A History of Western Philosophy

by Bertrand Russell

  All the three Saints with whom we are concerned in this chapter wrote innumerable letters, of which many are preserved; the consequence is that we know more about them than about any of the pagan philosophers, and more than about all but a few of the ecclesiastics of the Middle Ages. Saint Augustine wrote letters to all and sundry, mostly on doctrine or Church discipline; Saint Jerome’s letters are mainly addressed to ladies, giving advice on how to preserve virginity; but Saint Ambrose’s most important and interesting letters are to Emperors, telling them in what respects they have fallen short of their duty, or, on occasion, congratulating them on having performed it.

  The first public question with which Ambrose had to deal was that of the altar and statue of Victory in Rome. Paganism lingered longer among the senatorial families of the capital than it did elsewhere; the official religion was in the hands of an aristocratic priesthood, and was bound up with the imperial pride of the conquerors of the world. The statue of Victory in the Senate House had been removed by Constantius, the son of Constantine, and restored by Julian the Apostate. The Emperor Gratian again removed the statue, whereupon a deputation of the Senate, headed by Symmachus, Prefect of the City, asked for its renewed restoration.

  Symmachus, who also played a part in the life of Augustine, was a distinguished member of a distinguished family—rich, aristocratic, cultivated, and pagan. He was banished from Rome by Gratian in 382 for his protest against the removal of the statue of Victory, but not for long, as he was Prefect of the City in 384. He was the grandfather of the Symmachus who was the father-in-law of Boethius, and who was prominent in the reign of Theodoric.

  The Christian senators objected, and by the help of Ambrose and the Pope (Damasus) their view was made to prevail with the Emperor. After the death of Gratian, Symmachus and the pagan senators petitioned the new Emperor, Valentinian II, in A.D. 384. In rebuttal of this renewed attempt, Ambrose wrote to the Emperor, setting forth the thesis that, as all Romans owed military service to their sovereign, so he (the Emperor) owed service to Almighty God.* “Let no one,” he says, “take advantage of your youth; if he be a heathen who demands this, it is not right that he should bind your mind with the bonds of his own superstition; but by his zeal he ought to teach and admonish you how to be zealous for the true faith, since he defends vain things with all the passion of truth.” To be compelled to swear at the altar of an idol, he says, is, to a Christian, persecution. “If it were a civil cause the right of reply would be reserved for the opposing party; it is a religious cause, and I the bishop make a claim…. Certainly if anything else is decreed, we bishops cannot constantly suffer it and take no notice; you indeed may come to the Church, but will find either no priest there, or one who will resist you.” †

  The next epistle points out that the endowments of the Church serve purposes never served by the wealth of heathen temples. “The possessions of the Church are the maintenance of the poor. Let them count up how many captives the temples have ransomed, what food they have contributed for the poor, to what exiles they have supplied the means of living.” This was a telling argument, and one which was quite justified by Christian practice.

  Saint Ambrose won his point, but a subsequent usurper, Eugenius, who favoured the heathen, restored the altar and statue. It was only after the defeat of Eugenius by Theodosius in 394 that the question was finally decided in favour of the Christians.

  The bishop was, at first, on very friendly terms with the imperial court, and was employed on a diplomatic mission to the usurper Maximus, who, it was feared, might invade Italy. But before long a grave matter of controversy arose. The Empress Justina, as an Arian, requested that one church in Milan might be ceded to the Arians, but Ambrose refused. The people sided with him, and thronged the basilica in great crowds. Gothic soldiers, who were Arians, were sent to take possession, but fraternized with the people. “The Counts and Tribunes,” he says in a spirited letter to his sister,* “came and urged me to cause the basilica to be quickly surrendered, saying that the Emperor was exercising his rights since everything was under his power. I answered that if he asked of me what was mine, that is, my land, my money, or whatever of this kind was my own, I would not refuse it, although all that I have belonged to the poor, but that those things which are God’s are not subject to the imperial power. ‘If my patrimony is required, enter upon it; if my body, I will go at once. Do you wish to cast me into chains, or to give me to death? It will be a pleasure to me. I will not defend myself with throngs of people, nor will I cling to the altars and entreat for my life, but will more gladly be slain myself for the altars.’ I was indeed struck with horror when I learnt that armed men had been sent to take possession of the basilica, lest while the people were defending the basilica, there might be some slaughter which would tend to the injury of the whole city. I prayed that I might not survive the destruction of so great a city, or it might be of the whole of Italy.”

  These fears were not exaggerated, as the Gothic soldiery were likely to break out into savagery, as they did twenty-five years later in the sack of Rome.

  Ambrose’s strength lay in the support of the people. He was accused of inciting them, but replied that “it was in my power not to excite them, but in God’s hands to quiet them.” None of the Arians, he says, dared to go forth, as there was not one Arian among the citizens. He was formally commanded to surrender the basilica, and the soldiers were ordered to use violence if necessary. But in the end they refused to use violence, and the Emperor was compelled to give way. A great battle had been won in the contest for ecclesiastical independence; Ambrose had demonstrated that there were matters in which the State must yield to the Church, and had thereby established a new principle which retains its importance to the present day.

  His next conflict was with the Emperor Theodosius. A synagogue had been burnt, and the Count of the East reported that this had been done at the instigation of the local bishop. The Emperor ordered that the actual incendiaries should be punished, and that the guilty bishop should rebuild the synagogue. Saint Ambrose neither admits nor denies the bishop’s complicity, but is indignant that the Emperor should seem to side with Jews against Christians. Suppose the bishop refuses to obey? He will then have to become a martyr if he persists, or an apostate if he gives way. Suppose the Count decides to rebuild the synagogue himself at the expense of the Christians? In that case the Emperor will have an apostate Count, and Christian money will be taken to support unbelief. “Shall, then, a place be made for the unbelief of the Jews out of the spoils of the Church, and shall the patrimony, which by the favour of Christ has been gained for Christians, be transferred to the treasuries of unbelievers?” He continues: “But perhaps the cause of discipline moves you, O Emperor. Which, then, is of greater importance, the show of discipline or the cause of religion? It is needful that judgement should yield to religion. Have you not heard, O Emperor, how, when Julian commanded that the Temple of Jerusalem should be restored, those who were clearing the rubbish were consumed by fire?”

  It is clear that, in the Saint’s opinion, the destruction of synagogues should not be punished in any way. This is an example of the manner in which, as soon as it acquired power, the Church began to stimulate anti-Semitism.

  The next conflict between Emperor and Saint was more honourable to the latter. In A.D. 390, when Theodosius was in Milan, a mob in Thessalonica murdered the captain of the garrison. Theodosius, on receiving the news, was seized with ungovernable fury, and ordered an abominable revenge. When the people were assembled in the circus, the soldiers fell upon them, and massacred at least seven thousand of them in an indiscriminate slaughter. Hereupon Ambrose, who had endeavoured in advance to restrain the Emperor, but in vain, wrote him a letter full of splendid courage, on a purely moral issue, involving, for once, no question of theology or the power of the Church:

  “There was that done in the city of the Thessalonians of which no similar record exists, which I was not able to prevent happening; which, indeed, I had be
fore said would be most atrocious when I so often petitioned against it.”

  David repeatedly sinned, and confessed his sin with penitence.* Will Theodosius do likewise? Ambrose decides that “I dare not offer the sacrifice if you intend to be present. Is that which is not allowed after shedding the blood of one innocent person, allowed after shedding the blood of many? I do not think so.”

  The Emperor repented, and, divested of the purple, did public penance in the cathedral of Milan. From that time until his death in 395, he had no friction with Ambrose.

  Ambrose, while he was eminent as a statesman, was, in other respects, merely typical of his age. He wrote, like other ecclesiastical authors, a treatise in praise of virginity, and another deprecating the remarriage of widows. When he had decided on the site for his new cathedral, two skeletons (revealed in a vision, it was said) were conveniently discovered on the spot, were found to work miracles, and were declared by him to be those of two martyrs. Other miracles are related in his letters, with all the credulity characteristic of his times. He was inferior to Jerome as a scholar, and to Augustine as a philosopher. But as a statesman, who skilfully and courageously consolidated the power of the Church, he stands out as a man of the first rank.

  Jerome is chiefly notable as the translator who produced the Vulgate, which remains to this day the official Catholic version of the Bible. Until his day the Western Church relied, as regards the Old Testament, chiefly on translations from the Septuagint, which, in important ways differed from the Hebrew original. Christians were given to maintaining that the Jews, since the rise of Christianity, had falsified the Hebrew text where it seemed to predict the Messiah. This was a view which sound scholarship showed to be untenable, and which Jerome firmly rejected. He accepted the help of rabbis, given secretly for fear of the Jews. In defending himself against Christian criticism he said: “Let him who would challenge aught in this translation ask the Jews.” Because of his acceptance of the Hebrew text in the form which the Jews regarded as correct, his version had, at first, a largely hostile reception; but it won its way, partly because Saint Augustine on the whole supported it. It was a great achievement, involving considerable textual criticism.

  Jerome was born in 345—five years after Ambrose—not far from Aquileia, at a town called Stridon, which was destroyed by the Goths in 377. His family were well-to-do, but not rich. In 363 he went to Rome, where he studied rhetoric and sinned. After travelling in Gaul, he settled in Aquileia, and became an ascetic. The next five years he spent as a hermit in the Syrian wilderness. “His life while in the desert was one of rigorous penance, of tears and groans alternating with spiritual ecstasy, and of temptations from haunting memories of Roman life; he lived in a cell or cavern; he earned his daily bread, and was clad in sackcloth.” * After this period, he travelled to Constantinople, and lived in Rome for three years, where he became the friend and adviser of Pope Damasus, with whose encouragement he undertook his translation of the Bible.

  Saint Jerome was a man of many quarrels. He quarrelled with Saint Augustine about the somewhat questionable behaviour of Saint Peter as related by Saint Paul in Galatians II; he broke with his friend Rufinus over Origen; and he was so vehement against Pelagius that his monastery was attacked by a Pelagian mob. After the death of Damasus, he seems to have quarrelled with the new Pope; he had, while in Rome, become acquainted with various ladies who were both aristocratic and pious, some of whom he persuaded to adopt the ascetic life. The new Pope, in common with many other people in Rome, disliked this. For this reason among others, Jerome left Rome for Bethlehem, where he remained from 386 till his death in 420.

  Among his distinguished female converts, two were especially notable: the widow Paula and her daughter Eustochium. Both these ladies accompanied him on his circuitous journey to Bethlehem. They were of the highest nobility, and one cannot but feel a flavour of snobbery in the Saint’s attitude to them. When Paula died and was buried at Bethlehem, Jerome composed an epitaph for her tomb:

  Within this tomb a child of Scipio lies,

  A daughter of the far-famed Pauline house,

  A scion of the Gracchi, of the stock

  Of Agamemnon’s self, illustrious:

  Here rests the lady Paula, well-beloved

  Of both her parents, with Eustochium

  For daughter; she the first of Roman dames

  Who hardship chose and Bethlehem for Christ.*

  Some of Jerome’s letters to Eustochium are curious. He gives her advice on the preservation of virginity, very detailed and frank; he explains the exact anatomical meaning of certain euphemisms in the Old Testament; and he employs a kind of erotic mysticism in praising the joys of conventual life. A nun is the Bride of Christ; this marriage is celebrated in the Song of Solomon. In a long letter written at the time when she took the vows, he gives a remarkable message to her mother: “Are you angry with her because she chooses to be a king’s [Christ’s] wife and not a soldier’s? She has conferred on you a high privilege; you are now the mother-in-law of God.”†

  To Eustochium herself, in the same letter (XXII), he says:

  “Ever let the privacy of your chamber guard you; ever let the Bride-groom sport with you within. Do you pray? You speak to the Bridegroom. Do you read? He speaks to you. When sleep overtakes you He will come behind and put His hand through the hole of the door, and your heart shall be moved for Him; and you will awake and rise up and say: ‘I am sick of love.’ Then He will reply: ‘A garden enclosed is my sister, my spouse; a spring shut up, a fountain sealed.’”

  In the same letter he relates how, after cutting himself off from relations and friends, “and—harder still—from the dainty food to which I had been accustomed,” he still could not bear to be parted from his library, and took it with him to the desert. “And so, miserable man that I was, I would fast only that I might afterwards read Cicero.” After days and nights of remorse, he would fall again, and read Plautus. After such indulgence, the style of the prophets seemed “rude and repellent.” At last, during a fever, he dreamed that, at the Last Judgement, Christ asked him who he was, and he replied that he was a Christian. The answer came: “Thou liest, thou art a follower of Cicero and not of Christ.” Thereupon he was ordered to be scourged. At length Jerome, in his dream, cried out: “Lord, if ever again I possess worldly books, or if ever again I read such, I have denied Thee.” This, he adds, “was no sleep or idle dream.” *

  After this, for some years, his letters contain few classical quotations. But after a certain time he lapses again into verses from Virgil, Horace, and even Ovid. They seem, however, to be from memory, particularly as some of them are repeated over and over again.

  Jerome’s letters express the feelings produced by the fall of the Roman Empire more vividly than any others known to me. In 396 he writes:†

  “I shudder when I think of the catastrophes of our time. For twenty years and more the blood of Romans has been shed daily between Constantinople and the Julian Alps. Scythia, Thrace, Macedonia, Dacia, Thessaly, Achaia, Epirus, Dalmatia, the Pannonias—each and all of these have been sacked and pillaged and plundered by Goths and Sarmatians, Quadi and Alans, Huns and Vandals and Marchmen…. The Roman world is falling: yet we hold up our heads instead of bowing them. What courage, think you, have the Corinthians now, or the Athenians or the Lacedaemonians or the Arcadians, or any of the Greeks over whom the barbarians bear sway? I have mentioned only a few cities, but these once the capitals of no mean States.”

  He goes on to relate the ravages of the Huns in the East, and ends with the reflection: “To treat such themes as they deserve, Thucydides and Sallust would be as good as dumb.”

  Seventeen years later, three years after the sack of Rome, he writes:‡

  “The world sinks into ruin: yes! but shameful to say our sins still live and flourish. The renowned city, the capital of the Roman Empire, is swallowed up in one tremendous fire; and there is no part of the earth where Romans are not in exile. Churches once held sacred ar
e now but heaps of dust and ashes; and yet we have our minds set on the desire of gain. We live as though we were going to die tomorrow; yet we build as though we were going to live always in this world. Our walls shine with gold, our ceilings also and the capitals of our pillars; yet Christ dies before our doors naked and hungry in the person of His poor.”

  This passage occurs incidentally in a letter to a friend who has decided to devote his daughter to perpetual virginity, and most of it is concerned with the rules to be observed in the education of girls so dedicated. It is strange that, with all Jerome’s deep feeling about the fall of the ancient world, he thinks the preservation of virginity more important than victory over the Huns and Vandals and Goths. Never once do his thoughts turn to any possible measure of practical statesmanship; never once does he point out the evils of the fiscal system, or of reliance on an army composed of barbarians. The same is true of Ambrose and of Augustine; Ambrose, it is true, was a statesman, but only on behalf of the Church. It is no wonder that the Empire fell into ruin when all the best and most vigorous minds of the age were so completely remote from secular concerns. On the other hand, if ruin was inevitable, the Christian outlook was admirably fitted to give men fortitude, and to enable them to preserve their religious hopes when earthly hopes seemed vain. The expression of this point of view, in The City of God, was the supreme merit of Saint Augustine