To appreciate the connections between knowledge and pedagogy in early Christian catechesis, we will first need a map of the educational landscape in antiquity. This chapter cannot but provide a rough sketch, but it will hopefully serve to outline the key elements of the terrain. Critical aspects include the role of memory and the use of regula or “canons” of truth. I will also note some of the important dynamics of Second Temple Judaism and early Christian traditions, as well as the phenomenon of teachers and “school-churches” in second-century Rome. In highlighting these elemental practices and learning institutions, we discover key precedents for the origins of Christian catechesis.
Teaching and Knowledge in Graeco-Roman Education
While it was once common to study ancient philosophy in terms of divergent theories about metaphysics, logic, and ethics, it is no longer tenable to separate theoretical knowledge from the practices that generate and sustain knowledge. Stemming from the influential work of scholars like Pierre Hadot, Julia Annas, and Martha Nussbaum, ancient philosophy is now understood more as a series of exercises for healing the soul – a comprehensive “way of life” aimed at eudaimonia and spiritual transformation.Footnote 1 Meanwhile, the study of rhetorical education is also viewed now more in terms of its relation to ancient religious and wisdom traditions. Classical education (paideia) curated moral as well as aesthetic sensibilities in its students; it too aimed at a comprehensive way of life.Footnote 2 These new conceptions of ancient philosophy and education have sparked re-readings of patristic theology and, as I hope to show, can also be applied to the study of Christian catechesis.Footnote 3
The debates between Socrates and the sophists that emerged in fifth-century Greece raised fundamental questions about the relation between knowledge and teaching. A central question arose: Could virtue (ἀρετή) be taught? And if so, by whom? The sophist Protogoras thought it could. But by virtue, he primarily meant political virtue – managing one’s affairs, running a city – all of which could be taught, if only for the right price.Footnote 4 Other sophists, such as Gorgias, rejected the pretention to teach virtue and claimed instead only to teach the “art of rhetoric.” Whether or not the sophists held to the kind of relativism epitomized in Protagoras’s famous dictum that “man is the measure of things,” we can observe the way their opponents exposed their pedagogies as based upon an epistemological indifference. The sophists employed a range of disciplines, such as music, poetry, gymnastics, and geometry.Footnote 5 Yet Plato critiqued certain pedagogical techniques, such as the exercise known as “eristic” argumentation, as teaching students to win or refute arguments regardless of the truth of the position held.Footnote 6 Such exercises, in Plato’s mind at least, instructed the very moral and metaphysical relativism that was antithetical to the pursuit of virtue.
Plato, meanwhile, developed his own account of knowledge, which was matched with a corresponding pedagogy of dialogue. For Plato, knowledge (ἐπιστήμη), as opposed to opinion (δόξα), entailed knowing not only that a thing is such but also knowing its causes and purposes. Since sensory perception could not provide such knowledge, Plato rejected the idea that true knowledge can be taught; it only comes by divine illumination and participation in a non-material, eternal reality – the Form of the Good.Footnote 7 As the sun is required to see particular things in the world, so knowledge of particulars only comes by the vision of the Good.Footnote 8 Given that knowledge comes not by the testimony of others or through sense perception, Plato articulated the pedagogy of knowledge in terms of his famous theory of recollection or anamnesis. In the Meno, Plato shows how Socrates, by a process of dialogue, could elicit from even a slave boy true knowledge.Footnote 9 Socrates does not teach him this truth; he only guides the boy through a series of questions and prompts to recollect what he “already” knows. Elsewhere, Plato has Socrates refrain from even calling himself a teacher; he refers to those whom he is “teaching” simply as those who spent time with him.Footnote 10 Through dialogue among such peers, Socrates enabled students to rediscover the perception of the Forms that provided true knowledge.
In the centuries that followed, pedagogy and knowledge became increasingly connected. Rejecting Plato’s doctrine of the Forms, Aristotle’s approach to epistemology and pedagogy differed from Plato’s, though he still followed his master’s basic approach to dialogical reasoning. In the sixth book of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle discusses knowledge among several “virtues of thought,” including craft (τέχνη), knowledge (ἐπιστήμη), prudence (φρόνησις), wisdom (σοφία), and understanding (νοῦς).Footnote 11 Like Plato, Aristotle thinks of knowledge (ἐπιστήμη) as a state of knowing non-contingent universals – those things that exist necessarily and eternally. Such knowledge, for Aristotle (unlike Plato), is learnable and teachable. Aristotle’s categories thus allow him to distinguish between “knowledge” (ἐπιστήμη), which can be learned by deductive reasoning, and “understanding” (νοῦς), which is knowledge of a priori principles that cannot be discovered by deduction but that do constitute the necessary first principles of knowledge.Footnote 12 Aristotle’s high estimation of deductive logic engendered a different pedagogical form than Plato’s, one that approached truth through demonstration and reasoning more than dialogue. This should not be pressed too hard, however, as Aristotle’s epistemology also remained wedded to dialectical modes of reasoning.Footnote 13
The division between “rhetoric” and “philosophy” also impacted rhetorical education in the Hellenistic period. In ancient rhetorical education, school exercises like progymnasmata and declamation taught students not only to prepare speeches but also to absorb the linguistic and moral tastes incumbent upon the governing elite. As Martin Bloomer puts it, this education was a process of “persona building” in which instructors “produced a definite subjectivity in its elite participants.”Footnote 14 Teachers deployed the language of the mystery cults to present learning as an initiation into sacred mysteries.Footnote 15 Through developing the skills of reading and speaking, students literally learned to talk and imagine themselves as another kind of person. The mastery of speech demonstrated a mastery of the body and of the passions.Footnote 16 Instructors taught not only the elements of speech but also vocal and bodily modulation, which instilled a “kind of eloquence of the body” (quasi corporis … eloquentia), as Cicero called it.Footnote 17 They also taught moral virtues, especially the control of anger.Footnote 18 Among Latin moralists like Cicero and Quintilian, rhetorical education was also impacted by the philosophical critique. Instructive here is Quintilian’s final chapter of the Institutio Oratio, which is devoted to what he considered the most important issue of rhetoric – that the orator be “a good man.”Footnote 19 Eloquence meant little if it was not expressed and informed by a genuine search for goodness and truth.
We could include other related issues and schools of antique philosophy and education. Pyrrhonian Skepticism, for example, raised serious questions about the limits of knowledge. The schools of Epicureanism and Stoicism, which I will consider in more detail in the following section, did as well. My aim here, again, is not to provide a comprehensive analysis of ancient epistemology but to chart some of the primary ways that knowledge and pedagogy were related. Many Christian leaders in the patristic era continued to receive a classical education – albeit with varying degrees of appreciation and appropriation.Footnote 20 With notable exceptions, Christians did not reject or replace classical paideia but sought to utilize this cultural inheritance for Christian aims.Footnote 21
Memory and Regula in Ancient Philosophy
From this more global consideration of teaching and knowledge in antiquity, we can now focus more concretely on some of the key elements from ancient philosophy that would feature prominently in Christian catechesis. Especially important here is the role of memory and the use of short, credal-like formulas. Both of these topics were prominent in Epicurean and Stoic philosophy, though they were discussed in other schools as well.
The topic of memory was a major feature of both rhetorical and philosophical education.Footnote 22 In rhetoric, memory was one of five central elements of good speech-making, along with invention, arrangement, style, and delivery.Footnote 23 Memory was understood not simply as the ability to recall information but also as the foundation of creative thought and action. It was, as Mary Carruthers puts it, a “compositional art … among the arts of thinking, especially involved with fostering the qualities we now revere as ‘imagination’ and ‘creativity.’”Footnote 24 As the influential Latin textbook Ad Herennium described it, memory was the “storehouse of inventions (thesaurum inuentorum) and the custodian of all parts of rhetoric.”Footnote 25 The well-trained memory not only allowed the orator to adapt and shape his discourse to a particular audience. It provided the cognitive structure in which the mind could reach new heights.
While teachers debated the extent to which memory was natural or artificial, all agreed that artificial memory could be strengthened by certain exercises. Among them were the establishment of what Aristotle called “common places” and the twin activities of diuisio and compositio.Footnote 26 One first developed a series of ordered and organized mental “places” (Gk., τόποι; Lt., loci), portrayed as an architectural structure. Into these structures one could store a potentially unlimited amount of information. Images acquired through sense perception were understood quite literally to be imprinted or stamped upon the soul, like wax on a tablet – a metaphor that comes from Plato and would become ubiquitous in the ars memorandi literature.Footnote 27 A major key for training memory was organization and brevity. The more organized one’s mind, the stronger memory would be. As Cicero put it, “The best aid to clearness of memory consists in orderly arrangement.”Footnote 28
It is within the domain of mnemonic education that we can locate the importance of memorizing short formulas or precepts and, relatedly, the application of certain canons or criteria of truth.Footnote 29 If memory was understood in architectural terms – as a storehouse of the soul – then the “canon” of truth was a measuring device for building a strong memory structure. Without a good regula, the building would be unstable.Footnote 30 For such rules to be useful, however, they needed to be internalized through memory and frequently recalled and applied in daily life. Rules needed to be meditated upon frequently so they could be ready at hand. As Pierre Hadot comments, the rule is to be formulated in “the most striking and concrete way. We must keep life’s events ‘before our eyes,’ and see them in the light of the fundamental rule. This is known as the exercise of memorization (mneme) and meditation (meletē) on the rule of life.”Footnote 31 Hadot went on to speak of the use of such “rules of life” as especially conducive to developing “attention” (προσοχή): “We are to steep ourselves in a rule of life (kanon), by mentally applying it to all of life’s possible different situations, just as we assimilate a grammatical or mathematical rule through practice, by applying it to individual cases.”Footnote 32 The exercises of memorization and meditation on a rule of life were not simply for acquiring knowledge of things but for transforming one’s mode of being in the world. Hence meditation was closely connected to affective and visual pedagogies, such as the use of amplification and repetition. By memorizing a rule, one acquired a new lens for perceiving the world.
While the quest for ascertaining the correct criteria of truth appeared in several schools, it was especially prominent in Stoic and Epicurean schools.Footnote 33 One of the dividing lines between Skeptics, on the one hand, and Stoics and Epicureans, on the other, was that whereas the former rejected the use of a criterion altogether, the latter concurred about its legitimacy but disagreed about its contents and application.Footnote 34 Epicurus expressed the importance of canon/criterion for philosophy and might have been partly responsible for its importance in philosophical discussions.Footnote 35 For Epicurus, establishing a canon of truth referred primarily to two basic principles: that words could be understood according to ordinary usage; and that sense perceptions could be trusted to make inferences about what lies beyond the senses.Footnote 36 Diogenes reports that Epicurus’s main criteria are the senses (αἰσθήσεις), preconceptions (προλήψεις), and affections (πάθη), though elsewhere he could also include “perceptions of mental standards” (φανταστικὰς ἐπιβολὰς τῆς διανοίας).Footnote 37 Much has been made of these terms and to what extent they qualify as “criteria” for measuring truth. But the more general point, observed by Eric Osborn, can be well taken: namely, that Epicurus is less concerned with an abstract epistemology than with “a theory of knowledge which can move from the known to further knowledge.”Footnote 38 His appeal to criteria served to stimulate a constructive form of reasoning in which objects observed through the senses could be trusted to lead to true knowledge and so avoid becoming lost in infinite regress.
Stoics employed the language of canon and criteria similarly. While some Stoics admitted several criteria – the Stoic Boethius included intellect, perception, desire, and knowledge, for example – most considered the main criterion to be “cognitive impressions,” or impressions arising from existent things.Footnote 39 Stoics distinguished between cognitive impressions, which contain an exact impression of the existing thing in the mind, and “incognitive impressions,” which either do not correspond with being or contain distorted images.Footnote 40 This language recalls the basic psychology of antique memory, exercising attention to the sense impressions “stamped” upon the soul.Footnote 41 It goes in a slightly different direction, however, by focusing on whether or not one’s impressions correspond with being, and not only whether the image proved more useful for remaining fixed in memory.
In addition to establishing criteria of truth, both Stoics and Epicureans emphasized the importance of memory for training cognition. Exhortations to remember or meditate upon precepts occur throughout Stoic writers like Epictetus, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius.Footnote 42 Seneca, for example, explains that the beginner should “hold fast” to elemental precepts “with both hands” and daily meditate upon them so they occur to him readily:
These are the precepts that he must never let go, nay, must cling fast to, and make a part of himself, and by daily meditation reach the point where these wholesome maxims occur to him of their own accord, and are promptly at hand whenever they are desired, and the great distinction between base and honorable action presents itself without any delay.Footnote 43
The goal of frequent meditation was for the precepts to become internal to the student, insinuated in heart and mind and available for use in any given situation. In correspondence with another Stoic on the relevance of precepts (praecepta) versus doctrines (decreta), Seneca stressed the importance of precepts especially for those who were “making progress” in philosophy, in distinction from both the rank beginner and the advanced student.Footnote 44 For the student in this stage, memorizing short precepts was the most important task for making good progress in the philosophical life.
The training of memory was especially important in Epicurean philosophy. As Elizabeth Asmis observes, for Epicureans, memorization was not simply a rote exercise subservient to dialogue (as it might be considered in Platonism) but as itself a “process of philosophical discovery.”Footnote 45 Epicurus included an epitome of his teaching so that students could memorize the core principles that would enable a comprehensive understanding of physics and, subsequently, ethics. Those who could not study his treatises in detail were to “preserve in memory” the principle points so they could recall them on any occasion; they were to memorize “the principal headings of an elementary outline of the whole treatment of the subject,” for a “grasp of the whole” will be more important than particular details.Footnote 46 He explains that this is because “it is impossible to gather up the results of continuous diligent study of the entirety of things, unless we can embrace in short formulas and hold in mind all that might have been accurately expressed even to the minutest detail.”Footnote 47 The student who grasps the comprehensive vision in outline form, even if lacking knowledge of specific parts, will be much better equipped than his peers, for he or she will be able “in silent fashion and as quick as thought run over the doctrines most important for their peace of mind.”Footnote 48
Martha Nussbaum has suggested three reasons for the importance of memory in Epicurean philosophy.Footnote 49 First, memory enabled the student to internalize key doctrines in a way that would strengthen the mind and produce within the student a dynamic power that helped combat falsehood. Second, memory provided a “comprehensive grasp of the structure of the whole system.” This allowed the student not only to see how the various parts of a philosophical system fit together but also to acquire trust in the system itself. Memorizing the canons enabled the student to see the whole at a glance, and then to move around, as it were, among different topics while remaining oriented. This form of learning was more beneficial than merely working through each argument piecemeal. Third, memory helped the student understand truth at an internal, immediate level, not merely remaining on the surface. Here, Nussbaum finds Epicurus at his most psychologically astute, and in distinction from Aristotelian methods: “The false beliefs that cause disturbance in life do not all lie on the surface of the self, ready for critical and dialectical scrutiny, as the Aristotelian seems to think. They lie deep in the soul, exercising their baneful influence, often beneath the level of consciousness.”Footnote 50 Memory work, in other words, enabled the Epicurean philosopher to perform the therapeutic surgery that uprooted whatever spiritual maladies afflicted the soul and then to transplant a new thought system that would be more conducive to obtaining wisdom.
Memory, and particularly the memorization of short summative statements, were vital components of philosophical and classical pedagogy. Combined with reflection on establishing certain canons or criteria of truth, the training of memory was crucial for training the mind to know and grasp truth. Especially for the beginning student, the discovery of truth was premised upon a memory habituated through daily meditation on certain basic principles and rules of life. With a well-trained memory, the philosopher could dispense with obstructive thought patterns and begin to construct a new mental storehouse of the soul that would enable genuine progress in the quest for wisdom.
Education in Early Christianity
Graeco-Roman education played an unquestionably formative role in early Christian as well as Jewish teaching. While von Harnack presented sharply contrastive pictures of Hebraism and Hellenism, it is now more common to see Christian education emerging from within a Second Temple Judaism that was already conditioned by similar assumptions and questions as their Greek and Roman neighbors.Footnote 51
And while it is less plausible today to speak of a New Testament “catechism,”Footnote 52 we do find traces in early Christian literature of catechetical terminology, which had been largely absent in the Septuagint and in Hellenistic Jewish literature. The Greek term katēcheō (κατηχέω) and its cognates appear in several Christian texts during this period, though with a broadly didactic meaning and not necessarily related to baptismal instruction (Luke 1:4; Acts 18:25; 21:21, 24; 1 Cor. 14:19; Gal. 6:6; Rom. 2:18).Footnote 53 But it is not in terminological formula that we should look for the origins of catechesis. Rather, several features of early Christian pedagogy are more instructive – for example, Christian uses of non-Christian styles of producing, transmitting, and commenting on texts,Footnote 54 the use of classical genres,Footnote 55 and even the use of paideia language to depict God’s relation to his people.Footnote 56 Especially of interest is the organization of knowledge into stages or progressive patterns, distinguishing certain kinds of teaching as appropriate for beginners and others for the more advanced – milk and meat, for instance.Footnote 57 Paul’s preaching and especially moral instruction, as Abraham Malherbe has argued, especially drew on pedagogical techniques from classical education and moral philosophy in the Hellenistic age.Footnote 58 One finds evidence for this in Paul’s use of diatribal language to refute his opponents, for example, or his self-representation to the Thessalonians as a “gentle nurse” (1 Thess. 2:27).Footnote 59 Another is Paul’s use of phronēsis language in Romans 12:2–3, which may have been inspired by the practical wisdom tradition set out in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics.Footnote 60 In many ways, New Testament literature evidences a great deal of debt to ancient Graeco-Roman rhetorical and philosophical pedagogy.
Another important precursor to organizing catechetical knowledge is the famous “two ways” formula.Footnote 61 This image has been an important theme in studies of catechesis, as it charts the clear presentation, ostensibly for newcomers, of what Christian initiation entailed.Footnote 62 Indications of this image appear in several early Christian texts, such as Hebrews 6:1–6, 1 Peter 3, and the Epistle of Barnabas, but it is especially prominent in the Didache and the Shepherd of Hermas – two texts that came to be specifically associated in the fourth century with baptismal catechesis.Footnote 63 Such language should be judged carefully when attributing it to the formation of catechesis. While the Didache seems to indicate the use of the two ways formula as a kind of catechetical instruction, a text like the Shepherd of Hermas concerns repentance within a post-baptismal setting, and so does not appear to have been cast originally as a catechetical work.Footnote 64
From this survey, we can identify several key themes in early Christian education that led to the emergence of catechesis. Early Christian approaches to education were highly diverse and could vary in the use of texts, models, and social structures. But amid these variations, we find important emphases on moral formation, divine knowledge, and progressive stages of growth in virtue. The purposes of education in this period were concerned with forming persons who could know God through being assimilated into a community of instruction and worship. In this context, we see some of the primary outlines for the ways in which catechesis developed as an educational institution for shaping knowledge of God.
Teachers, Students, and Schools in Second-Century Rome
Surveying the landscape of education and knowledge in antiquity allows us to sketch a more detailed outline of the phenomenon of independent teachers and “schools-churches” in second-century Rome, which serves as another key precedent for the emergence of catechesis.Footnote 65 This context, I suggest, is especially helpful for understanding the correlation between social and ritual aspects of knowledge in early Christianity, as we observe a heightened focus on the need to demarcate the boundaries of orthodoxy and heterodoxy in attaining genuine knowledge of God.
The school model of second-century Roman Christianity, exemplified by Marcion, Valentinus, Justin, and others, operated in many ways like other ancient schools, even when they did not explicitly describe themselves that way. These school-churches were characterized by fellowship around a teacher, textual analysis, biblical commentary, a rigorous pattern of discipleship, and a shared way of life. They typically met in homes and were supported financially by patrons. Each church was normally headed by a bishop, but we also hear of presbyters or lay teachers serving in leadership roles. While we find hints of formal catechesis in these school-churches, we cannot identify any of these writings as catechetical in the delimited sense of peri-baptismal education.Footnote 66 Nonetheless, these schools illuminate the institutionalizing character of early Christian epistemology and pedagogy in the context of ritual initiation.
Valentinus and the Valentinians
Valentinus and those associated with him are especially helpful for understanding the emergence of Christian catechesis – particularly given the way that issues of knowledge and soteriology became linked with initiation into these school-like churches.Footnote 67 To be sure, one can question the extent to which Valentinianism can be called a “school.”Footnote 68 According to Christoph Markschies, Valentinus was an unremarkable figure in the mid second century, and stood at a distance from his followers who interpreted Scripture within a more complex mythology.Footnote 69 Einar Thomassen, by contrast, sees much more continuity between Valentinus and later Valentinians based on common “family resemblances.”Footnote 70 Regardless, the divergent streams of Valentinian Christianity should be seen as operating within the intellectual and social currents that governed other school-like church groups in second-century Rome, and we do well to locate Valentinian texts within this milieu.
The concept of “redemption” (ἀπολύτρωσις) was central to Valentinian Christianity, comprising a mutually interpreting set of baptismal, protological, and soteriological elements.Footnote 71 And yet, because Valentinian baptismal rituals were formally indistinct from other Christian communities’ rituals, it became imperative in the interpretation and explication of these rituals – presumably in some kind of catechetical instruction – to distinguish Valentinian identity based on theological issues.Footnote 72 Sociologically, we can also highlight the importance of reform in Valentinian Christianity. Thomassen has argued that, because of conflicting tensions between “decentralization” and “centralization” in the second- and third-century emergence of the monepiscopacy, figures like Valentinus pursued a model of reform based on a kind of pure church ideology.Footnote 73 However, rather than instilling an unbridgeable gap between the pure church and other Christians, Valentinian reform seems to have allowed for multiple levels of participation, corresponding with different levels of knowledge in which the perfected gnostic, or “spiritual” Christian, occupied a higher state of being than did the “psychic” Christian.Footnote 74 This kind of multi-layered structure, which perhaps set precedents for later distinctions between catechumen and baptized, generated new questions. How could rituals distinguish various levels of knowledge? And what educational practices would facilitate progression from one level to another?
In Valentinian baptismal initiation, we find several ways of dealing with these questions. We should be cautious with the heresiologists’ presentation of the varieties of the Valentinian ritual of redemption (ἀπολύτρωσις), such as Irenaeus’s in Aduersus haereses 1.21, which likely depicts Western derivatives of a more primitive Eastern Valentinianism.Footnote 75 He describes at least six groups differentiated by ritual: one group who understood baptism as preparing the “bridal chamber,”Footnote 76 three groups who baptized in water but did so with different rituals, a fifth group who replaced water baptism with a water-oil anointing, and a sixth group who rejected material elements altogether.Footnote 77 For Irenaeus, this latter group represents the most consistent form of Valentinianism, since it fits with his portrait of Valentinian redemption as a matter of pure gnosis; more likely, however, they were a marginal group within broader Valentinian currents.Footnote 78 When we turn to extant texts, most of which come from Eastern settings, we see not a wholesale rejection of material elements but rather a focus on the relation between the materiality of the rites and the spiritual symbolism they convey. Key texts include the Tripartite Tractate, the Excerpta ex Theodoto, and the Gospel of Philip – texts that come from Greek and Coptic sources from the second and third centuries, yet which helpfully indicate trajectories of Valentinian practice more generally.Footnote 79
The Coptic Tripartite Tractate shows an interest in questions of spiritual knowledge and metaphysics in ways that correspond with ancient philosophy more broadly, especially Middle Platonism.Footnote 80 The text also evidences use of a trinitarian confession in baptism and speaks of the baptizand’s participation in the “Totalities” or “Entireties” that descend upon the waters.Footnote 81 It also speaks of baptismal initiates needing to believe “what was said to them,” which seems to suggest some form of catechetical instruction.Footnote 82 In the Excerpta ex Theodoto, baptism is described in conjunction with Christ’s baptism as a liberation from fate and the passions. The author makes clear, however, that it is not a transformation of the body (σῶμα) but of the soul (ψυχήν),Footnote 83 and that “it is not only washing that sets one free, but also the knowledge of who we were, what we have become, where we were, where we were placed, where we are going, from what we are ransomed, what birth is, what rebirth is.”Footnote 84 The text emphasizes purity of soul as the condition in which initiates proceed into the water; they are encouraged to “fast, petition, pray, [raise up] hands, kneel, because a soul is saved ‘from the world’ and ‘from the mouth of lions.’”Footnote 85 Benjamin Edsall has qualified Thomassen’s strong claim that this section evidences a Valentinian “catechism.”Footnote 86 Nonetheless, the interrogatory format, the protological and soteriological narrativizing, and the emphasis on liberating gnosis make clear some of the directions that theological instruction around initiation rituals could take.
The Gospel of Philip, dating from perhaps the late second or early third century, is another key text associated with Valentinianism, and has even been identified as a series of notes for baptismal catechesis.Footnote 87 It situates various rituals and sacraments within a broader discourse about the nature of material and immaterial reality that characterizes the philosophical mood of this period.Footnote 88 Since “truth did not come into the world naked” but “in types and images,” so also human redemption occurs through images that reflect transcendent realities.Footnote 89 To depict the mystery of salvation, the Gospel of Philip develops an image of progressive entrance into three shrines: baptism is the “holy”; redemption is the “holy of holy”; and spiritual marriage is the “holy of holies.”Footnote 90 Mystery language here does not simply refer to the performance of rituals; it also entails deeper reflection on the relation between physical and spiritual realities – about “thinking sacrally,” as April DeConick puts it, about the way “mundane activities [are] infused with sacrosanct meanings.”Footnote 91 In this regard, the Gospel of Philip shows certain patterns we will see in later catechetical literature – especially teaching around baptismal initiation that focuses on how divine knowledge occurs through reflection on the materiality of the ritual and the invisible and spiritual divine powers in which they partake.
Valentinian teaching and initiation helps us understand later Christian catechesis as emerging amid discourses about metaphysics and epistemology. Both for Valentinians and those who opposed them, a key imperative of instruction was reflection on the relationship between rituals and the kinds of spiritual knowledge they induced. Precisely because common rituals were shared among opposing groups, teachers were compelled to distinguish themselves by articulating different visions of how true knowledge of God could emerge in such practices.
Marcion and the Marcionites
Marcion and those associated with him are also instructive for understanding the school-Christian context of the second century. Marcion, too, was concerned for reform and communal purity. After coming to Rome from Sinope in the 140s, his debate with certain “presbyters and teachers” left him frustrated and ready to lead a separate group.Footnote 92 While none of his writings survive, and we are dependent on the writings of his opponents and later heresiologists, the response to his work provides insight into the variety of early Christian engagements with education and initiation.
In terms of educational models, there is good reason to see Marcion as fitting well within the fluid and dynamic scene of second-century school Christianity. Despite the frequent accusations that he rejected or excised Jewish Scripture,Footnote 93 it is plausible that he simply did not know these Scriptures until he came to Rome, and thus his editorial agenda was perhaps less directly tied to theological concerns.Footnote 94 Christoph Markschies considers Marcion’s work as a scholar-teacher within the Alexandrian school model; while lacking the intellectual skills of a Clement or Origen, the institutional setting, Markschies thinks, was roughly the same.Footnote 95 Regardless of the ambiguity of Marcion’s own relation to text-critical questions, his students and the communities they formed do seem invested in such questions. Apelles, for instance, produced a substantial literary output, including the massive Syllogisms, which exposed the Old Testament contradictions that emerged in the disputes with Marcion.Footnote 96 His followers also produced their own editions of Scripture, which sought to expound in a more philologically sophisticated manner what their teacher intimated in broad strokes.Footnote 97 In this light, it becomes clearer how Marcionite communities fit within the broad ambit of second-century school Christianity.
Marcionite churches, too, seem to have employed similar rituals as other Christian groups. Tertullian’s polemical account, as others have noted, was directed not against their use of rituals but against the inconsistency of their use of material elements and the supposedly anti-creation theology they espoused.Footnote 98 It is unlikely, however, that Marcionite communities in fact taught the kind of anti-creation theology of which they were accused.Footnote 99 Recent scholarship has observed that Marcion was not concerned with the goodness of matter per se but, more precisely, with the disparity between the true God and the Demiurge responsible for the chaotic ordering of the cosmos.Footnote 100 Early critics like Justin take issue with Marcion’s theological dualism – that he proclaimed “another God” – but not that he viewed materiality (ὑλη) as inherently problematic.Footnote 101 It is only among later critics, such as Tertullian, that we find Marcion accused of teaching an anti-creation theology.Footnote 102
In terms of our understanding of the emerging catechumenate, this set of arguments points yet again to the growing need to correlate initiation rituals with theological epistemology. While Marcion has not often been considered a philosophical theologian, more recent assessments view his approach as broadly conversant with the Middle Platonism of second-century Christianity, in which a chief concern was ordering the relationship between the Supreme God and the organizing principles of the world.Footnote 103 Marcion’s view was certainly distinctive in the strong distance it placed between the Supreme God and the Demiurge, but the kind of questions he raised were standard for the academic context of second-century Rome.
Justin Martyr
The nature of Justin’s “school,” located above the baths of Myrtinus, has been the source of much scholarly interest.Footnote 104 It was likely not a catechetical school in the vein of Origen’s schools in Alexandria and Caesarea, though nor was it a distinct ecclesial subset that focused on instructing new believers.Footnote 105 Justin’s style resembles that of the “popular” or “salon” philosopher – open to broader audiences while still maintaining rituals that could preserve the Christian’s sacred meal for the initiated.Footnote 106 Though Justin’s extant writings are not explicitly catechetical in nature, they do suggest and perhaps assume an emerging catechetical institution.Footnote 107
The most important example is Justin’s well-known description of the requirements for baptism in the First Apology.Footnote 108 He explains that baptism was for Christians who had “dedicated [them]selves to God when [they] were made new through Christ.”Footnote 109 The scenario is one of persuasion and instruction, followed by commitment to living the Christian way of life, and culminating in a ritual procedure that comprised fasting, prayer, and baptism:
All those who are persuaded and believe that these things that we teach and say are true, and who give an undertaking that they are able so to live, are taught to pray and ask with fasting for forgiveness from God for their past sins, and we pray and fast for them.Footnote 110
Several key themes are of interest here. Justin characterizes baptism by emphasizing the necessity of repentance and the benefits of regeneration and illumination. But mainly, he assumes that some kind of teaching and persuasion has taken place in advance of baptism, and that on the basis of this instruction, new members can now be considered for baptism, but only after they undergo an additional period of repentance and fasting. Baptism is permitted only to those who have been persuaded and who believe – those who have faith that Christian teachings are true (πιστεύωσιν ἀληθῆ ταῦτα). Justin’s report of the strictures placed upon the recipients of baptism and eucharist suggests that there is a concern to organize rules for the instruction of baptismal candidates.
More generally, Justin’s well-known rhetorical presentation of Christianity as “true philosophy” is worth noting in this context. Donning not only the philosopher’s pallium but also certain literary styles, such as the dialogue, Justin presented Christianity as a comprehensive philosophy – a coherent system of intellectual and moral rectitude – to offer an apologetic account of the faith.Footnote 111 In his doctrinal commitments, Justin drew on Stoic and Middle Platonic thought, pitching Christianity as a superior form of transcendental monotheism and stressing the ultimate primacy of the one God who implants the logoi spermatikoi in human beings.Footnote 112 Justin’s presentation of Christianity thus capitalized on ideas pervasive in the Platonic philosophical monotheism of his day, which Justin deployed to position Christianity as a superior way of life.
The schools associated with Valentinus, Marcion, and Justin reveal some of the key links between Christian teaching practices in the context of baptism, and thus the way in which theological epistemology was beginning to be mapped onto Christian initiation. They are occupied, on the one hand, with articulating Christian doctrine within a broadly Stoic-Platonist philosophical milieu, concerned with questions about the relation between spiritual and material being. They are also interested, on the other hand, in expressing how the knowledge of God is transmitted through rituals that employ physical, material signs. These issues would become key features of early Christian catechesis.
Conclusion
The classical and early Christian teaching practices sketched here, incomplete as they must remain, allow us to perceive the important lines giving shape to the formation of Christian catechesis as a distinctive epistemological practice in early Christianity. Several features are especially noteworthy: the impulse to draw together aspects of pedagogy and knowledge within a ritual process of initiation, the focus on memory and credal formula to provide initial guidance to the formation of knowledge, the description of theological instruction as a form of moral and spiritual therapy, and the appearance of multi-stage levels of initiation that correspond with graded levels of knowledge. These features constitute key aspects of basic education in classical antiquity and early Christianity, and they received a more detailed composition in second-century Christianity in Rome.
As catechesis came to assume a more visible place in the landscape of early Christianity in the third and fourth century, many of these features endured. In the following chapters, we will return to these themes at several junctures. For now, we will see how these developments informed the emergence of the catechumenate in the writings of the late second-century bishop, Irenaeus of Lyons.
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