The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason (66 page)

8. Lim,
Public Disputation,
p. 171.

9. Ibid., pp. 171–81.

10. The first quotation is from Pseudo-Dionysius,
The Celestial Hierarchy,
quoted in A. Cameron,
Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire
(Berkeley and London, 1991), p. 219. Pseudo-Dionysius claimed that his works had been written by Dionysius the Areopagite, a convert of Paul’s. The claim was so successful that it was not until 1895 that his writings were recognized as coming from the fifth century. See Paul Rorem, “The Uplifting Spirituality of Pseudo-Dionysius,” in Bernard McGinn and John Meyendorff, eds.,
Christian Spirituality: Origins to the
Twelfth Century
(London, 1986); the quotation about “God being in no way like the things that have being” is taken from p. 135.

11. Quoted in Pelikan,
Christianity and Classical Culture,
p. 234.

12. Quoted in Lim,
Public Disputation,
p. 221.

13. I have taken these points from chap. 7, “The Orthodox Consensus,” in J. Pelikan’s
The Christian Tradition,
vol. 1 (Chicago and London, 1971). They remain recognizable in contemporary Roman Catholicism. Standard histories of Christian doctrine still tend to exclude mention of the historical context within which doctrine developed. This is one area of Christianity where the influence of Platonism remains strong. Correct doctrine is like the Platonic Forms, eternal, unchanging and available for an elite to grasp. This elite alone (the church hierarchies) has the right to interpret it for others. In such a context ideas cannot be relative to the society in which they are formed, and it is hardly surprising therefore that standard histories of Christian doctrine tend to ignore the wider historical context in which doctrine developed. Richard Hanson was one of the first theologians to declare, in
The Search for the
Christian Doctrine of God
(Edinburgh, 1988), that it was the emperors who were the main force in establishing orthodoxy. Even then, his view, which was supported by a mass of historical evidence, was described in one review as “provocative.”

14. There is Protagoras’ famous saying from the fifth century B.C.: “About the gods I am not able to know whether they exist or do not exist, nor what they are like in form; for the factors preventing knowledge are many: the obscurity of the subject, and the shortness of human life.” There is no indication here that Protagoras believed no one should have a go at defining the nature of the gods, in fact there is a record that he wrote just such a work himself and recited it in the home of the playwright Euripides.

15. Quoted in Cameron,
Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire,
p. 15.

16. Ibid., p. 67. See also chap. 13, “Madness and Divinization: Symeon the Holy Fool,” in Guy Stroumsa,
Barbarian Philosophy: The Religious Revolution of
Early Christianity
(Tubingen, 1999).

17. Augustine,
De Doctrina Christiana
4:163 (translation: Green). A little earlier (section 161) Augustine suggests that God’s words are like a possession that can be stolen. The fact that such a possession is held by a thief does not diminish its value. The point remains that the link stressed by Isocrates and Quintilian between the moral character of the speaker and the words he spoke has been broken.

18. G. Kennedy,
A New History of Classical Rhetoric
(Princeton, 1994), pp. 269–70.

19. Lim,
Public Disputation,
p. 233 and elsewhere in his book.

20. Ibid., pp. 231–32. Earlier attacks on Aristotle are to be found, as in the works of Tertullian. Arius was even referred to at one point as “the new Aristotle” on the grounds that he employed dialectic, in other words examined issues critically, rather than relying on faith. See R. Vaggione,
Eunomius of Cyzicus and the Nicene
Revolution
(Oxford, 2000), p. 95.

21. Lim,
Public Disputation,
pp. 174–75.

22. These quotations are taken from R. MacMullen, Christianity and Paganism
in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries
(New Haven and London, 1997), pp. 86–89.

23. Cameron,
Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire,
p. 206.

24. MacMullen, Christianity and Paganism, p. 90.

25. Edward Gibbon,
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,
chap. 28.

26. Basil is quoted in Pelikan,
Christianity and Classical Culture,
p. 177. For the bishop of Melitene, see Henry Chadwick,
The Church in Ancient Society
(Oxford, 2001), p. 591.

27. “Bede and Medieval Civilization” and “Bede and His Legacy,” reprinted as items XI and XIV in Gerald Bonner,
Church and Faith in Patristic Tradition
(Aldershot, U.K., and Brookfield, Vt., 1996). As Bonner puts it, “Bede’s outlook is a narrow one, not merely in the sense that any specialist, theologian or otherwise is professionally narrow, but in the sense of deliberatly seeking to exclude a whole department of human experience—the non-Christian—from his considerations. . . . Bede did not seek to be original, but to stand in the tradition of the Fathers of the Church” (p. 10).

28. H. Belting,
Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image Before the Era of
Art,
trans. E. Jephcott (Chicago and London, 1994). There is a wealth of material in this book on icons and the theological dimensions within which they were set. See also A. Cameron, “The Language of Images: The Rise of Icons and Christian Representation,” in D. Wood, ed.,
The Church and the Arts
(Oxford, 1992), pp. 1–42. An atmospheric account of these changes is to be found in P. Brown, The
World of Late Antiquity
(London, 1971), chap. 14, “The Death of the Classical World: Culture and Religion in the Early Middle Ages.”

29. R. McInerny,
Saint Thomas Aquinas
(Boston, 1977), p. 18.

30. M. Hoskin and O. Gingerich, “Medieval Latin Astronomy,” chap. 4 in M. Hoskin, ed.,
The Cambridge Concise History of Astronomy
(Cambridge, 1999).

31. See the essay by Louise Marshall, “Confraternity and Community,” in B. Wisch, ed.,
Confraternities and the Visual Arts in Renaissance Italy: Ritual,
Spectacle, Image
(Cambridge, 2000), above all the illustrations on pp. 22 and 23 (examples from Genoa and Siena). The examples are all the more remarkable in that when Apollo sends his plague on the Greeks at Troy (through arrows), it is the goddesses Hera and Athena who intervene to find a solution by which the plague is withdrawn.

32. Examples of shrines which maintain their continuity from pagan to Christian are taken from MacMullen, Christianity and Paganism, pp. 126–27, but most of the examples quoted here and in the following paragraph come from R. Porter,
The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity from
Antiquity to the Present
(London, 1997), chap. 4, “Medicine and Faith,” and chap. 5, “The Medieval West.” Miracles were, of course, known in the pagan world as well. One can learn a great deal from studying the contexts in which miracles take place and the range of miracles, some harming God’s apparent enemies, others healing, others used as a means of effecting conversions. See W. Cotter, Miracles in
Greco-Roman Antiquity: A Sourcebook
(London, 1999).

33.
The Life of Saint Francis of Assisi,
trans. Ewart Cousins, 1:5–6, in Bonaventura,
The Soul’s Journey unto God and Other Writings
(Paulist Press, 1978), pp. 34–35.

34. The Euchologion, quoted by P. Horden and N. Purcell, The Corrupting Sea (Oxford, 2000), p. 411.

35. Gibbon,
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,
chap. 28.

36. See Antonio Damasio,
Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human
Brain
(New York, 1994; London, 1995).

37. An excellent exploration of this aspect of Christianity is to be found in Averil Cameron,
Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire
(Berkeley and London, 1995), especially chap. 5, “The Rhetoric of Paradox.”

38. As Morris Kline, the historian of mathematics, puts it: “It is doubtful whether medieval Europe, if permitted to pursue an unchanging course, would ever have developed any real science or mathematics.” M. Kline,
Mathematical Thought
from Ancient to Modern Times,
vol. 1 (Oxford and New York, 1972), p. 214. For Copernicus’ achievement within the context of medieval astronomy, see Hoskin and Gingerich, “Medieval Latin Astronomy.”

20

1. This example is drawn from Elizabeth Fowden’s study
The Barbarian Plain
(Berkeley and London, 1999). The quote from the Nestorian patriarch comes from an article, “Two Civilizations Entwined in History,” by William Dalrymple in the
Independent
(London), October 12, 2001. I was intrigued to read in Jan Morris’
Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere
(London, 2001) that Sergius had, in legend, been converted to Christianity while serving as a soldier in Trieste, and that at the moment of his martyrdom on the Barbarian Plain his halberd fell miraculously from the sky into the main piazza of the city. It is still preserved and is the main feature of an annual procession on his feast day.

2. Quoted in R. MacMullen, Christianity and Paganism in the Fourth to
Eighth Centuries
(New Haven and London, 1997), p. 19.

3. I have drawn material for this section from R. R. Bolgar, “The Greek Legacy,” in M. Finley, ed.,
The Legacy of Greece: A New Appraisal
(Oxford, 1984), and chap. 4 of R. Porter’s
The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of
Humanity from Antiquity to the Present
(London, 1997). For fuller coverage of Islamic philosophy, whose contribution to western thought is increasingly being recognized, see R. Popkin, ed.,
The Pimlico History of Western Philosophy
(New York, 1998; London, 1999), sect. 2, “Medieval Islamic and Jewish Philosophy.” The works of Jewish philosophers such as Moses Maimonides were also an important influence on western philosophy.

4. Quoted in P. Brown, “Christianisation and Religious Conflict,” in A. Cameron and P. Garnsey, eds., The Cambridge Ancient History, vol. XIII (Cambridge, 1998), p. 639. Compare the statement made at the Council of Florence (1439–45): “No one who is outside the Catholic Church, not just pagans, but Jews, heretics, and schismatics, can share in eternal life.”

5. See R. Fletcher,
The Conversion of Europe
(London, 1997), for an overview. The consolidation of a rationale for church authority in both east and west is well covered by J. Pelikan,
The Christian Tradition,
vol. 1 (Chicago and London, 1971), chap. 7, “The Orthodox Consensus.”

6. See R. Tarnas,
The Passion of the Western Mind
(London, 1996), part IV, “The Transformation of the Medieval Era,” and M. Colish,
Medieval Foundations
of the Western Intellectual Tradition
(New Haven and London, 1997), especially chap. 20, “Scholasticism and the Rise of Universities.”

7. This view is argued with impressive power by Tarnas,
The Passion of the
Western Mind,
“The Quest of Thomas Aquinas,” pp. 179–90.

8. For Thomas Aquinas, a good short introduction is A. Kenny,
Aquinas
(Oxford, 1980). For more extended treatment, see R. McInerny,
Saint Thomas
Aquinas
(Boston, 1977), and B. Davies,
The Thought of Thomas Aquinas
(Oxford, 1992). While one can applaud Thomas Aquinas for his courage and independence in bringing back rational thought into the Christian tradition, he remained a man of his time in many of his attitudes, especially to women, whom he would consciously avoid, and sexuality in general.

9. McInerny provides a typical statement of Aquinas’ defence of free will, in which free will is seen as intrinsic to man’s status as a rational being. The extract also gives an idea of Aquinas’ method of exposition.

For the sheep seeing the wolf judges that she should flee by a natural judgment which is not free since it does not involve pondering but she judges by natural instinct. So it is with every judgment of the brute animal. Now man acts by means of judgment, because through a knowing power he judges that something should be pursued or avoided, yet this instinct is not by a natural instinct toward a particular action but from a rational pondering. Thus he acts by free judgment since he is capable of directing himself in diverse ways . . . For this reason, that man acts from free judgement follows necessarily from the fact that he is rational.

McInerny,
Saint Thomas Aquinas,
p. 54. One less happy result of the argument presented above was that Aquinas followed Augustine in seeing animals as non-rational beings who were thus entirely at the service of man. He also followed Aristotle in believing that women are “by nature subordinate to man, because the power of rational discernment is by nature stronger in man.”

There has been a tendency in Catholic theology to smooth over the difference between the major theologians. However, surely the contrast between Aquinas and Augustine is profound. Aquinas could never have written as Augustine did: “To approve falsehood instead of truth so as to err in spite of himself, and not to be able to refrain from the works of lust because of the pain involved in breaking away from fleshly bonds: these do not belong to the nature of man as he was created [before the Fall]. They are the penalty of man as [now] condemned [by original sin].” From
On
Free Will 3:18:52, quoted in C. Harrison, Augustine, Christian Truth and Fractured
Humanity
(Oxford, 2000), p. 86. Compare too the words of Athanasius, “We are not permitted to ask presumptuous questions about the begetting of the Son of God
nor to make our nature and our limitations the measure of God and his wisdom
” (my emphasis). This is the exact opposite of Aquinas’ “To take something away from the perfection of the creature is to abstract from the perfection of the creative power [i.e. God] itself.”

10. Aquinas left himself, of course, with the problem of defining what happened to the soul after death. He had to admit that it was no longer the person who had lived, but what was it? “A disembodied soul does not feel joy and sadness due to bodily desire, but due to intellectual desire, as with the angels.” For these issues, see the excellent chapter “Being Human” in Davies,
The Thought of Thomas
Aquinas.