For determining the order of Plato's works there is little help either from external sources or internally. Regarding the former, the only information likely to be reliable is Aristotle's statement, that the Laws was written after the Republic. This is repeated by Diogenes Laertius (3.37) and Olympiodorus (Prol. 6.24), who add that it was still on wax tablets when Plato died and was published posthumously by one of his students, Philip of Opus. As for internal evidence, cross-references in the Sophist and Politicus3 indicate the prior composition of the former, while the Timaeus mentions the Critias as its sequel. Rather less definite is the apparent reference in the Timaeus (17b–19b.) to the Republic, in the Sophist to the Parmenides and Theaetetus and in the Theaetetus to the Parmenides (183c). There is one other important piece of evidence: in the introduction to the Theaetetus (143c) Plato renounced his use of the reported dialogue form with a clear indication that the use of introductory formulae, such as καὶ ἐγὼ εἶπον, and of interlocutor's replies was becoming a nuisance. It seems unlikely, therefore, that any of his works written in this form are later than the Theaetetus.

In the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth century attempts to solve this problem of chronology were based on an interpretation of the dialogues’ contents followed by the formulation of a line of development for Plato's thought. Unsurprisingly the subjective nature of this approach led to a considerable discrepancy between the conclusions of the various scholars.

The next contribution to the stylistic method came from a scholar who had little sympathy with it, but whose view of Plato's philosophical development was threatened by its findings, which he sought to counteract in a series of articles. The first of these comprised three separate inquiries: an investigation to show that Plato's style did not develop uniformly (la); an examination of the author's vocabulary to determine the chronological order of his works, especially the position of the Phdr. and Theaet. (Ib); a similar investigation, but with a number of Lutoslawski's criteria for material (Ic). The second was a criticism of Lutoslawski's conclusions and so, indirectly, of most earlier research. The third, which appeared a year after the first two, was intended as an improved interpretation of the material which he had presented in the first article (Ib). In view of this no purpose would be served by reproducing his original interpretation, and in the following account it is replaced by the version he himself preferred.

For his first investigation (Ia) Natorp chose Plato's vocabulary; using Ast's Lexicon he compiled statistics of

1. (1) words peculiar to each dialogue (Table 16.1, series i). His figures were generally higher than Campbell's, because he took into account, as Campbell probably did not, words which apart from one of the genuine dialogues occurred only in dubious or unauthentic works. Which these were he did not say, but they almost certainly included works now regarded as genuine, such as Lys., Menex., Hipp. Mi., Ion;

2. […]

The scholar universally regarded in Germany as the founder of the stylistic method until as late as 1896 was W. Dittenberger. His first and most important criterion was the particle. After excluding the three usages ἦ μήν, οὐδὲ μήν, and οὐ μήν on the ground that they occur too rarely to be of any value, he found that there remained five others which by their frequency in the various dialogues provided the possibility of discerning a diversity in Plato's manner of writing. These were καὶ μήν ἀλλὰ μήν, τὶ μὴν; γε μήν and ἀλλὰ … μήν. Their occurrences are set out in Table 4.1 (p. 12), Apol., Tim. and Crit. being omitted by him on account of their deficiency in dialogue form.

Dittenberger called attention to the striking difference in the use of the first two and last three particle combinations. The former occur in every dialogue except the very short Crito> while the latter are completely absent from the first eleven dialogues, appearing in all the rest including the Symp. and Lys. Particularly noteworthy is the fact that, apart from the fluctuation in these two works, the three particles are always either all present or all absent from a work. This effectively rules out any notion of chance being the cause. Obviously, Dittenberger said, the fact must be accepted that Plato's language altered at this point, and so we can at once divide the twenty-one dialogues into two chronological groups, the later being indicated by the presence in it of the Laws.

It appears that there were two broad developments in Plato's literary style: an earlier one which was slow and gradual and a later, starting when he was about sixty, which was sudden and rapid. Regarding the former, where the changes concerned his vocabulary and were for the most part probably unconscious, one would expect the trend to be uneven and at times haphazard; in the latter, which concerned the euphony of his prose and involved a deliberate choice in respect of hiatus avoidance and rhythm, a more rational and systematic evolution might be anticipated, with any aberrations in it explicable by known or deducible factors.

The early research on Plato's vocabulary by Campbell, Dittenberger and Schanz, culminating in Ritter's book on the subject, identified in Soph., Pol., Phil., Tim., Crit. and Laws a group of dialogues which were distinguished from the rest by an exclusive or increased occurrence in them of certain words and phrases. Subsequent investigations into this aspect of style arrived at the same conclusion, and the dichotomy was confirmed by two further criteria with the discovery that only in these works, together with the Epin. and Epist. vn, did Plato make a consistent attempt to avoid certain types of hiatus and achieve a different kind of prose rhythm.

It has been argued that Plato avoided hiatus changeably rather than consistently after a certain date. This is to attribute to an elderly philosopher the disposition of a young woman pleased with a new hat, who then tires of it and lays it aside, only to rediscover its charm after a brief passage of time.

After a break in 1887 the following year produced three further works to sustain the growing interest in research into Plato's prose style. The subject of the first of these was πᾶς and its compounds; the results are contained in Tables 8.1 and 8.2 (pp. 42, 43). Walbe himself made no claim to have discovered the probable chronological sequence of the dialogues, but believed that his statistics were capable of throwing some light on the correct positions of certain works.

Directing his attention first to the use of σύμπας (including συνάπας), which he considered ‘particularly noteworthy’, he decided that the earliest group of works comprised those in which this word occurred only once or not at all, the middle one those in which it occurred between two and five times, while to the last period, where alone it could be called reasonably common, belonged Tim. 17, Crit. 5, Laws 85, Phil. 23, Soph. 23, Pol. 46. ‘This’, Walbe declared, ‘agrees so well with the results of both Dittenberger and Schanz that it now seems almost criminal to doubt that Soph., Pol., Phil., Tim., Crit. and Laws are the latest dialogues.’ This was confirmed by the fact that συνάπας occurs only in these six apart from two considered spurious, Hipp. Ma. and Ale. I., the reason being presumably that the more συνάπας was used the more it appeared to lose its force, and so a new form was needed stronger and more important than all the rest.

Having found a continuous increase in the use of συνάπας Walbe turned to examine ἄπας.

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?