Desire of the Everlasting Hills

by Thomas Cahill

  PETER AND PAUL

  From the earliest attempts to depict them, Peter and Paul are shown not as conventional types but as real men with specific physical characteristics, leading us to the conclusion that their visages were well known to many Christians, especially in Rome, where both apostles spent their last years. Peter (right) is normally the larger of the two and has a round, sympathetic face, surrounded by curly white hair of head and beard. Paul (left) is smaller and leaner, usually with a pointed beard and sharp features and always bald. When the artist is skillful enough, Paul is inevitably represented with lines of tension across his brow.

  PETER

  From the earliest attempts to depict them, Peter and Paul are shown not as conventional types but as real men with specific physical characteristics, leading us to the conclusion that their visages were well known to many Christians, especially in Rome, where both apostles spent their last years. Peter is normally the larger of the two and has a round, sympathetic face, surrounded by curly white hair of head and beard.

  FUNERARY PORTRAIT

  Depiction of recently deceased people, on coffin lids and grave memorials, was a custom that originated in Egypt and was common throughout the ancient world in the time of Jesus. These portraits were usually created by the encaustic (or hot wax) technique, because it gave the artist who employed it greater facility in portraying the deceased with as much realistic detail as possible. These portraits were normally made on wood.

  ENCAUSTIC ICON OF JESUS

  This portrait of Jesus, from Saint Catherine’s Monastery in Sinai, is our oldest surviving icon, dating to the sixth century. We have no earlier icons because they were all destroyed during the iconoclast controversy (from which Saint Catherine’s was spared because it was under Muslim protection). But we know that each generation of icon painters was expected to imitate faithfully the previous generation’s work and that, therefore, this icon represents a long tradition which may go back as far as the first century and even be based on eyewitness accounts. Unlike the catacomb depictions of Jesus, the icon is clearly meant (like the primitive portraits of Peter and Paul) to be a portrait of a specific man. Indeed, it is obviously a genuine descendant of the encaustic funerary tradition, made with hot wax on curved wood (not unlike a coffin lid). No print of this portrait can approach the effect of seeing it in person. The artist has used the curved surface as if it were a three-dimensional face, so that the eyes seem to look straight at you—an effect that is much reduced in a two-dimensional print.

  THE SHROUD OF TURIN

  In negative, the face on the Shroud is remarkably like the face in the Sinai icon—with long hair parted in the middle, long face and nose, similarly shaped brow, similar beard. The similarities are so many that if a transparency of the icon face is placed over the Shroud face, the two will be found to be largely congruent. This congruence would be explicable if the Shroud is genuine and the icon goes back to an eyewitness tradition. But the icon is also a somewhat Hellenized Christ, with the refined, slightly idealized face of a Greek man (a natural evolution if we imagine the icon as the result of a centuries-old cultural tradition), whereas the Shroud, in no sense an idealization, is of a dead man with clearly Semitic features.

  THE SHROUD OF TURIN

  The full length of the Shroud shows the body of a man front and back. He appears to have had a tail of hair in back, longer than shoulder length, indicating someone who, before catastrophe befell him, took pleasure in his appearance.

  TRADITIONAL IMAGE OF JESUS

  The icon tradition of realistic portraiture, rather than the idealized typological figures of the catacombs, came to dominate art to such an extent that all subsequent artists have given Jesus the same basic features, so that he is always recognizable, as in this portrait by Rembrandt.

  Read an excerpt from

  Heretics and Heroes

  By Thomas Cahill

  Available from Doubleday

  October 2013

  PRELUDE

  PHILOSOPHICAL TENNIS THROUGH THE AGES

  In nature’s infinite book of secrecy

  A little I can read.

  Antony and Cleopatra

  His nickname is Plato, which means “broad.” He’s an immensely confident if unsmiling Athenian, wide of forehead, broad of shoulders, bold of bearing, who casually exudes a breadth of comprehension few would dare to question. As he lobs his serve across the net, he does so with a glowering power that the spectators find thrilling. Throughout his game, his stance can only be labeled lofty; he seems to be reaching ever higher, stretching toward Heaven while his raised shirt provides an occasional glimpse of his noble abs.

  His serve is answered by his graceless opponent, a rangy, stringy-muscled man who plays his game much closer to the ground, whose eyes dart everywhere, who looks, despite his relative youth, to stand no chance of mounting a consistent challenge to our broad and supremely focused champion. And yet the challenger—his name is Aristotle, son of a provincial doctor—manages to persist, to meet his opponent with an ungainly mixture of styles. From time to time it even appears that he could be capable of victory. Certainly he is dogged in his perseverance. He begins to gain some fans in the crowd among those who prefer the improvisations of Aristotle to the unblinking gloom of great Plato.

  This is a game that has been played over and over—in fact, for twenty-four centuries—before audiences of almost infinite variety. At some point long ago, the game became a doubles match, for the two Greek philosophers were joined by two medieval Christian theologians: Plato by Augustine of Hippo, who could nearly equal him in style and seriousness; Aristotle by Thomas Aquinas, nearly as styleless as Aristotle but, though overweight, ungainly, and blinking in the sun, extremely thoughtful and genial—the sort of athlete who is always undervalued. This centuries-long philosophical doubles match has entertained intellectuals in every age and made a partisan of almost every educated human being in the Western world.

  To this day, it may be asked of anyone who cares about ideas: Are you a Platonist or an Aristotelian? Plato certainly won the opening set, waged in Athens in the fourth century BC; and once he had Augustine at his side, he, if anything, grew in stature during the early medieval centuries. But in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, medieval academics, such as Peter Abelard and Thomas Aquinas—who were not only deep thinkers but gifted publicists—were able to create a culture-wide renaissance on Aristotle’s behalf. Then, in the period we shall visit in this book, in the time of the Renaissance and Reformation, the pendulum would swing once more, as the graceful team of Plato and Augustine became the subject of nearly universal admiration, while the ungainly team of Aristotle and Aquinas suffered scorn and devaluation.*

  Of course, these men haven’t really been playing tennis (even if some speculate that the game was first played in the Mediterranean town of Tinnis in the time of the pharaohs and even if Plato was celebrated in his day for his physical prowess). Their styles should be accounted athletic only in metaphor, for in actuality, these styles—or lack thereof—are the qualities of their literary output. Plato is a great Greek prose stylist, never surpassed; nor did anyone ever write more well-knit, muscular Latin than Augustine. Aristotle’s Greek is banal, even at times confusing; Aquinas’s Latin prose, though clear, is scarcely more than serviceable. But these men and their philosophical heirs have surely been engaged in utterly serious, if sporting, contests about the ultimate nature of reality; and these contests have had profound, and sometimes deadly, consequences for us all.

  Before Plato’s arrival on the scene, the typical philosopher was a cross between a poet and a guru, dependable for pithy and memorable sayings—”Know thyself”; “Nothing endures but change”; “The way up and the way down are the same”—but quite incapable of elaborating his insight in a layered structure that could withstand criticism. Plato, father to all subsequent philosophical discourse, transformed the pursuit into a kind of science, full of sequential steps, a long course of acquired knowledg
e that begins in observation and ends in wisdom, even in vision.

  The fluctuating phenomena of physical life, according to Plato, are only minimally real. We can never hope to understand them from the inside, for they are relative, evanescent, and mortal, here today, gone tomorrow. If we are embarked upon the ascent to wisdom, however, these sensible things can lead us upward—from the merely material world to the absolute spiritual world on which all fleeting phenomena depend. What is more fragile than the momentary existence of a flower? But we can come to understand the truth that a flower “can be beautiful only insofar as it partakes of absolute beauty.”

  The phenomena of our world, in Plato’s teaching, are there to lead us to the absolute realities of which they are but partial, momentary expressions. These realities, which Plato called the Forms, are Beauty, Truth, Justice, Unity (or Oneness), and, highest of all, Goodness, since the other Forms are themselves but partial expressions of the ultimate reality, the Good.

  Human beings are bizarre combinations of the physical and the spiritual. Each of us is like a charioteer who must control two steeds: one material, instinctive, unruly, and seeking only its own low pleasures; the other spiritual, brimming with nobility, honor, and courage. The charioteer’s identity survives death, for it is spiritual, the rational principle, the soul. But the steed that is his body must perish.

  Augustine is able to identify Plato’s Good as the God of the Jews. God, incorporeal, existing outside time, is summum bonum, the Ultimate Good of Plato, containing all perfection. The human soul, though created by God and existing in time, is a spiritual principle and thus immortal. Translating Plato’s philosophy to the context of Christian belief, Augustine finds that “out of a certain compassion for the masses God Most High bent down and subjected the authority of the divine intellect even to the human body itself”—in the incarnation of Jesus, the God-Man—so that God might recall “to the intelligible world souls blinded by the darkness of error and befouled by the slime of the body.”

  Note that “slime.” For both Plato and Augustine, human life is a gloomy business, beset by the dross of meaningless matter, mitigated only by the hard-won illumination of that one-in-a-million character, the true philosopher (for Plato), or by the illumination that God bestows on a few blessed individuals (for Augustine). On our own, in Plato’s view, we are capable only of misunderstanding everything important. On our own, in Augustine’s view, we are capable only of sin. But to some few, God has gratuitously granted grace that enables them to see the light and choose the good. They are the ones who will live with God eternally; all the others (most of humanity, including all the unbaptized, even unbaptized babies, and probably you, dear Reader) will spend eternity in Hell.

  This is tough stuff; and no wonder it prompted some thoughtful medieval Christians to look for a path that might soften the grim austerities of the Platonic-Augustinian worldview. In the dissenting works of Aristotle, Plato’s most famous pupil, they discovered a foundation on which they could build an airier, more open structure.

  For Aristotle, there is no world of Forms beyond the world we know and see. The Forms are indeed universal ideas; they do not, however, exist apart somewhere but only in things themselves and in our minds. There is no absolute Beauty in some other world; there is only beauty in, say, the woman that I happen to see before me at this moment and in the idea of beauty that I and other human beings have in our minds. Thomas Aquinas championed this same approach, which came to be called moderate realism, as opposed to the position of Plato and Augustine, which came to be called extreme realism—the assertion that what is really real is not anything we perceive with our senses but the essences that exist elsewhere.

  Not eschewing physical realities, as did Plato, Aristotle was far more open to considering seriously the inner workings of material phenomena. His observations of the natural world, therefore, form the basis of much of what we would deem the science of ancient and medieval thinkers. Indeed, what we call science today was for Aristotle and his followers a perfectly legitimate branch of knowledge that they called natural philosophy. For both Aristotle and Aquinas, the unaided human mind is capable of perceiving reality as it is—an assertion that the pessimistic duo of Plato and Augustine have nothing but contempt for.

  Beyond these very basic differences between the Platonic-Augustinian and the Aristotelian-Thomistic schools, the gulf between the two great philosophical syntheses continues to widen, as each embraces opposed positions in many areas of thought. Without elaborating on these oppositions here, we may remind ourselves that the two schools are nonetheless both designated as species of realism and that other positions are possible. Against realism of any variety stands the philosophical school of idealism, which asserts that what Plato calls the Forms are to be found only in the human mind. All we have are the workings of our minds—our ideas—and, according to idealists, it is illegitimate (if tempting) for philosophers (or anyone) to speak of anything outside the mind itself. Idealists of more than one variety are also called nominalists, those who assert that the concepts (or nomina, names) we attribute to the physical universe—lion, chair, star—are convenient labels without ultimate meaning. The most frequently encountered nominalism of our own day is called logical positivism.

  I mean here merely to nod in the direction of such controversies, which could easily fill a book I have no wish to write. Though the centuries-long game of philosophical tennis may excite you at first, absorb and draw you into its ups and downs (and its sometimes surprising upsets), its mesmerizing back-and-forths can lull you into a kind of trance and finally threaten to become a serious bore. Let’s just keep at the back of our minds the poc-poc of the philosophical tennis ball as it hits the meshed rackets of our sweating champions and turn our attention, rather, to a few of the unsettling events that in the course of the late thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries signal that we are on the road to the Renaissance and the Reformation.

  * With the rise of scientific materialism, the pendulum swung back in the Aristotelian direction and has pretty much remained there, though there are those among us who still worship at the altar of Plato. The recent pope, Benedict XVI, for instance, identified himself pretty openly as a Platonic Augustinian.

  Thomas Cahill

  Desire of the Everlasting Hills

  Thomas Cahill is the author of the bestselling Hinges of History series, published to great acclaim throughout the English-speaking world and in translation in Latin America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. Born in New York City, Cahill graduated from Fordham University and earned an MFA in film and dramatic literature from Columbia University. A lifelong scholar, he has taught at Queens College, Fordham University, and Seton Hall University and studied scripture at Union Theological Seminary and Hebrew and the Hebrew Bible as a Visiting Scholar at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. He served as North American education correspondent for The Times of London and was for many years a regular contributor to the Los Angeles Times Book Review. For six years he was Director of Religious Publishing at Doubleday before retiring to write full-time. In addition to The Hinges of History, Cahill has published Pope John XXIII and Jesus’ Little Instruction Book, and with his wife, Susan Cahill, A Literary Guide to Ireland and Big City Stories by Modern American Writers. In 1999 Cahill was awarded an honorary doctorate from Alfred University. He and his wife divide their time between New York City and Rome.

  Acclaim for THOMAS CAHILL’S

  Desire of the Everlasting Hills

  “Divertingly instructive … gratifying.… [Cahill] makes of Jesus a still-living literary presence.”

  —The New York Times

  “[Cahill] is a popularizer of the best sort, and well-suited to the task of writing about the greatest religious populist in Western history. Cahill depicts a Jesus that even those who know the bible better than the Gideons might find unfamiliar.… Revelatory.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  “Cahill possesses a considerable tal
ent for writing about the distant past with the vitality of personal memoir.… [He] penetrates the Victorian husk that still envelops the Scriptures, getting straight to the kernel of truth.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “A great gift for spiritual-seeking friends who long ago stopped trusting anything from a pulpit.… It is also a treasure for those of us who have forgotten some of the good parts.”

  —The Dallas Morning News

  “A fresh and energetic look at the ‘historical Jesus’—who he was in history and what he’s done for history.”

  —Christianity Today

  “Thomas Cahill has done it again.”

  —Fort Wayne News-Sentinel

  “A popularization, but in the best sense of the word. With grace, skill and erudition, he summarizes obtuse semantic and historical arguments, highlights the findings most relevant to lay readers and draws disparate material together in his portraits of Jesus, his mother, Mary, and the apostle Paul.”

  —The Washington Post Book World

  “Thomas Cahill is taking us on a wonderful ride through Western civilization.… The figures in time become real.… You can feel the terror and pain when the Romans finally destroy the Temple in Jerusalem in 70. You can sense the enigmatic charisma of Paul.… And you get a wonderful sense of the feisty young mother of Jesus.”

  —Star-Tribune (Minneapolis)