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A radical and powerful reappraisal of the impact of Constantine's adoption of Christianity on the later Roman world, and on the subsequent development both of Christianity and of Western civilization.When the Emperor Contstantine converted to Christianity in 368 AD, he changed the course of European history in ways that continue to have repercussions to the present day. Adopting those aspects of the religion that suited his purposes, he turned Rome on a course from the relatively open, tolerant and pluralistic civilization of the Hellenistic world, towards a culture that was based on the rule of fixed authority, whether that of the Bible, or the writings of Ptolemy in astronomy and of Galen and Hippocrates in medicine. Only a thousand years later, with the advent of the Renaissance and the emergence of modern science, did Europe begin to free itself from the effects of Constantine's decision, yet the effects of his establishment of Christianity as a state religion remain with us, in many respects, today. Brilliantly wide-ranging and ambitious, this is a major work of history.
REVIEWS
“A fascinating account.” —The Atlanta Journal-Constitution“Engrossingly readable and very thoughtful. . . . Freeman draws our attention to myriad small but significant phenomena. . . . His fine book is both a searching look at the past and a salutary and cautionary reminder for us in our difficult present.” —The New York Sun
“One of the best books to date on the development of Christianity. . . . Beautifully written and impressively annotated, this is an indispensable read for anyone interested in the roots of Christianity and its implications for our modern worldview. . . . Essential.” —Choice
“Engaging. . . . Refreshing. . . . A memorable account. . . . The author is always interesting and well informed. Freeman’s study moves with ease between political and intellectual history. . . . The cumulative effect is impressive.” —The Times Literary Supplement
“A fine book for a popular audience that enjoys history, clear writing, and subject matter that reflects our own time.” —Houston Chronicle
“The narrative is clear and fluent, the nomenclature is studiously precise . . . and the theological conflicts of the fourth century are analyzed with . . . subtlety.” —History Today
“Ambitious, groundbreaking. . . . In the tradition of . . . Karen Armstrong’s A History of God . . . a scholarly history that is accessible, passionate and energetic.” —Hartford Advocate
“Freeman has a talent for narrative history and for encapsulating the more arcane disputes of ancient historians and theologians.... He manages not only to make these disputes interesting, but also to show why they mattered so much. It is a coup that few books on the early church pull off.” —The Independent
“Engaging and clearly written.” —The World and I
“[A] lucid account of an intellectual and social transformation that continues to shape the way Christianity is experienced and understood.” —The Dallas Morning News
PREVIEW
[lyrics]Introduction
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.D. 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.
Before setting out my argument, it is important to define what is meant by a tradition of rational thought. The Greeks were the first to distinguish, assess and use the distinct branch of intellectual activity we know as reasoning. By the fifth century they had grasped the principle of the deductive proof, which enabled them to make complex and irrefutable mathematical proofs. They also set out the principles of inductive reasoning, the formulation of “truths” from empirical evidence. Aristotle (384–322 B.C.) used this method to make significant advances in our understanding of the natural world. These “truths,” however, are always provisional. If the sun rises every day of our existence, we might assume that it will always rise, but there is no certainty of this. The Greeks recognized this as well as grasping that theories must always be the servants of facts. Describing what he has observed about the generation of bees, Aristotle notes that “the facts have not been sufficiently ascertained, and if they are ever ascertained, then we must trust perception rather than theories.” Implicit in this is the thinking of cause and effect. By the fifth century we find the historian Herodotus attempting to relate what he could observe about the Nile floods with their possible causes, and this approach became rooted in the rational tradition. It was the path to a fuller understanding of the natural world and offered the possibility of effective prediction. Yet one should not idealize. In practice it is impossible to disassociate observation from the influences of the wider world. Women were seen by Greek culture to be inferior to men, and “empirical” observations could all too easily be shaped or interpreted to sustain this, as they certainly were in medicine. The astronomer Ptolemy believed the earth was at the centre of the universe, and all his observations of the planets were interpreted so as not to conflict with this model.
A successful rational tradition needs the support and understanding of the society in which it is based, and in many parts of the Greek world, this is what it received. If truth is to be effectively advanced, any finding must be open to challenge, and this means that even the greatest thinkers must never be made into figures of authority. Aristotle’s colleague Theophrastus successfully queried instances of what Aristotle claimed was spontaneous generation by noticing tiny seeds Aristotle had missed. If a tradition of rational thought is to make progress, it is essential that it builds in tolerance. No authority can dictate in advance what can or cannot be believed, or there is no possibility of progress. From the philosophical point of view, it is perhaps as important that it accept the limits of what it can achieve, in those areas of knowledge where there are no basic axioms (as there are in a mathematical model, for instance) or empirical evidence from which rational thought can progress. E. R. Dodds, in his famous study The Greeks and the Irrational, notes that “honest distinction between what is knowable and what is not appears again and again in fifth-century [B.C.] thought, and is surely one of its chief glories.” In short, one cannot pronounce that a statement is true unless it can be supported by logic or empirical evidence. It followed that nothing of certainty could be said, for instance, about the gods. The problem is too complex and life is too short proclaimed the philosopher Protagoras in the fifth century. Despite these words of caution, Dodds’ work reminds us that irrationality flourished in the Greek world; but perhaps one can put up with 999 irrational minds if the thousandth is an Aristotle or an Archimedes (or a Copernicus or a Newton, or, in inductive logic, a Darwin). It takes only one independent and effective rational mind to change the paradigms of understanding for the rest of humankind.
The conventional wisdom is that Greek science and mathematics petered out in the Hellenistic period (323–31 B.C.), but recently scholars have shown greater appreciation of the achievements of such leading figures of the second century A.D. as Galen and Ptolemy. Galen’s work on logic is being recognized so that, in the accolade of Geoffrey Lloyd, “Galen is probably unique among practising physicians in any age and culture for his professionalism also as a logician . . . conversely he is also remarkable among practising logicians for his ability in, and experience of, medical practice.” The ingenuity of Ptolemy’s astronomical calculations (forced on him as they were by his misconception of the universe!) was extraordinary, but one is reminded, by a recent new translation of his Geography, that he also tackled the problem of how to represent the globe on a flat surface, introduced “minutes” and “seconds” to divide up degrees and established the notion of grids of coordinates for mapping. So even in the Roman empire we are dealing with a living tradition which is making important and influential scientific advances.
There was an alternative approach to rational thought, that taken by Plato (c. 429–347 B.C.). Plato believed in the reality of a world of Forms, Forms of everything from “the God” to a table, which was eternal and unchanging in contrast to the transient world here below. This world could be grasped, after an arduous intellectual journey of which only a few were capable, by means of reason. So “real” were the Forms that even the observations of the senses must be discarded if they conflicted with a Form as it was eventually discovered. “We shall approach astronomy, as we do geometry, by way of problems, and ignore what is in the sky, if we intend to get a real grasp of astronomy,” as Plato put it in The Republic. This was, of course, a challenge to the principle that facts should prevail over theories. The problem was that it was impossible to find axioms, unassailable first principles, from which one could progress to a Form such as that of Beauty or “the Good,” and the Platonic journey, while offering the lure of an ultimate certainty, never seemed, in practice, to be able to present a Form in terms with which all could agree.
The argument of this book is that the Greek intellectual tradition did not simply lose vigour and disappear. (Its survival and continued progress in the Arab world is testimony to that.) Rather, in the fourth and fifth century A.D. it was destroyed by the political and religious forces which made up the highly authoritarian government of the late Roman empire. 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. However, as with other aspects of Platonism, it proved impossible to find secure axioms from which to start the rational argument. Scriptural texts conflicted with each other, different theological traditions had taken root in different parts of the empire, theologians disagreed whether they should discard pagan Greek philosophy or exploit it. The result, inevitably, was doctrinal confusion. Augustine was to note the existence of over eighty heresies (for which read “alternative ways of dealing with the fundamental issues of Christian doctrine”). 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. By the middle of the fourth century, disputes over doctrine had degenerated into bitterness and even violence as rival bishops struggled to earn the emperor’s favour and the most lucrative bishoprics. At a time of major barbarian attacks, the threat to order was so marked that it was the emperors who increasingly defined and enforced an orthodoxy, using hand-picked church councils to give themselves some theological legitimacy.
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.
Some who have found this argument too damning have stressed how it was Christians who preserved the great works of the Greek philosophers by copying them from decaying papyri, or parchment. The historian is indeed deeply indebted to the monks, the Byzantine civil servants and the Arab philosophers who preserved ancient texts, but the recording of earlier authorities is not the same as maintaining a tradition of rational thought. This can be done only if these authorities are then used as inspiration for further intellectual progress or as a bulwark against which to react. This happened in the Arab world (where, for instance, even the findings of a giant such as Galen were challenged and improved on) but not in the Byzantine empire or the Christian west. The Athenian philosopher Proclus made the last recorded astronomical observation in the ancient Greek world in A.D. 475. It was not until the sixteenth century that Copernicus—inspired by the surviving works of Ptolemy but aware that they would make more sense, and in fact would be simpler, if the sun was placed at the centre of the universe—set in hand the renewal of the scientific tradition. The struggle between religion and science had now entered a new phase, one which is beyond the scope of this book. What cannot be doubted is how effectively the rational tradition had been eradicated in the fourth and fifth centuries. The “closing of the Western mind” has been ignored for all too long. I hope this book reinvigorates debate on this turning point in European history.
I have acknowledged the many works I have drawn on for this book in the notes. In addition, my agent, Bill Hamilton, has been a consistent support during the writing of this book, and my editor at Heinemann, Ravi Mirchandani, has played a vital role in helping to set its tone and to clarify its central argument. Josine Meijer gathered the pictures together with great efficiency, and the text was meticulously copy-edited by Caroline Knight. I would also like to thank my editor at Knopf, Carol Janeway, for the enthusiasm with which she has taken on this book for the United States market. For the preparation of this book for the United States market, I am especially grateful to Serena Lehman and Ellen Feldman at Knopf, proofreaders Chuck Antony and Patrice Silverstein and indexer Max Franke.
This book is dedicated to my wife, Hilary, with my love. While I have been dealing with the complex and often stressful relationships between Christianity and pagan society in the fourth and fifth centuries, she, in her work as a psychotherapist, has been dealing with similar tensions in the minds of her clients. So our concerns have often overlapped. A tribute from Helmut Koester to his wife that I came across when reading this distinguished Swiss theologian’s work seemed particularly appropriate: “It is therefore fitting that I should express here my indebtedness to her for all the patient and helpful listening to the progress of my work and for her indulgence with respect to all sorts of things around the house that I should have done rather than working on this manuscript.” With the closing of this book, such duties can be evaded no longer!
Charles Freeman
April 2003
Terminology and Sources
This book draws heavily on recent research, particularly in “late antiquity.” Much of this is to be found in specialist journals and expensive academic books, and the writing of this book without the help of the Cambridge University Library would have been impossible. Once again I record my thanks to its ever helpful and courteous staff.
I have recorded my sources either in the text or in notes. In addition I have used the notes to recommend further reading and to explore some topics where a digression in the text would have disrupted the flow of argument. So in the section on Alexander (chapter 4) I recommend a recent biography that reflects the state of research (note 3), give references to other sources I have used in the text (notes 4, 5, 6), and then provide a digression on the legacy of Alexander with further sources, both ancient and modern (note 7). The aim is to provide a coherent and readable narrative for the reader, with the notes available as supplementary material.
Finding the right terminology in this area is always difficult. Many of the concepts used in this book, “faith” for instance, shifted with time, and I have used the text and notes to indicate the shifts and explore the difficulties. Some terms need further mention here. The word “pagan” as used nowadays is often one of abuse, associated with witches, hedonistic living and minority spiritual ideas. Even the most cursory knowledge of the wide variety of pagan thought and movements in the Roman empire shows that to use the term in a derogatory sense is inappropriate. The word is used in this book to describe the diverse traditions of spirituality that predated and continued to exist alongside Christianity. They included cult worship of the traditional Greek and Roman gods, mystery religions and highly sophisticated philosophical approaches to the divine. It is obvious that this very variety makes any value judgment about paganism as a whole meaningless, but it is worth saying at this stage that pagans were normally tolerant of each other and that a number of distinct spiritual allegiances could be held by an individual without impropriety. So long as public order was not threatened, an individual could follow his, or in many cases her, spiritual instincts wherever they led.
Studies of early Christianity used to stress the uniformity of Christian belief; they now stress its diversity. It is as difficult to generalize about the early Christian communities as it is to generalize about paganism, but I have used the words “church” (small c) or “Christian communities” when appropriate. This should not imply any common agreement in doctrine or belief—such an agreement took many centuries to evolve and never became complete between the Christian communities. (In fact, one of the arguments of this book is that the debate by its very nature could not come to much in the way of agreement.) I have used “Church” (capital C) only when I quote directly from another writer who has done so, or in describing the Roman Catholic Church, which could be said to have had some understanding of its distinctiveness as the church of the west from the time of Gregory in the late sixth century. It was at about this time that the word “pope” was first used as a title for the bishop of Rome, and I have avoided using the word for the earlier bishops on the grounds that it was not a title they used themselves. (The question of the primacy of the bishops of Rome, actual or otherwise, over other bishops is, of course, a separate topic that I explore at appropriate points in the text.) When the emperors began to define and enforce Christian doctrine through law, I have described the doctrines they promulgated as “orthodox” (small o), although it should be remembered that in this period an imperial definition of orthodoxy did not mean that Christian communities necessarily became “orthodox” (despite enormous financial incentives to do so). The Roman empire, even in its more authoritarian phase in late antiquity, simply did not have the power to enforce uniformity of thought. In fact, the impassioned nature of much Christian preaching may be seen as a recognition of the churches’ continuing impotence in the face of Judaism, paganism and rival Christian traditions. “Orthodox” (capital O) is used to refer to the Greek-speaking churches of the east that remained true to their traditions as the popes gradually consolidated an independent western (and Latin-speaking) church in the first millennium.
A particularly difficult concept to define, at least so far as the fourth century is concerned, is “Nicene orthodoxy.” The concept that God the Father and Jesus the Son were homoousios, “of identical substance,” was first proclaimed at the council of eastern (Greek-speaking) bishops meeting at Nicaea under the auspices of the emperor Constantine in 325. Yet, contrary to traditional interpretations of the council, recent research is stressing the difficulties the homoousios formula had in being accepted by the church as a whole (as the text will explain). In the eastern church it was only fully accepted as orthodoxy after the Council of Constantinople in 381, and even then there remained much opposition to the concept. However, in the western church there was always greater sympathy for the idea that Father and Son were of equal divinity, even though, as a result of the linguistic and geographical isolation of the western church, there seems to have been little awareness of the actual Nicene formulation before the 350s. I have tended to use the term “Nicene orthodoxy” rather loosely to describe those in the west who saw Father and Son as being of equal grandeur, whether they knew of or used a strictly Nicene formulation or not.
I have acknowledged translators where possible in the notes. Most of the quoted texts from the Old and New Testaments are from the Jerusalem Bible, which I have long found the most congenial modern translation.
1
THOMAS AQUINAS AND “THE TRIUMPH OF FAITH”
A friar in the black-and-white habit of the Dominicans sits in a niche set within an elaborate columned edifice crowned by a vault. Carved on the panels either side of him are fasces, rods bound together, a symbol of authority that reaches back through the history of ancient Rome to the Etruscans. Conventionally, as those who are attuned to the more sinister aspects of modern European history will be all too well aware, an axe is fixed within the bundle, but here it is omitted and the fasces are lit. Even in ancient times the presence of the axe was associated with tyrannical authority, so the omission suggests a deliberate attempt to evoke an authority that is benign rather than menacing. A setting in Rome is confirmed by the views behind the imposing structure. On one side there is part of St. John Lateran, the cathedral church of Rome, fronted by an equestrian statue believed in the 1480s, the date of this fresco, to be of the emperor Constantine, its founder.1 On the other is the Porta Ripa Grande, the port alongside the river Tiber in Rome. The fresco itself is in the Carafa Chapel in Santa Maria Sopra Minerva, a Dominican church in the city.2 Even if the fasces are not menacing, one aspect of the fresco nevertheless is. The friar crushes a scowling old man beneath his feet. The old man is a personification of evil, and he clutches a banner with the Latin inscription “Wisdom conquers evil.” The friar himself is none other than the great Dominican theologian Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225–74). Above him in a roundel are the verses from the Book of Proverbs with which he chose to begin one of his finest works, the Summa contra gentiles, “a summary of the case against the heretics”: “For my mouth shall speak truth and wickedness is an abomination to my lips.” Also above him, on panels held by putti, appears a declaration of the importance of the revealed word of God: “The revelation of Thy words gives light; it gives understanding to the simple.” The most important text, however, must be that which Thomas has selected to hold in his left hand; it is from the Apostle Paul: SAPIENTIAM SAPIENTUM PERDAM, “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise.” As this book will suggest, the phrase, supported by other texts of Paul which condemn the “empty logic of the philosophers,” was the opening shot in the enduring war between Christianity and science. 3
Here Thomas is in a position of authority, defending the revelatory power of God against “the wisdom of the wise.” Yet this “wisdom” is allowed some place. Alongside the saint sit four further personifications, in order from the left, those of Philosophy, Theology, Grammar and Dialectic. Philosophy (largely the study of formal logic), grammar and dialectic (the art of disputation) were the first subjects of the traditional medieval curriculum. However, though they may appear at ease alongside Thomas, they are clearly subordinate to the word of God, as preliminaries that had to be mastered before any advanced study in theology, the longest and most challenging course, could begin. Theology’s prominence over the others is shown here by her crown and her hand raised to heaven, as well as by her position immediately to the right of Thomas.
Below Thomas and his intellectual companions two groups of men stand back from a clutter of books and manuscripts. A debate has been in progress, and it seems that its settlement has resulted in a disposal of discarded arguments. The reference here is to the fourth and fifth centuries, when the empire, newly if not fully Christianized, was rocked with debate over the nature of Jesus and his relationship with God. The Arians (followers of Arius) claimed that Jesus was a distinct and lower creation, divine perhaps but not fully God. At the opposite extreme, the followers of Sabellius, a Roman cleric, claimed that the Godhead was one and Jesus on earth was only a temporary manifestation of that Godhead, in no way distinct from it. In the fresco Arius stands on the left, a serious and thoughtful man as tradition records, wearing yellow robes. In front of him a book bearing the words of his thesis, “There was a time when the Son was not,” lies condemned. Sabellius, shown as an austere Roman in a red robe, gazes down on his work with its own heretical assertion, that the Father is not to be distinguished from the Son, likewise condemned. Other heretics, including the Persian Mani (to the right of Sabellius in a furred hood), to whose sect St. Augustine belonged before his conversion to Christianity, are in the crowd. These heretics had all been subject to specific refutation by Thomas in his works. What Thomas now upholds is the final solution to the issue, the doctrine of the Trinity. God the Father, Jesus the Son and the Holy Spirit are distinct persons within a single Godhead. It is a doctrine, as Thomas himself wrote in his other great work, the Summa theologiae, that cannot be upheld by reason, but only through faith.
The “triumph of faith,” as depicted here by the Florentine painter Filippino Lippi,4 reflects the theme of this book. “Faith” is a complex concept, but whether it is trust in what cannot be seen, belief in promises made by God, essentially a declaration of loyalty or a virtue, it involves some kind of acquiescence in what cannot be proved by rational thought. What makes faith a difficult concept to explore is that it has both theological and psychological elements. At a psychological level one could argue that faith must exist in any healthy mind. If we cannot trust anyone, have any optimism that “all will be well,” we cannot live full lives. Such faith will include positive responses to individuals, as evinced by those who met and travelled with Jesus. Here we cross a conceptual boundary because faith in Jesus, and in particular in the saving nature of his crucifixion and resurrection as taught by Paul, was of a different order from faith in the general sense that “all will be well.” With the elaboration of Christian doctrine, faith came to mean acquiescence in the teachings of the churches—to be seen as a virtue in itself.5
In the fourth and fifth centuries A.D., 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. Yet, and this is the paradox of the Carafa fresco, it was actually Thomas, through reviving the works of Aristotle, who brought reason back into theology and hence into western thought. Once again it was possible for rational thought and faith to co-exist. We will meet the other Thomas, the Thomas who champions reason alongside faith, in the final chapter of this book.
We begin by returning to ancient Greece and exploring in particular how reason became established as an intellectual force in western culture. Then we can see how Christianity, under the influential banner of Paul’s denunciation of Greek philosophy, began to create the barrier between science—and rational thought in general—and religion that appears to be unique to Christianity. Far from the rise of science challenging the Christian concept of God (as is often assumed by protagonists in the debate), it was Christianity that actively challenged a well-established and sophisticated tradition of scientific thinking.
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TITLE: The Closing of the Western Mind_ The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason
Author: Charles Freeman
Language: English
ISBN: 9781400033805
Format: TXT, EPUB, MOBI
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