Dionysus in Late Antiquity. Clement of Alexandria and Nonnus of Panopolis in Dialogue

CONTENT

INTRODUCTION ... 2

CLEMENT-IMITATIO DIABOLICA ... 4

NONNUS OF PANOPOLIS: ‘THE INCERTUS’ ... 8

CONCLUSION ... 11

BIBLIOGRAPHY ... 12

INTRODUCTION

The early Christian writers, in constructing a worldview in continuation with the Old Testament, were inevitably faced with the challenge of the widespread Greek culture, and in particular of the Greek religion. Specifically, of all the Greek gods, the most vexing seems to have been Dionysus, who in striking parallel with Christ is a resurrected god ­–according to the Zagreus mythic tradition– has universal aspirations for his cult, was the offspring of a mortal mother and a god, performs miracles, and not least, has wine as a sacred element in his ritual observances. These analogies between Dionysus and Christ, which make their thematic comparison fitting, were first exploited by Paul in ca. 54 CE.­ In his epistles to Corinthians ­his language reflects Dionysian cults in places (1 Cor 12:2) and notably, the consumption of wine in private meetings is rendered in distinctively Dionysian phraseology (1 Cor 11:17-34).[1] Similarly, as Richard Seaford has asserted, weighing in on the long-standing debate of the similarities between the Acts and the Bacchae first documented by Wilhelm Nestle in his 1900 article ‘Anklänge an Euripides in der Apostelgeschichte,’[2] the Acts and the Bacchae feature too many affinities, and at key points – Paul’s conversion (Acts 9:3-7; 22:6-11; 26:12-18) and Paul and Silas’ prison escape (Acts 16:19-40)­– to be taken as mere coincidence. [3]

These very parallels between Dionysus and Christ were drawn more distinctively in the second and third century CE by Greek and Latin Apologists; that is Christian intellectuals­ who writing in defence of Christianity assumed a polemic stance against Dionysus. However, on the whole, the confrontation of Christians with Dionysus played out in the Greek East; namely in Alexandria and Antiochia.[4] And reasonably so, since, as far as Alexandria is concerned, Dionysus’ cult was fostered by the kings themselves, who, from the Lagids through Mark Antony, sought to trace their origin to Dionysus and identified with the figure of Alexander. Ptolemey IV Philopater himself ­–he reigned 221-205 BCE– received the teletai of the New Dionysus[5], while in 215-214 BC he decreed that ‘those initiating to Dionysus’ in the countryside, are required to be registered in Alexandria; a move construed as an attempt to enter Dionysian mysteries into the official register, rather than supress them, as was the case in the Bacchanalian affair in Rome in 186 BCE, that is the harsh suppression of the Bacchic cult in Italy by a Roman Senate’s decree documented by Livy.[6]

Thus Clement of Alexandria (ca. 150-215 CE), the Church Father who taught at the Catechetical School of Alexandria until his persecution by Septimus Severus in 202-203 CE, was cenrtainly not the first to attack Dionysus as Justin the Martyr had done so earlier, comparing him to a daemon that plagiarised the Christian mysteries.[7] However, what sets Clement apart from the other apologists is that, in his exhortation to non-Christian Greeks to convert, the Properticus, not only does he co-opt the Bacchic vocabulary in a rather imaginative way by means of the Bacchae, but most importantly, he draws from a wide variety of literary sources, the majority of which are non-extant. [8] Dionysus and his mysteries are explicitly dismissed in the refutatio (Protrepticus 12.118-123), an arguably small portion of the text, all the while, the imagery and vocabulary of the Bacchae are transfixed on the Christian mysteries throughout the Properticus. In light of Clement’s apologetic discourse built on dichotomies such as Christianity versus paganism, and Christians versus pagans, Dionysus becomes the par excellence pagan god.

Conversely, the Egyptian poet, Nonnus of Panopolis, who lived in the fifth century CE, in blurring the Dionysian and Christian registers, somewhat breaks down the apologists’ barriers between paganism and Christianity. In Dionysiaca, his epic 48-book epic charting the god’s itinerary from his birth to his apotheosis, Dionysus at a critical point after Ampelus’ death sheds Christianlike tears for humanity. What is more, under the name of the same author, a poetic version of Saint’s John Gospel, the Paraphrase, has survived. It is characterised by the distinctive language of Dionysiaca -compound classicising adjectives­­–thus lending a strong Greek epic flavour to the Christian narrative. The obscure poet has puzzled scholars as to his intentions and his religious identity from the 20^th century onwards; Rudolph Keydell and Paul Collart in the early decades of the century posited that Nonnus, subsequent to his conversion to Christianity, abandonned his magnus opum in order to devote himself to the hexameter translation of John’s Gospel, while Robert Shorrock more recently advanced that Nonnus, was neither Christian nor pagan, but, in contrast, he was floating over the uncertain area between these two identities.[9]

Undeniably these two Greek authors lived in Egypt in different circumstances; in brief, in the third century CE Christianity was only one religious community of the Roman Empire whose universal message and resistance to the mores maiorum often met with animosity, whereas in the time of Nonnus ­­– fifth century CE­­– Egypt was a largely Christianised region. However, both writers taken together constitute two significant pieces of a puzzle which, if completed, reflects the assimilation of Dionysus with Christ throughout Late Antiquity –that is from the first century until at least Nonnus’ time, i.e. fifth century CE. If one reads between the lines in both texts and takes into account the syncretistic and monotheistic tendencies of the time, a prominent trend of Late Antiquity cutting across religious boundaries, one might deduce that Dionysus, at least in the Greek East, was envisaged as the essence of the divine; hence its comparison and equation with Christ.^[10]

To this end, firstly, I will examine Clement’s strategy of appropriation and repudiation as well as the main motifs used in the service of his ‘totalising discourse’[11]: the omophagia, the serpent and Dionysus’ dismemberment, a borrowing from the Orphic Dionysus, an integral part of Neoplatonist theories of the Many and the One, that is the derivation of the whole of reality from one principle. [12] Secondly, I will look at the ways whereby the Dionysian and Christian world intersect in Nonnus’ works; that is the motifs of the wine and the vine -in the Paraphrase and the Dionysiaca- and briefly the much-debated Christian attributes of Dionysus in Dionysiaca. In conclusion, I will bring the two authors into dialogue in order to shed light on the intersections of the Dionysian and Christian realm in Late Antiquity.

[...]

[1] Friesen 2013:209.

[2] Mentioned in Friesen 2013: 210.

[3] Seaford has outilined 15 narrative shared themes between the Bacchae and the Acts in his article “Thunder, Lightning, and Earthquakes’. See Seaford 1997:139-148.

[4] Francesco Massa mentions Antiochia, Alexandria and Rome, although no Latin apologist went to some lengths as the Greek ones­ – Justin the Martyr, Origen and Clement– in their confrontation with Dionysus. See Massa: 2014.

[5] Seaford 2006: 58

[6] (Livy 39.1-19)

[7] (Apology:1.21)

[8] On Clement’s sources see Zeegers-vander Vorst:1968.

[9] Shorrock provides a synopsis of all the scholarly views on Nonnus from the 20^th century onwards.

See Shorrock 2011: 50-56.

[10] On pagan monotheism see Athanassiadi & Frede 1996.

[11] Cameron 1994:12.

[12] Edmonds 1999:42.