A History of Western Philosophy

by Bertrand Russell

  There are two resurrections, that of the soul at death, and that of the body at the Last Judgement. After a discussion of various difficulties concerning the millennium, and the subsequent doings of Gog and Magog, he comes to a text in II Thessalonians (II, 11, 12): “God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie, that all they might be damned who believed not the truth, but had pleasure in unrighteousness.” Some people might think it unjust that the Omnipotent should first deceive them, and then punish them for being deceived; but to Saint Augustine this seems quite in order. “Being condemned, they are seduced, and, being seduced, condemned. But their seducement is by the secret judgement of God, justly secret, and secretly just; even His that hath judged continually, ever since the world began.” St. Augustine holds that God divided mankind into the elect and the reprobate, not because of their merits or demerits, but arbitrarily. All alike deserve damnation, and therefore the reprobate have no ground of complaint. From the above passage of Saint Paul, it appears that they are wicked because they are reprobate, not reprobate because they are wicked.

  After the resurrection of the body, the bodies of the damned will burn eternally without being consumed. In this there is nothing strange; it happens to the salamander and Mount Etna. Devils, though incorporeal, can be burnt by corporeal fire. Hell’s torments are not purifying, and will not be lessened by the intercessions of saints. Origen erred in thinking hell not eternal. Heretics, and sinful Catholics, will be damned.

  The book ends with a description of the Saints’ vision of God in heaven, and of the eternal felicity of the City of God.

  From the above summary, the importance of the work may not be clear. What was influential was the separation of Church and State, with the clear implication that the State could only be part of the City of God by being submissive towards the Church in all religious matters. This has been the doctrine of the Church ever since. All through the Middle Ages, during the gradual rise of the papal power, and throughout the conflict between Pope and Emperor, Saint Augustine supplied the Western Church with the theoretical justification of its policy. The Jewish State, in the legendary time of the Judges, and in the historical period after the return from the Babylonian captivity, had been a theocracy; the Christian State should imitate it in this respect. The weakness of the emperors, and of most Western medieval monarchs, enabled the Church, to a great extent, to realize the ideal of the City of God. In the East, where the emperor was strong, this development never took place, and the Church remained much more subject to the State than it became in the West.

  The Reformation, which revived Saint Augustine’s doctrine of salvation, threw over his theocratic teaching, and became Erastian,* largely owing to the practical exigencies of the fight with Catholicism. But Protestant Erastianism was half-hearted, and the most religious among Protestants were still influenced by Saint Augustine. Anabaptists, Fifth Monarchy Men, and Quakers took over a part of his doctrine, but laid less stress on the Church. He held to predestination, and also to the need of baptism for salvation; these two doctrines do not harmonize well, and the extreme Protestants threw over the latter. But their eschatology remained Augustinian.

  The City of God contains little that is fundamentally original. The eschatology is Jewish in origin, and came into Christianity mainly through the Book of Revelation. The doctrine of predestination and election is Pauline, though Saint Augustine gave it a much fuller and more logical development than is to be found in the Epistles. The distinction between sacred and profane history is quite clearly set forth in the Old Testament. What Saint Augustine did was to bring these elements together, and to relate them to the history of his own time, in such a way that the fall of the Western Empire, and the subsequent period of confusion, could be assimilated by Christians without any unduly severe trial of their faith.

  The Jewish pattern of history, past and future, is such as to make a powerful appeal to the oppressed and unfortunate at all times. Saint Augustine adapted this pattern to Christianity, Marx to Socialism. To understand Marx psychologically, one should use the following dictionary:

  Yahweh=Dialectical Materialism

  The Messiah=Marx

  The Elect=The Proletariat

  The Church=The Communist Party

  The Second Coming=The Revolution

  Hell=Punishment of the Capitalists

  The Millennium=The Communist Commonwealth

  The terms on the left give the emotional content of the terms on the right, and it is this emotional content, familiar to those who have had a Christian or a Jewish upbringing, that makes Marx’s eschatology credible. A similar dictionary could be made for the Nazis, but their conceptions are more purely Old Testament and less Christian than those of Marx, and their Messiah is more analagous to the Maccabees than to Christ.

  III. THE PELAGIAN CONTROVERSY

  Much of the most influential part of Saint Augustine’s theology was concerned in combating the Pelagian heresy. Pelagius was a Welshman, whose real name was Morgan, which means “man of the sea,” as “Pelagius” does in Greek. He was a cultivated and agreeable ecclesiastic, less fanatical than many of his contemporaries. He believed in free will, questioned the doctrine of original sin, and thought that, when men act virtuously, it is by virtue of their own moral effort. If they act rightly, and are orthodox, they go to heaven as a reward of their virtues.

  These views, though they may now seem commonplace, caused, at the time, a great commotion, and were, largely through Saint Augustine’s efforts, declared heretical. They had, however, a considerable temporary success. Augustine had to write to the patriarch of Jerusalem to warn him against the wily heresiarch, who had persuaded many Eastern theologians to adopt his views. Even after his condemnation, other people, called semi-Pelagians, advocated weakened forms of his doctrines. It was a long time before the purer teaching of the Saint was completely victorious, especially in France, where the final condemnation of the semi-Pelagian heresy took place at the Council of Orange in 529.

  Saint Augustine taught that Adam, before the Fall, had had free will, and could have abstained from sin. But as he and Eve ate the apple, corruption entered into them, and descended to all their posterity, none of whom can, of their own power, abstain from sin. Only God’s grace enables men to be virtuous. Since we all inherit Adam’s sin, we all deserve eternal damnation. All who die unbaptized, even infants, will go to hell and suffer unending torment. We have no reason to complain of this, since we are all wicked. (In the Confessions, the Saint enumerates the crimes of which he was guilty in the cradle.) But by God’s free grace certain people, among those who have been baptized, are chosen to go to heaven; these are the elect. They do not go to heaven because they are good; we are all totally depraved, except in so far as God’s grace, which is only bestowed on the elect, enables us to be otherwise. No reason can be given why some are saved and the rest damned; this is due to God’s unmotived choice. Damnation proves God’s justice; salvation His mercy. Both equally display His goodness.

  The arguments in favour of this ferocious doctrine—which was revived by Calvin, and has since then not been held by the Catholic Church—are to be found in the writings of Saint Paul, particularly the Epistle to the Romans. These are treated by Augustine as a lawyer treats the law: the interpretation is able, and the texts are made to yield their utmost meaning. One is persuaded, at the end, not that Saint Paul believed what Augustine deduces, but that, taking certain texts in isolation, they do imply just what he says they do. It may seem odd that the damnation of unbaptized infants should not have been thought shocking, but should have been attributed to a good God. The conviction of sin, however, so dominated him that he really believed new-born children to be limbs of Satan. A great deal of what is most ferocious in the medieval Church is traceable to his gloomy sense of universal guilt.

  There is only one intellectual difficulty that really troubles Saint Augustine. This is not that it seems a pity to have created Man, since the immense majori
ty of the human race are predestined to eternal torment. What troubles him is that, if original sin is inherited from Adam, as Saint Paul teaches, the soul, as well as the body, must be propagated by the parents, for sin is of the soul, not the body. He sees difficulties in this doctrine, but says that, since Scripture is silent, it cannot be necessary to salvation to arrive at a just view on the matter. He therefore leaves it undecided.

  It is strange that the last men of intellectual eminence before the dark ages were concerned, not with saving civilization or expelling the barbarians or reforming the abuses of the administration, but with preaching the merit of virginity and the damnation of unbaptized infants. Seeing that these were the preoccupations that the Church handed on to the converted barbarians, it is no wonder that the succeeding age surpassed almost all other fully historical periods in cruelty and superstition.

  CHAPTER V

  The Fifth and Sixth Centuries

  THE fifth century was that of the barbarian invasion and the fall of the Western Empire. After the death of Augustine in 430, there was little philosophy; it was a century of destructive action, which, however, largely determined the lines upon which Europe was to be developed. It was in this century that the English invaded Britain, causing it to become England; it was also in this century that the Frankish invasion turned Gaul into France, and that the Vandals invaded Spain, giving their name to Andalusia. Saint Patrick, during the middle years of the century, converted the Irish to Christianity. Throughout the Western World, rough Germanic kingdoms succeeded the centralized bureaucracy of the Empire. The imperial post ceased, the great roads fell into decay, war put an end to large-scale commerce, and life again became local both politically and economically. Centralized authority was preserved only in the Church, and there with much difficulty.

  Of the Germanic tribes that invaded the Empire in the fifth century, the most important were the Goths. They were pushed westward by the Huns, who attacked them from the East. At first they tried to conquer the Eastern Empire, but were defeated; then they turned upon Italy. Since Diocletian, they had been employed as Roman mercenaries; this had taught them more of the art of war than barbarians would otherwise have known. Alaric, King of the Goths, sacked Rome in 410, but died the same year. Odovaker, King of the Ostrogoths, put an end to the Western Empire in 476, and reigned until 493, when he was treacherously murdered by another Ostrogoth, Theodoric, who was King of Italy until 526. Of him I shall have more to say shortly. He was important both in history and legend; in the Niebelungenlied he appears as “Dietrich von Bern” (“Bern” being Verona).

  Meanwhile the Vandals established themselves in Africa, the Visigoths in the south of France, and the Franks in the north.

  In the middle of the Germanic invasion came the inroads of the Huns under Attila. The Huns were of Mongol race, and yet they were often allied with the Goths. At the crucial moment, however, when they invaded Gaul in 451, they had quarrelled with the Goths; the Goths and Romans together defeated them in that year at Chalons. Attila then turned against Italy, and thought of marching on Rome, but Pope Leo dissuaded him, pointing out that Alaric had died after sacking Rome. His forbearance, however, did him no service, for he died in the following year. After his death the power of the Huns collapsed.

  During this period of confusion the Church was troubled by a complicated controversy on the Incarnation. The protagonists in the debates were two ecclesiastics, Cyril and Nestorius, of whom, more or less by accident, the former was proclaimed a saint and the latter a heretic. Saint Cyril was patriarch of Alexandria from about 412 till his death in 444; Nestorius was patriarch of Constantinople. The question at issue was the relation of Christ’s divinity to His humanity. Were there two Persons, one human and one divine? This was the view held by Nestorius. If not, was there only one nature, or were there two natures in one person, a human nature and a divine nature? These questions roused, in the fifth century, an almost incredible degree of passion and fury. “A secret and incurable discord was cherished between those who were most apprehensive of confounding, and those who were most fearful of separating, the divinity and the humanity of Christ.”

  Saint Cyril, the advocate of unity, was a man of fanatical zeal. He used his position as patriarch to incite pogroms of the very large Jewish colony in Alexandria. His chief claim to fame is the lynching of Hypatia, a distinguished lady who, in an age of bigotry, adhered to the Neoplatonic philosophy and devoted her talents to mathematics. She was “torn from her chariot, stripped naked, dragged to the church, and inhumanly butchered by the hands of Peter the Reader and a troop of savage and merciless fanatics: her flesh was scraped from her ¿ones with sharp oyster-shells and her quivering limbs were delivered to the flames. The just progress of inquiry and punishment was stopped by seasonable gifts.”* After this, Alexandria was no longer troubled by philosophers.

  Saint Cyril was pained to learn that Constantinople was being led astray by the teaching of its patriarch Nestorius, who maintained that there were two persons in Christ, one human and one divine. On this ground Nestorius objected to the new practice of calling the Virgin “Mother of God”; she was, he said, only the mother of the human Person, while the divine Person, who was God, had no mother. On this question the Church was divided: roughly speaking, bishops east of Suez favoured Nestorius, while those west of Suez favoured Saint Cyril. A council was summoned to meet at Ephesus in 431 to decide the question. The Western bishops arrived first, and proceeded to lock the doors against late-comers and decide in hot haste for Saint Cyril, who presided. “This episcopal tumult, at the distance of thirteen centuries, assumes the venerable aspect of the Third Œcumenical Council.”†

  As a result of this Council, Nestorius was condemned as a heretic. He did not recant, but was the founder of the Nestorian sect, which had a large following in Syria and throughout the East. Some centuries later, Nestorianism was so strong in China that it seemed to have a chance of becoming the established religion. Nestorians were found in India by the Spanish and Portuguese missionaries in the sixteenth century. The persecution of Nestorianism by the Catholic government of Constantinople caused disaffection which helped the Mohammedans in their conquest of Syria.

  The tongue of Nestorius, which by its eloquence had seduced so many, was eaten by worms—so at least we are assured.

  Ephesus had learnt to substitute the Virgin for Artemis, but had still the same intemperate zeal for its goddess as in the time of Saint Paul. It was said that the Virgin was buried there. In 449, after the death of Saint Cyril, a synod at Ephesus tried to carry the triumph further, and thereby fell into the heresy opposite to that of Nestorius; this is called the Monophysite heresy, and maintains that Christ has only one nature. If Saint Cyril had still been alive, he would certainly have supported this view, and have become heretical. The Emperor supported the synod, but the Pope repudiated it. At last Pope Leo—the same Pope who turned Attila from attacking Rome—in the year of the battle of Chalons secured the summoning of an œcumenical Council at Chalcedon in 451, which condemned the Monophysites and finally decided the orthodox doctrine of the Incarnation. The Council of Ephesus had decided that there is only one Person of Christ, but the Council of Chalcedon decided that He exists in two natures, one human and one divine. The influence of the Pope was paramount in securing this decision.

  The Monophysites, like the Nestorians, refused to submit. Egypt, almost to a man, adopted their heresy, which spread up the Nile and as far as Abyssinia. The heresy of Egypt, like the opposite heresy of Syria, facilitated the Arab conquest. The heresy of the Abyssinians was given by Mussolini as one of his reasons for conquering them.

  During the sixth century, there were four men of great importance in the history of culture: Boethius, Justinian, Benedict, and Gregory the Great. They will be my chief concern in the remainder of this chapter and in the next.

  The Gothic conquest of Italy did not put an end to Roman civilization. Under Theodoric, king of Italy and of the Goths, the civil administr
ation of Italy was entirely Roman; Italy enjoyed peace and religious toleration (till near the end); the king was both wise and vigorous. He appointed consuls, preserved Roman law, and kept up the Senate: when in Rome, his first visit was to Senate house.

  Though an Arian, Theodoric was on good terms with the Church until his last years. In 523, the Emperor Justin proscribed Arianism, and this annoyed Theodoric. He had reason for fear, since Italy was Catholic, and was led by theological sympathy to side with the Emperor. He believed, rightly or wrongly, that there was a plot involving men in his own government. This led him to imprison and execute his minister, the senator Boethius, whose Consolations of Philosophy was written while he was in prison.

  Boethius is a singular figure. Throughout the Middle Ages he was read and admired, regarded always as a devout Christian, and treated almost as if he had been one of the Fathers. Yet his Consolations of Philosophy, written in 524 while he was awaiting execution, is purely Platonic; it does not prove that he was not a Christian, but it does show that pagan philosophy had a much stronger hold on him than Christian theology. Some theological works, especially one on the Trinity, which are attributed to him, are by many authorities considered to be spurious; but it was probably owing to them that the Middle Ages were able to regard him as orthodox, and to imbibe from him much Platonism which would otherwise have been viewed with suspicion.