How to Think Politically

by James Bernard Murphy

  Now we see how Augustine, a Christian idealist, could also be a political realist. Given his view that human evil is too deeply rooted to be controlled by any rational human discipline, we cannot reasonably hope for virtuous rulers. According to Augustine, politics does not stem from our good nature, as created by God: there was no politics in the Garden of Eden. Instead, politics (including war, punishment and slavery) is a necessary evil to control human sinfulness.

  Augustine’s grim realism about human politics is evident in his appraisal of the story of Alexander and the pirate. Alexander the Great, as commander of a mighty fleet, encounters a lone pirate ship. He asks of the pirate: ‘What do you mean by infesting the seas?’ To which the pirate replies: ‘What do you mean by conquering the world? You do on a large scale what I do in a tiny boat.’ Augustine endorses the pirate’s answer: ‘What is an empire, but piracy on a large scale? What is a pirate but a small emperor?’ We see Augustine’s political realism in his revision of the classical definition of a political community. He cites Cicero’s definition of a polity as ‘an association of men united by a common understanding of right’. Unfortunately, given the fact that no pagan polity ever possessed a true understanding of justice, by Cicero’s definition there never was a true polity. Augustine then goes on to propose a more realistic definition of a polity as ‘a multitude of rational beings united around a common agreement on the objects of their love’. Augustine’s definition of a polity here, however, might be too realistic since it includes not just pagan polities but even criminal syndicates.

  Augustine’s political realism has its origins in St Paul’s Letter to the Romans, in which Paul says that governments are a terror not to the good but to the bad and that governments execute God’s wrath upon the wrongdoer. Here the mission of government is clearly not to cultivate the moral and intellectual virtues but simply to punish malefactors. In his treatise On Free Will, Augustine points out that virtue rests upon the interior quality of our intentions: virtue means doing the right thing for the right reasons. But civil laws can reach only to the external deeds, not to the motives of the doer. So human laws regulate only external deeds, while the eternal law of God alone can judge the quality of our deepest intentions and motivations. Civil laws can only prohibit crimes; the eternal law prohibits all sins. Instead of attempting to create virtue and justice, the human polity should therefore aim merely at peace, since peace is the one thing that everyone seeks. As we shall see, Thomas Hobbes will follow Augustine by arguing that securing peace is the ultimate purpose of civil government. Augustine realizes that true peace is ‘the tranquillity of order’: the harmony within each human soul and justice between peoples. But civil peace – the mere cessation of conflict – at least permits the Church to do its work of building true peace.

  In his City of God, Augustine argues that the love of self is the basis of the City of Man while the love of God is the basis of the City of God. He also claims that the Christian Church represents the City of God while the pagan empires represent the City of Man. But Augustine makes it clear that this identity is far from perfect: there are members of the City of God outside of the Christian Church just as there are members of the City of Man within the Christian Church. He says that he once felt the appeal of the idea of a Christian Roman empire in which the imperial City of Man could be Christianized. But he became disillusioned with the idea that there could be a Christian empire. He concluded that there was only one possible Christian society and that was the Church. Christians must learn to live in religiously pluralistic polities, so long as those polities respect the independence of the Christian Church. Augustine’s ideal polity is certainly led by Christian statesmen, but he nonetheless rejected the ideal of a Christian political community.

  To understand how a Christian theologian could lay the foundations for a secular conception of politics we need to recall the biblical parable of the wheat and the weeds, which was central to Augustine’s political thought. A farm worker tells the farm owner that weeds are growing up amidst his wheat: ‘Shall I pull up the weeds?’ he asks. But the farm owner says, ‘No, let the weeds and wheat grow up together; for if we try to pull up the weeds, we shall damage the wheat.’ ‘At the final harvest,’ the owner says, ‘we can separate the wheat from the weeds.’

  Augustine interpreted this to mean that human beings cannot discern who belongs to the City of God and who belongs to the City of Man, since only God can discern the nature of the love within our hearts. Hence, political efforts to separate Christians from non-Christians will probably cause more harm than good. We must allow wheat and weeds to grow up together in communities of religious pluralism so that God himself can create the true City of God at the end of history. Augustine did not always respect this principle of religious tolerance himself. Notoriously, he reluctantly permitted Roman authorities to use legal and political coercion against heretics in north Africa, thus creating a dangerous precedent for the much more heinous religious persecutions of medieval and early modern Europe.

  Augustine insisted that Christians would make good citizens because they feel a religious duty to obey just governments. Christians would pursue the common good without the pagan lust for personal glory. But Augustine’s Christian ideals do tend to undermine some of the kinds of loyalty often thought to be central to civic virtue. For example, Augustine asks: ‘Given how short is the span of human life, does it matter what kind of regime we live under, so long as we are not coerced into idolatry?’ Of course, for champions of republican and democratic government, it matters a great deal. If the patriots who founded the United States had taken Augustine’s point of view, America would still be a British colony.

  Augustine also says of war: ‘What does it matter whether those killed are our own compatriots or the enemy? It is still human blood being shed.’ Yet for patriots, it matters a great deal. If we were to follow Augustine’s advice, we would erect monuments not only for our own dead soldiers but also for the dead soldiers of our enemies. From the perspective of the City of God, no doubt, differences of regime are trivial and all wars are civil wars. But civic virtue in the City of Man requires more narrow loyalties.

  Nonetheless, Augustine’s demotion of politics from being widely honoured as the supreme human good to being regarded merely as a necessary evil continues to influence our modern attitudes to politics. When Thomas Jefferson said, ‘That government governs best when it governs least’, or when James Madison said, ‘Were men angels, no government would be necessary’, we can hear the voice of Augustine.

  Medievals

  5

  Al-Farabi: The Imam

  After supporting him for several years, Al-Farabi’s patron, a famous Muslim prince of Aleppo, lost his patience. Wearing the same drab cloak everywhere, Al-Farabi was known to make cheerful observations such as ‘The virtuous man is an unhappy stranger in the world and death is better for him than life’. No wonder the prince found Al-Farabi to be less than the life and soul of the party!

  In retrospect, we can easily recognize Al-Farabi’s poor social skills, sorry attire and asceticism as true marks of his calling as a philosopher. By eschewing any interest in financial gain or political power, Al-Farabi lived so modestly that virtually nothing is known about him, apart from his writings. These very qualities ensured his freedom and independence as a thinker. We think of an imam as a kind of Muslim cleric, but Al-Farabi boldly claimed that the only true imam is a philosopher.

  Born in 870 near Farab, in modern-day Kazakhstan, Al-Farabi grew up in Damascus, lived for decades in Baghdad and died in Aleppo at the age of 80. He is revered today as the greatest of all Muslim philosophers – honoured by later Christian, Jewish and Muslim medieval philosophers as the ‘Second Master’ (after Aristotle). Yet Al-Farabi was also denounced by a leading medieval Islamic theologian, Al-Ghazali, as an infidel. Behind his modest demeanour was an audacious teacher. Al-Farabi attempted to introduce the ancient Greek ideal of the philosopher-king into the radically new context
of an Islamic polity.

  Philosophy has always been threatened by religious belief: Socrates was put to death in part because of his alleged impiety. But the challenge posed by religion to philosophy became dramatically greater in the wake of the Abrahamic religions, all of which claim to possess a divinely revealed truth independent of philosophy. If truth is contained in the Bible or the Qur’an, then what need do we have for the enquiries of philosophers?

  In all of the Abrahamic faiths, we find religious fundamentalists who insist that Scripture is the only reliable source of truth. How can the fallible human enquiries of pagan philosophers possibly compare to the revealed word of God? At the same time, in all the Abrahamic religions we find rationalists who believe that philosophy alone leads us reliably to truth; they are sceptical of the truthfulness of the myths and legends of Scripture. Al-Farabi was neither a fundamentalist nor a sceptical rationalist.

  Is it possible to compare claims of philosophy and religion from a neutral standpoint? Must one adopt philosophical reason to evaluate the claims of religion or adopt religious belief to evaluate the claims of philosophers? Some medieval philosophers assume the truth of Scripture and then attempt to see if the views of the philosophers can be reconciled to it; others begin with a commitment to reason and evaluate the Scripture in its light. Al-Farabi certainly looked to philosophy as the standard for judging all truth, and he devised various arguments to show that God’s revelation to the Prophet Muhammad met the standards of philosophical truth.

  Al-Farabi attempted to steer a middle way between religious fundamentalism and sceptical rationalism. He honoured both the revealed wisdom of the Qur’an and the rational wisdom of ancient Greek philosophy. His position could be called ‘Islamic humanism’, and he was attacked for it by both Islamists and humanists. How did Al-Farabi harmonize Islam and philosophy? He treated Muhammad as a philosopher, and he treated ‘the divine Plato’ as Scripture – that is, he argued that Muhammad understood the philosophical basis of his prophecy and that Plato’s writings must be interpreted as carefully as the Qur’an. Rhetorically, of course, Plato’s dialogues could not be more different from the Qur’an. But these rhetorical differences may reflect Plato’s and Muhammad’s different audiences more than their different views. After all, Plato did write that ‘God, not man, is the measure of all things’. Perhaps Plato was Muhammad speaking ancient Greek?

  Although Aristotle, as we have noted, rejected central aspects of Plato’s philosophy (including his political philosophy), after Aristotle’s death the ‘Neoplatonists’ attempted to harmonize and synthesize the ideas of Plato and Aristotle. Al-Farabi is the founder of Islamic Neoplatonism, and he devoted his life to advancing this synthesis. Although he was revered as ‘the second Aristotle’, his political philosophy is much more Platonic than Aristotelian. Indeed, Aristotle’s great treatise the Politics was not translated into Arabic until modern times. Though Al-Farabi certainly knew of it, his own work does not draw upon Aristotle’s Politics. Al-Farabi’s political Platonism would have a fateful effect on the future of Islamic political philosophy.

  Plato and Aristotle differed, as we have seen, on the question of the relationship of philosophical knowledge to politics. Aristotle contrasts the theoretical wisdom of a philosopher with the practical reason of a statesman. He insists that practical wisdom, not theoretical wisdom, is essential for good rulers. He does not expect statesmen to be philosophers or philosophers to rule.

  Plato, by contrast, does not explicitly distinguish theoretical wisdom from practical wisdom. According to Plato, the evils of political life cannot cease until the masters of theoretical wisdom (that is, philosophers) rule. Of course, he also recognizes the importance of practical experience in politics, and so he insists that his philosopher-kings acquire it before ruling.

  Al-Farabi decisively sides with Plato. He insists that the ideal rulers of political communities must possess both theoretical and practical wisdom. Philosopher-kings must have mastered geometry, physics, astronomy, music, metaphysics and logic. Al-Farabi believes that practical wisdom about human affairs is impossible unless it rests upon demonstrable truths about the nature of the universe and humanity’s place within it. His ethics and politics revolve around a set of detailed analogies comparing the structure of the cosmos, the soul, the body and the polity. Political hierarchy, he says, must mirror the hierarchy we discover in the cosmos and in the human soul. For example, one God rules the cosmos, so one philosopher should rule the polity; reason rules the human body just as philosophy should rule society. Like Plato and Aristotle, Al-Farabi affirms natural inequality among human beings: some people are destined to rule from birth and others to be slaves.

  Like Plato, Al-Farabi is aware that every actual political regime falls far short of the ideal; indeed, when have philosophers ever ruled? He carefully catalogues all the ignorant, vicious, erroneous and renegade regimes whose rulers have been dedicated not to the love of truth but to the love of wealth, honour, conquest or pleasure. Nonetheless, Al-Farabi insists that in our efforts to reform our governments we must ensure that policy rests upon philosophy: if rulers are not themselves philosophers, they can at least listen to philosophers.

  Al-Farabi’s great political genius was to realize that philosophers alone cannot rule. Philosophers have too little in common with ordinary people to be effective rulers. Philosophy must enlist the services of religion, law, rhetoric, literature and music in order to shape the conduct of the people in accordance with the demands of truth. Most people cannot grasp abstract ideas or follow logical demonstrations: they need visual images or verbal stories to approach the truth. Theologians, jurists, artists, writers and musicians all serve in their own way to make the truths of philosophy accessible to the people. Like Plato, Al-Farabi calls upon the poets to dress philosophical truths in pleasing garb.

  By defending Plato’s conception of the philosopher-king, Al-Farabi creates a real challenge to the authority of the prophet. Moses, Jesus and Muhammad are described in Scripture as divinely appointed rulers of their respective peoples. Although these prophets were all men of practical wisdom, experienced in managing human affairs, none could even remotely be described as a philosopher. If all true political authority rests upon philosophy, how does Al-Farabi account for the authority of the prophet?

  The nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche disparaged Christianity as a dumbed-down ‘Platonism for the masses’. Yet Al-Farabi praises Islam for bringing Platonic truths to ordinary people. His true prophet is someone who approaches the divine mind by the perfection of his rational and moral faculties. God rewards the prophet’s intellectual virtue by revealing the whole of philosophical knowledge. Whereas ordinary philosophers must acquire their wisdom piecemeal through laborious enquiry and debate, prophets have their philosophical wisdom directly imparted by God. What the prophet writes in Scripture, then, is only the concrete illustration of the philosophical principles revealed by God. If Scripture is to guide human conduct, it must be accessible to ordinary people, who can understand only stories and commandments. But these stories and commandments all rest logically upon philosophical truths known to the prophets by divine revelation.

  Because Scripture and the religious law it contains rest upon the implicit philosophical knowledge of the prophets, the interpretation of Scripture and its application to human affairs must be controlled by philosophers. Here we see why Al-Farabi considered the philosopher to be the true imam: all religious truth rests upon abstract principles known only to the true prophet and to his successors, the philosophers.

  In addition to applying Plato’s ideal of philosophical kingship to the prophetic rulers of the Abrahamic religions, Al-Farabi also applies the Platonic and Aristotelian ideal of a virtuous city-state to a large medieval empire. The ideal polity of both Plato and Aristotle is a small community of citizens united by a common vision of moral and intellectual virtue. According to the Greeks, a polity devoted to the common education of its citiz
ens must be very small indeed – between five and ten thousand citizens. Al-Farabi was the first political philosopher to propose that this ideal could be extended to a whole nation or even an empire of nations. Indeed, he pioneered the idea of a nation as the basis of political life: does national unity rest upon a common language, ethnicity, religion, literature or music? In Islam, ‘nation’ refers both to a particular ethnic and cultural community as well as to ‘the nation of Islam’. Al-Farabi had already witnessed the defeat of the dream of a unified Islamic empire, but he defended the idea of multi-national empires as potentially virtuous polities.

  Aristotle had argued in his Politics that nations and empires are too large and too diverse to become communities of shared virtue. An educational polity must share a common language, religion, literature, schools and culture. Aristotle wondered how citizens could acquire the civic virtues without an opportunity to rule and be ruled in turn. According to Aristotle, size matters in politics: nations and empires are destined for vice and despotism. Yet Al-Farabi, with brilliant practical insights, considers how a ruler might create a virtuous empire while ruling a diverse set of particular nations, each with its own distinctive language, religious customs and literature.