Three Prolegomena
I. Presumed Priority of Scientific Treatises
In what follows I explore the validity of the general thesis put forward by Reinhartz and Seim that “Aristotelian epigenesist” constitutes the background for “birth” in the Gospel of John.
First, however, three prolegomena demand attention. Prolegomenon #1 is the presumed priority of scientific (so-called “medical”) treatises. If scientific theory is as culturally embedded as other ancient literary constructions of generation - for example, those provided by myth, “religion,” philosophy and/or theology, then it may be mistaken to privilege it as prior (i.e., background).[362] Scientific theory offers a possible context for myth, but its ontological priority to other ancient literature, including early Christian literature must be demonstrated rather than assumed.[363] [364]II. The Role of “Female” in Epigenesis
Prolegomenon #2, also crucial to the proposal, is a definition of terms. According to the theory of “pangenesis,” the female provides seed that contributes to generation in equal amount to the male.[365] With “preformation- ism,”[366] females contribute to generation seed containing miniature females, whereas males contribute seed containing miniature males.[367] Although it might seem that these two theories depict females in a more proactive role than in epigenesis, this is an oversimplification. Three relevant presuppositions of Aristotelian epigenetic generation are: (1) males provide seed, females provide blood - without either one there is no life; (2) whereas males impart connate πνεύμα (as part of the sentient soul), females impart other types of πνεύμα to the fetation; and (3) females and males each contribute half to the human soul.[368] A.
L. Peck summarizes the contributions of male and female parts in Aristotelian epigenetic generation as follows:With regard to his famous doctrine that the male supplies the Form and the female the Matter of the embryo, some misunderstanding may easily arise.... Form is not found apart from matter, nor is matter found which is not to some extent “informed”; and Aristotle can say (end of Met. H) that Matter in its ultimate stage is identical with Form.... Hence it is clear that fundamentally the contributions of both parents in generation are identical; both are potentially a living animal of a certain kind, and this involves that both possess the living animal's Form, viz., its Soul, potentially; and the only difference between them is that the male's contribution possesses also sentient Soul potentially (LCL, xiii-vi, emphasis original).[369]
Of course, Aristotle famously considers the male superior to the female sex.[370] Both Seim and Reinhartz highlight his description of the male factor in generation (cf. 716a5) as QeiMTepoy (“more god-like,” viz., “eternal” [732a1—12]) in its because it contributes the principle of movement
to generated things. Although Aristotle deems sexual differentiation “better” than its absence, he defines “female” in terms of incapacity, referring to it as a “natural deformity.” Nevertheless, the purpose of Aristotle's comments is not to make a case for female subordination or inferiority - something he and his readers took for granted. His treatise On the Generation of Animals seeks to provide a “scientific” explanation for generation.[371] Even if the question to what extent ideology determined, even compromised, Aristotle's “scientific” observations is a valid one (ably treated by G. E. R. Lloyd in a chapter “on the female sex”), the fact remains that Aristotle does not promote generation in the absence of a female cause.[372] In terms of overall potential contribution to generation, male (motive cause) and female (material cause) are equals in Aristotelian epigenesis.
Aristotle contrasts each with the “Final Cause” as necessity is contrasted with the good (Gen. an. 6, 7).[373] If, therefore, the Fourth Gospel reflects no maternal contribution to generation, epigenesis is not in the background.III. Epigenesis as Embryological Development
In general, the superiority of the male over the female factor is not an important theme among the various ancient generation theories. Rather, the advancement that Aristotelian so-called epigenesis makes over pangenesis and preformationism is the notion of embryonic development (Prolegomenon #3). The critical question for Aristotle is whether embryos exhibit, in the words of H. A. E. Driesch (1907), “a real production of visible manifoldness” or merely a “simple growth of visibly pre-existing manifoldness.”[374] Aristotle argues, on the basis of his observations of oviparous animals, that at its earliest stage an egg is unformed, that is, possesses no obvious features (in miniature) of the adult animal. This observation is consistent with his conceptualizing embryonic development in terms of his cosmological beliefs (viz., four cause paradigm: matter, mover, form, and end), namely as real production.[375] In the crucial passage, Aristotle acknowledges the import of the problem:
And on this subject we are confronted by no small puzzle. How, we ask, is any plant formed out of the seed, or any animal out of the semen? That which is formed by means of a process (to γιγομενον) must of necessity be formed (a) out of something (b) by something (c) into something. (Gen. an. 733b20-30)
Aristotle goes on to speculate that female ύλη is formed by a series of successive internal processes directed by a male-derived potential constituent of the fetation’s ψυχή (733b30-735a26). Such an idea was not new with Aristotle, agreeing in large part with theories of Pythagoras more than a century and a half earlier.
D.