14. There is Protagoras’ famous saying from the fifth century B.C.: “About the gods I am not able to know whether they exist or do not exist, nor what they are like in form; for the factors preventing knowledge are many: the obscurity of the subject, and the shortness of human life.” There is no indication here that Protagoras believed no one should have a go at defining the nature of the gods, in fact there is a record that he wrote just such a work himself and recited it in the home of the playwright Euripides.
15. Quoted in Cameron, Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire, p. 15.
16. Ibid., p. 67. See also chap. 13, “Madness and Divinization: Symeon the Holy Fool,” in Guy Stroumsa, Barbarian Philosophy: The Religious Revolution of Early Christianity (Tubingen, 1999).
17. Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana 4:163 (translation: Green). A little earlier (section 161) Augustine suggests that God’s words are like a possession that can be stolen. The fact that such a possession is held by a thief does not diminish its value. The point remains that the link stressed by Isocrates and Quintilian between the moral character of the speaker and the words he spoke has been broken.
18. G. Kennedy, A New History of Classical Rhetoric (Princeton, 1994), pp. 269–70.
19. Lim, Public Disputation, p. 233 and elsewhere in his book.
20. Ibid., pp. 231–32. Earlier attacks on Aristotle are to be found, as in the works of Tertullian. Arius was even referred to at one point as “the new Aristotle” on the grounds that he employed dialectic, in other words examined issues critically, rather than relying on faith. See R. Vaggione, Eunomius of Cyzicus and the Nicene Revolution (Oxford, 2000), p. 95.
21. Lim, Public Disputation, pp. 174–75.
22. These quotations are taken from R. MacMullen, Christianity and Paganism in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries (New Haven and London, 1997), pp. 86–89.
23. Cameron, Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire, p. 206.
24. MacMullen, Christianity and Paganism, p. 90.
25. Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, chap. 28.
26. Basil is quoted in Pelikan, Christianity and Classical Culture, p. 177. For the bishop of Melitene, see Henry Chadwick, The Church in Ancient Society (Oxford, 2001), p. 591.
27. “Bede and Medieval Civilization” and “Bede and His Legacy,” reprinted as items XI and XIV in Gerald Bonner, Church and Faith in Patristic Tradition (Aldershot, U.K., and Brookfield, Vt., 1996). As Bonner puts it, “Bede’s outlook is a narrow one, not merely in the sense that any specialist, theologian or otherwise is professionally narrow, but in the sense of deliberatly seeking to exclude a whole department of human experience—the non-Christian—from his considerations. . . . Bede did not seek to be original, but to stand in the tradition of the Fathers of the Church” (p. 10).
28. H. Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image Before the Era of Art, trans. E. Jephcott (Chicago and London, 1994). There is a wealth of material in this book on icons and the theological dimensions within which they were set. See also A. Cameron, “The Language of Images: The Rise of Icons and Christian Representation,” in D. Wood, ed., The Church and the Arts (Oxford, 1992), pp. 1–42. An atmospheric account of these changes is to be found in P. Brown, The World of Late Antiquity (London, 1971), chap. 14, “The Death of the Classical World: Culture and Religion in the Early Middle Ages.”
29. R. McInerny, Saint Thomas Aquinas (Boston, 1977), p. 18.
30. M. Hoskin and O. Gingerich, “Medieval Latin Astronomy,” chap. 4 in M. Hoskin, ed., The Cambridge Concise History of Astronomy (Cambridge, 1999).
31. See the essay by Louise Marshall, “Confraternity and Community,” in B. Wisch, ed., Confraternities and the Visual Arts in Renaissance Italy: Ritual, Spectacle, Image (Cambridge, 2000), above all the illustrations on pp. 22 and 23 (examples from Genoa and Siena). The examples are all the more remarkable in that when Apollo sends his plague on the Greeks at Troy (through arrows), it is the goddesses Hera and Athena who intervene to find a solution by which the plague is withdrawn.
32. Examples of shrines which maintain their continuity from pagan to Christian are taken from MacMullen, Christianity and Paganism, pp. 126–27, but most of the examples quoted here and in the following paragraph come from R. Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity from Antiquity to the Present (London, 1997), chap. 4, “Medicine and Faith,” and chap. 5, “The Medieval West.” Miracles were, of course, known in the pagan world as well. One can learn a great deal from studying the contexts in which miracles take place and the range of miracles, some harming God’s apparent enemies, others healing, others used as a means of effecting conversions. See W. Cotter, Miracles in Greco-Roman Antiquity: A Sourcebook (London, 1999).
33. The Life of Saint Francis of Assisi, trans. Ewart Cousins, 1:5–6, in Bonaventura, The Soul’s Journey unto God and Other Writings (Paulist Press, 1978), pp. 34–35.
34. The Euchologion, quoted by P. Horden and N. Purcell, The Corrupting Sea (Oxford, 2000), p. 411.
35. Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, chap. 28.
36. See Antonio Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York, 1994; London, 1995).
37. An excellent exploration of this aspect of Christianity is to be found in Averil Cameron, Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire (Berkeley and London, 1995), especially chap. 5, “The Rhetoric of Paradox.”
38. As Morris Kline, the historian of mathematics, puts it: “It is doubtful whether medieval Europe, if permitted to pursue an unchanging course, would ever have developed any real science or mathematics.” M. Kline, Mathematical Thought from Ancient to Modern Times, vol. 1 (Oxford and New York, 1972), p. 214. For Copernicus’ achievement within the context of medieval astronomy, see Hoskin and Gingerich, “Medieval Latin Astronomy.”
20
1. This example is drawn from Elizabeth Fowden’s study The Barbarian Plain (Berkeley and London, 1999). The quote from the Nestorian patriarch comes from an article, “Two Civilizations Entwined in History,” by William Dalrymple in the Independent (London), October 12, 2001. I was intrigued to read in Jan Morris’ Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere (London, 2001) that Sergius had, in legend, been converted to Christianity while serving as a soldier in Trieste, and that at the moment of his martyrdom on the Barbarian Plain his halberd fell miraculously from the sky into the main piazza of the city. It is still preserved and is the main feature of an annual procession on his feast day.
2. Quoted in R. MacMullen, Christianity and Paganism in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries (New Haven and London, 1997), p. 19.
3. I have drawn material for this section from R. R. Bolgar, “The Greek Legacy,” in M. Finley, ed., The Legacy of Greece: A New Appraisal (Oxford, 1984), and chap. 4 of R. Porter’s The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity from Antiquity to the Present (London, 1997). For fuller coverage of Islamic philosophy, whose contribution to western thought is increasingly being recognized, see R. Popkin, ed., The Pimlico History of Western Philosophy (New York, 1998; London, 1999), sect. 2, “Medieval Islamic and Jewish Philosophy.” The works of Jewish philosophers such as Moses Maimonides were also an important influence on western philosophy.
4. Quoted in P. Brown, “Christianisation and Religious Conflict,” in A. Cameron and P. Garnsey, eds., The Cambridge Ancient History, vol. XIII (Cambridge, 1998), p. 639. Compare the statement made at the Council of Florence (1439–45): “No one who is outside the Catholic Church, not just pagans, but Jews, heretics, and schismatics, can share in eternal life.”
5. See R. Fletcher, The Conversion of Europe (London, 1997), for an overview. The consolidation of a rationale for church authority in both east and west is well covered by J. Pelikan, The Christian Tradition, vol. 1 (Chicago and London, 1971), chap. 7, “The Orthodox Consensus.”
6. See R. Tarnas, The Passion of the Western Mind (London, 1996), part IV, “The Transformation of the Medieval Era,” and M. Colish, Medieval Foun
dations of the Western Intellectual Tradition (New Haven and London, 1997), especially chap. 20, “Scholasticism and the Rise of Universities.”
7. This view is argued with impressive power by Tarnas, The Passion of the Western Mind, “The Quest of Thomas Aquinas,” pp. 179–90.
8. For Thomas Aquinas, a good short introduction is A. Kenny, Aquinas (Oxford, 1980). For more extended treatment, see R. McInerny, Saint Thomas Aquinas (Boston, 1977), and B. Davies, The Thought of Thomas Aquinas (Oxford, 1992). While one can applaud Thomas Aquinas for his courage and independence in bringing back rational thought into the Christian tradition, he remained a man of his time in many of his attitudes, especially to women, whom he would consciously avoid, and sexuality in general.
9. McInerny provides a typical statement of Aquinas’ defence of free will, in which free will is seen as intrinsic to man’s status as a rational being. The extract also gives an idea of Aquinas’ method of exposition.
For the sheep seeing the wolf judges that she should flee by a natural judgment which is not free since it does not involve pondering but she judges by natural instinct. So it is with every judgment of the brute animal. Now man acts by means of judgment, because through a knowing power he judges that something should be pursued or avoided, yet this instinct is not by a natural instinct toward a particular action but from a rational pondering. Thus he acts by free judgment since he is capable of directing himself in diverse ways . . . For this reason, that man acts from free judgement follows necessarily from the fact that he is rational.
McInerny, Saint Thomas Aquinas, p. 54. One less happy result of the argument presented above was that Aquinas followed Augustine in seeing animals as non-rational beings who were thus entirely at the service of man. He also followed Aristotle in believing that women are “by nature subordinate to man, because the power of rational discernment is by nature stronger in man.”
There has been a tendency in Catholic theology to smooth over the difference between the major theologians. However, surely the contrast between Aquinas and Augustine is profound. Aquinas could never have written as Augustine did: “To approve falsehood instead of truth so as to err in spite of himself, and not to be able to refrain from the works of lust because of the pain involved in breaking away from fleshly bonds: these do not belong to the nature of man as he was created [before the Fall]. They are the penalty of man as [now] condemned [by original sin].” From On Free Will 3:18:52, quoted in C. Harrison, Augustine, Christian Truth and Fractured Humanity (Oxford, 2000), p. 86. Compare too the words of Athanasius, “We are not permitted to ask presumptuous questions about the begetting of the Son of God nor to make our nature and our limitations the measure of God and his wisdom” (my emphasis). This is the exact opposite of Aquinas’ “To take something away from the perfection of the creature is to abstract from the perfection of the creative power [i.e. God] itself.”
10. Aquinas left himself, of course, with the problem of defining what happened to the soul after death. He had to admit that it was no longer the person who had lived, but what was it? “A disembodied soul does not feel joy and sadness due to bodily desire, but due to intellectual desire, as with the angels.” For these issues, see the excellent chapter “Being Human” in Davies, The Thought of Thomas Aquinas.
11. R. Markus, “Aquinas and Aristotle,” Blackfriars, March 1961. Compare Pelikan’s view that Aquinas’ treatise On the Soul was “determined more by philosophical than by biblical language about the soul” (Pelikan, The Christian Tradition, vol. 1, p. 89). It perhaps needs to be stressed how fascinated by science Aquinas was. He did, after all, write commentaries on Aristotle’s physics, cosmology and meteorology, and he is known to have secured a copy of Heron of Alexandria’s work on the mechanics of steam engines before anyone else at the University of Paris.
12. Quoted in Davies, The Thought of Thomas Aquinas, p. 246.
13. See J. Mahoney, The Making of Moral Theology: A Study of the Roman Catholic Tradition (Oxford, 1987), chap. 7, “The Impact of Humanae Vitae.” For the relationship between Aristotle, Plato and Aquinas in the formulation of the concept of natural law, see J. Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights (Oxford, 1980), chap. 13, “Nature, Reason, God.” Finnis sees Plato’s late work The Laws as one of the foundation texts of the concept. Aquinas asserts that natural law cannot conflict with the teachings of the scriptures, but this gives rise to further conceptual problems (for example, is each one of the Ten Commandments to be regarded an expression of natural law?). In the Catechism of the Catholic Church (London, 1994), the sections on “Natural Moral Law,” numbers 1954–60, are supported, rather surprisingly, by a quotation from Cicero but otherwise by none other earlier than Augustine.
14. An excellent survey of Aquinas’ political views can be found in J. S. McClelland, A History of Western Political Thought (London and New York, 1996), chap. 7, “Christendom and Its Law.” McClelland not only compares and contrasts Aquinas with Augustine but discusses the implications of natural law for medieval political thought. The philosopher Alisdair MacIntyre claims that Aristotelianism as developed by Thomas Aquinas represents the high point of western thought on ethical issues.
15. The tendency was to use Aristotle as an authority figure in support of Christian theology rather than as a means of invigorating it. Aristotle’s view (supported by Greek thinkers in general) that the male provides the essential element of life at conception, with the woman providing a stable fluid in which it can grow, fitted well with traditional ideas of the virgin birth, and may actually have influenced the development of these views; see M. Warner, Alone of All Her Sex (London, 1985), chap. 3, “Virgin Birth.” If the modern scientific view that Mary’s genetic contribution to Jesus would be equal to God’s is taken at face value, the theological problems are daunting. Aristotle’s ideas were also used to support the doctrine of transubstantiation (the doctrine that the bread and wine are changed totally into the body and blood of Christ at the moment of consecration). By the seventeenth century the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes was to write that in the universities philosophy “hath no other place than as the handmaiden to the Roman religion; and since the authority of Aristotle is only current there, that study is not properly philosophy but Aristotelity.” Louis XIV was to make the astonishing assertion that “notre religion et Aristote sont tellement liez qu’on ne puisse renverser l’un sans ébranler l’autre”—“our religion and Aristotle are so closely linked that one cannot overthrow one without undermining the other” (quoted in J. Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750 [Oxford and New York, 2001]; this brilliant book shows just how tightly a sterile Aristotelianism dominated conservative thinking in the seventeenth century).
As already stressed in this book, the essence of Greek intellectual life lay in its stress on the provisional nature of knowledge and the acceptance that all “authorities” were there to be challenged, and one can assume that Aristotle would not have approved of the “fixed” status given to his works by theologians, any more than Ptolemy or Galen would have approved of the way that their work was frozen. It was not until the twentieth century that Aristotle’s extraordinary intellectual achievement was once again fully recognized.
EPILOGUE
1. See Jonathan Barnes, “Galen, Christians, Logic,” in T. P. Wiseman, ed., Classics in Progress (Oxford, 2002), for fuller discussion.
2. On the relationship between reason and emotion in the healthy mind, see Antonio Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain (New York, 1994; London, 1995). On free will and optimism, see the works of Raymond Tallis, especially Enemies of Hope: A Critique of Contemporary Pessimism (London, 1997).
Modern Works Cited in the Text and Notes
References to ancient texts can be followed up in the Loeb Classical Library, although many of the major works can be found in the Penguin Classics series. The Penguin Classics also include the works of the more prominent Christian thinkers, such as Augustine. Not
e also the compilations by Henry Bettenson cited below. Otherwise, the original works of the Church Fathers are not always easy to track down, and often the easiest way to find translations is through the Internet. For early Christianity in general I can recommend www.christianorigins.org, through which can be reached www.newadvent.org/fathers/, which has translations of most of the key works of the Church Fathers.
Ackroyd, P. R., and C. F. Evans, eds. The Cambridge History of the Bible. vol. 1. Cambridge, 1970.
Alexander, L. “Paul and the Hellenistic Schools: The Evidence of Galen.” In Troels Engbury-Pedersen, ed., Paul in His Hellenistic Context. Edinburgh, 1994.
Alison, James. Faith Beyond Resentment: Fragments Catholic and Gay. London, 2001.
Armstrong, Karen. A History of God. London, 1993.
Athanassiadi, P., and M. Frede. Pagan Monotheism in Late Antiquity. Oxford, 1999.
Baldry, R. The Greeks and the Unity of Mankind. Cambridge, 1965.
Barclay, John. “Paul Among Diaspora Jews: Anomaly or Apostate.” Journal of the Study of the New Testament 60 (1995): 89–120.
Barnes, Jonathan. Aristotle. Oxford, 1982.
———. “Galen, Christians, Logic.” In T. P. Wiseman, ed., Classics in Progress. Oxford, 2002.
Barrett, C. K. A Commentary on the First Epistle to the Corinthians. London, 1971.
Barton, John, and John Muddiman, eds. The Oxford Bible Commentary. Oxford, 2001.
Beard, M., J. North, and S. Price. Religions of Rome. Cambridge, 1998.
Becker, J. Paul: Apostle to the Gentiles. Trans. O. C. Dean, Jr. Louisville, Ky., 1993.
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