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

by Charles Freeman

  “Look now; here are some folk suffering from demons. Either cleanse these men by your logic chopping or by any other skill or magic you wish, or otherwise, if you can’t, lay down your quarrel with us and witness the power of Christ’s cross.” And with these words he called on Christ, sealed the sufferers with the sign of the cross twice and a third time, and straightaway the men stood forth all healed.23

  Inevitably a church that relied heavily on miracles as a means of securing status was vulnerable to criticism by intellectuals. One pagan response was that if a god had to resort to miracles to show his power, then he had surrendered his dignity. Celsus claimed that Christians were able “to convince only the foolish, dishonourable and stupid and only slaves, women and little children.”24 He was echoed by the physician Galen, who criticized Christians for their adherence to faith rather than reason and for relying on “undemonstrated laws.”25 There was some truth in these attacks. As we have seen, Paul had condemned the “philosophers,” and his stress on “faith” rather than reason had shifted Christianity outside the world of traditional Greek philosophy with its stress on rational argument. This approach had now become a handicap. It was common for students in the Greek world to go from one school of philosophy to another, listening to debates and querying positions taken, and unless Christians were able to take part in such debates, Christianity was unlikely to achieve intellectual respectability. In a growing church, most Christians at any one time were converts, and there were many who had had a traditional training in philosophy either before encountering Christianity or while waiting for baptism. Some kind of accommodation had to be made with Greek philosophy. The Christian Justin Martyr (c. 100–c. 165), a Platonist by training, was among the first to argue that Christianity could draw on both scriptures and Greek philosophy and could even appropriate philosophy for its own ends. “Whatever good they [the philosophers] taught belongs to us Christians.” He was echoed by Clement of Alexandria (c. 150–c. 215), who claimed that God had given philosophy to the Greeks as “a schoolmaster” until the coming of the Lord as “. . . a preparation which paved the way towards perfection in Christ.” “If those who are called philosophers, and especially the Platonists, have aught that is true and in harmony with our faith, we are not only not to shrink from it, but to claim it for our own use from those who have unlawful [sic] use of it . . . ,” added Augustine some 200 years later.26 Whether the pagan philosophers were able to recognize the fact or not, their concept of logos, reasoning power, could be equated with the logos that was Christ. This strand of thought was developed so that Greek philosophers were even said to have absorbed “Christian” insights from the Old Testament, which they were assumed to have read. The theologian and historian Eusebius claimed that it was possible to find almost all of Plato’s philosophy mirrored in the Old Testament. There was therefore no necessary contradiction between Greek philosophy and Christianity, but now that the logos had been incarnated as Jesus, the world had, Clement argued, moved into a new phase of history. The pagan philosophers should not be discarded, but their writings should be studied in such a way that their “Christian” teachings were disentangled from the rest. In the west, however, there continued to be a strong distrust of pagan philosophy, although Stoicism appears to have been an important influence for some, such as Tertullian.

  Clement was in effect drawing on Middle Platonism, which stressed the power of “the Good” or “the One” to act in the world through the Platonic Forms. Platonism was ideally suited to providing the intellectual backbone of Christianity in that Platonists, particularly Middle Platonists, were dealing with the concept of an unseen, immaterial world in which “the Good,” or God, could be described as absolute while at the same time being able to have a creative and loving role. Middle Platonists had developed the idea of the human soul from earlier Greek philosophy. They saw the soul as distinct from the human body and able to exist independently of it and to make its own relationship with a providential God, who, in his turn, might reach out to it lovingly and creatively through the Forms, or “thoughts of God,” as they were now described by Christian theologians. The logos was one of these thoughts, but distinguished by becoming incarnate in Jesus Christ. It helped that Platonism had never compromised with the Greek gods and their mythology.

  Platonism was to prove helpful in another sense. The Platonists argued that only a few could glimpse the reality of the immaterial world, including the true nature of “the Good”/God, but could prescribe what it consisted of for the rest. This was to be used to support the rationale for church authority, if the “few” were equated with the Christian hierarchy. The theologian Origen put the matter succinctly when he showed how the concept of faith could be used to keep the “multitude” in line: “As this matter of faith is so much talked of, I have to reply that we accept it as useful for the multitude, and that we admittedly teach those who cannot abandon everything and pursue a study of rational argument to believe without thinking out their reasons” (my emphasis).27 Here the concept of faith has shifted, from being a state of openness to revelation (or directly to the teachings and personal charisma of Jesus as recorded in the Gospels) to one of being ready to accept what is authoritatively decreed by the church hierarchy. The readiness to do this without questioning becomes a virtue in itself. So reasoning, as an intellectual power open to every man in the sense proclaimed by Aristotle, is now reserved for the few. In effect, Platonism offered no threat to the evolving authority structure of the church—if anything it reinforced it. As is clear from the subsequent history of the churches, the idea that there are set dogmas laid down by church leaders that have to be believed by those entering the Christian communities and that cannot be challenged intellectually by either insiders or outsiders became part of the essence of Christianity. It should also be remembered that Plato had denigrated the natural world as inferior to the immaterial world of the Forms, and so the adoption of Platonism did nothing to undermine Paul’s condemnation of any philosophy that concerned itself with finding truth in the material world.

  So Platonism became entwined with Christianity. As Christopher Stead puts it: “The reality of God, his creation and providence, the heavenly powers, the human soul, its training, survival and judgment could all be upheld by the appropriate choice of Platonic texts.”28 With the scriptures and church tradition still providing the bedrock of Christian theology, this was a question of grafting Platonism onto Christianity rather than the creation of a new philosophy. One problem lay in reconciling the Hebrew concept of God with the single pure unity of “the Good” of Plato (a problem already addressed, as we have seen, by the Jewish philosopher Philo). The God of the Old Testament had “human” attributes; he was emotional, quick to anger but also loving and providential, and he could intervene directly in the world, winning battles for the Israelites or speaking through their prophets. The “God” of the Platonists was cooler, more austere, and both more consistent and more remote in his relationship with the world. He is essentially unchanging, “the rock of ages.” For such a concept to display even a benevolent concern for individual human beings, let alone Old Testament emotions, was awkward. Imaginative thinking was needed. It proved possible, for instance, for “the divine Craftsman” introduced as a creator figure by Plato in his Timaeus to be assimilated with the creator God of Genesis, yet the tension between the concepts remained, as later disputes were to show. A further distinction between Platonists and Christians was that Platonists believed that matter had existed eternally alongside “God,” while Christians believed that it would detract from the power of God if he had not existed before matter, which, of course, he had created.

  One way of resolving the tension between scripture and philosophy was to draw a distinction between God as the ultimate supreme being (who could be equated with the Platonic God) and God as an outgoing power in the material world, able in this capacity to show some emotions, represented by the logos, itself incarnated in Jesus Christ. Most Christians agreed th
at there had to be a distinction between God and Jesus/the logos, in that God surely could not suffer, and so Jesus, who clearly did suffer on the cross, must be in some way a distinct creation who served as an intermediary between God and man. In the early fourth century, Eusebius provided a useful analogy when he said that if God had come down to earth himself, it would have been as if the sun itself had arrived on earth, and the result would have been devastation. God needed to reveal himself through some kind of intermediate force, and this is the logos. The logos is able to contain the power of God but then to transmit it to the earth in a milder form through the presence of Jesus in human form. In Platonic thought the relationship between “the Good,” the Forms and the material world was conceptualized in many different ways, and the same was true for Christianity. The Sabellians, at one extreme, saw Jesus Christ/the logos simply as a manifestation of God, never fully distinct from him and with no separate personality or substance; the Adoptionists, at the other, saw the logos as a distinct entity, fully human and created separately by God like the Old Testament prophets.29

  In contrast to Aristotle, who had talked of the soul as the essence of a human body, using the analogy that a body without a soul would be like an axe that cannot cut, Plato had stressed the independence of the soul from the body and its continuing existence from one body to another. Some early Christian theologians (Origen, for example) actually adopted this idea, arguing that the soul was preexistent to the body in which it came to live and could move on to others after the death of a body (transmigration), but gradually the belief was consolidated that each body had its individual soul given to it at conception and that soul continued to exist eternally after the death of that body, something Aristotle could never have imagined. It could enjoy the happiness of heaven or the suffering of punishment in hell for eternity. This left major conceptual problems. Did the soul enter the body with the semen—in other words, become associated with a purely material process—or was it created by God and placed there by him at the moment of conception? The second answer seemed more likely, but it became incompatible with the doctrine of original sin when that doctrine was elaborated by Augustine in the late fourth century. It seemed unlikely that God himself would place souls already tarnished with sin into the human foetus, and the question had to be left unresolved (or ignored).30 Plato had always argued that there are echoes of the immaterial world of the Forms in the material world. The relationship works two ways. The Form of Beauty acts to create beautiful things on earth, while humans can create beautiful things themselves that give a hint of what the Form of Beauty itself might be. (This idea was later developed as part of the rationale through which Christians felt able to decorate their buildings so opulently—the opulence gives a glimpse of the reality of heaven.) In the same way, each soul has its own logos or reasoning power, which is an echo of the divine logos that reaches out to it and to which it is naturally attracted in return. This concept was to be creatively developed by the Alexandrian theologian Origen.

  Origen (c. 185–c. 254), who was born a Christian in Alexandria, was a fervent believer. His father had been taken off to martyrdom, and he would have followed if his mother had not hidden his clothes. He may even, according to one report, have mutilated himself so he could not feel sexual desire, and he suffered so badly in the persecution of 251 that his health was permanently broken. He was a prodigious thinker, one of the most fertile writers of the ancient world, with possibly some 2,000 titles to his name (most have been lost or were destroyed when he was declared a heretic). He plunged himself into the scriptures, even mastering Hebrew, and is seen as the founder of biblical scholarship. He set texts from different versions of the scriptures alongside each other to explore the differences between them, and he wrote his own commentaries on the major books. Yet his approach was primarily allegorical. He claimed that much in the world was purely symbolic of something else and that the scriptures were no different. It was not necessary to adopt a literal interpretation of scripture but rather to search for the deeper truths concealed in the text. Such an approach had a respectable history in the Greek intellectual tradition. The epics of Homer, the closest the Greeks ever came to sacred texts, had long been interpreted allegorically. The reward in taking this approach was that it allowed Origen to think creatively about theological issues and to avoid the issues involved in reconciling a literal interpretation of the events of the Old Testament with his Platonic philosophy.31

  Origen’s greatest work, De Principiis, survives now only in an often obscure Latin translation made in the 390s, but its four books show the breadth and originality of his thinking. Origen’s is a Platonic God, uncreated, transcendental, perfect in his unity and at the same time the source of all being. This God is given the supreme place in the powerful drama of human existence. Originally, argued Origen, all human souls were equal and attached to God, but all except one, Christ, fell away as a result of losing perfection, either through indifference or neglect of God. Origen described the unity of the logos and the soul of Christ as being like iron suffused by heat; the two are inseparable. Some remained as angels, but the more recalcitrant dropped down through the immaterial world towards the earth, where they became imprisoned in human bodies. This was the state in which most of those who neglected God existed, but a few, who were more violent in their rejection, became demons. Evil was not a separate force in the world (as some Christians believed: note “the Sovereignties and the powers which originate the darkness in this world, the spiritual army of evil in the heavens” of the letter to the Ephesians 6:12); it was rather a reflection of the degree to which an individual had rejected God.

  However, human souls retained the memory of their previous state of being and experienced their separation from God as a loss; they also retained logos, the power of rational thought, even if this was now separated from the logos that remains fully in Christ, the only unfallen soul. It is this sense of loss that provides the impulse to return to God. Origen drew on the Platonic idea of a long, disciplined period of training before it was possible to achieve knowledge of the true reality—in this case God. The first step, the desire to commit oneself to the long path ahead, was the most important. This created the possibility of being “transformed,” a key concept for Origen. Those who selected themselves for “transformation” were the equivalents of Plato’s Guardians, and like the Guardians their selection distinguished them from those less committed to recovery. They would also, as the Middle Platonists had argued, be aided by the power of God’s love, although Origen always emphasized the crucial importance of the individual will. The assistance of Christ was also essential. He was a reflection of God, with all the attributes of God, but he was somehow distinct from God. Origenist theology is not always clear about exactly how, although certainly it was in some form of subordinate role to God the Father—in one passage, for instance, as “the first born of all created, a thing created, wisdom.” Christ’s position as one close to God acted as a catalyst for those who wished to make the return. In so far as Origen had argued that all souls, including that of Christ, had started together, the ultimate aim was to become like Christ, in effect to reach divinity. Origen may have drawn on Paul’s idea that we are co-heirs with Christ as “sons of God,” as well as on Plato’s assertion that we can become assimilated with “the Good.” As it is human nature to try to reach God, and we have the freedom to do so, God will punish those who “have gone against the impulses of nature . . . And he threatens them through prophets and through the Saviour who came to visit the whole human race, in order that by means of the threat those who hear may be converted, while those who neglect the words aimed at their conversion pay penalties according to their deserts.” However, whatever their just deserts, Origen believed that all would ultimately be saved. There would be an end point at which even the soul of Satan, the extreme case of one who had rejected God, would be reunited with him. If God is truly providential and powerful, argued Origen, there can be no other final state of
being. “And providence will never abandon the universe. For even if some part of it becomes very bad because the rational beings sin, [God] arranges to purify it, and after a time to turn the universe back to himself.” 32 Origen’s followers also argued that God’s committing a soul to hell would be an admission that he had been thwarted by a mere human being, something inconceivable if God was truly all powerful. Ultimately God’s concept of the world, one brought to order by his providence, must prevail, and so all must end subject to his care. Origen, like the traditional Platonists, also rejected the idea that there would be a bodily resurrection.

  It was to prove impossible to achieve full philosophical coherence in Christian doctrine. Different sources for doctrine, a variety of scriptures, tradition and Platonism (which, as we have seen, had its own internal contradictions), conflicted with each other and were in themselves shaped by the internal needs of communities that until 312, the moment when Christianity was given toleration, had to define their identity within a hostile world. The future of Christian doctrine would depend on whether the church could open itself to these contradictions and see them as inevitable and containable or whether the desire to ensure conformity would lead to their suppression. In the end the combination of church and state authority was to prove too powerful. Origen was among those whose teachings were suppressed. After the formulation of the Nicene Creed in 325, he would be condemned for seeing Christ as a created—and thus subordinate—being rather than an eternal part of the Godhead. As Christianity became as much a political as a religious movement, the fear that without eternal punishment there would be insufficient incentive for being good predominated, and Origen was further condemned for his view that all would eventually be reunited with God. So by the end of the fourth century, the belief that God would ultimately be eternally unforgiving of some, perhaps even of most (a view found, of course, also in Paul and Matthew), with all the implications that raised about his fundamental goodness and the nature of the final state of the world, had become part of Christian doctrine. Augustine was to give his own formidable intellectual support to the idea of a hell for all eternity, pessimistically adding his doubts that humans had the freedom to overcome the burden of their sinfulness. The first condemnation of Origen, for providing a “hydra of heresies,” came from Theophilus, the powerful patriarch of Alexandria, in 402. Theophilus (who was responsible for overseeing the destruction by Christians of the massive temple to Serapis in Alexandria and pillaging the great library there) insisted on the Hebrew concept of God, “with eyes, ears, hands and feet like men,” and condemned Origen for preaching God was incorporeal. A final condemnation by the church as a whole came in 553 at the Second Council of Constantinople (although it is likely that this was on the basis of distorted interpretations of Origen’s writings).