The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason

by Charles Freeman

  Contrary to Gibbon’s claim, the intellectual achievements of the period were not only sophisticated but also wide-ranging. Greek rationalism continued to prove fruitful. In mathematics Diophantus (although his precise dates are unknown, he probably lived in the third century A.D.) achieved a breakthrough in algebra by suggesting the use of symbols for unknown numbers. While the geometricians had hitherto used only powers up to three (all that is needed when working in three dimensions), Diophantus postulated greater powers and found ways to express them. Much of his work was in the study of indeterminate equations, and this branch of algebra is still known as Diophantine analysis.11

  The most significant figure in medicine at this time was Galen (who was born in A.D. 129 and lived at least until the end of the century), a physician from Pergamum. He eventually made his way to Rome, where he served as a doctor in the court of Marcus Aurelius and his successors. Both Galen’s versatility and his energy were remarkable—he wove medical knowledge into philosophy (like many of his time a Platonist by temperament, he borrowed Plato’s concept of the tripartite soul, linking its rational elements with the brain, its “spirited” aspects with the heart and its grosser [in Platonic terms] desires or appetites with the liver), wrote prodigiously (some 20,000 pages of his works survive; many have still not been properly studied) and carried out hundreds of dissections. It was Galen who finally understood the function of the arteries as vessels for carrying blood, as well as the workings of the bladder. He was particularly interested in the operation of the nerves and would display his understanding by taking a pig and destroying one function of its nervous system after another before an astonished audience. He was also remarkable for his attempts to define the foundations of certainty in medicine. Geoffrey Lloyd writes: “Galen is probably unique among practising physicians in any age or 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.” His work dominated his field for the next thousand years, so successfully, however, that many earlier advances in medicine were assumed to be superseded and texts describing them discarded.12

  It seems appropriate to refer to the work of Ptolemy in astronomy (his period of most intense work in Alexandria took place between A.D. 127 and 141) as marking the apogée of the science. The word “apogée” (the root is in the Greek “from the earth”) was coined by him to describe the moment in its orbit when the moon is furthest from the earth. (It was first used in English in its sense of “a climax” in 1600.) Ptolemy drew on earlier astronomical observations but improved them through the use of the armillary astrolabe, which allowed him to identify the position of stars more effectively and quickly than earlier methods. He then set about plotting and predicting the movements of the moon, the sun and the planets. Sharing as he did the conventional wisdom that the sun moved around a stationary earth, he was forced to come up with extraordinarily complicated models of circles whose own centres moved around other circles. While his models were all flawed, in that his basic assumptions were wrong, the intellectual achievement was magnificent: “extraordinary for the rigour of its mathematical arguments, for the range of data encompassed and the comprehensiveness of the results proposed,” as Geoffrey Lloyd puts it. Though the Greek original is lost, his major work on astronomy, now known as the Almagest (from the Arabic “the greatest”), survived intact in its Arab edition and was eventually translated back into Latin. Like Galen’s, Ptolemy’s mind ranged widely—he speculated on geography, studied acoustics and carried out experiments with mirrors.

  As a recent review of his Geography reminds us:

  Ptolemy was the pioneer who established the graticle (a grid of carefully mapped coordinates) as the basis for serious cartography; who introduced “minutes” and “seconds” to facilitate the division of degrees; who argued for the primacy of the simplest hypothesis that did not contradict observations; who demanded that observations calling for precision should be checked and rechecked over a long period; who insisted that maps be drawn to scale; who developed the use of both gnomon and astrolabe for celestial angle-measurements to determine latitude; who, most notably, tackled the perennial problem of how to represent the globe, in whole or in part, on a flat surface.

  Despite his achievements as a scientist, Ptolemy remained in awe of the universe.

  I know that I am mortal, ephemeral; yet when I track the

  Clustering spiral orbits of the stars

  My feet touch earth no longer: a heavenly nursling,

  Ambrosia-filled, I company with God.13

  Ptolemy’s words are a reminder that for the Greeks spirituality and rationality, muthos and logos, could co-exist without conflict. As we have seen, one of the most sophisticated of the Greek intellectual achievements was the distinction between the areas of knowledge in which certainty was possible and those that were not subject to rationalism. A mathematical proof could be sustained by deductive logic and was unarguably true, while a myth was fluid and flexible, open to individual interpretation. To the Greeks, the idea that anyone could insist that others respect the truth of a myth was absurd, yet this did not mean that a myth lacked power. Whether used to explain or justify a ritual or as a means to explore issues in tragic drama, myth was a crucial way of mediating between the real and imagined world. The mature mind, as Aristotle had stressed, was one in which reason and emotion could be sustained in harmony.

  Although few Romans achieved the intellectual creativity of the finest Greek minds (we have no evidence of a Roman carrying out original mathematical work, for instance), like the Greeks, Romans appreciated that their own myths, those connected to the founding of their city, for example, were not dogma. They were woven into ritual in the service of tradition and good order but not as absolute and unassailable truths. Cicero makes the point well. In his On the Nature of the Gods he was openly sceptical about the existence of the gods, but he nevertheless served as a priest in civic cults. The fulfillment of public duties was an intrinsic part of being Roman; the question of what an individual believed about the gods or myths surrounding those gods was a private matter. It became relevant only if he publicly offended by disrupting a ritual or openly refusing to follow it. Religious practice was closely tied to the public order of the state and with the psychological well-being that comes from the following of ancient rituals. Religious devotion was indistinguishable from one’s loyalties to the state, one’s city and one’s family.14

  The Romans assumed that other people’s gods were as important a part of the fabric of their society as their gods were of theirs, and this provides one reason why they were so easily prepared to tolerate other deities and beliefs. Their respect for gods was inclusive and involved a concern that local deities should not be offended. When Publius Servius conquered the city of Isaura Palaia in southern Galatia in 67, he set up a dedication to “whichever” gods protected the city he had taken. Again, when Roman legions arrived in the Libyan desert in 201, they conciliated the local god Gholia by placing a representation of him alongside the Roman gods in their camp. Often, over time, these local gods would become assimilated with the Roman deities. A local god of thunder might be Zeus, “in disguise” as it were, and the Romans would willingly make the connection by incorporating the local god into their rituals. One of the gods to whom they erected a temple in Libya was Zeus Hammon, Zeus in his role as protector of caravan routes, a role unimaginable in Greece or Italy, but enthusiastically adopted by the Romans as they encountered new types of territory. The Edict of Milan of 313, in which the emperor Constantine declared toleration of all cults including Christianity, marks the culmination of this process.

  By the second century A.D. it was increasingly commonplace to see the divine world as subject to one supreme god, with the other gods being either manifestations of his divinity or as lesser divinities. The Egyptian goddess Isis, for instance, spreads across the empire as a mother goddess with many concerns. “I am nature, the u
niversal mother, mistress of all the elements, primordial child of time, sovereign of all things spiritual, queen of the dead, queen also of the immortals, the single manifestation of all gods and goddesses that are. My nod governs the shining heights of heaven, the wholesome sea breezes, the lamentable silence of the gods below,” she tells Lucius, the “hero” of Apuleius’ novel The Golden Ass (c. A.D. 160).15 In Aphrodisias, a city in southern Asia Minor, a cult statue dedicated to Aphrodite, traditionally goddess of love and sexuality, has panels detailing her powers over the sea (where she was, in mythology, born) and the underworld. New cults emerged. A mass of inscriptions, found throughout the east and Egypt, are dedicated to theos hypsistos, “the Most High God,” and worshippers of this divinity seem to have modelled their practices on Judaism while remaining distinct from it. They observed a Sabbath but did not insist on circumcision, and they rejected the ceremonies or institutions of the Roman state. While the origin of this cult dates from before Christianity (it is first attested in the second century B.C.), Christ is also found in a later inscription to be attached as “an angel” to the God.16

  What is central to these cults is their flexibility. The device of allowing different gods to be assimilated into a supreme deity was an effective one. “It makes no difference,” wrote the second-century Platonist Celsus, “whether we call Zeus the Most High or Zeus or Adonis or Sabaoth or Amun like the Egyptians, or Papaeus like the Scythians.”17 It is possible even to go so far as to say that a belief in an overriding deity was, by this period, the most widespread belief of pagan religion. While the cult of theos hypsistos is known to have attracted the poorer classes, and Zeus/Jupiter conventional Romans, Aristotelians could speak of the “unmoved mover” and Platonists of “the Good.” The Jews had the God of Israel and the Stoics one supreme rational principle that survived the conflagration that ended each cycle of cosmic history, absorbing all other divine forces into it and then allowing them to re-emerge. All these groups accepted that there was at the apex of the hierarchy of divine forces one higher being, even if the form of this being was conceptualized in different ways and addressed by different names in different cultures. As the sophist Maximus of Madaura put it in A.D. 390 (in a letter to the Christian Augustine):

  That the supreme God is one, without beginning, without offspring [a reference here to the Christian belief in the Incarnation, which Platonists, in particular, found unsustainable], as it were the great and august father of nature, what person is there so mad and totally deprived of sense to deny? His powers diffused through the world that is his work we invoke under various names, because we are obviously ignorant of his real name. For the name “God” is common to all religions. The outcome is that while with our various prayers we each honour as it were his limbs separately all together we are seen to be worshipping him in his entirety.

  In the fourth century, the orator Themistius, berating the emperor Valens for his intolerance in insisting on the worship of a narrowly defined Christian God, was to claim that there were some 300 ways of describing the Godhead and that God would actually enjoy being worshipped in a diversity of ways. “Pagan monotheism,” write Athanassiadi and Frede in summing up their own survey, “was a deeply rooted trend in ancient philosophy which developed under its own momentum, broadening sufficiently to embrace a good part of the population.” They go on to argue that Christianity, with its supreme God and his surrounding entourage of divine forces—Jesus, the Holy Spirit, the Virgin Mary, angels, saints and martyrs—should be seen as an integral part of this trend, not as a force outside it.18 Belief in a supreme God was, of course, only the starting point for fresh debates as to “his” nature, powers and concerns. Discussion centred on whether the supreme deity had existed and would continue to exist eternally, whether all matter appeared with “him” at the beginning of time (as the Platonists assumed) or was a separate creation from nothingness, whether “he” interacted with the world, and if so benevolently, or was indifferent to it (as Aristotle’s “unmoved mover” and the Epicurean gods were assumed to be). So long as no ruler attempted to enforce a definition of the supreme deity and his attributes, these fruitful speculations could continue.

  While it is difficult to know what spiritual needs drew worshippers towards the adoption of a single deity, this development was accompanied by a renewed interest in mystery cults. The oldest Greek “mystery” shrine, that of Eleusis near Athens, which centred on cults to Demeter, the Greek goddess of corn, and her daughter Persephone, was by now centuries old and so respectable that emperors and other Roman notables would be initiated without embarrassment into its rituals. The new mystery cults, by contrast, were not tied to any fixed centre and thus could spread widely through the empire. The new cults tended to focus on deities from outside the traditional pantheon, from Persia, Egypt, or in the case of Christianity, which shares some of the features of the mystery cults, from Judaism. The initiation rites of Isis (vividly described in The Golden Ass) included a ritual bath, the transmission of secrets of the cult and then ten days of fasting before the final ceremony. No wonder Lucius describes the experience as intense and hallucinatory—he reaches “the borders of death,” “sees” the sun blazing at midnight and enters into “the world of the gods.” Another mystery cult, Mithraism, which originated in the worship of a Persian cattle god, Mithras, was particularly popular among soldiers and men of business. Initiates, exclusively male, met in “caves,” enjoyed communal meals and could rise through a hierarchy of grades as their commitment to the cult grew. Mithraism spread far to the west—among the 400 known Mithraic “caves,” one is in London. Christianity, through its initiation rites (baptism), communal meals and the promise of a blessed afterlife, had much in common with these cults, not least in the idea that a priestly elite had privileged access to the cult’s secrets and the absolute right to interpret them for others.19

  While certain behaviours could offend the gods to the extent that individuals or the state were vulnerable to their revenge, Roman religion did not in itself provide an ethical system. Those who wanted to develop their own could turn to the schools of philosophy. Both Epicureanism and Stoicism preached “ideal” ways of living, and the Epicureans openly proselytized, although their idea of withdrawal from society did not impress the traditional Roman. 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 suprem
e “God.”

  The traditional Platonic view was that “the Good” and the Forms were timeless; in other words, there was no act of creation, they had always been there. Did they, however, have a purpose? An important development in Middle Platonism (the name given by nineteenth-century scholars to developments in Platonic philosophy in the period between the 60s B.C. and A.D. 204, the birthdate of Plotinus, who introduces a new phase of Platonism, Neoplatonism) was the argument that “the Good” was something more than simply an entity to be recognized by the reasoning human soul—it had an active intelligence and the Forms were its “thoughts.” The Forms too had an active purpose in that they provided a blueprint for entities in the material world. One view was that the material world had been in chaos until the Forms had acted on it in some way to produce order. To put it crudely, the Form of Table had acted to produce actual usable tables, the Form of Beauty to produce objects with the characteristics of being beautiful.20

  These ideas were drawn on by 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 later Platonist Numenius [second century A.D.] went so far as to claim, “Who is Plato, if not Moses speaking Greek?”) For Philo, however, God was eternal and unchanging, outside space and time and free of all passion, but able to act creatively, in bringing into being the material world, the human soul and virtues, from what Philo, like other Platonists, believed to have been an original state of chaos, and in upholding good and punishing evil. The influence of Plato on Philo was so pronounced that, despite his Jewish background, Philo rejected Old Testament portrayals of God which talk of his face, his hands and his emotional power. As an entity who was beyond all human attributes and even beyond human understanding, he could not be classified in such an anthropomorphic way.