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

by Charles Freeman

  24. How a language which can deal with abstract things and states of being emerged has been a subject of great controversy centring around the work of Eric Havelock. See C. L. Johnstone’s introductory essay in Theory, Text, Context: Issues in Greek Rhetoric and Oratory (New York, 1994), and the essays by Havelock, J. Margolis and others in K. Robb, ed., Language and Thought in Early Greek Philosophy (La Salle, Ill., 1983). For the foundations of the term logos, see Mortley, From Word to Silence, chap. 1, “Logos Identified.”

  25. The Athenians, for instance, believed that their founding king, Erectheus, had sprung from semen placed directly in the earth of Attica, the plain surrounding the city, by the god Hephaestus and so they alone among Greeks could be said to be truly native to Greece and thus superior to other Greeks. Most of their rivals had foundation myths in which the founder came from elsewhere. Having a “better” foundation myth than anyone else was typical of Athenian arrogance.

  26. The use of myth in tragic drama was such a sophisticated way of dealing with apparently resolvable ethical issues that a digression seems justified here. The play Antigone by Sophocles (performed in 468 B.C.) offers an excellent example of how a moral dilemma is presented in drama. The brother of Antigone, Polyneices, has been killed attacking the city of Thebes. Creon, the king of Thebes, declares him polluted and thus not worthy of burial. Antigone is determined that he should be buried according to the “unwritten and unfailing conventions of the gods” and goes ahead to scatter earth on his body. Which should take precedence, the authority of the city ruler or the conventions of the gods? This had become an issue of crucial importance as city authority grew in the sixth and fifth centuries. Sophocles makes the dilemma more complex through his portrayal of the characters. Creon is hard, emotionally clumsy and inflexible. Antigone is also inflexible (in comparison to her more pliant sister Ismene, for instance) but expresses herself more nobly. The play ends tragically. Antigone commits suicide, as does Creon’s son who has been in love with her, and his wife, but Sophocles allows other characters in the play to consider the need for living flexibly within the world without losing one’s sense of overall purpose. An analogy is made with a ship. It has its purpose, to sail towards a destination, but it would never arrive if it tried to sail directly there in the face of the wind. It has to learn how to exploit the winds for its own ends. Sophocles is suggesting that inflexibility in support of absolute values may not be the best way of living. The play is discussed in detail by M. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness (Cambridge, 1986), chap. 3.

  The Suppliants by Aeschylus (performed in 463 B.C.) deals with a problem facing any city state (and many states today), how to deal with those seeking refuge from tyranny. The “Suppliants,” fifty daughters of Danaus, arrive in the city of Argos fleeing from the fifty sons of the king Aegyptus (of Egypt) who wish to marry them; their objections to the marriages are not explored but the king was a usurper of the Egyptian throne. The king of Argos is reluctant to shelter them—it could lead to war with Egypt. Yet the popular assembly of the city overrules him. Zeus is the protector of the suppliant and he must not be offended, so the welcome must be given. There are two issues here, that of acceptance of refugees and that of who should make decisions within a city. The Athenian audience must have watched with fascination as they heard of an assembly actually voting and carrying the day, and it was only two years later, in 461, that a revolution in the city led to the Athenian assembly of all its male citizens taking full control of Athens. So The Suppliants can be seen as a consideration of the issue, which must have been very much alive in the city when the play was acted.

  The strength and importance of drama lay in its use of myth to take an issue out of contemporary politics or society and so defuse it. The audience could see the dilemma as an issue to be meditated on, and their reflections can be fed back, in a measured way, to the debates of everyday life. It is the sheer courage of the dramatists which most impresses. In his Helen (412), for instance, Euripides suggests that it was not really Helen but a phantom of her that was taken to Troy, and therefore the Trojan war was futile. All this when the Athenians had just learned of the appalling losses of their own Sicilian expedition, during which some 40,000 may have died. It is hard to imagine any twentieth-century state allowing its participation in war to be questioned in such an open way before the whole community.

  27. The quotation on the “unmoved mover” comes from Aristotle’s Physics 259a. Aristotle provides the concept of a supreme “God” who may have initiated motion but who does not necessarily have any active relationship with the world thereafter. For Aristotle and monotheism, see M. Frede, “Monotheism and Pagan Philosophy,” in P. Athanassiadi and M. Frede, Pagan Monotheism in Late Antiquity (Oxford, 1999), pp. 44–50.

  For introductions to the debates on the nature and powers of the gods see G. Kerferd, The Sophistic Movement (Cambridge, 1981), especially chap. 13, “Religion and the Gods,” and A. A. Long, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Early Greek Philosophy (Cambridge, 1999), especially chap. 10 by S. Broadie, “Rational Theology.” See also S. Price, Religions of the Ancient Greeks (Cambridge, 1999), especially here chap. 7, “Greek Thinkers.” While it was believed by conservatives that the gods could intervene when outraged, the attitude of the Greeks in general was optimistic rather than pessimistic. “For they say that foolish decisions are typical of this city, but the gods turn up for the best whatever mistakes you make,” as the chorus in Aristophanes’ play Clouds put it. It is worth stressing that even centuries later when Augustine in the Latin west argued for the existence of original sin burdening humankind so heavily that even the power to reason had been corrupted, the idea never caught on in the Greek east.

  28. Helen King’s study was published in London and New York, 1998.

  29. Trans. A. Oksenberg Rorty.

  3

  1. There is a mass of new work on rhetoric, but a good place to start is G. Kennedy, A New History of Classical Rhetoric (Princeton, 1994); see chap. 1, “Introduction: The Nature of Rhetoric.” See also Robert Wardy, “Rhetoric,” in J. Brunschwig and G. E. R. Lloyd, eds., Greek Thought: A Guide to Classical Knowledge (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 2000), and Wardy’s longer consideration of the issues, The Birth of Rhetoric (London, 1996). There are also essays in I. Worthington, ed., Persuasion: Greek Rhetoric in Action (London and New York, 1994).

  2. The speech which swayed the argument back towards leniency was made by one Diodotus. Part of the speech, as reported by Thucydides, is worth quoting in this context and as a paean to free speech and rational argument.

  Haste and anger are, to my mind, the two greatest obstacles to wise counsel—haste, that usually goes with folly, anger, that is the mark of primitive and narrow minds. And anyone who maintains that words cannot be a guide to action must be either a fool or one with some personal interest at stake: he is a fool if he imagines that it is possible to deal with the uncertainties of the future by any other medium, and he is personally interested if his aim is to persuade you on into some disgraceful action, and knowing that he cannot make a good speech in a bad cause, he tries to frighten his opponents and his hearers by some good-sized pieces of misrepresentation . . . the good citizen, instead of trying to terrify the opposition, ought to prove his case in fair argument; and a wise state, without giving special honours to its best counsellors, will certainly not deprive them of the honour they already enjoy; and when a man’s advice is not taken, he should not even be disgraced, far less penalised.

  Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War 3:42–3 (trans. R. Warner).

  3. Quoted in Wardy, “Rhetoric,” p. 467.

  4. The quotation is from Kennedy, A New History of Classical Rhetoric, p. 47. Kennedy discusses Quintilian on pp. 177–86. An excellent analysis of Isocrates’ views is to be found in chap. 5 of J. Ober, Political Dissent in Democratic Athens: Intellectual Critics of Popular Rule (Princeton and Chichester, Eng., 1998).

  5. Quoted in Wardy, “Rhetoric,” p. 483. The original is to be f
ound in Aristotle’s Rhetoric I:2:3 1335b.

  6. For the issues surrounding Socrates’ death, see R. Parker, Athenian Religion: A History (Oxford, 1996), pp. 199–207.

  7. On Plato, see R. M. Hare, Plato (Oxford, 1982), as an introduction. The essay on Plato by G. Press in R. Popkin, ed., The Pimlico History of Western Philosophy (New York, 1998; London, 1999), is also recommended.

  8. Quoted in C. Stead, Philosophy in Christian Antiquity (Cambridge, 1994), p. 19. This work is particularly useful because it sets Christian theology within its Greek philosophical background.

  9. A full account of Plato’s doctrine of the soul is to be found in J. Cooper, “Plato’s Theory of Human Motivation,” in History of Philosophy Quarterly 1, no. 1 (January 1984). I am grateful to my son Barney for bringing this article to my attention.

  10. Plato, The Republic 7.530 B–C. One should contrast Plato’s approach with Aristotle’s privileging of empirical observation over theory. As Aristotle puts it when discussing the reproduction of bees:

  This then seems to be what happens with regard to the generation of bees, judging from theory (logos) and from what are thought to be the facts about them. But the facts have not been sufficiently ascertained, and if they ever are ascertained, then we must trust perception rather than theories, and theories too, so long as what they show agrees with what appears to be the case.

  De Generatione Animalium 760 b. 27ff., quoted in G. E. R. Lloyd, Magic, Reason and Experience (Cambridge, 1979), p. 138.

  11. If Plato had been right there would surely have been someone who would have left record of the Form of, say, Justice that others, using no more than the power of reason, would have agreed with totally. There is little evidence for this, although some Christian theologians would claim that there is. The problem lies in finding a relationship between a mathematical proof and the concept of, for example, “justice.” Plato would have argued that both could be found in the same way using deductive logic, although he accepted that the task of finding “justice” would be much more intellectually demanding. A mathematical proof starts from an agreed symbolic representation (for instance a drawing of a square divided into quarters) and a proof can be developed from there. All are agreed on the first principles (as set out in the drawing), and each step follows logically from the one before to the satisfaction of all. The proof fails as soon as one person can find a valid reason for disagreeing. While individuals can come up with instances of what they, as individuals, consider to be beautiful, it is hard to see how an agreed symbolic representation could ever be set out from which to start the process of deductive reasoning towards a Form of Beauty that has the same degree of truth as a mathematical proof. What has happened more often is that one figure or ruling elite has claimed to have found the Forms and then imposed them on others. The French revolutionary leader Robespierre, for instance, who, like his colleagues, was deeply influenced by his classical education, stated his political aims in absolutely Platonic terms: “the peaceful enjoyment of liberty and equality; the reign of eternal justice, whose laws are engraved, not in marble or stone, but in the hearts of all men, even in that of the slave who forgets them [compare Meno] and of the tyrant who rejects them.” When others disagreed with his interpretation of “Virtue” they were, in the manner recommended by Plato in his Laws, eliminated in the Terror. The classic book on all this is K. Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies (reprint, London, 1995). Of course, for many the sheer sparkle of Plato, and his method of using dialogues to explore all possible points of view, lead to all this being forgiven. The point is also made later in this book that Plato attempts to convince through reason (even though we may have doubts about the way he uses it) rather than by the power of emotion.

  12. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1155a3. As an introduction to Aristotle’s ethics, see chap. 5, “Ethics and the Organisation of Desire,” in J. Lear, Aristotle: The Desire to Understand (Cambridge, 1988).

  13. Nicomachean Ethics 1144b3.

  14. The contrast is developed in the conclusion of the first part of The Passion of the Western Mind (London, 1996) by R. Tarnas.

  4

  1. The term “Hellenistic,” coined in the nineteenth century to describe the fusion of Greek and non-Greek, is given to the period between the death of Alexander (323) and the conquest of Egypt by Rome (30 B.C.). For a recent and comprehensive introduction to the period, see G. Shipley, The Greek World After Alexander, 323–30 B.C. (London, 2000).

  2. See W. G. Runciman, “Doomed to Extinction: The Polis as an Evolutionary Dead-End,” in O. Murray and S. Price, eds., The Greek City from Homer to Alexander (Oxford, 1990). For a survey of the Greek world in the fourth century, see the later chapters of J. K. Davies, Democracy and Classical Greece, 2nd ed. (London, 1993).

  3. For Alexander, a judicious life which avoids over-romanticization is by A. B. Bosworth, Conquest and Empire: The Reign of Alexander the Great (Cambridge, 1988).

  4. See A. B. Bosworth, Alexander and the East: The Tragedy of Triumph (Oxford, 1996), for a study of the sources behind Alexander’s campaigns there.

  5. See R. R. R. Smith, Hellenistic Sculpture (London, 1991), chap. 1, pp. 19–33.

  6. On ruler cults in this period, see Shipley, The Greek World After Alexander, pp. 156–63. There is a good exposition of the theory of divine kingship in a (? third century A.D.) tract attributed to the Egyptian god Thoth in his Hellenistic guise of Hermes Trismegistus. (Hermes Trismegistus is credited with some forty-two books of spiritual wisdom.)

  There are in the universe four regions . . . namely, heaven, the aether, the air, and the earth. Above, my son, in heaven dwell gods, over whom, as over all else likewise, rules the maker of the universe . . . and upon earth dwell men, over whom rules he who is king for the time being; for the gods, my son, cause to be born at the right time a man that is worthy to govern upon earth . . . he who is king on earth is the last of the four rulers, but the first of men. As long as he is on earth, he has no part in true deity; but as compared with other men, he has something exceptional, which is like to God.

  Quoted in H. A. Drake, Constantine and the Bishops: The Politics of Intolerance (Baltimore and London, 2000), p. 128. Echoes of such statements survived to justify the Byzantine emperors’ role as representatives of God on earth.

  7. The careful and critical work of A. B. Bosworth has done much to produce a balanced assessment of Alexander. One reason why Alexander’s reputation has remained high is the influence of the main surviving source for his life, Arrian’s, written in the second century A.D. In fact, Arrian based his life on one of Alexander’s commanders, Ptolemy, whose eulogistic account of Alexander’s campaigns was developed to boost his own claim to succession to Alexander in Egypt. (See A. B. Bosworth, From Arrian to Alexander: Studies in Historical Interpretation [Oxford, 1988], and A. B. Bosworth and E. J. Baynham, eds., Alexander the Great in Fact and Fiction [Oxford, 2000].)

  See A. B. Bosworth, Conquest and Empire: The Reign of Alexander the Great (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 285–86 for Callisthenes’ opposition to proskynesis and pp. 118–19 for his death. For a sober assessment of Plutarch’s view that Alexander tried to create some form of unity between Greeks, see R. Baldry, The Greeks and the Unity of Mankind (Cambridge, 1965), chap. 4, esp. pp. 113–34. For an assessment of Plutarch’s eulogy, see also J. R. Hamilton, Plutarch’s Alexander: A Commentary (Bristol, 1999), pp. xxiv–xxxiii. Hamilton shows how it was a rhetorical display piece in which the speaker, here a young Plutarch, was expected to make the very best case possible, even at the risk, as here, of gross distortion of the reality. Adulation of Alexander was boosted in the nineteenth century by the Prussian historian Droysen’s claim that without Alexander the Greek world would have remained confined to the Aegean, and Christianity would have been unable to spread across the Mediterranean and Asia. The implication is that the pagan Alexander was sent by God to pave the way. Droysen’s view reached its apogée in the work of William Tarn. In his Alexander (Cambridge, 1948), Tarn mak
es the suggestion that

  Alexander lifted the civilized world out of one groove and set in in another . . . In so far as the modern world derives its civilization from Greece, it largely owes it to Alexander that it had the opportunity . . . when at last Christianity showed the way to that spiritual unity after which men were feeling, there was ready to hand a medium for the new religion to spread in the common Hellenistic civilization of the “inhabited world.”

  Even today, when we are much more sensitive to imperialist propaganda, there are those who see Alexander’s immediate legacy as positive, but on the whole the brutality of his conquests and the lack of vision beyond them is now being recognized. It was his successors who provided the stability within which Greek civilization could spread, and there is much evidence that it was not until the long Roman centuries that Greek culture penetrated below the surface of the native cultures of Asia. The Romans never swallowed the Alexander legend uncritically. In a bitter attack on Alexander in his History of Rome, Livy suggests that it was one thing for Alexander to conquer barbarians—if he had met the Romans the outcome would have been very different! (Livy, History of Rome 9, xviii) Cicero in his De Republica tells the story of a pirate captured by Alexander.