The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason

by Charles Freeman

  Jerome and Paula eventually settled in Bethlehem, where Paula’s wealth was used to found two monasteries to support them and their followers. The new Latin version of the Gospels had now been completed and for the next twenty years Jerome worked on his translation of the Hebrew scriptures. At first this work aroused deep suspicion. The Greek Septuagint version had achieved a canonical status, and there was much unease over a rival version that might threaten its dominance. Augustine prophesied that there would be a break between east and west if the west abandoned the Septuagint, which Greek-speaking Christians believed to have been divinely inspired, for the Jewish original. It was only in the ninth century, in the great Bibles produced by Charlemagne, that Jerome’s version was fully accepted (and by that time the breach was in any case complete).

  Translation seems to have been Jerome’s forte; he was notably less at ease with original and creative work. Many of his commentaries on the Old Testament are drawn almost entirely from earlier commentators (despite his abuse of Ambrose for doing the same). He was thoroughly caught out as late as 1941 when the discovery in the Egyptian desert of a voluminous five-book commentary on the prophet Zachariah by Didymus the Blind showed how heavily Jerome had relied on Didymus in his own commentary on the prophet. It has to be remembered that before the invention of printing there were very few copies of most works available and the opportunities for successful plagiarism were widespread. Also, to be fair to Jerome, there are many occasions in these commentaries when he does record his sources. Perhaps Jerome’s greatest inspiration came from Origen, whose works were available in manuscript in nearby Caesarea, where Origen had spent his last years. Origen had been the first Christian to compare systematically Hebrew versions of the scriptures with the Septuagint and was a model for Jerome on those grounds alone, but he had also written major commentaries on many of the books of the Old and New Testaments, adaptations of which appear in Jerome’s own work. It has been shown, for instance, that in his Commentary on the Epistle to the Ephesians, which can be compared to parts of Origen’s own commentary, Jerome passed off Origen’s ideas as his own, even to the extent of unwittingly repeating under his own name some of Origen’s errors!

  Yet it was also the legacy of Origen which exposed Jerome at his weakest. The sheer creativity and originality of Origen had left him vulnerable to critics, and by the end of the fourth century these were gathering. Epiphanius, the ardently orthodox bishop of Salamis in Cyprus, included Origen as one of a long list of heretics he had compiled, on the grounds that Origen had been an inspiration for Arius. An intransigent and forceful man, Epiphanius then began to approach scholars such as Jerome to win them over to his rigid brand of orthodoxy. He sent a group of monks to Bethlehem, and, for reasons that have never fully been understood, they were able to persuade Jerome to abandon his mentor. Perhaps the reason lies in Jerome’s fundamental lack of selfconfidence, which made him particularly vulnerable to pressures of this kind. Others, however, were not to be so easily bullied, among them the bishop of nearby Jerusalem, John, and Rufinus, a friend of Jerome’s from his school days who had settled in a monastery on the slopes of the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem and had been responsible for the Latin translation of works of several of the great Greek theologians, among them the Cappadocian Fathers. Rufinus now set about a translation of Origen’s major work, On the First Principles (De Principiis in Rufinus’ Latin version, which is the only one to survive). He was aware that in Rome, where the Latin version would be read, Origen was already being treated with suspicion, so he prefaced his translation with the comment that he believed that Origen had been unfairly represented by his critics. He also proclaimed that he was only following in the footsteps of a far greater scholar then himself, Jerome, the well-known enthusiast for Origen! Jerome was outraged, as he had some right to be (Rufinus knew of his change of heart), but his response, dispatched to Rome in a letter intended to be made public, was vituperative. Rufinus was branded as a heretic who had covered himself with infamy through translating such a heretical work as De Principiis. Jerome went on to create distorted versions of the translation so as to associate Rufinus with extreme views he had never expressed. Although Jerome later wrote a more moderate personal letter to Rufinus, it never reached him, and the damage was done—an old friendship had been rudely shattered. Rufinus retaliated by quoting passages of Jerome’s where he had borrowed from Origen without any acknowledgement. While things moved Jerome’s way when, as we have seen, in 400, Theophilus, bishop of Alexandria, also branded Origen a heretic, Jerome’s inability to control his vindictiveness and his unashamed readiness to distort the writings of an opponent has lingered across the centuries.

  Among Jerome’s many correspondents was a younger and brilliant theologian from north Africa, Augustine. Augustine’s first letter, in 394 or 395, actually asked Jerome to make more Latin translations of Greek theologians for those in north Africa, such as himself, whose Greek was weak (“especially,” one reads with some unease “that Origen you mention in your writings with particular pleasure”).5 However, the main purpose of the letter was to comment on Jerome’s suggestion that the famous/notorious row between Peter and Paul recounted in Galatians was a deliberate simulation, with both Apostles acting a part in collusion with each other. Augustine argued that Galatians was describing the event as it actually took place and that once one began to suggest things may have been otherwise, the authenticity of any other part of the scriptures might be challenged. A sermon of Augustine’s only recently discovered in Mainz shows that he believed that Peter’s humble acceptance of rebuke by Paul actually enhanced the former’s authority as a moral leader. This correspondence was interrupted for some years by postal problems, but the very hint of criticism was enough to launch Jerome into another of his vindictive letters. This time he had met his match: Augustine replied with a letter of conciliation and magnanimity.6 Although he tried to shift the blame for the controversy onto others (including Rufinus), Jerome appears to have been genuinely moved by the care Augustine had taken. At heart Jerome was a lonely man, and his last years, during which Paula and Eustochium, who had herself come out to Bethlehem, died, and even his monastery was sacked by a mob, were unhappy ones. Nevertheless, his last surviving letter to one Donatus (of whom nothing else is known, the name being a common one in north Africa) inveighs against the Pelagian heretics and expresses the hope that the new bishop of Rome, Boniface, will “cut them to pieces with Christ’s sword, for neither plasters nor soothing medicaments can enable them to recover sound health.”7 Combative to the last, Jerome died in 419 or 420.

  So we come to Augustine. Through his sheer intellectual power, probing curiosity, originality, extraordinary range of concerns and enormous output of work (it has been said that anyone who claims to have read all of Augustine’s works must be lying), Augustine has come to be seen as the cornerstone of the western Christian tradition.8 There is no other Christian theologian (Origen possibly excepted) who shows such uninhibited philosophical curiosity. It is truly through Augustine that we pass from the classical world to the medieval, in that Augustine brought to fruition much of earlier Christian theology and gave it powerful expression, vigour and coherence. Thomas Aquinas cites Augustine in his works nearly ten times as often as he cites Jerome. When printing was invented, Augustine’s works were the earliest to be printed after the Bible; a complete edition of his massive City of God was published at Subiaco in Italy as early as 1467. Martin Luther was deeply influenced by Augustine, often using Augustine’s theology as a starting point for his own.9 He remains a deeply controversial figure, his reputation burdened with the responsibility of integrating sinfulness into human nature (at least in the western Christian tradition if not elsewhere): “the man who fused Christianity together with hatred of sex and pleasure into a systematic unity,” as the German theologian Uta Ranke-Heinemann has put it.10 The truth is necessarily more complex, and Augustine, while undeniably pessimistic by temperament and increasingly so with age, is cer
tainly a more remarkable man than he is often portrayed by his critics. Nevertheless, his legacy, developed as it was by his successors, remains an awkward one. In particular, his gradual subjection of reason to faith and authority did much to undermine the classical tradition of rational thought.

  Like Tertullian, Augustine came from northern Africa; he was born in the inland city of Thagaste in 354. It is impossible to discuss Augustine without assessing the impact on his character of his mother, Monnica, a Christian. His preoccupation with her still pervades the Confessions, which he wrote in his forties, ten years after her death. In comparison to Monnica, his father, Patricius, a civil servant, who was not baptized until the end of his life, is a shadowy figure hardly mentioned by Augustine. Monnica appears to have been stifling in her love for her son; any lapse on his part brought out agonies in her as crippling, her son commented, as the pains of labour. However, determined that he should succeed, she, supported by her husband and the help of a patron, insisted on the best education for him, and by the age of seventeen he was at university in Carthage, the ancient port on the north African coast, specializing in law. His curriculum, in the traditional Latin authors, may have been restricted (he never properly mastered Greek, for instance), but he received a firm grounding in rhetoric, and this was to be the skill which gave him hope of advancement in the imperial service. However, a reading at the age of eighteen of Cicero’s Hortensius, a now-lost “exhortation to philosophy,” convinced Augustine that a life of philosophy was the true one, especially when he compared the sophistication of Cicero’s prose with the clumsy and incoherent scriptures that he was also reading for the first time. This in itself was a form of conversion, a dedication to the path of knowledge rather than to an imperial career, and one senses that Augustine had also achieved a precarious form of psychological independence from his mother. He lived with a woman (whose name has not been recorded). Far from being debauched (a legend propagated by himself and indicative of his own deep sense of guilt about even minor peccadilloes), his life appears to have been stable. The relationship lasted some fifteen years, and he had a son, Adeodatus, who survived until his late teens. Apart from a brief visit home in 375, Augustine remained based in Carthage as a teacher of literature until 383.

  Augustine desperately needed a spiritual home, and he was prepared to leave the mainstream to find it. For nine years he was attached to the Manicheans, an isolated and somewhat elitist sect whose beliefs centred on the teachings of Mani, an influential Persian prophet of the previous century. With Persia so often at war with Rome, emperors distrusted the Manicheans’ Persian origins and the sect was often persecuted, giving its members even more of a sense of exclusiveness. The Manicheans drew heavily on Christianity and accepted the authenticity of Jesus as an important spiritual leader, but their main teachings centred on the nature of evil. Evil, symbolized by darkness, and to be found in all matter, was involved in an endless struggle against Good, the forces of light that it often defeated and fragmented. However, uncontaminated light remained in the sun and the moon, and these acted as rallying points for the forces of light themselves, with God as the ultimate force of life. The human body, like all matter, was evil, and had been deliberately designed by the forces of evil as a mechanism for keeping the soul, a potential source of light, imprisoned. The soul had to be set free, and this was the role of Christ, but, in contrast to orthodox Christians, the Manicheans believed that he could never have entered a human body, as thereby he would have lost his power. The Manicheans, in fact, saw themselves as teachers of a pure “scientific” Christianity closer to the truth than that of the church. They derided the scriptures for their contradictions and the Old Testament prophets for the immorality of their lives. The more committed Manicheans were profoundly ascetic and attempted to remove themselves as far as they could from matter, even going so far to employ “hearers” who served them by handling their food and other needs. Augustine was a “hearer,” in other words outside the elite, and as such he was allowed to have sexual relationships, although having children (in other words, producing more evil matter) was frowned on.

  Augustine appears to have valued the comradeship of the Manichean group and the apparent coherence of their teachings, but he gradually came to be disillusioned with them. Not all Manicheans lived up to the high standards they set themselves, and Augustine’s wider readings in philosophy showed him that far from being “scientific” they disregarded the findings of Greek science. He found the definition of all matter as evil too crude, especially in the implication that the forces of Good could be defeated by it. His instinct was to find “a Good” that was unassailable, and it was this search that was to lead him to Platonism.

  Augustine had by this time left Africa. First in 383 he had gone to Rome, in the hope, he tells us, of finding a better living as a teacher with more disciplined students than the unruly ones he found in Carthage. His mother continued to dominate him—his father had died when he was about eighteen. She had already been deeply upset by his Manicheism but made matters worse by turning up on the quayside in Africa, apparently hoping either to drag him back home or go with him to Rome. When he gave her the slip and boarded the ship alone, she was distraught at his betrayal. The matter troubled Augustine deeply, and it is possible the illness which struck him while he was in Rome was some form of breakdown associated with the break with his mother. (In the Confessions Augustine dwells on the terrible blow it would have dealt to his mother if he had died of his illness, still mired in evil and assuredly on his way to hell.) Rome was not a success, but then he had the break he needed. The prefect of the city, Symmachus, the Symmachus of the diptych discussed earlier, had been asked to find an imperial orator for Milan, and having heard Augustine speak, recommended him to the emperor. The post was granted, and Augustine set off north. One of his first encounters in his new home was with none other than Symmachus’ adversary in the dispute over the Altar of Victory, Ambrose, bishop of the city.

  Augustine came to Milan not as a Christian but as a man still searching for truth. It was the Platonists who first impressed him there. Platonism was popular among both Christians and non-Christians, although those Platonists whom Augustine met appear to have been Christians who had drawn their Platonism from Plotinus and Porphyry (even though the latter was strongly anti-Christian). It is not known exactly what authors Augustine read (although it appears that they did include Plotinus and Porphyry), but Platonism now gave him much of what he was looking for: the sense of an ultimate incorporeal reality, eternal, unassailable and all powerful, the source of creation, good and happiness, which a human soul, if committed to the task, was able to grasp. Evil, far from being the powerful and destructive force preached by the Manicheans, could be seen in Platonism as a departure from goodness. This was a foundation on which Augustine could build. Yet Platonism was not fully satisfying. The traditional Platonic view had been that, while it might take many years, the ultimate reality could be grasped by reason. Augustine wanted to avoid, perhaps needed to avoid, this long journey. His stay in Milan was marked by another emotional crisis, and he suffered asthmatic attacks so debilitating that he had to give up his post as orator. He yearned for a more immediate means of bridging the gap between the human soul and the incorporeal God. Into the void came Christianity.

  Augustine was deeply impressed by Ambrose’s preaching and personality. Here was a man brought up in the classical world who was true to his background yet who had espoused Christianity. When Augustine, still under the influence of the Manicheans, expressed his concern with the “grossness” of the Old Testament, the urbane Ambrose said that he should see the “gross” passages as allegories, as Origen had done. As his doubts dissolved, Augustine now began to believe that Christ was the intermediary he searched for, and that through accepting the authority of the church, its tradition and the scriptures he could gain a direct relationship with God. While Platonism might represent the highest intellectual and spiritual point of the pagan world, Chr
istianity went beyond it and provided an everlasting haven. As Augustine later put it in the City of God, Christianity “is the religion that embodies a universal path to the liberation of the soul, since the soul can be liberated no other way but this. For this is the royal road that alone leads to the kingdom, a kingdom not doomed to sway uneasily upon a pinnacle of time but solidly founded on eternity.”11 His actual conversion, as he described it in the Confessions, was sudden. While in emotional torment in a garden he heard the voice of a child in a nearby house saying over and over, “Take it and read, take it and read.” He took up Paul’s Epistles and came across a verse from Romans (13:13–14), “Not in revelling and drunkenness, not in lust and wantonness, not in quarrels and rivalries. Rather arm yourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ; spend no more thought on nature and nature’s appetites.” This was for him the final piece of the puzzle. He had found a spiritual home and was now ready to embrace celibacy.12