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

by Charles Freeman

  The provinces of north Africa had been reconquered by Justinian in the 530s and restored to orthodox Christianity, but in the seventh century they were overrun by the Arabs. For good or ill, Rome lost those provinces of the west that had provided the most effective challenge to her authority, with the result that, in the words of Robert Markus, “Rome’s world became radically simplified; and the Roman see emerged as the single, isolated, religious centre of the barbarian west.”47 The history of western Christianity was rewritten so successfully to reflect this fact that many western Christians are hardly aware of the predominently Greek nature of the early church. In fact, it is still possible to read of the eastern churches “breaking away” from Catholicism. Though the story is necessarily complicated, it seems rather to have been one of “the final detachment of the papacy from Byzantine political allegiance and the creation of a new western empire” in the eighth century.48

  A story survives of one Fursey, an Irish ascetic of the seventh century, who dreamed that he had died and was facing the last judgment. He was assailed by a mass of demons, who pointed out that many of his deeds, apparently good in themselves, were tainted because they had not sprung from love alone. There would be no justice, the demons told him, if God was to accept him in paradise. They even doubted, they told him, that God was as fully aware of his shortcomings as they were! To remind him of his peril, as he passed through the flames of hell, the required route to reach heaven, the body of a burning sinner, to whom on earth he had given a light penance in return for a gift of clothing, brushed against him, leaving a scar on his face. Although with the help of protecting angels Fursey did make it to heaven, the scar remained on his cheek when he awoke from his dream, and every time he recounted his terrifying experience he was seen to break out into sweat. 49

  Ever since Paul described the last judgment as “a day of anger,” anxiety had formed a significant part of the Christian experience; reading the writings of the western Church Fathers, it is easy to see why this was so sustained. They expressed intense anxiety over authority, over sex, over the punitive powers of their God. No one who follows Augustine can be sure of salvation. What has been particularly important has been the conceptualisation, following Plato, of the human psyche as at continual war with itself. We are caught as individuals in a cosmic drama, and one can never relax in case the demons take hold. (There is an interesting analogy here with Freud, who saw the unconscious ready to ambush our rational behaviour at any moment.) It deserves repeating that this is only one possible way of conceptualising the psyche; others, following Aristotle, would prefer to stress its potential for harmonious eudaimonia. However, in medieval Christianity preoccupation with internal battles and the inherent sinfulness of humankind took an ever more powerful hold. As so often, art reflects the process. As Neil MacGregor has put it in his thoughtful study of Christian art, Seeing Salvation, “as the number and scale of our wrong doings grow, so, necessarily do his [Christ’s] sufferings.”50 The rare depictions of crucifixion in the fifth century show no sign of Christ’s humiliation and suffering— perhaps Christians still found it difficult to accept the degradation of crucifixion. The words “who was crucified for us” were added to the litany for the first time in the 470s in Antioch. 51 By 1300 his suffering is shown in prurient detail. Christ’s agony on the cross makes sense only in the context of man’s sinfulness; if Christ brings salvation, then it follows that humanity is in need of it and the nature of man is defined accordingly. Thus the profound rupture with the classical world’s conceptions of “man.” And the rupture was firmly associated with the attack on rationalism, as can be seen in Augustine’s assertion that man’s power to think rationally had been corrupted forever by Adam’s sin.

  Yet at the same time, what was now the Roman Catholic Church was assuming responsibility for the poor and unloved. The tradition of learning was narrow, particularly by comparison with the classical world, but in so far as education was preserved it was through the Church, as was a system of health care. These centuries were also a time when imperial authority had disappeared and the Church in the west began to fill the vacuum. The Church preserved Roman law and the bishops a structure of institutional authority. The different cultures of western Europe may have adopted different kinds of Christianity as they fused their local cultural and spiritual traditions with those of the church, but there was a sense of a common language, even if it was a restricted one, with which communities could communicate with each other across Europe. If imperial Christianity—the Christianity of the empire in its death throes, in which even Jesus emerges as a warrior— was far removed from the Christianity of the Gospels, Christianity now takes on a new role as an agent of social cohesion in a world built out of the ruins of the empire. What remained was a tension between the obedience demanded by institutional Christianity and the original Gospel message of ambivalence to authority. (Paul provided a much more effective model than the Gospels for those who wished to stress the importance of authority, one reason, perhaps, why he became so prominent in the fourth century.) It is a tension which has persisted throughout Christian history and remains alive today, as reformers, in most cases drawing directly on the words of Jesus, have challenged the power, wealth and social conservatism of the established churches.

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  “WE HONOUR THE PRIVILEGE OF SILENCE WHICH IS WITHOUT PERIL” The Death of the Greek Empirical Tradition

  In a famous passage in Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, Jesus returns to earth, is recognized by the Grand Inquisitor and is thrown into prison for threatening to subvert the Church. His message of universal freedom had proved impossible to follow. As the Inquisitor taunts Jesus:

  Did you forget that a tranquil mind and even death is dearer to man than a free choice in the knowledge of good and evil? . . . Instead of the strict ancient law, [when you came] man had in future to decide for himself with a free heart what is good and what is evil . . . But did it never occur to you that he would at last reject and call in question even your image and your truth, if he were weighed down by so fearful a burden as freedom of choice?

  You hoped, the Inquisitor tells Jesus, that people would worship you out of free will and without the need for miracles, but what they really yearn for is good order. Otherwise they tear themselves apart.

  Freedom, a free mind and science will lead them into such a jungle and bring them face to face with such marvels and insoluble mysteries that some of them will destroy themselves, others will destroy one another, and the rest, weak and unhappy, will come crawling to our [the church’s] feet and cry aloud: “Yes, you were right, you alone possessed his mystery and we come back to you—save us from ourselves.”

  The Church, the Inquisitor concludes, had, through the use of “mystery, magic and authority,” soothed the anxieties that Jesus had aroused. Hence the threat posed by his return.1

  “Mystery, magic and authority” are particularly relevant words in attempting to define Christianity as it had developed by the end of the fourth century. The century had been characterized by destructive conflicts over doctrine in which personal animosities had often prevailed over reasoned debate. Within Christian tradition, of course, the debate has been seen in terms of a “truth” (finally consolidated in the Nicene Creed in the version of 381) assailed by a host of heresies that had to be defeated. Epiphanius, the intensely orthodox bishop of Salamis in the late fourth century, was able to list no less than eighty heresies extending back over history (he was assured his total was correct when he discovered exactly the same number of concubines in the Song of Songs!), and Augustine in his old age came up with eighty-three. The heretics, said their opponents, were demons in disguise who “employed sophistry and insolence. Through the former they won over the less intelligent by specious argument; through the latter they attacked the weaker, terrified them with fear of their effrontery, and tried to make them submit to their heresies.”2 From a modern perspective, however, it would appear that the real problem was not that evil
men or demons were trying to subvert doctrine but that the diversity of sources for Christian doctrine—the scriptures, “tradition,” the writings of the Church Fathers, the decrees of councils and synods—and the pervasive influence of Greek philosophy made any kind of coherent “truth” difficult to sustain, even by such sophisticated thinkers as the Cappadocian Fathers. Both church and state wanted secure definitions of orthodoxy, but there were no agreed axioms or first principles that could be used as foundations for the debate. As soon as the essentials of Christianity were explored, a mass of underlying philosophical problems emerged—witness the many different ways of conceiving the supreme deity. As we have seen, the scriptures were so diverse that texts, none of which had been written with the theological issues of the fourth and fifth centuries in mind, could be produced to support a wide variety of doctrines. The very fact that Augustine and Epiphanius could each list over eighty different interpretations of Christian doctrine (“heresies”) makes the point. A desperation to establish doctrinal certainty, a desperation made more intense by the fear of eternal punishment in an area where certainty was, in rational terms, so hard to achieve, helps explain why the level of bitterness in Christian debate was so high, much higher than it was in the more open world of pagan philosophy. It is hard to imagine a situation more conducive to frustration. It was not that Christians were any less able or forgiving than their pagan fellows. It was rather that they had become trapped in a philosophical cul-de-sac. The resulting tension explains why the emperors, concerned with maintaining good order in times of stress, would eventually be forced to intervene to declare one or other position in the debate “orthodox” and its rivals “heretical.” This in its turn led to the heretical groups being deprived of imperial patronage. Hence the widespread rioting reported in the east when Arianism was finally condemned in the 380s.

  One way of calming the theological turmoil was to declare that ultimately God was unknowable and that therefore speculation about his nature was futile, even blasphemous. We see such an approach in the preaching of Gregory of Nazianzus (c. 329–90), already encountered as one of the Cappadocian Fathers and as a thinker very much at home with Greek philosophy.3 Gregory’s enthusiasm for public speaking conflicted with a fundamentally shy nature, and throughout his life he was torn between the demands of public life and the attractions of asceticism and personal study. The conflict was crystallized by his arrival in 379 in Constantinople, where he was asked to become preacher to the small Nicene community in the city (at a time when Homoeanism and Arianism were still the most popular forms of Christianity there). With the arrival of the emperor Theodosius and his declaration of Trinitarian orthodoxy he found himself thrust into unexpected prominence. As leader of a minority position now declared by the emperor to be the “truth,” he was confronted by a maelstrom of debate, as much in the streets as elsewhere. 4 His reaction was to try to find a rationale to defuse it. In his Theological Orations, delivered in Constantinople in 380, he drew on a tradition established by his fellow Cappadocian Basil that ultimately the nature of God is a mystery and that the proper response to questions about his nature should be silence. Basil had argued:

  It should be enough for you to know that there is a good shepherd who gave his soul for his sheep. The knowledge of God is comprised within these limits. How big God is, what His limits are, and of what essence He is, such questions are dangerous on the part of the interrogator; they are as unanswerable on the part of the interrogated. Consequently they should be taken care of with silence.5

  In his Orations Gregory follows Basil’s lead. Unlike many of his contemporaries he avoids attacking specific heresies but instead confronts the tradition of questioning itself. So much speculation, he claims, is purely for effect, reminiscent of the promoters of wrestling bouts who stage-manage contests “to give the uncritical spectators visual sensations and compel their applause.” The questioners are manipulating others’ minds, trying to mould men into holiness, but they produce instead “ready-made councils of ignorant intellectuals.” Only those who are pure in heart, by which he appears to mean ascetics, and have theological grounding, in effect priests and bishops, should contemplate the mystery of the divine and even then “to tell of God is not possible.”6

  Whether Gregory was right even to include bishops as worthy participants in the debates was brought into question when he was asked to preside over the Council of Constantinople, which passed the final formulation of the Nicene Creed. The experience appalled him. He records of one meeting of the bishops:

  I finished my speech, but they squawked in every direction, a flock of jackdaws combining together, a rabble of adolescents, a gang of youths, a whirlwind raising dust under the pressure of air currents, people whom nobody who was mature either in the fear of God or in years would pay any attention, they splutter confused stuff or like wasps rush directly at what is in front of their faces.7

  He was challenged over whether he should be bishop at all (a challenge rooted in the struggle for primacy between Alexandria and Constantinople), and in 381, complaining of ill health, real or imagined, he left Constantinople for good, dying in Nazianzus some nine years later. “We are quiet here without strife and disputes,” he wrote before his death, “since above all else we honour the privilege of silence which is without peril.” 8 It is telling that after Gregory of Nazianzus was deposed as bishop, his replacement was the urban prefect Nectarius, like Ambrose of Milan an unbaptized layman when he was appointed. Clearly the priority was the maintenance of good order in an unsettled city, and one assumes that another “Nicene” appointment would have threatened this.

  Gregory’s views were echoed by his much more outspoken and confident contemporary John Chrysostom. In a series of sermons preached in his native Antioch between 386 and 387 John inveighed against those who speculated on God. It is faith that matters, says John; it provides the limits within which one can know about God, but “they [the speculators] invent and meddle in everything so that faith is excluded from the understanding of their listeners . . . Whenever God reveals something, it is necessary to accept what is said in faith, not to pry impetuously.” John compares the subservience of the angels in heaven to the irreverent prattle of those on earth: “Did you see how great the holy dread in heaven and how great the arrogant presumption here below? The angels in heaven give God glory; these on earth carry on meddlesome investigations.” In fact, God was beyond human understanding, and human language was unable to capture his true nature.9 A century later the mystical theologian known as Pseudo-Dionysius (who probably wrote in Syria c. 500–520) summarized the essence of the debate: “It is most fitting to the mysterious passages of scripture that the saved and hidden truth about the celestial intelligences be concealed through the inexpressible and the sacred and be inaccessible to the hoi polloi.” Dionysius, who has proved a highly influential figure in Christian mysticism, partly because for many centuries his writings were believed to be those of a first-century Dionysius, a convert of Paul, until modern textual analysis showed the extent to which they were influenced by Neoplatonism, argued that the soul should progress beyond the senses and reason, entering “a darkness beyond understanding” in which God cannot be conceptualized at all. “God is in no way like the things that have being and we have no knowledge at all of His incomprehensible and ineffable transcendence and invisibility.” 10 Perhaps consciously Dionysius echoed Paul, who famously noted (1 Corinthians 13:12): “We are seeing a dim reflection in a mirror; but then we shall be seeing face to face. The knowledge I have now is imperfect; but then I shall know as fully as I am known.”

  There were, of course, conceptual issues raised by the idea of an unknowable God. Could a creed which consisted overwhelmingly of positive assertions about the nature of God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit (the only negative assertion in the Nicene Creed is the phrase “not made” in “begotten, not made”) co-exist with the belief that God is unknowable? Conversely, how was it possible to say we have “no knowledge” of
a God who has frequently revealed himself in the Old Testament, and, through Christ, in the New? Gregory of Nyssa was forced to admit that this might indeed be the case: “Whoever searches the whole of revelation will find there no doctrine of divine nature at all, nor indeed a doctrine of anything else that has a substantial existence, so that we pass our lives in ignorance of much, being ignorant first of all of ourselves as human beings and then of all other things besides.” 11 There was surely a fundamental conceptual incoherence here. If God is essentially unknowable, what implications does this have for the authority of the Church so far as doctrine is concerned? Could Christian doctrine be divided into some areas where certainty is possible and others where it is accepted that it is not; if so, where is the boundary between the two to be drawn and the distinction justified in any coherent way? Essentially, the problem was that the Christian concept of God had evolved in too many different and conflicting contexts. As we saw earlier, this did not trouble a pagan like the orator Themistius, who revelled in the 300 ways of describing God, but Christians were forced to narrow their definitions of God to a few fundamental attributes. It could not be done in any philosophically coherent way, and claiming that God was unknowable can perhaps be seen a pragmatic response to the difficulties.

  By the end of the fourth century this theological development (or it might equally be described as the extinction of theology in that the freedom to explore the nature of God was becoming restricted to the point of extinction) suited the political needs of the emperors. They too wished to defuse the acrimony of Christian debate in a world that seemed increasingly beyond their control politically as well as spiritually. Theodosius II was particularly anxious to bring order into government and religion. His Code of Laws, an accumulation of some 2,500 imperial laws since the time of Constantine, promulgated in 438, brought together an extensive range of edicts defending Christianity and condemning its rivals. When preparations were under way for the Council of Ephesus of 431, Theodosius II tried to settle the Nestorian debate without engendering the chaos and acrimony of earlier councils. Recognizing how easily debates could degenerate into personalized abuse, he pleaded with Cyril of Alexandria that “true doctrine with respect to religion ” should be sought “by means of research rather than by arrogant disputations concerning words.”12 He planned that the council should be presided over by an imperial commissioner who would guide the assembled bishops towards consensus. As we have seen, Theodosius was outmanoeuvred by Cyril, who pushed through a doctrine for which he then attempted to gain the support of the imperial authorities through massive bribery. However, in 451 at Chalcedon, the imperial authorities were, as we have seen, better prepared. A compromise formula on the nature of Christ was prepared and imposed and an attempt (unsuccessful in this instance) made to silence further debate through an imperial decree.