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

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Author: Thomas M. Conley

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cenLeR ber
in

for

H E L L E N I S T I C and

The GRADUATE THEOLOGICAL UNION

M0 D E R N C U L T U R E

& The UNIVERSITY of CALIFORNIA

BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA

PROTOCOL OF THE FORTY SEVENTH COLLOQUY:

30 OCTOBER 1983

4>!/IGN 'PHTQP: A STUDY OF RHETORIC AND EXEGESIS THOMAS M. CONLEY PROFESSOR OF SPEECH AND CLASSICS UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS

DANIEL F.

MELIA,

EDITOR

EDITOR:

Daniel F. Melia Department of Rhetoric University of California, Berkeley Berkeley, CA 94720

Ezeautive Commi-ttee of t;he Cent;ezo fozo Hezomeneutioat S-tudies fozo 1984/85 Victor Gold Erich Gruen William R. Herzog II Steven Knapp Daniel Melia Herman Waetjen Wilhelm Wuellner

Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley Professozo of OUi Testament University of California, Berkeley Professozo of His-tozoy Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley Professozo of New Testament University of California, Berkeley Associate Professozo of English University of California, Berkeley Associate Pzoofessozo of Rhet;ozoic Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley Professor of New Testament Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley Pzoofessor of New Testament

The Center for Hermeneutical Studies arose as a response to a growing awareness of the fragmentation and lack of direction in humanistic research, specifically in the area of Hellenistic studies, post-Biblical Judaica, and studies in early Christianity. In the belief that (1) team effort is essential for real growth in these fields, and that (2) methodological breakthroughs will likely occur where scholars of a variety of fields encounter each other seriously in pursuit of common interests, a group of New Testament scholars at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley formed the Center for Hermeneutical Studies in Hellenistic and Modern Culture, during the Spring of 1969. The next step was the creation of a network of relationships and cooperation between scholars of the Graduate Theological Union and those in various fields within the University of California who share their interests in Hellenistic studies and in the problems of hermeneutics involved in their significance for modern culture. The Center brings together faculty members of the departments of Classics, Comparative Literature, English, Folklore, History, Law, Near Eastern Studies, Rhetoric, and others at the University of California, and from the Graduate Theological Union including the center for Judaic Studies, as well as select graduate students from each institution, and from other universities and research institutes. Besides monthly or quarterly colloquies, published in the Protocol Series of the Center, the Executive Committee of the Center organizes and schedules Task Force Work Project-s and Research Seminars.

Copyright €)1984 by Center for Hermeneutical Studies All rights reserved

ISSN 0098-0900

Key titLe: Protocol of the colloquy of the Center for Hermeneutical Studies

in Hellenistic and Modern Culture

Library of Congress Cataloglug lu Publication Data

Conley, Thomas M., 1941[Philon Rhetor], a study of rhetoric and exegesis. (Colloquy, ISSN 0098-0900 ; 47) At head of title: The Center for Hermeneutical Studies in Hellenistic and Modern Culture, the Graduate Theological Union & the University of California. Includes bibliographies. I. Philo, of Alexandria--Language--Congresses. 2. Rhetoric, Ancient--Congresses. 3. Hermeneutics-History--Congresses. I. Title. 11. Series: Colloquy (Center for Hermeneutical Studies in Hellenistic and Mo~ern Culture) ; 47. ISBN 0-89242-047- .2.

Published by The Center for Hermeneutical Studies in Hellenistic and Modern Culture 2465 Le Conte Avenue Berkeley, CA 94709, USA

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Thomas M. Conley

OIAQN 'PHTQP:

A STUDY OF RHETORIC AND EXEGESIS

Appendix

1-24 24-27

RESPONSES John W. Leopold, Assistant Professor of Rhetoric, University of Califo:r>Jia, Berkeley

28-34

L. 1\'illiam Countryman, Professol' o:' the NeM Testarne>Jt, Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley

34-35

Anthony A. Long, Professor of Classics, University of California, Berkeley

35-38

Horst R. Moehring, Professor of Religious Studies, Brolim University

38-41

MINUTES OF THE COLLOQUY List of Participants The Discussion

42 43-59

~IAON

'PHTOP:

A STUDY OF RHETORIC AND EXEGESIS THOMAS M. CONLEY

I intend here to try to make a case for a careful and open-minded study of Philo's rhetoric. I want to do this partly because I have come to believe that, in regard to his literary and rhetorical achievement, there is a myth of "Philo the Inept" which needs to be examined again, more closely than it has been heretofore. In fact, I think that myth ought to be dispelled, once and for all, if only because the negative judgements on Philo the rhetor by Hellenists of two or three generations ago seem to have given more recent scholars an excuse to ignore that aspect of his production.! That is not good, because it is not possible to read Philo rightly if one ignores his rhetorical art, dismissing it at the outset as "hopelessly pedantic and confused," any more than it is possible to read Donne or Faulkner--or Plato--rightly while ignoring the rhetoric of their respective oevres. Most importantly, however, sensitivity to what Philo does in his rhetoric allows us to perceive--so I shall argue--a critically important aspect of his mode of exegesis. We can, in short, get more out of close attention to Philo's style than a mere "aesthetic" appreciation; but we cannot get it until we have come to grips with the aesthetic dimension of Philo's work. The argument which follows is an abbreviated version of one I have laid out at greater length elsewhere. The short version may present problems, for the sort of argument I want to make is very difficult to make briefly. Adequate exploration of the principles of style and composition in Philo's writings requires extensive use of examples, because there is nothing that is so paradigmatic as to stand by itself for everything else. I hope that the examples I have selected may not be too loosely connected to constitute an adequate representation of Philo's rhetoric. In any event, I will try to show in the first section of what follows what I think to be the most important and interesting aspects of Philo's style. In the second section, I shall discuss Philo's motives and the issues he meant to address in the "Allegories." And ~n the third and final section, I shall talk about connections I see in Philo between rhetoric and hermeneutic. 1 In the view of most scholars, Philo was a conscious but not always successful "Atticizer" who wrote quite well considering the time and place in which he worked. As Cohn remarks in his preface to his edition of De opificio mundi (Breslau, 1889), p. xlii, "sed etiamsi Philonis sermo non is est, qui cwn Platonis eZegantia

vere comparari possit, laudem tamen boni et eZ.egantis pro suo tempore scriptoris iure adeptus est." But Wilamowitz complains of Philo's "labyrinthine" periods (cf. Commentariolum grammaticum 3 [Greifswald, 1889]=KZeine Schriften 4 [Berlin, 1962],

pp. 624ff.). In 1926, Bousset writes of Philo's "Perpetual repetitions •.• profound monotony which tortures the reader" (Die Religion des Judentums in spatheZZenistisehen ZeitaZter [Tiibingen, 1926] ); and Reitzenstein accuses Philo of being a "stylistic coquette" (Studien zum antiken Synkretismus aus Iran und GriechenZand [Leipzig/Berlin, 1926], p. 30). In the introduction to the Loeb Philo (1929), Colson calls Philo "an inveterate ramb 1er" (p. x).

2

I. Style and Argumentation. What makes style interesting from a rhetorical point of view is what it can tell us about an author's intentions to relate stylistic resources to effects he wishes to produce in his audience. What needs to be examined, then, is how stylistic features of Philo's discourse actually operate in relation to the persuasive designs he had on his audience. When I speak of "persuasive designs," I do not envision a stark adversary situation wherein one party seeks to impress his opinions upon another "by any means necessary," and thereby win the day. The occasions for, and ends of, persuasion are not limited to such situations, but extend to any attempt by a speaker to increase his audience's adherence to the theses presented for its assent.2 Rhetoricians, it ought to be recognized, are not concerned exclusively with verbal coercion, but characteristically seek to reinforce consensus as well. In attempting to do that, a rhetorician uses style as more than a mere embellishment. His style is rather the very agency of his attempts to gain or intensify the agreement of his audience. In what follows, we shall try to see how Philo's style operates in that way. For the present purposes, it will be useful to observe how style--both

le:r:ia and synthesis--"works" for Philo at three levels of magnitude, so to speak:

at the level of the phrase or clause; at the level of the sentence; and at the level of rather larger units, up to and including entire sections devoted to the exposition of a given scriptural lemrna.3

Any discussion of Philo's style at the first level should begin with a consiaeration of his use of figures, particularly the schemata dianoias, because they bring out some important rhetorical nuances which most discussions of Philo's style ignore, yiz., how Philo uses figures of thought to establish and maintain a particular relationship with his audience.4 An obvious instance would be the use of 2I accept Perelman's expansion of the notion of "argument" to cover any such attempt. See C. Perelman and L. Olbrechts-Tyteca, TheN~ Rhetoric (trans. J. Wilkinson and P. Weaver) (Notre Dame/London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1969), pp. 187-92. Making an argument is more than changing, or attempting to change, another's mind. Et.vmologically, it ought to be recalled, "argumentatio" means something like "clarifying the thought." 3"Lemrna" here refers to the passage, or word, phrase, or clause in it, which Philo isolates and addresses in his comments. V. Nikiprowetzky's definition of it as a "set" defined by a quaestio and its solutio is useful. See his remarks in D. Winston and J. Dillon, ~o Treatises of Philo of Alexandria, Brown Judaic Studies #25 (Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1983), pp. 7ff., 53ff.

4In the terms Aristotle uses in his Rhetoric, this relationship is defined by the interplay of ethos, pathos and logos. What I have in mind, however, is something closer to the Classical notion of deco:rwn, "the exactitude of the relationships that exist among pe:rsona, materia, and audiens," as W. R. Johnson puts it in Luxuriance and Economy: Cicero and the Alien Style, UCPCS n.s. 6 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), p. 6.

3 of~yndeton to suggest excitement or intensity, as at, e.g., SacP 101. 5 Philo's care for precision is often suggested by what looks on the page like redundancy or needless piling up of synonyms, but which is in fact an instance of coppectio, 6 as at LegAZZ 1.6, for instance; or a way of emphasizing one specific aspect of the subject under discussion. In general, many of the figures which are often classified as ornamental--antithesis and paralleli_sm, for instance--turn out to be something more than mere embellishment of periodic construction when they are used to condition the expectations and perceptions of the hearers.

The most basic standard means of giving emphasis, creating presence, and making vivid are those figures which operate on the principle of repetition in its various forms.7 These include not only synonymity (mentioned before in a somewhat different connection), but also figures of a more structural nature, such as anaphora and epiphora, which, when used correctly, can produce a sense of psychological immediacy that is quite dramatic. A good example can be found at DeteP 72:8 ~ .• &noMVQLOUcrL yo0v ~~Wv

t&

~Ta,

t~v 6LKaLo~Unv KOLVWvLxOv,

rnv crw~poouvnv crun~{pov, tnv eUoEacLav W~cAL~WtaTov, T~V OAAV ap£T~V uyc£Lv&rarou T£ Mal crwrnPLOV apo~atvovT£>, Mal XQACU tnv &6LH~OV aoRo6pov,

Tnv BMOAaO~aV VOO£p6v, &crlacLav lxaco~ov, OAAnv MaMcav BAaB£pwraTov 6L£~c&vr£>.

t~v T~v

5Cf. Aristotle Rhetoric 1413b 19ff., longinus On the SUbZime 19; Oemetrius In the comments on figures that follow, I shall give a few references to traditional treatments (chiefly from the Ad HePennium and Quintilian) along with occasional references to Perelman's observations in The Ne~ Rhetoric, where appropriate. W.J. Brandt provides many useful insights into the argumentative functions of figures in The RhetoPic of APgumentation (New York, 1970).

On StyZe 194, etc.

6 on synonymity (intePpPetatio in some of the ancient handbooks), see AdH 4.27. 37; Quintilian 9.3.45. For corPectio, see, e.g., AdH 4.26.36, along with the references in lausberg's Handbuch,S~ 386~

7The author of the Ad Herennium outlines a rather complete theory of repetition in his treatments of gPadatio, anaphopa, epiphora, compZexio and antanakZasis (cf. 4. 13.19-15.21). For Perelman's treatment, cf. NR 494, 504 (on gradatio), 175f. (anaphora); 218 (antanakZasis). On repetition generally, see also ibid. pp. 406, 478, 504. Cf. also Quintilian 9.3.30. 8Many more citations (and parallels) can be found in H. Thyen, DeP StiZ der Although I am less happy with the form-critical nature of both his methods and conclusions, I have found Thyen's book very useful.

judisch-heZZenistischen HomiZie, FRLANT 65 (Gottingen, 1955), pp. 47ff.

4

Anaphoric repetition with variatio 9 can be seen at, e.g., Somn 1.92: 0vC6putol.. ~£v ycip ot A~-(I..Opo~, ~pavtaoCas;, ci1rO tliJv aOtWV npay~dtwv o~x~ TOS a6t&s aAA'£vavt~as txovtES, av~6pUTOV 6t xat .~ aw~a. ~s ~nvuouo~v at EM ap£~ous

&xp~ Y~PWS TWV hA~MLWV anaowv tponat, avC6puta 6~ xat ~a lxt~S lwnwpn~~va ,opfi tuxns aEt oaAE6ouons.

And anaphora with repetition can be used with interrogatio to produce in the audience not only a sense of presence, but of communion with the speaker as well. 10 The use of interrogatio to achieve such a sense of communion is common in Philo, and frequently involves an active participation by his audience in his exposition, as at, e.g., Somn 2. 145f. T~S y&p E~S TOV &ywva TOU acou •apEA6~v ~ntwtos ~~E~VE; t~o 6" o6x ~KEOMEACo6n; .•. t~v~ 6' 06M ~~~OpEvEv ••• KtA.

At Deter 5Bff., Philo poses questions in such a way as to create a sense of expectation in his audience and then fulfill that expectation, a strategy very like a playwright's in its handling of the audience. In rather severely abridged form: (58) T~ O~v MOL a•oMpLOEWS g~EAos .•. ; aAAa ~nt€ov, Mt~ TOLaOta .•. TLVOS o~v ~vEMa '~OEL TLS (aws, AtyETa~ TOLaOta; tv• ~ ~tAAouaa t&s &noxpLOELs ... (59) TL o~v .~ EM a•oMpCo£WS EIOLvEt6v; L6o6 t~v &pct~v,

,noCv ... HTA.

What we see in passages like these are fiQures used not for the sake of mere ornament, but for the sake of argument. Philo's works teem with such rhetorical phenomena, which, properly understood, can be seen to perform three basic rhetorical functions. In broad te~s. there are the figures by which Philo seeks to direct his audience's attention to specific aspects of his subject matter, to achieve what we might call focus. There are those figures by means of which Philo reinforces his audience's sense of the importance and immediacy of what he is talking about, or presence. And there are those figures by which he seeks to establish or reinforce the bond, the communion, between himself and his audience. 9

Cf.~ e:g., AdH 4.11.16; Ci~ero De Oratore 3.9.32ff. On Cicero's exploisee H. Gotoff, C~cero's Elegant Style Wrbana: University of 1111 no1 s Press, 1979), pp. 27ff. Gotoff remarks, "Cicero does whatever he can to exploit the expectations generated by periodic composition to be unpredictable." Like Cicero's, Philo's is a periodic style that is functionally rhetorical rather t:;an just "ornamental." •

tat~on.of var~at~o.

1 °Cf.

Perelman, op. cit., pp. 163-7 on this.

5

Philo does not, of course, use these figures one-by-one, as a catalogue of them might suggest. They are used, and their functions are exploited in a complex and often powerful way that may be evident from the following passage from De chel'Uhim. De chel'Uhim 82[[.

Toward the end of Cher 82, Philo's rhetorical objectives shift somewhat, from establishing agreement on particular exegetical issues (his concern until then) to reinforcing a sense of commitment and community in his audience. He has already set his listeners apart from "those others" as the "purified" as opposed to the "unpurified."ll Now he seeks to establish that sense of identity more solidly. When (in Philo's version of the verse) God says at Nwnbers 28:2, "All things are Mine: bounties and gifts and fruits which you shall observe and offer at My feasts to t·1e," He is laying down a dogma which is irrefutable in the eyes of those "who belong to the company of wisdom-lovers (tots q>~>.oooq>~ao ~~aoo!a1-s, i85)." 12 Philo's explanation of this dogma is more than a straightforward account of what it "means." lle is speaking now to an audience which ought to identify, by now, with the "purified"; yet he hammers away at the point that "keeping festivals" belongs to God alone: ~ovos

3

~E3s 6~
xa~ ~ovos xacp<:~

tnv

xat

k&~

y&p

~dvos yn~•~

~6vos EUq>POLVEta~

d~~yii no>.£~ouou~slanx.:v d.p~nv

xat ~ovw tf.y.:l:\1:.-.-

To the repetition, variation, and polysyndeton here he adds alliteration and asyndeton in the second member of the sentence:

llRecall the uses of the "collective" or "communicative" "we" and the indirect paraenetic effect of Philo's prosopopoeia at s 29f •. Cf: ~ls~ the ."!han~s giving" at !i 32 (xat ~qCotn xap1-s tw T£XV~tn .•. ) and the 1mpl1c1t 1dent1f1cat1on of the audience with those who are not among the unpurified at 5 33. As we shall see, Philo continually stresses his audience's identity as "us" against "th~m." For a discussion of "identity" and "identification," see K. Burke, A Rhetor1-c of Motives (New York, 1950), pp. 19ff., 55ff. 12 1 do not think much importance should be attached to ~~aowtal-s here. The word does not always refer to a religious cult association but is used for various types of groups--phratry-divisions, dining clubs, etc. See the remarks of A.D. Nock in Essays on ReLigion and the Ancient world (Cambridge, MA, 1972), v. 2, pp. 896ff. (rpt. of Neck's review of E.R. Goddenough, J~~ish Symbols in the GrecoRoman Period V-VI in Gnomon 29 [1957], pp. 524ff.).

6

6Auwos tar~ x~t ;,osos x~t &xo~vwvnros x~x~v, &v£v6oros, &vw6uvos, 6x~~s. tu6~~~ovCas &xparou

~tar~s ...

In the third member, Philo continues with a correctio, which allows for even more amplification; and in the fourth, he recited a virtual litany, praising God as apx£runov

T~

upbs

aAD~EL~V X~A~V

rd ay£vnrov xat

~~xap~ov

xat

a,u~pTOV,

What we see in this passage is a skillful combination of focus, presence, and communion, building from a rather dispassionate beginning at f 83 to something a good deal more "feverish" by the end of I 86. And indeed, from this point on in De cherubim, we find that the emotional intensity increases steadily up to the end of the treatise as we have it in the manuscripts. It should be clear from the examples we have seen why there was so much confusion and disagreement in Antiquity over the question of whether certain figures should be included under the heading of exornatio at all but consigned instead to disposition and even to invention. 13 Our examples, along with the disagreement among rhetoricians, show very clearly that the distinction between ornamentation and invention is not as firm as many more modern accounts have held it to be. They should also put Philo's use of figures into the right context: not that of "flowery prose," but that of "fully-equipped" argument.I 4 Sentences . Some of the examples we have seen point up another aspect of figurative discourse which most scholars, in their determination to separate thinking from speaking, overlook. We can see from the examples of anaphoric progression--even more clearly, perhaps, from instances of distributio and expeditio15--that figures of thought involve audience expectations and the fulfillment of those expectations 13See Quintilian 9.2.100-107 (dealing mainly with the lists of figures drawn up by Celcus and Rutilius). Quintilian's attitude is summed up at 9,3.99, where he says, nam eos quidem auctores, qui nuZZum propre finem fecerunt exquirendis nominibus, praeteribo, qui etiam, quae sunt a:t'gumentorum, figuris ascripse:ru.nt.

14 The basic meaning of "ornare" and "exor71a:t'e," it should be recalled, has more to do with "fitting out" and "fitting out fully" (as in "equipping") than with cosmetics. It is no aberration, in their terms, that some handbook writers (cf., e.g., AdH 4.18.25) include enthymema in the section on e%0rnatio. 15Traditionally, a distributio is a division of a concept and apportioning of its parts. A structural distributio is one by which the structure of the argument which follows may be controlled. See AdH 4.15.47; Quintilian 4.5.18, 7.1.11, etc. At NR 504f., Perelman discusses the utility of distributio in providing a scheme of reference to the audience. For expeditio, see, e.g., AdH 4.29.40: expeditio est cum rationibus conpluribus enumeratis quibus aliqua res confieri potuerit, ceterae toZZuntur, una reZiquitur quam nos intendimus. See also Quintilian g,3.99 again, and 5. 10.66ff., where expeditio is discussed as a line of argument.

7

by the speaker. The ways in which Phflo exploits those figures to arouse and fulf111 his audience's expectations, bringing his listeners through often highly formal progressions, are so various and common in his work as to suggest that he did it not just to indulge himself stylistically, but deliberately, with an audience fn mind 1~ho understood what he wanted to do and why he needed to do it the ~·ay he did. The exploitation of strategies of expectation and fulfillment is not just a peculiar stylistic choice of Philo's. It is inherent in the use of the figure~ we have been discussing; and at the level of composition, or synthesis, it is the essence of good Greek prose. Of course, Philo has never been credited for wr1tinq particularly good prose, the basic standard for which involves the handling of periodic composition. But in fact, Philo was quite capable of composing periods of the first rank, and did so frequently. A good example can be found in Pla111 139: 11cpl. ~tv o?iv ycwpyCas Tii> xpcolllncfrns Hat tcpwTChns, ~ T& atTLov 11pbs Tbv H6o~ov, TA lla~,opwTaTov ,uT~v, XPiiTaL, H~L ncpt Tiis t11o~lvns, ~v b aoTctos ~11LTn6cucL, Hat ~cpt TiiS 'Epo~{vn• TETPQOO. T~V ~~AttlV ~ MaTA liPOOTa(EL. Hat 6,ny~OEL!; VO~WV OUVEHPOTCLTO w!; o[dv TE ~v clno~cv. ' Somn 2.301-2, at the end of what we have of that treatise, might be offered as

another instance:

cyw OE TA TOLOUTa hovo~QTttJV Tp6nov napi'JpTUO~aL TQL!; Lcpat• avaypa,ats acyTLWOEttl!; lvEHa T~V fvTUYXOVOVTWV ~liOAa~aQvw• Mal OUOE~Lav T~V ~nTOVVTttlV MaTayvwolov EupEOLAoyCav, aAA• cl ~~ ~I'JTOLEV, ~~liOALV &py~av. oo6~ yAp 11Cpc liOTa~~v toTLV l.oTop~a!; ~ napouoa onou6n, 11cpl. 6£ aCwv Twv ctxa~o~lvwv liOTO~LOL!; pcU~QOLV, ~VaVTLOU~EVWV QAA~AOL!;.

a

~CV

ydp TOU onou6aCou acos CV ~pyOL!;, EV AOYOL. 6E 6 TOU ,aUAOU ~EWPELTOL.

We can see in these two examples the required features of the most striking sort of periodic "rounding off": suspension of the sense of the sentence to the very end (Plant 139: l!Cpt ~CV o~ •• xat ncpl ••• xat ncpl .•• ~!; ofov TE nv ctli~Ev; Somn 2.301: 1yw oi •.. ~noAa~aQvw; b ~tv y&p •.• ecwllctTaL). Here also are the balancer! clauses which one expects of periodic composition: note the tricolon in the Plant passage and the orderly alternation of prepositional and relative clauses (ncp~ ... ~ •.. xal llcpt .•. ~v ••. xat 11cpt •.• &), with skillful variation. 16 In the Som11 2 passage: ouoc~Cav ... EUPEOLAOyCav, au' ... / ou6c y~p ... up't 6c ... / 0 ~h ... l:v £pyoL>, l:v A6yoL> 6E .•• -- the first two built around the figure correctio, the last wrought into a chiasm (of rather commonplace status, we might add). All of these marks of artistic composition can be found in the period at Ebr 157: 16Compare,

e.g., Gig 37; Deus 24-6; Mig 91f.

8 TO napanAno~ov o~v EV ~ux~ naVTW~ ayvo~a cpuyattTa~ TQ eAluovTa MaL &xouovta aUT~- Auva~vo~lvn xa~ ~nTt ,~~ ~nTt Aoyov ~apc~otA~ctv £~oa, Tbv ~lv fva ~n 6~6a~n. Tb 6£, tva ~~ 6t~~n Ta ~VTi,-aQeJ 6l oxoTo' xaL ~orA~ &AoyCav xaTaxlaoa xw,hv ACeov TO ntp~xaAAloTaTOV cr6o' ~uxn• tLpyaoaTo.

As in the other examples, we have here the element of expectation and fulfillment which explains the strategy of leaving the resolution of the syntax to the end (Ta eAl~ovTa .•• Au~a~vo~lvn xa~ ~nTt ,~~··· £~aa); and we have periodic balance (To ~£v ••. To 6l ... ) and a chiastic balance (£pyatcTa~ +participial clause: participial clause + ctpyaoaTo). Now there are many ways of setting up expectations, and as many ways of fulfilling them; and Philo uses them all. The simplest way (and I do not claim any sort of completeness in what follows), perhaps, is to work through both parts of an opposition, treating, first, one element and then the other in such a way as to do more than simply exhaust the idea by enumerating its parts. At LegAZl 3.89, for instance, we hear Philo saying: ,~oc~ yap 6o0Aov nap~ ~£~ Tb ,aoAov xat &Aoyov,

~yt~OV~Nbv 6l Mat lAtu6pov Tb QOT£COV xac AOY~KOV •al &~c~vov, •at ovx ~Tav ~6n y~vnTa~ tv Tij ~uxij TlAc~ov EMaTcpov, aAAa x&v £v6o~&tnTa~· ~Aw& yap HQL ~~Mpa T~· a~pa Tij~ aptTij& apxnv xat ~YE~OVLaV, oux EA£U6tpCav ~ovov, t~,aLvc~, xat l~naA~v ~ Tuxoooa xaxCa, ylvco~• 6ouAot T6v Aoy~o~ov, x&v ~nnw TlAE~OV a~TijO tx,O~T~on T6 ylvv~a.

Balance is achieved between the two parts of the sentence by the oux ~Tav .•. &AAa xav ••• in the first part and ou !lovov .•. xav ~nnw in the second; and "rounding off" by the chiastic treatment of 6ouAcCa/ EAcuecpCa/ '£AcuecpCa/ 6oucCa within the sentence as a whole--the "pivot" occuring at ~Aw, yap, halfway through. The chiasm here, it should be noted, is no mere literary flourish. It fs the very means by which Philo can round off the thought of the sentence. Moreover, the chiasm, which becomes barely apparent when £AcuecpCa is brought up at the beginning of the second part of the sentence, virtually demands that 6ouA£La also be brought in. And when it is, the expectations previously generated are neatly fulfilled. As the sentence is apprehended oveP time, in other words, the chiasm performs a function similar to that achieved by the suspension of the main verb until the end of the period. 17 A similar kind of "rounding off" can be seen in those instances where Philo begins 1 g sentence with an opposition and then runs through the parts in the same · order, as at, e.g., Post 137, where, in a long sentence, Philo explains why it 17 It cannot be stressed too much that such things as periodic composition must be approached as oral, not typographic, phenomena. 18Cf.

Deus

4lff.

Lausberg, op. cit., §S 67lff., 881. A clear example can be seen at

9

is particularly to the point that Hagar is said to have brought a skin to the well, whereas Rebecca brings a pitcher. This sort of expectation-structure, it might be added, is usually sustained by the typical ~lv ... 6£ construction, and is sometimes amplified by subordinate constructions of the same kind (cf., e.g., Deus 78, LegAll 3.61-2). There remain, of course, those unruly examples that Philo's detractors have in mind. But a close look at even those shows that, more often than not, there are clear methods of amplification (of which we will speak later) governing the construction of those sentences. Take, for example, the sentences at Ebr 106. Philo has just quoted Abraham's words at Gen 14:22ff. Of the last words of Abraham's euch=istikon hymnon (' 105), "ano navTwv Twv owv," Philo says, 6£txvo~ 6', ~~ y' ~~ot 6ox£~, Tb y£yovb~ nav, o6pavdv, ynv, ~6wp, nv£u~a, ~wa bpoO xat ,uTa• &xaotw yap auTwv b T&~ T~~ ~uxn~ ~v£py£Ca~ ~phs

6ebv TELva~ Mat ~ap' aUToO ~Ovou Ta~ w,EAeLa~ €n£AnL~wv 6£ovTw~

&v £tno~· nap• ou6Evo~ TWV owv, ou nap'nALOU T6 PE3~~EP~V~V, OU ~apa O£Anvn~ xat TWV aAAWV OOTEPWV Tb VUXTC ~lyyo~, ou napa bipo~ xat V£~£Awv ucTou~, ou nap& ~6aTo~ xat y~~ noT& xat o~TLa, o6 uap& 6~3aA~wv To bpav, ou Tb ~xouc~v nap& ~Twv, o6 nap& ~uxTnpwv oo~a~, ou nap' ~VUTOPLOU XUAOO T6 y£~£o3a~, ou nap& yAwTT~~ TO AEyc~v, o6 nap& X£~pwv Tb 6~66va~ xat Aapaav£~v, ou Tb npoocpx£o3a~ xat i~avaxwp~v napa no6wv, o6 avanvonv napa nvcupaTo~. ou UE~~v nap' ~nato~. o6 nap& twv.&AAwv onAayxvwv Tas xa3' £xaoTov A~.o~a~

otMeLou~ ~VEpye(a~s

oU nap& 6£v6pwv xat anaoTWv

TO~~ ET~OLOU~ xapno6~. 00~00 TO~

QUTOU

6AA& navTa nap& ToO p6vou

xap~oTnpCou~ 6vvap£~~ naT~ TE~VQVTO~ Mat 6La T00TwV W,EAOUVTOS.

Strictly speaking, the sentence beginning with &xaoTw y&p ..• is held together by the oux .•• aAAa construction. The delay in the completion of that construction by the insertion of no fewer than fourteen clauses repeating o& napa, however, would seem to dissolve whatever tension the oux ..• aAAa format might ordinarily generate in a more tightly-knit periodic composition. But in fact, Ebr 106 is otherwise very carefully constructed, as can be seen by the way in which the asyndetic catalogue of the first part of the sentence-- oupavCov, ynv, v6wp, nvco~a. ~wa opoO xat ~uTa--is systematically amplified in the second part.l 9

19Because the "sentence" is so long, I have (despite what I just said above, in note 17) appended a schematic version. On occasion, it is convenient to do work on the page which ought, properly, to be done by the ear.

•

,ll~O_;J03A

s9ynX

<\13A}Y

Ul1'1''(A

"""Oll<\9919

~30J3X

5?1f10l.(H\~

JU.ndl

~0

/llr109

53d\!iNOr1

11JK

L a ..m6 ~='

···ooldp•o] '10;tOL113

~DK • ~ •

·y "1""

~ll

<\"31'0Kll 'll.

lll.'.l'

i\~dq

59r1Ylllicb9

So.\.A..i'm 11Hp<\ q1 i\myy~ ~~1

~1

0.1

'll.

<\~d}.LD~

SUI\~Y3D ~dnn

QO

OL

11

What we see here is something more than what we have called "rounding off." There is that, to be sure; but there is something else going on in Ebr 106. In order to deal with it, we must move to a consideration of the second important component of Philonic composition, techniques of amplification. If Philo's abilities in periodic composition have been doubted by his critics, his propensity to amplify has not, and has been a matter of rather severe censure. But Philo's love of amplification is not the result of idle pedantry nor of an uncontrollable urge on his part to pile platitude upon platitude. Philo's way of amplifying, in the first place, is anything but controlled--at least, as a rule--and is, in the second place, an important, if not crucial, factor in both theory and practice of "interpretation" in Philo's works. Let us therefore look briefly at what Philo does when he amplifies. Amplification There are many techniques for amplification. Philo knew them all, and used them all. Among the most obvious and the most common in his work is amplification "by part." In Ebr 106, as we just saw, Philo distributes the parts of "the created whole" and then amplifies each part in turn by analyzing it into its respective parts.zo A second method of amplification involves enargeia, vivid description of things or persons.21 At Somn 1.122, for instance, Philo speaks of those who love luxury: O~TO~ ~E~· n~cpav, ~Tau Ta EV o~xaornpCo~s xat Bou.I.EurnpCo~s xat ~Echpo~s xat navraxoo npbs rots

&AAOUS QOLxn~aTa O~E(C:>.~wo~v. OLXaOE a~LXVOUVTa~ rov £aurwv olxov, ol ouoTUXEL>, 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

EXE~

rnv

E)(~EOLu,

n 6E 6LaTdnwOLE Tb nav EV

au~~O£L

xaL £uapy£La ....

12 oU Tbv TWv

oLxo6o~n~dTwv, O~AQ

10v

oup~ua rn~ ~uxns

olxov~ rO nW~a~ rpo,a~ &~ftpou~ MaL c~aAAnAous £Locp{poVT£~ Hal. 11oAUv &xparov O:p6oVTE~, (tal<; Civ BV&•~o~ ~fv o Aoyco~6, o~xn•ac, •& 6~ ~n6 yaoTipo nAno~ovn~ C)fyova nci.Sn 6t..avaanivra .. AUrrn XPWucva Cota-8Ekno~ 1tpoonro0vTa xal. EunAaxEvra tot~ En .. ruxollol.~ rOv

ROAUV oloTpov anEpUyOVTU Aw,non.

Or take, on a similar theme, Cher 92f. (indeed, one could take the entire passage from g1 to g7): Philo is inveighing against all festal assemblies other than . God's. Their only purpose is "empty vanity." 1dan~ ~oprns TE xat. navny~pEw~ t~v nap' h~rv r~ 6auuaor& Hat xrpt..u&xnra Epya TaUra· &or~a Ovr.ot..~ hqEc~LU ~E~n llap~cv~o HW~OL xh6n l)pu?l·~ .{lupaAcac R
6t

c;La

••>

Hat 11a\:6tuot..~, Tll Tii~ ScLa5; ~uxii~ ~ci.a i_,~ &.>.n~ii>~ &ydAuaTa, &~wv~av toxct.., at 6~ uaoTponrUouont.. Hat

KpOf;£\!OUOUL TCXVOL Tci!; n6ov/x, yaOTpt yaoTcpa PnTopcuouoc.

H<>.l.

TOloS

~£Tix

And Philo continues in a similar vein for a few pages, clearly intending to arouse in his audience indignation and disgust at the way those nations, "both Hellenic and barbarian," carry on. A third method involves the elaboration of comparisons. The passage I have in mind as a good example also comes from azer, at§ lOlff. Philo has just finished the long invective against the wicked and is now (in 101) in the middle of an equally long paraenesis addressed to his audience. OlHov o~v (ncyroov Tnv clOpaTov

""uxhv

TOO clopr;Tou -5£oD ).{yovT£s;

£vtH:lfr..ls; ;.:u~ xaT~

vOuov q>!iao)Jcv,

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~,

1lE~EA~o~ ll~V ~noBEBAnollwo~v £U~uta •a~ 6c6aoxaAca tipETat. 6E. IJETa HaAWv Ttpci.;£wV Enol.lt060IJ£Ln6woav

aUrW, rO:

6l

liPOMOCJUriuaTa £arw

n &vci>..n'-"1..$

TWV

E.\HuM>.(wv ...

<104) ..• EH 6£ Tii~ cyHvdcou TW~ nponac6ruuchwv llEACTfl~ Ta npa, xoo~ov Tii~ tuxn~ ~, fnTcns RP•n•ac· •a1ldnEp yelp HOVt.ciUQTI'l M(J.t~ ypatpat. Htli lll vQK~

noA~T~A~v 6t..a~€O£t.~, af~

Td

E6a~n

0.

HCl~ .\(ShiV

ob u6vov TO~XOU( no~H~AAouoc ... x.T.A.

&AA& MOt~

13 In this passage, Philo uses the oikos-analogy as a sort of armature for his instruction on the subject of how the soul ought to be prepared to receive God. Just as a house will not stand for long unless a strong foundation is laid carefully, and just as it makes no sense to begin decorating without having made sure that the structure is sound, so each of us must lay foundations in virtue and good teaching and realize that the enkyklia by themselves contribute nothing to the strength of the building, however much they may make it pleasing to behold. First things first. But the analogy does more, for in addition to the order it suggests, the analogy with house-building also lends concreteness to a matter--"soul building"-that is far from concrete. This concreteness, and the familiarity of the commonplace relative to the comparandum (for the oikos-analogy was commonplace), serves Philo's instructional ends well by making the process more vivid and more clearly structured.22 Another example of this sort of amplification can be found at Deter 141-6. Phi1o begins by quoting Genesis 4:3: 11 Ma~ £Zxc KaL\1 ltpbs MUpL0\1 'Mdtw\1 n a~tCa )Jou tou aq>EllTi\laL'." "What sort of thing this cry is," Phi 1o says, "wi 11 appear from the following likenesses." He then goes on to draw analogies with the helmsman abandoning the ship and the effect that has; with the charioteer who drops the reins in the middle of the race; and with the city abandoned by its rulers and laws to anarchists and outlaws. Just so, when the soul abandons the body, the body dies. Philo can now move from those comparisons to his real theme: how serious is the loss of a guiding hand, the abandonment by God. At 142ff., Philo runs through another series of abandonments: the weak abandoned by the benefactor, the unskilled deprived of the possibility of learning, etc.--all these are overturned "like vessels without ballast." Abandonment is worse, Philo says, than punishment; for punishment, at least, "sets the weak up again"(l45). One thing that should be noted about this passage is the way in which the analogies become progressively closer to the point at which Philo wants to arrive. It should also be noted that the catalogues of comparisons are cast as sequences of rhetorical questions. Philo in this way involves his audience's responses in his argument, so that, when he says at 144, 6L6 lJOL ooMouaL\1 ot lJ~ t£A£~ws ouaMallaptoL £~taallaL &" xoAaalln\laL, it is not only he who can say that, but his audience as well. And thus, after he has gone through the catalogue of those who are improved by punishment in 145--a long accumulative sentence which ends at taCL\1 EHltAnoo\ltas as yet another rhetorical question--Philo can with confidence 22 0ne of the best examples I can think of for this procedure can be found in Plautus's Mostellaria, vv. 90-148, where Philolaches develops at length an e:r:emplwn comparing a man to a house. Id repperi iam e:z:emplwn, he says, nouarum aediwn esse arbi-tror similem ego hominem, I quando natus est. ei rei argwnenta dicam. I atque hoc uosmet ipsi, scio. proinde uti nunc / ego esse auturtt>, quando dicta audietls I mea, haud aliter id dicetis. I auscultate •.• (vv. 90-5). Philolaches then goes on to explain why he sees the comparison as a legitimate one and proceeds to explain it to the audience (vv.ll9ff.), showing them why they should see it that way, too.

14

change to the first person plural in summing up the lesson and mean quite literally, "Let ue beseech ..• "23 In combination with the power of the analogies themselves to arouse expectations, the "communicative" style in which they are cast can be seen to be particularly apt; for Philo is not interested solely in getting his audience to understand the words of Scripture. He seeks from them moral commitment, too. Beyond the Period It should be evident that in all these examples the technique of amplification is always buttressed by the periodic element of expectation and fulfillment. On occasion. of course, the periodic constraints are attenuated by the sheer quantities of accumulated and amplified material. But they are never completely absent, as we shall see when we look at some even larger units of Philo's text. What may be a little less evident, but is nevertheless very important, is that the rhetorical functions of the different types of amplification correspond to those of the figures of thought we looked at earlier, viz., presence (enargeia), focus (analogy),and communion (amplification by common "places," 24 as well as by the use of prosopopoeia and runs of rhetorical questions). Philo's discourse, that is to say, is not some "discourse of the soul," addressed only to himself, but a formal, addressed appeal calculated to affect an audience. Some figures, as we noted before, are used as ways of organizing an audience's perception of things at the same time that they are used as devices by which to analyze a subject into its parts with a view toward presenting a coherent treatment of it. Distributio and expeditio are good examples. Such figures often work as organizing principles which operate at a level far beyond that of a single period. In a sense, then, they cease to be figures as such and become devices which are related to invention and disposition, and not just to diction and synthesis at the periodic level. Philo uses a distributio at the beginning of De fuga, for instance, to set up the basic framework of a good part of the rest of the treatise. Indeed, one could argue that the distribution of Fug 2 not only controls the next four or five sections (up to S 7), but controls, in the final analysis, the structure of the entire treatise as we have it. What we have in Fug is, of course, a fairly

23 Cf. Thyen, op. cit., pp. 4lff., on the significance of the use of the first person plural. His account is more bound by genre-requirements than it should be, but his selection of relevant texts is good. 24Full discussion of topical amplification would take us too far afield to suit present purposes. I have sketched out some aspects of Philo's use of topoi in my contribution to Winston and Dillon, op. r.it., pp. 171-8.

15 complex sequence of distributions, each one "motivated" by the previous one, 25 a procedure which takes us pretty far afield from the original one. Yet the return to Gen 16:7 at S 202 can be seen as the completion of the original "preview" contained in the opening sections. It is interesting to note that Philo does not move from verse to verse of the LXX. Lemma, however, but skips back and forth, leaving verse 7 out until the very end. If his audience had the entire text in mind at the beginning, heard Philo's disquisitions on all but the one referring to Hagar at the well, and listened to Philo work out the theme of the "springs" at SS 176-201, it might well see his return to the missing verse as a finishing off of the promised exposition. Similarly, Philo structures his remarks on

in Genesis 6:4, at In 60-l, he sketches out the natures of the earth-born, the heaven-born, and the "men of God." In 62-4, he explains the latter two, using the Abram-Abraham "conversion" as his prime example, and endi'l{} with an explanation of what it means to be "earth-born" (using Nimrod as his example). The structure of the discussion is, that is to say, quasichiastic: A-8-C-B' -C' -A', a sequence which, in purely formal terms, forces the audience to wonder, by the time Philo has finished with B' -C', what is to be said about the ci'U:C of the passage introduced at S 59, i.e., "A-A'." "y~yavTEs"

Gig 59ff., by laying down a three-part distribution in 60ff.

De aongressu 1-9

A somewhat different sort of "progressive form" can be seen in Philo's handling of Ge>Zesis 16:1 at Cong 1.9. Here (again for the sake of brevity), I refer to the schematic representation below (figure 2). From it, it is clear that Philo proceeds by way of a series of linked divisions. The progression of thought, it must be admitted, is not as clear as one might wish it to be; but it is not, for all that, random or specious. Philo wants to do two things at the outset of Co'I{J. He wants, on one level to explain the meaning of Genesis 16:1 (and, I might add, to explain why Moses says what he says);Z6 and he needs to relate that verse to the larger theme of the treatise, the place of the enkykZios paideia in a life devoted to wisdom and 25 Elaboration of the various senses of "aRl6pa" (=cpuyn , in Philo's view) takes us up to S 53. After exploring various other aspects of l6:6ff., Philo goes on at 85ff. to treat four questions arising over the "cities of refuge," in the midst of which he deals with the six potencies of God. At 119ff., we find that there are four variants on the theme of finding vs. seeking (motivated by E~P£ in the LXX text), and so on to the end. The development of "Rny~" at 177ff. is broken down into five parts, as we shall see below. 26 Philo points out (cf. S 3) that the words of Moses here at 16:6ff., present a paradox: how can Sarah, who is said there to be barren, be said to have been the origin of "the most populous of nations"? Cong 1-9 allows Philo to determine for us (cf. S 9) what is really meant.

16 De Congressu 1-9

~b.pxn~ !i 2 ("generic" cher 5) !i 3

(lpxn

ste~

uo"-

__../"

Ciiin xa~ !pUtn

!i 4

DpET'I

(no limits)

worthy offspring

~ /

not yet worthy

e.g., Philo himself

!i 6

"Therefore, we should pray ... " (+ supp. text, EX 25:37f.)

!i 7-8 !i 9

.'"-._,

---

(limits)

s5

fertile

This is why Moses says,

/

~&rw ~

un

tcxtEtv

and not simply,

l.lli Tt.HT£'CV.

FIGURE 2

and virtue. The series of divisions is Philo's way of allowing his audience to follow his train of thought as he moves from a close and orderly reading of the verse to the introduction of the "great theme" at !i 11. The genius of such "diaeret1c" procedure is that it allows a speaker to divide and select absolutely, so to speak, since the terms extracted by the process are incompatible opposites. If you choose one, you must reject the other; and there is no third choice. Hence, there is an "apodictic" quality to this procedure that distributio, for instance, does not share.27 What needs to be emphasized here is that the sort of division we are talking about here has little or nothing to do with Philo's frequent representations of opposites in nature. we are not dealing with an ontological principle here but with rhetorical invention. 2 The divisions in Cong 1-9 represent a kind not of dialectic but of a sort of expeditio carried over a linked succession of topics leading progressively from A to 0, as it were, by way of B and C. If we were to look to see where Philo might have learned such a method of arguing, we would do better to refer to something like Anaximenes' Techn~ than to, e.g., Plato's PhaedPus or Sophist, where quite a different kind of diaeresis is elaborated. 27 For the obvious reason that distributions are not necessarily exhaustive in their analyses. E:r:peditio is notorious as "the argument from residue," often equally incomplete in its analysis. 28 For the rhetorical sense of 6~aCp£a~s. see, e.g., Hermogenes, who frequently speaks of "dividing (into) heads" (o~aCp£cv ••• KE<Pa>.aca ) in explaining how to go about analyzing a case. Cf., e.g., Frog. 7, Stat. 1, etc.; Philodemus Rhet. 1.164.18, 2.181.18 (o~aCpEa~s E~S £t6~ ).

17 Let us take one final example of the ways in which Philo exploits expectations and fulfillment in longer units of his text. At Fug 177 (on Gen 16:7), Philo distributes five senses of the word "nnyn," which, he says, is •oHaxiiis; >.lyETaL, and therefore in need of explication. Each of the five senses of "11nyn" Philo illustrates by a citation from Scripture: 1. (FUg 178ff.) Gen 2:6, the nnyn which flowed from the earth in Eden. 2. (183ff. ) E~ 15:27, the springs of Elim, where the Hebrews camped on their journey from Egypt. 3. (188ff. ) Lev 20:18, women's (mens:trual)"spring." 4. (195ff. ) Gen 24:16, the spring to which Rebecca went to get water for Eliezer. 5. (197f. ) Jer 2:13, the spring of Life, the most excellent of alJ. Each.one of these sections exhibits skillful use by Philo of the sorts of rhetorical strategies we have seen so far--from the argumentative use of figures to the exploitation of the techniques of amplification--but it is the strategy of the entire section which interests us here. The first, and most important, thing we must bear in mind is that a listener or reader works through this sequence from the beginning to end, i'n time. The enumeration of senses of the word "nnyn" in 177 provides the listener with a framework that allows him to anticipate the order of discussion; and Philo is very careful to mark both beginnings and endings within the sequence. 29 Second, Philo's distribution of the five senses of "nnyn" is hierarchically symmetrical. This is clear from the distribution itself, but becomes unmistakably clear as Philo proceeds. ~le move from (1) nnyn = vous; to (2) nnyn =n AoyLxh ~~Ls; (xat naL6£Ca), to (3) nnyn = n ~auAn 6La6£oLs;--from good to leSS good to WOrSe--and then from (4) nnyn : n onoo6ata (l~L§6• the OppOSite Of (3), to (5) nnyn = o Tiiiv oAwv noLnTns; xaL naTnp--i.e., God. In view of the fact that Philo's purpose throughout this section is to explain what "•nrn" means in 16:7, we might see the progression as one from an acceptable sense to one unacceptable and back to an acceptable one. But what we need to notice is, third, the fact that it is not the last sense of "nnyn" which Philo wants to lead us up to. The preferred sense is (4), as it develops, the one he finds in Gen 24:16. 2 9After enumerating the five sense of "11nyn," Philo starts in at S 178 with the first (cf. £v a11xn there) and takes that explanation to the end of 182. S 183 begins £Cot 6~ xat •.. and ends at 188 with ToLaliTaL u~v £toLv aL naL6£Cas; .... The discussion of nnyillr3) starts immediately with Thv 6' &,poouvns; inLaH£~wueGa and ends with the summary aL 6' etoLv .•. ; that of 11nyn (4) be~ins thereafter with Tnv 6£ ~povno£ws; EPEVVnTlov. At 197, Philo moves to nnyn (5) with A£MTEOV 6' n6n ...

30 J.

Cazeaux offers a rather different analysis of this passage in his

Strucf:u:toes litteraires et

1980).

~egese

dans cinq traites de Philon d 'AZe:r:andrie

(;iirGHJ,

18

What the audience may have perceived as an ezpeditio containing an element of anxiety-relief ( such as we often seen in the Attic orators) turns out to end with a correctio, as Philo indicates clearly at S 202. Limitations of space do not permit as full an examination as these passages from Philo deserve. But we have seen enough to recognize that various formal rhetorical principles are at work at virtually every level of Philo's style. There are, first, the fundamental rhetorical functions of presence, focus, and communion; and there are the two technical aspects, manipulation of expectations an amplification. The latter devices combine with the former appeals to constitute discursive whales which may be characterized as having "rhetorical from."31 This form, in turn, defines the basic "units" of Philonic rhetoric. 32 Instead of having, as some have implied, die Form der FormZosigkeit, Philo's prose is profoundly formal in the sense we have suggested, a sense of "form" which is very close to that set out in Burke's Counterstatement. "Form," in this view, is neither platonic form nor structuralist code nor Gattung as the form critics understand it. It is rather the general term we would use to describe what goes on in the auditor's active listening, which amounts to a fullness of understanding at which. one arrives by passing through the dramatic sequencing by which the thought is completed by the speaker, a process wherein appetites, both cognitive and affective, are created, conditioned, directed, and satisfied. II.

Motives and Issues.

We have come to a point where we must begin to ask some different questions. Once we ~ave seen how pervasive rhetoric is in Philo, and once we begin to realize that rhetoric is not just an embellishment, much less an embellishment sophistically exploited, we must ask, What was all that rhetoric for? The views of Philo's activities which represent him either as imposing Greek philosophy on Scripture or as articulating some hidden truth in Scripture using Greek philosophy as a vehicle--that is, most Philonic scholarship to date-overlook a fundamental aspect of Philonic exegesis: in almost every instance which involves a principal text or pericope, Philo is taking sides in continuing controversy over the meaning or importance of a given citation, debating on behalf of one interpretation as opposed to another, different one. No one, that is to say--not even Nikiprowetzky--has fully appreciated the pervasiveness of the debate setting of Philo's work. And when I speak of a "debate setting," I do not refer to a mere literary device but to actual controversy going on as Philo wrote. The "Allegories" are intended primarily as expositions on some 150 verses from Genesis. While this is a small number of the total number of references in the corpus, the~e ~50 verses are the o~es with which Philo is primarily concerned. They are ~he pr1nc1pal texts. The other citations are brought in as support, or as analog1es, or as both. For the most part, the supporting texts seem not to 31 Cf. Kenneth Burke, Counterstatement, p. 126ff. 32See above, note 3.

19 generate as much controversy as the principal texts. 33 As for the principal texts, roughly one half of the expositions are explicitly directed at one or another contrary interpretation. Of these explicitly argumentative interpretations, the majority are concerned with "literalist" reading which Philo sees as incomplete, possibly misleading, or simply ridiculous. 34 In some cases, "Uteralist" interpretations lead us into problems involving anthropomorphisms. Passages in which Philo sees the danger of anthropomorphism and makes his case against it make up a second large group among the explicitly argued interpretations. There are, in addition, many passages which involve more "literary" controversies 1 but which are at base zetemata concerning the integrity of Moses as an author. 30 Most of these passages have been noted and discussed by Siegfried, Shroyer, and David Hay. 37 Aside from the instances where there is an explicit exegetical controversy, there are many cases--roughly half of the total of 150--where there is no immediately evident debate in which Philo is taking a stand. But I believe that Philo was involved in current debates about those passages, too. How one decides where to locate and identify exegetical issues where none is explicitly brought up by Philo is, of course, a problem. I have used three criteria which, though they are perhaps not as rigorous as some would desire, are. not unreasonable, given the evidence we have. Where I suspect a controversy in the background, one with which Philo and his audience may have been familiar enough with as not to require explicit identification, I have tried to see whether there are (1) problems in the correspondence of the Greek and Hebrew and,concomitantly, attested variants of the lXX MSS. tradition.38 Frequently,such passages can be predicted to excite exegetical activity, even though Alexandrian Jews of Philo's time knew little or no Hebrew. As Katz and 33As, I suppose, one might suspect. But more work needs to be done there. It is clear, for instance, that EX 21:12f. and NUmb. 35 posed problems (cf. ~"q 54ff .. 87ff.) for Alexandrian Jews. See also LegAlt 3.209f. (on Gen 22:'1i); Gi'g 66 (10:8); Agr 13lf. (Lev 11:4); Plant 69f. (Deut 10:19 and NUm 1B:20); Cong l72ff. (Peu~ B:2). 34 Cf., e.g., LegAZl 1.38f., 90; 2.10; Saer 2; Deter 47ff.; Agr lff.; Sobr 33ff.; Cong 1lff.; Mut 62ff. 35LegA2Z 1.43, 4B; Post ?f.; Deus 20f.; Conf 133f.; Mut 69f., etc.

36For example, Saer llff.; Deter 79ff.; Deus 141; Sobr 30ff.; Heres 81ff., lOOf.; Cong 7lff., etc. 37 Cf. C. Siegfried, PhiZon L•orz AZe.xandria aZs AusZeger, pp. 142ff.; M. Shroyer, "Alexandrian Jewish Literature," JBL 55 (1936), pp. 261-84; D. Hay, "Philo's References to Other A1legorists," SP 6 (1979/80), pp. 41-75. 38Cf., e.g., LegAZZ 2.53-70 (on Gen 2:25), 3.65ff. (Gen 3;14); Deter lf. (Gen 4:8); Heres 2 (15:2,3).

20 others have shown, this is a tricky business. 39 (2) Indications of concern among the targumim: 40 Dealing with these passages calls for as much energy as caution, since the dates and the purposes of those "translations" are tar from clear. 41 (3) Questions raised in the manner of Alexandrian criticism: 4 I do not think such questions are raised gratuitously, either by the Alexandrian philologoi or by Philo. 43 That such questions over passages in Genesis were likely to have involved deep conviction is suggested by the place Scripture held in the Alexandrian Jewish milieu, if it is not obvious from the energy Philo expends in explaining them. This way of locating the problems at issue may not be perfect, but I think the broad picture it projects of Philo's involvement in actual exegetical ·debates is persuasive. Three important points emerge from the examination of Philo's treatment of these "implicit" controversies. First, the controversial issues addressed by Philo seem to correspond roughly to problems with the text evident in the Palestinian targumim, especially the Targum Pseudo-Jonathan. This is particularly apparent in LegA'LZ 2.55ff. (Gen 2:25; LegAZl 3.49f. (3:9), 251 (?) (3:118f.); Deter lff. (4:8), 177ff. (4: 15); Post 66ff. (4: 18); Gill lff. (6: 1f.); Agr lff. (9 :20); Conf l62ff. (11:6), l68ff. (11:17); Migr 7ff. (?} (12:2-4), 70f., l09ff.; Heres 2ff. {15:2,3), 40ff.,_ 63ff., 129-242, 243ff.; Mut 47f. (17:1); Somn 1.175f. (28:14). 44 39 P. Katz, Philo's Bible (Cambridge, 1950), passim. in JTS 47 (1946), pp. 166ff.

o~servations

See also, e.g., Katz's

40Such concerns are suggested by a comparison of Philonic and Targumic treatmeots of, e.g., Gen 3:9 (see LegAZl 3.49ff.), 4:8 (Deter lff.) and 4:15 {ibid. 177f.), 11:6 {Conf 152f. and 11:17) (ibid. l68ff.). See the important discussion by S. Churgin, "The Targumim and the Septuagint," AJSL 50 (1933/4), pp. 41-65. . 41 The introductory essay by R. Le Deaut in Targum du Pentateuch 1 (Sources chretiennes 45, 1978), pp. 15-67, is essential reading. 42 Cf., e.g., LegAll 1.97f. (Gen 2:16); Sacr llff. (4:2); Deus 1-19 {6: 4f.); Mig 45ff. (12:1); Cong 7lf. {16:3), etc. 43Qn the zetemata in Alexandrian criticism, the observations of K. Lehrs, De Aristarchi studiis homericis (Leipzig, 1882), pp. l79ff., 328ff., are still valuable. 44As an example, cf. Heres 26ff., on Gen 15:12-15. That the targumists had trouble with these verses is clear: both Neof and TPsJ resort to allegory to bring out the significance of the prophecy. · TPsJ

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21 The question naturally arises as to whether similar correspondences might be found among the passages displaying explicit controversies. I must confess I have not studied all of those passages with possible targumic parallels in mind, but a spot check convinces me that such parallels are there, too.45 Second, fore him. And, by resorting to Saar 88f. , Post

Philo, unlike the targumists, works hard to preserve the text beparadoxically, he sometimes preserves the letter of the LXX text allegorical interpretation, as is the case at, e.g., Cher 53ff., 33f. , 49f. ; Heres 248f. ; and Cori{J 20ff.

Third, Philo does sometimes divert attention away from the literal, or indeed ignore it. This almost always happens when the literal implications of a particular passage would be problematic for Diaspora (Alexandrian) Jews. The relevant passages and citations are: Mig ll9ff. (12:3); Heres 96ff. (15:7), 266ff. (15:13-15·), 313f. (15:18); CoriiJ 34ff. (l6:2ff.). l39f. (16:5); Fug as a whole; Mut 154ff. (17:17); and Somn 1.4-72 (28:10). By suggesting here a broad context of concerns common to both Alexandrian and Palestinian Judaism, I do not mean .to raise--at least not strenuously-- the question of influences. Nevertheless, one must be careful not to overestimate the degree of. .d#ference between the two. It i's. tTue that in the Egyptian Diaspora Jewish cultus took on a form rather different from that of Jerusalem. We see in Alexandria a form of worship centered almost entirely on words, consisting of prayers and hymns, the reading of the Law, and its interpretation carried on in the proseuahai. 46 But Jews in Alexandria evidently still looked to Jerusalem as a seat of authority, tradition, and learning. Philo's main lines of argument are, moreover, directed at Jewish concerns--the same sorts of concerns as those which the Targumim suggest preoccupied Palestinian Jews before, during, On the variety of interpretations of this passage, see Ginzberg 5.229f. Similarly, Philo allegorizes at Heres 3llf. in his interpretation of Gen 15:17; but what he does with this text is nothing compared to what is done in the Targumim, where the verse is filled out with a vision similar to that in Daniel 7: Cf., e.g., Neof ad loa.: T'7o:K~

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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.

28

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 coul
~hat

Long: 8ut it does seem to me that Philo is playing a sleight of hand game with us. That in a way is why I brought Pindar up. The similarlity is this: they both start with something that controls how they should proceed. Pindar starts with a particular event; Philo starts with a text. Pindar somehow has to get back to where he started once he has turned the victory in the games into the whole comment on life and values through some kind of myth. Philo is going to take us from this very strict text which has all those intractable things about cherubim and swords, into some kind of sermon, using all his knowledge about philosophy and other things, which will edify us in some way at the end of the day. That is what

49

I call sleight of hand. Why is it sleight of hand for Philo and not for Donne? If you have an Tmagined audience that places great stock in what God's own word means to them in terms of how they should lead their lives, why is it sleight of hand when you say, "You 411 know this text here; I will give it to you in the Greek. There are a couple of words you do not understand, so I will explain them to you, and then· I will tell you why this is important to you." I do not see this as sleight of hand. I see it as using a text like that in precisely the way it ought to be used.

~:

~:

At one point in explaining the construction of the ark, Philo says something Ti1e this: Noah put bitumin on the inside and the outside of the ark. Philo somehow contrives to explain this as the relationship of the soul to the body via Stoic concepts, in that the soul both binds the body together (outside bitumin) and also has its own internal protector (the inner bitumin). That is what I think I am calling sleight of hand. Conley: That is only because you don't believe it. I see 1~hat you mean by sleight of hand, but I would answer that when you get that kind of amplification, which is the inverse of the extended simile or extended metaphor, what Philo is saying is that Moses was giving a very brief version of a metaphor and that Philo is going to expatiate on it. Maybe he believed that and maybe he did not. I think that on the \~hole, the notion of the meaning of a passage, the gist, is important. Is ~loses just giving some detailed technical information, or does he have some overriding intention in mind? That puts me in mind of the incident I witnessed in the Port Authority bus terminal in New York. A fellow comes up with a wine bottle sticking out of his back pocket, and asks for a ticket to Elephant, New York. The agent tells him that he is sorry, but Greyhound does not service Elephant directly. The other fellow says, "Don't tell me that, I go there every week." They pull out a map, and another fellow in line, getting impatient, says, "Don't you mean Buffalo, New York?" The first fellow says, "Yeah, I knew it was one of those big animals."

I use that as a paradigm, if you will, to talk about the whole question of vagueness about philosophy, genres, and so on. So I have sleight of hand there, but I do not think of it in the category of dirty tricks. That is what I think of when I think of sleight of hand as something illegitimate. Wuellner: Could I suggest another way of getting at that problem? That is, to see that Philo, unlike Pindar, is working in a society for which a different text is used constantly for reference in any decision to be made on whatever matter. The role of the normative text is important for that culture. That, I gather, was not Pindar's or Epicurus' problem. Long: Yes, I see the point. If that text is absolutely authoritative, then what you are saying is that it is better to give it some kind of interpretation which will be useful in some way. 9onley: I am not sure that the suggestion is that the text is absolutely author1tatlve. Suppose we are faced with a difficult question and we want to make an argument as to what decision should be made, and the other party asks us what we have to go on. We look through the Torah and find nothing, but do find this thing about the ark. So we think if we can work this out right, we can defend our position.

50 I do not know the Talmudic stuff very well, but I appreciate what Gary Porten taught me about it. One, that one can have five or six different opinions in the Talmud, none of which is right, or maybe useful. This is why subsequently there were such violent debates about who is right. So one gets a splintering of various groups within Judaism on the basis of each group's preservation of a canon of texts. One can have a compendium of arguments, which a rabbi could use and settle disputes. I think that some of that kind of thing was going on in Alexandrian Judaism. Oavid Winston, tell me I am wrong, or tell me I'm right. Win ston I think the paradigms here for Philo are both Greek and Jewish. On the Jewish side, you are quite right; the rabbinic dictum was hapok bah we-happ~k bah dek~Lah bah [M. Abot 5.22], keep reading the text again and again, for everything is in it. For Philo to dress his philososphical construction in the form of exegesis was typically rabbinic. One does not write new books; rather, one writes exegesis on an important text. That was not only Jewish; it was also Greek. The kind of allegory of the soul that one finds in Philo, where the hidden meanings of the text do not occur to external human beings, but to components of the human soul, that kind of allegory was certainly being done later in Neoplatonism, but Middle Platonists were already doing it. Already in Plutarch's Quaestiones ConvivaZes (7450F), we encounter a Pythagorean allegorization of the well-known Sirens in Od. 12 as symbolizing the heavenly spheres whose music creates in the souls departing this world passionate love for the heavenly and divine and forgetfulness of mortality, so that they follow the Sirens and join them in their celestial circuits. On earth, while yet in the body, a faint echo of that music reaches the soul and reminds it of an earlier and better existence, provided its ears are not sealed by carnal passions as wax blocked the ears of Ulysses' companions. Unfortunately, we have lost much of this literature. I suspect that much of what Philo was doing on the Biblical texts is what was done already to a large extent by Middle Platonists on texts like the odyssey. Now, to speak of the various commentaries on philosophical texts. By the time Philo was writing, it was very typical for Platonists to write philosophy in terms of a commentary on the Timaeus or other Platonic dialogue. But aside from that, the other activity of Middle Platonists, the allegorization of a poetic text, i.s very close to what Philo was doing. ~:

That is something Oavid Winston and I have talked about for many years.

·r-tnfnk that there is ·something to it; I think that I would make a distinction

though, which I make neither in the paper nor in the long course. It is one of those fictions, that is to say, one has very little hard evidence by way of support. MY scenario for the Greeks goes something like this. A very small number . of people who were seriously interested--and even Plutarch was seriously interested-had access to a number of different texts that were canonized. There is a parallel in the Renaissance which I may get to in a minute. If you are depending on those old texts to try to make sense of what is really the case, there are two ways one can go. First, Cicero's way: everything is debatable, and one tries to sort out the most plausible arguments. Secondly, one can go the unitarian way, in the sense that there has to be something that is true. How can one make all these texts fit together? That is why the Stoics' allegories and those of the Neoplatonists, of which we have so few examples, go to such incredible lengths to rewrite the text

51

to make it mean something that is already known in their own mind. The same thing happens, I think, a little bit later, for it took rhetoricians about 200 years more to get to this same level of consciousness. Quintilian, for instance, whose whole method bores the hell out of most of my students, is to review every possible position on how many status questions there are. He sorts things out in a very encyclopedic way, that is to say, there is no rational construction he is putting on this history. Then we get someone like Hermogenes, who, I think, looked at all this stuff and said, this is all wrong, and found a way of reconstructing the whole thing so that it was vertically organized: genus, species, contraries, and so forth. Very rational. Philo, on the other hand, with what I imagine was a sort of Jewish approach to it, was first of all convinced that everything that meant anything was in that Greek text. They believed that that Greek text was just as good as the Hebrew. It was God's word-Winston: Conley:

I really doubt that very much. Well, this was the propaganda that was being--

Winston: But not Philo. He knew much better than that. He even unconsciously corrects the Greek Septuagint when he quotes it, so much does it jar his own sense of Greek. Conley: Yes, this is what I mean when I said texts are a very tricky business. I do not know whether those variations with what we now have as the established Septuagint text are corrections or a variant text. Winston: Aside from the problem of variations in the text, it seemed quite obvious to John Dillon and me when we were working through De Gigantibus and Quod Deus that on several occasions Philo apparently unconsciously changed the wording because he just could not have written it that way in his own mind. Co~ley:

Show me these. Really, I am very interested in this. But to get to my po1nt: I think the way in which Philo works with these texts is a little bit different or comes from a different kind of concern from that of someone like Plutarch or even Quintilian, trying to make sense of all those variety of opinions. I think that Philo's rhetoric is designed to show not himself so much, but the people he is writing for,that there is no problem. All of these different opinions can be made sense of. long: May I just come back to a defense of what I meant by sleight of hand, which may be related to what we are saying now? This may just be my lack of knowledge of Philo, but how does Philo make it clear to the reader that he, Philo, will distinguish between what we would call the literal meaning of a passage (ka.ta Ze:r.in) and the allegorical or interpretive meaning (kata gnomen), or whatever phrase one would chose. One does find, for example, in Simplicius, who was centuries later, that he interpreted Empedocles in his literal way, and then said, "Of course what he really means here is the noetos kosmos, which is the Platonic interpretation." Conley:

He does that a couple of times--

J'Iinston: In the Quaestiones he does it systematically. Every single biblical lemma he starts with the literal interpretation and then he adds the allegorical one.

52

Wuellner: With all the formalities that seem to be similar on both sides that make Philo both Hellenistic and Greek, there appears to be one important difference. The similarity I think we argued earlier when we had the colloquy with Conley on paideia. [See "General Education" in Philo of Alexandria. Protocol of the fifteenth Colloquy of the Center for Hermeneutical Studies, with Thomas Conley and others -(Berkeley, 9 March 1975)]. That the difference lies in the role that the text occupies in a culture or in a society. The role that Empedocles plays, or even Homer plays regarding the significance of the normativeness of those texts is different in those two societies. That must not be taken for granted. I think that makes all the difference in the world. The social-cultural role of the text--and .that has little to do with Palestine or Alexandria--that is, the Sita im Leben issue is not really that specific as to time and space, but relates to the universal or typical audience. In the specific Jewish sense, it is that audience which knows this sacred text and nothing but this text is chosen as 1~orth knowing. Winston: Conley:

May I ask the classicists how normative Homer was at this time? The classicist.

Homer clearly carries enormous authority. However, his status for Philo is nor-entirely clear to me because I do not know enough about the Jewish background pf Alexandria of the time. One sometimes has the feeling that Philo is more familiar with the Greek background than he is with the Jewish. In other words, that is one of the reasons why he is so concerned to interpret things that way. Using the fact that the audience was a highly educated one, and if he can show a type of congruence between Greek and Talmudic, then of course he has achieved a great dea 1.

~:

That is precisely why he got kicked out. The Jewish tradition at some po1nt, probably after the destruction, moved him right out.

Co~ley:

Winston: I do not think you can say he was kicked out; he never got in. Not only Philo, but Josephus too, is not even mentioned once in the entire rabbinic literature. ~:

We asked this question of you (David W1nston), once before: in any of tne-Tater Talmudic commentaries is there any evidence of Philo, while not mentioned by name, but of themes that might be found in Philo7 Do you think he was being stuck in the back door?

Winston: It has been pointed out, for example, that through Origen the rabbis in Caesarea picked up a number of Philonic themes. This was already pointed out by Wilhelm Bacher whose reference I'll give to you. Leopo1d: I just had an observation about Homeric allegory. It arises from a passage 1n Heraclitus' The AUegoPiea of Homer. He makes a distinction between allegories of the poets, which he regards as being intentional--and of being more or less sleightof hand--and the systematic allegory which is deliberately concealed throughout the text of Homer. It seems to me that here we have a rhetorically sopl1isticated author who wants to make a distinction between allegory as it is

53

known in the textbooks, and among the figures where it definitely has a place, and the kind of allegory that Homer would be doing. I wonder if something similar also applies to Philo. Even if one assumes that Moses has deliberately concealed mysteries in the past, is not the assumption behind systematic allegory different from the assumption behind rhetorical allegory? Winston: May I ask you a question about that? Do you know if any of these allegorists consciously reject the literal interpretation completely and insist only on the other? Philo insists on a double level. Leopold: I believe that Plutarch and the author of the Plutarchian book on Homer's llfe and poetry both make comments to the effect that there are things in the literal text that are simply unacceptable to the Greek morality and theology of their own time. Winston:

Unacceptable?

Leopold:

Yes, you have to go to the allegorical--

Winston:

In that case Philo would be deviating from the Middle Platonic norm.

Leopold: It seems to me that in your earlier remarks, Professor Conley, you were not making a clear distinction between rhetorical allegory and the assumptions that gJ with it, and systematic allegory. Conley: I was--predictably, I guess--wondering whether that was a real distinction, as opposed to a convenient one. There are several places in Philo in which he gives the literal interpretation which is not obtrusive or offensive and then he says the equivalent of that what we really need to do is to get into the deeper meaning of this. I see all of this as programmatic and all of this as rhetorical. That is to say, if Philo sees the opportunity for amplifying on one level of a passage, he will bloody well do it. If there is not much there, beyond the literal meaning and a few scattered remarks, and he should move on to the next verse, he will do that too. Most of my reading of old Philo ended about two years ago, so I do not know if there is that much difference for him between a programmatic as opposed to a rhetorical mode. Later on we do get that. The Neoplatonists particularly approach those tex~s from more antique times with the assumption that they only meant one thing. John Dillon had that wonderful piece on the first line of the Phaedo, which takes up twelve pages of exegesis, making Freudian or Derridean transformations in order to get it to mean what it is supposed to mean. Everything is pregnant with Neoplatonism somehow. But I think that it is a different ball game somehow. My reading of Philo's "Allegories", and my knowledge of the special laws is as superficial as you can get, but as far as the '~llegories" is concerned, he is talking to an audience of nervous Alexandrian Jews. These Jews really felt uncomfortable with where they were and what their identity was. There is no question that if Philo was trying to consolidate the Jewish community, he did not do a very good job of it, for whatever reason, because things just went to hell in a handbasket very shortly after his death. I get the sense that he was really talking to a community, and was trying to tell them that they really were Jewish. The thir that Horst Moehring did with the numerology was kind of interesting. Philo sort o1 appealed to the most scientific and indubitable and then went into the other stuff and showed that there is no way of arguing against that. The De opificio mmdi

54

shows that this is what he is talking about. So no matter what thick-skinned political assimilationists you are dealing with, they have to admit that. Wuellner: But whether the argument led to any results that were effective should be separated. Conley: Right. I am not saying that he was a bad rhetorician because things did not work. Demosthenes was a great rhetorician and Athens went to hell in a handbasket. ~: I would ~~uestions of

like to take up the question of audience. I was intrigued by John Leopold's paper: "What if the same group of figures turns up in Dio, Philo, Plutarch, Epictetus. and Marcus Aurelius? Are the implied relations with their audiences then the same?" These persons intrigue me. I am somewhat of an outsider to the details of the discussion, but I am reminded of the discussion of early Christianity, going from Palestin1ln Judaism, to Hellenistic Judaism, to Gen~lel.hristianity, and so on. The generalizations about these groups are so large that they are not very useful. I am curious to know, in ·the light of the work that has been done on ancient society, whether it is possible at least to hypothesize relationships about the kind of audience that might have motivated Philo to use these kinds of rhetorical devices. Even if you hypothesize the presence of nervous Jews in Alexandria, why does Philo think that these would have an effect on his audience?

In one way I think that the question which John Leopold raised was more profound and more unanswerable. Does the use of a particular figure of speech or trope or organizational principle guarantee a particular view of rhetoric? I think that you ask this question too, and it is a tough one. I fall back on my notion of the audience that the author imagines. With regard to the other thing, I think that there are specifics that you can reconstruct out of Philo that he imagined. From my reading, it was an audience that would probably not be approved of by some of the rhetoric writers who were heavy Atticists or purists. But the audience appears to be a group of educated Greek-speaking Jewish people.

~:

Herzog:

Do you have any sense that he might be talking to the Greek world as well?

Conley: No, I don't think so. The only pieces we have are the LP.gatio, which is a rewrite and probably largely a fabrication of what he said, and possibly in some of the biographies of the prophets--the lives of Moses and Abraham--he might have had in mind something beyond the community. There, it seems to me, he plays by the rules much more in terms of the style and structure of these things, and in taking up the standard list of topo1~ one after the other, with great regularity, it is as though he is trying to prove something. I think that with the "A 11 egori es" there is a narrower audience. Herzog:

How do you get that sense?

Is it intuitive?

Conley: There are two things. One is purely grammatical. It is the frequency of the first person plural forms of verbs. Philo speaks in terms of we are this and they are that. Some of the verbs are quite vivid and excited. The second thing is the selection of the text. If I could find the manuscripts to prove this, I would be vindicated in my own mind for life. However, there are many passages

55

in Philo that suggest this, namely the ones directed against the anthropomorphists or literalists. He is talking about people in his community who say that this passage means such and such, but they are wrong. What it really means is this; there are also passages where he does not identify any particular opponent or interpretation. We find that anyone who was translating and commenting on the Pentateuch at'this time was occupied by these kinds of passages. So I see it as kind of in the air. People of Alexandria knew about these different kinds of opinions. We also find gratuitous facts about his nephew who did in fact assimilate--to the hilt. Let us get back for a moment to· the sense in which Philo's allegorization of scripture quotes does not conform or does conform to Greek allegorizing of Homer. I am struck by a certain ambiguity that has to do with what you present at the end of your paper. You argue that Philo's hermeneutic becomes a rhetorical one. What I am not clear about is to what extent your argument becomes the strong claim that would distinguish Philo clearly from the classical tradition of allegorical reading according to which truth claims are .simply suspended in exegesis, and that what one is really interested in doing is an opportunistic pouncing on moments in the text. As you said a few moments ago: if one does not get it out of the literal text. then you move to the allegorical. I wonder if that does not suggest a move so strongly in the direction of the rhetorical that there is no reason to talk about it as a hermeneutic at all, nor as an exegetical performance. Rather, what we have is a case of a more purely rhetorical performance because of the contingent fact that in this culture it has an extraordinary authority. ~:

I find difficulty with your use of hermeneutic; also, with your use of tlieterm "purely rhetorical." I do not know what a hermeneutic that was not rhetorical would look like. It is a fact that rhetoricians can actually believe in what they say. Sometimes they do not. Secondly, to kind of destabilize--and I see that Derrida is infecting my brain--the notion that there is a truth, that the hermeneutic process arising and that the allegorizing process kind of unfolds, does not bother me at all. In other words, the text that Philo was talking about is one which has already been questioned by other people. Not only Jews, but by pagan critics as well. So we are talking about something that had been historically destabilized, and people are asking questions. How could Moses talk about putting pitch on the inside and pitch on the outside? What kind of dummy is he? Someone has to come to poor Moses' defense. When that happens, there are divisions within divisions, and one has to come up with an argument; one has a context of debate, and of uncertainty. ~:

~:

But there are different ways of describing a situation in which there are anomalous moments in the text in which one needs to--

~:

But we are not just talking about anomalous moments in the text. talk1ng about people who detect anomalies in the text.

Countryman: ~:

We are

How do you know that these people were there?

Philo says it. I believe him. this-.iterally, and they are wrong.

He says there are people who interpret

56

Countryman: But there are texts in which he does not say this. I do not know that weC:an assume that they are always there, just because they are there in some places. Conley:

Now we get into the bugs under the rugs argument.

Countryman: 1 think that hidden behind this there is another problem, the argument that assumes that there is a kind of broad-based situation of debate. It arises from the fact that you seem to be using the term rhetoric in two different ways, whi eh a re indeed connected. 1 wou 1d agree with you. that a11 communi ea ti on is inescapably rhetorical. But in another sense. though not sharply defined, there was a social institution in the Greek-speaking world, called rhetoric, which we are also speaking about, and which was dominated, it would seem--at least, in in the imperial period. by its uses in the debating situations. Those really are two quite different things. Rhetoric in that second sense is only one small area of rhetoric in the large sense as communication. People may find a great many reasons to conununicate besides the existence of debate. Given the importance of the oywv as an image in Greek culture, I would guess that people in the first century who used Greek in an educated way would bl) inclined to overstate th11 amount of debate, rather than to understate it. I thought Professor Long's reference to Marcus Aurelius lt~s very helpful in that regard. for there may be a style of speech which does not •·e~>resent 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

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[41 p.)

Peter Brown (Berkeley), 22 May 1983.

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