‘The gold of Egypt’: Spolia as appropriation and dissemination of objects and ideas

Abstract

This article examines how the biblical motif of ‘despoiling the Egyptians’ (Exod. 12:35–36) underlies both Christian intellectual appropriation of pagan culture and the physical reuse of pagan material culture in late antiquity. Beginning with Philo of Alexandria, it traces the earliest allegorisation of the Exodus narrative as a paradigm for ‘immaterial spoils’: the fruits of pagan education, carried as ‘baggage’ by the mind on its philosophical journey to the true fatherland. Philo’s curriculum of εγκύκλια μαθήματα, subordinate to philosophy and, ultimately, to wisdom, is shown to anticipate later Christian concepts of secular paideia as a necessary, if subordinate, preparation for higher knowledge. The article then turns to St Irenaeus of Lyon, the first on record to explicitly Christianise the spoils motif. Reading the Exodus plunder typologically, Irenaeus treats the transformation of Egyptian booty into Tabernacle furnishings as a divine sanction for the charitable appropriation of pagan wealth in the service of the Church, thereby legitimising the reclassification and redeployment of alien goods without effacing their origin. Irenaeus’ espousal of material spolia is very likely to have been influential.

Origen of Alexandria extends this logic into a full-blown hermeneutical programme. Drawing both on Philo’s allegory of Abraham, Sarah, and Hagar and on Exodus’ account of the Tabernacle, he rearticulates the relationship between the εγκύκλια, philosophy, and Christianity: secular studies are handmaidens to philosophy, and philosophy itself a handmaiden to Christian exegesis. The ‘Egyptian gold’ of Greek learning is to be selected, purified, and subordinated to the interpretation of Scripture; misused, it issues in idolatry and heresy. St Augustine of Hippo, while indebted to Origen, gives the spoils motif a more overtly providential cast. In De doctrina Christiana, he presents pagan eloquence and learning as resources mined from the ‘quarries of providence’, ultimately belonging to God and rightly reclaimed by Christian writers. By naming St Cyprian, Lactantius, Sts Victorinus, Hilary, and others as exemplars, Augustine retrospectively canonises the practice of intellectual spoliatio as constitutive of the Christian tradition itself.

In the final part, the study argues that this patristic ‘theology of spoils’ can be correlated to late antique practices of spolia in the visual and architectural spheres. The patristic consensus regarding intellectual and material spoils and artistic practice might be put down to a cultural habit of legitimising alien goods by recombining them in a bricolage (to use Lévi-Strauss’s term), in this case to suit a sacred order. From the adaptation of domestic spaces such as the house-church at Dura Europos to the Constantinian basilicas and the heterogeneous use of columns, marbles, and sculptural fragments at sites like St John Lateran and the shrine of St Peter, Christian patrons and builders worked not ex nihilo, but with inherited materials, the prestige and symbolism of which were redirected to a new sacred order. Just as the Israelites’ Egyptian gold became legitimate when fashioned into the Tabernacle, and pagan disciplines became legitimate when pressed into the service of Scripture and Christian wisdom, so architectural and artistic spolia became Christian by being detached, discerned, and recomposed within spaces of worship. The ‘gold of Egypt’, on this view, refers to a persistent cultural logic by which alien treasures—intellectual and material alike—are converted for the greater glory of God.