[FONT="]Bill Rhea[/FONT]
[FONT="]Christian Platonists of Alexandria[/FONT]
[FONT="]The Light of the World[/FONT]
[FONT="]The[/FONT][FONT="] [/FONT][FONT="]Greek[/FONT][FONT="] [/FONT][FONT="]text[/FONT][FONT="] [/FONT][FONT="]of[/FONT][FONT="] [/FONT][FONT="]John[/FONT][FONT="] 1:9 [/FONT][FONT="]reads[/FONT][FONT="] ην το φως το αληθινον ο φωτιζει παντα ανθρωπον ερχομενον εις τον κοσμον. [/FONT][FONT="]Modern English translations have tended to take the implied subject of [/FONT][FONT="]ερχομενον[/FONT][FONT="] as [/FONT][FONT="]το[/FONT][FONT="] [/FONT][FONT="]φως[/FONT][FONT="], thus rendering the passage as The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world. Cyril of Alexandria, in Book I, Chapter 9 of his commentary on the Gospel of John, offers a different interpretation of the same passage. He takes [/FONT][FONT="]παντα[/FONT][FONT="] [/FONT][FONT="]ανθρωπον[/FONT][FONT="] as the antecedent of the implied subject in [/FONT][FONT="]εροχομενον[/FONT][FONT="], a reading which translates into English as He [or That] was the true light, who enlightens every person coming into the world. Under this interpretation, John 1:9 is not a statement about the light coming into the world in the incarnation, but rather about the illumination of the world through the eternal creative work of the Logos. The following will attempt to describe Cyrils account of John 1 through a focus on his argumentation concerning this passage, and then proceed to understand his reading of John through a consideration of his philosophical and cultural context. Although his reading of the text has been virtually abandoned in modern translations, it may prove to be worth a second look.[/FONT]
[FONT="]Cyril begins his consideration of John 1:9 in Ch. 8, having already exhaustively considered the opening verses of the Johannine prologue. The previous chapters focus, in particular, on the relationship between God and the Word in order to demonstrate, as he summarizes so poetically in Ch. 8, the Word of God is essentially light
passing through the Father into the Heir of His Essence. At this point Cyril draws a strong contrast between the true light of the Logos and the other light which is not light at all. It appears that Cyril is not trying to call genuine truth within the world a sort of false truth, but instead is trying to call it an untrue light in the sense that whatever light it has is reflected. The true light, the Logos, is true in the sense that the light of the sun is true: the light of the sun is generated by the sun. So too, earthly visions of the good, the true, and the beautiful are not true light in the same way that the light of the moon is not self-generating; genuine truths comprehended by the world are not the sources of illumination, but rather reflections of the higher, genuine, true light, the Logos. This distinction between the true light and reflected light reminds one readily of the common grace vs. nature distinction at work throughout patristic literature.[/FONT]
[FONT="]Having brought his discussion of the Johannine prologue up to this point, Cyril proceeds to consider v. 9b. He begins by rehashing the theme of the previous chapter with particular attention to the illumination provided by angels and prophets. His consideration as this point, however, moves beyond the distinction between autonomously-generated light and reflected light, and instead deploys a distinction between the simplicity of the unified vision of wisdom and the refracted complexity of particular wisdom found among creatures. Thus, that in the creature is what is compound, and nought of simple is in it. Cyrils point here touches on his anti-Arian theme running throughout Book I, while appealing to a shared late antique understanding of divinity. Complete ontological simplicity, which removes any consideration of whole vs. parts in the divine, or (as later emphasized in the western scholastics) any distinction between substance and accidents, is fundamental to the Hellenistic conception of God alongside its parallel doctrine of divine impassibility. The notion of divine simplicity seems to underlie this discussion. Thus the Logos is fully divine because as the universal font of wisdom, all wisdom exists in him as a partless unity. This unity cannot be divided or delegated to creatures, by definition, and therefore any entity that possesses it must be divine.[/FONT]
[FONT="]The perlocutionary force of this argument from simplicity is capitalized immediately below. Having already demonstrated the divinity of the Son as it consists in simplicity, Cyril returns to the text and his notion of being light by nature vs. being light by grace. Yet rather than making the move most modern commentators would be likely to make, and thus describing the gracious illumination of creatures as an aspect of the Christ event, Cyril, in a passage worth quoting at length, describes it thus:[/FONT]
[FONT="]But the Word of God lighteth every man that cometh into the world, not after the manner of teaching, as the angels for example or men, but rather as God after the mode of creation He engrafteth in each of those that are called unto being, the seed of wisdom or of Divine knowledge, and implanteth a root of understanding and so rendereth the living creature rational, shewing it participate of His own Nature, and sending into the mind as it were certain luminous vapours of the Unutterable Brightness, in way and mode that Himself knoweth: for one may not, I deem, say on these subjects anything overmuch. Therefore our forefather Adam too is seen to have attained the being wise not in time, as we, but straightway from the first beginnings of his being does he appear perfect in understanding, preserving in himself the illumination given of God to his nature as yet untroubled and pure, and holding the dignity of his nature unadulterated.[/FONT]
[FONT="]This account of gracious illumination in creation, even in the pre-fall state of Adam, highlights the ways in which Cyril understands the eternal nature of the Logos work in creation. The incarnation and the illumination the Logos provides in that incarnation is entirely consistent with the illumination the Logos provides throughout the cosmos from the creation. The Logos, as the omnipresent grounding of wisdom herself, being himself wisdom, imbues all humans by his gracious presence with rational faculty. This understanding of the Logos as universal illuminator is consonant with Augustines Neoplatonic epistemology of illumination, although he tends to paint with pneumatological colors.[/FONT]
[FONT="]With this reading in mind, it is not just good sense to see the subjective antecedent in [/FONT][FONT="]ερχομενον[/FONT][FONT="] [/FONT][FONT="]as all persons.
[FONT="][1][/FONT] Such a reading is entirely demanded by the topical progression in the prologue. Cyril here clearly admits that it was not wholly clear to the hearers, whether it meant that the Light lighteth every man that cometh into the world, or that the Very Light itself, passing as from some other place into the world, maketh its illumination of all men. Acknowledging this, Cyril does not rely wholly on a contextual case based on the preceding passages. Instead, he looks forward to 1:10, which states clearly that the Logos was in the world. Being in the world, then, the issue is not him coming into the world, for he was always there. Rather, the change in locale (notice again the appeal to divine immutability) is a change that happens to humans coming into the world.[/FONT]
[FONT="]Here Cyril finally takes up the principal objection to his reading. He notes that if one pictures persons as coming into the world, then it seems that they have preexistent souls that are embodied at conception. He describes the position as follows:[/FONT]
[FONT="]the souls of men were pre-existent in Heaven before the fashioning of their bodies, passing long time in un-embodied bliss, and enjoying more purely the true Good. But when the sate [
sic] of better things came into them and, declining at length to the worser, they sank to strange thoughts and desires, the Creator justly displeased sends them forth into the world, and entangled them with bodies of earth compelling them to be burdened therewith, and having shut them as it were in some cave of strange pleasures, decreed to instruct them by the very trial itself, how bitter it is to be carried away to the worser, and to make no account of what is good.[/FONT]
[FONT="]This is almost certainly a description of the Origenist position. The Origenist controversy of the late fourth and early fifth centuries surrounded followers of Origen who held persons entered the world sinful because had committed sins in lives on a spiritual plane prior to their embodiment. Thus bodily existence, original sin, and predestination are all accounted for through the preexistence of the soul and its life in that spiritual mode.
[FONT="][2][/FONT] Not surprisingly, Augustine needed to defend his novel doctrine of original sin against charges made by Pelagians that we was an Origenist; how else would you defend original sin?
[FONT="][3][/FONT] Cyril, of course, rejects the Origenist position in mocking tones.[/FONT]
[FONT="]Cyrils work on John 1:9 opens up new vistas in the reading of scripture. As is now well know, ancient literary works like the gospels have a highly oral and performance-oriented structure. The Gospel of John, much like the Gospel of Mark, seems to be as much a script for performance as a document to be read. One readily imagines, then, that the gospel text (and especially the prologue, which reads very much like an antiphonal liturgical piece) would be read multiple times. As was pointed out in class, a first reading, with John 1:1-8 as the only background, would suggest Cyrils reading; a second reading, with the whole of the gospel in the readers mind, would suggest the reading given in modern translations. Musicians compose and artists paint their work in order to give devoted hearers and viewers new insights and deeper appreciation through multiple experiences of their art. A literary artist is no different, and John is certainly that. In pushing a reading of the text with which modern readers would likely not know, but which both vitalizes the Johannine prologue and deepens our understanding of the text as a performance piece, Cyril reminds us again of Augustine and his famous statement: The Gospel of John is deep enough for an elephant to swim and shallow enough for a child not to drown.[/FONT]
[FONT="][1][/FONT] Translation of ανθρωπον can be difficult. It is my personal theory that with the term προσωπον having the theatrical background of mask that ανθρωπον tended to function in an equivalent manner as our term person.
[FONT="][2][/FONT] Trigg, Joseph W.,
Origen, (New York: Routledge, 1998), 28-29.
[FONT="][3][/FONT] Brown, Peter,
Augustine of Hippo: A Biography, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 280, 545.