Key ideas: Published in 2003. “This book deals with a significant turning point in western cultural and intellectual history, when the tradition of rational thought established by the Greeks was stifled in the fourth and fifth centuries a.p. This “closing of the Western mind” did not extend to the Arab world, where translated Greek texts continued to inspire advances in astronomy, medicine and science, and so its roots must be found in developments in the Greco-Roman world of late antiquity. This book explores those developments.” (Charles Freeman)
There had been premonitions of this destruction in earlier Christian theology. It had been the Apostle Paul who declared war on the Greek rational tradition through his attacks on “the wisdom of the wise” and “the empty logic of the philosophers,” words which were to be quoted and requoted in the centuries to come. Then came the absorption of Platonism by the early Christian theologians. It was assumed that Christian dogma could be found through the same process as Plato had advocated, in other words, through reason, and would have the same certainty as the Forms. …
When Constantine gave toleration to the churches in the early fourth century, he found to his dismay that Christian communities were torn by dispute. He himself did not help matters by declaring tax exemptions for Christian clergy and offering the churches immense patronage, which meant that getting the “right” version of Christian doctrine gave access not only to heaven but to vast resources on earth. …
So one finds a combination of factors behind “the closing of the Western mind”: the attack on Greek philosophy by Paul, the adoption of Platonism by Christian theologians and the enforcement of orthodoxy by emperors desperate to keep good order….
The imposition of orthodoxy went hand in hand with a stifling of any form of independent reasoning. By the fifth century, not only has rational thought been suppressed, but there has been a substitution for it of “mystery, magic and authority,” a substitution which drew heavily on irrational elements of pagan society that had never been extinguished. … Pope Gregory the Great warned those with a rational turn of mind that, by looking for cause and effect in the natural world, they were ignoring the cause of all things, the will of God. This was a vital shift of perspective, and in effect a denial of the impressive intellectual advances made by the Greek philosophers.
In the fourth and fifth centuries a.p., however, faith in this last sense achieved prominence over reason. The principles of empirical observation or logic were overruled in the conviction that all knowledge comes from God and even, in the writings of Augustine, that the human mind, burdened with Adam’s original sin, is diminished in its ability to think for itself. For centuries any form of independent scientific thinking was suppressed.
So, Greek religion acted as mediator of political and social tensions. Transitions could be effected through the use of ritual and difficult deci- sions made with the help of oracles. Even so, political life was not easy, and in the seventh and sixth centuries in particular there were continual clashes between the old aristocratic elites and the newly wealthy, who had made their money through trade, and the rising peasant classes, increasingly conscious of their own cohesion and power.
At the very worst a city would explode into civil war. Thucydides describes one case in 427 in Corfu, which saw a vicious spiral of terror and counter-terror between the ruling classes and “democrats.” In the resultant complete breakdown of order, where, as Thucydides puts it, “fanatical enthusiasm was the mark of a ‘real man,’” fathers killed sons, temples were violated by the massacre of those sheltering in them and many committed suicide rather than wait to be killed.“ “As for the citizens who held moderate views, they were destroyed by both the extreme parties, either for not taking part in the struggle or in envy at the possibility that they might survive.”°
The most sophisticated resolution of conflicts such as these was to be made in fifth-century Athens, where all male citizens came to share in government equally, in the Assembly, as jurors in the law courts and, for those aged over thirty, as administrators. Athenian democracy lasted some 140 years and, despite its exclusion of women and slaves, remains a remarkable political innovation.
It was in this resolution of internal conflicts that a remarkable intellectual development took place. …
Only a few years later than Solon, in 585 B.c. in the Ionian city of Miletus on the coast of Asia Minor, the philosopher-scientist Thales is said to have predicted an eclipse of the sun (the eclipse did indeed take place and was independently recorded by the historian Herodotus). For Aristotle, writing some 200 years later, this was truly the moment when Greek philosophy began. An underlying order to the cosmos had been observed, and its movements were assumed to be so regular that future events could be predicted from empirical observations gathered over time. …
What Thales and his associates in Miletus went further was to speculate on why the world was as it was. They began to ask major questions. What was the cosmos made of, and why did it move in the way it did? Thales himself suggested that the world may have originated in a single substance, water, and that it rested on a base of water. …
Another Milesian, Anaximenes, suggested that everything came from air. If steam could be condensed into water and water could be frozen into ice, it followed that a single substance could change form dramatically, and perhaps air could be condensed into solid forms. These speculations were bound to be primitive, but they did represent a new way of thinking and, moreover, one in which each thinker was able to use observation and reason to challenge his rivals. …
The next step, then, in this parade of intellectual innovation is to try to isolate the circumstances in which rational argument can be used to achieve certainty without being challenged by what is actually observed by our senses. Here the achievement of Aristotle was outstanding.
One of Aristotle’s many contributions to the definition of certainty was the introduction of the syllogism, a means by which the validity of a logical argument can be assessed.’ A syllogism is, in Aristotle’s own words, “an argument in which certain things being assumed [the premises], something different from the things assumed [the conclusion] follows from necessity by the fact that they hold.”
What kinds of things can be “assumed”? The famous examples, although not used by Aristotle himself, are “All men are mortal” and “Socrates is a man.” Both premises seem fully tenable. No one has come up with an example of a man who has not died; it is part of the condition of being human. Similarly, anyone who met Socrates would have agreed that he was a man. From these two assumptions could be drawn the conclusion: “Therefore Socrates is mortal.” …
Aristotle’s syllogisms can take us only so far; their premises have to be empirically correct and relate to each other in such a way that a conclusion can be drawn from their comparison. They provide the basis for deductive argument, an argument in which a specific piece of knowledge can be drawn from knowledge already given. The development of the use of deductive proof was perhaps the greatest of the Greeks’ intellectual achievements. …
It is in the nature of man, according to Aristotle, to be curious. Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) arrived in Athens from the northern Aegean (his father had been court physician to the king of Macedon and legend records that he himself was later tutor to Alexander “the Great”). His Macedonian connections made him vulnerable in Athens, and he travelled widely. He is found probing into every area of intellectual activity, exploring the ultimate nature of things, the ends of human life, the best form of government, the variety of animal life, the importance of tragedy, the nature of rhetoric, the problems of logic. …
This was the mainstream of Greek intellectual tradition. One had to distinguish between what could be known for certain and what could not be and develop tests or methods of argument that could be universally accepted. The Greeks had recognized that science is as much concerned with proving things false as with proving them true. Overall, this was a staggering achievement. In isolating and systematizing rational thought, the Greeks had founded science and mathematics in the form they are still followed today without implying that rational thought was the only path to truth. None of this would have been possible without an atmosphere of intellectual tolerance. …
And it has to be remembered that even this level of “rational” thought was alien to most Greeks, who, it can be assumed, were oblivious to the sophisticated discussions of their educated peers. Irrationality flourished in the Greek world, much as it does, alongside scientific thinking, in ours.
If men are to be motivated to fight with commitment, they need to be given good reasons for doing so. In Homer, it is a mark of aristocratic status that one is able to persuade others to risk their lives. Yet Homer also highlights the importance of discussion between leaders who meet in common council at the end of the day. The views of one speaker need to be tempered by those of his listeners so that there is a reasoned consensus. By the sixth century, however, speakers found themselves faced by the much more demanding audiences of the citizen assemblies, raucous, volatile and much less ready to defer to aristocratic status. New demands on speakers forced the Greeks to think about the nature of rbhetorike, rhetoric, itself, and how to exploit it effectively before audiences. ….
The effectiveness of a speech seemed to depend as much on the emotional power of the speaker, his learned skills and oratorical devices, as on the quality, in rational terms, of its argument. In the activities of the Athenian assembly, for example, during the tense days of the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta (431-404 B.C.), the citizens, swayed by powerful speeches, decided one day in 427 that all the men of the island of Mytilene, captured after a revolt, should be executed. When tempers had cooled the next day, they realized that so harsh a decision might rebound against them and they reversed it.’ (A trireme sent off hurriedly to communicate the reversed decision arrived in Mytilene just as the executions were beginning.)
In 406, the assembly was persuaded by impassioned speakers to order the execution of eight of its generals who were accused of failing to pick up shipwrecked sailors after a battle. After the executions, the assembly regretted its decision and somewhat hypocritically condemned the speakers for “forcing” it to act the way it did. So emotions could be seen to overrule reason. …
The very success of Athens in earlier times had shown that good speaking could offer a pathway to greatness. What was vital, argued Isocrates, was the moral independence and integrity of the speaker, and training in moral responsibility was an essential part of training in rhetoric. “The stronger a person desires to persuade hearers, the more he will work to be honourable and good and to have a good reputation among the citizens.”* …
Platonic thought assumes that the material world is not the ideal setting for the soul. A more satisfying home exists elsewhere, in the immaterial world of the Forms. This was a revolutionary concept in the Greek world, where, for example, the afterlife was traditionally seen as a shadowy and unfulfilling existence, and it created a radical disagreement between those who attempted to live life to the full within the material world, and whose philosophies and ethical systems reflected that, and those who saw the soul as trapped temporarily in this inadequate and transient world before a greater one to come.
Platonists also assumed there was a deep gulf between the world of the senses and that of the Forms. Because it was accessible to so few and needed such an arduous training to reach it, the world of the Forms was divine in a very different sense from that of the traditional world of the Greek gods, whose human forms, behaviour and rich mythology of exploits made them comprehensible, even accessible, to all.
If a Form, say that of a supreme Good, was equated with an actual God, then he would indeed be an awesome and remote one. Inherent in Plato’s thought was a massive realignment of the relationship between human beings and “the divine” that involved, inevitably, the diminution of the place of “the ordinary man” in the scheme of things.
The fruits of Platonic reason might not be self-confidence but the opposite—a realization of how insignificant human beings were in the face of the superior, unchanging, hierarchical world of the Forms. Explicit too was the grading of human beings into a minority who could grasp the nature of the immaterial world and the mass who could not and were therefore dependent on the minority for elucidation. Effective reasoning was the preserve of the few, who had to persuade or coerce those who were unable to grasp the nature of the Forms.
Aristotle is typical of Greek thinkers in having a confident and optimistic view of human nature. He proclaims that it is worthwhile being human, and, unlike Plato and later Christian thinkers, he says little about the possibility of natural desires pulling one away from eudaimonia towards some lower state of existence. “Nature always produces the best,” he says on several occasions; in the Nicomachean Ethics he states that “all the virtues of character seem to belong to us from birth . . . For we are just and moderate and courageous and the rest straight from our birth . . . even children and animals have these natural dispositions, though they evidently prove harmful without rational guidance.”’? In short, becoming virtuous involves using one’s power of reasoning to shape virtues that are innate. Aristotle assumes that human beings will want to achieve the pleasure of reaching their full and undoubted potential. As an inherent condition of being human, that is the direction in which they are oriented.
In Raphael’s famous Vatican fresco the School of Athens, Aristotle and Plato are shown among the assembled philosophers. Plato’s hand points upwards to the heavens, Aristotle’s down towards the earth. They represent not only themselves but two contrasting approaches in the quest for certainty.
For Aristotle certainty has to be found in this world through the painstaking accumulation of empirical evidence and reasoned deduction from it. It is always subject to reason and challenge through the acquisition of new evidence accumulated by the senses. Outside the world of abstract mathematics and logical syllogisms, knowledge is always provisional. Plato, by contrast, rejects the world of the senses altogether. It holds no real value in comparison to the immaterial world of the Forms, where truth alone resides.
The most significant political development in the Mediterranean world between 350 B.C. and A.D. 100 was the spread of monarchical government. By the beginning of the second century a.D., the entire Mediterranean world and much else besides (southern Britain, France and Spain in the west, Armenia and Mesopotamia in the east) were subject to a single ruler, the Roman emperor. This office was rooted in the Hellenistic monarchies, which had arisen in the east following the rise of Philip II of Macedon and the destruction of the Persian empire by his son Alexander “the Great” between 334 and 323.
The rise of Macedon became possible because by the fourth century the independent Greek city state had come to an evolutionary dead end. The small elites of male citizens who, typically, ran the polis either as a democracy or an oligarchy may have provided an excellent cockpit for political debates—which in turn proved highly stimulating to intellectual and cultural life—but their very exclusiveness prevented any polis from controlling an area large enough to provide the resources for any lasting political control.
In the fifth century Athens had managed to create an empire of Aegean city states, sustained originally by common fear of a Persian revival and later by Athens’ clever manipulation of naval power, but the hope of long-term control of a mass of city states scattered across the islands and shores of the Aegean was far-fetched, and the empire disintegrated when Athens was defeated by its rival Sparta in 404. …
No act shows Alexander’s lack of respect for and understanding of Greek culture more clearly than his insistence that his Greek and Macedonian commanders adopt the Persian custom known in Greek as proskynesis, prostration before a monarch. This had long been seen by the Greeks as a symbol of the servility of the Persian people and contrasted with the dignified behaviour expected of a free man who would never submit to a display of such subservience. …
(He took a historian, Callisthenes, from the city of Olynthos, with him, but after Callisthenes had bravely articulated opposition to proskynesis on the grounds that it was impious to offer Alexander divine honours and the practice of proskynesis was an insult to the Greek sense of liberty, he was executed for “conspiracy.” ) …
In the face of protest and ridicule, Alexander reluctantly gave way. On his return to Persia, however, he assumed the regalia of the Persian monarchy. An ill-judged attempt to integrate the Macedonians into court life by marrying them to Persian noblewomen failed ignominiously. The Macedonians discarded their Persian wives as soon as Alexander had died. ….
Greece benefited little from Alexander’s reign and suffered like his other territories from his autocratic ways. His policies were based on short-term opportunism. …
When rumours of Alexander’s death first reached Athens in 323, the Athenian politician Demades argued that it could not possibly be true, because if it were the whole world would know because of the stink of the corpse. When the death was confirmed, Athenian resentment against Macedonia exploded in revolt.
Aristotle, sensitive to his links with the Macedonian royal family, left Athens for exile, determined, so he said, that Athens would not commit a second crime against philosophy (the first being, of course, the execution of Socrates). He died a year later. Meanwhile, Macedonian troops put down the uprising. In Athens the world’s first sustained democracy, which had lasted 140 years and had been respected by Alexander’s father, Philip, was crushed.
Archimedes (c. 287-212 B.C.) laid the foundations of integral calculus, applied mathematics and hydrostatics as well as formulated the means for the calculation of areas and volumes (such as cones) and the computing of very large numbers. His work is characterized by an extraordinary imagination, through which he conceptualized the problems in hand, allied to a technical ingenuity that allowed him to work them out practically. The two came together in his alleged discovery of a way of determining the proportions of gold and silver in a crown while meditating in his bath. His cry of “Eureka” as he rushed through the streets perhaps best symbolizes this age of excited intellectual discovery.’
The secret of Rome’s resilience lay in a psychology of aggression married to policies that were dedicated to increasing its fighting manpower. The emerging state was always prepared to give citizenship or, failing that, a favoured status (known as Latin rights) to loyal communities. Their manpower became Rome’s own, and defeated cities were usually required to become allies so that their men too would be available for Rome’s future wars. The Greek cities had never proved able to share citizenship so easily, one reason why none had created a sustainable empire. …
… much of the Greek intellectual tradition remained alien to Rome. Romans proved impatient with philosophy and relatively indifferent to Greek science and mathematics. When the Skeptic Carneades appeared in Rome in 155 as one of a group of philosophers and argued on one day that justice was an indispensable part of government and the next day that it was not, traditional Romans (though not the younger generation) were shocked, and the group was sent back to Athens. The Romans considered the Greek tradition of competing in games naked undignified, and while Greek-style basilicas and temples were acceptable in Rome, gymmasia (literally “places of nakedness”) appear only later, and then as additions to that quintessential Roman invention, the monumental public bath.
If there was one Greek skill that was adopted by the Romans with enthusiasm, it was rhetoric. All the magistrates in Rome were elected by the citizen body, and while military prowess was important, so was the ability to speak well before the mass of citizenry, which would flock into the city for the elections. By the first century a career could be built through public speaking alone, not only at election time but also as an advocate at the public trials that had become a feature of political life. Marcus Tullius Cicero was supreme in the art, the first man to achieve the post of quaestor, the lowest of the senior magistracies, without having served the normal ten years of military service. He had spent two years in Greece undertaking an intensive study of the art of rhetoric, and he made his name in 70 B.c. with a devastating opening speech as prosecutor in the trial of Gaius Verres, a former governor of Sicily notorious for having used his position to ransack the province. Verres, who had himself employed a leading advocate to defend him, went into exile. Only seven years later, in 63 B.c., Cicero was elected consul. …
Perhaps the most prominent of the casualties of these debilitating conflicts, after Caesar himself, was Cicero. In his many surviving letters he reveals his agonies over the turmoil he found around him. Cicero was wedded to the old ideals of public service and the republic, whose virtues he idealized in his De Republica (54 B.c.), a dialogue set in the more harmonious days of the second century, but as chaos grew, he reluctantly accepted that only a strong man could restore order. At first Cicero backed Pompey, even joining him as a noncombatant at Pharsalus. After Pompey’s defeat, he made his peace with Caesar in the hope that the republic would be restored. Inevitably as Caesar’s rule grew more dictatorial, Cicero grew disillusioned. There is no evidence to link Cicero with Caesar’s assassination (although he rejoiced at the news), but when Octavian arrived in Rome, Cicero believed he could use him against Mark Antony. His last great speeches (the Philippics)’ were in support of Octavian against Mark Antony. It proved a fatal miscalculation: when Mark Antony added Cicero to the list of those to be eliminated as enemies of Caesar, Octavian acquiesced. Cicero was hunted down and killed in December 43 B.c. His head was hacked off and mounted— together, at Mark Antony’s request, with the hands which had written the Philippics—on the speaker’s rostrum in the Roman Forum.
Largely excluded from political life by the 40s, Cicero spent his last years writing. Steeping himself in Greek culture, he built, in effect, an enduring bridge over which Greek philosophy passed into the Latin world. The death of his daughter, Tullia, in 45 B.c. led him to explore the effects of grief in his Consolatio. He moved on to overtly philosophical issues, epistemology, moral philosophy, the ultimate aims of existence and the nature of the gods. Sceptical by nature, he was nevertheless broad-minded enough to read widely across the various schools of Greek philosophy and to examine issues from different perspectives. His work was marked by a cultivated humanism; he valued cultural diversity and distrusted dogmatism, and to this extent he can be seen as one of the founders of European liberal humanism and a forerunner of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. When the Roman empire fragmented some centuries later and Greek became forgotten in the west, Cicero’s works survived, even if, as a result of Christian opposition to his scepticism (and, of course, paganism), a full appreciation of his work was delayed until the Renaissance.
One of Cicero’s central philosophical interests was the nature of the gods. He was keenly aware of the difficulties of finding any reasoned justification for their existence, while remaining convinced of the importance of belief and ritual in everyday life. …
Stoicism, with its celebration of public service, resistance to tyranny and stress on emotional restraint and endurance, even to the extent of committing suicide for one’s ideals, accorded rather better with traditional Roman values. Seneca, one of Nero’s principal advisers, wrote extensively on how one should behave in unsettling circumstances and became an exemplar for all Stoics by committing suicide as Nero’s rule became more intolerable.
There was also much of the Stoic in the emperor Marcus Aurelius, who, although not trained as a soldier, saw it as his duty to remain on the northern frontier leading the legions against the onslaughts of the barbarians. His famous Meditations (which have inspired some and appeared platitudinous to others) were jotted down in Greek in spare moments during his campaigns.
However, it was Platonism that was to become the dominant school of philosophy in these centuries. Not only did Platonism develop in new directions; it also absorbed aspects of other philosophies, especially Stoicism. …
Plato valued reason above emotion; indeed, he went further in showing an active distaste for sensual pleasure, which he believed diverted the soul from its highest purpose, which was understanding, through reason, the real world of the Forms that existed on a higher plane than the material world “below.” We have seen that “the Good” was to Plato a supreme Form in that it could be assumed that Beauty and Justice and other Forms had some “Good” within them that could be represented by an overriding “Good.” The most important development of later Platonism was to consider what this “Good” might be, and whether it was something more than a supreme and unchanging entity that just “was.” So, echoing the developments discussed above, evolved the possibility that “the Good” might actually be conceived of as some form of supreme “God.”…
… a Jewish philosopher, the Greek-speaking Philo of Alexandria (active in the first half of the first century A.D.), to offer a radically new approach to Jewish theology. If Plato was right and the Forms existed eternally, then others living before Plato might have been able to grasp them. Philo went so far as to argue that Moses had been a Platonic philosopher who had understood the Forms in the way Plato had hoped his followers would. Moses’ Old Testament God was none other than “the Good” of Plato. ….
The Forms act as the ideals to which each entity in the material world aspires, in other words (as noted), a table in the material world can be judged as an imitation of the Form of Table, even if it is never likely to be so perfect. However, some tables will be closer to the ideal table than others, and the same can be said of men. Philo names some men, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, for instance, as more “ideal” than others. What marked them out was their commitment to the Forms and God, a commitment implied through their desire for goodness and the avoidance of any emotion and sensuality that would draw them away from God.
Philo knew nothing of Christianity, but he was to prove enormously important in bridging the gap between Judaism and Greek philosophy in representing God of the Old Testament as a Platonic God, thus enabling Greek philosophers to find a home within the Jewish and, later, the Christian tradition.
Platonists continued to make a distinction between soul and body, and to place these within a hierarchy of creation. At the top of this was God (“the Good”), then the Forms, below which was the human soul, and finally the material world, including the human body. Here the human soul is the noblest part of the “material” world, but each level of the hierarchy is understood to be less divine and good than the one above it (rather as copies taken of copies gradually lose the quality of the original). Some argued that there would be a level in the hierarchy at which the original goodness of God was so diluted that evil would become part of that level, while others argued that the goodness of “the Good” or God could never, however diluted, become evil. It was human beings acting freely who created evil.
The problem for the Romans was that the barbarians could never be successfully and definitively defeated, as there was no way of controlling so many rival groups whose leaders depended on the prestige of war and the plunder of raids. The Romans tried everything—buying off tribes, stationing legions across the border so that raiders could be dealt with before they reached the frontier, using one tribe against another. None of these tactics brought lasting stability, and by the third century a new wave of raids began.” …
planning. Diocletian tackled the debilitating inflation (arising from the frequent debasing of the coinage) that had accompanied the crisis by intro- ducing a standard gold coin, but when inflation continued (probably as a result of the large numbers of bronze coins still being minted) he attempted an empire-wide Edict of Prices (A.D. 301), which set out an approved price for every kind of produce and fixed rates for each kind of professional service. (A shipwright working on a seagoing ship was to be paid sixty denarii a day, teachers of Greek and geometry 200 denarii per pupil per month, a bathhouse attendant two denarii per bather.) It was far too ambitious an undertaking for a still undeveloped economy and, as socialist-planned economies showed 2,000 years later, only encouraged black-market activity. Despite severe penalties for evasion, the edict became moribund, but it remains a fascinating record of an assessment of comparative values of goods and activities in the empire and, of course, a symbol of Diocletian’s determination.
Paul occupies the dominant position in the early Gentile church, even to the extent of being called by some the founder of Christianity. It was he who formulated a meaning for Jesus’ death and resurrection, one that he used creatively in the years in which the first troubled Christian communities were establishing themselves, and he was important too in planting these communities in Asia Minor and Greece and in devising ways for them to maintain themselves in a world they had come to see as hostile. Unlike Jesus he insisted on a dramatic break with traditional culture, not only his own, but also that of the Greco-Roman world, and so he brought new challenges and tensions to Christianity as it spread among Gentiles. While Peter and the Jerusalem Christians were, understandably, suffused with their memories of Jesus as a human being (“a man commended by God” as Peter had put it), Paul’s Christ has relevance only through his death and resurrection, in a theology presented in his own words in letters whose eloquence has reverberated through the ages. …
The death and resurrection of Christ, proclaims Paul, bring a new era for mankind in which all who have faith in Christ (Greek and Jew, slave and free, male and female) will enter a new life. As is usual with Paul, those readers who rejoice in the equality of all enshrined in this proclamation are then brought down to earth with a text such as 1 Corinthians 14:34, which enjoins women to remain silent at meetings and, if they have questions to ask, to ask them of their husbands at home!
The story starts with Adam. Adam sinned in the garden of Eden and with him sin entered the world. For Paul sin is a heavy, albeit abstract, entity that burdens the human race. Yet, and here Paul maintained his Judaism, there is a God who acts providentially for mankind. At times Paul even seems to go so far as to suggest that God introduced sin into the world deliberately so that he could exercise his saving compassion: “For God has consigned all people to disobedience, that he may have mercy upon all” (Romans 11:32).
God is the opposite of the darkness of Sin, “the Spirit” that contrasts with “the Flesh.” For Paul “the Spirit” is the power of God’s love for humanity, the driving force of the Christian life. The term “Flesh” is used to sum up the state of humanity when in opposition to God. …
In the fourth century Christianity became the “official” religion of the Roman empire. The emperor responsible for ending Diocletian’s persecution of Christians and bringing Christianity into the structure of the state was his successor, Constantine. …
Recent research, however, is emphasizing another Constantine. Outside Eusebius’ Life, there is virtually no evidence that suggests that Constantine knew anything much about Christ or even of the requirements for Christian living. His main concern may rather have been to ensure that the growing Christian communities supported his imperial rule, but, shrewd political leader that he was, he also carefully maintained his relationship with paganism to a degree that Eusebius was unwilling to admit. In a recent assessment by H. A. Drake: “Constantine’s goal was to create a neutral public space in which Christians and pagans could both function .. . [and] he was far more successful in creating a stable coalition of both Christians and non-Christians in support of this program of ‘peaceful co-existence’ than has generally been recognised.” …
It was a mark of Constantine’s political genius and flexibility that he realized it was better to utilize a religion that already had a well-established structure of authority as a prop to the imperial regime rather than exclude it as a hindrance. …
The adoption of Christianity was not, however, to prove entirely straightforward. Constantine knew so little about Christianity that he immediately ran into difficulties.
First, Christ was not a god of war. The Old Testament frequently involved God in the slaughter of his enemies, but the New Testament did not. Constantine would have to create a totally new conception of Christianity if he was to sustain the link between the Christian God and victory in war.
Second, it was crucial for Constantine’s political survival that he did not break with the pagan cults that still claimed the allegiance of most of his subjects, yet Christianity emphatically rejected paganism; many Christian groups would never accept a relationship with a state still condoning paganism. Some very careful political manoeuvring was necessary if Constantine was to avoid offending either Christian or pagan.
Finally, while Constantine might have hoped for a church that could be subservient to him, he found one racked with disputes and power struggles. This became even more apparent when he came to power in the east and confronted the maelstrom of conflict and rivalry among the Greek-speaking Christians.
One of the most important of Constantine’s legacies was the creation of a relationship between Christianity and war. Constantine was a brilliant and effective soldier, and he associated his continuing success with the support of the Christian God. Once he had used the victory at the Milvian Bridge as a platform for the granting of toleration to Christians, each new victory strengthened the link. Eusebius makes the point succinctly, describing him as
the only Conqueror among the Emperors of all time to remain Irresistible and Unconquered, Ever-conquering and always brilliant with triumphs over enemies, so great an Emperor…so God beloved and Thrice blessed…that with utter ease he governed more nations than those before him, and kept his dominion unimpaired to the very end.
In his Ecclesiastical History, Eusebius refers to Constantine as “God’s Commander-in-Chief.” So a new element enters the Christian tradition. When the papacy and the Roman Catholic Church came under sustained attack for the first time in the Reformation, the Medici pope Leo X (pope 1513-21) ordered a great room to be built in the Vatican. Known as the Sala di Constantino, it had an unashamedly propagandist purpose. Its frescoes, by Raphael, show the early popes from Peter onwards and then, in four great scenes, the achievement of Constantine.
One fresco shows the vision of the cross, another the battle of the Milvian Bridge itself. Leo associated himself with the victory. The palle from the Medici coat of arms are on Constantine’s tent, and lions, a reference to Leo’s name, are also found on the tent, with another depicted on a standard. At a moment of crisis and confrontation, this was the event the pope chose to highlight.
However, the problem of how to present Jesus, the man of peace, in this new Christian world, persisted. The ultimate response was to transform him, quite explicitly, into a man of war. By the 370s Ambrose, bishop of Milan, is able to state in his De Fide that “the army is led not by military eagles or the flight of birds but by your name, Lord Jesus, and Your Worship.” In the Archiepiscopal Chapel in Ravenna (c. 500), Jesus is shown dressed as a Roman soldier trampling a lion and an adder beneath his feet.
There is, of course, no New Testament source for the presentation of Christ as a soldier (other than one in the Book of Revelation, where a warrior for justice [often assumed to be Christ] appears from heaven on a white horse with “a sharp sword to strike the pagans with” [19:11-16]), and, as has already been suggested, a military image was particularly inappropriate when it is remembered that Jesus was crucified by Roman soldiers as an enemy of the empire.
The mosaicist had to draw on the more appropriate models offered in abundance by the Old Testament, as in Psalm 91:13, where the supplicant is promised that with the help of God he will survive battle and “tread on lion and adder, trample on savage lions and dragons.” This extraordinary transformation of Jesus’ role is a mark of the extent to which Constantine forced Christianity into new channels. (A step further is taken when, on the eleventh-century bronze doors of San Zeno Maggiore in Verona, Christ is shown being nailed to the cross by Jews rather than by soldiers.)
The immediate challenge for the new emperors, as it had been for Constantine, was to bring some form of order to the Christian communities, above all by establishing and, if necessary, imposing a doctrine that defined the natures of God and Jesus and the relationship between them. It was not only a matter of good order. Once Constantine had provided tax exemptions for Christian clergy, eventually including exemptions for church lands, it became imperative to tighten up the definition of “Christian.” As Constantine had put it in a law of 326,
The benefits that have been granted in consideration of religion must benefit only the adherents of the Catholic [e.g., ‘correct’] faith. It is our will, moreover, that heretics and schismatics shall not only be alien to those privileges but shall be bound and subjected to various compulsory public services.
The definition of “Catholicism” and heresy took on a new urgency for the state.
This explains why the emperors came to play such a large part in the determining of doctrine, although their roles varied: some had personal convictions to impose, others were more concerned to find formulations of doctrine around which consensus could be built. By the end of the century emperors were imposing doctrinal solutions that were backed by imperial edicts….
Julian knew Christianity well—he had been brought up as a Christian and served as a lector—but he had been dismayed by the vicious infighting he saw around him. “Experience had taught him that no wild beasts are so dangerous to man as Christians are to one another,” wrote Ammianus Marcellinus, who went on to suggest that Julian believed that the Christians left to themselves would simply tear each other apart.
The roots of Julian’s distaste for Christianity may well lie in the brutal treatment of his close relations by Christian emperors. In any case, once he had buried Constantius with suitable Christian piety, Julian adopted “paganism,” proclaiming that the very fact that he had come to power showed that the traditional gods were on his side.
Summoning the bishops, he ordered them “to allow every man to practise his belief boldly without hindrance.” The clergy lost all their exemptions, and in 362 they were forbidden to teach rhetoric or grammar. It was absurd, declared Julian, for Christians to teach classical culture while at the same time pouring scorn on classical religion—if they wished to teach, they should confine themselves to teaching the Gospels in their churches.
Julian was a throwback, a philosopher emperor. For Julian, philosophy did not involve a withdrawal from the world (though he had spent most of the 350s as a student in Athens and other cities) but provided the underpinning for wise and moderate rule. His inspiration was the emperor Marcus Aurelius.
However, although Julian left more writings than any other emperor, untangling his religious and philosophical beliefs from them has proved enormously difficult. Like many educated pagans, he drew on a variety of beliefs and movements (although Neo-platonism was probably the most significant) and combined mysticism with rationalism, particularly in his defence of traditional Greek secular learning.
In his Contra Galilaeos (Against the Galileans), written in 362~63, Julian challenges what he sees as the irrational nature of Christian belief. The work draws heavily on conventional pagan criticisms of Christianity, but it is enhanced by Julian’s own knowledge of the scriptures, which enabled him to highlight their apparent contradictions.
Only John among the Gospel writers accepts the divinity of Jesus; why did not all do so if he was truly a god? The so-called prophecies of Christ’s coming in the Old Testament are based on misinterpretations of the texts—there is, for instance, no unequivocal prophecy of the virgin birth. Christian teachings about God, especially those which draw on the all-too-“human” Old Testament God with his sole commitment to the Jews, lack the sophistication of pagan conceptions of the divine.
Why did God create Eve if she was going to thwart his plans for creation? Why did he deprive Adam and Eve of the knowledge of good and evil?
Turning to Paul, Julian questions why God neglected most of humanity for thousands of years but then arrived to preach to a small tribe in Galilee.
Why were the Greeks not also favoured by his presence if he was, as Paul argues, a universal God? Do not the latest bitter arguments over Christian doctrine deprive Christians of their claim to have found the truth?
In contrast, Julian argues, the Greeks have achieved superiority in every area of knowledge; in Contra Galilaeos he gives examples from law, mathematics, medicine, astronomy and philosophy as well as theology.
Julian’s was a pointed challenge and is evidence of the extent to which Christians, despite their adoption of elements of Platonism, still failed to convince the pagan philosophers. ….
Nor did Julian’s military success, so vital to the maintenance of imperial power, last. A campaign against Sassanid Persia ran into difficulties, and Julian himself was killed, by a spear throw by an unknown assailant, in 363. His reign had lasted only eighteen months. …
“A clean body and clean clothes betoken an unclean mind.” -The ASCETIC PAULA, a roman aristocrat, to her nuns!
The idea of disciplined training, askesis, was intrinsic to the ancient world, from the preparation for games or practice as a rhetor to the clearing of the mind for profound philosophical study. In a sense the victory odes of Pindar, the great poet of the fifth century B.c., which suggest that a winning athlete comes close to the gods through his success, celebrate the same attributes required by the Christian hermit who tortures his body so as to come close to his God. In both cases, discipline eventually brings the possibility of a spiritual transformation. …
Asceticism is a complex phenomenon, and there are many issues raised by the adoption of an ascetic life. First there is the implication that the mind or soul has a relationship with the body (and that they are indeed separate entities), and that this relationship can be manipulated for some higher end, normally through the mind or soul “subjugating” the “desires” of the body. From the philosophical point of view Plato offers one of the clearest rationales for asceticism. The soul and body are distinct….
Plato’s approach cannot be separated from other contexts in which asceticism appears in the ancient world. Continence and emotional restraint were widely valued, especially among the Roman elite, and they covered any form of excess passion, any behaviour which demeaned a man in front of his peers. This is why Stoicism proved so popular; it provided a philosophical framework that supported the traditional instincts of the elite, and there are many instances of upper-class Romans facing pain or death in service of a higher cause. ….
So when Christians turned towards asceticism they were taking a path that was not in itself remarkable, but there were nevertheless elements of Christian asceticism that took it well beyond mere conventional restraint, often into a realm of obsessive intensity. … Jesus himself had enjoined poverty, and his death, as well as those of the Christian martyrs, enshrined a tradition of suffering at the heart of Christian history. …. For many fourth-century Christians, it was as if suffering had to be undergone as a mark of one’s faith, even to the extent of deliberately inflicting it on oneself….
Once the possibility of an afterlife was accepted, powerful images of it could be developed. Christianity’s heaven of eternal bliss and a hell of perpetual torment had a powerful impact.
Even within Rome the Christian community was marginal in a city where the pagan senatorial aristocracy remained powerful to the end of the fourth century. …
Jerome was born, probably about 345, on the border of Dalmatia but was educated in Rome and baptized as a Christian there. Then he set out to the east, first staying in Antioch, where he was ordained a priest, and next retreating to the Syrian desert, where he was to spend several years. Here he was tortured by his sexual desire, but he also later recorded a terrible dream in which he was flogged for preferring Cicero to the scriptures. He was warned that if he ever read non-Christian writers again he would suffer worse torments. He seems to have resolved his guilt and continued his reading (or at least he continued to fill his writings with classical allusions). …
When he returned to Rome in the 380s, Jerome’s breadth of learning recommended him to Damasus, bishop of Rome, as a personal secretary, and it was Damasus who first suggested that he provide a proper translation into Latin of the Bible. The “Old Latin” versions, as they were known, dated from the second century; they were poorly translated and varied from one copy to the next. They urgently needed revision and correction. The task gave Jerome the purpose in life that he seems to have craved, and these next three years in Rome were the most emotionally settled of his life….
His relationship with a wealthy ascetic, Paula, mother of Eustochium, aroused particular scorn, and so on Damasus’ death he was in effect driven from the city, the scandal intensifying when Paula left with him. Jerome was never to forgive the Roman clergy, that “senate of Pharisees,” for the rejection. For Jerome, Rome itself was indeed “the whore of Babylon” of the Book of Revelation. ..
Combative to the last, Jerome died in 419 or 420.
So we come to Augustine. Through his sheer intellectual power, probing curiosity, originality, extraordinary range of concerns and enormous output of work (it has been said that anyone who claims to have read all of Augustine’s works must be lying), Augustine has come to be seen as the cornerstone of the western Christian tradition. There is no other Christian theologian (Origen possibly excepted) who shows such uninhibited philosophical curiosity. It is truly through Augustine that we pass from the classical world to the medieval, in that Augustine brought to fruition much of earlier Christian theology and gave it powerful expression, vigour and coherence. Thomas Aquinas cites Augustine in his works nearly ten times as often as he cites Jerome. …
He remains a deeply controversial figure, his reputation burdened with the responsibility of integrating sinfulness into human nature (at least in the western Christian tradition if not elsewhere): “the man who fused Christianity together with hatred of sex and pleasure into a systematic unity,” as the German theologian Uta Ranke-Heinemann has put it.
The truth is necessarily more complex, and Augustine, while undeniably pessimistic by temperament and increasingly so with age, is certainly a more remarkable man than he is often portrayed by his critics. Nevertheless, his legacy, developed as it was by his successors, remains an awkward one. In particular, his gradual subjection of reason to faith and authority did much to undermine the classical tradition of rational thought.…
However, determined that he should succeed, she [mother], supported by her husband and the help of a patron, insisted on the best education for him, and by the age of seventeen he was at university in Carthage, the ancient port on the north African coast, specializing in law. His curriculum, in the traditional Latin authors, may have been restricted (he never properly mastered Greek, for instance), but he received a firm grounding in rhetoric, and this was to be the skill which, owever, a reading at the age of eighteen of Cicero’s Hortensius, a now-lost “exhortation to philosophy,” convinced Augustine that a life of philosophy was the true one, especially when he compared the sophistication of Cicero’s prose with the clumsy and incoherent scriptures that he was also reading for the first time….
Apart from a brief visit home in 375, Augustine remained based in Carthage as a teacher of literature until 383….
His instinct was to find “a Good” that was unassailable, and it was this search that was to lead him to Platonism.
Augustine had by this time left Africa. First in 383 he had gone to Rome, in the hope, he tells us, of finding a better living as a teacher with more disciplined students than the unruly ones he found in Carthage. ….
Rome was not a success, but then he had the break he needed. The prefect of the city, Symmachus, the Symmachus of the diptych discussed earlier, had been asked to find an imperial orator for Milan, and having heard Augustine speak, recommended him to the emperor. ….
Augustine came to Milan not as a Christian but as a man still searching for truth. It was the Platonists who first impressed him there. Platonism was popular among both Christians and non-Christians, although those Platonists whom Augustine met appear to have been Christians who had drawn their Platonism from Plotinus and Porphyry (even though the latter was strongly anti-Christian). …
The traditional Platonic view had been that, while it might take many years, the ultimate reality could be grasped by reason. Augustine wanted to avoid, perhaps needed to avoid, this long journey. …
Augustine now began to believe that Christ was the intermediary he searched for, and that through accepting the authority of the church, its tradition and the scriptures he could gain a direct relationship with God. While Platonism might represent the highest intellectual and spiritual point of the pagan world, Christianity went beyond it and provided an everlasting haven. …
None the less, it was in these early years as bishop that Augustine wrote his most famous and accessible work, the Confessions, which reviews his early life and his path to conversion. [In Hippo, Africa]…
What is remarkable about the Confessions is that for the first time in western literature the world of the interior mind—with, in this case, all its guilt and uncertainty—is explored in detail in what is essentially a dialogue with God. …
One cannot read the Confessions without being aware of Augustine’s preoccupation with his own sinfulness. He is deeply overcome, for instance, by what seems a fairly harmless prank of shaking down the ripe pears from a tree and stealing them. His sexual feelings and experiences, even if in reality they were relatively limited, disturb him continuously. Augustine talks in the Confessions, as throughout his writings, of the supreme importance of the love of God, but the dominant picture he gives in the Confessions is of a God who is angry and punitive.
I broke all your lawful bounds and did not escape your lash. For what man can escape it? You were always present, angry and merciful at once, strewing the pangs of bitterness over all my lawless pleasures to look for others unallied by pain. You meant me to find them nowhere but in yourself, O Lord, for you teach us by inflicting pain, you smite so that you may heal and you kill us so that we may not die away from you.
Far from being a Platonic God—above earthly things and free of emotion—this is a God who actively punishes as a form of showing love (as, Augustine was often to remark, a schoolmaster would). It is a confused and unsettling picture and becomes even more disturbing as Augustine elaborates his doctrine of original sin. …
… there are now signs of an intellectual struggle in which Augustine explores whether one can ever know anything fully. He concludes that some things have to be taken on trust and this involves the acceptance of the authority of others. This acceptance of authority in itself requires humility, and here the humility of Christ in becoming human provides the model for one’s own humility. Augustine follows Paul’s example in deriding “the philosophers” as arrogant in the belief that they can find truth for themselves. “For Augustine the root of sin lies in pride, and this includes pride in one’s own intelligence.”
From here Augustine moves to the authority of the church and thence to the authority of the scriptures. “I would not have believed the Gospels, except on the authority of the Catholic Church.” …
One of the benefits of making the leap to faith, Augustine argues, is that in doing so one breaks through a barrier and reaches a higher level of understanding. “Unless you believe you will not understand,” as the prophet Isaiah had put it. By 396 Augustine had progressed to saying belief in God, faith, is a gift of God. Reason now plays only a supporting role as the means through which one learns that authority must be accepted. “The main use of reason by the mature Augustine,” writes Adrian Hastings, “is unquestionably to understand what is already believed.”! …
Augustine believed that every other form of learning had to be subordinated to the scriptures, so in De Doctrina Christiana, his major work on the exegesis of scripture, worked on throughout his later life, secular knowledge, whether provided by mathematicians, scientists or philosophers, is said to be valid only in so far as it leads to an understanding of scripture. ….
Augustine’s uncritical reliance on the inadequate Latin translations of the original Greek and Hebrew versions made things worse. For instance, he interpreted the Latin of verse 12 of chapter 5 of Paul’s Epistle to the Romans to mean that all individuals sinned through Adam, hence to support the doctrine of an original sin, whereas if he had gone back to the original Greek he would have found that sin, which entered the world as a result of Adam’s transgression, was a “cosmic” force burdening all humanity in general rather than being born uniquely in each individual. No wonder the concept of original sin never travelled to the Greek world.
In so far as he came to take refuge in scriptures, Augustine was particularly influenced by Paul, and, as noted above, it was from a misreading of Paul that Augustine developed his doctrine of original sin.” He was tackling a major theological and philosophical problem, perhaps the most profound and challenging of all, the cause of evil. There are various ways of approaching the problem of evil. …
In Augustine’s writings in the 380s there are indications that he accepts the existence of free will. In the opening of On Free Will, begun in 388, he argues that “what each one chooses to pursue and embrace is within the power of his will to determine.” Man must take responsibility for the evil he commits. This was in line with established thinking on the issue. …
As he continued to write On Free Will over the next eight or nine years, however, Augustine’s position changed. The later parts of the book accept only one true instance of the exercise of free will: Adam’s decision to eat the forbidden fruit. (There remains a significant issue. If Adam was the perfect man, created as such by God, why did he give in to temptation so easily?) As a result of the Fall, Adam becomes imbued with sin, “original sin,” as it came to be known, which he then passed down to the human race.
The power of this sin is so debilitating that it even limits the extent to which human beings can enjoy free will. Mankind is now, Augustine writes in his Letter to Simplicianus (397), no more than “a lump,” infused with the guilt of Adam. As a result of this corruption all are deprived of the power to save themselves. … The effect of being burdened by sin is profound; it not only makes our lives on earth ones of certain wrongdoing that our own efforts can do little to avoid, it makes damnation (which Augustine, drawing on Jesus’ words in Matthew, believes to be eternal) very likely. …
n De Trinitate he argued that God had provided the soul with the means of recognizing him when grace was offered—the truth could not be gained except through God’s grace. …
By the late 390s Augustine’s rejection of reason and the wider philosophical tradition of the classical world had led him to a philosophical dead end. … To accept original sin is to accept that one generation can be held responsible for the guilt of another, an assumption alien to most ethical systems. As guilt is independent of any action, good or bad, by the individual, even a baby can be damned to eternal fire. …
One of the eighteen dissenting Italian bishops, Julian of Eclanum, who was forced into exile by the debate, set out the clearest and most powerful objection to Augustine’s position in a letter addressed to Augustine himself.
Babies, you say, carry the burden of another’s sin, not any of their own… . Explain to me, then, who this person is who sends the innocent to punishment. You answer, God… God, you say, the very one who commends his love to us, who has loved us and not spared his son but handed him over to us, he judges us in this way; he persecutes new born children; he hands over babies to eternal flames because of their bad wills, when he knows that they have not so much formed a will, good or bad… It would show a just and reasonable sense of propriety to treat you as beneath argument: you have come so far from religious feeling, from civilized standards, so far indeed from common sense, that you think your Lord capable of committing kinds of crime which are hardly found among barbarian tribes.
Augustine’s confusing concept of God, a loving but punitive deity, was exposed with great clarity. Augustine nevertheless stood firm and was preaching to worried and perplexed enquirers on the issue until his death. …
It was Augustine who developed a rationale of persecution.
Augustine’s earlier, more tolerant, views were to change in the early fifth century. He began with the argument that Donatism intimidated many ordinary Christians and it was the duty of the “true” church to release them from such coercion. Furthermore, his experience of ordinary former Donatists was that most became excellent Christians when forced to do so. Therefore, compulsion was permissible.
Just as God could punish in the exercise of his love, so too could the church, knowing as it did so that it was saving sinners from everlasting hell fire.
“What then does brotherly love do? Does it, because it fears the shortlived fires of the furnace for the few, abandon all to the eternal fires of hell? And does it leave so many… to perish everlastingly … whom ‘others’ [i.e. the Donatists] will not permit to live in accordance with the teaching of Christ?”
Not for the last time in Christian history, fantasies about hell fire were being used as a means of manipulating Christian behaviour on earth. As for coercion, God himself had shown the way.
The conversion of Paul had been effected by God throwing him to the ground; Augustine finds comparable examples of forced conversions in the Old Testament. …
… As Gregory of Nyssa put it: “The human voice was fashioned for one reason alone—to be the threshold through which the sentiments of the heart, inspired by the Holy Spirit, might be translated clearly into the Word itself.” No longer is coherence of argument valued.
Augustine follows Tertullian in arguing that it is the very irrationality of the Christian message that is its strength: “If by calling yourself wise, you become a fool, call yourself a fool, and you will become wise,” he says….
In his De Doctrina Christiana Augustine argued that the moral quality of the speaker was not relevant so long as the doctrine he preached was orthodox. “It is possible,” he wrote, “for a person who is eloquent but evil actually to compose a sermon proclaiming the truth for another, who is not eloquent but who is good to deliver.” So much for the tradition of Isocrates and Quintilian. Here again the influence of Platonism was strong. Truth exists eternally and totally independently of the one who speaks it, and there is evidence that priests increasingly used approved sermons, such as those by Augustine or other recognized orthodox thinkers, rather than their own. So the art of rhetoric declined as was inevitable with the devaluation of reasoned argument and individual creativity. Richard Lim has noted how councils were now dominated by texts prepared for the occasion rather than by spontaneous speeches
Aristotle was another casuality of this.
Aristotle was another casuality of this. Attacks were focused on his work the Categories. The Categories sets out ten questions that needed to be asked about any entity, such as its size, its qualities, its relationship to other entities and its place in time. In the debates of the fourth century, some participants, such as Aetius the Syrian, had used the Categories as a framework for speculating about the divine and had taught that dialectical questioning on the Aristotelian model was the way to progress in theological matters. By the mid fifth century, however, it was no longer possible to enjoy open-ended discussion as to the nature of God, and the Categories became “a prime villain.”
In the seventh century Anastasius, abbot of the monastery of St. Catherine in Sinai, was to argue that the ten horns of the dragon in the Book of Revelation (12:4) were none other than the ten categories (“heresies” as he termed them) of Aristotle. With the exception of two works of logic, Aristotle vanishes from the western world; his work only reappears in the thirteenth century thanks to its preservation by Arab interpreters.
It was perhaps particularly unfortunate that the silencing of debate extended beyond the spiritual and across the whole Greek intellectual tradition. The effects of Paul’s condemnation of “the philosophers” could not have been put more clearly than by John Chrysostom, an enthusiastic follower of Paul.
Restrain our own reasoning, and empty our mind of secular learning, in order to provide a mind swept clear for the reception of divine words.
Basil echoes him:
Let us Christians prefer the simplicity of our faith to the demonstrations of human reason… For to spend much time on research about the essence of things would not serve the edification of the church.
This represented no less than a total abdication of independent intellectual thought, and it resulted in a turning away from any speculation about the natural world as well as the divine. …
The impact of this fundamental change in approach on intellectual life was profound. One effect, noted by Averil Cameron, was the decline of book learning.
Books ceased to be readily available and learning became an increasingly ecclesiastical preserve; even those who were not ecclesiastics were likely to get their education from the scriptures or from Christian texts.
…
Despite these continuities with the past, however, sickness is now understood within a specifically Christian perspective. The rejection of a scientific approach to medicine is underlined by the belief (again rooted in Platonism) that the soul is of greater value than the body and that suffering is part of the Christian condition, even to be welcomed as a test of faith. A sick man in danger of death urgently needed, it was said, a priest for his soul rather than a doctor for his body.
It is undoubtedly true that Christians cared for the sick “as if Christ were being directly served by waiting on them,” and that hospitals attached to the ordered life of the monastery achieved much good, but there was a risk of caring becoming an end in itself, a means of salvation for the carer, rather than being primarily focused on curing the diseased. There is a story told, for instance, by St. Bonaventura (1221-74) of St. Francis of Assisi, who
rendered humble service to the lepers with humane concern in order that he might completely despise himself, because of Christ crucified, who according to the prophet Isaiah was despised as a leper. He visited their homes frequently, generously distributed alms to them, and with great compassion kissed their hands and their mouths.
The sick risk being used here to fulfill the spiritual needs of their carer. The causes of sickness were seen within a religious perspective. So leprosy, which we now understand to be spread by any kind of physical contact, was said to be a punishment sent by God for lust. …
… Christian thought that emerged in the early centuries often gave irrationality the status of a universal “truth” to the exclusion of those truths to be found through reason. So the uneducated was preferred to the educated and the miracle to the operation of natural laws.
After the defeat of Pelagius, the possibility that man was free to manage his own destiny was diminished. This reversal of traditional values became embedded in the Christian tradition and was, among other things, used to sustain the authority of the church. Intellectual self-confidence and curiosity, which lay at the heart of the Greek achievement, were recast as the dreaded sin of pride. Faith and obedience to the institutional authority of the church were more highly rated than the use of reasoned thought. The inevitable result was intellectual stagnation.
… Aistotle, Plato, Hippocrates, Galen, Euclid and Ptolemy among them—were carefully translated by teams of scholars into Arabic.
What proved crucial for its survival in this new context was the fact that Greek thought did not have to be doctored for the Islamic world. As the philosopher Averroés argued, religion and philosophy reached the same truths but by different routes and thus could exist alongside each other. …
Al-Razi, a Persian who studied at Baghdad before returning to Persia, deliberately set out, in the best tradition of Greek thinking, to expose his forebears to rational criticism, in Al-Razi’s case even including Aristotle. Reason should come first; it is “the ultimate authority which should govern and not be governed; should control and be not controlled; should lead and not be led.” …
Yet Aristotle offered an obvious challenge to Christianity: he was a pagan philosopher (whose “unmoved mover” did not even relate to the created world), and he extolled reason not only through the use of formal logic (the syllogism), but also as a means of understanding the natural world through the analysis of empirical evidence. …
In 1215 the Faculty of Arts of the University of Paris forbade the use of his works as a basis for discussion. For Christians to accept Aristotle, his work had somehow to be made compatible with Christian doctrine, which in turn made it necessary for Christianity to allow reason and the study of the natural world a new role.
Aquinas was to incorporate Aristotle into the Christian, above all Roman Catholic, tradition with such intellectual power and coherence that in some areas of thought Aristotelianism and Catholicism became virtually indistinguishable. As one commentator has put it, Aquinas converted Aristotle to Christianity and carried out the baptism himself! In view of Aquinas’s heavy dependence on Aristotle, it might rather be said that Aquinas was converted to Aristotelianism…..
He is little read today, but it is arguable that Thomas Aquinas revived the Aristotelian approach to knowing things so successfully that he unwittingly laid the foundations of the scientific revolution that was to transform western thought. ….
… in December 1273, Aquinas appears to have had some form of breakdown. This has been variously explained in terms of a mystical experience, complete exhaustion or as a possible moment of realization that reason was breaking the bounds of orthodoxy. …
In the year of his breakdown he was strongly criticized in Paris for his insistence on a natural underlying order of things (which appeared to deny God’s power of miraculous intervention) and his respect for the body as the sustainer of the soul. In 1274 Aquinas was summoned by the pope to a council at Lyons, where it is possible that he would have been confronted with these criticisms, but he fell ill on the way, in unknown circumstances, and died. Three years later, several of his theses were formally condemned, first in Paris and then in Oxford; the Paris condemnation lasted fifty years, and there is no record that the Oxford condemnation has ever been revoked.