Out of Our Minds

by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto

  The terrors of the times shaped legalism. After generations of disastrous feuding between the Warring States, during which the ethics-based thinking of the Confucians and Taoists did nothing to help, the legalists’ ascendancy inflicted so much suffering that in China their doctrines were reviled for centuries. But, born in a time of great civil disaster, their doctrine, or something like it, has resurfaced in bad times ever since. Fascism, for instance, echoes ancient Chinese legalism in advocating and glorifying war, recommending economic self-sufficiency for the state, denouncing capitalism, extolling agriculture above commerce, and insisting on the need to suppress individualism in the interests of state unity.72

  The legalists had a Western counterpart, albeit a relatively mild one, in Plato. No method of choosing rulers is proof against abuse; but he thought he could deliver his ‘objective in the construction of the state: the greatest happiness of the whole, and not that of any one class’. He belonged to an Athenian ‘brat pack’ of rich, well-educated intellectuals, who resented democracy and felt qualified for power. Some of his friends and relations paid or staffed the death squads that helped keep oligarchs in office. His vocation was for theories of government, not for the bloody business of it, but when he wrote his prescriptions for the ideal state in The Republic, they came out harsh, reactionary, and illiberal. Censorship, repression, militarism, regimentation, extreme communism and collectivism, eugenics, austerity, rigid class structure, and active deception of the people by the state were among the objectionable features that had a baneful influence on later thinkers. But they were by the way: Plato’s key idea was that all political power should be in the grip of a self-electing class of philosopher-rulers. Intellectual superiority would qualify these ‘guardians’ for office. Favourable heredity, refined by education in altruism, would make their private lives exemplary and give them a godlike vision of what was good for the citizens. ‘There will be no end’, Plato predicted, ‘to the troubles of states, or indeed, of humanity … until philosophers become kings in this world, or till those we now call kings and rulers really and truly become philosophers.’73 The idea that rulers’ education in philosophy will make them good is touching. Every teacher is susceptible to similar hubris. I go into every class, convinced that from my efforts to teach them how to unpick medieval palaeography or interpret Mesoamerican epigraphy they will emerge not only with mastery of such arcana, but also with enhanced moral value in themselves. Plato was so persuasive that his reasoning has continued to appeal to state-builders – and, no doubt, their teachers – ever since. His guardians are the prototypes of the elites, aristocracies, party apparatchiks, and self-appointed supermen whose justification for tyrannizing others has always been that they know best.74

  ‌Optimism and the Enemies of the State

  Despite rulers’ attraction toward legalism, and the power of Plato’s arguments, optimists remained predominant. When Confucius summoned rulers and elites to the allegiance ordained by heaven, he meant that they should defer to the wants and wisdom of the people. ‘Heaven’, said Mencius, ‘sees as the people see and hears as the people hear.’75 Chinese and Indian thinkers of the time generally agreed that rulers should consult the people’s interests and views, and should face, in case of tyranny, the subject’s right of rebellion. They did not, however, go on to question the propriety of monarchy. Where the state was meant to reflect the cosmos, its unity could not be compromised.

  On the other hand, the obvious way to maximize virtue and prowess in government is to multiply the number of people involved. So republican or aristocratic systems, and even democratic ones, as well as monarchy, had advocates and instances in antiquity. In Greece, where states were judged, unmystically, as practical mechanisms to be adjusted at need, political experiments unfolded in bewildering variety. Aristotle made a magisterial survey of them. He admitted that monarchy would be the best set-up if only it were possible to ensure that the best man were always in charge. Aristocratic government, shared among a manageable number of superior men, was more practical, but vulnerable to appropriation by plutocrats or hereditary cliques. Democracy, in which all the citizens shared, sustained a long, if fluctuating, record of success in Athens from early in the sixth century bce. Aristotle denounced it as exploitable by demagogues and manipulable into mob rule.76 In the best system, he thought, aristocracy would predominate, under the rule of law. Broadly speaking, the Roman state of the second half of the millennium embodied his recommendations. It became, in turn, the model for most republican survivals and revivals in Western history. Even when Rome abandoned republican government, and restored what was in effect a monarchical system under the rule of Augustus in 23 bce, Romans still spoke of the state as a republic and the emperor as merely a ‘magistrate’ or ‘chief’ – princeps in Latin – of state. Greek and Roman models made republicanism permanently respectable in Western civilization.77 Medieval city-republics of the Mediterranean imitated ancient Rome, as, in the late eighteenth century, did the United States and revolutionary France. Most new states of the nineteenth century were monarchies, but in the twentieth the spread of the republican ideal became one of the most conspicuous features of politics worldwide. By 1952, an ineradicable anecdote claims, the king of Egypt predicted there would soon be only five monarchs left in the world – and four of those would be in the pack of playing cards.78

  The most optimistic political thinker of all, perhaps, was Christ, who thought human nature was redeemable by divine grace. He preached a subtle form of political subversion. A new commandment would replace all laws. The kingdom of Heaven mattered more than the empire of Rome. Christ cracked one of history’s great jokes when Pharisees tried to tempt him into a political indiscretion by asking whether it was lawful for Jews to pay Roman taxes. ‘Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s’, he said, ‘and unto God the things which are God’s.’ We have lost the sense of what made this funny. Every regime has taken it literally, and used it to justify tax demands. Charles I of England, fighting fiscally recalcitrant rebels, had ‘Give Caesar His Due’ embroidered on his battle flag. But Christ’s auditors would have been rolling around, clutching their vitals in mirth at our Lord’s rabbinical humour. To a Jew of Christ’s day, nothing was properly Caesar’s. Everything belonged to God. In denouncing taxes, and implying the illegitimacy of the Roman state, Christ was being characteristically demagogic. He welcomed outcasts, prostitutes, sinners, Samaritans, whom Christ’s compatriots disdained, and tax collectors – the lowest form of life in his audience’s eyes. He showed a bias toward the marginalized, the suffering, children, the sick, the lame, the blind, prisoners, and all the deadbeats and drop-outs hallowed in the Beatitudes. With revolutionary violence, he lashed moneylenders and expelled them from the temple of Jerusalem. It is not surprising, against the background of this radical kind of politics, that Roman and Jewish authorities combined to put him to death. He was clear about where his political sympathies lay, but his message transcended politics. His followers turned away from political activism to espouse what I think was genuinely his main proposal: personal salvation in a kingdom not of this world.

  ‌Slavery

  The antiquity of slavery as an institution is unfathomable. Most societies have practised slavery; many have depended on it and have regarded it – or some very similar system of forced labour – as entirely normal and morally unchallengeable. Our own society is anomalous in formally abjuring it, typical in perpetuating it in sweatshops and brothels and in the abuse of the labour of ‘illegal’ immigrants who are not free to change their jobs or challenge their conditions of work. Not even Christ questioned it, though he did promise that there would be neither bond nor free in heaven; Paul, the posthumously selected apostle, confided a missionary role to a slave, whose master was not obliged to free him, only to treat him as a beloved brother. Slavery is standard. Aristotle, however, did introduce a new idea about how to justify it. He saw the tension between enforced servility and such values as the independent
worth of every human being and the moral value of happiness. But some people, he argued, are inherently inferior; for them, the best lot in life is to serve their betters. If natural inferiors resisted conquest, for instance, Greeks could capture and enslave them. In the course of developing the idea, Aristotle also formulated a doctrine of just war: some societies regarded war as normal, or even as an obligation of nature or the gods. Aristotle, however, rated wars as just if the victims of aggression were inferior people who ought to be ruled by their aggressors. At least this teaching made war a subject of moral scrutiny, but that would be little consolation to the victims of it.79

  While slavery was unquestioned, Aristotle’s doctrine seemed irrelevant; masters could admit, without prejudice to their own interests, that their slaves were their equals in everything except legal status. Jurists exhumed Aristotle’s argument, however, in an attempt to respond to critics of the enslavement of Native Americans. ‘Some men’, wrote the Scots jurist John Mair in 1513, ‘are by nature slaves and others by nature free. And it is just … and fitting that one man should be master and another obey, for the quality of superiority is also inherent in the natural master.’80 Because anyone who was a slave had to be classified as inferior, the doctrine proved to be a stimulus to racism.81

  ‌Chapter 5

  Thinking Faiths

  Ideas in a Religious Age

  Religion should make you good, shouldn’t it? It should transform your life. People who tell you it has transformed them sometimes talk about being born again. But when you look at the way they behave, the effects often seem minimal. Religious people, on average, seem to be as capable of wickedness as everyone else. I am assiduous in going to church, but I do little else that is virtuous. Inasmuch as religion is a device for improving people, why doesn’t it work?

  The answer to that question is elusive. I am sure, however, that while religion may not change our behaviour as much as we would like, it does affect the way we think. This chapter is about the great religions of the 1,500 years or so after the death of Christ: in particular, how innovative thinkers explored the relationship between reason, science, and revelation, and what they had to say about the problem of the relationship of religion to everyday life – what, if anything, it can do to make us good.

  ‘Great religions’ for present purposes are those that have transcended their cultures of origin to reach across the globe. Most religion is culturally specific and incapable of appealing to outsiders. So we have to begin by trying to understand why Christianity and Islam (and to a lesser extent Buddhism) have bucked the norm and demonstrated remarkable elasticity. We start with how they overcame early restraints.

  ‌Christianity, Islam, Buddhism: Facing the Checks

  New religions opened the richest areas for new thinking: Christianity – new at the start of the period – and Islam, which appeared in the seventh century after Christ. Similar problems arose in both. Both owed a lot to Judaism. The disciples Christ acquired during his career as a freelance rabbi were Jews; he told a Samaritan woman that ‘salvation comes from the Jews’; references to Jewish scriptures saturated his recorded teachings; his followers saw him as the Messiah whom Jewish prophets foretold and the Gospel writers reflected the prophecies in their versions of his life. Muhammad was not a Jew but he spent a formative part of his life alongside Jews; traditions locate him in Palestine, where, in Jerusalem, he made his storied ascent to heaven; every page of the Qur’an – the revelations an angel whispered into his ear – shows Jewish (and, to a lesser extent, Christian) influence. Christians and Muslims adopted key ideas of Judaism: the uniqueness of God and creation from nothing.1

  Both religions, however, modified Jewish ethics: Christianity, by replacing law with grace as the means of salvation; Islam, by substituting laws of its own. While Christians thought Jewish tradition was too legalistic and tried to slim down or cut out the rules from religion, Muhammad had the idea of putting them back in, centrally. Reconfigured relationships between law and religion were among the consequences in both traditions. Christians and Muslims, moreover, came to occupy lands in and around the heartlands of Greek and Roman antiquity. A long series of debates followed about how to blend Jewish traditions with those of classical Greek and Roman learning, including the science and philosophies of the last chapter.

  For Christians and Muslims alike, the social context made the task harder. Sneerers condemned Christianity as a religion of slaves and women, suitable only for victims of social exclusion. During Christianity’s first two centuries, high-ranking converts faced a kind of derogation. The Gospels gave Christ divine and royal pedigrees, but insisted at the same time on the humility of his birth and of his human calling. He chose co-adjutors from among walks of life, lowly or despised, of provincial fishermen, fallen women, and – at what for Jews at the time were even lower levels of degradation and moral pollution – tax-gatherers and collaborators with the Roman Empire. The vulgar language of Christians’ holy books inhibited communication with the erudite. Early Islam faced similar problems in gaining respect among the elite in seventh-century Arabia. Muhammad came from a prosperous, urban, mercantile background, but he marginalized himself, excluding himself from the company of his own kind by embracing exile in the desert and adopting ascetic practices and a prophetic vocation. It was not in the civilized streets of Mecca and Medina that he found acceptance, but out among the nomadic Bedouin whom city dwellers despised. It took a long time for Christianity to become intellectually estimable. The talents and education of the Gospel writers invited learned contempt. Even the author of the Gospel of St John, who injected impressive intellectual content into the rather humdrum narratives of his predecessors, could not command the admiration of pedantic readers.

  ‘The folly of God’, said St Paul, ‘is wiser than the wisdom of men.’ Paul’s writings – copious and brilliant as they were – came with embarrassing disfigurements, especially in the form of long sequences of participle phrases such as sophisticated rhetoricians abhorred. Despite being the most educated of the apostles, he was intellectually unimpressive to the snobs of his day and even of ours: when I was a boy, my teacher indicated my inept use of participles in Greek prose composition by writing a π for ‘Pauline’ in the margin. To a classically educated mind, the Old Testament was even more crudely embarrassing. In the pope’s scriptorium in late-fourth-century Rome, Jerome, a fastidious, aristocratic translator, found the ‘rudeness’ of the prophets repellent, and the elegance of the pagan classics alluring. In a vision, he told Christ he was a Christian. ‘You lie’, said Christ. ‘You are a follower of Cicero.’2 Jerome vowed never to read good books again. When he translated the Bible into Latin (in the version that has remained the standard text of the Catholic Church to this day), he deliberately chose a vulgar, streetwise style, much inferior to the classical Latin he used and recommended in his own letters. At about the same time St Augustine found many classical texts distastefully erotic. ‘But for this we should never have understood these words: the “golden shower”, crotch, deceit.’3

  The pagan elite, meanwhile, succumbed to Christianity almost as if a change of religion were a change of fashion in the unstable culture of the late Roman Empire, where neither the old gods nor the old learning seemed able to arrest economic decline or avert political crises.4 Classical literature was too good to exclude from the curriculum, as St Basil acknowledged: ‘into the life eternal the Holy Scriptures lead us … But … we exercise our spiritual perceptions upon profane writings, which are not altogether different, and in which we perceive the truth as it were in shadows and in mirrors’,5 and schoolboys were never entirely spared from the rigours of a classical education. Two hundred years after Jerome and Augustine, the turnaround in values, at least, was complete: Pope Gregory the Great denounced the use of the classics in teaching, since ‘there is no room in the same mouth for both Christ and Jupiter’.6 In the thirteenth century, followers of St Francis, who enjoined a life of poverty, renounced learning on the gro
unds that it was a kind of wealth: at least, so some of them said, though in practice they became stalwarts of the universities that were just beginning to organize Western learning at the time.

  From the eleventh century onward, at least, a similar trend affected Islam, extolling popular wisdom and mystical insights above classical philosophy, ‘abstract proofs and systematic classification … Rather’, wrote al-Ghazali, one of the great Muslim apologists for mysticism, ‘belief is a light God bestows … sometimes through an explainable conviction from within, sometimes by a dream, sometimes through a pious man … sometimes through one’s own state of bliss.’7 The followers Muhammad gathered in his day, al-Ghazali pointed out, knew little and cared less about the classical logic and learning that later Muslim philosophers appreciated so admiringly.

  In all these cases, it was an easy and obviously self-indulgent irony for learned men to affect mistrust of erudition; but their rhetoric had real effects, some of which were bad: to this day in the Western world you hear philistinism commended on grounds of honesty, and stupidity applauded for innocence or ‘authenticity’. In Western politics, ignorance is no impediment. Some shorter-term effects of the turn towards popular wisdom were good: in the Middle Ages in Europe, jesters could always tell home truths to rulers and challenge society with satire.8