The subject of this inquiry was several phrases used by Plato to express the contrast between ‘being’ and ‘appearing’, τῷ ὂντι and ὂντως on the one hand and ὡς ἀληθῶς, τῇ ἀληθείᾁ, ἀληθῶς on the other. Schanz's reasons for choosing these expressions were their independence of the dialogue form, the frequent necessity for a philosophical writer of bringing out the above contrast, and the series of synonyms which they provided.

In the case of the first two synonyms, τῷ ὂντι and ὂντως, though the latter did not find a place in Plato's literary vocabulary for some years, once introduced its greater succinctness gradually won preference for it over τῷ ὂντι, until finally it replaced the earlier expression completely. Its superiority is most manifest in those instances where the participle τῷò ὂν is involved; in fact, when this is in the dative, τῷ ὂντι is out of the question, e.g. Rep. vi 49Ob5 τῷ ὂντι ὂντως, Tim. 52C5 τῷ δὲ ὂντως ὂντι. The increasing use which Plato made of ὂντως is illustrated in Table 7.1 (P. 35).

The instances in the Euthd. (305e) and Crat. (413e) are dubious, the former extremely so. Editions earlier than that of Hermann in the Teubner series read ὂντως in both cases. Since Hermann (1879) opinion has varied. Whereas he and the Budé edition (1931) accept οὔτως the reading of the best manuscripts BTW for the Euthd. and ὂντως the reading of W for Crat., Burnet prefers ὂντως in the Euthd. (though attested only by an inferior MS, Venetum 184) and the reading of BT, ὂντος, in the Crat.

In a series of lectures Arnim published the results of an inquiry into Plato's use of reply formulae. He was apparently unaware of the existence of Ritter's work, but though much of the ground which he covered was the same, his material did differ to some extent from his predecessor's. His definition of his sphere of operation was as follows: ‘Ad eas tantum formulas animum attendi quae sive separatim sive initio orationis positae nil nisi meram affirmationem continerent, eamque ipsis verbis expressam neque cohaerentem cum verbis antecedentibus interrogantis.’ The method of presentation, too, differed greatly from Ritter's, and an attempt has been made to preserve its form while at the same time compressing it as much as possible by collecting the statistics into tables (pp. 110–14).

Regarding the accuracy of this investigation, the difficulty of checking statistics of reply formulae owing to the numerous variations has already been mentioned (p. 55). Arnim's classification was less strict than Ritter's, which means that his figures for the same formula are usually higher, and while for the most part they appear to be fairly accurate, there are some disturbing errors.

Campbell approached the study of Plato's style with the purpose of determining the date of the two dialogues which he was editing. He had reason to believe that they were later than was generally supposed and with this in mind made the following observations:

1. Socrates is no longer the chief speaker, and in this respect the Soph. and Pol. resemble the Parm., Tim. and Crit.

2. The Soph, and Pol. form the middle portion of an unfinished tetralogy, in which they again resemble the Tim. and Crit.

3. There is a certain didactic tone common to Soph., Pol., Phil, and Laws which is absent from other works like the Phdr. and Rep., where the movement is lighter and more spontaneous.

4. The natural order of the words is more frequently inverted in these works, the periods more elaborate.

5. There is a monotonous recurrence of a particular rhythmical cadence, which is also noticeable in certain parts of the Phdr., Rep., Theaet. and the myth of the Prot.

6. Finally, in the Soph, and Pol. there is a greater fondness for unusual words, poetical and technical, than in any other dialogues except the Phdr., Rep., Tim. and Laws.

It was on this last observation that Campbell based his investigation of the chronology of the dialogues. He had noticed the phenomenon of a technical terminology first of all in the Theaet., then to a greater extent in the Phil., Soph., Pol. and Laws.

‘The evolution of orthodoxy’ might easily be understood as a process which belongs wholly to the past: the development of Christian doctrine, on which Henry Chadwick has shed such a graceful and penetrating light, would then be contrasted with a complete and stable construction in which Christianity has come to rest. But to call it complete and stable need not mean that further progress is excluded; at the very least, new challenges are likely to arise, and old truths will need to be re-stated. And most of our generation, and of our juniors, will think this programme far too tame: in their eyes, only an obstinate and secluded mind will persist in defending an orthodoxy that is purely static. I for one would certainly wish to see its evolution as a continuing process, in which established positions need to be clarified and some false steps retracted, in the faith that a better grounded and better articulated consensus of belief may be attained.

From such a standpoint one can turn with a rueful admiration to a handbook which has given invaluable service to a succession of beginners in theology, the Enchiridion Patristicum of M. J. Rouet de Journel, completed in 1911 and appearing in its twenty-fourth edition in 1969.

Renan's comment on Matthew 28.19 revealed an insight into the part played by the lex orandi in the creation of this text, as well as by the text itself in the evolution of the lex credendi, that was well ahead of its time, and still remained so when F. C. Conybeare, a quarter of a century later, proposed to advance on it in two respects. Renan had nowhere implied that the hand that planted the seed of Trinitarian dogma in the gospel, whatever its cultic background, was any but the evangelist's own; Conybeare found evidence in Eusebius' writings that suggested otherwise. And the extreme conclusions that he drew from that evidence about Eusebius' permanent ignorance of the received text were pressed into the service of an account of later dogmatic history that was not evolutionary so much as revolutionary.

Iconoclasm invites overkill, and it was to be expected that conservative professionals like E. Riggenbach and J. Lebreton (who would have been little happier with Renan's position than with Conybeare's) would apply themselves to crush the gentleman amateur on both counts. Of his wilder conclusions they were able to make short work.

Patristic scholarship has always been one of the great strengths of the Anglican Communion. It has been represented by a long succession of able scholars, including J. B. Lightfoot (d. 1889), B. F. Westcott and F. J. Hort, Benjamin Kidd and G. L. Prestige. It has never been subjected to the constraints that beset Roman Catholic patristic scholars on the continent at the time of the imposition of the anti-Modernist oath by the Papacy in 1910. The critical study of the early Fathers has flourished in the United Kingdom as one of the hallmarks of ‘sound learning’ in the church, and in particular, the four-yearly patristic conferences at Oxford initiated by F. L. Cross in 1951 remain a memorial to the contribution by scholars of British universities in that field. For more than forty years Henry Chadwick has represented the outstanding quality of their achievement.

Patristics, however, are by definition concerned largely with the literary study of the orthodox tradition of early Christianity. The Fathers were educated men, belonging to the relatively small cultural élite that has left its ideas for posterity. They were conscious, also, of belonging to a tradition of Christian teaching that was the sole truth, and they were concerned to defend its message against heresies, false interpretations, and misunderstandings. Their vast output of works expounding and defending the orthodox position as defined by the precedent of tradition reinforced by church councils, and their commentaries on every book of the Bible fill the columns of Migne's Patrologia.

When I began the study of theology, I did not at first find patristics a particularly attractive branch of the subject. The Trinitarian and Christological controversies, which bulked so large in those initial studies, seemed to me to be a prime example of those ‘strifes of words’ (or logomachiai, to give them their more forceful Greek expression) against which the author of the Pastorals warns us (1 Timothy 6:4). The first step in acquiring a basic sympathy with what was going on in those controversies, essential to any serious engagement with, let alone understanding of, them, was to see how closely they were felt to impinge on the issue of salvation. That is one of the many insights for which I am indebted to Henry Chadwick. So when in my first book I included the sentence ‘The concern about Christology was not a barren intellectual concern; it was intimately connected with a concern about soteriology’, I gave the sentence a justifying footnote consisting of a reference to an article by Henry Chadwick. In that article, ‘Eucharist and Christology in the Nestorian Controversy’, he not only emphasizes the soteriological rather than psychological nature of Cyril's concern for the unity of Christ, but also brings out how Cyril's eucharistic doctrine ‘strikes at the heart of Nestorius' soteriology’. Soteriological concerns were central to both sides of that debate. Few scholars today would enter on any discussion of those fourth- and fifth-century Christological controversies without that recognition as a basic element in their approach.

Church councils at any level are improbable organs of the Holy Ghost, subject, as they are, to the same failings and mischances as beset annual general meetings of amateur dramatic societies, the proceedings of Faculty Boards and even more august assemblies. They are composed of the few who speak much, and the many who sit silent save when roused to chorus approval or outrage. When they meet, some members will turn up late; most will have only an imperfect understanding of the business; and none will remember what they collectively did at the meeting, till the minutes are later circulated. Indeed ‘remember’ is too strong a word, since the chairman and secretary will have drawn up the record and decreed a corporate memory of what was said and done.

The Council of Ephesus (ad 431) is an excellent example of the genus at its worst. It was, effectively, run by the bishop of Alexandria, Cyril, in the absence of a substantial portion of the membership which turned up late and set up its own assembly; the Roman delegates, whose presence validated Cyril's assembly as the genuine Ecumenical Council, were only very badly informed about the question of Nestorius which was the main business; and the subsequent accounts of the proceedings were, at least partly, edited by Cyril who veiled, so far as he could, some damaging items.

Henry Chadwick, once fellow of Queens', Cambridge, student of Christ Church, Oxford, and Dean, returned to Cambridge and became the most junior fellow of Magdalene. As he humbly performed the duties of the most junior fellow in the combination room after dinner, he would delight to tell a stranger that he was following the rule handed down from monasticism of old. In a volume devoted to the evolution of orthodoxy I offer him my hunch that the tradition is even older than he thinks. He will find the rule he followed in Magdalene explicitly stated in Philo's book On the Contemplative Life, §67. Ideas may evolve, but practice remains stubbornly the same, and I offer this essay as grateful tribute to a teacher and friend who passed on to me by precept and example the ancient practices of scholarship without which truth would soon be choked with weeds. I argue that, if orthodoxy evolved, the practice of the orthodox did not.

Everyone says that monasticism began with Antony and Pachomius in Upper Egypt, that is, at the end of the third century and the beginning of the fourth, and the case is certainly impressive. Athanasius' Life of Antony, and the Life of Pachomius are massive literary evidence of a popular movement, first of disciples around the great hermit Antony, and then of settled monasteries governed by an abbot according to a definite Rule, a Rule formulated by Pachomius.

INTRODUCTION

Kanon (euklees kai semnos) and kriterion were kingly words which lived and reigned for four hundred years in the philosophy of the hellenistic period. For they answered the questions: is there objective truth? How can it be known? To Stoics and Epicureans, who gave an affirmative answer to the first question, the answer to the second question was ‘by following the criterion or canon’. For the Sceptics who denied truth, its proposed canon was the target of their attack. Regula (kanon) also had a common legal application as a summary principle which governed any situation within a certain definition, but Cicero is the chief Latin source. Since Tertullian has commonly been regarded as more of a lawyer than he was, the legal definition has seemed more useful than the philosophical; this is not the case and we shall find a strong philosophical interest in the Christian use of this concept.

The rule of truth or faith is central to the emergence of orthodoxy. It has been regarded either as restrictive to the use of reason (Celsus made it central in his attack) or (by nineteenth-century liberals) as the decline into intellectualism which reduced a gospel to a set of doctrines. In the hands of Tertullian it begins as a barrier to enquiry. Arguing about scripture is useless and uncertain; only the rule is decisive and apostolic. The rule is enough; after Christ there is no place for argument (De praescriptione hereticorum, hereafter Praescr., (7).

Two images of heresy and orthodoxy prevailed in Christian antiquity. One had been canonized by Eusebius and was generally accepted until the seventeenth century, that orthodoxy is primary and heresies are deviations, corruptions of a previously pure, virgin orthodoxy. Its echo is distinctly audible in the edict issued by the court of Ravenna in 418 condemning the teaching of Pelagius, Celestius and their followers: they were confounding the ‘light of catholic simplicity shining forth with permanent radiance’. This image represented orthodoxy as a given constant: a rock buffeted by the waves, the light of the sun hidden by the clouds. Held often alongside it, there is another, equally common, belief with an even more venerable ancestry (1 Corinthians 11:19): that heresy serves to bring orthodoxy to light. Compared with the first model, this treats heresy as creative: orthodoxy is the product of faithful response to heresy. Both models invite us to see the conflict of heresy and orthodoxy in the perspective imposed on it by the ‘orthodox’. The besetting temptation for any historian is to take the past at the valuation of those who emerged as the victors; and nowhere more so than in the study of what councils, theologians and ecclesiastical historians have come to label as ‘heresy’ and ‘orthodoxy’. What is ‘heresy’, what is ‘orthodoxy’, and what constitutes ‘progress’, are all determined by the victors, that is to say by those who were, by their own definition, the ‘orthodox’.

Augustine's disavowal, in Book xx of De civitate Dei, of a materialistic understanding of the thousand-year reign of Christ with His saints, as prophesied in Revelation 20:4, is undoubtedly a symbolic gesture in the intellectual history of Western Christendom. ‘He marks…a decisive moment of western thought, in which it frees itself from a paralysing archaism and turns to an autonomous creation’, is the verdict of Jean Daniélou. Nevertheless, the effect of Augustine's change of mind should not be exaggerated. Millenarian eschatological hopes and ideas survived, to find expression in the prophecies ascribed to Joachim of Flora and, later, in the ideology of the Anabaptist movement, thereafter to find their way, in a secular and anti-religious guise, into philosophies like Marxism and anarchism, as a consequence of the apparently ineradicable human longing for a state of perfection to be enjoyed upon this earth by the elect, however the elect may be defined. It is, of course, undeniable, given the influence of Augustine's theology on mediaeval thought, that professional theologians would have followed his lead in rejecting a literal understanding of the thousand-year reign; but a doubt remains. Was Augustine's rejection of millenarianism as uncompromising as is generally assumed?

Western discussion of the fall has been dominated by the views expressed by Augustine during the course of the Pelagian controversy. Just over a decade before the outbreak of this controversy, with the condemnation of Caelestius at Carthage for denying that Adam's sin injured the rest of the human race, the late fourth-century Origenist disputes had been terminated by the pronouncements of Theophilus of Alexandria and Anastasius of Rome against the heretical teachings attributed to Origen. Up to this date the rival theories on the origin of the human soul (creationism, traducianism or pre-existence) had been a matter for open discussion. Augustine himself had aired all three in his De libero arbitrio and sometimes speaks in his earlier writings of sin and the fall in terms that can best be understood of an individual fall in a previous existence. Meanwhile opponents of Origenism were rejecting not only the theory of the fall of the pre-existent soul but also the suggestion that Adam's fall implicated the subsequent human race and were propounding what seemed a naively optimistic view of the human condition. Pelagius himself, although strongly influenced by Origen's anti-gnostic emphasis on human free will, came to adopt this anti-Origenist optimism with regard to the fall, whereas Augustine in attacking Pelagianism retained Origen's view of the human condition in this life as a fallen one but, because of his rejection of the theory of pre-existence, placed the whole burden of responsibility for this condition on Adam's sin and condemnation.

Eusebius' Life of Constantine has an obvious relevance to the making of Christian orthodoxy. It has often seemed to be a peculiarly problematical text. I had the great good fortune to be introduced to the Life and its problems many years ago by Henry Chadwick, who pronounced, in that grave and rational tone of voice which all who have known him will recall so well, that Eusebius' authorship was the only plausible hypothesis – an opinion which he later reiterated in print. At the time, I was wrestling with the problem of trying to understand Tertullian under Henry's temporary guidance, but I never forgot the remark. When I began to work seriously on the Constantinian period, I consciously adopted the transmitted and traditional attribution of the Life as a working hypothesis, which came to seem more strongly based the more I penetrated the period. Hence it is with deep gratitude and pleasure that I offer the following essay on the occasion of Henry Chadwick's seventieth birthday – all the more so since the first article which I wrote about Constantine was published in a volume celebrating the seventieth birthday of Sir Ronald Syme. Debate has moved on since 1973: here I shall be less concerned to demonstrate partially novel interpretations of Constantine and Eusebius than to apply hypotheses which I have developed elsewhere to the work which has for ever linked their two names.

The problems posed by the Life of Constantine are both literary and historical.

The range of Henry Chadwick's achievement is, of course, almost legendary – so much so that it was thought desirable to produce two volumes in his honour, one celebrating his continuing contribution to the work for unity between the Christian churches, the other concerned with his work as a patristic scholar over some four decades. The former volume, edited by Dr G. R. Evans and published by Oxford University Press, has already appeared. The present collection represents the tribute of fellow specialists to one who is perhaps uniquely a ‘master in Israel’ in the study of early Christian thought.

From the first, Henry Chadwick's researches have been concentrated on the question of how early Christianity developed an idiom of its own, especially in its long and fruitful (and often bad-tempered) conversation with the world of classical culture. Chadwick's first major production – in itself an achievement sufficient to guarantee his significance as a scholar – was a fully annotated translation of Origen's Contra Celsum, a work in which early Christianity's self-definition over against the religio-philosophical consensus of enlightened second-century minds has been decisively advanced, and the intellectual credibility of ‘Catholic’ Christianity defended at a new level of sophistication.

To honour Henry Chadwick is to honour the great tradition of British scholarship to which Edwin Hatch belonged. The work of Edwin Hatch was the inspiration of this paper, and it may be regarded as a celebration of the centenary of the publication of his Hibbert lectures of 1888, as well as a tribute to one who, like him, has achieved international acclaim for his erudition.

Some of what Hatch pioneered in those lectures on The Influence of Greek Ideas on Christianity has become commonplace, but not all. It was the content of the first three lectures which provided the starting point of this study, those on Greek education and its legacy, on the influence of Greek methods of exegesis on Christian exegesis, and on the debt Christian preaching owed to Greek rhetoric.

By the Christian era, there was long established a system of education based upon the study of literature and practical exercises in speech-making. As Hatch explained, literature from the distant past was powerful speech preserved from a Golden Age, which could act as a model for those who produced literary exercises to be declaimed. The teaching of the grammaticus and the rhetor in each city's gymnasium was the principal agent for the spread of Hellenistic culture throughout the then known world, and for its ongoing transmission through approximately 800 years.

Hatch stressed the hold the educational system had upon the society into which Christianity came, and showed how inevitably it would affect the emerging church.