The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason (65 page)

23. The old question of how a god who is conceptualized as omnipotent and omniscient can allow evil seems impossible to answer. The pagan philosopher Sextus Empiricus (probably end of the second century A.D.) put the issue well in his
Outlines of Pyrrhonism,
3:12: “For in claiming that he [God] is provident in all things, they will be saying that he is the cause of evil, but if they claim that he is provident only about some things or nothing, they will be forced to say either that God lacks good will or is weak; yet obviously only people who are impious will say this.” Quoted in M. Frede, “Monotheism and Pagan Philosophy” in P. Athanassiadi and M. Frede, eds.,
Pagan Monotheism in Late Antiquity
(Oxford, 1999), p. 56. In the mid second century, Marcion (the champion of Paul) attempted to solve the problem by arguing that there were two Gods, the powerful Creator God of the Old Testament, whose behaviour as related in the Old Testament was quite clearly wicked, and a good, all-knowing God who was the father of Christ. See Pelikan,
The
Christian Tradition,
vol. 1, pp. 71ff. An introduction to the problems can be found in any study of the philosophy of religion, for instance, that edited by B. Davies,
Philosophy of Religion: A Guide and Anthology
(Oxford, 2000). There is a short overview in the article “Evil, the Problem of” by Thomas P. Flint in Hastings, ed.,
The Oxford Companion to Christian Thought.
I have always been unhappy with the argument that evil should be seen as the inevitable consequence of God’s gift to humanity of free will. Should one attempt to persuade those whose lives have been irretrievably ruined by the evil actions of others that this is because of the exercise of a free will given to the perpetrator of the evil by a God whom they should believe to be fully loving?

24. See Harrison,
Augustine,
p. 87, for the quotation from Augustine. The earlier history of Christian thinking on free will (as well as Augustine’s views) is covered by Pelikan,
The Christian Tradition,
vol. 1, chap. 6, “Nature and Grace.”

25. Pelikan’s chapter on “Nature and Grace” is outstanding on Augustine’s views. The problem remained of why anyone should behave well if it was already predestined who should be saved and who condemned. At the same time, if God can grant or withhold grace at will, then the responsibility of “allowing” human beings to go to hell is his. Augustine argued in return that God created men whose damnation he could foresee as a means of manifesting his anger and demonstrating his power. The contradictions involved in sorting out predestination can be seen in the following quotation from Augustine cited by Pelikan (p. 297): “As the one who is supremely good, he made good use of evil deeds [
sic!
], for the damnation of those whom he had justly predestined to punishment and for the salvation of those whom he had kindly predestined to grace.” One hardly needs to go further to explain the profound sense of insecurity that Augustine and his followers brought into the Christian tradition.

26. Harrison’s quotation comes from her
Augustine,
p. 28. Kirwan,
Augustine,
lists the “original sin” texts on p. 131. They are also discussed by Pelikan in
The
Christian Tradition,
vol. 1, pp. 299–300. Pelikan notes how Augustine was misled by a Latin mistranslation of Romans 5:12 in which “death spread to all men, through one man, in whom all men sinned,” whereas the Greek original reads, “Death spread to all men, through one man, because all men sinned.” See Stead,
Philosophy in Christian Antiquity,
pp. 232–33, for Augustine’s views that the number of saved equalled the number of angels. In his
City of God
(22:24), Augustine leaves only the smallest scope for reasoned thought in “fallen man.” “There is still the spark, as it were, of that reason in virtue of which he was made in the image of God: that spark has not been fully put out” (trans. H. Bettenson).

27. Pelikan,
The Christian Tradition,
vol. 1, p. 315, for the first of Pelagius’ quotations; Harrison,
Augustine,
p. 103, for the second. Gerald Bonner has useful essays on Augustine and Pelagianism in his
Church and Faith in the Patristic
Tradition (Aldershot, U.K., and Brookfield, Vt., 1996).

28. Quoted in Kirwan,
Augustine,
p. 134. Richard Sorabji in his
Emotion and
Peace of Mind: From Stoic Agitation to Christian Temptation
(Oxford, 2000), concludes that Julian (and Pelagius) won the philosophical argument but that the political argument (which was what now mattered) was won by Augustine. Sorabji concludes his chapter “Augustine on Lust and the Will” as follows (p. 417):

To many, myself included, the Pelagian view that lust is a good thing, which may be put to bad use, is far more attractive than Augustine’s view that lust is a bad thing which may, in marriage, be put to a good use. If Pelagius had prevailed on this and more generally on original sin, a British theologian would have been at the centre of western theology, and western attitudes to sexuality, and to much else besides, might have been very different.

The question of how an “evil” thing (sexual incontinence as Augustine conceived it) can be made good simply through the circumstances in which it is undertaken is another example of Augustine tying himself up in knots (and defying his own mentor Paul, who had condemned the idea of doing evil that good may come of it, Romans 3:8). The contradictions here are dissected by J. Mahoney on “Augustinism and Sexual Morality” in his
The Making of Moral Theology: A Study of the Roman
Catholic Tradition
(Oxford, 1987), pp. 58–68.

29. The quotations are taken from the article by H. Chadwick, “Orthodoxy and Heresy,” in A. Cameron and P. Garnsey, eds., The Cambridge Ancient History, vol. XIII (Cambridge, 1998), p. 583.

30. The conference of 411 is well covered by M. Tilley in “Dilatory Donatists or Procrastinating Catholics: The Trial at the Conference of Carthage,” in E. Ferguson, ed.,
Doctrinal Diversity: Varieties of Early Christianity
(New York and London, 1999). Tilley argues that the Donatists assumed that this conference would be a proper chance to discuss theology, but in fact it turned out to be no more than “an imperial administrative process” through which to condemn them. The Donatists attempted to argue that the issue was one of the goodness of individuals and mocked Augustine’s view that good and bad individuals could co-exist within the same institution without defiling that institution.

31. The quotation from Augustine is from Kirwan,
Augustine,
p. 212, and that from Gregory from H. Drake,
Constantine and the Bishops: The Politics of
Intolerance (Baltimore and London, 2000), p. 407. See C. Kirwan, Augustine, pp. 212–18, for Augustine’s shifting views on persecution. See also Rist,
Augustine,
“Towards a Theory of Persecution,” pp. 239–45.

32. Rist,
Augustine,
p. 215. Like the Homoeans, the Donatists were casualities of the new principle that there should be only one state church based on one interpretation of Christianity. As rivals to the ownership of Christian “truth,” the Donatists were treated far more harshly than Jews or pagans.

33. The quotation, itself quoted from a review, comes from Stephen O’Shea’s
The Perfect Heresy: Life and Death of the Cathars
(London, 2000).

34. A point made by Harrison,
Augustine,
p. 197, who elaborates, on pp. 200–202, the sources for the idea of “the two cities.” The rigid dichotomy between polarized extremes, good and bad, saved and unsaved, not only draws, like so much of Augustine’s thought, on Paul but is typical of Augustine’s polemical rhetoric. As such, it has created a great deal of unnecessary anxiety among Christians (if one does not agree totally with what has been defined as orthodoxy, one is condemned), and it has hindered the exploration of unresolved theological issues.

35.
The City of God
19:13, quoted ibid., p. 207.

36. J. S. McClelland, A History of Western Political Thought (London, 1996), p. 108.

37. The point is made in Michael Signer’s article “Jews and Judaism,” in Fitzgerald, ed.,
Augustine Through the Ages,
pp. 470–73. See also Harrison’s sympathetic assessment in
Augustine,
pp. 142–44.

38. Stead,
Philosophy in Christian Antiquity,
p. 235.

39. Rist,
Augustine,
pp. 291–92. Note St. Jerome’s comment in his Letter CVC: “You are renowned throughout the world. Catholics venerate you, and look upon you as a second founder of the old faith. And, surely what is a sign of greater glory [
sic
], all the heretics detest you.” Mahoney, “Augustinism and Sexual Morality,” p. 69, notes that Augustine’s use of polarized language “can lead to violent and extreme language and entrenched positions, in which words become weapons with which to crush an adversary rather than inadequate counters of that humble exploration of divine reality which should be characteristic of theological discourse.”

40. Quoted by M. Warner,
Alone of All Her Sex
(London, 1985), p. 57. As she notes, the idea “is an extension of Augustine’s argument about original sin.”

41. For this period, see chap. 5, “A Divided City: The Christian Church, 300–460,” especially the section “The Primacy of Peter,” in R. Collins,
Early
Medieval Europe, 300–1000,
2nd ed. (London, 1999). On Rome, R. Krautheimer’s
Rome: Profile of a City, 312–1208
(Princeton, 2000), is an excellent starting point.

42. A good starting point for the tortuous career of Vigilius is his entry in J. Kelly,
The Oxford Dictionary of the Popes
(Oxford, 1986).

43. Herrin,
The Formation of Christendom,
pp. 125–27. Her chap. 3, “The Churches in the Sixth Century: The Council of 553,” is essential for more detailed study of this period.

44. Ibid., p. 182. On Gregory, Herrin has good points to make—see her chap. 4, “The Achievement of Gregory the Great.” For a fuller study, see R. Markus, Gregory the Great and His World (Cambridge, 1997), and for Gregory’s thought, C. Straw,
Gregory the Great: Perfection in Imperfection
(Berkeley and London, 1988). There is also a sensitive introduction to Gregory by M. Colish in her
Medieval
Foundations of the Western Intellectual Tradition
(New Haven and London, 1997), pp. 37–41.

45. Quoted in MacMullen, Christianity and Paganism, p. 97. R. A. Markus considers Gregory’s approach to secular learning in
Gregory the Great,
pp. 34–40.

46. Herrin,
The Formation of Christendom,
p. 177. The longer extract from this reproach that Herrin gives has much to say about Gregory’s view of the ministry, in particular that the need for unity in the church requires that bishops should be prepared to cooperate and compromise with each other when necessary. The quotation on “compassion” and “contemplation” comes from Gregory’s
Regula
Pastoralis,
his great work on the exercise of spiritual power.

47. Markus,
Gregory the Great,
p. 204.

48. Collins in
Early Medieval Europe,
p. 233. Chap. 13, “The Sundering of East and West,” provides a good overview of the process.

49. The story of Fursey is told by P. Brown in “Gloriosus Obitus: The End of the Ancient Other World,” in W. Klingshirn and M. Vessey, eds., The Limits of
Ancient Christianity: Essays on Later Antique Thought and Culture in Honor of
R. A. Markus
(Ann Arbor, 1999), pp. 294–95. The problem of why Christianity laid such heavy stress on punishment in the afterlife is, of course, a major subject in itself and has only been partially addressed in this book. The words of Jesus in Matthew (25:31–46) have been fundamental, and Matthew 22:14, “Many are called but few are chosen,” was used “generation after generation as proof that only a minority ever reached heaven” with the majority consigned everlastingly to hell. See the article on “hell” by A. Hastings, ed., in
The Oxford Companion to Christian Thought.

50. N. MacGregor, Seeing Salvation: Images of Christ in Art (London, 2000), p. 127. See also M. Merback,
The Thief, the Cross and the Wheel: Pain and
Punishment in Medieval and Renaissance Europe
(London, 1999), although this book concentrates primarily on the crucifixion of the good and bad thieves. The chapter “Images of the Suffering Redeemer” in R. M. Jensen,
Understanding Early
Christian Art
(London and New York, 2000), provides an excellent exploration of the issues involved.

51. See Peter Brown,
The Rise of Western Christendom,
2nd ed. (Malden, Oxford, Melbourne, and Berlin, 2003), p. 119. This magnificent survey of western Christendom takes the story up to 1000.

19

1. Book 5, chap. 5. The extracts are from the Penguin edition, translated by D. Magarshack.

2. Tenth-century
Ecomium
of Gregory of Nazianzus, quoted in R. Lim,
Public
Disputation, Power and Social Order in Late Antiquity
(Berkeley and London, 1995), p. 158. A survey of how these heresies interacted on the ground can be found in S. Mitchell, Anatolia: Land, Men and Gods in Asia Minor (Oxford, 1993), vol. 2, pp. 91–108. Mitchell’s survey shows that in fourth-century Phrygia and Lycaonia, orthodox Christianity was virtually unknown in an area that was, however, heavily Christian.

3. J. Pelikan,
Christianity and Classical Culture
(New Haven and London, 1993), is especially helpful here. See in particular chap. 3, “The Language of Negation.”

4. As reported by his fellow Cappadocian Gregory of Nyssa, above, p. 195.

5. Lim,
Public Disputation,
p. 168.

6. See ibid., pp. 158–71, for a full analysis of these orations.

7. R. Hanson,
The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God
(Edinburgh, 1988), p. 809. Edward Gibbon made the point that if one wanted to know just how vicious debates were in these councils, one turned not to opponents of Christianity but to “one of the most pious and eloquent bishops of the age, a saint and a doctor of the church,” Gregory of Nazianzus. A member of the Anglican commission on liturgy, the late Michael Vesey, is said to have compared preparing liturgical texts for the Anglican Synod with “trying to do embroidery with a bunch of football hooligans.” Quoted in a letter to the
Independent
newspaper (London), November 29, 2000.