6

EXEGETICAL CULTURES 2

LAW AND RELIGION

The oriental philosophy of the Gnostics, the dark abyss of predestination and

grace, and the strange transformation of the Eucharist from the sign to the sub-

stance of Christ’s body, I have purposely abandoned to the curiosity of specula-

tive divines. But I have reviewed, with diligence and pleasure, the objects of

ecclesiastical history, by which the decline and fall of the Roman empire were

materially affected, the propagation of Christianity, the constitution of the

Catholic church, the ruin of Paganism, and the sects that arose from the myste-

rious controversies concerning the Trinity and incarnation.

—E. Gibbon (ed. D. Womersley), The history of the decline

and fall of the Roman Empire (1994) 3.86^1

Ι ignore the two major intellectual achievements of the age, theolog y

and law....

—A. H. M. Jones, The later Roman Empire 284–602 (1964),

first paragraph of Preface

If we may call Aristotle the founding genius or prophet of his school, its
scriptures were his writings both exoteric and esoteric. The latter were “pub-
lished” as a corpus only some three centuries after his death, but then became
a dominant presence in various strands of First Millennium thought. Being,
many of them, little more than cryptic lecture notes, they drew exegetes and
commentators eager to annotate, cross- reference, explain. Alexander of Aph-
rodisias c. 200 CE was the earliest durable representative of this exegetical
phase, which culminated in fifth- and sixth- century Alexandria, and then
again among the early Arabic philosophers. There was also a proliferation of
short introductions to philosophy for teaching purposes, with Porphyry’s

1 But cf. Theodor Mommsen, in a letter to Henry Pelham, 1894: “He [Gibbon] has taught us to
combine Oriental with occidental lore; he has infused in history the essence of large doctrine, and of
theolog y” (quoted by B. Croke, “Mommsen on Gibbon,” Quaderni di storia 32 [1990] 56).