The Cave and the Light

by Arthur Herman

  14. Clarke, Roman Mind, 39.

  15. Seneca, “Of Peace of Mind,” in Minor Dialogs, trans. Aubrey Stewart (London: George Bell & Sons, 1900), 3.2.

  16. Seneca, “Of Anger,” ibid., II, 7–8.

  17. Tacitus, The Annals of Tacitus, trans. Donald Dudley (New York: Mentor Books, 1966), 363–64.

  18. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, in Whitney J. Oates, The Stoic and Epicurean Philosophers (New York: Modern Library, 1940), 544 (VIII), 584–85 (XII).

  19. Peter Brown, The World of Late Antiquity (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971), 22.

  20. John Gregory, ed., The Neoplatonists (London: Routledge, 1991), 3.

  21. See W. R. Inge, The Philosophy of Plotinus (1929; repr., New York: Greenwood Press, 1968), 1:41. However, the notion propagated by Inge and others—that Plotinus’s mystical philosophy was the result of a fusion of Greco-Roman and Oriental ideas—seems unfounded. As Mark Edwards notes in Culture and Philosophy in the Age of Plotinus (London: Duckworth, 2006), there is no evidence that Plotinus joined Gordian’s expedition to Persia in hopes of meeting Zoroastrian and Indian mystics, as his student Porphyry claimed, or that “Plotinus gave a thought to either of these races” (31).

  22. A. E. Taylor, Platonism and Its Influence (1924; repr., New York: Cooper Square, 1963), 12.

  23. Plato, The Republic, trans. Desmond Lee, 2nd ed. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), VII, 509B.

  24. Arthur L. Herman, The Ways of Philosophy (Atlanta, Ga.: Scholars Press, 1990), 83.

  25. David Knowles, The Evolution of Medieval Thought (New York: Random House, 1962), 24.

  26. Taylor, Platonism, 13.

  27. Quoted in A. O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being (1936; repr., New York: Harper & Row, 1965).

  28. Especially in the Sophist and Parmenides. See Plato, Plato’s Epistles, ed. Glenn Morrow (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1962), 70.

  29. Plotinus, Enneads, trans. Stephen McKenna, 2nd ed., rev. (London: Faber & Faber, 1956), IV, 8.

  30. Knowles, Evolution of Medieval Thought, 21.

  31. Plotinus, Enneads, VI, 9, viii–ix.

  32. Ibid., II, 4, quoted in Charles Norris Cochrane, Christianity and Classical Culture (1940; repr., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1957), 172.

  33. Gregory, Neoplatonists, 6.

  Chapter 10: Christ Is Come: Plato and Christianity

  1. Acts 17:18. All direct quotations are from the King James Version.

  2. Acts 17:26, 28, 31. Outside the account in Acts, very little is known about the Unknown God or where such an altar existed. See Charles Stephan Conway Williams, Commentary on the Acts of the Apostles (London: A. & C. Black, 1964).

  3. Acts 20:13–15.

  4. 2 Corinthians 9:8.

  5. 1 Corinthians 15:55.

  6. Tacitus, The Annals of Tacitus, trans. Donald Dudley (New York: Mentor Books, 1966), 354.

  7. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, in Whitney J. Oates, The Stoic and Epicurean Philosophers (New York: Modern Library, 1940), 583 (XII).

  8. Richard Tarnas, Passion of the Western Mind (New York: Harmony, 1991), 103.

  9. For example, Charles Freeman, The Closing of the Western Mind (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003), and in a more vulgar vein, Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2008).

  10. Heraclitus quoted in Alexander Kohanski, The Greek Mode of Thought in Western Philosophy (Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1984), 92.

  11. 1 John 1:9, 14.

  12. See John Dillon, “Logos and Trinity: Patterns of Platonist Influence on Early Christianity,” in Dillon, The Great Tradition: Further Studies in the Development of Platonism and Early Christianity (Brookfield, Vt.: Ashgate, 1997), chap. 8, 3; and Dillon, “Origen and Plotinus: The Platonic Influence on Early Christianity,” in Thomas Finan and Vincent Twomey, eds., The Relationship Between Neoplatonism and Christianity (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1992), 11.

  13. Tarnas, Passion of Western Mind, 475 n.

  14. “For Plato says: ‘The holy souls shall return to human bodies.’ ” Augustine, The City of God, trans. John Healey (London: Dent, 1945), (XXII:27). Augustine was in effect taking Plato’s theory of transmigration of souls as an endorsement of the idea of physical resurrection after death.

  15. Ibid., 403–4 (XXII:29).

  16. Revelation 22:13, 5.

  17. Plato, Phaedo, in Plato, The Last Days of Socrates, trans. Hugh Tredennick (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1954), 135.

  18. John 20:31.

  19. Tarnas, Passion of Western Mind, 103.

  20. Justin Martyr, The First Apology (Edinburgh: J. Grant, 1912), 5, 56.

  21. In particular, Porphyry and Iamblichus. See Mark Edwards, Culture and Philosophy in the Age of Plotinus (London: Duckworth, 2006).

  22. Theodore Vrettos, Alexandria: City of the Western Mind (New York: Free Press, 2001), 186, 188. Celsus’s work is lost. The arguments and quotations largely come from Origen’s refutation, Against Celsus, trans. H. Chadwick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965).

  23. Adamantius in Latin. See Henri Crouzel, Origen (Edinburgh: T. T. Clark, 1999), 51.

  24. Henri Daniel-Rops, Church of Apostles and Martyrs (New York: Doubleday, 1960), 2:55.

  25. Vrettos, Alexandria, 181.

  26. The method of the death of his father, Leonidas, has led some scholars to speculate that he must have been a Roman citizen. See Crouzel, Origen, and Joseph Wilson Trigg, Origen (London: Routledge, 1998).

  27. Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1995), 264.

  28. Trigg, Origen.

  29. Charles Norris Cochrane, Christianity and Classical Culture (1940; repr., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1957), 181.

  30. Justin Martyr, The First Apology (Edinburgh: J. Grant, 1912), 19.

  31. Crouzel, Origen, 74, 93.

  32. Ibid., 100. See also Robert Berchman, From Philo to Origen: Middle Platonism in Transition (Chicago: Scholars Press, 1984).

  33. Joseph Wilson Trigg, Origen: The Bible and Philosophy in the Third Century Church (Atlanta, Ga.: J. Knox, 1983), 10–11.

  34. Trigg, Bible and Philosophy, 167; Trigg, Origen, 36–39.

  35. Crouzel, Origen, 63; Henry Chadwick, The Early Church (1967; repr., Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), 105–7.

  36. Dorothy Sayers, introduction to Dante Alighieri, Divine Comedy I: Hell, trans. Dorothy Sayers (1949; repr., Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976).

  37. E. R. Dodds, Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety (New York: Norton, 1970), 120.

  38. Crouzel, Origen, 53, which calls Origen’s devotion to Jesus as a person “unique” in Christian antiquity.

  39. Origen, Commentary on the Gospel According to John, trans. Ronald E. Heine (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University Press, 1989), 2:267–68.

  40. Thomas à Kempis, Imitation of Christ, trans. Thomas Kepler (Cleveland: World Publishing, 1952), 35.

  41. Quoted in Dodds, Pagan and Christian, 120.

  42. Trigg, Bible and Philosophy, 228.

  43. See Dodd, Pagan and Christian, 29–36.

  44. Ibid., 119.

  45. Eusebius, The History of the Church, trans. Geoffrey A. Williamson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965).

  46. Crouzel, Origen, 140–42.

  47. A. E. Taylor, Platonism and Its Influence (1924; repr., New York: Cooper Square, 1963), 88.

  48. Eusebius, History of the Church; Theodore Vrettos, Alexandria: City of the Western Mind (New York: Free Press, 2001), 192.

  49. Chadwick, Early Church, 109.

  Chapter 11: Toward the Heavenly City

  1. This is the account from Lactantius, who was writing only a few years after the event. See Ramsay MacMullen, Constantine (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1970), 72.

  2. Noel Lenski, Cambridge Companion to the Age of Constantine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 69.

  3. Ibid., 71. The other interpretation is that Constantine himself connected the looped cross with the Christogram, and by making his soldiers p
aint it on their shields, he was declaring himself to be a Christian. Peter Weiss, “The Vision of Constantine,” Journal of Roman Archeology 16 [2003]: 237–59.

  4. See Justin Martyr, Apology I, in The Apologies of Justin Martyr, trans. Basil Gildersleeve (New York, 1877).

  5. Charles Norris Cochrane, Christianity and Classical Culture (1940; repr., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1957), 179.

  6. Eusebius, The History of the Church, trans. Geoffrey A. Williamson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), 413.

  7. Tertullian, On Idolatry (New York: Kessinger, 2004), 18–19.

  8. Celsus quoted in Peter Brown, The World of Late Antiquity (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971), 82.

  9. On Origen and Eusebius, see Timothy Barnes, Constantine and Eusebius (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981), 86–95.

  10. Eusebius, History of the Church.

  11. Ibid., 389; Panegyric, quoted in Cochrane, Christianity and Classical Culture, 185.

  12. Eusebius, The Life of Constantine, trans. A. Cameron and Stuart Hall (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), 87.

  13. Noel Lenski, Cambridge Companion to the Age of Constantine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

  14. Walter Ullmann, A History of Political Thought: The Middle Ages (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), 35.

  15. C. M. Odahl, Constantine and the Christian Empire (New York: Routledge, 2004), 136.

  16. Cochrane, Christianity and Classical Culture, 39.

  17. Lactantius, Divine Institutes, trans. A. Bowen and P. Garnsey (Liverpool: University of Liverpool Press, 2003).

  18. Cochrane, Christianity and Classical Culture, 195.

  19. Ibid., 194.

  20. Eusebius, Life of Constantine, bk. II, 24, 28.

  21. Ibid., bk. IV, 25.

  22. See James Carroll, Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews: A History (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2001).

  23. Richard Krautheimer, Three Christian Capitals: Topology and Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983); Odahl, Constantine and Christian Empire, 262.

  24. Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994), 1:863.

  25. Quoted in ibid., 1:994.

  26. Ibid., 1:869.

  27. Ibid., 1:946.

  28. J. M. Wallace-Hadrill, The Barbarian West: The Early Middle Ages A.D. 400–1000 (1952; repr., New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 21–22.

  29. Augustine quoted in David Knowles, The Evolution of Medieval Thought (New York: Random House, 1962), 37.

  30. See Richard Enos, The Rhetoric of Saint Augustine of Hippo (Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, 2008).

  31. Cochrane, Christianity and Classical Culture, 195.

  32. Augustine, Confessions, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961), 47.

  33. Jerome quoted in Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 289.

  34. Augustine quoted ibid., 293, 298.

  35. Augustine, The City of God, 94 (III:17).

  36. Ibid., 64 (II:21).

  37. Ibid., 235–36 (VIII:9).

  38. Which is why, for Augustine, animals are incapable of true knowledge. See Bruce Bubacz, St. Augustine’s Theory of Knowledge (New York: E. Mellen Press, 1981), 101.

  39. See the discussion in Knowles, Evolution of Medieval Thought, 41–43, and compare Étienne Gilson, The Christian Philosophy of Saint Augustine (1960; repr., New York: Octagon, 1983), chap. 5, esp. 107–11.

  40. Étienne Gilson, Reason and Revelation in the Middle Ages (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1939), 18–19.

  41. Augustine, City of God, 404 (XXII:30).

  Chapter 12: Inquiring Minds: Aristotle Strikes Back

  1. Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, trans. Victor E. Watts (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), 11 (introduction).

  2. Theodoric quoted in Jonathan Barnes, “Boethius and the Study of Logic,” in Margaret Gibson, ed., Boethius: His Life, Thought, and Influence (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982), 73.

  3. Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy, I, 35, 36, 38.

  4. John Marenbon, The Cambridge Companion to Boethius (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 77–79.

  5. Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy, III, 113.

  6. R. W. Southern, The Making of the Middle Ages (1953; repr., New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1967), 171.

  7. Ultimately, Boethius’s distinction between simple and conditional necessity, which allows for free choice, rested on his reading of Aristotle. H. R. Patch, “Fate in Boethius and the Neoplatonists,” Speculum 4, no. 1 (1929), 62–72.

  8. Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy, I, 39.

  9. Boethius, Commentaries on Aristotle’s “De Interpretatione,” ed. H. F. Campenhausen (Tübingen: Mohr, 1988), 285–86.

  10. See Richard Rubenstein, Aristotle’s Children (Orlando, Fla.: Harcourt, 2003), and chapter 14 of this book.

  11. Thomas Cahill, How the Irish Saved Civilization (New York: Anchor, 1996).

  12. Plato, Theaetetus, 189e–190a. On the Neoplatonist attitude contrasted with Aristotle, see Henry Chadwick, Boethius: The Consolation of Music, Logic, Theology, and Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 108–9.

  13. Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (1945; repr., New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007), 199.

  14. Henri Focillon, The Year 1000 (New York: Ungar, 1970).

  15. R. W. Southern, The Making of the Middle Ages (1953; repr., New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1967), 174–75.

  16. David Wagner, ed., The Seven Liberal Arts in the Middle Ages (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983).

  17. Southern, Making of the Middle Ages, 177; James Morrison, The Astrolabe (London: Janus, 2007).

  18. Southern, Making of the Middle Ages, 175–76.

  19. David Knowles, The Evolution of Medieval Thought (New York: Random House, 1962), 95.

  20. R. W. Southern, Saint Anselm and His Biographer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963).

  21. Originally stated in Anselm, Proslogium, chapter 3. The key to the argument is the notion that a being so obviously perfect as the God we imagine in our minds would never not exist, because existence is part and parcel of perfection. For a quick summary of the philosophical issues involved, check W. T. Jones, A History of Western Philosophy, vol. 2, The Medieval Mind (New York: Harcourt Brace & World, 1971), 203–4.

  22. D. W. Robertson, Abelard and Heloise (New York: Dial Press, 1972), 6.

  23. Later, Abelard probably knew some additional Aristotle texts on logic that were being translated from Arab sources, like the Topics, but the Categories remained the heart of his own system, along with Boethius’s own two treatises on the subject; and Porphyry’s Isagoge, which was still considered the best introduction to logic for young minds. See Jeffrey Brower, The Cambridge Companion to Abelard (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

  24. Peter Abelard, History of My Calamities, quoted in Robertson, Abelard and Heloise, 11.

  25. Ibid., 27.

  26. Russell, History of Western Philosophy, 438–39.

  27. Knowles, Evolution of Medieval Thought, 126; Jones, Medieval Mind, 191.

  28. Russell, History of Western Philosophy, 437.

  29. Sic et Non, quoted in Georges Duby, Eleanor Levieux, and Barbara Thompson, The Age of the Cathedrals: Art and Society 980–1420 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 115.

  30. Knowles, Evolution of Medieval Thought, 125.

  31. Ibid.

  32. Abelard, History of My Calamities, quoted in Robertson, Abelard and Heloise, 44.

  33. Ibid., 56.

  34. Peter Abelard, Letters of Abelard and Heloise, trans. Betty Radice (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974).

  35. Russell, History of Western Philosophy, 437, 199.

  36. Knowles, Evolution of Medieval Thought, 123.

  Chapter 13: Celestial Harmonies: Plato in the Middle Ages

  1. Glauber quoted in Alain Erl
ande-Brandenburg, The Cathedral Builders of the Middle Ages (London: Thames & Hudson, 1995), 13.

  2. Augustine, Confessions, trans. J. M. Cohen (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1954), VIII:i, 1 and 2.

  3. Bernard of Clairvaux, Letters of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, trans. Bruno Scott James (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Cistercian Publications, 1998), 249, 328.

  4. Ibid., 318, 324.

  5. Ibid., 239, 318.

  6. G. R. Evans, Bernard of Clairvaux (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 121.

  7. Bernard of Clairvaux, Letters, 319.

  8. Ibid., 328.

  9. Étienne Gilson, Reason and Revelation in the Middle Ages (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1939).

  10. Bernard of Clairvaux, Letters, 163.

  11. In a letter to the pope, he said he wanted Abelard “exterminated.” Ibid., 324, 320.

  12. R. W. Southern, Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), 314–15.

  13. Bernard of Clairvaux, Letters, 162.

  14. Ibid.

  15. Knowles, Evolution of Medieval Thought, 147.

  16. Bernard of Clairvaux, Letters, 161.

  17. Ibid.,162.

  18. Southern, Making of the Middle Ages.

  19. Augustine declared that the perfect consonance of the major octave, based on the ratio 1:2, conveyed to human ears the mystery of redemption. Augustine, On the Trinity, trans. Stephen McKenna (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of American Press, 1963), IV:2, 4.

  20. Augustine quoted in David Wagner, ed., The Seven Liberal Arts in the Middle Ages (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983), 40.

  21. Otto G. von Simson, The Gothic Cathedral (1956; repr., Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1974), 41.

  22. Fran O’Rourke, “Being and Non-Being in the Pseudo-Dionysius,” in Thomas Finan, and Vincent Twomey, eds., The Relationship Between Neoplatonism and Christianity (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1992), 56.

  23. Eric Perl, Theophany: The Neoplatonic Philosophy of Dionysius the Areopagite (Albany: SUNY Press, 2007).

  24. See M. D. Chenu, Nature, Man, and Society in the Twelfth Century (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1979).

  25. Dionysius the Areopagite, Celestial Hierarchy (Fintry, U.K.: Shrine of Wisdom Press, 1965).