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Panayiotis Tzamalikos, Anaxagoras, Origen, and Neoplatonism. Te Panayiotis Tzamalikos, Anaxagoras, Origen, and Neoplatonism. !e Legacy of Anaxagoras to Classical and Late Antiquity, Vol. I and II, Arbeiten zur Kirchengeschichte 128/I and 128/II, Berlin–Boston, De Gruyter 2016, XIX + IX + 1793 p., ISBN: 978-3-11-041946-7 Florin George Calian* !is massive book, with no less than 1822 pages, published in two volumes, aims to narrate how Anaxagoras, one of the most enigmatic Presocratics, indirectly in"uenced patristic thinking beyond what current scholarship would expect. !e overall work has four parts. !e #rst volume covers the Philosophy of Anaxagoras (the #rst part) and the Legacy of Anaxagoras to Classical and Late Antiquity (the second part), while the second volume is dedicated to Origen (the third part), and to the !eory of the Soul: from Anaxagoras to Antiquity (the fourth part). !e author intends to provide a comprehensive study on two di$cult ancient intellectuals who belong to two historically, culturally, and even geographically, di%erent areas. !e book has so far received little attention,1 and one would imagine a possible reason is that the reader of such an ambitious study should be equally pro#- cient both in Presocratic philosophy and Patristics thought. !e author announces epic goals as he aims to provide an overview of Anaxagoras’ philosophy and its heritage – in itself a considerable endeavor – and argues for the idea that Origen can be best understood through an Anaxagorean lens. !e Presocratic philosopher is well-known for his theory that ‘everything is in everything’, and for arguing that the Mind is the cause of the universe. Both Plato and Aristotle were not satis#ed with his philos- ophy, but not Origen, who, according to Tzamalikos (T.), found inspiring points in Anaxagoras’s philosophy. !roughout the book, T. advances his thesis in an almost dogmatic manner, to the point that he labels Origen “a pupil of Anaxagoras”. T. insists that the history of ancient philosophy that he provides here challenges W. K. C. Guthrie and his now classic A History of Greek * Florin George Calian, Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu, Institute for Ecumenical Re- search, Philosophy and Religious Studies Unit, 30 Mitropoliei St., 550179 Sibiu, Romania, [email protected]. 1 So far, I identi#ed only two reviews in the English-speaking scholarship: Mark J. Edwards, review of Anaxagoras, Origen, and Neoplatonism. !e Legacy of Anaxagoras to Classical and Late Antiquity, by Panayiotis Tzamalikos, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 69, no. 3 (July 2018): 610–12, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022046918000507, and Ilaria L.E. Ramelli, review of Anaxagoras, Origen, and Neoplatonism. !e Legacy of Anaxagoras to Classical and Late Antiquity, by Panayiotis Tzamalikos, Gnomon 92, no. 2 (2020): 109–13, https://doi. org/10.17104/0017-1417-2020-2-109. RES 12 (3/2020), p. 556-561 DOI: 10.2478/ress-2020-0044 Book Reviews / Buchrezensionen Philosophy. !e book under review is based on “an entirely di%erent meth- odology” (p. 69) that evokes many elements elaborated by Harold Cherniss – especially in Aristotle’s criticism of the Presocratics. Cherniss’ methodolo- gy, T. caustically remarks, was avoided by Guthrie since “this would have been a far more demanding undertaking” (p. 69). While Guthrie et al. re- garded Aristotle as receptive to historical facts, and, consequently, a reliable source on the Presocratics, Cherniss and Tzamalikos place little value on Aristotle as a trustworthy historian of philosophy. T.’s methodology for read- ing Anaxagoras (explained at p. 42-55) is therefore based on the principle that it should not follow Aristotle’s explicit testimonies, “but also what he said of him implicitly, which calls for study of all of Aristotle’s commen- tators”. !e key commentator in T.’s new methodology is Simplicius, an author completely ignored by present-day scholarship on Anaxagoras, as the author claims. I #nd this dichotomy (Cherniss versus Guthrie) too exacting and ex- clusivist.2 One of the ensuing results for this methodological choice is that T. deliberately ignores modern scholarship, since it “has almost entirely relied on Aristotle’s parochial report” (p. 41). T. challenges not only the Guthrie’s apparent apology of Aristotle, but also the relevance of ‘the precarious’ Diels- Kranz fragments. !us, T. is “introducing a di%erent methodology, which is much more di$cult to pursue compared to deciphering ‘D-K’-passages”. !e attempt to avoid Aristotle’s testimony and to minimize Diels-Kranz fragments is unaccounted for in the scholarship on Anaxagoras, and T’s ar- guments are too feeble and inconsistent in order to be taken seriously. T. equally ignores the immense work that has been done on Origen. A little before T.’s book was issued, an important survey of recent publications on Origen and the Alexandrian Tradition was published,3 but almost none of the surveyed titles are present in T.’s book. All scholars must have felt, at some point, the fatigue of imposed controlled reading by the immense cor- pus of scholarship and the desire to read primary sources without the con- stant reference to other readings. Nevertheless, the unwillingness to enter into dialogue with current scholarship on Origen and on Anaxagoras is one of the book’s major weaknesses. As it is also the stated principle of its meth- odology, it casts a shadow across the whole enterprise. It would have been 2 Guthrie himself expressed his “general admiration and appreciation of the fact that [Cherniss’ work] it is a permanent contribution with which all future scholarship will have to reckon.” W. K. C. Guthrie, “Aristotle as a Historian of Philosophy: Some Preliminaries,” !e Journal of Hellenic Studies 77 (1957): 35–41, 35. 3 Lorenzo Perrone, “Pubblicazioni recenti su Origene e la tradizione alessandrina,” in Ada- mantius 21 (2015): 425–94. 557 Book Reviews / Buchrezensionen more honest and convincing if the author argued for a reading of Anaxagoras without referring to modern scholarship in a manner closer to philosophical commentaries rather than to exegetical ones. Despite the huge in"uence that Origen had on the development of Christian theology, several essential aspects concerning his philosophical and theological identity require further clari#cations. Several of Origen’s views remain uncanonical and his heresies were considered to be caused by the inherent Platonism of his theology. And indeed, he regularly uses Plato and develops his theology in a platonic mold. For T., this Platonism is readily apparent, while Origen’s thinking was fundamentally Anaxagorean. Despite there being no evidence that Origen ever alluded to Anaxagoras – although some tenets of his philosophy could have been known by Origen –, Origen was an Anaxagorean, and less of a Platonist, to the point that T. labelled him as an anti-Platonist. Furthermore, T. argues, if Origen used Plato in any way, he did so only to interpret his ideas through Anaxagorean principles. But which one of the Origens is he actually speaking about? !e pa- gan one or the Christian one? T. claims that both of them are the same person, although he presents no evidence, ignoring, once again, and with no justi#cation, the extant literature on the issue. How then can he accommo- date the anti-Platonist Origen with the pagan Platonist Origen, the student of Ammonius Saccas? !e author does not even start to discuss the problem. One of T.’s factual arguments in describing Origen as Anaxagorean, is that Proclus mentioned Origen in the Platonic !eology as one of those, and above all others, who a$rmed Mind (Nous) as the supreme principle – a statement which would indeed make Origen a disciple of Anaxagoras, and not of Plato. Proclus criticized Origen “as being an anti-Platonist who dis- missed the Plotinian pattern”. But T. points out that “the guardians of the imperial orthodoxy accused him of making the Christian Trinity a Plotinian Triad” (p. 823). T. struggles to show that “the ‘object’ that the Father created in the Logos/Wisdom was not any Platonic Ideas: it was the logoi” (p. 868). !is is an important feature, since T. reasons that Origen’s concept of the Body of the Logos was Anaxagorean in its essence. According to T., Origen’s !eory of the Logoi is also evident for Gregory of Nyssa, an admirer of Origen, and even for Maximus Confessor, who avoids mentioning the forms, but does make reference to the logoi (p. 874). For T., Plato’s “failure” and “Aristotle’s ‘obscurity’” in explaining how the supreme principle relates to sensible objects drives Origen’s attention to the !eory of the Logoi, a theory which is “the most spectacular and stunning in"uence of Anaxagoras upon Late Antiquity” (p. 867). According to T., the Anaxagorean logoi make possible the link between the Mind and the world. 558 Book Reviews / Buchrezensionen Conceptualizing the logoi of Anaxagoras, and not those developed by stoi- cism, Origen took up the !eory of the Logoi in his philosophical theology (p. 891). Ironically, in T.’s aggressive attempts to purge Origen’s thought of pla- tonic elements, I could not help the feeling that the hidden protagonist of this book is actually Plato. !e author uses pejorative a$rmations on Plato, such us “[Plato] was too confused to have an opinion of its own” (p. 1524) on the theory of metempsychosis. In another fragment, the author claims that “it would be good to bear in mind how much of Plato’s work is the product of inconsistently adapted plagiarism” (p. 1524). Additional exam- ples include: “the Republic was allegedly a product of plagiarism from Egypt” (p. 1530), and “Plato was the most notorious plagiarist of all history” (p. 1181). Plato’s thought is too complex, and cannot be reduced to plagiarism in such simple terms.
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