Table of Contents Title Page Dedication Epigraph Praise Introduction Terminology and Sources - THOMAS AQUINAS AND “THE TRIUMPH OF FAITH” - THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY - THE QUEST FOR VIRTUE - CHANGING POLITICAL CONTEXTS Alexander and the Coming of the Hellenistic Monarchies - ABSORBING THE EAST, ROME AND THE INTEGRATION OF GREEK CULTURE - “ALL NATIONS LOOK TO THE MAJESTY OF ROME” The Roman Empire at Its Height - THE EMPIRE IN CRISIS, THE EMPIRE IN RECOVERY Political Transformations in the Third Century - JESUS - PAUL, “THE FOUNDER OF CHRISTIANITY”? 10 - “A CROWD THAT LURKS IN CORNERS, SHUNNING THE LIGHT” The First Christian Communities 11 - CONSTANTINE AND THE COMING OF THE CHRISTIAN STATE 12 - “BUT WHAT I WISH, THAT MUST BE THE CANON”1 Emperors and the Making of Christian Doctrine 13 “ENRICHED BY THE GIFTS OF MATRONS” Bishops and Society in the Fourth Century 14 - SIX EMPERORS AND A BISHOP Ambrose of Milan 15 - INTERLUDE Quintus Aurelius Symmachus and the Defence of Paganism 16 - THE ASCETIC ODYSSEY 17 - EASTERN CHRISTIANITY AND THE EMERGENCE OF THE BYZANTINE EMPIRE, 395– 600 18 - THE EMERGENCE OF CATHOLIC CHRISTIANITY IN THE WEST, 395–640 19 - “WE HONOUR THE PRIVILEGE OF SILENCE WHICH IS WITHOUT PERIL” The Death of the Greek Empirical Tradition 20 - THOMAS AQUINAS AND THE RESTORATION OF REASON Epilogue Notes Modern Works Cited in the Text and Notes About the Author ALSO BY CHARLES FREEMAN Copyright Page For Hilary Blessed is he who learns how to engage in inquiry, with no impulse to harm his countrymen or to pursue wrongful actions, but perceives the order of immortal and ageless nature, how it is structured EURIPIDES, FRAGMENT FROM AN UNNAMED PLAY, FIFTH CENTURY B.C There is another form of temptation, even more fraught with danger This is the disease of curiosity It is this which drives us to try and discover the secrets of nature, those secrets which are beyond our understanding, which can avail us nothing and which man should not wish to learn AUGUSTINE, LATE FOURTH/EARLY FIFTH CENTURY A.D Acclaim for Charles Freeman’s The Closing of the Western Mind “A fascinating account.” —The Atlanta Journal-Constitution “Engrossingly readable and very thoughtful Freeman draws our attention to myriad small but significant phenomena His fine book is both a searching look at the past and a salutary and cautionary reminder for us in our difficult present.” —The New York Sun “One of the best books to date on the development of Christianity Beautifully written and impressively annotated, this is an indispensable read for anyone interested in the roots of Christianity and its implications for our modern worldview Essential.” —Choice “Engaging Refreshing A memorable account The author is always interesting and well informed Freeman’s study moves with ease between political and intellectual history The cumulative effect is impressive.” —The Times Literary Supplement “A fine book for a popular audience that enjoys history, clear writing, and subject matter that reflects our own time.” —Houston Chronicle “The narrative is clear and fluent, the nomenclature is studiously precise and the theological conflicts of the fourth century are analyzed with subtlety.” —History Today “Ambitious, groundbreaking In the tradition of Karen Armstrong’s A History of God a scholarly history that is accessible, passionate and energetic.” —Hartford Advocate “Freeman has a talent for narrative history and for encapsulating the more arcane disputes of ancient historians and theologians He manages not only to make these disputes interesting, but also to show why they mattered so much It is a coup that few books on the early church pull off.” —The Independent “Engaging and clearly written.” —The World and I “[A] lucid account of an intellectual and social transformation that continues to shape the way Christianity is experienced and understood.” —The Dallas Morning News Introduction This book deals with a significant turning point in western cultural and intellectual history, when the tradition of rational thought established by the Greeks was stifled in the fourth and fifth centuries A.D This “closing of the Western mind” did not extend to the Arab world, where translated Greek texts continued to inspire advances in astronomy, medicine and science, and so its roots must be found in developments in the Greco-Roman world of late antiquity This book explores those developments Before setting out my argument, it is important to define what is meant by a tradition of rational thought The Greeks were the first to distinguish, assess and use the distinct branch of intellectual activity we know as reasoning By the fifth century they had grasped the principle of the deductive proof, which enabled them to make complex and irrefutable mathematical proofs They also set out the principles of inductive reasoning, the formulation of “truths” from empirical evidence Aristotle (384–322 B.C.) used this method to make significant advances in our understanding of the natural world These “truths,” however, are always provisional If the sun rises every day of our existence, we might assume that it will always rise, but there is no certainty of this The Greeks recognized this as well as grasping that theories must always be the servants of facts Describing what he has observed about the generation of bees, Aristotle notes that “the facts have not been sufficiently ascertained, and if they are ever ascertained, then we must trust perception rather than theories.” Implicit in this is the thinking of cause and effect By the fifth century we find the historian Herodotus attempting to relate what he could observe about the Nile floods with their possible causes, and this approach became rooted in the rational tradition It was the path to a fuller understanding of the natural world and offered the possibility of effective prediction Yet one should not idealize In practice it is impossible to disassociate observation from the influences of the wider world Women were seen by Greek culture to be inferior to men, and “empirical” observations could all too easily be shaped or interpreted to sustain this, as they certainly were in medicine The astronomer Ptolemy believed the earth was at the centre of the universe, and all his observations of the planets were interpreted so as not to conflict with this model A successful rational tradition needs the support and understanding of the society in which it is based, and in many parts of the Greek world, this is what it received If truth is to be effectively advanced, any finding must be open to challenge, and this means that even the greatest thinkers must never be made into figures of authority Aristotle’s colleague Theophrastus successfully queried instances of what Aristotle claimed was spontaneous generation by noticing tiny seeds Aristotle had missed If a tradition of rational thought is to make progress, it is essential that it builds in tolerance No authority can dictate in advance what can or cannot be believed, or there is no possibility of progress From the philosophical point of view, it is perhaps as important that it accept the limits of what it can achieve, in those areas of knowledge where there are no basic axioms (as there are in a mathematical model, for instance) or empirical evidence from which rational thought can progress E R Dodds, in his famous study The Greeks and the Irrational, notes that “honest distinction between what is knowable and what is not appears again and again in fifth-century [B.C.] thought, and is surely one of its chief glories.” In short, one cannot pronounce that a statement is true unless it can be supported by logic or empirical evidence It followed that nothing of certainty could be said, for instance, about the gods The problem is too complex and life is too short proclaimed the philosopher Protagoras in the fifth century Despite these words of caution, Dodds’ work reminds us that irrationality flourished in the Greek world; but perhaps one can put up with 999 irrational minds if the thousandth is an Aristotle or an Archimedes (or a Copernicus or a Newton, or, in inductive logic, a Darwin) It takes only one independent and effective rational mind to change the paradigms of understanding for the rest of humankind The conventional wisdom is that Greek science and mathematics petered out in the Hellenistic period (323–31 B.C.), but recently scholars have shown greater appreciation of the achievements of such leading figures of the second century A.D as Galen and Ptolemy Galen’s work on logic is being recognized so that, in the accolade of Geoffrey Lloyd, “Galen is probably unique among practising physicians in any age and culture for his professionalism also as a logician conversely he is also remarkable among practising logicians for his ability in, and experience of, medical practice.” The ingenuity of Ptolemy’s astronomical calculations (forced on him as they were by his misconception of the universe!) was extraordinary, but one is reminded, by a recent new translation of his Geography, that he also tackled the problem of how to represent the globe on a flat surface, introduced “minutes” and “seconds” to divide up degrees and established the notion of grids of coordinates for mapping So even in the Roman empire we are dealing with a living tradition which is making important and influential scientific advances There was an alternative approach to rational thought, that taken by Plato (c 429–347 B.C.) Plato believed in the reality of a world of Forms, Forms of everything from “the God” to a table, which was eternal and unchanging in contrast to the transient world here below This world could be grasped, after an arduous intellectual journey of which only a few were capable, by means of reason So “real” were the Forms that even the observations of the senses must be discarded if they conflicted with a Form as it was eventually discovered “We shall approach astronomy, as we geometry, by way of problems, and ignore what is in the sky, if we intend to get a real grasp of astronomy,” as Plato put it in The Republic This was, of course, a challenge to the principle that facts should prevail over theories The problem was that it was impossible to find axioms, unassailable first principles, from which one could progress to a Form such as that of Beauty or “the Good,” and the Platonic journey, while offering the lure of an ultimate certainty, never seemed, in practice, to be able to present a Form in terms with which all could agree The argument of this book is that the Greek intellectual tradition did not simply lose vigour and disappear (Its survival and continued progress in the Arab world is testimony to that.) Rather, in the fourth and fifth century A.D it was destroyed by the political and religious forces which made up the highly authoritarian government of the late Roman empire There had been premonitions of this destruction in earlier Christian theology It had been the Apostle Paul who declared war on the Greek rational tradition through his attacks on “the wisdom of the wise” and “the empty logic of the philosophers,” words which were to be quoted and requoted in the centuries to come Then came the absorption of Platonism by the early Christian theologians It was assumed that Christian dogma could be found through the same process as Plato had advocated, in other words, through reason, and would have the same certainty as the Forms However, as with other aspects of Platonism, it proved impossible to find secure axioms from which to start the rational argument Scriptural texts conflicted with each other, different theological traditions had taken root in different parts of the empire, theologians disagreed whether they should discard pagan Greek philosophy or exploit it The result, inevitably, was doctrinal confusion Augustine was to note the existence of over eighty heresies (for which read “alternative ways of dealing with the fundamental issues of Christian doctrine”) When Constantine gave toleration to the churches in the early fourth century, he found to his dismay that Christian communities were torn by dispute He himself did not help matters by declaring tax exemptions for Christian clergy and offering the churches immense patronage, which meant that getting the “right” version of Christian doctrine gave access not only to heaven but to vast resources on earth By the middle of the fourth century, disputes over doctrine had degenerated into bitterness and even violence as rival bishops struggled to earn the emperor’s favour and the most lucrative bishoprics At a time of major barbarian attacks, the threat to order was so marked that it was the emperors who increasingly defined and enforced an orthodoxy, using hand-picked church councils to give themselves some theological legitimacy So one finds a combination of factors behind “the closing of the Western mind”: the attack on Greek philosophy by Paul, the adoption of Platonism by Christian theologians and the enforcement of orthodoxy by emperors desperate to keep good order The imposition of orthodoxy went hand in hand with a stifling of any form of independent reasoning By the fifth century, not only has rational thought been suppressed, but there has been a substitution for it of “mystery, magic and authority,” a substitution which drew heavily on irrational elements of pagan society that had never been extinguished Pope Gregory the Great warned those with a rational turn of mind that, by looking for cause and effect in the natural world, they were ignoring the cause of all things, the will of God This was a vital shift of perspective, and in effect a denial of the impressive intellectual advances made by the Greek philosophers Some who have found this argument too damning have stressed how it was Christians who preserved the great works of the Greek philosophers by copying them from decaying papyri, or parchment The historian is indeed deeply indebted to the monks, the Byzantine civil servants and the Arab philosophers who preserved ancient texts, but the recording of earlier authorities is not the same as maintaining a tradition of rational thought This can be done only if these authorities are then used as inspiration for further intellectual progress or as a bulwark against which to react This happened in the Arab world (where, for instance, even the findings of a giant such as Galen were challenged and improved on) but not in the Byzantine empire or the Christian west The Athenian philosopher Proclus made the last recorded astronomical observation in the ancient Greek world in A.D 475 It was not until the sixteenth century that Copernicus—inspired by the surviving works of Ptolemy but aware that they would make more sense, and in fact would be simpler, if the sun was placed at the centre of the universe—set in hand the renewal of the scientific tradition The struggle between religion and science had now entered a new phase, one which is beyond the scope of this book What cannot be doubted is how effectively the rational tradition had been eradicated in the fourth and fifth centuries The “closing of the Western mind” has been ignored for all too long I hope this book reinvigorates debate on this turning point in European history I have acknowledged the many works I have drawn on for this book in the notes In addition, my agent, Bill Hamilton, has been a consistent support during the writing of this book, and my editor at 11, 12, 13 By 390 Christ, here “in majesty” in the church of Santa Pudenziana in Rome (top), has been transformed from an outcast of the empire to one who is represented by its most traditional imperial images, fully frontal on a throne (credit: Scala) The setting echoes the portrayal of Constantine distributing largesse on his Arch (315) (above; credit: Alinari) and of the emperor Theodosius I on a silver commemorative dish of 388 (right; credit: Ancient Art and Architecture Collection) Note Christ’s adoption of a halo, hitherto a symbol of monarchy (while his beard echoes representations of Jupiter) On Christ’s left, Paul is introduced as an apostle, an indication of his growing status in the empire of the late fourth century 14 According to the Gospels, Jesus was executed by Roman soldiers and offered no resistance to them In imperial Christianity, by contrast, he himself has become a Roman soldier, “the leader of the legions,” as Ambrose of Milan put it With no supporting evidence for this role from the Gospels, the Old Testament Psalm 91, which portrays a protective God trampling on lion and adder, is drawn on to provide the imagery (A mosaic from Ravenna, c 500; credit: Scala) 15 Constantine’s use of a military victory as the platform from which to announce his toleration of Christianity was a radical departure which defined the relationship between Christianity and war for centuries to come The Sala di Constantino was commissioned from Raphael by the Medici pope Leo X (pope 1513–21) The early popes are shown alongside Constantine’s vision Leo associated himself with the victory by adding the palle (balls) from the Medici coat of arms to Constantine’s tent; lions, a reference to Leo’s name, are also found on the tent, with another depicted on a standard (Credit: Scala) 16 “Alexamenos worships his god.” Early Christians were ridiculed for their worship of a “god” who had suffered the humiliation of crucifixion In this graffito of c 200 from Rome, one Alexamenos is mocked for worshipping a donkey on a cross (Credit: Scala) 17 Even in the fifth century, Christians themselves had inhibitions about representing Christ on the cross, as can be seen in this representation of Christ from the door of the Roman church of Santa Sabina (c 420) (Credit: Scala) 18 An increasing stress on the sinfulness of the human race led to graphic portrayals of the appalling agonies Christ had to go through to redeem humanity (“The Crucifixion” from the Isenheim Altar, 1515; credit: Bridgeman Art Library) 19 A further development in the medieval iconography of Jesus was to differentiate him racially from his fellow Jews and to stress their responsibility for the crucifixion by caricaturing them Note the same differentiation of Veronica, who has just wiped Christ’s face with her veil (Christ Carrying the Cross by Hieronymus Bosch, c 1450–1516; credit: Bridgeman Art Library) 20 The motif of the Good Shepherd had been known in eastern and Greek art for over a thousand years before it was adopted for Christ, as here (c 300; credit: Scala) Constantine is known to have erected emblems of the Good Shepherd on fountains in Constantinople, and in his Life Eusebius tells how his troops mourned him as their own “Good Shepherd.” This is yet another example of how Constantine manipulated images to sustain consensus between pagan and Christian 21 Traditional imperial iconography was also adopted as a setting for Christ’s life On the sarcophagus of Junius Bassus (359) in Rome, Christ is shown in the two central panels; in the upper panel, he appears in divine majesty ruling over the cosmos (in the same pose as an emperor is shown in a relief of 310), and, in the lower, entering Jerusalem, in a format also traditionally used for the arrival of emperors (credit: Scala) There were debates in this period over the relationship between the divine and human aspects of the emperor; here they appear to have been transferred into Christian theology, a forerunner of the great theological disputes over Christ’s nature in the decades to come 22 While Christian art often drew on pagan imagery, it also developed distinctive themes of its own In this sixth-century ivory from Ravenna, the emphasis is on Christ as miracle worker The four major miracles shown are (reading counter-clockwise from top left): the Cure of the Blind Man, the Cure of the Possessed Man, the Cure of the Paralytic Man and the Raising of Lazarus Below Christ are the Three Young Men in the Burning Fiery Furnace from the Old Testament By the fifth century miracles had become the primary way in which a Christian “holy man” could show authenticity as one favoured by God; stories of miracles pervade the lives of the saints (Credit: Ancient Art and Architecture Collection) 23 We also find an increasing adulation of sacred objects, icons and the relics of saints Here the bones of St Stephen, the first Christian martyr, are borne into Constantinople by the patriarch of the city and welcomed by Senate, emperor, Theodosius II, and, probably, his pious sister Pulcheria, in 421 By now Constantinople is a Christian city An icon of Christ appears at the gate into the imperial palace (upper left) and spectators in the top row of windows of the palace swing incense burners (Credit: Bridgeman Art Library) 24, 25, 26 Goddesses had been prominent in Mediterranean religion, and the Egyptian Isis, here shown with her son Horus (above left; credit: Bridgeman Art Library) in a fourth-century A.D limestone statue, was one of the most popular As Christianity developed the role and status of Mary, she absorbed many of the attributes and iconographies of these goddesses By the sixth century the Virgin and child, often accompanied by saints and angels, as in this example from St Catherine’s, Sinai (above right; credit: Staatliche Museen zu Berlin /Preussicher Kulturbesitz / Museum für Spatantlike und Byzantinische Kunst), is an integral part of Christianity No one depicts the femininity, and motherhood, of Mary more exquisitely than Caravaggio (1571–1610), here in his Rest on the Flight into Egypt (detail, below; Ancient Art and Architecture Collection) 27, 28 However rigid the theological definitions of the church, the boundaries between paganism and Christianity remained fluid In this mosaic from Cyprus (first half of the fourth century), the god Dionysus is presented to on-looking nymphs as “a divine child” (above; credit: Scala) Perhaps more astonishing are the representations of the Virgin Mary produced by the medieval Italian confraternities Here the confraternity of St Francis in Perugia shows her protecting the people from the wrath of her son, who is shooting arrows of plague to earth (left; credit: Ancient Art and Architecture Collection) In Homer’s Iliad, Apollo also spreads plague with his arrows, and the goddesses Hera and Athena intervene to calm his wrath 29, 30 One of the major developments of fourth-century Christianity was the adoption of the pagan custom of celebrating God through magnificent buildings, many of them of great beauty, as the simple basilica of Santa Sabina (top) in Rome (c 420) suggests (credit: Scala) In a lovely seventh-century mosaic in her church outside Rome (above), Saint Agnes has been transformed by her martyrdom into a Byzantine princess and set against a background of gold (credit: Scala) Two of the popes responsible for building her church (one of the most atmospheric in Rome) surround her 31, 32, 33 Among the most prominent church builders was the emperor Justinian (527–65), here shown with his entourage in the church of San Vitale in Ravenna (top; credit: Scala) His most majestic creation was Santa Sophia in Constantinople, here (above left) in a watercolour by Gaspard Fossati (1852, by which time it had become a mosque; credit: Scala) The massive transfer of resources into buildings was justified by Christians on the Platonic grounds that they provided an image on earth of the splendours of heaven Any sacred object could be encased in gold and jewels, as this ninth-century gospel cover shows (above right; credit: Ancient Art and Architecture Collection) Well might Jerome complain that “parchments are dyed purple, gold is melted into lettering, manuscripts are dressed up in jewels, while Christ lies at the door naked and dying.” These underlying tensions erupted, centuries later, during the Reformation, when vast quantities of Christian art were destroyed by the reformers 34, 35 This diptych may well have been issued by the Symmachus and Nicomachus families as a memorial to the pagan senator Praetextatus, who died in 384 “He alone,” it was said, “knew the secrets of the nature of the godhead, he alone had the intelligence to apprehend the divine and the ability to expound it.” Here a wealth of traditional imagery suggests the resilience of paganism in the late fourth century See chapter 15 for detailed discussion of the diptych (Credit: Hirmer) 36 The death of Symmachus, the upholder of freedom of thought against Ambrose of Milan, is commemorated in traditional style in this depiction of his apotheosis (c 402) He ascends in heroic nudity from the funeral pyre in a four-horse chariot and is then received into heaven (Credit: Ancient Art and Architecture Collection) CHARLES FREEMAN The Closing of the Western Mind Charles Freeman is the author of The Greek Achievement and Egypt, Greece, and Rome He lives in Suffolk, England ALSO BY CHARLES FREEMAN Egypt, Greece, and Rome The Greek Achievement The Legacy of Ancient Egypt FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, FEBRUARY 2005 Copyright © 2002 by Charles Freeman Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows: Freeman, Charles, [date] The closing of the Western mind: the rise of faith and the fall of reason / Charles Freeman.—1st American ed p cm Includes bibliographical references and index Civilization, Western Christianity—Influence Church and state— Europe—History Church history—Primitive and early church, ca 30–600 Church history—Middle Ages, 600–1500 Civilization, Western—Classical influences Hellenism Europe—History—To 476 Europe— History—476–1492 10 Europe—Intellectual life I Title CB245.F73 2003 940.1’2—dc21 2002044821 www.vintagebooks.com www.randomhouse.com eISBN: 978-0-307-42827-1 v3.0 ... councils to give themselves some theological legitimacy So one finds a combination of factors behind the closing of the Western mind”: the attack on Greek philosophy by Paul, the adoption of Platonism... title they used themselves (The question of the primacy of the bishops of Rome, actual or otherwise, over other bishops is, of course, a separate topic that I explore at appropriate points in the. .. in the 1480s, the date of this fresco, to be of the emperor Constantine, its founder On the other is the Porta Ripa Grande, the port alongside the river Tiber in Rome The fresco itself is in the