiresias'
prophecy, here filtered through the sort of salvational
allegorizing the neoplatonist Porphyry, about a century after the
date here proposed for the Acts of Andrew, practiced when
he made that prophecy into the final cause of the action of the
Odyssey).
It is only in his Conclusion that MacDonald finally presents
arguments that attempt to prove, rather than simply illustrate,
his hypothesis (302-316). His claim is that by the criteria of
"density and order", "explanatory value", "accessibility",
"analogy", and "motivation", the Acts of Andrew is best
understood as a hypertextual transvaluation of the
Odyssey, with a generous dash of Plato and other
polytheist texts mixed in. The first issue turns, as I've said
above, on the specifics of each "similarity", and there are just
too many loose ends and dubious equations. Order proves nothing
if the parts do not hold up. Nevertheless, MacDonald proves
alarmingly (and sympathetically) willing to concede a great deal
here (307): "Even if one were to disqualify three-fourths of the
evidence argued for here, the remaining quarter would demonstrate
more investment in transforming Greek mythology than one can find
in all previous Christian narrative combined." Now, when we are
talking about "mythology"--about stories, story-patterns, motifs,
situations-- MacDonald is much more persuasive. Simply to
establish what is claimed in this sentence would be a great deal,
and it could be accomplished quite efficiently. Frankly, the
gymnastics required to argue MacDonald's further claim of
"literary dependence"--that a Christian author with certain books
of the Odyssey in front of him proceeded episode by
episode to rewrite them as tales of the apostle of a benevolent
God victorious over the demons of the polytheists--look in
retrospect like overkill. If he feared that three-quarters of
his specific "similarities" might be suspect to a sceptical
reader, then the better plan would have been to scrap them and
build a stronger and more persuasive case on what was left.
The brief discussion of "explanatory value" (308) does not get
us far beyond the assertion that a number of decided oddities
about the Acts of Andrew can be resolved "by reading the
text against Euripides, Plato, and, above all, Homer" (308). In
general terms, this seems to be the case, though I find it far
easier to believe that the stories, the myths we know best in the
literary form given them by Homer and Euripides, are here subject
to appropriation rather than any specific literary version of
those stories. The case of Plato is rather different and there
is little doubt that a certain number of motifs do enter the
latter portion of the Acts of Andrew from the
dialogues--most obviously, the metaphor of the philosopher
(=apostle) as midwife, from the Theaetetus, and the figure
of the imprisoned Socrates, lecturing to the last, from the
Phaedo, clearly the prototype for the portrayal of the
imprisoned Andrew (midwife: 218-22, 234-36; Andrew as Socrates:
252 ff.).
This brings us to the matter of "accessibility", third in
MacDonald's list of criteria of "literary dependence" above.
MacDonald's touchstone here is Clement, quite credibly the
best-read Christian of his time, and the assertion that he
knew numerous dialogues of Plato as well as Homer and Euripides
needs no defense. He cites them, criticizes them, appropriates
what he can and condemns much of what is left. But the author of
the Acts of Andrew would not have needed to know a single
one of those texts firsthand to have known enough about
them to generate this novelistic biography. He was capable of
reproducing the rhetoric of Christian Platonism in the speeches
he wrote for the imprisoned Andrew, but there is little danger
here of confusing mimetic skill and true knowledge. Furthermore,
the figure of Socrates that we get in Plato's Phaedo was
probably a topos by the time Plato wrote the dialogue (as
Socrates' Apologia was not a single composition but a
genre in the 390s). The evidence from the period of the Acts
of Andrew, in any case, is abundant, both among polytheists
(Lucian Peregrinus 37) and, as MacDonald shows, in Justin
Martyr and Tertullian (249-51). In the rich resonances of the
style of the Second Sophistic, there could hardly be a
representation of an imprisoned philosopher who was not in some
sense Socrates--so much so that the penetration of the topos into
Christian texts is hardly a surprise.
Under the rubric of "analogy" (310-14), MacDonald points to
comparanda that increase the plausibility of his hypothesis. He
correctly observes that the closest analogy to his text is to be
found in the polytheist romances, permeated in turn by the
influence of the Odyssey and of Euripides. Still, the
romances we have do not appropriate Homeric or Euripidean
material in the way MacDonald claims the author of the Acts of
Andrew has done. Their appropriation, first of all, is
purely esthetic and literary, and more important, it can rarely
(if ever) be reduced to parallel passages and narrative
imitation. Furthermore, we must ask again if even this sort of
adaptation and appropriation, coupled with a "transvaluation" of
the original, can be conceived as a Christian project of the
second century. The only Christian appropriation of Homer
MacDonald can point to at such an early date is the
centones, and one would like a more convincing one.
MacDonald promises (313) "a description of the role the
Odyssey played in the Book of Tobit, the Gospel of Mark,
and the Acts of Luke" and such a display would indeed lend
plausibility to his claims about the dependence of the Acts of
Andrew on Homer, but I remain sceptical that any such
dependence can be shown.
Are any generalizations possible from this rich accumulation
of detail? Prieur, in the section of his Introduction to the
Acts dealing with "sources and literary influences"
dispensed with "la tradition et la litterature antiques" in less
than 150 words (403-4). MacDonald effectively expands his
treatment of the same subject to 350 pages. Both cannot be
correct and neither is wholly so, but we can say with certainty
that MacDonald has sensitized us to an aspect of this wonderful
text--perhaps its most important aspect--to which Prieur remains
almost entirely insensitive.
Under his final rubric of "motivation", MacDonald reasserts
his repeated hypothesis that we have here an author whose
"thorough rewriting of classical Greek literature" was intended
to urge "the reader to compare the worst of traditional pagan
religion with the best of Christianity and to choose the latter
over the former" (316). That was certainly a goal of
second-century Christian intellectuals, from the heavy-handed
Justin Martyr to the learned and subtle Clement. It would be
surprising if the author of the Acts of Andrew did not
have something of the sort in mind. What remains in doubt is
whether he went about his task with his eye so firmly fixed on
prominent polytheist texts as MacDonald would have us
believe--but what we can be more certain of, thanks to
MacDonald's work, is that in what John Dillon (Middle
Platonism [London, 1977], 379) called the "sea of bores" of
the late second century, there existed alongside the sparsely
distributed polytheist "islands of wit" at least one modest
Christian archipelago.