The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason (52 page)

Notes

1

1. It is now known to be of the emperor Marcus Aurelius, but the mistaken belief that it was of Constantine led to it being spared when pagan statues were being destroyed by Christians. It was later moved to the Capitoline Hill and can now be seen under cover there in the Palazzo Nuovo.

2. The information used in this chapter comes from the fine study of the fresco by G. Geiger,
Filippino Lippi’s Carafa Chapel: Renaissance Art in Rome
(Kirksville, Mo., 1986), chap. 5, on which my own text is based.

3. The text itself is from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, 1:19, where it is related back to earlier scripture. In the subsequent verses Paul goes on to place God’s wisdom above human wisdom. The consequences of this condemnation of pagan philosophy are a major theme of this book, although, as will be argued later, Paul appears to have known very little of the philosophical tradition which he was attacking.

4. Filippino Lippi was the son of the Florentine Fra Filippo Lippi, an important painter of narrative scenes, and, between 1488 and 1493, a student of Botticelli. The chapel—the only commission known to have been undertaken by Filippino in Rome—was undertaken at the behest of Cardinal Oliviero Carafa (1430–1511), cardinal protector of the Dominicans and a staunch upholder of papal authority. Carafa was a man of action who led a crusade against the Turks in the 1470s. (The Porta Ripa Grande is probably included in the fresco because it was from here that he embarked for the crusade.)

5. The concept of “faith” will be explored in different contexts in this book. For some of the philosophical problems involved see chap. 9, note 14. The words “all will be well” come from the writings of the Christian mystic Julian of Norwich and refer directly to the peace and serenity brought by Jesus.

2

1. Aristotle, Metaphysics II. 1 993a30–34, trans. W. D. Ross.

2. The story is told in book 5 of the
Odyssey.
A recommended translation is that by R. Fagles (London and New York, 1996). Examples of “heroes” consciously using rational thought to decide on a course of action can also be found in Homer’s
Iliad.
In book 17, lines 101–21 (trans. R. Fagles, Harmondsworth, 1991), Menelaus, “deeply torn, as he probed his own great heart,” weighs up whether to fight Hector in single combat or to withdraw from battle. In an important article, “The Epic Cycle and the Uniqueness of Homer” (
Journal of Hellenic Studies,
vol. 97 [1977], pp. 39–53), Jasper Griffin compares Homer’s epics, the
Odyssey
and the
Iliad,
with an epic cycle that survives from the same period. In the epic cycle heroes are immortal and there are monsters and miracles, while Homer’s is a cosmos where even heroes cannot escape death and the natural world is presented as it really is. (Animals cannot change shape or form, for instance.) In Homer’s world, of course, the gods still hold some power, as in the passage here, but over the next centuries the development of rational thought was to diminish their role in the natural world. Homer can thus be seen to have made an important contribution to the transition from a world of magic and miracles to one of reason.

3. The evolution of the city state can be traced in O. Murray, Early Greece, 2nd ed. (London, 1993), and R. Osborne, Greece in the Making, 1200–479 B.C. (London, 1996).

4. For an introduction to Greek religion see S. Price, Religions of the Ancient
Greeks
(Cambridge, 1999).

5. Quoted ibid., p. 79.

6. Thucydides,
The Peloponnesian War
3:82, trans. R. Warner, Penguin Classics.

7. Homer’s epics already include some appreciation of an underlying natural order. In this extract, the gods themselves act to impose it. Poseidon, the god of earthquakes, helped, significantly, by Apollo, the god of reason among other things, gets rid of the intrusive settlement made by the Greeks along the coastline outside Troy.

The earth-shaker himself, trident locked in his grip,
led the way, rocking loose, sweeping up in his breakers
all the bastions, strong supports of logs and stones . . .
He made all smooth along the rip of the Hellespont
and piled the endless beaches deep in sand again
and once he had levelled the Argives’ mighty wall
he turned the rivers flowing back in their beds again
where their fresh clear tides had run since time began.
So in the years to come Poseidon and the god Apollo
would set all things to rights once more.

Trans. R. Fagles,
The Iliad,
Penguin Classics. The “Argives” are the Greeks.

8. Translation by O. Murray.

9. As an overview of the “scientific revolution,” see C. Kahn, “The Origins of Greek Science and Philosophy,” in A. Bowen, ed.,
Science and Philosophy in Ancient
Greece
(New York and London, 1993).
The Cambridge Companion to Early Greek
Philosophy,
ed. A. A. Long (Cambridge, 1999), has articles on the main pre-Socratic (that is, those practising before Socrates, late fifth century) philosophers. For a broad survey of Greek thinking in general, see J. Brunschwig and G. E. R. Lloyd, eds.,
Greek Thought: A Guide to Classical Knowledge
(Cambridge, Mass., and London, 2000), and the chapter “Philosophy” by B. Williams, in M. I. Finley, ed.,
The Legacy
of Greece: A New Appraisal
(Oxford, 1984).

10. Lloyd’s case for the relationship between politics and philosophy is argued most strongly in his
Magic, Reason and Experience
(Cambridge, 1979). See especially chap. 4, “Greek Science and Greek Society.”

11. M. West, “Early Greek Philosophy,” in J. Boardman, J. Griffin and O. Murray, eds.,
The Oxford History of the Classical World
(Oxford, 1986).

12. For Aristotle a particularly good introduction is J. Barnes,
Aristotle
(Oxford, 1982). Chap. 7, “Logic,” deals with syllogisms. A more advanced survey is J. Lear,
Aristotle: The Desire to Understand
(Cambridge, 1988).

13. Quoted in P. Hoffman, The Man Who Loved Only Numbers (London, 1999), p. 113. A good introduction to Greek mathematics is to be found in M. Kline,
Mathematical Thought from Ancient to Modern Times,
vol. 1 (New York and Oxford, 1972). Euclid and Apollonius are given full treatment in chap. 4.

14. Herodotus used to be derided by commentators for his continuing use of myth and uncritical use of oral evidence, in contrast, it is argued, with the more “scientific” Thucydides. Recently, however, R. Thomas, in her
Herodotus in
Context: Ethnography, Science and the Art of Persuasion
(Cambridge, 2000), has argued that Herodotus deserves to be placed in the forefront of intellectual developments of the fifth century.

15. From Sacred Disease, attributed to Hippocrates, VI 352, 1–9L; 364, 9–15; 366, 5–6L. Trans. J. Longrigg; quoted in his Greek Medicine: From the Heroic to the
Hellenistic Age. A Source Book
(London, 1998), p. 21.
Sacred Disease
is considered at some length by G. E. R. Lloyd, in his
Magic, Reason and Experience
(Cambridge, 1979), pp. 15–29.

16. The Ionian physician Alcmaeon (Ionian, fifth century B.C.) transfers the concept of stability being achieved through the union of opposites, surely a concept taken from notions of “the ideal city,” to the human body.

Alcmaeon holds that what preserves health is the equality of the powers, moist and dry, cold and hot, bitter and sweet, and the rest—and the supremacy of any one of them causes disease, for the supremacy of either is destructive. The cause of disease is an excess of heat or cold, the occasion of it surfeit or deficiency of nourishment: the location of it, marrow or the brain. Disease may come about from external causes, from the quality of water, local environment or toil or torture. Health, on the other hand, is a harmonious blending of the qualities.

Longrigg,
Greek Medicine,
p. 31. For Galen’s attempts to find a mathematical base for scientific demonstration, see G. E. R. Lloyd, “Demonstration in Galen,” in M. Frede and G. Striker, eds.,
Rationality in Greek Thought
(Oxford, 1996), pp. 255–78.

17. This is how Aristotle defended the spherical nature of the earth:

(i) If the earth were not spherical, eclipses of the moon would not exhibit segments of the shape they do . . . (ii) Observation of the stars also shows not only that the earth is spherical but that it is of no great size . . . we do not see the same stars as we move to the North or South . . . For this reason those who imagine that the region around the Pillars of Heracles [Straits of Gibraltar] joins on to the regions of India, and that in this way the ocean is one, are not, it would seem, suggesting anything incredible.

From On the Heavens, trans. W. Guthrie, Loeb Classical Library, 1939, 297b25–298a10.

18. For introductions to Greek science, see T. E. Rihill,
Greek Science
(Oxford, 1999), and G. E. R. Lloyd,
Early Greek Science: Thales to Aristotle
(London, 1974), and
Greek Science After Aristotle
(London, 1973). For astronomy there is Michael Hoskin, ed.,
The Cambridge Concise History of Astronomy
(Cambridge, 1999).

19. Barnes,
Aristotle,
is excellent on all this.

20. These examples are taken from Aristotle’s
Historia Animalium
and
De
Partibus Animalium,
which are discussed in G. E. R. Lloyd,
Aristotelian Explorations
(Cambridge, 1996), chap. 3. When Aristotle was absorbed into Christianity (see chap. 20 of this book), his readiness to question was played down, and it was only fully recognized again in the twentieth century.

21. G. E. R. Lloyd,
The Revolutions of Wisdom
(Berkeley and London, 1957), p. 153.

22. Ibid., p. 57.

23. It is easy to pick up, from Paul’s letters and from Christian thought in general, the idea that rational thinking is somehow an arrogant enterprise, trespassing on what belongs to God. However, in so far as rational argument is subject to public scrutiny at every stage, the opposite is the case. A mathematician or scientist can be humiliated by his peers when his arguments are shown to be invalid. As E. R. Dodds put in in his well-known study
The Greeks and the Irrational
(Berkeley and London, 1951): “That honest distinction between what is knowable and what is not appears again and again in fifth-century thought, and is surely one of its chief glories; it is the foundation of scientific humility [
sic
]” (p. 181). The real problem, as Dodds suggests, lies in taking rational thought in directions where it cannot go—in cases where there are no firm axioms from which the argument can begin. This is, arguably, the problem with Plato. Plato believed that the ultimate truth about everything from “the Good” to beauty and justice could be solved by the use of rational thought. The difficulties this led to will be discussed in the next chapter and at other points in this book. There was an important strand in Greek thought—known usually as Pyrrhonist Skepticism, after its supposed founder, Pyrrhon (c. 365–275 B.C.)—that used rational argument to delineate the problems in making rational argument. The Greeks were also aware of how the value of materials or concepts may be relative to their context. Heraclitus, inventive as ever, noted, “Sea: purest and most polluted water, for fish drinkable and life-sustaining, for people undrinkable and death-bringing,” suggesting in other words that what may appear to have value in one context may lack it in another. See the article “Skepticism” by J. Brunschwig and G. E. R. Lloyd, eds.,
Greek Thought: A Guide to
Classical Knowledge
(Cambridge, Mass., and London, 2000), and R. Mortley,
From
Word to Silence: The Rise and Fall of Logos
(Bonn, 1986).

24. How a language which can deal with abstract things and states of being emerged has been a subject of great controversy centring around the work of Eric Havelock. See C. L. Johnstone’s introductory essay in Theory, Text, Context: Issues
in Greek Rhetoric and Oratory
(New York, 1994), and the essays by Havelock, J. Margolis and others in K. Robb, ed., Language and Thought in Early Greek
Philosophy
(La Salle, Ill., 1983). For the foundations of the term
logos,
see Mortley,
From Word to Silence,
chap. 1, “
Logos
Identified.”

25. The Athenians, for instance, believed that their founding king, Erectheus, had sprung from semen placed directly in the earth of Attica, the plain surrounding the city, by the god Hephaestus and so they alone among Greeks could be said to be truly native to Greece and thus superior to other Greeks. Most of their rivals had foundation myths in which the founder came from elsewhere. Having a “better” foundation myth than anyone else was typical of Athenian arrogance.

26. The use of myth in tragic drama was such a sophisticated way of dealing with apparently resolvable ethical issues that a digression seems justified here. The play Antigone by Sophocles (performed in 468 B.C.) offers an excellent example of how a moral dilemma is presented in drama. The brother of Antigone, Polyneices, has been killed attacking the city of Thebes. Creon, the king of Thebes, declares him polluted and thus not worthy of burial. Antigone is determined that he should be buried according to the “unwritten and unfailing conventions of the gods” and goes ahead to scatter earth on his body. Which should take precedence, the authority of the city ruler or the conventions of the gods? This had become an issue of crucial importance as city authority grew in the sixth and fifth centuries. Sophocles makes the dilemma more complex through his portrayal of the characters. Creon is hard, emotionally clumsy and inflexible. Antigone is also inflexible (in comparison to her more pliant sister Ismene, for instance) but expresses herself more nobly. The play ends tragically. Antigone commits suicide, as does Creon’s son who has been in love with her, and his wife, but Sophocles allows other characters in the play to consider the need for living flexibly within the world without losing one’s sense of overall purpose. An analogy is made with a ship. It has its purpose, to sail towards a destination, but it would never arrive if it tried to sail directly there in the face of the wind. It has to learn how to exploit the winds for its own ends. Sophocles is suggesting that inflexibility in support of absolute values may not be the best way of living. The play is discussed in detail by M. Nussbaum,
The Fragility of Goodness
(Cambridge, 1986), chap. 3.