The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason (64 page)

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. Brown,
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.

16. G. Wills,
Saint Augustine
(London and New York, 1999), p. 93, quoting Albrecht Dihle.

17. C. Stead, Philosophy in Christian Antiquity (Cambridge, 1994), p. 223. Stead goes on (p. 227) to consider the problems of isolating oneself from empirical evidence.

One cannot explain human knowledge as a purely active process; it always involves attention to data which are not of our own making, apart from the exceptional case where we attend to our own creative thoughts and fantasies. Augustine often seems to see this clearly enough; but he does not take the decisive step of abandoning the will-o’-the-wisp of a purely active intellect, and the artificial theories to which it leads.

There is much wisdom in this statement, and it is of relevance to the theme in this book as a whole.

18. From the article “Reason” in A. Hastings, ed.,
The Oxford Companion to
Christian Thought
(Oxford and New York, 2000), p. 596. Compare the words of Joan of Arc in George Bernard Shaw’s
St. Joan,
scene 5, when she is asked by Dunois, the Bastard of Orleans, why she provides him with reasons for her belief in her voices. “Well, I have to find reasons for you, because you do not believe in my voices. But the voices come first; and I find the reasons after . . .”

19. Quotations taken from Wills,
Saint Augustine,
p. 44.

20. R. MacMullen, Christianity and Paganism in the Fourth to Eighth
Centuries
(London and New Haven, 1997), p. 94.

21. See G. Bonner, “Augustine as Biblical Scholar,” in P. R. Ackroyd and C. F. Evans, eds.,
The Cambridge History of the Bible,
vol 1 (Cambridge, 1970), pp. 541–63. In order to show how lively Augustine’s imagination could be, I summarize (from this article) Augustine’s analysis of the 153 fish caught in the miraculous draught (John 21:11). The sum of the integers 1 to 17 is 153. Taking 17, this is the sum of 10 (the Ten Commandments) and 7 (the number of the Holy Spirit, who enables the elect to fulfill the law). Thus 153 fishes comes to represent the whole number of the elect, as regenerated by the Holy Spirit. It is also three times 50 plus 3, the persons of the Trinity. The number 50 represents the square of 7 (the number of the Spirit) with one added to show the unity of the Spirit, whose operations are sevenfold and who was sent on the fiftieth day to the disciples! Note the mildly sarcastic comment of R. Mortley in his
From Word to Silence,
vol. 2,
The Way of
Negation, Christian and Greek
(Bonn, 1986), p. 246: “At times it appears as if Augustine’s pursuit of meaning in the pages of Scripture is somewhat like that of the modern literary critic [note Mortley is writing in the mid 1980s], who by multiplying a series of references and subjective connections, finds a meaning which is far removed from the text itself and any possible authorial intention.”

22. See Kirwan, Augustine, p. 131, for Augustine on original sin. Paul’s influence on Augustine was profound, so much so that one scholar has gone so far as to claim that “much of western Christian thought can be seen as one long response to Augustine’s Paul” (P. Fredriksen in the entry on Paul in Fitzgerald, ed., Augustine
Through the Ages
).