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

by Charles Freeman

  In the west, however, which after the fall of the Latin empire in the 470s was increasingly free of imperial control, it became possible to construct alternative structures of authority. Gregory the Great consolidated a rationale of papal supremacy that once again stressed the bishop of Rome’s precedence in both west and east. Inevitably much tidying up of Christianity’s turbulent past needed to be done to give it ideological coherence. The doctrines of orthodox Christianity, it was now said, had been known throughout the ages. Even the patriarchs, who had lived before the time of Moses, “knew that one Almighty God is the Holy Trinity,” though Gregory admitted that “they did not preach very much publicly about the Trinity whom they knew.” Now that it was claimed that the scriptures, of both the Old and New Testaments, spoke with one voice, the Church Fathers’ impassioned and bitter disagreements over the interpretation of contradictory passages could be expunged from the record; in fact, they were now said to have spoken with unanimity. What the scriptures taught, Gregory argued, had been upheld by the four councils that could be associated with orthodoxy—Nicaea, 325; Constantinople, 381; Ephesus, 431; Chalcedon, 451—and these were given status as ecumenical councils at which the genuine voice of the Church had been heard. “In like manner,” wrote Gregory, “all the four holy synods of the holy universal church we receive as we do the four books of the Holy Gospels.” Orthodoxy is seamless and given unanimous and consistent backing from scriptures, Apostles, Church Fathers and ecumenical councils. The role of the emperors in calling the councils and pressuring them into consensus was, perhaps understandably, passed over, as was the lack of significant western participation. As orthodox doctrine was now presented as though it had been settled and accepted from the beginning of time, heretics were consequently accused of “bringing forth as something new which is not contained in the old books of the ancient fathers.” So, whatever inspection of the historical record might suggest, it became impossible to see Christian doctrine as the product of a process of evolution. A “heresy” could not have “matured” into “orthodoxy.” Isolated in the west and free of the imperial presence, Gregory was free to proclaim papal supremacy. When new disputes arose, it was to be the pope, as successor of Peter, who would have the final say, even if a council had made its own decisions: “Without the authority and consent of the apostolic see [Rome],” said Gregory, “none of the matters transacted [by a council] have any binding force.” The supremacy of the pope in all matters of doctrine was now fully asserted.13

  Confronted by the terrible animosities of Christian debate in the fourth century, one has reason to be relieved that silence fell in the churches (even if this silence did not extend to Nestorians and Monophysites). One can sympathize with the words of Gregory of Nazianzus, “It is better to remain silent, than to speak with malice.” Yet there is a difference between accepting that ultimately the nature of God (or any spiritual force) cannot be known (a view which mainstream Greek philosophy would have accepted as perfectly valid)14 and proscribing speculation about it altogether. The ancient Greek tradition that one should be free to speculate without fear and be encouraged to take individual moral responsibility for one’s views was rejected. This was especially clear in rhetoric. Previously (in the writings of Isocrates and Quintilian, for instance) good rhetoric had been inseparable from the speaker who composed it. The words said could not be isolated from the character of the one who said them; this is why both Isocrates and Quintilian laid such stress on the moral goodness of the speaker. In the Christian tradition, on the other hand, it was God who spoke through his preachers, who were merely the conductors of his words. Here again it was Paul who initiated the new approach, turning his back on traditional philosophy in the process. From 1 Corinthians 2:4–5: “In my speeches and sermons that I gave, there were none of the arguments that belong to philosophy; only a demonstration of the power of the Spirit. And I did this so that your faith should not depend on human philosophy but on the power of God.” In other words, it is the Spirit rather than the individual who speaks, and “human philosophy” is specifically rejected as a means of finding truth. With the integration of aspects of the Greek philosophical tradition into Christianity, pagan rhetoric came again to be valued; in his funeral oration to Basil, Gregory of Nazianzus is still able to present rhetoric as an art dependent on the skill of the speaker. Yet it was Paul’s view that the speaker is only an intermediary that came to predominate. As Gregory of Nyssa put it: “The human voice was fashioned for one reason alone—to be the threshold through which the sentiments of the heart, inspired by the Holy Spirit, might be translated clearly into the Word itself.”15 No longer is coherence of argument valued. Augustine follows Tertullian in arguing that it is the very irrationality of the Christian message that is its strength: “If by calling yourself wise, you become a fool, call yourself a fool, and you will become wise,” he says, echoing Paul’s observation to the Corinthians, “The foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.” 16 In his De Doctrina Christiana Augustine argued that the moral quality of the speaker was not relevant so long as the doctrine he preached was orthodox. “It is possible,” he wrote, “for a person who is eloquent but evil actually to compose a sermon proclaiming the truth for another, who is not eloquent but who is good to deliver.”17 So much for the tradition of Isocrates and Quintilian. Here again the influence of Platonism was strong. Truth exists eternally and totally independently of the one who speaks it, and there is evidence that priests increasingly used approved sermons, such as those by Augustine or other recognized orthodox thinkers, rather than their own.18 So the art of rhetoric declined as was inevitable with the devaluation of reasoned argument and individual creativity. Richard Lim has noted how councils were now dominated by texts prepared for the occasion rather than by spontaneous speeches.19

  Aristotle was another casuality of this. Attacks were focused on his work the Categories. The Categories sets out ten questions that needed to be asked about any entity, such as its size, its qualities, its relationship to other entities and its place in time. In the debates of the fourth century, some participants, such as Aetius the Syrian, had used the Categories as a framework for speculating about the divine and had taught that dialectical questioning on the Aristotelian model was the way to progress in theological matters. By the mid fifth century, however, it was no longer possible to enjoy open-ended discussion as to the nature of God, and the Categories became “a prime villain.” In the seventh century Anastasius, abbot of the monastery of St. Catherine in Sinai, was to argue that the ten horns of the dragon in the Book of Revelation (12:4) were none other than the ten categories (“heresies” as he termed them) of Aristotle.20 With the exception of two works of logic, Aristotle vanishes from the western world; his work only reappears in the thirteenth century thanks to its preservation by Arab interpreters.

  It was perhaps particularly unfortunate that the silencing of debate extended beyond the spiritual and across the whole Greek intellectual tradition. The effects of Paul’s condemnation of “the philosophers” could not have been put more clearly than by John Chrysostom, an enthusiastic follower of Paul. “Restrain our own reasoning, and empty our mind of secular learning, in order to provide a mind swept clear for the reception of divine words.”21 Basil echoes him: “Let us Christians prefer the simplicity of our faith to the demonstrations of human reason . . . For to spend much time on research about the essence of things would not serve the edification of the church.” This represented no less than a total abdication of independent intellectual thought, and it resulted in a turning away from any speculation about the natural world as well as the divine. “What purpose does knowledge serve—for as to knowledge of natural causes, what blessing is there for me if I should know where the Nile rises, or whatever else under the heavens the ‘scientists’ rave about?” wrote Lactantius in the early fourth century. One Philastrius of Brescia implicitly declared that the search for empirical knowledge was in itself a heresy.
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br />   There is a certain heresy concerning earthquakes that they come not from God’s command, but, it is thought, from the very nature of the elements . . . Paying no attention to God’s power, they [the heretics] presume to attribute the motions of force to the elements of nature . . . like certain foolish philosophers who, ascribing this to nature, know not the power of God.22

  (There is an intriguing echo here of Plato’s “We shall approach astronomy, as we do geometry, by way of problems, and ignore what’s in the sky, if we intend to get a real grasp of astronomy.”)

  The impact of this fundamental change in approach on intellectual life was profound. One effect, noted by Averil Cameron, was the decline of book learning. “Books ceased to be readily available and learning became an increasingly ecclesiastical preserve; even those who were not ecclesiastics were likely to get their education from the scriptures or from Christian texts.”23 And one contemporary observer, questioned on the state of philosophy in that former great centre of intellectual life, Alexandria, replied that “philosophy and culture are now at a point of a most horrible desolation.”24 Edward Gibbon notes the story that Bishop Theophilus of the city allowed the celebrated library to be pillaged “and nearly twenty years afterwards, the appearance of the empty shelves excited the regret and indignation of every spectator whose mind was not totally darkened by religious prejudice.”25 No less a figure than Basil of Caesarea lamented the atrophy of debate in his home city. “Now we have no more meetings, no more debates, no more gatherings of wise men in the agora, nothing more of all that made our city famous.” The change of atmosphere can be seen in a letter written by the metropolitan bishop of Melitene in Armenia in 457. One of a group of bishops asked by the emperor Leo I whether they wished to reopen the declaration of Chalcedon, he replied, “We uphold the Nicene creed but avoid difficult questions beyond human grasp. Clever theologians soon become heretics.” It was a shrewd appreciation of the limitations of intellectual debate. There was no longer any joy to be had in the cut and thrust of discussion—the penalties for transgressing the boundaries, in this world and the next, were too great. 26 The diminution of learning appears to have been greater in the east than in the west, where, in the middle of the sixth century, Cassiodorus was still stressing the importance of an education in secular matters—the seven liberal arts—even if it must take second place to theology. However, when Isidore of Seville began compiling his collection of Etymologies, an ambitious summary of sacred and secular knowledge, at the end of the same century he was already finding it difficult to locate the texts of classical authors. The authors stood, he said, like blue hills on the far distant horizon and now it was hard to place them even chronologically. A hundred years on we have details of the library of the Venerable Bede, the Northumbrian scholar (672–73 to 735). The library consisted overwhelmingly of commentaries on scripture, the patristic treatises of the Latin Fathers (the Greek Fathers were not represented) and secular works like Pliny’s Natural History, which would be of value in biblical exegesis. This was already a much more limited range of books than that enjoyed by Cassiodorus— books on the liberal arts had now disappeared, and there may not even have been a copy of Virgil’s Aeneid in Bede’s library. Bede’s most famous work, the Ecclesiastical History, could be seen to be modelled on Eusebius’ own history of the church, and like his life of St. Cuthbert it resounds with the miraculous. The scholar Gerald Bonner sees Bede as working within the parameters established by Augustine in his De Doctrina Christiana, in which secular knowledge is of use only in so far as it helps biblical exegesis. Fine writer though he is, Bede can hardly be called an original thinker, and this reflects an age when learning had become circumscribed and available sources limited compared to what they had been.27

  In the east, there came to be increasing emphasis on learning by rote from a select list of texts and a shift from written material to the visual. The rise of a fixed repertoire of images, icons, especially of the Virgin and Child, was another means by which the church defined what it was acceptable to believe, or in this case, to see. Icons not only played their part in defining correctness but acquired their own prestige, as “not made by human hands,” together with the power to effect miracles, in the case of one icon of the Virgin even to the point of saving Constantinople from defeat when it was stormed by the Persians in 626.28

  If the Greek intellectual tradition was to be so comprehensively rejected, what was to be done with its great thinkers? Should the Christian simply ignore Aristotle, Galen and Ptolemy? Plato could become an honorary Christian—there is a statue of him on the twelfth-century facade of the Siena cathedral and his dialogue Timaeus was used to support the idea of an orderly universe created by God, the “Master-Craftsman.” However, by the twelfth century the Timaeus was the only one of his many works known in the west, and even then only in an incomplete translation. Two more of his dialogues, the Phaedo (on the soul) and the Meno, were to be rediscovered in the thirteenth.29 The approach to the others was the same: either simply to ignore them as thinkers or to transform them into authorities whose views were integrated into a “Christian” view of the world. The sheer breadth and originality of much of Ptolemy’s work, both in astronomy and geography, suggest that he was always open to the possibility of new understandings based on fresh empirical evidence; by contrast, his cosmology, including his view that the universe had the earth at its centre, was frozen into Christian Platonism, becoming itself a matter of doctrinal orthodoxy. In his late work Planetary Hypotheses, Ptolemy had suggested that the planets could be arranged into a unified system in which each planet occupied its distinct orbit and did not intrude on the orbits of the others as they moved around the earth. (In other words, the earth was surrounded by a series of layers each occupied by a single planet.) Now a Platonist gloss was added in which the earth was seen as not only the centre point of creation but also its “lowest” part, where all was change, decay and fragility. Moving away from the earth, from the moon to the planets and then to the apparently fixed stars, each sphere was closer to “the unchanging,” with heaven, the ultimate immutable sphere, lying beyond the stars. Then Genesis was integrated into this model so that “the firmament” was identified with the eighth layer of Ptolemy’s universe and “the waters above the firmament” (Genesis 1:7) with the ninth. The outermost layer of all consisted of the heavens created by God on the first day. Ptolemy’s works were thus absorbed into a Christian cosmology.30

  A comparable process took place in medicine. Galen, the great physician of the second century A.D., had argued that a supreme god (here he was within the mainstream pagan monotheistic tradition, as most pagan intellectuals were) had created the body with a purpose to which all its parts tended. This fitted nicely with Christianity, and so the pagan Galen (who had in his time criticized Christians for their failure to think rationally) also became absorbed into Christian tradition, in effect, “frozen” into it in so far as some of his writings were collected into sixteen volumes of canonical medical texts around 500 and then remained unquestioned for another thousand years. While Greek physicians had certainly made little progress in finding actual cures, they had nevertheless instituted a rational method of approaching and attempting to understand the workings of the human body. This vanished. In effect, we see the preservation of the “magic” of traditional Greek medicine, which had never been eclipsed by the rise of the Hippocratic tradition, and the abandonment of later “scientific” approaches. The sacred springs of the pagan world came to be associated with saints offering the possibility of miraculous cures. In the early fifth century the Asclepion (a temple dedicated to Asclepius, the god of medicine) in Athens was adopted by Christians, and the stoa of incubation (where the sick slept in the hope of receiving an advisory dream from the god), the sacred spring and the adjoining hostel were all incorporated into the church built on the site. Accounts of healing experiences at Christian shrines, the saint appearing, offering a cure and then being thanked with hymns and offerings, mir
ror those at shrines dedicated to Asclepius. While in Homer’s world, before the rise of Greek philosophy, it is Apollo who is responsible for visiting plague on the Greeks at Troy to punish them for their misdeeds, now it is the Christian God who sends plagues as punishment. In medieval Italy, paintings still depicted plague as being transmitted by God through arrows, as it had been by Apollo, and in some remarkable cases, the Virgin Mary shields the populace with her cloak against the Lord’s wrath.31 When a crowd of pagans who had crammed into a theatre at Neocaesarea in Asia Minor for a local festival desperately needed more space and called on Zeus to provide it, the local Christian “wonder-worker” Gregory, who had previously brought plagues to an end, successfully petitioned God that disease should spread among those who had unwisely called on a pagan god.32