Priests and Prophets among Pagans,

Jews and Christians

EDITED BY

Beate DIGNAS, Robert PARKER and Guy G. STROUMSA

PEETERS
LEUVEN – PARIS – WALPOLE, MA
2013
 CONTENTS

Preface .................................................................................................................................. VII

Notes on Contributors ...................................................................................................... IX

R. PARKER, Introduction .......................................................................................................... 1

I J. SCHEID, Priests and Prophets in Rome .............................................................. 15

II T. RAJAK, Investment in/of the Jerusalem Priesthood in the Second Temple

and Beyond................................................................................................................. 29

III N. MCLYNN, Aelius Aristides and the Priests ...................................................... 52

IV B. DIGNAS, Greek Priests in the First Three Centuries CE: Traditional, Diverse,
Wholly New? .............................................................................................................. 80

V N. BELAYCHE, Priests as Diviners: An Impact on Religious Changes in Imperial

Anatolia? .................................................................................................................. 112

VI J.N. BREMMER, The Representation of Priests and Priestesses in the Pagan

and Christian Greek Novel..................................................................................... 136

VII S. ELM, Priest and Prophet: Gregory of Nazianzus’s Concept of Christian

Leadership as Theosis ............................................................................................ 162

VIII K. TRAMPEDACH, Daniel Stylites and Leo I: an Uneasy Relationship between

Saint and Emperor .................................................................................................. 185

IX G.G. STROUMSA, False Prophets of Early Christianity ..................................... 208

Index of names, subjects and passages ..................................................................... 233

 PRIEST AND PROPHET:
GREGORY OF NAZIANZUS‘S CONCEPT OF
CHRISTIAN LEADERSHIP AS THEOSIS

Susanna Elm

Prophecy features comparatively rarely among the characteristics used to

define, or at least describe, Christian leadership in the fourth century if the
leadership in question is that of the priest and its close relation, the bishop.
To be sure, exceptional Christian leaders continued to be considered
prophets by their contemporaries and, even more so, their successors who
praised their lives as precisely that, exceptional. Most of the persons
considered as imbued with prophetic gifts such as, for example, Shenoute of
Atripe, are, however, associated with monasticism and stand as such, a
priori, in tension to episcopal office.1 If this distinction between the
prophetic powers ascribed to persons living in a monastic milieu versus the
powers associated with those holding episcopal and priestly office appears
to echo Max Weber, this is not by accident. ‗The prophet‘ is central to
Weber‘s ideal types of religious leadership, because he possesses that
‗certain charisma‘ Weber considered indispensable for gaining authority
among the charismatic‘s followers. The exact nature of that charisma and
of the authority derived from it, are of course hotly debated in scholarship.
For Weber, for example, prophecy was closely associated with magic he
considered intrinsic to ‗popular religion‘, so that the true prophet‘s con-
sistent rejection of magic in favour of ethical instruction became for him a

1
On Shenoute as prophet, both in his own words and as proclaimed by his followers, see
especially D. Brakke, ‗Shenoute, Weber, and the Monastic Prophet: Ancient and Modern
Articulations of Ascetic Authority‘, in A. Camplani and G. Filoramo (eds), Foundations of Power
and Conflicts of Authority on Late Antique Monasticism (Louvain, 2007) 47-73; and A.G. Lopez,
Shenoute of Atripe and the Uses of Poverty: Rural Patronage, Religious Conflict, and Monasticism in Late
Antique Egypt (Berkeley, 2013).
 SUSANNA ELM 163

crucial plot-element in the narrative of the institutionalisation of that

‗certain charisma‘ into priestly office.2
Today, few scholars would subscribe to such clear-cut, essentialising
notions of magic and of what Weber called ‗the habit of the masses‘.3 What
one might want to call prophecy and priesthood, what characterises ‗the
prophet‘ and ‗the priest‘, or bishop, has similarly undergone a process of
refinement and complication, often pointing to the fact that the ascetic is
indeed the priest or bishop, and easy definitions of either the component
parts – priest, prophet, ascetic – and even less their composite – prophetic
monk-bishop/priest – are hard to come by.4 If one were to attempt a more
precise circumscription as to what aspects are essential in defining what a
priest or bishop was and how the authority he represented related to
prophecy (and hence to charisma, however defined), ‗location, location,
location‘ appears to be central. That is, the historical and social context,

2
M. Weber, The Sociology of Religion, trans. E. Fishoff. (Boston, 19634) 46-79, esp. 78-9. The
bibliography on the topic is enormous. See C. Rapp, Holy Bishops in Late Antiquity: The Nature of
Christian Leadership in an Age of Transition (Berkeley, 2005) 6-18, and especially her discussion of
spiritual authority as exemplified by pneumatophoroi and christophoroi, 56-66. Despite her well-
founded caveats regarding Weber‘s taxonomy, I prefer to continue to call what she defines as
spiritual authority charismatic. See now K. Sessa, The Formation of Papal Authority in Late Antique
Italy: Roman Bishops and the Domestic Sphere (Cambridge, 2012) 14-25. For Weber and the prophet
see also L. Nasrallah, An Ecstasy of Folly: Prophecy and Authority in Early Christianity (Cambridge,
Mass. 2003) 13-9.
3
Already lambasted as an inapplicable category by A. Momigliano, ‗Popular Religious
Belief and the Late Roman Historians‘, in Essays in Ancient and Modern Historiography (Mid-
dletown, Conn., 1977) 141-59. For a discussion of magic and prophecy, with recourse to
anthropological comparanda, see D. Frankfurter, ‗Syncretism and the Holy Man in Late
Antique Egypt‘, Journal of Early Christian Studies 11 (2003) 339-85; K. Bowes, Private Worship, Public
Values, and Religious Change in Late Antiquity (Cambridge, 2008) 44-8.
4
For a detailed analysis of the nature and function of prophecy in late Roman Christianity
see G. Filoramo, Veggenti Profeti Gnostici. Identità e conflitti nel cristianesimo antico (Brescia, 2005)
151-189, and especially 255-90 on monk-prophets; Nasrallah, Ecstasy, is less concerned with
what one might want to call a monastic milieu.
164 PRIEST AND PROPHET

both the space and the place in which our monastic-ascetic-prophetic-

priest authors created, more specifically wrote, their authority and the
audience for which they did so, which often also included persons who later
styled our authors as prophets and priests, is crucial. 5 This place and space,
more often than not, was urban. Even if it was not primarily urban, it is
indispensable to consider the place and space in which a Shenoute, say,
displayed his understanding of the ways in which he led as prophet and was
said to have led as prophet by his followers. Similarly, it is from the vantage
point of the polis, or rather the oikoumene, for whom the protagonist of this
paper, Gregory of Nazianzus, styled himself as priest endowed with pro-
phetic gifts that we may be able to gain a clearer picture of the nature of his
authority as he created it: it was an episcopal and priestly authority in
which a particular kind of prophetic quality played a central role.
To phrase it differently, the recent enhancing and complicating of the
Weberian ideal types through an increased focus on the rhetorical con-
struction of authority and the interplay of modes of authority with compet-
ing claims within a given cultural and historic moment has helped to
sharpen one question that remains to be explained in each case: how
exactly does investment with spiritual, and that is charismatic, authority
actually work? How precisely do the actors themselves describe such
spiritual, charismatic authority and the process by which they acquired it,
and how do they conjoin that process of acquisition to the legitimisation of
their own authority, especially if this is the authority and power of the
priest or bishop?

Late antique prophets: Shenoute of Atripe and Gregory of Nazianzus

In what follows I will present a particular iteration of that interplay to show

how one ancient author used tension between prophetic gifts and priestly

5
For discussions of ‗place‘ and ‗space‘ as tools of analysis see P.S. Alagona, After the Grizzly:
Endangered Species and the Politics of Place in California (Berkeley, 2012), and Bowes, Private
Worship, 24-44.
 SUSANNA ELM 165

authority in a rather fruitful manner to develop a concept that would prove

to be of longue durée: Gregory of Nazianzus and the notion of the deification
of the individual also known as theosis. To begin with, however, I would like
to summarise briefly what scholars have identified as the key elements of
prophecy, taking my cue from recent studies of Shenoute, who stands out
both for his assurance in claiming the mantle of a prophet and for being
endowed with it by his followers. According to Rebecca Krawiec, Shenoute‘s
prophetic authority rested on his understanding that a prophet is ‗a figure
who could lead any who obeyed him to salvation‘. To claims such abilities,
Shenoute aligned himself with others who spoke as ‗proxy for God‘, all
obedient servants of Christ such as the apostles and prior prophets. But
neither Shenoute‘s prophetic characteristics nor the obedience it required
were a given: he had to ‗create‘ both in order to convince, for example, his
recalcitrant female followers.6 Caroline Schroeder also focuses on the fact
that Shenoute ‗adapts‘ biblical precedents to constructs for himself the
persona of a prophet. For her, this is ‗a latter day prophet ... who stands
outside the primary religious and political authority system and speaks to
the community from a marginal, but not wholly outside, position‘.7 Ascetic
detachment is an essential component. This detachment, however, serves
to place Shenoute into a position in which he can mediate not only between
those in his care and God, but also between those in his care and his and
their opponents ‗on the outside‘.8 Clairvoyance, or rather, the claim to
receive or to have received divine revelations in visions or dreams, is
another key element, especially because such revelatory power permits
Shenoute the ‗prophet‘ to voice harsh criticism of less gifted Christian
leaders as well as unreconstructed local pagans. One aspect of prophecy,

6
R. Krawiec, Shenoute and the Women of the White Monastery: Egyptian Monasticism in Late
Antiquity (New York, 2002) 51-72, quote 55-7, 69-71.
7
C. Schroeder, ‗Prophecy and Porneia in Shenoute‘s Letters: The Rhetoric of Sexuality in a
Late Antique Egyptian Monastery‘, Journal of Near Eastern Studies 65 (2006) 81-97.
8
Shenoute, Not Because a Fox Barks XH 204-05, in Émile Chassinat, Le quatrième livre des
entretiens de Shenouti (Cairo, 1911), 38-9; Brakke, ‗Shenoute, Weber‘, 63-65.
166 PRIEST AND PROPHET

also highlighted by Laura Nasrallah, must not be underestimated: Shenoute

exemplified the central claim that he as prophet understood how God
communicated with man and was able to make that communication
intelligible to his followers. 9
I have chosen Shenoute of Atripe as a foil, because, at least as charac-
terised by scholarship, he was a quintessential monastic leader, an ordained
presbyter who commanded a vast, complex institution, ‗a learned man, and
even a writer‘, but a man who remained, though recent research challenges
this assumption, in essence a fairly isolated product of Upper Egypt.10 His
older contemporary Gregory on Nazianzus, in contrast, was not a monastic
leader, a mantle carried proudly by his contemporary Basil of Caesarea, but
was instead a priest as well as a bishop (of two different sees), well-
connected in the Eastern world of early fourth century Constantinople and
Antioch, and very much a learned man and writer – indeed, the paragon of
the Christian learned man and writer as priest and bishop. Both men, to be
sure, claimed the mantle of ascetic and that of prophet, the latter very
much along similar lines.
Gregory of Nazianzus called himself a prophet on several occasions. He
claimed to have received divine revelations in visions and dreams, com-
pared himself on several occasions with Moses, Elijah, and Paul, but the
most interesting synthesis of what he considered his special prophetic
characteristics can be found in the concept of theosis, a concept he invent-
ed.11 Or, rather, the neologism theosis Gregory of Nazianzus invented in his
Oration 4 against Julian crystallises the way in which he nuanced and altered
a particular concept – that of the divination of the individual – in intense

9
Brakke, ‗Shenoute, Weber‘, 65-70; compare Nasrallah, Ecstasy, 2.
10
S. Emmel, ‗Shenoute the Monk: the Early Monastic Career of Shenoute the Archiman-
drite‘, in M. Bielawski and D. Hombergen (eds), Il monachesimo tra eredità ed aperture (Rome,
2004) 151-74, quote 171. Lopez, ‗Shenoute‘, stresses Shenoute‘s role vis-à-vis those outside his
monastery, i.e. the wider context.
11
S. Elm, Sons of Hellenism, Fathers of the Church: Emperor Julian, Gregory of Nazianzus and the
Vision of Rome (Berkeley, 2012), passim.
 SUSANNA ELM 167

dialogue, confrontation, and conflict with his contemporaries: ‗orthodox‘

Christians, ‗orthodox‘ Christians who were nevertheless bad leaders,
‗heretical‘ Christians, former Christians who had resumed worship of the
ancient gods of the Greeks and the Romans, and persons who had always
believed in these gods of the Greeks and Romans, often characterised as
pagans. All persons who participated in these debates belonged to a
homogeneous group (and it is worth wondering to what extent Shenoute
shared those characteristics): that of the Greek intellectual elite of the later
Roman Empire formed by paideia. That was the basis of their group identity
and it preserved its cohesive force, whereas other group-identities had far
more porous boundaries. In formulating his novel concept, Gregory agreed
with some who remained pagan throughout and differed rather markedly
from others, who, like him, were to become pillars of Christian orthodoxy;
that is, the pagan-Christian divide does not hold firmly. Before entering in
medias res, however, I would like to expand briefly on the meaning and
relevance of theosis and on Gregory of Nazianzus‘ historiographic persona as
it relates to the question at hand.

Theosis

a) Theosis traditionally understood

Gregory developed his notion of theosis in the context of formulating the

notion of ideal Christian priesthood in Oration 2 on the same theme. Both
together, theosis and priesthood, became foundational for orthodox Chris-
tian praxis, that is, the praxis of the Greek and then Russian orthodox
Churches; Gregory‘s second oration On Priesthood, in which he first formu-
lated his ideas regarding divination and the priest, remains required
reading in Russian seminaries today.12 Theosis – deification – was a central
concept in the so-called Corpus Areopagiticum and in the theology of Maxi-

12
H. Alfeyev, Zhizn’i uchenie sv. Grigoriia Bogoslova (St. Petersburg, 2001). I thank Boris Rodin
Maslov for this reference and the revelation of its content.
168 PRIEST AND PROPHET

mus the Confessor. Symeon the New Theologian made it the corner stone of
the monastic movement later known as hesychasm. The term entered Old
Church Slavonic and then modern Russian as obozhenie, retaining both the
semantic structure and the importance of its Greek equivalent.13 In sum, as
pointed out by Jaroslav Pelican, who here stands as pars pro toto for the
conventional accounts of the development of the Eastern Churches, theosis
or deification was ‗the chief idea of St. Maximus, as of all of Eastern theolo-
gy‘, and, he continues, ‗[l]ike all of [Maximus‘] theological ideas, it had come
to him from Christian antiquity and had been formulated by the Greek
fathers‘.14
Scholarly consensus holds that what these Greek Fathers considered
deification or divinisation was a ‗recognizable conflation of two views, the
biblical and the Platonic‘.15 Such scholarly consensus itself represents a
number of conflations. First, ‗the Greek fathers‘ under discussion are
usually seen as a homogeneous group consisting in the main of the ‗three
Cappadocians‘ without further differentiation, to be followed by Maximus
Confessor and Symeon the New Theologian, also more or less considered as
one homogeneous strand of development, so that, second, Gregory of
Nazianzus‘ own individual role in the formulation of deification and its later
Byzantine and Russian orthodox fate is downplayed, if not entirely over-
looked. Third, ‗Platonism‘ stands for yet another homogenizing move that
flattens a number of different philosophical voices – in fact an intense

13
For a summary see H. Alfeyev, St. Symeon the New Theologian and the Orthodox Tradition
(Oxford, 2000) 255-69.
14
J. Pelican, The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of the Doctrine. Vol. 2: The Spirit
of Eastern Christianity (600-1700) (Chicago, 1974) 10.
15
D.F. Winslow, The Dynamics of Salvation: A Study in Gregory of Nazianzus (Philadelphia, 1979)
173. Winslow‘s discussion of Gregory at 171-99 remains foundational; his argument that
Gregory merged Plato and Scripture is accepted by N. Russell, The Doctrine of Deification in the
Greek Patristic Tradition (Oxford, 2004) 224-5. Russell lists the vocabulary of deification at 121-54
and 333-44. Gregory of Nazianzus, Orationes 2 and 4 play no role in these discussions other than
for the two occurrences of the term theōsis in Or. 4.
 SUSANNA ELM 169

debate – into one more or less harmonious one, which is then neatly
subdivided into either ‗Christian Platonism‘ or pagan Platonism, the latter
usually known as ‗Neo-Platonism‘.
Such scholarly emphasis has had rather detrimental results for the
study of theosis. The proposed merger of Platonic and Biblical concepts to
create theosis fails to account for the spectacular subsequent success of the
notion of deification in the East, because it remains rather vague what
theosis actually entailed. What did the ancient authors in question actually
mean when they talked about theosis? This remains vague even in the most
recent works on theosis, despite their undisputed merit, because to collapse
such different authors as, for example, Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa,
and Gregory of Nazianzus, into a neat package called ‗the three Cappadoci-
ans‘ does little to clarify the matter.16

b) Gregory of Nazianzus on theosis – the traditional view

Indeed, what Gregory of Nazianzus said when he spoke of theosis differed

markedly from Gregory of Nyssa‘s concepts of deification. Gregory of
Nyssa‘s version has received in depth scholarly analysis that is then often
merely transposed onto Gregory of Nazianzus. 17 What Gregory actually said
when he spoke of theosis, one central point he made when speaking of
deification, was that Christianity properly practised would make man into

16
Thus Russell, Deification, 213-25, notes Gregory‘s distinctiveness, but flattens his impact
by labelling it ‗the Cappadocian thought‘. Thus, he misses Gregory‘s impact on Maximus the
Confessor, 233-7.
17
H. Merki, Homoiōsis theō. Von der platonischen Angleichung an Gott zur Gottähnlichkeit bei
Gregor von Nyssa (Fribourg, Switz., 1952), focuses only on Gregory of Nyssa; his work is
foundational; J.A. Wittung, ‗Resources on Theosis with Select Primary Sources in Translation‘,
in M.J. Christensen and J.A. Wittung (eds), Partakers of the Divine Nature: The History and
Development of Deification in the Christian Traditions (Madison, N.J., 2007), 294-309, has an
extensive bibliography. P. Molac, Douleur et transfiguration. Une lecture du cheminement spirituel de
saint Grégoire de Nazianze (Paris, 2006), discusses Gregory‘s concept of man as God‘s eikōn, of
which he considered theōsis a part, 31-78, 104-61.
170 PRIEST AND PROPHET

God; such proper practice required as essential condition the right correla-
tion of individual and communal action. Gregory‘s idea of deification, of
making individual humans divine, in a Christian context, sits uneasily with
many scholars as Donald Winslow indicates when he remarks that ‗Gregory
himself was well aware that the constant use he made of the doctrine of
‗deification‘ ... must have been somewhat startling to his congregation‘.18
Leaving the presumed reaction of Gregory‘s audience aside, what scholars
find startling is that Gregory could have intended this as ‗the reassertion of
any divine element within created nature‘ rather than solely as ‗a gift of
God the creator‘, according to John McGuckin. Norman Russell solves this
conundrum by proposing that Gregory must have intended deification as a
metaphor only, because he cannot have meant to imply that a creature can
‗become God in the proper sense of the word‘; what he must have meant
must have been metaphorical because he cannot have meant the process to
have been in any sense real.19
In other words, the idea that startles scholars is that Gregory could
have applied the notion of deification to individual persons (rather than to
humanity as a whole, deified through Christ‘s incarnation), because that
idea comes perilously close to pagan notions such as apotheōsis, and to the
theurgic operations that ‗made god (theon poiein)‘ present in the souls of
men, propagated by persons such as Julian, the emperor and theurgist, alive
and well at the time Gregory wrote his second oration on priesthood and
the notion of deification.20

18
Winslow, Salvation, 180.
19
J. McGuckin, ‗The Strategic Adaptation of Deification in the Cappadocians‘, in Christen-
sen and Wittung, Partakers of the Divine Nature, 95-114, quote 101-02; Russell, Deification, 222-3,
makes much of Gr. Naz. Or. 42.17, the only time Gregory states that a created being cannot
become God, which for Russell implies that, for Gregory, following Athanasius, man can
‗become god‘ only by analogy.
20
Russell‘s appendix, Deification, 333-44, demonstrates that Christian writers were at pains
to develop a vocabulary that distanced their concepts from such associations.
 SUSANNA ELM 171

Several factors are operative in the scholarly reluctance to attribute a

real rather than merely a metaphorical idea of deification to Gregory of
Nazianzus. Gregory developed his version of deification primarily in two
texts: his Oration 2 on the Priesthood and his Oration 4 Against Julian. Because
Gregory is usually seen, from a historiographic standpoint, as ‗the Theolo-
gian‘, who messed up as Bishop of Constantinople because he was a fine
thinker but a bad administrator, scholars of later Roman history rarely
consider his writings on the priesthood at all when thinking in terms of the
evolution of later Roman episcopal office. Modern theologians, on the other
hand, are interested in Gregory as theologian, and hence focus on his later
so-called Theological Orations, where he employs, but does not explicate, his
notion of theosis (since he did that in his earlier orations). Because theologi-
ans and Church historians use Gregory‘s oration on the priesthood, if at all,
only to note his ideas of pastoral care, they do not pay much attention to
what he has to say about theosis in that oration. Modern philosophers do
not use Gregory to find out what persons like him thought about deification
in the fourth century because he was a Christian Platonist and not a pagan
Neo-Platonist, and modern philosophers do not like to read the texts of
Christian Platonists unless they really cannot avoid them (and in such cases
of dire necessity the confirmed Platonist Gregory of Nyssa tends to be far
more palatable than the other Gregory). Modern historians use Gregory‘s
Oration 4 Against Julian for their (limited since polemical) contributions to
the reconstruction of the Emperor Julian‘s history; Gregory‘s ideas about
theosis are not seen as relevant to that task. Church historians look at
Oration 4 for that same reason, which is also the reason why modern
theologians do not read it: since it deals with the pagan emperor and
apostate Julian, it cannot have any theological content to speak of. Hence
what Gregory has to say here about theosis remains largely overlooked, with
the exception of the two occasions where Gregory actually uses the term: It
is after all in his Oration 4 Against Julian that Gregory coined the new term
theosis. That alone should, however, give us some clues – Gregory developed
the notion of theosis in the context of priesthood and against the Emperor
Julian.
172 PRIEST AND PROPHET

Oikeiosis pros theon – Gregory’s notion of theosis

a) Oikeiosis and Stoa

What, then, does Gregory‘s notion of theosis imply and why does it matter
when thinking about the relation between prophecy understood as expli-
cating the link between divine and human, and priesthood? What does
Gregory actually say? First, in Gregory of Nazianzus‘ case, the scholarly
consensus about the conflation of ‗Platonism‘ and the Bible must be
jettisoned. Gregory never quotes 2 Peter 1:4, the one New Testament
passage alluding to divinisation; Ps. 82:6 is the second Scriptural passage
often adduced in this context and he uses even that one rarely. 21 Further,
Gregory never used the phrase homoiōsis theōi, commonly associated with
the Platonic concept of assimilation to the divine. Instead, in Oration 2 he
speaks exclusively of oikeiōsis pros theon; theiōsis is a conceptual continuation
of his understanding of oikeiōsis pros theon and neither concept is prima facie
Platonic.22 Rather, oikeiōsis is a well-known Stoic concept, and this is
significant for Gregory‘s use of the terminology of deification. The verb
oikeioō from which the nearly untranslatable noun derives means, first, to
grow used to, to treat someone as, or to make someone one‘s own; second,
to feel endearment for; and, third, to assert kinship with someone; a
semantic range that permitted the term oikeiōsis to travel beyond its
technical Stoic usage.23

21
2 Peter 1:14: ‗since I know that the putting off of my body will be soon, as our Lord Jesus
Christ made clear to me‘; Ps. 82:6: ‗I said, ―You are gods, sons of the Most High, all of you‖‘; T.T.
Tollefsen, ‗Theosis according to Gregory‘, in J. Børtnes and T. Hägg (eds), Gregory of Nazianzus.
Images and Reflections (Copenhagen, 2006) 257-70, illuminates his reliance on Scripture.
22
Merki, in his conclusion to Homoiōsis theō, observed that by the 4th century all philosoph-
ical schools used that phrase. Indeed, Gregory of Nyssa did so, but not Gregory of Nazianzus.
23
The point is not whether Gregory was conscious of the Stoic history of the term. G.B.
Kerferd, ‗The Search for Personal Identity in Stoic Thought‘, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library
55 (1972) 177-96, discusses the meaning and translations of the terms at 178-9. R. Bees, Die
Oikeiosislehre der Stoa 1: Rekonstruktion ihres Inhalts (Würzburg, 2004) 248-9. M. Pohlenz,
 SUSANNA ELM 173

In Stoicism, especially as part of Stoic ethics, the term denoted a con-

cept of the self in its relation with the external world; the natural impulse
to love oneself that guarantees the individual‘s well-being was expanded to
include the other: you love yourself best if you love others as if they were
you. Parental love expresses the concept, but the expansion of that love
outward, in widening circles, according to the famous image of the second-
century CE Stoic Hierocles, to more and more distant persons, including
eventually not only humanity but the entire cosmos, was the principal
point. Such a cosmic dimension of the power of self-love is easily explaina-
ble.24 According to Epictetus, all men are brothers because they are Zeus‘s
progeny, so that all humans form one koinōn, are bound by the same
koinōnia. All altruistic acts benefited both the self and the other; to recog-
nise this provides all impulses for ethical behavior – especially since the
altruistic act presupposes a choice (prohairesis) and results from free will
(autexousia; cf. Or. 2.17).25
Thus, Stoic ‗care of the self‗, in contrast to Platonic notions, denotes not
a retreat from the world into oneself, but the expansion of the self in a
voluntary, altruistic gesture benefitting all others. As far as the philosopher
is concerned, this requires that he prove his worth by engaging fully in
life‘s activities. Such a demand, essential to the Stoic philosopher, directly

Grundfragen der stoischen Philosophie (Göttingen, 1940) 1-47, esp. 11, addresses the origins of
oikeiōsis as foundational for Stoic ethics.
24
G. Reydams-Schils, The Roman Stoics: Self, Responsibility, and Affection (Chicago, 2005) 35-79,
115-34.
25
Hierocles at Stobaeus 4.671.7-673.11; see also Epictetus, Diss. 1.13.3; A.A. Long, Hellenistic
Philosophy: Stoics, Epicureans, Sceptics (London, 1974) 172, glosses the Stoic notion of oikeiōsis as
follows: ‗All creatures are so constituted by Nature that they are ‗well-disposed towards
themselves‘. The word translated ‗well-disposed‘ (oikeios) is commonly used in Greek to mean
‗related/akin/belonging to‘; but the Stoics are expressing a technical concept […]. Oikeiosis
determines an animal‘s relationship to its environment, but that to which it is primarily well
disposed is itself (Diogenes Laertius, Lives 7.85). Its self-awareness is an affective relationship,
and all behaviour can be interpreted as an extension or manifestation of the same principle‘.
174 PRIEST AND PROPHET

challenges ‗another distinction, that between the contemplative life and

practical wisdom‘.26 Through participation in the ‗world‘, the Stoic philoso-
pher who attained perfect oikeiōsis identified his self with the entire cosmos,
including humanity, because he understood that all was one and justified by
divine Reason (Logos), itself identical with Nature (Physis), which it also
governs. Hence the philosopher‘s apatheia, or absence of passion, that is,
indifference to good and evil, makes him the perfect mediator between
divine Reason and man, and between human beings.27
Oikeiōsis, the individual‘s linking his self to nature, was also expressed
as the philosopher‘s sympatheia with the entire cosmos. This provided the
cosmological dimension by which oikeiōsis, in late antiquity, entered the
thought world of Platonism, especially in Plotinus, as Gary M. Gurtler has
shown. Here the important point is that such a concept presupposes an
understanding of the created cosmos, including man and his physical body,
as essentially good because divinely created and shared by all. 28 By late
antiquity (by way of Plotinus) such views resulted in a (un-Platonic)
rehabilitation of the physical world as a well-ordered divine economy, in
which all things and persons found their proper place.29

26
Epictetus, Diss. 3.1.4-6; the fuller citation is Reydams-Schils, Roman Stoics, 74: ‗even when
we appear the most withdrawn, even whether in ourselves or on the remotest of islands, we
are actually still involved in community and cannot be otherwise‘; and see Bees, Oikeiosislehre,
248-9 and 285.
27
E.g. Chrysippus in Diogenes Laertius 7.87-8; Long, Hellenistic Philosophy, 165; also Rey-
dams-Schils, Roman Stoics, 37. In Long‘s words, ‗Soul and Body in Stoicism‘, Phronesis 27 (1982)
34-57, quote 37: ‗There is in Stoicism a great chain of being which tolerates no discontinuity or
introduction of principles which operate at one level but not at another. The entire universe is
a combination of god and matter, and what applies to the whole applies to any one of its
identifiable parts‘.
28
G.M. Gurtler, ‗Sympathy: Stoic Materialism and the Platonic Soul‘, in M.F. Wagner (ed.),
Neoplatonism and Nature: Studies in Plotinus’ ‘Enneads’ (Albany, N.Y., 2002) 241-76.
29
P. Hadot, ‗L‘apport du néoplatonisme à la philosophie de la nature en Occident‘, in Tradi-
tion und Gegenwart: Eranos Jahrbuch 1968 (Zurich, 1970) 91-132, here 118-21.
 SUSANNA ELM 175

b) Oration 2

Gregory‘s second oration stands firmly in this tradition.30 In this oration,

Gregory outlines his notions of perfect priesthood: the ideal orthodox priest
is none other than the philosopher. Gregory‘s emphasis on the philosophi-
cal life has, however, typically been read in the Christian Platonic or Neo-
Platonic vein as reflecting a retreat to the self understood as strict rejection
of the world and its imbroglios. Indeed, on the face of it, Gregory‘s second
oration, also known as Apology for his Flight, makes much of his repulsion
when forced to return to the world and accept a position of leadership. It
certainly can be read as expressing the idea that the true philosophical life
cannot be lived other than in isolation, and, correspondingly, Gregory has
long stood paradigmatic for the traditional idea of tension between the
Christian philosophical ideal of ascetic retreat, or hesychia, and the office of
priest or bishop.
Gregory‘s intense use of the language of oikeiosis redirects that empha-
sis. As is the case with the Neo-Platonic philosophers Dominic O‘Meara
discusses in his Platonopolis, Gregory‘s use of oikeiosis when describing his
ideal philosophical life indicates that for him philosophical return to the
self implies leading others to the same ideals: the philosophical ideal is
precisely that of leadership of the oikoumene, conceptually as well as
practically.31 Gregory‘s is an active, political philosophical life. It rests on a
positive evaluation of nature and the world, including the human body. For
Gregory, each Christian person is a member of the body of the church, a
single, well-ordered organism affiliated with God. Therefore, Gregory‘s

30
Clement and Origen also contributed to Gregory‘s notions. For Clement, a sense of inti-
macy with the divine was essential to oikeiōsis; Origen added an emphasis on the agency of God
in establishing that intimacy between himself and the believer, and on the Christian‘s
enthusiastic embrace of that kinship. Apatheia as an aspect of oikeiōsis was particularly
important for Clement, Stromateis 4.23.148; 6.9.73; Quis dives salvetur 7 and 33.1; M. Spanneut, Le
stoïcisme des Pères de l’Église. De Clément de Rome à Clément d’Alexandrie. (Paris, 19572) 249-50; and
377. For Origen see Contra Celsum 4.6.
31
D.J. O‘Meara, Platonopolis: Platonic Political Philosophy in Late Antiquity (Oxford, 2003).
176 PRIEST AND PROPHET

philosopher as leader was called to act altruistically on behalf of others, and

he accepted that duty voluntarily.
In Gregory‘s words, it is the philosopher‘s principal ergon, or duty, to
reach the highest possible state of purification which implies the closest
possible approximation of the divine. Such closeness is both spatial as well
as ethical: the purer the philosopher, the nearer to God, and the closer he
will be to the originator of the chain that links God, the Good, nature, and
man. Once the philosopher has reached the highest possible degree of
purity, he must then, according to the principles of oikeiosis, voluntarily
accept the yoke of leadership, so that he can bring those farther away from
the supreme good, God, closer to God also, thus making them, too, God.
Thus, the philosopher embraces and then hands down to those in his care
the kind of good that is ‗something not merely sown by nature, but also
cultivated by choice (prohairesis) and by the back-and-forth motions of the
free will‘ (τὸ ἀγαθὸν ... οὐ φύσει μόνον κατασπειρόμενον, ἀλλὰ καὶ
προαιρέσει γεωργούμενον καὶ τοῖς ἐπ‘ ἄμφω τοῦ αὐτεξουσίου κινήμασιν, Or.
2.17). The ‗true philosophers and lovers of god‘ are defined by their disa-
vowal of self in preference to ‗kinship‘ with the divine: divinisation is only
possible at the cost of self-effacement – but such voluntary self-effacement
is the first act in a sequence that first affiliates the philosopher with the
divine, and then, through his mediating agency, all in his care with the
divine also.
Such were the central tenets of Gregory‘s definition of the philosopher
as physician of the soul, which he elaborates in Oration 2. Because as
philosopher and physician, Gregory had progressed ‗higher than the
multitude in [his] virtue and oikeiōsis pros theon‘, he now had to become
active and show his mettle by altruistically taking on the yoke of servitude:
to guide others to greater kinship with the divine also, body and soul. His
means to do so were his words (Or. 2.3 and 91). His most powerful pharma-
kon, the words with the greatest healing effect but also, if misused, the
greatest potential to cause infinite harm, were the words that encompassed
the Trinity: the Logos.
 SUSANNA ELM 177

To bring home (eisoikisai) the Logos, Christ, in the hearts of men ‗is what
the law our teacher (ὁ παιδαγωγός νόμος) intends for us; this the prophets
intend who mediate between the law and Christ; this Christ intends, the
fulfillment and the end of the spiritual law; 32 this is the intent of the divine
that has emptied, of the flesh taken on. This is the intention of the new
mixture (μίξις), God and man, one thing out of two and both present in one.
This is why God has been mixed with the flesh through the soul as mediator
and why two separated realities‘ (Or. 2.22),33 the divine and matter, ‗have
been joined, because the soul, acting as intermediary, is affiliated with
both‘, so that everything, because it has only one source, one father, ‗strives
toward the One‘.34 Christ‘s birth, passion, and resurrection (Or. 2.24-5) are
the means God, our teacher, devised for our ‗formation ... and as a healing
cure for our weakness‘.35 Gregory is the servant of this healing cure: this is
the ‗medicine we, who sit above others, serve and of which we are fellow-
workers‘ (Or. 2.26).
As physician of the soul and as leader (that is, priest) the true philoso-
pher reinforced the individual soul‘s affiliation to, or kinship, with the
divine, the Logos, by adhering to ethical demands that also affected the
body: the physician of the soul must prescribe means that heal both,
because ‗the soul is to the body what God is to the soul‘: the soul must
educate the body so that it will become her ‗fellow-slave, affiliated to God‘
(Or. 2.17). Oikeiōsis to God affects soul and body both; the link between soul

32
ὁ τοῦ πνευματικοῦ νόμου τελειωτὴς καὶ τὸ τέλος
33
διὰ τοῦτο Θεὸς σαρκὶ διὰ μέσης ψυχῆς ἀνεκράθη. ἀνεκράθη, aor. passive of
anakerannumi, means to dilute, used mainly for water and wine, which gives the passage an
eucharistic tone. For the centrality in Iamblichus, Porphyry, and Plotinus of the soul as mean
between two extremes, divine intellect and material (human) body, F. Finamore and J.M. Dillon
(eds), Iamblichus De Anima. Text, Translation and Commentary (Leiden, 2002) 14-17, 30-31.
34
Gr. Naz. Or. 2.23: … Χριστός, τοῦτο ἡ κενωθεῖσα θεότης, τοῦτο ἡ προσλεφθεῖσα σάρξ,
τοῦτο ἡ καινὴ μίξις, Θεὸς καὶ ἄνθρωπος, ἕν ἐξ ἀμφοῖν καὶ δι‘ ἑνὸς ἀμφότερα.
35
Gr. Naz. Or. 2.25: παιδαγωγία τις ἦν περὶ ἡμᾶς τοῦ Θεοῦ καὶ τῆς ἀσθενείας ἰατρεία.
178 PRIEST AND PROPHET

and God, like the ethical demands strengthening it, are real, not a metaphor
– the opposite of what Norman Russell has proposed.
Gregory shares with others at his time the notion of the physical body
as essentially good and worthy of salvation. The idea of the cosmos as good
was held widely by Christians and non-Christians alike. The Emperor Julian
expressed it when he stressed that the soul, deified through the purifying
rites and the ethical conduct required by the myth of the Great Mother, also
healed the body.36 After all, Julian and Gregory both knew that the well-
ordered cosmos and its manifestation, the oikoumenē of the Romans, was
theirs (to lead); there was no reason to consider it anything but in essence
good, even if it needed improvement.
Indeed, Gregory‘s notion of philosophical leadership as oikeiosis pros
theon is an elite model. Not everyone, as he repeatedly stressed, was able to
reach the required philosophical heights: to do so required first and
foremost the qualifications well-established by Greek paideia. One had to be
well-born, ideally into a philosophical marriage, and one had to be exceed-
ingly well educated. Otherwise, it would be impossible to grasp the funda-
mental of that philosophy which would ensure purity – purity, in sum, was
not the result of retreat from the world, but of deep penetration into the
depth of philosophical learning (including proper grasp of Aristotelian

36
In Peter Brown‘s words, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early
Christianity (New York, 1988) 27: ‗An unaffected symbiosis of body and soul was the aim both of
medicine and philosophical exhortation ... The body had its rightful place in the great chain of
being that linked man both to the gods and to the beasts‘. Julian, Or. 7.178bc uses the verb theoō
for the deified state of the soul (θεωθεῖσαι). Julian‘s imperial letter excluding Christians from
public teaching, Ep. 61 (Wright 36), declared that ‗right education‘ resulted ‗in a healthy
condition of the mind, that is, one which has understanding and true beliefs‘, and that those
who believed mistakenly in Christianity suffered from a disease of the mind and soul, of which
they ought ‗to be cured, even against their will, as one cures the insane... . For we ought, I
thought, to teach, but not to punish the demented (Καίτοι δίκαιον ἦν, ὥσπερ τοὺς
φρεντίζοντας, οὕτω καὶ τούτους ἄκουντας ἰᾶσθαι πλὴν ἀλλὰ συγγνώμην ὑπάρχειν ἅπασι τῆς
τοιαύτης νόσού. καὶ γὰρ, οἶμαι, διδάσκειν, ἀλλ‘ οὐχὶ κολάζειν χρὴ τοὺς ἀνοήτους) –
reintegration rather than further exclusion was Julian‘s aim.
 SUSANNA ELM 179

logic), for which retreat was a good precondition (but not per se the aim).
As such, as an elite model, Gregory‘s idea of leadership, of priesthood,
implied a ‗dual ethics‘.

Such a ‗dual ethics‗, a term proposed by Norman Baynes, was already

part of Eusebius‘s concepts, who wrote in the (Dem. Ev. 1.8) that there are
two ‗lawful modes of life in the Church‘ (τῇ Χριστοῦ ἐκκλησίᾳ δύο βίων
νενομοθετῆσθαι τρόπους), one of which is ‗entirely set at variance with the
entirety of common and accustomed ways of all men, and fit only for the
service of God in extremity of heavenly desire‘ (ὅλον δὲ δι‘ ὅλου τῆς κοινῆς
καὶ συνήθους ἁπάντων ἀνθρώπων ἀγωγῆς παρηλλαγμένον, καὶ μόνῃ τῇ
τοῦ θεοῦ θεραπείᾳ προσῳκειωμένον καθ‘ ὑπερβολὴν ἔρωτος οὐρανίου),
while for the other ‗a second rang of piety has been accorded‘ (τούτοις
δεύτερος εὐσεβείας ἀπενεμήθη βαθμός).37 This dual ethics necessarily
determined notions of salvation. In Eusebius‘ words, none is deprived of
salvation (‗μηδένα ἀμοιρεῖν τῆς σωτηρίου ἐπιφανείας‘), yet the average man
depends on the few ‗consecrated on behalf of the whole humankind to the
God who is in charge of everyone‘ (ὑπὲρ τοῦ παντὸς γένους ἱερωμένοι τῷ
ἐπὶ πάντων θεῷ).
Gregory develops this further to have two implications. First, because
of the fundamental linking of all men to God through divinely initiated
kinship, oikeiosis, everyone can be saved. But, second, moral perfection,
even if desirable, is not expected from an average Christian, because the
perfection of the philosopher-as-leader makes such ethical demands upon
the less perfect unnecessary. In a passage in Oration 4 Against Julian (Or. 4.99),
Gregory insists on the necessity of a two-tiered ethics and implies that such
an ethics is a distinguishing feature of Christian philosophy (τῆς ἡμετέρας
φιλοσοφίας).

37
Cited by N. Baynes, ‗The Thought-World of East Rome‘, Reprinted in Byzantine Studies and
Other Essays (London, 1960) 24-46, at 26.
180 PRIEST AND PROPHET

Gregory rebukes Julian for ‗legislating [a set of ethical demands that] is

beyond the ability of each and every one‘ (τί σοι βούλεται τὸ ταῦτα
νομοθετεῖν ἃ μὴ τῶν πάντων ἐστίν...), privileging the chosen few who can
achieve such high ethical demands and thus essentially condemning the
many to forgo the salvation afforded the few (this, of course, is Gregory‘s
polemical evaluation). By contrast, ‗our law enjoins necessity in some of its
aspects, those which must be upheld if the danger is to be avoided (τῆς
ἡμετέρας νομοθεσίας τὰ μὲν ἀνάγκην ἔχει τοῖς ἐπιταττομένοις, ἃ καὶ μὴ
φυλάττουσι κίνδυνος), while in others, it involves free choice, so that while
those who uphold the law win honour and reward, those who do not are
not in any way endangered (τὰ δὲ οὐκ ἀνάγκην, αἵρεσιν δέ· ἃ φυλάττουσι
μέν, τιμὴν καὶ ἀντίδοσιν, μὴ φυλάττουσι δέ, οὐκ ὅντιν‘ οὖν κίνδυνον)‘.
Phrased differently, because of the ethical height reached by the few, the
many may be saved even if they cannot reach the level of the former; thus
is the power of oikeiosis pros theon that the select few are capable of saving
all in their care thanks to the their voluntary submission to the needs of the
many.

c) Oration 4

Indeed, Gregory‘s presentation of the Emperor Julian and his choice of

philosophical life provides additional nuances for his concept. Gregory first
introduced his neologism theosis in Oration 4 in the context of denigrating
the philosophical models the Platonist Emperor Julian had chosen as his
ideals for a true philosophical life. These philosophers, Empedocles, Crates,
Plato, and so on, revealed in their lives and deaths the fatal flaw that also
marred Julian: they strove for virtue—and for divinisation—because of self-
interest, vainglory, and self love (κενόδοξος καὶ ἀφιλόσοφος, and
φιλαυτία). Hence, like Julian in his legislation, they perfected their own
assimilation to the divine (homoiosis theo, the term Julian also used, for
example in his oration against the Cynic Heraclius) without further regard
of the common good, indeed, by retreating from the common good into
 SUSANNA ELM 181

isolation and ‗the shade‘ of mere contemplation. Their life and its ethic
basis made no allowance for those of lesser aptitude.
Thus, Gregory ridicules Empedocles‘s attempts at self-deification ‗by
means of Sicilian craters‘ (τοῖς Σικελικοῖς κρατῆρσιν ἑαυτὸν θεώσας, ὡς
ᾤετο; Or.4.59): he had thrown himself into the Aetna to make his body
disappear, thereby suggesting deification, but he was found out when his
sandal got caught on the crater‘s rim. Gregory‘s philosophers, by contrast,
seek honour from God only (τῆς παρὰ θεοῦ τιμῆς) or, ‗even more than that
they embrace the kinship (oikeiosis) toward the beautiful for the sake of the
beautiful itself‘ (τὴν πρὸς τὸ καλὸν οἰκείωσιν ἀγαπῶντες δι‘ αὐτὸ τὸ καλόν,
Or. 4.60). Again, Gregory proposes a distinct opposition between the
exercise of one‘s free will for oneself, and one‘s free will to chose renuncia-
tion of the self for the sake of the other: true philosophers and lovers of god
chose voluntarily ‗kinship‘ with the divine through abnegation of self-
interest thus to better affiliate all with God. 38
As a result, and in contrast to the famous philosophers of the past (and,
in the person of Julian, the present), motivated by earthly glory, the ideal
Christian philosophers ‗know no measure in their ascent and deification‘
(μηδὲν μέτρον εἰδότων ἀναβάσεως καὶ θεώσεως, Or. 4.71). Again, in contrast
to the familiar Platonic idea of assimilation to the divine, their kinship and
deification embraces rather than rejects human nature, the embodied state
was of immense value. After all, the miracle-working dead bodies of
martyrs are the ultimate proof of the efficacy of Christian theosis (Or. 4.69),
so that Christian philosophers ‗lose sight of their nature only where it is
necessary to make oneself kin with God through chastity and mastery‘
(κἀνταῦθα μόνον ἐπιλανθανομένων τῆς φύσεως οὗ δεῖ θεὸν οἰκειοῦσθαι δι‘
ἁγνείας καὶ καρτερίας, Or. 4.73).

38
For the emergence of free will in Stoicism and for Augustine‘s own developments of his
notion of free will, also greatly influenced by Stoicism and, I think, by Gregory of Nazianzus,
see M. Frede, A Free Will. Origins of the Notion in Ancient Thought (Berkeley, 2011) 31-48, 153-74.
182 PRIEST AND PROPHET

Gregory‘s theosis, the telos of Christian life, is a riposte to Empedocles‘

failed ‗self-deification‘ (Or. 4.59). Thus, his most succinct definition occurs
in the last sentence of the oration, in which Gregory depicts Christian life as
dynamic in contrast to the self-centred, static whirling of pagan life that
spins like a top (alluding to Plato Republic, 436d): ‗One of the beautiful things
(τῶν καλῶν) we have achieved; another we hold on to; and still another we
aim for; until we reach the telos of deification (μέχρι τοῦ τέλους καὶ τῆς
θεώσεως) for which we are born and to which we are propelled, those of us
at any rate who are advanced in our way of thinking (οἵ γε διαβατικοὶ τὴν
διάνοιαν) and expect something worthy of God‘s magnanimity‘ (Or. 4.121).

Summary

Gregory‘s model of the priest/bishop, based on the concept on the correct

interaction of individual salvation and the common good is, no doubt,
essentially an elite model. It assumes and defends the division of man into
the very few capable of achieving maximal personal purity equated with
achieving the heights of classic philosophical education as required by
paideia, understood as representing at the same time the highest ethical
ideals. Such a life of the few, the true philosophical life, required retreat
and a focus on the self, but in Gregory‘s Stoic understanding of that life and
that retreat, personal, individual perfection could only be accomplished if it
was then extended outward to encompass all others, less able to reach
these heights. Only through a voluntary act of submission of the self to all
others, to the common good and the community of all, could the salvation
of each, both the philosopher and the common man, be achieved. That was
the foundational notion of kinship, affiliation with the divine, and only in
such a way could each person ‗become God‘. This affiliation with the divine,
becoming God, had indeed been prefigured and made real in the Trinity:
‗why else had Christ become man if not to make us God‘? (Or. 32.14). Other
forms of the philosophical life, then for example embraced by the Emperor
Julian, failed to achieve this aim, because they did not provide for the kind
of mediation between man and God Gregory‘s notion entailed. Precisely the
 SUSANNA ELM 183

gap Gregory postulates between the philosophical elite and hoi polloi
necessitates priestly mediation, and that mediation is in fact the only way
to deify all truly. Whereas Julian‘s philosophical ideals strives merely for
‗sublimity in appearance‘, Gregory as priest and philosopher achieves
sublimity in [his] way of life‘ (τὸ ἐν τοῖς σχήμασιν ὑψηλὸν ... τὸ ἐν τῷ
τρόπῳ) and thus can, rather than simply impressing them, really ‗educate
the multitude‘ (τοὺς πολλοὺς ἐκπαιδεύομεν, Or. 4.114), by caring for the ‗the
inner man‘ (τὸν ἐντὸς ἄνθρωπον).
While acknowledging the vast distance that separates the ‗few‘ and the
‗many‘, Gregory nevertheless distributes the privileges of the few to all by
positing an ‗individual‘ that is not a self-contained entity, held accountable
to an absolute ethical standard, but a notion of an individual that – para-
doxically-became inclusive by becoming ‗supra‘-individual: hoi polloi are to
be made members of the same body as the elites, parts of a single organism,
‗God‘s own‘ (and as a consequence, they perceive God as ‗their own‘).
As should have become apparent, though, Gregory‘s sophisticated con-
cept nevertheless was based on and incorporated a number of characteris-
tics of ‗the prophet‘ that we also saw operative in Shenoute, especially the
idea of being ‗at the margins‘ as a result of deep purification achieved
through ascetic retreat, and the notion of divine revelation, initiated by a
dream or a vision. Not least, these qualities permitted, indeed, demanded of
the philosopher as prophet a vigourous criticism of competing leaders,
deemed of lesser value. On the other hand, Gregory‘s notion of theosis
became so powerful, I think, because the philosopher-prophet as priest
differs from all others only by degree of advancement to the same goal,
shared by all: he has ‗to have progressed farther than others in their
closeness to God‘ (ὑπὲρ τοὺς ἄλλους μακρῷ γενέσθαι τῇ πρὸς θεὸν ἐγγύτητι,
Or. 2.91). But that advance position then benefits all others; it is an inclusive
model – and here the parallels to Shenoute may be most instructive –
because the closer to God the philosopher-as-leader has progressed, the
better he can then assume the role of mediator between God and the
common people, making them too become God: ‗placed between God and
the humans, engaging in a contest on behalf of the latter while leading the
184 PRIEST AND PROPHET

chosen people toward—and affiliating it to—the former‘ (μέσος θεοῦ καὶ

ἀνθρώπων ἱστάμενος, ὑπὲρ μὲν τῶν ἀγωνιζόμενος, τῷ δὲ προσάγων καὶ
οἰκειῶν λαὸν περιούσιον, Or. 2.53).