37. Terry Eagleton, The Meaning of Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 31, 77.
38. Douglas Adams, A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (New York: Ballantine Books, 1979), 165.
39. Eagleton, The Meaning of Life, 53.
40. Antony Flew, “Tolstoi and the Meaning of Life,” in The Meaning of Life, ed. E. D. Klemke, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 209.
41. Flew, “Tolstoi,” 210.
42. Flew’s dismissive analysis would not have taken Tolstoy by surprise. Indeed, Tolstoy himself raised similar criticisms. Thus, in his “search for the overall meaning of life” (Tolstoy, “A Confession,” 28), he tried to persuade himself that his questions were misconceived. “The questions seemed so stupid, simple, and childish. But the moment I touched upon them and tried to resolve them I was immediately convinced, firstly, that they were not childish and stupid questions but were the most important and profound questions in life, and secondly, that however much I thought about them I could not resolve them” (29).
43. R. M. Hare, “Nothing Matters,” in Klemke, The Meaning of Life, 277.
44. Hare, “Nothing Matters,” 281.
45. See Hilary Putnam, Reason, Truth, and History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 105–6.
46. John Cottingham, On the Meaning of Life (London: Routledge, 2003), 1. Cf. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 677 (“Lots of people don’t want to ask the meta-question [‘what is the meaning of it all’]; but once it arises for someone they will not easily be put off by the injunction to forget it”).
47. John Wisdom, “The Meanings of the Questions of Life,” in Klemke, The Meaning of Life, 257, 258–59.
48. Wisdom, “Meanings of the Questions,” 260.
49. Cf. Robert M. Adams, “Comment,” in Wolf, Meaning in Life, 75, 83 (“But judgments of meaning in life are assessments of something that does have a narrative structure”).
50. Eagleton, The Meaning of Life, 106.
51. In this vein, Michael Perry associates “religion” with “religious or limit questions,” such as: “Who are we? Where did we come from; what is our origin, our beginning? Where are we going; what is our destiny, our end? What is the meaning of suffering? Of evil? Of death? And there is the cardinal question, the question that comprises many of the others: Is human life ultimately meaningful or, instead, ultimately bereft of meaning, meaning-less, absurd?” Michael J. Perry, The Political Morality of Liberal Democracy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 43 (footnotes omitted).
52. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, [1930] 1961). Scornfully dismissive of religion as “so patently infantile, so foreign to reality” (22), Freud endorsed the deflationary conclusion that “what decides the purpose of life is simply the programme of the pleasure principle” (25).
53. Jonathan Sacks, The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning (New York: Schocken, 2011), 25. “We are the meaning-seeking animal, the only known life form in the universe ever to have asked the question ‘Why?’ There is no single, demonstrable, irrefutable, selfevident, compelling and universal answer to this question. Yet the principled refusal to ask it, to insist that the universe simply happened and there is nothing more to say, is a failure of the very inquisitiveness, the restless search for that which lies beyond the visible horizon, that led to science in the first place” (288–89).
54. Sacks, The Great Partnership, 104.
55. Sacks, The Great Partnership, 197.
56. Sacks, The Great Partnership, 19.
57. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, rev. ed. (New York: Barnes and Noble, 2004), 39.
58. James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 44.
59. Exod. 3.
60. Matt. 4:19.
61. See, e.g., Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion, ed. Todd Dufresne, trans. Gregory C. Richter (Toronto: Broadview Press, [1927] 2012).
62. Luc Ferry, A Brief History of Thought: A Philosophical Guide to Living, trans. Theo Cuffe (New York: HarperCollins, 2011), 230.
63. Exod. 3.
64. Acts 9.
65. Abraham Joshua Heschel, God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1955), 107, 119.
66. Heschel, God in Search of Man, 45.
67. Heschel, God in Search of Man, 74. Cf. James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 61 (“It is as if there were in the human consciousness a sense of reality, a feeling of objective presence, a perception of what we may call ‘something there,’ more deep and more general than any of the special and particular ‘senses’ by which the current psychology supposes existent realities to be originally revealed”).
68. Heschel, God in Search of Man, 39.
69. Heschel, God in Search of Man, 88–89.
70. “To the Biblical man, the sublime is but a form in which the presence of God strikes forth. . . . To the Biblical man, the beauty of the world issued from the grandeur of God; His majesty towered beyond the breathtaking mystery of the universe. Rather . . . than praise the world for its beauty, he called upon the world to praise its Creator.” Heschel, God in Search of Man, 95–96.
71. Quoted in Valerie M. Warrior, Roman Religion: A Sourcebook (Newburyport, MA: Focus Pub.; R. Pullins, 2002), 2.
72. E.g., Heschel, God in Search of Man, 117.
73. Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine, trans. John W. Harvey, rev. ed. (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, [1917] 2010). Hereafter, page references from this work will be given in parentheses in the text.
74. Otto contended that the holy designated both a transcendent reality and a category of value (Otto, Idea of the Holy, 52). “Especially as encountered by mystics, the holy is experienced in its essential, positive, and specific character as something that bestows upon man a beatitude beyond compare, but one whose real nature he can neither proclaim in speech nor conceive in thought. . . . It is a bliss which embraces all those blessings that are indicated or suggested in positive fashion by any ‘doctrine of Salvation.’ . . . It gives the Peace that passes understanding, and of which the tongue can only stammer brokenly” (33–34).
75. Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, trans. Willard R. Trask (Orlando: Harcourt, 1957), 11.
76. Eliade, Sacred and the Profane, 64 (emphasis deleted).
77. James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 39. James acknowledged the institutional nature of religion.
78. James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 37.
79. For an exposition, see Peter J. Kreeft, “C. S. Lewis’s Argument from Desire,” in The Riddle of Joy, ed. Michael H. Macdonald and Andrew A. Tadie (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989), 249.
80. See, e.g., C. S. Lewis, “The Weight of Glory,” in The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses, rev. ed. (New York: HarperCollins/HarperOne, 1949), 25–34.
81. Lewis, “The Weight of Glory,” 29.
82. Lewis, “The Weight of Glory,” 32–33.
83. See Freud, The Future of an Illusion.
84. See Otto, Idea of the Holy, 56; Eliade, Sacred and the Profane, 17, 30, 32.
85. James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 418.
86. James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 409. Cf. E. L. Mascall, The Christian Universe (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1966), 47–48 (suggesting that “behind and beyond the world that our senses perceive, there is another realm of being which, . . . in some way or another, confers explanation upon the world of our senses and gives meaning to human life”).
87. Heschel, God in Search of Man, 36.
88. Eliade, Sacred and the Profane, 64.
89. See, e.g., From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. and trans. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 155 (“The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all,
by the ‘disenchantment of the world’ ”).
90. J. S. Mill, “A Crisis in My Mental History—One Stage Onward,” in The Autobiography of John Stuart Mill (Rockville, MD: Arc Manor, [1873] 2008), chap. 5.
91. A. N. Wilson, God’s Funeral (New York: Norton, 1999), 51.
92. Wilson, God’s Funeral, 52.
93. Jürgen Habermas, “An Awareness of What Is Missing,” in An Awareness of What Is Missing: Faith and Reason in a Post-Secular Age, trans. Ciaran Cronin (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010), 15.
94. James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 57. See also 418 (summing up the religious life as founded in the beliefs that “the visible world is part of a more spiritual universe from which it draws its chief significance” and that “union or harmonious relation with that higher world is our true end”).
95. James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 255–62.
96. Even here, though, a sort of quasi-aesthetic sensibility may be needed to separate the “spirit” from the “letter” of the directives. See, e.g., 2 Cor. 3:6.
97. James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 79.
98. See James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 36 (discussing “the many sentiments which religious objects may arouse . . . [including] religious fear, religious love, religious awe, religious joy, and so forth”).
99. Otto, Idea of the Holy, 1–4.
100. Mark 8:36.
101. Rom. 3:10.
102. James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 5.
103. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, 68. Frankl emphasized, however, that he used the term “religion” “in the widest possible sense” and in a way that “goes far beyond the narrow concepts of God promulgated by many representatives of denominational and institutional religion” (17).
104. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, 152, 151.
105. Eliade, Sacred and the Profane, 204–5.
106. Augustine, The Confessions of St. Augustine, ed. and trans. Albert Cook Outler, rev. ed. (New York: Dover, 2002), 1.1.
107. Blaise Pascal, Pensées, trans. A. J. Krailsheimer, rev. ed. (London: Penguin, 1995), 37–43.
108. Mascall, The Christian Universe, 18.
109. See, e.g., Christian Smith, Moral, Believing Animals (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).
110. See Posner, Economic Analysis of Law, 3–4.
111. Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 12.
112. James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 419.
113. James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 431.
114. Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, trans. Karen E. Fields (New York: Free Press, [1912] 1995), 1.
115. See generally Athanasius, The Life of Antony and the Letter to Marcellinus, trans. and ed. Robert C. Gregg, Classics of Western Spirituality (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist, 1980).
116. Matt. 4:1–11.
117. See Steven D. Smith, “Separation and the Fanatic,” Virginia Law Review 85 (1999): 238.
118. Edwin S. Gaustad, Liberty of Conscience: Roger Williams in America (Valley Forge, PA: Judson, 1991), vii.
119. Matt. 18:20.
120. E.g., 1 Cor. 12:27.
121. Aristotle, Politics, trans. Ernest Barker (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962), 1.1253a.
CHAPTER 3
City of the Gods
If you were asked what was the best period of human history to live in, what time and place would you choose? Swinging New York in Gatsby’s “Roaring Twenties”? The Elizabethan England of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson? The Florence of Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Lorenzo the Magnificent? Periclean Athens? Kublai Khan’s resplendent Cathay? India under the wise and benevolent Ashoka?
For Edward Gibbon, celebrated eighteenth-century historian of the Roman Empire, friend of luminaries like Hume and Voltaire, and faithful representative of Enlightenment sensibilities, the answer was obvious:
If a man were called upon to fix the period in the history of the world, during which the history of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would, without hesitation, name that which elapsed from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus [i.e., from AD 96 to 180]. The vast extent of the Roman empire was governed by absolute power, under the guidance of virtue and wisdom. The armies were restrained by the firm but gentle hand of four successive emperors, whose character and authority commanded involuntary respect. The forms of the civil administration were carefully preserved by Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, and the Antonines, who delighted in the image of liberty, and were pleased with considering themselves the accountable ministers of the laws. . . .
The labours of these monarchs were over-paid by . . . the exquisite delight of beholding the general happiness of which they were the authors.1
In short, the period was a “golden age.”2
Gibbon was idiosyncratic in his intensity, perhaps, and also in his specificity, but not in his general sentiment. Adulation of the classical world—of “the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome”3—has been a recurring theme among Western thinkers.4 Indeed, at least since the Renaissance, an effort to reclaim or reconstruct the ethos and civitas of classical antiquity has been—and continues to be (though perhaps less overtly, as Virgil, Ovid, and Cicero fade from the curriculum)—a shaping influence in the formation of the Western world.
But why? The Antonine emperors may have been admirable rulers, comparatively speaking; their reign may stand out as a relative bright spot in a world history that sometimes seems, as Gibbon put it, “little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.”5 Still, to assert without qualification that “a man”—any man, in other words; and, as we will see, the masculine gender is apt here—would “without hesitation” prefer that period over all others seems an audacious claim. So, what was it about the period that made it so “golden”? What was the basis of the “general happiness” that Gibbon discerned, or thought he discerned?
“Every Refinement of Conveniency, of Elegance, and of Splendour”
Gibbon’s effusive declaration supplies one reason: the period was “prosperous.” This prosperity was a natural result of the Pax Romana, and of the trade permeating the “vast extent of the Roman empire.” In this respect, the empire achieved the same commercial goals sought after by international political and trade agreements today. On a material level, consequently, life was good in this period, at least for the affluent—for people, basically, of the same class to which Gibbon himself 6 and his readers belonged in their own eighteenth-century world. Nor was material affluence merely crass; it was matched by a kind of cultural abundance and elegance.
So let us suppose that you are so fortunate as to belong to the affluent class in the age of the Antonine emperors. Like Gibbon, you are wealthy enough, let’s say, but not extravagantly rich—not so rich that you can afford a palazzo or a sprawling country villa. Even so, you might reside in an elegantly decorated home comparable to those that can be visited today in archeologically restored Pompeii7—a domus nicely adorned with stately columns, an interior decorative pool in the atrium just inside the front entrance, colorful mosaics and murals, sculptures imported from Greece, and graceful gardens ornamented with (as a more recent historian reports) “shrubs, fountains, decorative statuettes, and often frescoes on the enclosing walls” (737). The furniture filling out your home will include bronze or marble tables “supported by elaborate legs compounded of lions’ paws, volutes, griffins’ foreparts, and the like” (731).
On a warm summer evening, you and your guests might enjoy a leisurely dinner out of doors, in enchanting fashion. “Sheltered by an awning or a vine-arbour and cushioned by mattresses and pillows, the diners would recline on their elbows in the Greek manner, picking titbits from a central table or, like Pliny’s guests, from floating dishes in the form of little boats and water-birds; as night drew on, lamps would be lit in su
rrounding candelabra, some of them . . . suspended from the hands of bronze statues” (739). The dinner fare is sumptuous, and exotic. “The guests were treated to a whole sequence of unnerving surprises: peahen’s eggs containing beccaficos rolled in spiced egg-yolk, a wild boar containing live thrushes, a pig full of sausages and black puddings, cakes and fruit filled with liquid saffron, thrushes made of pastry and stuffed with raisins and nuts, quinces decorated with thorns to look like sea-urchins” (740).
And, of course, wine: “no meal was complete without a jar of a fine vintage.” These culinary delights would be served up in “superb beakers, cups, bowls, and dishes decorated with repousse reliefs of plants, arabesques or mythological scenes, together with the simpler, but still elegant, spoons and ladles” (740).
So far, what’s not to like? (I admit with some embarrassment that I have no idea what beccaficos are, or quinces, or volutes—but I infer that they all would have been in impeccably good taste.)
If you feel like going out, you might join your fellow citizens and subjects as a spectator at a chariot race at the Circus Maximus. Or perhaps a stirring gladiatorial contest at the Flavian Amphitheater (later known as the Colosseum), where you will cheer wildly along with your fellow Romans at the hunt and slaughter of exotic animals imported from Africa; and you will feel the thrill and solidarity as you and your fellows collectively implore the emperor to give thumbs up or thumbs down to some hapless warrior.
But then again, maybe (like Gibbon, who shunned sports even as a clumsy schoolboy)8 you are a more sedate soul, lacking a taste for these muscular and bloody spectacles. In that case, you might prefer to attend the theater. Or maybe relax at one of the vast and elegant public baths, designed for leisurely repose and conversation, with cold and warm baths, open spaces for exercising, and even libraries, and lavishly decorated with sculptures and intricate mosaics.
Returning home but not yet ready to sleep, you might curl up with a history by Tacitus or Livy, or with a play by Terence or Plautus (or of course, by one of the Greek masters). Or maybe a work of philosophy by Plato or Aristotle or, if you prefer, by a homegrown thinker—the estimable Cicero. Or perhaps some poetry—the majestic epics of Homer or Virgil, or if you are in the mood for something a little lighter, perhaps some amorous stanzas of Catullus to his lover Lesbia or the seduction poetry of Ovid.
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