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PLATO'S SOUL AND THE BODY OF THE TEXT IN AND

David Dawson

Bibliographical Introduction

This essay examines some of the ways that two ancient Alexandrian thinkers, the Jewish Piatonist Philo (ca. 25 B.C.E. - 50 CE.) and the Christian Platonist Origen (184/5 - ca. 254 C.E.), used the metaphor of a text's body in the course of their accounts of the transforma• tive effects of allegorical reading.1 Philo and Origen closely connect the text's body (its textuality) and soul (its meaning) with the bod• ies and souls of the text's allegorical readers. By describing a read• ing process that forges strong links between real and textual bodies, and real and textual souls, these two Platonists radically transform 's conception of a soul that is properly non-textual and non- bodily (for an account of Plato's quest for a soul purified from the influences of poetic narratives and the body, see Eric A. Havelock's Preface to Plato [Cambridge, Mass., 1963]). [On some attitudes of other ancient interpreters toward the body, see chapter 6; on some differences in orientation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, see chapter 19. —ed.] In the course of the essay, I examine passages from Plato's Republic and Phaedrus (conveniently available in Greek and English in The Loeb Classical Library; newer English translations in The Collected Dicdogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns [Princeton, NJ., 1961]); from Philo's Questions and Answers on Genesis, On the Migration of Abraham, and The Contemplative Life (also available in the Loeb series); and from Origen's On First Principles, Commentary on the Gospel of John, Against , and 'Commentary on Psalm 1.5' (Greek and

1 I wish to express my appreciation to the National Endowment for the Humanities, which provided a Summer Stipend in support of the research project on which this essay is based. 90 DAVID DAWSON texts in Origenes Werke in Die griechischen chnstlichen Schriftsteller der ersten drei Jahrhunderte, vols. 5, 4, 1-2, and 27, respectively; English trans• lations in Ongen: On First Principles, trans. G.W. Butterworth [New York, 1966]; Ongen. Commentary on the Gospel According to John Books 1-10, trans. Ronald E. Heine [Washington, D.C., 1989]; Contra Celsum, trans. Henry Chadwick [Cambridge, 1965]; and [for fragments from the 'Commentary on Psalm 1.5'] Jon F. Dechow, Dogma and Mysticism in Early : Epiphanius of Cyprus and the L·gacy of Origen [Macon, Ga., 1988], 373-76). To view ancient allegorical reading of texts as a means by which non-textual, and especially non-narrative, forms of human identity were re-textualized or re-narrativized, is to challenge the dominant understanding of the subject. Scholars typically regard allegorical reading as inherently uncommitted to the significance of textual details in their own right. Classicists who have long debated whether ancient allegorical reading was a 'positive' technique of authentic philoso• phizing or a 'defensive' effort to protect the poets against philo• sophical attack have tended to agree that allegorical practice was valued precisely for its capacity to move readers' attention away from the particularities of texts (see J. Tate, 'On the History of Allegorism,' Classical Quarterly 28 [1934]: 105-14). Similarly, whether theologians and scholars of ancient biblical interpretation have applauded alle• gorical reading as a means of discerning the deeper spiritual mean• ings of scripture, or, contrasting it with 'typology,' attacked it as a way of replacing scriptural with non-scriptural meanings, they have often agreed that allegorical reading serves to displace the text itself in favor of something ultimately deemed more important (for an influential example of this sort of allegory/typology contrast, see Erich Auerbach, '"Figura,"' trans. Ralph Manheim, in Auerbach's Scenes from the Drama of European Literature [1959; rpt. Minneapolis, 1984], 11-71). In Allegorical Readers and Cultural Revision in Ancient Alexandria (Berkeley, 1992), and in the present essay, I have explored some aspects of the alternative possibility—that allegorical reading by ancient Jews and Christians, at least in certain circumstances, enabled the particular• ities of the scriptural canon to reshape, and thereby reinterpret, the non-scriptural meanings prominent in the interpreter's culture. There is an interesting similarity between my challenge to those scholars of biblical interpretation who have denigrated allegorical reading for theological and Robert Lamberton's challenge to those clas-