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

by Charles Freeman

  48. Hanson, The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God, p. 855.

  49. Ibid., p. 852. In his Ecclesiastical History (V, 8), the early-fifth-century Socrates notes: “Great disturbances occurred in other cities as the Arians were ejected from their churches.” Williams, Ambrose of Milan, suggests that Ambrose’s attempt to impose Nicene orthodoxy in Milan at the Council of Aquileia in 381 actually led to an increase in support for the Homoean alternative. See his chap. 7, “A Homoian Revival in Milan.”

  50. Quoted in Kallistos Ware, “Eastern Christendom,” chap. 4, in John McManners, ed., The Oxford Illustrated History of Christianity (Oxford, 1990), p. 137. It is certainly arguable that historians and theologians have underestimated the hostility to Theodosius’ imposition of “his” faith—the widespread opposition to the imposition of Nicene orthodoxy in Constantinople provides a plausible explanation as to why the creed formulated by the council of 381 was given so little publicity. One could go on to suggest that it was not until 451, when Homoean Christianity had largely disappeared, that it was possible to proclaim the creed openly in the east. As mentioned above there is no record of its public use in the east before the late fifth century. This is an area of history that needs further research.

  51. S. Mitchell, Anatolia: Land, Men and Gods in Asia Minor (Oxford, 1993), vol. 2, ch. 17, section X, “The Epigraphy of the Anatolian Heresies.”

  52. For Palladius’ attack on De Fide, see Williams, Ambrose of Milan, pp. 148–53.

  53. Hanson, The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God, pp. 672–73.

  54. Wiles, Archetypal Heresy, p. 39.

  55. See comment ibid., p. 50. One scholar quoted by Wiles describes the Homoean Goths as having “a ponderous and earthbound reliance on the text of the Bible” (E. A. Thompson, The Visigoths in the Time of Ulfila [Oxford, 1966]). There is perhaps a hint of condescension here reflecting the traditional attitude to Arians by a conventional scholar, but the point is made—they clung to the scriptures.

  56. Hanson, The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God, p. 831. For the debate, in which Maximinus was considered the winner, see A. D. Fitzgerald, ed., Augustine Through the Ages (Grand Rapids, Mich., and Cambridge, 1999), p. 550. The full text of the debate is given in Arianism and Other Heresies, vol. 18 of The Works of Saint Augustine, Augustinian Heritage Institute, J. Rutelle, ed. (New York, 1995), pp. 175–230.

  57. Fitzgerald, ed., Augustine Through the Ages, p. 80. The article on “authority” in this excellent survey of Augustine and his time gives a number of quotations from Augustine illustrating his adherence to orthodoxy when interpreting the scriptures. His insistence that the scriptures be interpreted to support the doctrine of the Trinity comes from his De Trinitate 1.11.22. One prominent Italian scholar has summed it up as follows: “The whole development of Catholic doctrine is based on the interpretation of a certain number of passages in Scripture in the light of particular needs” (M. Simonetti, Profilo storico dell’esegesi patristica [Rome, 1980], quoted in D. Janes, God and Gold in Late Antiquity [Cambridge, 1998]).

  58. Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana 3:5. The translation is from the Oxford World’s Classics edition (Oxford, 1999) by R. P. H. Green. Pelikan explores the same issue from the perspective of the Cappadocian Fathers in Christianity and Classical Culture; see pp. 225–26 especially.

  59. Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana 3:33.

  60. Pelikan, The Christian Tradition, vol. 1, p. 76.

  61. The most common interpretation of the S. Pudenziana mosaic, adopted here, is of Christ as emperor, with reference being made back to the frontal image of Constantine on his arch as a model. However, a strong critique of this interpretation has been made by T. Mathews in his The Clash of Gods: A Reinterpretation of Early Christian Art, rev. paperback ed. (Princeton, 1999), chap. 4. Mathews sees the Christ of the mosaic essentially as a teaching figure, with his Apostles as “co-philosophers,” and as representative of a bishop rather than an emperor. He concludes his assessment (p. 114): “The mosaic is propaganda not for the imperial aspirations of Christ, but for the divine origins of ecclesiastical authority.” A full study of the iconography is to be found in G. Hellemo, Adventus Domini (Leiden, 1989), pp. 41–64, and it is this I have drawn on here. There is also much relevant material in A. Grabar, Christian Iconography: A Study of Its Origins (London, 1968), esp. pp. 60–86, which has a wealth of illustrations relating the mosaic to contemporary pagan art.

  62. Mathews, The Clash of the Gods, p. 104.

  63. R. Krautheimer, Rome: Profile of a City, 312–1308 (Princeton, 2000), pp. 42–43. Margaret Mitchell’s study was published in Tubingen in 2000.

  13

  1. Quoted in Philip Rousseau, Ascetics, Authority and the Church in the Age of Jerome and Cassian (Oxford, 1978), p. 84.

  2. Eusebius: Life of Constantine, ed. A. Cameron and S. Hall (Oxford, 1999), 3:14.

  3. R. Krautheimer, Three Christian Capitals (Berkeley, 1983), p. 100.

  4. Ammianus Marcellinus, The Later Roman Empire xxvii. 3.14.

  5. D. Hunt, “The Church as a Public Institution,” chap. 8 in A. Cameron and P. Garnsey, eds., The Cambridge Ancient History, vol. XIII (Cambridge, 1998), is my main source for these points. Guy Stroumsa notes on p. 112 of his Barbarian Philosophy: The Religious Revolution of Early Christianity (Tubingen, 1999): “in pre-Nicene Christian writings the birthplace of the new religion was first and foremost identified as the city of Christ’s killers.” Chap. 18 in Stroumsa’s book, “Mystical Jerusalems,” is also of interest.

  6. See K. Bradley, Slavery and Society at Rome (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 145–53, for this argument.

  7. Augustine, The City of God 19:15. No effective Christian opposition to slavery was shown until the eighteenth century, and, as debates over the issue during the American Civil War showed, there was no consensus that it was against the teachings of the Bible even a century later. For Augustine’s thoughts on slavery, see Peter Garnsey, Ideas of Slavery from Aristotle to Augustine (Cambridge, 1996), chap. 13. Garnsey also discusses the views of Paul (chap. 11) and Ambrose (chap. 12) in addition to those of earlier classical authors.

  8. Aristotle, Politics 1330 a 8–160.

  9. Quoted in S. Williams, Diocletian and the Roman Recovery (London, 1985), p. 162.

  10. These calculations come from D. Janes, God and Gold in Late Antiquity (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 55–57. Janes’ study is essential for an understanding of the rationales that lay behind accepting opulence in building.

  11. The relationship between Christianity and art remained an ambivalent one. There is no indication that Jesus wished resources to be spent on opulent decoration (if anything the opposite, Luke 21:5–6). The spending of so much money on material possession was in essence a pagan custom transferred by the state into Christianity. It is remarkable how many traditional histories of church architecture fail to mention the enormous resources involved and the shifts in perspective needed to justify the building of churches. A common approach in such histories is to say the large churches were built simply because Christianity was now free to operate openly and was attracting larger congregations.

  Such offerings were always vulnerable to alternative interpretations of the Christian message, as witnessed by the massive destruction of Christian art by the iconoclasts of eighth-century Byzantium and by Protestant Christians in Reformation Europe. One must also remember that vast quantities of pagan art and architecture were destroyed by Christians.

  12. Janes, God and Gold, p. 78.

  13. P. Brown, “Art and Society in Late Antiquity,” in K. Weitzmann, ed., Age of Spirituality: A Symposium (New York, 1980).

  14. Janes, God and Gold, p. 145.

  15. S. MacCormack, Art and Ceremony in Late Antiquity (Berkeley and London, 1981), p. 130.

  16. Janes, God and Gold, p. 119.

  17. Ibid., p. 169.

  18. Ibid., p. 137. Specifically on renunciation of property, see D. Trout, Paulinus of Nola (Berkeley and London, 1999), chap. 6, “Salvatio
n Economics: The Theory and Practice of Property Renunciation.”

  19. Quoted in P. Brown, Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity (Madison, Wis., and London, 1992), p. 121.

  20. Hunt, “The Church as a Public Institution,” p. 263.

  21. R. MacMullen, Christianising the Roman Empire (A.D. 100–400) (New Haven and London, 1984), p. 115.

  22. Brown, Power and Persuasion, p. 148. For Synesius, see J. W. Liebeschuetz, Barbarians and Bishops: Army, Church and State in the Age of Arcadius and Chrysostom (Oxford, 1990), chap. 23, “The Bishop and Public Life in the Cyrenaica of Synesius.”

  23. Quoted in Hunt, “The Church as a Public Institution,” p. 265. An anonymous Catholic priest writing in the April 2000 edition of the magazine Prospect (London) tells the story of how a Vatican representative sent to Britain after the Second Vatican Council (1962–65) brought the message that English Catholic bishops should be of the appropriate class, public school and Oxbridge educated, so that they would be socially fitted to develop ecumenical links with the Anglican bishops!

  24. Brown, Power and Persuasion, p. 122. See also chap. 2 of his study.

  25. Hunt, “The Church as a Public Institution,” p. 266.

  26. Brown, Power and Persuasion, p. 150.

  27. Ibid., p. 98. The issue is fully discussed by Peter Brown in his Poverty and Leadership in the Later Roman Empire (Hanover and London, 2002). Brown argues that the bishops’ acceptance of their responsibility for the poor was in part a recognition of the privileges they had been granted (p. 32).

  28. The quotation from Ammianus Marcellinus (xxvii.3.5) comes from S. Mitchell, Anatolia: Land, Men and Gods in Asia Minor (Oxford, 1993), vol. 2, p. 82. The quotation from Basil is in the same book, p. 83.

  29. Letters of Basil 28, quoted ibid., vol. 2, p. 84.

  30. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 77.

  31. Brown, Power and Persuasion, p. 16.

  14

  1. N. McLynn, Ambrose of Milan: Church and Court in a Christian Capital (Berkeley and London, 1994), p. 371, which I have drawn on heavily for this chapter. See also D. Williams, Ambrose of Milan and the End of the Nicene–Arian Conflicts (Oxford, 1995). A short and balanced account of Ambrose’s career is that by Ivor Davidson, chap. 47 in P. Esler, ed., The Early Christian World, vol. 2 (New York and London, 2000).

  2. McLynn, Ambrose of Milan, p. 376.

  3. Augustine, Confessions 6.3.3.

  4. J. Kelly, Jerome (London, 1975), p. 143. For an alternative view on Ambrose and On Duties, see M. L. Colish, “Cicero, Ambrose and Stoic Ethics: Transmission or Transformation?” in A. S. Bernardo and S. Levin, eds., The Classics in the Middle Ages (New York, 1990).

  5. For discussion of this basilica, see R. Krautheimer, Three Christian Capitals (Berkeley, 1983), pp. 81–86, and McLynn, Ambrose of Milan, pp. 174–79.

  6. Williams, Ambrose of Milan, chap. 5; R. Hanson, The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God (Edinburgh, 1988), pp. 667–75.

  7. R. Lim, Public Disputation, Power and Social Order in Late Antiquity (Berkeley and London, 1995), explores the way in which written texts presented as the basis for discussion came to displace oral debate during these years.

  8. Williams, Ambrose of Milan, pp. 154–55.

  9. McLynn, Ambrose of Milan, pp. 181–95.

  10. Williams, Ambrose of Milan, p. 216.

  11. Ambrose, Letters, trans. Sr. Melchior Beyenka (New York, 1954). Letter number 61 in this collection, number 22 in the older Benedictine enumeration.

  12. McLynn covers these points in Ambrose of Milan, chap. 7.

  13. Ambrose, Letters; letter number 2 in this collection, number 40 in the Benedictine enumeration.

  14. M. Simon, Verus Israel (Oxford, 1986), pp. 227–28.

  15. McLynn, Ambrose of Milan, p. 308.

  16. Ibid., p. 315.

  17. Ibid., pp. 358–60. The quotation is taken from S. MacCormack, Art and Ceremony in Late Antiquity (Berkeley and London, 1981), pp. 145–50.

  18. Davidson, in Esler, ed., The Early Christian World, vol. 2, p. 1197.

  15

  1. The diptych had apparently been brought from Rome in the seventh century by one Bercharius and lodged in an abbey he founded in France at Montier-en-Der (Haut Marne). There the panels had been adapted to serve as the door leaves of a thirteenth-century reliquary casket. The abbey had suffered badly in the French Revolution, and the panels had been burned and apparently lost. The Musée de Cluny panel was recovered in a well in 1860 and acquired by the Musée soon afterwards. The Victoria and Albert panel was found by a local collector in France who sold it in 1862 to a Mr. Webb, who in his turn sold it to the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1865. I found it a moving experience to visit an exhibition in Rome in the spring of 2001 at which the two sides of the diptych had been reunited, presumably for the first time in the city since the seventh century. Here I have drawn on two major articles on the diptych: B. Kiilerich, “A Different Interpretation of the Nicomachorum-Symmachorum Diptych,” Jahrbuch für Antike und Christentum 34 (1991): 115, and D. Kinney, “The Iconography of the Ivory Diptych Nicomachorum-Symmachorum,” Jahrbuch für Antike und Christentum 37 (1994): 64.

  2. Kiilerich, “A Different Interpretation,” pp. 118–19.

  3. Ibid., p. 123.

  4. Ibid., p. 122.

  5. See Kinney, “The Iconography of the Ivory Diptych,” pp. 74–82, for the wide variety of contexts in which such torches have been found.

  6. Ibid., pp. 67–73, for the contexts in which representations of pietas have been found.

  7. For the full text of the letters and background details, see B. Croke and J. Harries, Religious Conflict in Fourth-Century Rome (Sydney, 1982), chap. 2, “The Debate on the Altar of Victory, A.D. 384.” Earlier the pagan orator Themistius had used a similar argument in an Appealing Oration to the emperor Valens (364–78), who had tried to uphold Homoean Christianity against its rivals. Themistius told Valens

  that he ought not to be surprised at the difference of judgement in religious questions among Christians; inasmuch as that the discrepancy was trifling when compared to the multitude of conflicting opinions current among the heathen; for these amount to above three hundred, that dissensions occurred was an inevitable consequence of this disagreement, but that God would be more glorified by a diversity of sentiment, and the greatness of his majesty be more venerated from the fact of its not being easy to have knowledge of him.

  The oration is quoted in Socrates, Ecclesiastical History, 4, 32.

  8. For the argument that Praetextatus is the man commemorated, see Kiilerich, “A Different Interpretation,” pp. 126–27, from which the quotation in the next paragraph has been taken. The quotation about Praetextatus’ intellectual qualities, which was recorded by one Macrobius, can be found in W. Liebeschuetz, “The Significance of the Speech of Praetextatus,” in P. Athanassiadi and M. Frede, eds., Pagan Monotheism in Late Antiquity (Oxford, 1999), p. 196. Praetextatus’ funerary monument has survived (in the Capitoline Museum in Rome). It includes details of the many cults with which he was associated. The dedication on it to his wife, Paulina, is worth quoting to give a flavour of pagan marriage in late antiquity.

  Paulina, partner of my heart, nurse of modesty, bond of chastity, pure love and loyalty produced in heaven, to whom I have entrusted the deep secrets of my heart, gift of the gods who bind our marriage couch with friendly and modest ties; by the devotion of a mother, the bond of a sister, the modesty of a daughter, and by all the loyalty friends show, we are united by the custom of age, the pact of consecration, by the yoke of the marriage vow and perfect harmony, helpmate of your husband, loving, adoring, devoted.

  Paulina’s own tribute to her husband is inscribed on the back of the monument. Quoted in Croke and Harries, Religious Conflict, pp. 106–7.

  9. See Jerome’s Letter XXII in Select Letters of St. Jerome, trans. F. A. Wright (London, 1933).

  10. See J. Kelly, Jerome (London, 1975), p. 96. Jerome makes the point in his Letter XXIV.

  11. Q
uoted in P. Rousseau, Ascetics, Authority and the Church in the Age of Jerome and Cassian (Oxford, 1978), p. 119.

  12. Quoted in R. Smith, Julian’s Gods: Religion and Philosophy in the Thought and Action of Julian the Apostate (London and New York, 1995), p. 224. There is some dispute over the origin and date of this anonymous poem, but it is possibly an authentic plea to the emperor Julian.

  16

  1. Quoted in J. Kelly, Jerome (London, 1975), p. 132.

  2. Phaedo 66 C; quoted in J. Dillon, “Rejecting the Body, Redefining the Body: Some Remarks on the Development of Platonist Asceticism,” in V. Wimbush and R. Valantasis, eds., Asceticism (New York and Oxford, 1995).

  3. The quotation is from P. Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York, 1988; London, 1989), p. 19.

  4. Quoted in G. Clark, “Women and Asceticism in Late Antiquity: The Reversal of Status and Gender,” in Wimbush and Valantasis, eds., Asceticism, p. 43.

  5. Quotations from his Letter XXII.

  6. R. A. Markus, The End of Ancient Christianity (Cambridge, 1990), p. 166.

  7. P. Brown, “Asceticism: Pagan and Christian,” in A. Cameron and P. Garnsey, eds., The Cambridge Ancient History, vol. XIII (Cambridge, 1998), p. 618.

  8. The quotation from Epictetus is from his Discourses 4.10.16. The other two quotations are taken from Brown, The Body and Society, pp. 375 and 309. Aristotle’s views on moderation between two extremes are also important here. See his Nicomachean Ethics II. 6–7 and comments on the theme in R. Sorabji, Emotion and Peace of Mind: From Stoic Agitation to Christian Temptation (Oxford, 2000), chap. 14, “The Traditions of Moderation and Eradication.”

  9. See G. Stroumsa, Barbarian Philosophy: The Religious Revolution of Early Christianity (Tubingen, 1999), chap. 10, “Caro Salutis Cardo: Shaping the Person in Early Christian Thought,” especially pp. 177–81. There are immense philosophical problems about what is meant by “will” here. See, as an introduction, C. Kahn, “Discovering the Will: From Aristotle to Augustine,” in J. M. Dillon and A. A. Long, eds., The Question of Eclecticism: Studies in Later Greek Philosophy (Berkeley and London, 1988).