Der Wahre Logos des Kelsos: Eine Strukturanalyse. By Johannes Arnold.

Abstract

The Ἀληθὴς λόγος by the ‘pagan’ Middle Platonist Celsus is only fragmentarily extant in Origen of Alexandria’s Contra Celsum. This was written under Philip the Arab, about 70 years after the composition of the Ἀληθὴς λόγος. The title can mean ‘True Discourse’, ‘Account’, ‘Theory’, or even ‘True Logos’. I suspect, indeed, that Celsus chose a title that could resonate, polemically, with the main epinoia of Christ: Logos. On this hypothesis, Celsus was establishing and supporting ‘the true Logos’ against the false Logos that was said to be Christ. Indeed, Celsus was arguing that the philosophical (Platonist) Logos was incompatible with the Christ-Logos and the logos/discourse/theory of Christianity, whereas Origen argued that the philosophical Logos was in fact the Christ-Logos (αὐτολόγος, fr. 2.31a, Cels. 3.41.6; cf. p. 1, n. 4). Like Porphyry later—and those who still resist the category of patristic philosophy—Celsus claimed that philosophy was incompatible with Christianity. This is why Porphyry denounced Origen’s intellectual figure as an impossible hybrid of a philosopher and a Christian—a great philosopher whose fault was that of living like a Christian while thinking like a Greek and applying Greek philosophical allegoresis to the Jewish–Christian Scriptures (C. Chr. F39). To Porphyry’s mind, as to Celsus’, this operation was an ἀδύνατον, because the Bible did not contain philosophical doctrines to be discovered through allegoresis. The use of allegoresis by Celsus, well pointed out by Arnold, can indeed be inscribed in the wider imperial debate on the legitimacy and applicability of philosophical allegoresis to certain authoritative texts rather than others (see Ilaria Ramelli, ‘The Philosophical Stance of Allegory in Stoicism and its Reception in Platonism’, IJCT 18 [2011], pp. 335–71).