Nevertheless, perhaps his biggest contribution to the history of ideas was what scholars call his doctrine of illumination: the claim that there are truths known by direct apprehension from God. Augustine said that mathematical axioms, for instance, and the idea of beauty, and maybe the existence of God himself are ideas of that kind, together with all facts inaccessible to reason, sense perception, revelation, or recollection. He realized that there must be some other source of validation for such knowledge, ‘in that inward house of my thoughts’, as he put it, ‘without help of the mouth or the tongue, without any sound of syllables’.39 His language is a clue to his thinking: deepening self-awareness came to him through the habit – unusual at the time – of silent reading. His personality helped. Selective humility, which afflicts many people of genius, made him diffident about discerning all the dark mysteries of life without divine flashes of illumination.40 His thinking in this respect bears comparison with the ancient Greek belief that knowledge is accessed from within the self, not acquired by input from outside. The Greek word for truth is aletheia – literally, ‘things unforgotten’. Knowledge is innate – Plato said as much. Education reminds us of it. Recollection makes us aware of it. We retrieve it from within ourselves. In St Augustine’s notion, by contrast, we rely on impressions from outside. Mysticism had been practised among Christians from the time of the apostles: St Paul twice describes what seem like mystical experiences. Before Augustine pronounced on the subject, however, mystics were – as it were – on their own, compelled to make their messages convincing without a general theory to fall back on in self-justification. Augustine supplied the justification. He licensed mystics to represent raptures as revelations. For Christians he opened up a new means to knowledge: mysticism joined reason, experience, scripture, and tradition. The consequences were serious. Western mysticism became largely a matter of introspective meditation. The alternative – nature-mysticism or the contemplation of the external world in an effort to arouse a mystical response – remained a marginal pursuit. More serious were the inducements mysticism gave to heresy. Mystics can transcend reason, overleap science, bypass Scripture, and dodge the Church.
Augustine’s idea of illumination has affinities with the tradition in Buddhism that we know by its Japanese name, Zen. As we have seen (see here), traditions about the illusory nature of perceptions – Zen’s starting point – were common in India and China in the first millennium bce. Nagarjuna, whom most students and initiates regard as the intellectual progenitor of the tradition that led to Zen, systematized them in the early second century ce. ‘As dream or as the lightning flash’, he suggested, ‘so should one look at all things, which are only relative.’41 Over the next couple of hundred years his followers pursued his advice unremittingly, even so far as to embrace an apparently self-defeating paradox by doubting the reality, or at least the individuality, of the doubting mind: strictly speaking (as Descartes later pointed out – see here) it is logically impossible for you to doubt your own doubts. Zen, however, delights in paradox. To achieve perfect Buddhist enlightenment, you have to suspend thought, forgo language, and obliterate all sense of reality. There are commendable consequences: if you forgo consciousness, you escape subjectivism. If you renounce language, you can engage the ineffable. When the teacher Bodhidharma arrived in China in the early sixth century, he announced that enlightenment was literally inexplicable. A twelfth-century Japanese text defines his doctrine with a formula that fits the way Augustine wrote about illumination, as ‘a special transmission, outside the scriptures, not founded on words or letters, which allows one to penetrate the nature of things by pointing directly to the mind’.42
In traditional tales of Zen masters from Bodhidharma onwards, they baffled their pupils into enlightenment, answering questions with apparently irrelevant rejoinders, or meaningless noises, or enigmatic gestures. They might offer the same answer to different questions. A single question might elicit mutually contradictory answers or no response at all. Zen is popular in the West today with revellers in uncertainty, because it makes every perspective seem evanescent and none objectively correct.43 It is therefore more appealing than the indifference of ancient Greek and Roman sceptics, who professed contentment with things as they seemed, on the grounds that appearances could do duty for truths no one can know (see here). By contrast, Zen’s ‘forgetfulness of the sky, retirement from the wind’ represents radical withdrawal from perceived reality – a consequence of self-extinction, the inertia of nonbeing, beyond thought and language. Zen is a bid by mere humans for the reality and objectivity of a clod or a rock. You have ‘no wandering desires at all’, says Robert Pirsig, author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, ‘but simply perform the acts of … life without desire’.44
Zen does not sound like an attempt to be practical. But it had enormous practical consequences: by encouraging practitioners in discipline, self-abnegation, and willingness to embrace extinction it contributed to the martial ethos of medieval and modern Japan; the art Zen helped to inspire included gardens of meditation and mystical poems; and in the late twentieth century, as we shall see (see here) the appeal of Zen was among the influences from East and South Asia that reshaped the mental worlds of Western intellectuals.
Faith and Politics
Religious thinkers did a good and conscientious but imperfect job of reconciling reason and science. What about the further problems of reconciling religion ‘not of this world’ with real life? Thinkers of the period contributed world-changing ideas in this connection in two ways. First, thinking about the state – how you make the state holy, how you legitimize authority by appealing to divine investiture of the powers that be, or even how you sanctify war – and second, thinking about the problem that opened this chapter: how you devise ways of applying religion to improve behaviour.
Take political thinking first. We have seen how tradition misinterpreted Christ’s humour (see here). The command ‘Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s’ has not only been misapplied to reinforce taxation, but also abused more generally to mean, ‘Respect the distinction between the secular and spiritual realms.’ But is this what Christ meant? It is not surprising that Christ should have been radically misunderstood – irony is the hardest form of humour to penetrate across chasms of time and culture.
The Church has always tended to emphasize the second half of Christ’s sentence and to insist that ‘things of God’ are not subject to the state: so the clergy have enjoyed immunity under the law, in some Christian states, or the right to be tried by their own courts; church property has often secured exemption from taxation or, at least, privileged fiscal status. The long history of dispute over these liberties started in Milan in the late fourth century, when the bishop, Ambrose, refused to surrender a church to imperial expropriators. ‘I answered that if the emperor asked of me what was mine I would not refuse it. But things which are God’s are not subject to the emperor.’45 A power struggle was under way. Pope Boniface VIII, who contended as fiercely as any cleric, summed it up toward the end of the thirteenth century: ‘That laymen have been hostile to the Church has been clear from antiquity … Nor do they realize that power over the clergy is forbidden to them.’46
Alternatively, religious people with no stomach for such squabbles have shut themselves off from the world. In the mid-third century, the theologian and church historian Origen thought Christ’s words obliged the people of God to withdraw from the state, passively obeying it at most; many others have continued to think the same. Early in the fifth century, St Augustine drew a distinction between two worlds – or cities as he called them: God’s and the state, the latter of which was of little concern to Christians. Ascetics literally withdrew – to found hermitages in the desert or on remote islands: this was the beginning of Christian monasticism. But Church and state always seemed to get entangled. Because of their purity and objectivity, holy men were not allowed to escape the world: people
brought them their troubles. Monks became magistrates; anchorites, administrators; and popes, in effect, came to do the jobs of emperors.47
So Christ – to the evident disappointment of some of his followers – tried to steer clear of politics; in some parts of the world where Christians are a minority and in most of the Orthodox world, churches have managed to stay that way. In western Europe, as the Roman Empire dissolved, the Church took on ever more of the functions of the state. Bishops ran administrations that bureaucrats abandoned. Holy men replaced judges and professional arbitrators where the system of justice broke down.48 For much of what we now think of as the early Middle Ages, the popes had the best chancery in Europe – and therefore, in effect, the most wide-ranging network of intelligence and influence. Government needed the Church: this was where learned and disinterested personnel could be recruited. The Church wanted influence over government: laws that conduced to the salvation of souls, agreements that kept peace within Christendom, crusades that deflected aggression against the infidel.
Theorists responded to this practical environment with arguments in favour of a politically committed Church and – ultimately – with the idea that the Church should rule the world. The fifth-century pope Gelasius proposed the image of Two Swords: when Christ told Peter to sheathe his sword, it was still ready for action. The Church had a residual right to rule. In the eighth century, the forgers of the Donation of Constantine went a stage further and claimed that imperial power had been surrendered to the pope at the time of the conversion of the first Christian Roman emperor. In the thirteenth century, Pope Innocent III devised a new image: the Church was the sun and the state the moon, disposing only of reflected power. In 1302, Pope Boniface VIII delivered the most trenchant utterance yet in this tradition:
Truly he who denies that the temporal sword is in the power of Peter misunderstands the words of the Lord … Both swords are in the power of the Church, the spiritual and the material. The latter is to be used by kings and captains, only at the will and with the permission of priests … Temporal authority should be subject to spiritual.49
The position was unsustainable in practice: states simply had bigger battalions than churches. But Christianity remained enmeshed in politics. The pope was useful as an arbiter in the power struggles of states, imposing truces, organizing crusades, setting disputed frontiers. In modern times, churches continued to interfere in politics, supporting political parties or movements, organizing trade unions, and publicly endorsing or condemning policies according to how well they conform to the Gospel or suit the interests or prejudices of Christians.50
The story is not yet over. ‘How many divisions has the pope?’ sneered Joseph Stalin, and papal impotence or pusillanimity in the face of the great dictators during the Second World War seemed to show that the Church was indeed a spent force in secular politics. Yet in the long and dramatic pontificate of John Paul II, which straddled the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the Church re-entered the political arena with new confidence. Partly, political re-involvement was the result of the pope’s own initiatives in subverting communist regimes, challenging capitalist ones, reinvigorating the papal diplomatic service, and renewing the papacy’s roles in international arbitration. Partly, it was a grass-roots initiative by religiously committed political activists – sometimes under papal disapproval – such as the Latin American revolutionaries inspired by ‘liberation theology’ to demand rights for poor peasants and underprivileged native communities. Partly, too, a resurgently political Church was the result of voters in democratic countries seeking a ‘third way’ in place of discredited communism and insensitive capitalism – and finding it in the Catholic social tradition.
In conflicts with the Church, secular rulers had, for most of the Middle Ages, a serious disadvantage: they depended on the Church to educate and often to pay the men they employed to run their administrations, write their propaganda, and formulate their own claims to legitimacy. ‘The powers that be are ordained of God’, said St Paul, but how did his legitimation get transmitted? Did it descend from heaven upon his anointed, or did it arise via the people by popular election – ‘the voice of God’? Everyone in the medieval West, and every devout Catholic to this day, continually hears politically revolutionary sentiments uttered in the prayer of the Church to a God who hath put down the mighty, exalted the meek, and shattereth kings in the day of wrath. The Church, however, generally left the revolutionary implications to heresiarchs and millenarians and sought a practical way of reconciling God’s bias to the poor with the world’s preference for the mighty.
In thirteenth-century Latin Christendom, this dilemma was resolved in practice by borrowing a model from classical antiquity: ‘mixed’ government, originally recommended by Aristotle,51 modified to combine monarchical, aristocratic, and popular elements. ‘The state’, in Aristotle’s opinion, ‘is better inasmuch as it is made up of more numerous elements.’52 Typically, medieval monarchs consulted ‘the community of the realm’ through representative assemblies in which magnates, who were the king’s natural advisers and his companions, joined deputies of other ‘estates’ – usually the clergy and the common people (who were variously defined, from country to country).
Early in the fourteenth century, at a time when the papacy was in conflict with kings over power and money, Marsilius of Padua worked as a propagandist against Rome. He lived in a world of Italian city-republics that resembled Aristotle’s polities: small states where citizens and senates ruled. Marsilius thought it was not just Aristotle’s choice but God’s: God chose the people; the people chose their delegates, who might be assemblies or monarchs. Marsilius applied the mixed-government model to the Church, too, advocating collegiality among the bishops, in which the pope is unprivileged or merely presides. He even raised the question of whether bishops should be popularly elected. These recommendations were obviously the self-interested programme of a particular party. But they responded to a deeply democratic tradition in Christianity, which went back to the teachings of Christ: He came to call publicans and sinners, summoned the rich to poverty, and welcomed the discipleship of fishers and prostitutes. And for Christ, no one was too lowly for God’s love.
Every step in the popes’ progress to unique power in the Church has therefore had to be ratified by the bishops collegially, and has been protected from reversal only by the tradition that ‘ecumenical’ decisions are divinely inspired and therefore irreversible. Conciliarism is alive and well today, reinvigorated by the use that recent popes have made of councils of the Church in launching and guiding their own reform programmes. The arguments of Marsilius were taken up by reformers who wanted only to improve Church government, not confide it to secular rulers, though the Reformation seemed to show that the pope was a necessary guarantee of the independence of the Church: wherever Luther’s message was successful, secular states usurped the pope’s traditional functions. Conciliarism, which originated as the appropriation of a secular model for the Church, influenced secular political thought in its turn. This started, in a very obvious way, in the fifteenth century in the German Empire, where the great princes claimed a role analogous to bishops in the Church. It continued with the rise of representative institutions in many European states, claiming equality with kings in making laws and raising taxes. In the long run, developments of this sort fed into and sped the ideas that have shaped modern politics: popular sovereignty and democracy.53
Early in the fifteenth century, the Church was the main focus of the political thought of Jean Gerson; his concern was to justify the view that the bishops collectively, rather than the pope in particular, exercised the authority of Christ on earth. In the course, however, of comparing secular and ecclesiastical government, he developed a theory of the origins of the state that has affected politics in the Western world ever since. The state arose because of sin: outside Eden, there was no limit to iniquity except that which men established by agreement to pool resources and bind liberty in the interest
s of peace. The process was natural and reasonable. The agreement of the citizens is the only legitimate foundation of the state. In contrast to the Church, which is God-given, the state is a creation of human free will, made by a historic contract and sustained by the implicit renewal of that contract. In the case of a monarchy, the power of the ruler owes nothing to God, everything to the contract by which the people entrust their rights to his keeping.
The ruler is simply the minister of this historic contract and the trustee of rights that he cannot abrogate or annul. The sovereign power remains with the people: the ruler merely exercises it on their behalf. They can recover it in cases where the ruler breaks or abuses the contract. He is not above the community, but part of it. He has no rights over the society, or its members, or their property, except by common consent. An ‘absolute’ ruler, who claims to be entitled to change the law at his own prompting, or to dispose of the lives or property of subjects, cannot be a lawful ruler: the people have the right to eject him.
For anyone who values freedom or thinks collaboration in civil society is natural for our species, the state is a limitation or even an almost inexplicable burden. The problems of explaining and justifying it came together in social contract theory. The idea of the contractual foundation of the state has nourished constitutionalism and democracy. By providing a justification for the state without reference to God, it has been particularly useful in the modern, secular world. There were, however, critical weaknesses in the idea as Gerson devised it: he made the ruler party to the contract – leaving open the possible objection that the ruler was actually outside it and not bound by its terms (see here); and he made challengeable assumptions about the clauses of the contract: apologists for absolutism could argue that the other parties surrendered their rights to the state, rather than merely placing them in trusteeship.54
Out of Our Minds Page 24
