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  • Explaining the Cosmos: Creation and Cultural Interaction in Late-Antique Gaza by Michael W. Champion
  • Aryeh Kofsky
Michael W. Champion Explaining the Cosmos: Creation and Cultural Interaction in Late-Antique Gaza Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2014 Pp. x + 240. $74.00.

Gaza in the late fifth and early sixth centuries was an important Palestinian port city with a thriving cultural life, distinguished writers, and flourishing monastic communities. Classical paideia contined to form the cultural substrate for educated Christians in the Eastern Mediterranean, but Christian intellectuals had to contend with challenges presented by the contemporary hegemonic Neoplatonist philosophy, eventually leading to the closure of the Academy at Athens. In Explaining the Cosmos, Michael Champion studies the strategies of three eminent local Christian intellectuals: Aeneas, Zacharias and Procopius. His book demonstrates that they subscribed deeply to Neoplatonic discourse while skillfully confuting Neoplatonic cosmogony and theology. Champion’s study charts, methodically and analytically, their nuanced responses to major conflicting Neoplatonic tenets.

Chapter One presents the authors and their main works analyzed in the book: Aeneas’s Theophrastus, Zacharias’s Ammonius, and Procopius’s Commentary on Genesis. They were primarily responding to Proclus’ exposition of Plato, and Champion contends that the local circumstances behind their individual rebuttals were in fact a composite intellectual amalgam culled from philosophical concepts, monastic ideologies, schools of rhetoric, dogmatic theology, and contacts with the prominent intellectual centers of Athens and Alexandria. But Champion argues further that their individual idiosyncrasies were affected by their specific involvement in the local society and culture of contemporary Gaza. [End Page 325]

The rest of the book is divided into two parts. In the first part (Chapter Two) the author surveys the urban society, the rhetorical schools and the monastic communities, and their ties with the church of Gaza and the schools. He then proceeds (Chapter Three) to identify the distinct involvement of each writer in his society as the background for his polemics. Here Champion illustrates succinctly the expediency of the dialogue (Aeneas and Zacharias) and commentary (Procopius) formats for adapting philosophical discourse to Christian theology and hermeneutics. Champion concludes that the primary goals of the Gaza writers were to win over pagan sophists and to enhance Christian lore in the rhetorical schools.

The second part of the book (Chapters Four through Six) constitutes the bulk of the work. Here Champion performs a masterful analysis of the texts, with their polemics against Neoplatonic constructs and adaptation of those constructs to Christian dogmas and concepts. Chapter Four discusses the pivotal issue of creation, addressing the fundamental discrepancy between Neoplatonic monism and the Christian notion of ex nihilo creation, with its implications for the questions of immortality and the eternity of the world and for the validity of Christian eschatology. Champion astutely assesses the innovative treatment of the Gazans in addressing the Neoplatonic issues philosophically before turning, albeit only sparingly, to biblical hermeneutics. Chapter Five moves to examine Procopius’s Commentary on Genesis and his treatment of monist philosophy versus divine revelation, and eternal versus created matter, soteriology, divine will and temporality. The concepts of creation and eternity in Aeneas and Zacharias are discussed in Chapter Six, indicating their rejection of the Neoplatonic eternal cosmos in order to maintain the eschatological renewal and perfection of the universe. Champion insightfully relates the context of earlier Trinitarian controversies and the Origenism that fermented Palestinian monastic communities to Aeneas’s refutation of certain Neoplatonic notions and the polemical discussion of the preexistence of the soul. Champion concludes (Chapter Seven) that the serious polemics of his protagonists and their adaptation of Neoplatonic discourse to champion Christian theology merits our recognition of Aeneas, Zacharias and Procopius as not merely Christian rhetoricians or sophists, but rather as Christian philosophers.

Whereas Champion’s analysis of the apologetic works of the Gazan authors within the context of Neoplatonic discourse is remarkable, it seems that his wish to anchor the discussion also in the context of the cultural and social environment of late antique Gaza by revealing the creative, productive, and violent tensions prevailing among heterogeneous local cultures is largely unsubstantiated. These cultural and social interconnectivities—real as they might have been—remain suggestive rather than actual. This is no...

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