The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason (12 page)

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.
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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.

The Forms, Philo continued, had come into being at the same time as God but were organized by him through the divine power of reason (once again the word
logos
is used), which somehow acted as a directing force for the Forms, encapsulating them and ordering their work. It is not always clear from Philo’s writings whether he believed the
logos
to be an attribute of God employed for a specific purpose, or a separate entity acting under God’s control, but the distinction between God’s fundamental essence (
ousia
) and his power as manifested in the world was a crucial one. (It is paralleled in other Jewish writings, for example, in the Book of Proverbs 8:22 and 8:31, where it is said that Wisdom was created by God as “the oldest of his works” and “at play everywhere in the world delighting to be with the sons of men.”) For Philo the
logos
could actually appear in the world—he gave as an example the voice speaking to Moses from the Burning Bush—and it was the
logos
that organized the creation of the world in line with a blueprint that God had had in his mind from the beginning. (Philo makes an analogy with an architect who has a clear idea of the city he wishes to build before he commences work on it.) The Forms act as the ideals to which each entity in the material world aspires, in other words (as noted), a table in the material world can be judged as an imitation of the Form of Table, even if it is never likely to be so perfect. However, some tables will be closer to the ideal table than others, and the same can be said of men. Philo names some men, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, for instance, as more “ideal” than others. What marked them out was their commitment to the Forms and God, a commitment implied through their desire for goodness and the avoidance of any emotion and sensuality that would draw them away from God.

Philo knew nothing of Christianity, but he was to prove enormously important in bridging the gap between Judaism and Greek philosophy in representing God of the Old Testament as a Platonic God, thus enabling Greek philosophers to find a home within the Jewish and, later, the Christian tradition. Although no direct connection with Philo has been established, John’s use of
logos,
translated into English as “word” in the prologue to his Gospel (“And the Word was made flesh”), uses
logos
as a force which was both “with God in the beginning” and actively involved in the creation, as Philo and earlier writers suggest. Where John innovates is to see the
logos
becoming flesh in Jesus, an idea unique to Christianity and deeply troubling to traditional Platonists.

The Middle Platonists who followed Philo maintained his view that God or “the Good” was a simple unchangeable unity with an intelligence that worked actively in the material world through the Forms. He was to be “reached” by reason rather than emotion and through asceticism rather than sensuality; Philo went so far as to argue that the ideal human being would be asexual. Much debate focused on the act of creation. Plato suggested that the universe had existed eternally but (in the dialogue
Timaeus
) left open the possibility of a divine craftsman intervening to create from an already existing chaos (a possibility that might be reconciled with the account given in Genesis). An alternative strand of thought suggested that God existed before matter. Greek thinkers found it difficult to conceive of the notion of non-existence—some even proposed an entity termed “that which is not” (!)—but one thinker, Basilides, expounded the idea of creation from nothing in the early second century, and it is found adopted by Christians by A.D. 180.

The human race appears, of course, as part of God’s creation, although pagan philosophers disagreed as to whether it was created directly by God or through the agency of the Forms. Platonists continued to make a distinction between soul and body, and to place these within a hierarchy of creation. At the top of this was God (“the Good”), then the Forms, below which was the human soul, and finally the material world, including the human body. Here the human soul is the noblest part of the “material” world, but each level of the hierarchy is understood to be less divine and good than the one above it (rather as copies taken of copies gradually lose the quality of the original). Some argued that there would be a level in the hierarchy at which the original goodness of God was so diluted that evil would become part of that level, while others argued that the goodness of “the Good” or God could never, however diluted, become evil. It was human beings acting freely who created evil. Alternatively, others claimed that the human soul that had been good had been corrupted by the material world, or that it was still good but so deeply imprisoned in the material body (as “a divine spark”) that it was unable to show its goodness. This latter was the view put forward by of one important school of thinkers who drew on Platonism, the Gnostics. The Gnostics were dualists in that they saw the world as evil, the creation of an evil creator, but the human soul as good and imprisoned in it. (The body, the evil gaoler of the good soul, was to be despised, and many Gnostics were aggressively ascetic.) The soul was, however, capable of enlightenment (
gnosis
), possibly through a teacher, and could be released to be reunited with God. Jesus was adopted as one of the teachers able to release the soul, but the relationship between the Gnostics and mainstream Christianity (in so far as this existed in the early Christian centuries) was complex, and Christians eventually separated themselves from Gnosticism. (Gnostics accepted the possibility of there being many Christs, and it was as a rejoinder to this that Christian creeds later spoke of “
one
[my emphasis] Lord Jesus Christ.”)

The most sophisticated of the Platonic thinkers, and the one who conventionally marks the beginning of Neoplatonism, was Plotinus (204–70). Plotinus was from Egypt and had set off eastwards, to Persia and India, in search of wisdom, but when his travels were thwarted, he headed instead towards Rome. He can be seen as a mystic—for Plotinus, the supreme desire of the soul is to be reunited with “the One,” and he describes the moment of reunion as one that could not be exchanged for anything else, even for the kingdom of all the heavens. Plotinus drew heavily on Plato (and, as scholars now recognize, on Aristotle) but developed an overtly spiritual philosophy. It was written up by his follower Porphyry and circulated as the
Enneads
in the early fourth century.

There is “a One,” the Ultimate Being, who is supernatural, above all material being, self-caused and absolutely good. Plotinus preferred the term “the One” to “the Good” because it emphasized that “the One” was above all values. From this Being processes
nous,
or Mind. The procession is continual (and has existed through eternity), and
nous
appears in a whole range of manifestations in what might be called “thoughts” or, in Platonic terminology, the Forms. These in their turn project outwards to a “world soul,” which exists as a composite of all animate beings in the world although appearing as an individual soul in each human being. Each of the three entities exists as “lower” than the one above, but “the One” does not lose anything of its goodness during the procession of
nous—
any more, said Plotinus, than the brightness of a lamp is diminished when it gives out light. “The One,” the
nous
and the world soul share a single substance (
ousia
), but each maintains its distinct nature, its
hypostasis,
or personality. Plotinus went on to argue that the “lower” states would always be attracted back to the “higher.” So the soul would be attracted to the
nous
and then back to “the One,” in the final moment of mystical reunion achieved (as always in Platonic thought) by a very few. The material world has to exist in order for the soul to have something to live in, but as inanimate things cannot think, the material world represents the very furthest one can get from “the One.” It is, in short, a state in which goodness is virtually nonexistent. While the soul’s natural orientation is “upwards” to the
nous
and “the One,” an individual soul can choose to turn “downwards” to the natural world. Thus, through its free choice, it can turn towards evil, a view shared by Christian theologians such as Origen, although it has to be stressed that Plotinus himself had no direct links with Christians and Porphyry actively opposed them.

It is also worth stressing that Plotinus, mystic though he might have been, was wary of attributing powers to supernatural sources. A record survives of a conversation he had as an old man in the 260s in which he discusses whether illnesses can be cured by casting out demons through special prayers. First, he says, there are no such things as demons, and, in any case, “real” gods would not respond to such mundane things as spells. There is a sense here, found in other pagan philosophers and arguably also in the Gospel of John, that a true god, secure in his own being, would not need to prove himself by effecting miracles. If one actually looks at cases of fever, he continues, one finds there are normally definable causes: exhaustion, overindulgence or the wrong kind of diet. They should be cured through medicines and a disciplined way of life. Here Plotinus remains fully within the Greek tradition, in which reason and empirical evidence remain central and the material world operates according to its own ascertainable laws rather than in response to the interventions of the gods.
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Miracles, in short, have no place in sophisticated thinking.

It is impossible to make any kind of assessment of how many adherents each of these movements and beliefs had. Most subjects of the Roman empire can hardly have had the time or the inclination to speculate about the nature of the spiritual world, and one can only assume that they continued with their traditional beliefs. Nevertheless, there clearly existed a wide range of spiritual possibilities, any of which could be followed without any sense of impropriety, and, even though there existed some degree of competition between the different movements for adherents, none excluded other beliefs. The traditional gods of the state might be offended by neglect, but they were not jealous of other cults. It is certainly too simplistic to argue, as many histories of Christianity have done, that spiritual life in the empire had reached some kind of dead end and that Christianity provided a solution all had been yearning for. In fact, studies of oracles in this period suggest that questioning, which had traditionally centred on personal affairs, was increasingly concerned with theological issues (such as what happens to the soul at death) that could be answered from within the very rich and varied pagan tradition and developed without inhibition.
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As we shall see, Christianity did provide for important spiritual needs, but it was one of many movements that attempted to do so, and it was by no means the most sophisticated.

The Roman empire in the second century had reached the height of its maturity in that it was relatively peaceful, was able to defend itself and its elites flourished in an atmosphere of comparative intellectual and spiritual freedom. The empire had a sophisticated legal system, and the parameters within which justice was enforced, for instance, were clearly set out—although those who were actually Roman citizens (all subjects of the empire except slaves from A.D. 212) were better protected than others. “Good” emperors acted with reasonable benevolence, as did the more moderate governors. Those who were talented could rise far, particularly through service in the army.
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Yet this is an idealized picture. There was a streak of cruelty in the Roman make-up that to us is nauseating. Criminals were deliberately humiliated by public execution, on the cross or in the amphitheatre. Even the most apparently benign of emperors watched such proceedings without flinching—in fact, they prided themselves on laying on a good show of slaughter. In religion there were limits to what the Romans would tolerate. They always distrusted fervour,
superstitio,
and indeed Christianity was mocked by one principal governor as “a degenerate
superstitio
carried to extravagant lengths.”
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Although Judaism was accorded some respect for its ancient roots, there are many accounts of open mockery of Jewish customs, and at times there was outright insensitivity: Hadrian, in his attempt to encourage Hellenism, tried to ban circumcision. The result was the outbreak of the Jewish revolt of 132, which was put down with great brutality and resulted in the reconstruction of Jerusalem as a Roman colony. Nor were things necessarily better at a local level. There were major riots between Jews and Greeks in Alexandria in A.D. 38 and 66. Then there was the problem of those who actively rejected the gods of the state and who expected to proselytize for converts. Such were the Christians, who referred in their sacred writings to Rome as “the whore of Babylon.” Eventually a state-sponsored campaign of persecution was to be launched against them.