The historical Context of John Philoponus' De Opificio Mundi in the Culture of Byzantine-Coptic Egypt

Abstract

John Philoponus (ca. 490–575) was the first and probably only universal mind of the culture of Christian Egypt. Since the publication eighteen years ago of a collection of studies entitled Philoponus and the Rejection of Aristotelian Science, this sixth-century Alexandrian philosopher, theologian and polymath has become the focus of increased scholarly interest. As a documentary papyrologist working on the sixth-century Egyptian lawyer-poet Dioscorus of Aphrodito, I had even earlier come to speculate about a possible connection between that writer and Philoponus. However, despite the growth of scholarship on the society of late antique Egypt, studies on Philoponus have until recently continued to be carried on largely within the closed universe of late antique classical philosophy, with little attention paid to the actual social world within which Philoponus lived and worked, and concentrating on only one aspect of his output, the philosophical commentaries, to the comparative neglect of his theological works and his identity as a non-Chalcedonian thinker at the time of the early growth of Egypt's separate church. What I should like to do is try and understand Philoponus better within his social background of sixth-century Egypt, the world of the Greek and Coptic documentary papyri. In his great work, the De Opificio Mundi or “Explanations of Moses' Cosmogony” (CPG 7265), Philoponus produced a Miaphysite commentary on Genesis, the goal of which was to demonstrate to the people of his own place and time that only this correct understanding of Christ, the Miaphysite one, would provide a key to understanding the created universe through correctly reconciling the data of classical science with those of Christian revelation.