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

by Charles Freeman

  10. P. Brown, “Asceticism: Pagan and Christian,” in Cameron and Garnsey, eds., The Cambridge Ancient History, vol. XIII, p. 616.

  11. See A. Cameron, Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire (Berkeley and London, 1991), p. 153.

  12. Brown, “Asceticism,” p. 607. The quotation comes from section 67 of the Life of Anthony.

  13. Eunapius of Sardis, Vitae Sophistarium vi.11 (c. 395); quoted in P. Rousseau, Ascetics, Authority and the Church in the Age of Jerome and Cassian (Oxford, 1978), p. 9.

  14. Quoted in Clark, “Women and Asceticism,” pp. 34 and 43.

  15. Brown, The Body and Society, p. 370.

  16. Quoted on p. xix of M. Warner, Alone of All Her Sex (London, 1985).

  17. See H. Bettenson, The Early Christian Fathers (Oxford, 1956), pp. 82–83 for Irenaeus’ views and pp. 126–27 for Tertullian’s.

  18. Kelly, Jerome, p. 301.

  19. Vasiliki Limberis, Divine Heiress: The Virgin Mary and the Creation of Christian Constantinople (London and New York, 1994). As Limberis shows, in the great hymn to Mary, the Akathistos Hymn, Mary absorbed many of the epithets used of both Rhea and another ancient goddess, Hecate. For instance, Hecate is virgin but also a protecting mother (one of her most common roles was as a carer for orphans), and the Virgin Mary is acclaimed in the same role in the hymn. Hecate is also seen as an initiator into divine knowledge, and Mary is hailed as “O knowledge, superseding the wise,” the one “who enlightens the minds of believers” and “who extricates us from the depths of ignorance.”

  20. For further examples of the adoption of Isis’ attributes by Mary, see R. Witt, Isis in the Greco-Roman World (London, 1971), pp. 272–73.

  21. Warner, Alone of All Her Sex, p. 58.

  22. Kelly, Jerome, pp. 180–87, for Jerome’s views on Jovinian. P. Brown, “Christianisation and Religious Conflict,” in Cameron and Garnsey, eds., The Cambridge Ancient History, vol. XIII, p. 638, for Jovinian’s flogging in Rome. Tertullian’s view is quoted in Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition, vol. 1 (Chicago and London, 1971), p. 288.

  23. Rousseau, Ascetics, Authority and the Church, p. 179.

  24. Kelly, Jerome, p. 99.

  25. Rousseau, Ascetics, Authority and the Church, p. 29.

  26. Ibid., p. 152.

  27. Kallistos Ware “The Way of the Ascetics, Negative or Affirmative?” in Wimbush and Valantasis, Asceticism, p. 7. See also the account of the life of St. Theodore of Sykeon, pp. 122–50 in vol. 2 of S. Mitchell, Anatolia: Land, Men and Gods in Asia Minor (Oxford, 1993). Theodore specialized in cures and exorcisms.

  28. The French sociologist Emile Durkheim spotted the problem.

  Imagine a society of saints, a perfect cloister of exemplary individuals. Crimes, properly so called, will be there unknown; but faults which appear venial to the layman will create the same scandal there that the ordinary offence does in ordinary consciousness. If, then, this society has the power to judge and punish, it will define these acts as criminal and judge them as such.

  From Emile Durkheim, Rules of Sociological Method, Eng. trans. (Glencoe, Ill., 1950).

  29. Rousseau, Ascetics, Authority and the Church, p. 187.

  30. Ibid., p. 49.

  31. S. Elm, Virgins of God (Oxford, 1994), p. 63.

  32. Ibid., p. 69.

  33. Rousseau, Ascetics, Authority and the Church, pp. 195–96.

  34. Ibid., p. 55.

  35. Ibid., p. 220.

  36. Ibid., p. 151, and one might mention the modern example of the late Cardinal Basil Hume, who followed the same path.

  37. Markus, The End of Ancient Christianity, p. 197.

  38. Quoted in Rousseau, Ascetics, Authority and the Church, p. 105.

  39. Quoted in R. MacMullen, Christianity and Paganism in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries (New Haven and London, 1997), p. 16.

  40. Seneca, Letter LXXX, 3–4.

  41. Ambrose, Expositio in Psalmum 118, 4.22; quoted in R. F. Newbould, “Personality Structure and Response to Adversity in Early Christian Hagiography,” Numen XXXI (1984): 199.

  42. William James’ book originated as the Gifford Lectures delivered in Edinburgh in 1901–2 and was published for the first time in 1902. The quotation comes from lecture 13.

  17

  1. Eusebius: Life of Constantine, ed. A. Cameron and S. Hall (Oxford, 1999), 3:15.

  2. See the introduction ibid., especially pp. 34–39.

  3. Quoted in E. M. Pickman, The Mind of Latin Christendom (New York, 1937), p. 545.

  4. See C. Kelly, “Emperors, Government and Bureaucracy,” in The Cambridge Ancient History, vol. XIII, ed. A. Cameron and P. Garnsey (Cambridge, 1998), p. 141.

  5. Ibid., p. 143.

  6. Ibid., p. 142.

  7. For a full account of the affair, see J. Kelly, Golden Mouth: The Story of John Chrysostom (London, 1995), chap. 6.

  8. Quoted in R. MacMullen, Christianity and Paganism in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries (New Haven and London, 1997), p. 27.

  9. As in The Cambridge Ancient History, vol. XIII, pp. 638–39.

  10. Ibid., p. 642.

  11. I have relied heavily on J. Kelly, Golden Mouth, for my account of John Chrysostom’s life, but see also J. Liebeschuetz, Barbarians and Bishops: Army, Church and State in the Age of Arcadius and Chrysostom (Oxford, 1990), part 3 in particular.

  12. J. Kelly, Golden Mouth, pp. 45–46, for Jerome’s views on Paul and virginity. The quotation comes from Hubart Richards, St. Paul and His Epistles: A New Introduction (London, 1979). See now Margaret Mitchell, The Heavenly Trumpet: John Chrysostom and the Art of Pauline Interpretation (Tubingen, 2000), for an analysis of John’s attitude toward Paul.

  13. J. Kelly, Golden Mouth, pp. 97–98. The “silver chamber pot” quotation comes from Liebeschuetz, Barbarians and Bishops, p. 176.

  14. J. Kelly, Golden Mouth, pp. 62–66, for a survey of the sermons. The fullest analysis is to be found in R. L. Wilken, John Chrysostom and the Jews: Rhetoric and Reality in the Late Fourth Century (Berkeley and London, 1983). There is useful background information (relating John’s sermons to earlier anti-Judaism) in chap. 8 of G. Stroumsa, Barbarian Philosophy: The Religious Revolution of Early Christianity (Tubingen, 1999).

  15. For the conflict between John Chrysostom and the emperor’s views of the church, see Vasiliki Limberis, Divine Heiress: The Virgin Mary and the Creation of Christian Constantinople (London and New York, 1994), pp. 37–40. Limberis sees the conflict as one not just of personalities but of irreconcilable differences over the degree to which the church should submit to the state. Kelly considers the issues surrounding the intervention in Asia Minor in Golden Mouth, pp. 178–80.

  16. Despite their unruliness, the loyalty of the crowds was eventually rewarded. In 438, the emperor Theodosius II, anxious to calm tensions within the church, ordered the return of John’s body to Constantinople. It was received with great ceremony, although whether John would have approved of his resting place, in the church of the Holy Apostles close to the bodies of Arcadius and Eudoxia, is another matter. Even this was not his final grave—his body was one of the many relics stolen by the Venetians and the Crusaders after their sack of the city in 1204 and is reputedly now in St. Peter’s in Rome.

  17. For the controversy and its main protagonists I have drawn on the excellent accounts given by F. Young in her From Nicaea to Chalcedon (London, 1993), chap. 5, and J. Pelikan, The Christian Tradition, vol. 1 (Chicago and London, 1971), chap. 5, “The Person of the God-Man.” The complex philosophical problems involved are also dissected by C. Stead in chap. 17, “Two Natures United,” of his Philosophy in Christian Antiquity (Cambridge, 1994). There is much in this chapter about the ingenuity of the theologians. How could two natures, divine and mortal, which were opposites, possibly be combined? What physical analogy might be used? Were they like a pile of beans and peas, materially separate from each other even when mingled, or two coexisting entities that maintain their identities like heat in a piece of iron, or did they lost their
identity in each other, like tin and copper in bronze (an analogy drawn from Stoic physics)?

  18. Augustine, Confessions 7:19. Adoptionism had an important revival in Spain as late as the eighth century.

  19. There are short historical accounts of the Council of Ephesus and that at Chalcedon in the encyclopaedia section of G. W. Bowersock, P. Brown and O. Grabar, eds., Late Antiquity: A Guide to the Postclassical World (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1999). See also the comments on Chalcedon by R. Lim in his Public Disputation, Power, and Social Order in Late Antiquity (Berkeley and London, 1995), pp. 224–26.

  20. The quotation on Leo’s role comes from J. Herrin, The Formation of Christendom (Oxford, 1987), p. 103. While the council provided a formulation of co-existence of the two natures, it did not, perhaps wisely, try to suggest how they co-existed, and the debate over the two natures of Christ was “acted out” when Christ had to be portrayed on the cross. H. Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image Before the Era of Art, trans. E. Jephcott (Chicago and London, 1994), poses the question (p. 102): “Who was it who hung on the Cross? The man Jesus or only God or both in one. And who, if anyone, died on the Cross? If Jesus is shown dead does this not risk falling into the heresy of suggesting that God died? If he is shown alive to what extent is it right to show his suffering?” There were clearly inhibitions about showing Christ as dead. The earliest known depiction is believed to be one from the ninth century in the monastery of St. Catherine in the Sinai desert.

  Stead, Philosophy in Christian Antiquity, pp. 193–94, sums up the Council of Chalcedon as follows:

  I take the view that the Chalcedonian definition was a fairly limited definition; it was a statement of the conditions that needed to be met, within a given horizon of thought, for a satisfactory doctrine of Christ; it did not amount to a positive solution . . . My case is that the problem could not then be solved because too many issues were simultaneously in question, some of them matters of open controversy, some of them undetected assumptions and inconsistencies.

  He then goes on to try to sort some of these out. This is, of course, the essential difficulty in Christian theology, finding firm foundations on which to build coherent doctrine.

  21. G. W. Bowersock, Hellenism in Late Antiquity (Ann Arbor, 1990), pp. 17–19.

  22. P. Brown, “Christianisation and Religious Conflict,” in Cameron and Garnsey, eds., The Cambridge Ancient History, vol. XIII, p. 660. On Paulinus there is now an outstanding biography, which ranges far wider than just the life of its subject: D. Trout, Paulinus of Nola: Life, Letters, and Poems (Berkeley and London, 1999). The sacrifice of two hogs and a heifer at St. Felix’s shrine is recounted in a poem of Paulinus written in 406 and described by Trout, p. 179.

  23. MacMullen, Christianity and Paganism, p. 121.

  24. Ibid., p. 116.

  25. Ibid., p. 124.

  26. Ibid., p. 121.

  27. Bowersock, Hellenism in Late Antiquity, pp. 49–52, with illustrations.

  28. MacMullen, Christianity and Paganism, pp. 43–45.

  29. Story recounted in Brown, “Christianisation and Religious Conflict,” pp. 648–49.

  30. N. de Lange, Atlas of the Jewish World (Oxford, 1984), p. 34.

  31. MacMullen, Christianity and Paganism, pp. 13–14.

  32. Ibid., p. 66.

  33. Ibid., p. 60.

  34. M. Kline, Mathematical Thought from Ancient to Modern Times, vol. 1 (Oxford and New York, 1990), p. 181. Gibbon writes as follows (chap. 47):

  Hypatia, the daughter of Theon the mathematician, was initiated in her father’s studies: her learned comments have elucidated the geometry of Apollonius and Diophantus; and she publicly taught, both at Athens and Alexandria, the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle. In the bloom of beauty, and in the maturity of wisdom, the modest maid refused her lovers and instructed her disciples; the persons most illustrious for their rank and merit were impatient to visit the female philosopher; and Cyril beheld with a jealous eye the gorgeous train of horses and slaves who crowded the door of her academy. A rumour was spread among the Christians that the daughter of Theon was the only obstacle to the reconciliation of the prefect and the archbishop; and that obstacle was speedily removed. On a fatal day, in the holy season of Lent, Hypatia 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 inhuman fanatics: her flesh was scraped from her bones 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: but the murder of Hypatia has imprinted an indelible stain on the character and religion of Cyril of Alexandria.

  The story of Hypatia lived on. The novelist Charles Kingsley used Gibbon’s account for his own novel, Hypatia, a best-seller in Britain in 1853.

  35. Quoted in P. Chuvin, A Chronicle of the Last of the Pagans (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1990), p. 133.

  36. Bowersock, Hellenism in Late Antiquity, pp. 1–3. For evidence of the Christian groups see S. Mitchell, Anatolia: Land, Men and Gods in Asia Minor, vol. 2, chap. 17, part X, “The Epigraphy of the Anatolian Heresies.”

  37. Chuvin, A Chronicle of the Last of the Pagans, p. 141.

  38. Quoted in Jerome Murphy-O’Connor, The Holy Land: An Oxford Archaeological Guide, 4th ed. (Oxford, 1998), p. 86.

  18

  1. The evidence for Peter’s presence in Rome is flimsy, but no other city (outside Antioch, where by tradition he was the first bishop, and, of course, Jerusalem) lays claim to his presence, and so most scholars are prepared to accept that he did travel to Rome. How and why is difficult to guess. It is known that Jewish groups from the city made pilgrimages to Jerusalem, so Peter, perhaps at a time when his own authority among Christian Jews in Jerusalem was coming under threat from James, “the brother of Jesus,” may have decided to return with them in the hope of regaining his status elsewhere. The legend that he was bishop of Rome (if that was the position he held when in the city) for twenty-five years seems to have been a third-century invention.

  2. Gregory is quoted in R. Markus, Gregory the Great and His World (Cambridge, 1997), p. 7. For the linguistic separation of east and west, see J. Herrin, The Formation of Christendom (Oxford, 1987), pp. 104–5.

  3. From De praescriptione haereticorum (c. 200), quoted in H. Bettenson, Documents of the Christian Church (Oxford, 1943), p. 8. For Tertullian, see the entries in general reference books such as The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd ed., ed. F. Cross and E. Livingstone (Oxford, 1997), and P. Esler, ed., The Early Christian World (London and New York, 2000), vol. 2, chap. 40, by David Wright. The quotation about Tertullian’s lack of curiositas comes from Wright, p. 1033, although Wright warns his readers not to dismiss Tertullian’s lack of interest in Greek philosophy too readily. He had read widely in the classics although he kept them subordinate to the Christian faith that he preached so vigorously. One can find, for instance, elements of Stoicism in his thinking as when he argued that through God “we find this whole fabric of the universe to be once for all disposed, equipped, ordered as it stands, and supplied with the complete guidance of reason.” (The Stoics argued that the supreme divine principle, call it what you will, suffused the cosmos and provided it with an underlying order.) Also see chap. 3 in P. Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York, 1988; London, 1989), for views on Tertullian and his abiding concern, human sexuality. A full selection of Tertullian’s writings is to be found in H. Bettenson, The Early Christian Fathers (Oxford, 1956), pp. 104–67.

  4. For this account of Jerome I have drawn on the full and readable life by J. Kelly, Jerome (London, 1975).

  5. Ibid., p. 218. Taken from Letter LVI in Jerome’s collected correspondence.

  6. Letter CX in Jerome’s collected correspondence.

  7. Quoted in Kelly, Jerome, p. 331.

  8. There is a mass of work on Augustine. The standard life is still P. Bro
wn, Augustine of Hippo (London, 1977; rev. ed., Berkeley and London, 2000). It is very vivid and insightful, and certainly one of the finest biographies of any figure from the ancient world. A shorter life is by H. Chadwick, Augustine (Oxford, 1986). The massive encyclopaedic study Augustine Through the Ages, ed. A. Fitzgerald (Grand Rapids, Mich., and Cambridge, 1999), is an essential companion to further study. Highly recommended are C. Harrison, Augustine: Christian Truth and Fractured Humanity (Oxford, 2000); J. Rist, Augustine: Ancient Thought Baptised (Cambridge, 1994); and a more critical study by a philosopher, C. Kirwan, Augustine (London and New York, 1989). Harrison contains an overview of the main works analysed in the text and is perhaps the best starting point. Recent issues in Augustinian studies are covered in R. Dodaro and G. Lawless, eds., Augustine and His Critics (London and New York, 2000).

  9. See the entry on Luther in Fitzgerald, ed., Augustine Through the Ages, p. 515. One of the themes of the Council of Trent (1545–63) was a reassertion of Catholic interpretations of Augustine against those of Luther.

  10. Uta Ranke-Heinemann, Eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven: Women, Sexuality and the Catholic Church, trans. P. Heinegg (New York, 1990), p. 75.

  11. The City of God 10:32.

  12. Confessions 8:12. I have used the translation by R. S. Pine Coffin in the Penguin Classics edition, first published in 1961. It is interesting that Augustine was converted by a verse of Paul’s, not one of Jesus’. Scholars have noted that he seemed relatively uninterested in the person of Christ.

  13. Confessions 9:10.

  14. See P. Fredriksen, “Paul and Augustine: Conversion Narratives, Orthodox Traditions and the Retrospective Self,” Journal of Theological Studies 37 (1986): 3–35.

  15. These two quotations are taken from the Confessions, 10:8 and 2:2. The introspective nature of Augustine is well illustrated by the following quotation: “We do not consult a speaker who utters sounds to the outside, but a truth that resides within . . . Christ, who is said to dwell in the inner man—he it is who teaches.” The influence of Platonism, in the idea that one is recollecting what is already inside oneself, can also be seen here. From Augustine’s De Magistro, “On the Teacher,” paragraph 38, quoted in J. Pelikan, The Christian Tradition, vol. 1 (Chicago and London, 1971), p. 295.