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.

Henry Chadwick's inaugural lecture as Regius Professor at Oxford sketched out, economically and elegantly, some aspects of the problem confronting every historian of early Christian thought, the problem of how to discern and define the self-perception of the first Christian communities: how, with reference to what, did they define themselves? Chadwick portrays a tension between two models of authoritative self-identification, the ‘circle’ and the ‘ellipse’ – the unified institution with a definable centre providing a norm or touchstone for right belief, and the network of communities linked by their common origins in Jerusalem and the events transacted there at the navel of the earth. In some sense, the narrative of Paul's career as set out in the Acts of the Apostles dramatizes this tension: the movement is necessarily and inevitably away from Jerusalem, itself originally the centre of a ‘circle’, the church of the circumcision (pp. 4–5), towards the administrative heart of the Roman civilized world (pp. 12–16); but Rome cannot replace Jerusalem or assert a unilateral sovereignty over the churches that stem from the events in Jerusalem. In spite of all temptations (and efforts), Rome never comes to be taken for granted as the sole standard of the church's self-definition; the circle model never quite triumphs (p. 12). In one way or another, the idea of the church as a family united in virtue of its ancestry rather than of its present organizational structure persists.

The great majority of theological students in the English-speaking world can only read English. If such a one were to determine to investigate the critical development concerning Christian doctrine which took place in the fourth century of the Christian era, he would find himself very badly served. Recent books covering the whole story of the last stages of the formation of the doctrine of the Trinity are scarce, but they exist, and they are not in English. Much the best is Manlio Simonetti's La Crisi Ariana nel Quarto Secolo. There is also E. Boularand's L'Hérésie d'Arius et la foi de Nicée, which has some good points but generally is not satisfactory, if only because when Arius propounded his views they were not then formally heretical. In English the last full-scale book written on the whole Arian controversy was that of H. M. Gwatkin, Studies of Arianism, published in 1882. Twenty-seven years later he published the short Arian Controversy but in a note prefixed to it he says that this work is ‘largely, though not entirely, an abridgement’ of the earlier book. That book was a fine one in its day, but it is now almost completely out of date. The only other works that could be said to be comprehensive in approaching the subject are G. L. Prestige's God in Patristic Thought and J. N. D. Kelly's Early Christian Doctrines.

Over twenty years ago, when ‘soundings’ were beginning to be taken and doubts raised about the future of theology, Root diagnosed as the most serious problem facing the Christian faith the existence of a secularized imagination for which theology is no longer alive. The problem of the imagination as part of a crisis in the cognitive aspect of theology continues to preoccupy theologians almost two generations later. It is also commonly asserted that we are entering an historical age in which the visual will be paramount as the means of exposition of the truth and the verbal, with its great faith in logic, will no longer be accorded the premium which it has had for so long, particularly in European thinking. But in the early church it was possible to think theologically without cutting oneself off from other ranges of thought and imagination which in our day no longer have contact with theology; and in a volume of essays dedicated to Professor Chadwick it is a matter of happiness to begin with the recognition that there is indeed a way out of the modern impasse because it already exists in the tradition.

In 842 when the church proclaimed the Triumph of Orthodoxy it was talking about art as the visual interpretation of dogma. The ancient church considered that nourishment was to be found for theology and doctrine in the world depicted by artists, which sometimes rejects the conventional ways of theology and religion as they exist in the literary expression.

For some two hundred years following its mid-eighteenth-century discovery by Mingarelli in a manuscript lacking title page and the opening chapters, the De Trinitate was regarded as the chief surviving work of Didymus the Blind (313–98), the last really distinguished leader of the catechetical school in Alexandria. Mingarelli based his ascription in part on the numerous and striking verbal parallels between this work and Didymus' De Spiritu Sancto, which survives only in Jerome's Latin translation. The last generation, however, has seen a remarkable shift in scholarly opinion on the matter: the discovery of the Toura papyri in 1941 and the ascription to Didymus of a series of extensive biblical commentaries contained in them has led in turn to comparisons of these works with the De Trinitate which seemed to support the conclusion that Didymus could not also have been the author of the latter. If correct, this conclusion not only requires a radical revision of the entire picture of Didymus and his theological teaching developed before the discovery of the Toura papyri; it also leaves the De Trinitate – a major work by any standards – floating in the void of anonymity. In recent years, study of Didymus has concentrated on the Toura commentaries; the De Trinitate has received relatively scant attention, though it is arguably more theologically substantial and significant than the commentaries, whether or not Didymus is the author.

Categories: preliminary rationale

It was suggested in §0 that the metaphysical theory of the Categories could be seen as a miniature or cut-down study model relative to the theory of the Metaphysics; but although the Categories is indeed limited in apparatus, that is not to say that there is anything modest about its scope, which is nothing less than to offer a logical/semantical analysis or ‘philosophical grammar’ for the entirety of predicative being – that is, for every state of affairs in the world that ordinary language (the immediate object language of the theory is of course Greek of the mid fourth century, but we may for our purposes pass rather freely between that medium and our own) casts into the form

X is γ

for any subject X, and any predicate γ. The purported analysis regards this immense field of situations as falling into eight distinguishable types, exemplified by the following instances (the selection here is arbitrary, but the arrangement deliberate), so that it claims to analyze the being of

1. (1) Socrates' being man′ or animal, and of

2. (2) Socrates' being brave or grammatical, or Coriscus' being ghastly pale or precisely 52.39 kilograms in weight, and of

3. (3) Socrates' being virtuous or knowledgeable, or Coriscus' being some-how-colored or a bantamweight, and of

4. (4) (a) man's being (a) mammal, (an) animal, and of

5. (5) (a) man's, (an) animal's, being brave, grammatical, ghastly pale, precisely 52.39 kilograms in weight, and of

6. (6) (a) man's, (an) animal's, being virtuous, knowledgeable, somehow-colored, a bantamweight, and of

7. (7) bravery's being (a) virtue, grammar's being (a) knowledge, ghastly pallor's being (a) color, and of

8. […]

My aim in what follows is to explain and to motivate a theory of essence, existence and individuation that I think is to be found in the later and more advanced of the extant writings of Aristotle. The view to be explored has several features that are noteworthy from a scientific as well as a philosophical standpoint: it centers especially, though not exclusively, on a concept of what an individual material object is – a concept that has both intrinsic interest and (if some suggestions I shall advance as to its provenance and motivation are accepted) a historical significance that has not always been accurately appreciated.

The subject has of course had a great many discussants over the millennia, and so inevitably there is overlap at most points here with what others have had to say. Yet anyone familiar with the richness, elusiveness and originality of Aristotle's thought in this area will readily agree that present understanding of it remains imperfect and that new points and perspectives regarding it are still to be gained; the topic is limitless. Such novelties of content as I shall recommend will emerge in their due order. But there are also some unconventional and very likely exceptionable aspects to my method in this study which should be identified at once.

One is a variation on the usual approach to a historical philosopher – that of working from his text to his meaning. For my interpretive practice here is in places frankly reconstructive in character, synthetic rather than analytic; where it seems needed, or even merely helpful, I do not stick at approaching the text by convergence, rather than by trying to extract doctrine from it in the conventional way.

This book began when I resolved to take a sabbatical leave in 1971–2. My proposed research consisted of three limited projects, as I thought: one on Aristotle's biology and metaphysics, one on Leibniz's monadology, and one on Frege's philosophy of language. Because I had written previously on the second and third of these topics, I decided (with a logic that seemed persuasive at the time but now escapes me) to work first on the Aristotle.

That was in the summer of 1971. I am writing these final words in the summer of 1986. Leibniz and Frege are still in my file drawer.

There have to be many reasons why a project should prove so intractable, besides the incapacities of its author, and there is little ground to expect the author to be aware of all of them. The main reason that I myself know about is the size and complexity of the subject, which I adequately realized only gradually. I have felt like a builder who contracted to construct a modest country church from a plan supplied by the vestry, but who finds that as each phase of the construction is supposedly completed, the plan has mysteriously become that of a larger and more elaborate building, and eventually that of a huge and pretentious cathedral – one which he would never have agreed to build at the start, but which he must now try to finish in view of the efforts already invested. (That is a personal and subjective simile; a different constructional image better suited to the subject-matter is pursued in §0.)