than merely by asserting the precedence of one’s particularistic symbols over
others’ (such as the names of gods and demons, characteristic of the Gnos-
tics).^33 Arius and his adherents, involved in a struggle in the 320s and 330s
that tested the power of the bishop of Alexandria against the other great church
metropoles, made use of Origen’s transcendent monotheism, formulated with
the development of Christian philosophy two generations before (EP, 1967:
1:162–164). By contrast, the “Cappadocian fathers,” influential in court circles
in the 370s and 380s, and thus victorious in the struggle to constitute ortho-
doxy, made use of Aristotelean and Middle Platonist doctrines in expounding
theology (CHLG, 1967: 432–447; Chadwick, 1967: 148–152). (Figure 3.7
shows the connections of Saint Gregory of Nazianzen, Saint Gregory of Nyssa,
and others with pagan philosophers at Athens, Constantinople, and Antioch.)
The Christians represent the victorious side of the law of small numbers,
subdividing intellectually to fill the expanding space available to them. Like all
strongly based intellectuals, they appropriated intellectual capital from move-
ments which were collapsing: Middle Platonism at first, and later when its
political strength was vitiated, Neoplatonism as well. Pagan concepts became
the weapons for heresy disputes. The Christian doctrine of the Trinity, which
emerged after 150 c.e., may well have been inspired by the propensity of the
Middle Platonists and neo-Pythagoreans to expound triadic hypostases of the
originating One.^34 Puzzles in reconciling identity and difference among parts
of the Trinity were taken up as occasions for dispute around the time when
Christianity came into political respectability and then power. Technical cate-
gories taken over from the amalgamation of Aristotelean logic with Platonism
ahomoousios (of dissimilar essence) and homoousios (of identical essence),
were the slogans of the Arians and their opponents, and the logic-chopping
homoiousios (the likeness of an image to its archetype) became the heated
subject of would-be compromise. The Council of Constantinople in 381 used
the doctrine of hypostases to expound orthodoxy concerning the parts of the
Trinity (Chadwick, 1967: 129–151). From another angle, one sees the pagan
networks migrating into the center of action, which is now on Christian terrain.
Saint Jerome was connected with the Middle Platonist faction; his doctrinal
opponent Saint Augustine derived from a Neoplatonist lineage (Marius Vic-
torinus, Simplicianus) which was now giving up the struggle and converting
under pressure to Christianity (CHLG, 1967: 342–343; Brown, 1967: 271–
275). These abstract heresy disputes are a sign of the intellectualization of
Christianity as it took over the philosophical attention space.
The great Christian philosophers are those most centrally involved in
intellectual networks connecting back to the accumulated sophistication of the
pagan philosophers, as well as into the church power hierarchy at the time of
the heresy disputes. It is not surprising that figures such as Augustine and
128 •^ The Skeleton of Theory