Dialoguing in Late Antiquity by Averil Cameron (review)

Did the ascendancy of Christianity in the later parts of late antiquity spell the end of dialogue? This is the question Averil Cameron’s most recent monograph, Dialoguing in Late Antiquity, seeks to address.¹ The answer, of course, hinges in large part on how “dialogue” ought to be defined: an open-ended intellectual give-and-take, in which both parties are engaged in a shared process of discernment, or a somewhat more expansive understanding that includes exchanges which, while dialogical in form, might reflect a somewhat less “open” spirit. The former definition has shaped accounts of the “end of dialogue” in late antiquity, including those of Richard Lim and Daniel Boyarin. Cameron’s volume, by contrast, relies upon the latter, arguing that to do otherwise gives too much credit to classical dialogues and too little to those of late antiquity. In short, “Contrary to the idea that discussion was ‘shut down’ in the fifth and sixth century, what happened was the very opposite” (9): dialogues proliferated in both number and diversity, ranging from the philosophical, to the self-consciously interreligious, to the highly rhetorically stylized.

Rather than focusing upon any one of these categories, the book casts a wide net on the premise that studying the genre’s seemingly disparate representatives in conjunction with one another will yield important insights for any of its subsets. The resulting study attests to Cameron’s characteristic erudition; its bibliography, weighing in at nearly a quarter of the entire volume, is bound to serve as a starting point for the many future studies whose necessity the book highlights. At the same time, Dialoguing in Late Antiquity aims to introduce audiences of all levels of expertise to intriguing ancient texts. After an opening chapter that surveys the status quaestionis of dialogue in late ancient studies, Cameron accordingly turns first to the historical evidence for debate and dialogue in this era (Chapter Two), and then to three literary exemplars of these practices (Chapter Three). Of these, the dialogues of Methodius, including the well-known Symposium, are likely to be familiar to students of late antiquity. By contrast, Theodoret’s Eranistes, a collection of three dialogues concerning the nature of Christ, and the self-styled pre-Islamic Dialexis between Gregentius of Taphar and Herban, a learned Jew, promise glimpses into more obscure literary territory.

The texts are chosen for their diversity rather than their coherence; indeed, aside from their dialogical format, little connects these writings with one another. Yet each of them shows traces of the complex intersection between rhetorical and historical, the production of text and the production of discourse “on the ground” that characterize late ancient dialogue. The lines evidently blur, yet Cameron’s analysis demonstrates once again that orthodoxy remained a moving target and that late ancient, even Byzantine, dialogues were not mere literary shell-games. Amidst all its diversity, “Christian dialogue had a purpose; it was not dialogue for dialogue’s sake” (55).

Beyond its substantive importance for historians of late antiquity, however, Cameron’s contribution offers valuable challenges on two additional fronts. First, while the book works out its central argument at least initially as a critique of its predecessors, Dialoguing in Late Antiquity strives to re-open conversation rather than providing a definitive answer to the role of dialogue in late antiquity. As such, the book can be read as an invitation to the study of a fabulously diverse and still insufficiently well-considered range of sources. By the same token, Cameron’s determination to cast a wide net, considering sources from classical antiquity through the Byzantine era and from a range of Eastern languages, calls attention to one of the central methodological challenges facing late ancient historians. In recent decades, students of late antiquity have begun to forge connections with a number of disciplines previously considered discrete including, inter alia, Syriac and Byzantine studies. The ever-greater integration of the fields is surely salutary, even as it raises questions about...