The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason (50 page)

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, mirror 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.
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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.
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Despite these continuities with the past, however, sickness is now understood within a specifically Christian perspective. The rejection of a scientific approach to medicine is underlined by the belief (again rooted in Platonism) that the soul is of greater value than the body and that suffering is part of the Christian condition, even to be welcomed as a test of faith. A sick man in danger of death urgently needed, it was said, a priest for his soul rather than a doctor for his body. It is undoubtedly true that Christians cared for the sick “as if Christ were being directly served by waiting on them,” and that hospitals attached to the ordered life of the monastery achieved much good, but there was a risk of caring becoming an end in itself, a means of salvation for the carer, rather than being primarily focused on curing the diseased. There is a story told, for instance, by St. Bonaventura (1221–74) of St. Francis of Assisi, who

rendered humble service to the lepers with humane concern in order that he might
completely despise himself
[my italics], because of Christ crucified, who according to the prophet Isaiah was despised as a leper. He visited their homes frequently, generously distributed alms to them, and with great compassion kissed their hands and their mouths.
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The sick risk being used here to fulfill the spiritual needs of their carer. The causes of sickness were seen within a religious perspective. So leprosy, which we now understand to be spread by any kind of physical contact, was said to be a punishment sent by God for lust. Meanwhile saints become associated with specific diseases, often ones related to their own life experiences. Two martyrs from Asia Minor, Damian and Cosmas, who went through a particularly brutal martyrdom in which their bodies were cut up, re-emerge as patron saints of surgery. Similarly, St. Apollonia, whose teeth were knocked out during her martyrdom, is the patron saint of toothache. St. Margaret of Antioch had been swallowed by a dragon. Making the sign of the cross while inside its belly, she was miraculously delivered and subsequently became a patron saint of childbirth.

The relics of martyrs, sacred texts and icons became mechanisms through which miracles are effected. John Chrysostom noted that children in Antioch were given a small codex of the Gospels to hang round their necks to protect them from harm. Epilepsy, which Hippocrates described as a natural illness, is now placed under the care of St. Christopher; the English physician John of Gaddesden (1280–1349) recommended a composite cure—the reading of the Gospel over the epileptic while simultaneously placing on him the hair of a white dog. The relics of Thomas à Becket at Canterbury were believed to cure blindness, insanity, leprosy and deafness.

So a different and increasingly “magic” Christian world emerges. Demons are to be found everywhere. One Byzantine source lists them as to be found in seas, rivers, wells, cliffs, ponds, marshes, forests, trees, and pagan tombs and describes the need for them to be driven from such places into the wilderness.
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The world becomes suffused with miraculous happenings, and they become part of the repertoire of any successful holy man. (Even today no saint can be declared by the Catholic Church without evidence of at least two miracles effected by him or her.) Accounts of miracles were repeated and elaborated so extensively that miracle literature becomes a genre in its own right, the founding texts being, of course, the Gospels themselves. A sick man visits a monk, he is healed, he converts. On the other hand holy men promise to effect a miraculous cure, or disperse demons who have brought a crop failure, if the suppliant will convert in advance. Miracles become so commonplace in the records that Edward Gibbon was led to remark sarcastically that “we may surely be allowed to observe that a miracle, in that age of superstition and credulity, lost its name and merit, since it could scarcely be considered as a deviation from the ordinary and established laws of nature.”
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While the miraculous had long been part of everyday life, in the Christian world it was further highlighted as a mark of status. In short, the subversion of the natural order of things by miracles becomes one of the distinguishing features of Christianity and, necessarily, goes hand in hand with the waning of scientific thought.

There is increasing scientific evidence that reason and emotion need to live side by side in the healthy mind. It appears that some degree of irrationality acts as a healthy corrective to the aridity of narrowly logical thought.
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So when Christians talked in apparent paradoxes, claiming that the ignorant was closer to the truth than the educated, or that the foolishness of God was greater than the wisdom of the wise, there was much that was healthy in their approach. There are areas of the human psyche which reason cannot reach and they may provide “truths” of their own—one is reminded of the paradox attributed to the physicist Niels Bohr, “The opposite of one profound truth is often another profound truth.” Jesus’ insistence that the poor, the rejected and the unloved may have something to contribute was a major development in the western ethical tradition. However, Christian thought that emerged in the early centuries often gave irrationality the status of a universal “truth” to the exclusion of those truths to be found through reason. So the uneducated was preferred to the educated and the miracle to the operation of natural laws.
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After the defeat of Pelagius, the possibility that man was free to manage his own destiny was diminished. This reversal of traditional values became embedded in the Christian tradition and was, among other things, used to sustain the authority of the church. Intellectual self-confidence and curiosity, which lay at the heart of the Greek achievement, were recast as the dreaded sin of pride. Faith and obedience to the institutional authority of the church were more highly rated than the use of reasoned thought. The inevitable result was intellectual stagnation. It is hard to see how mathematics, science or associated disciplines that depended on empirical observation could have made any progress in this atmosphere. The last recorded astronomical observation in the ancient Greek world was one by the Athenian philosopher Proclus in A.D. 475, nearly 1,100 years after the prediction of an eclipse by Thales in 585 B.C., which traditionally marks the beginning of Greek science. It would be over 1,000 years—with the publication of Copernicus’
De revolutionibus
in 1543—before these studies began to move forward again.
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20

THOMAS AQUINAS AND THE RESTORATION OF REASON

Among the many martyrs of the persecutions of the early years of the fourth century was Sergius, a high-ranking army officer and a friend of the emperor (probably Maximinus, Augustus in the east from 310 to 313). He was also a Christian. His Christianity had never interfered with his military duties, but when he was denounced by rivals the emperor insisted that he sacrifice to the Roman gods. He refused, but the emperor, reluctant to lose him, sent him away to the east to Antiochus, one of Sergius’ former protégés who had become the governor of a remote frontier province. Antiochus also did his best to persuade Sergius to sacrifice—unsuccessfully—and finally Antiochus ordered Sergius’ execution by the sword. The site of the martyrdom was the fortress city of Rusafa on the Syrian steppes, thirty miles from the Euphrates. It was a remote area, constantly disputed between the Romans and the Persians and known to the Greeks as “the Barbarian Plain.”

In the middle of the fifth century a local bishop gave 300 pounds of gold so that a basilica could be erected over Sergius’ remains. Rusafa became a place of pilgrimage and the city grew wealthy. Then, in the seventh century, Arabs overran the area. Rusafa was now no longer a frontier town but lay well within the territories of the Ummayads, Syria’s rulers between 661 and 750; one of these rulers, the caliph Hisham, made Rusafa the site of his summer palace. The basilica still stood, but Hisham did nothing to disturb it directly. Rather, in the courtyard of the building he erected a mosque, and there is evidence that Sergius was adopted as an Islamic holy man. (“An old Christian saint at Damascus, now of Islam,” as the Victorian traveller Charles Doughty was to put it.) The presence of Islam was affirmed, but so was the continuation of Christian worship. As the patriarch of the Nestorian Christians, who had themselves been cast out as heretics by their fellow Christians, put it in 649, “These Arabs fight not against our Christian religion; nay, rather they defend our faith, they revere our priests and saints, and they make gifts to our churches and monasteries.” In 1150 an Arab source referred to the inhabitants of Rusafa as “mostly Christians,” occupied in the caravan trade. In 1982 some silver vessels, two of them chalices dating from the mid thirteenth century, were found. The chalices came from northern Europe, perhaps even from England, and appear to have been buried just before the Mongol invasions. Rusafa continued as a centre of Christian pilgrimage for 600 years after the Arab conquest.
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The story of the basilica at Rusafa shows that it was possible for a monotheistic faith to assert its identity without necessitating the destruction of other faiths. They could even be shown continuing respect and “a holy man” might be honoured for his piety rather than his specific religious allegiance. Arab toleration extended also to the Greek intellectual tradition, which the Arabs had encountered in the course of their conquests and which they both preserved and built on. The ninth-century scholar Abu al-Hasan Tabith paid fulsome tribute to the achievements of “the heathen,” by whom he meant the Greeks.

And we are the heirs and transmitters to our heirs, of heathenism, which is honoured gloriously in this world . . . Who made the world to be inhabited and flooded it with cities except the good men and kings of heathenism? Who has constructed harbours and conserved the rivers? Who has made manifest the hidden sciences . . . and it is they who have also made to arise the medicine for bodies. And they have filled the world with the correctness of modes of life and with the wisdom which is the head of excellence. Without these products of heathenism the world would be an empty and a needy place and it would have been enveloped in sheer want and misery.
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Reflecting this readiness to accept the best of Greek thought, not only were Plato’s “the Good,” Aristotle’s “unmoved mover” and Plotinus ’ “the One” appropriated to provide insights into the nature of Allah, but also in the ninth and tenth centuries most of the great Greek thinkers—Aristotle, Plato, Hippocrates, Galen, Euclid and Ptolemy among them—were carefully translated by teams of scholars into Arabic.

What proved crucial for its survival in this new context was the fact that Greek thought did not have to be doctored for the Islamic world. As the philosopher Averroës argued, religion and philosophy reached the same truths but by different routes and thus could exist alongside each other. Nor was original thinking stifled by the adoption of Greek thought. Avicenna, for instance, compiled a major textbook of medicine based on Greek sources but added to it the results and conclusions of his own researches and observations. Al-Razi, a Persian who studied at Baghdad before returning to Persia, deliberately set out, in the best tradition of Greek thinking, to expose his forebears to rational criticism, in Al-Razi’s case even including Aristotle. Reason should come first; it is “the ultimate authority which should govern and not be governed; should control and be not controlled; should lead and not be led.” While Al-Razi declared that he was a disciple of Galen, he also wrote books criticizing some of Galen’s precepts; he was the first to distinguish between smallpox and measles. Ibn al-Nafis also directly criticized Galen, noting how the blood passed through the lungs, not between the cavities of the heart as Galen had claimed. By contrast, Galen’s works were at this time being treated as sacred texts in Christian Europe and no attempt was being made to progress from them. In short, the Arabs sustained the Greek tradition by valuing the intellectual achievements of the past without being overawed by them and in using empirical evidence and reason to carry the understanding further. All this was possible without threatening Islam itself.
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So the classical tradition survived and in time it was once again to filter through to Europe. While fifth-century Christianity defined itself, in a defensive tradition inherited from Paul, largely in terms of its enemies—Judaism, paganism and other heretical Christians (as Augustine was to put it: “heretics, Jews and pagans; they have formed a unity against our Unity”)
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—even by the time of Gregory there is a sense of a lessening of insecurity and a relaxation of tension. As Christianity spread inexorably through western Europe, it gained confidence in itself, though this confidence was for some time expressed solely in spiritual rather than intellectual terms.
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One of the results of the massive shifts of perspective consequent on the “triumph” of Christianity was an intense concentration on the other world at the expense of this one. For centuries there was virtually no sign of any renaissance of independent thought, and most scholarly work focused on analysing, summarizing and commenting on the canon of authoritative texts.

The only western Christian philosopher of note in the 500 years between Boethius (whose
Consolation of Philosophy
of c. 524 became a medieval best-seller) and Anselm in the eleventh century was the ninth-century Irishman Erigena, who was remarkable for his time in knowing Greek. It was through him that the works of Pseudo-Dionysius entered the west, and so he played an important role in founding western mysticism. Erigena is intriguing in that he seems to come from nowhere; he has no links to an existing tradition or centre of learning. In his
Division
of Nature,
he explores “nature,” by which he means the totality of all that exists or does not exist, from a Neoplatonist perspective.
The Division
was, in fact, too original for the church, which disapproved of his views on the identity of God (and presumably his endorsement of Origen’s view that ultimately everyone would be saved), and all Erigena’s works were declared heretical in the thirteenth century. He was removed so effectively from the western tradition that he still does not appear in many standard introductions to medieval thought, and it is only recently that his importance has been recognized.

In the eleventh century, Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109) raised the possibility that reason could again play a part in orthodox Christian thought. He argued that certain tenets of faith—for instance, the impossibility of salvation without divine assistance in the shape of an incarnated Jesus—could be proved by reason. However, it was not until the twelfth century that a newly emerging investigative spirit in the west (usually referred to as Scholasticism) began to rediscover the classical tradition as it had been preserved in the writings of the Islamic east. Early stirrings of this spirit can be seen in the work of the Augustinian canon Hugh of Saint-Victor in Paris early in the century. Hugh asserts that accumulating knowledge about the world does not necessarily threaten the supremacy of either God or the Church. So begin the compilations of
summae,
encyclopaedic works synthesizing what was known to the medieval world, and also the foundation of the first universities (Paris, for instance, in 1170, Oxford at about the same time), in which secular learning could be taught so long as it was not seen to subvert the authority of the Church. Instruction in scientific method was inevitably sought in the works of Aristotle, which, along with the massive commentaries of the Arab philosophers, now began to be translated into Latin. With them came a fuller knowledge of the work of Ptolemy—his great astronomical treatise is still known by its Arab name, the Almagest, the “greatest.”
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Yet Aristotle offered an obvious challenge to Christianity: he was a pagan philosopher (whose “unmoved mover” did not even relate to the created world), and he extolled reason not only through the use of formal logic (the syllogism), but also as a means of understanding the natural world through the analysis of empirical evidence. As we have seen, his works had long since been discredited; suspicions still lingered. In 1215 the Faculty of Arts of the University of Paris forbade the use of his works as a basis for discussion. For Christians to accept Aristotle, his work had somehow to be made compatible with Christian doctrine, which in turn made it necessary for Christianity to allow reason and the study of the natural world a new role. A German Dominican, Albert the Great (c. 1200–1280), was the first to present Aristotle in full to Christian Europe. To Albert the scientific exploration of the world was of value in itself, and he claimed that its findings could never conflict with those arrived at through faith. Aristotle was not to be feared, and, as the philosophers of Islam had already argued, reason and faith would eventually reach a harmony in the knowledge of God. His was a major endorsement of the significance of reason and empiricism (and eventually, in the twentieth century, earned Albert the title of “patron saint” of the natural sciences). Yet this was just a beginning; in 1248, Albert acquired a new student, a young Dominican who already shared his enthusiasm for “the Philosopher,” as Aristotle was known, called Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas was to incorporate Aristotle into the Christian, above all Roman Catholic, tradition with such intellectual power and coherence that in some areas of thought Aristotelianism and Catholicism became virtually indistinguishable. As one commentator has put it, Aquinas converted Aristotle to Christianity and carried out the baptism himself! In view of Aquinas’s heavy dependence on Aristotle, it might rather be said that Aquinas was converted to Aristotelianism.

A prodigious worker, Aquinas wrote several million words of lucid, albeit technical, medieval Latin prose. He avoids rhetoric and exposes little of his personality in the relentless logic and thoroughness with which his great works unfold. Unlike Augustine, he does not offer insights into his own character—there is none of Augustine’s struggle with sexual temptation and a difficult mother to appeal to the modern reader. Adopted into the Catholic tradition as the great teacher, above all in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, he remains a major figure in Catholic theology. Outside Catholicism, philosophers of religion still have to tackle his five “proofs” of the existence of God. He is little read today, but it is arguable that Thomas Aquinas revived the Aristotelian approach to knowing things so successfully that he unwittingly laid the foundations of the scientific revolution that was to transform western thought.
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Aquinas was born near Naples in southern Italy almost certainly in 1225.
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His background was aristocratic, but as a seventh son he was expected to join a religious order, probably the Benedictines—at the age of five he was sent off to the celebrated Benedictine abbey of Monte Cassino. His university studies were in Naples, where he was introduced to secular learning and the works of both Jewish and Arab philosophers; it was here he had his first acquaintance with Aristotle. He was also drawn to the Dominican order, in some ways a surprising choice for one of his background. Compared to the wealthier and more established religious orders, the Dominicans were new (Dominic, their founder, had died only five years before Aquinas’ birth) and relied on begging as a means of support. However, they had already established a reputation for learning and teaching, and this may have attracted the somewhat reserved Aquinas. Shocked by Thomas’ choice of this low-status order, his brothers kidnapped him and removed him to a family estate. He escaped to the Dominicans’ teaching house at Paris, where his extraordinary intellect was soon recognized, and he was then sent to Cologne to study with Albert, the academic star of the order, before returning to Paris, the most celebrated of Europe’s universities, for seven intensive years of study. He was already writing, and even at this early stage the contours of his philosophy, with its emphasis on the use of reason to explore all that can be explored within a creation that was wholly God’s, were established.