GREEK PHILOSOPHY AS THE ANTECEDENT OF THE PATRISTIC APPREHENSION OF FACT
The Latin West afforded the _milieu_ in which the thoughts and sentiments
of the antique and partly Christian world were held in Latin forms and
preserved from obliteration during the fifth and succeeding centuries,
until taken up by the currents of mingled decrepitude and callowness which
marked the coming of the mediaeval time. Latin Christianity survived, and
made its way across those stormy centuries, to its mediaeval harbourage.
The antique also was carried over, either in the ship of Latin
Christianity, or in tenders freighted by certain Latin Christians who
dealt in secular learning, though not in “unbroken packages.” Those
unbroken packages, to wit, the Latin classics, and after many centuries
the Greek, also floated over. But in the early mediaeval times, men
preferred the pagan matter rehashed, as in the _Etymologies_ of Isidore.
The great ship of Christian doctrine not only bore bits of the pagan
antique stowed here and there, but itself was built with many a plank of
antique timber, and there was antique adulteration in its Christian
freight; or, in other words, the theology of the Church Fathers was partly
made of Greek philosophy, and was put together in modes of Greek
philosophic reasoning. The Fathers lived in the Roman Empire, or in what
was left of it in the third, fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries. Many of
them were born of pagan parents, and all received the common education in
grammar, rhetoric, and literature, which were pagan and permeated with
pagan philosophy. For philosophy did not then stand apart from life and
education; but had become a source of principles of conduct and “daily
thoughts for daily needs.” Many of the Fathers in their pagan, or at least
unsanctified youth, had deeply studied it.
Philosophy held the sum of knowledge in the Empire, and from it came the
concepts in which all the Fathers reasoned. But the _Latin_ Fathers, who
were juristically and rhetorically educated, might also reason through
conceptions, or in a terminology, taken from the Roman Law. Nevertheless,
in the rational process of formulating Christian dogma, Greek philosophy
was the overwhelmingly important factor, because it furnished knowledge
and the metaphysical concepts, and because the greater number of Christian
theologians were Hellenic in spirit, and wrote Greek; while the Latins
reset in Latin, and sometimes juristic, phrase what their eastern brethren
had evolved.[34]
Obviously, for our purpose, which is to appreciate the spiritual endowment
of the Middle Ages, it is essential to have cognizance of patristic
thought. And in order to understand the mental processes of the Fathers,
their attitude toward knowledge and their perception of fact, one must
consider their intellectual environment; which was, of course, made up of
the store of knowledge and philosophic interests prevailing in the Roman
Empire. So we have to gauge the intellectual interests of the pagan world,
first in the earlier times when thinkers were bringing together knowledge
and philosophic concepts, and then in the later period when its
accumulated and somewhat altered thought made the actual environment of
the Church.
* * * * *
What race had ever a more genial appreciation of the facts of nature and
of mortal life, than the Greeks? The older Greek philosophies had sprung
from open and unprejudiced observation of the visible world. They were
physical inquiries. With Socrates philosophy turned, as it were, from
fact to truth, to a consideration of the validity of human understanding.
Thereupon the Greek mind became entranced with its own creations. Man was
the measure of all things, for the Sophists. More irrefragably and
pregnantly, man became the measure of all things for Socrates and Plato.
The aphorism might be discarded; but its transcendental import was
established in an imaginative dialectic whose correspondence to the
divinest splendours of the human mind warranted its truth. With
Platonists--and the world was always to be filled with them--perceptions
of physical facts and the data of human life and history, were henceforth
to constitute the outer actuality of a creation within the mind. Every
observed fact is an apparent tangibility; but its reality consists in its
unison with the ultimate realities of rational conception. The
apprehension of the fact must be made to conform to these. For this reason
every fact has a secondary, nay, primary, because spiritual, meaning. Its
true interpretation lies in that significance which accords with the
mind’s consistent system of conceptions, which present the fact as it must
be thought, and therefore as it is; it is the fact brought into right
relationship with spiritual and ethical verity. Of course, methods of
apprehending terrestrial and celestial phenomena as illustrations of
ideally conceived principles, were unlikely to foster habits of close
observation. The apparent facts of sense would probably be imaginatively
treated if not transformed in the process of their apprehension. Nor, with
respect to human story, would such methods draw fixed lines between the
narration of what men are pleased to call the actual occurrence, and the
shaping of a tale to meet the exigencies of argument or illustration.
All this is obvious in Plato. The _Timaeus_ was his vision of the
universe, in which physical facts became plastic material for the spirit’s
power to mould into the likeness of ideal conceptions. The creation of the
universe is conformed to the structure of Platonic dialectic. If any
meaning be certain through the words and imagery of this dialogue, it is
that the world and all creatures which it contains derive such reality as
they have from conformity to the thoughts or ideal patterns in the divine
mind. Visible things are real only so far as they conform to those
perfect conceptions. Moreover, the visible creation has another value,
that of its ethical significance. Physical phenomena symbolize the
conformity of humanity to its best ideal of conduct. Man may learn to
regulate the lawless movements of his soul from the courses of the stars,
the noblest of created gods.
Thus as to natural phenomena; and likewise as to the human story, fact or
fiction. The myth of the shadow-seers in the cave, with which the seventh
book of the _Republic_ opens, is just as illustratively and ideally true
as that opening tale in the _Timaeus_ of the ancient Athenian state, which
fought for its own and others’ freedom against the people of
Atlantis--till the earthquake ended the old Athenian race, and the
Atlantean continent was swallowed in the sea. This story has piqued
curiosity for two thousand years. Was it tradition, or the creation of an
artist dialectician? In either case its ideal and edifying truth stood or
fell, not by reason of conformity to any basic antecedent fact, but
according to its harmony with the beautiful and good.
Plato’s method of conceiving fact might be applied to man’s thoughts of
God, of the origin of the world and the courses of the stars; also to the
artistic manipulation of illustrative or edifying story. Matters, large,
remote, and mysterious, admit of idealizing ways of apprehension. But it
might seem idiocy, rather than idealism, to apply this method to the plain
facts of common life, which may be handled and looked at all around--to
which there is no mysterious other side, like the moon’s, for ever turned
away. Nevertheless the method and its motives drew men from careful
observation of nature, and would invest biography and history with
interests promoting the ingenious application, rather than the close
scrutiny, of fact.
Thus Platonism and its way of treating narrative could not but foster the
allegorical interpretation of ancient tradition and literature, which was
already in vogue in Plato’s time. It mattered not that he would have
nothing to do with the current allegories through which men moralized or
rationalized the old tales of the doings of the gods. He was himself a
weaver of the loveliest allegories when it served his purpose. And after
him the allegorical habit entered into the interpretation of all ancient
story. In the course of time allegory will be applied by the Jew Philo of
Alexandria to the Pentateuch; and one or two centuries later it will play
a great rôle in Christian polemics against Jew and then against Manichean.
It will become _par excellence_ the chief mode of patristic exegesis, and
pass on as a legacy of spiritual truth to the mediaeval church.
Aristotle strikes us as a man of different type from Plato. Whether his
intellectual interests were broader than his teacher’s is hardly for
ordinary people to say. He certainly was more actively interested in the
investigation of nature. Head of an actual school (as Plato had been), and
assisted by the co-operation of able men, he presents himself, with what
he accomplished, at least in threefold guise: as a metaphysician and the
perfecter, if not creator, of formal logic; as an observer of the facts of
nature and the institutions and arts of men; as a man of encyclopaedic
learning. These three phases of intellectual effort proportioned each
other in a mind of universal power and appetition. Yet it has been thought
that there was more metaphysics and formal logic in Aristotle than was
good for his natural science.
The lost and extant writings which have been ascribed to him, embraced a
hundred and fifty titles and amounted to four hundred books. Those which
have been of universal influence upon human inquiry suffice to illustrate
the scope of his labours. There were the treatises upon Logic and first
among them the _Categories_ or classes of propositions, and the _De
interpretatione_ on the constituent parts and kinds of sentences. These
two elementary treatises (the authorship of which has been questioned)
were the only Aristotelian writings generally used through the West until
the latter half of the twelfth century, when the remainder of the logical
treatises became known, to wit, the _Prior Analytics_, upon the syllogism;
the _Posterior Analytics_ upon logical demonstration; the _Topics_, or
demonstrations having probability; and the _Sophistical Elenchi_, upon
false conclusions and their refutation. Together these constitute the
_Organon_ or complete logical instrument, as it became known to the
latter half of the twelfth century, and as we possess it to-day.
The _Rhetoric_ follows, not disconnected with the logical treatises. Then
may be named the _Metaphysics_, and then the writings devoted to Nature,
to wit, the _Physics_, _Concerning the Heavens_, _Concerning Genesis and
Decay_, the _Meteorology_, the _Mechanical Problems_, the _History of
Animals_, the _Anatomical descriptions_, the _Psychology_, the _Parts of
Animals_, the _Generation of Animals_. There was a Botany, which is lost.
Finally, one names the great works on Ethics, Politics, and Poetry.
Every one is overwhelmed by the compass of the achievement of this
intellect. As to the transcendent value of the works on Logic,
Metaphysics, Psychology, Rhetoric, Ethics, Politics, and Poetry, the world
of scholarship has long been practically at one. There is a difference of
opinion as to the quantity and quality of actual investigation represented
by the writings on Natural History. But Aristotle is commonly regarded as
the founder of systematic Zoology. On the whole, perhaps one will not err
in repeating what has been said hundreds of times, that the works ascribed
to Aristotle, and which undoubtedly were produced by him or his
co-labourers under his direction, represent the most prodigious
intellectual achievement ever connected with any single name.
In the school of Aristotle, one phase or another of the master’s activity
would be likely to absorb the student’s energy and fasten his entire
attention. Aristotle’s own pupil and successor was the admirable
Theophrastus, a man of comprehensive attainment, who nevertheless devoted
himself principally to carrying on his master’s labours in botany, and
other branches of natural science. A History of Physics was one of the
most important of his works. Another pupil of Aristotle was Eudemus of
Rhodes, who became a physicist and a historian of the three sciences of
Geometry, Arithmetic, and Astronomy. He exhibits the learned activities
thenceforth to characterize the Peripatetics. It would have been difficult
to carry further the logic or metaphysics of the master. But his work in
natural science might be supplemented, while the body of his writings
offered a vast field for the labours of the commentator. And so, in fact,
Peripatetic energies in the succeeding generations were divided between
science and learning, the latter centring chiefly in historical and
grammatical labours and the exposition of the master’s writing.[35]
Aristotelianism was not to be the philosophy of the closing pre-Christian
centuries, any more than it was to be the philosophy of the thousand years
and more following the Crucifixion. During all that time, its logic held
its own, and a number of its metaphysical principles were absorbed in
other systems. But Aristotelianism as a system soon ceased to be in vogue,
and by the sixth century was no longer known.
Yet one might find an echo of its, or some like, spirit in all men who
were seeking knowledge from the world of nature, from history and humane
learning. There were always such; and some famous examples may be drawn
even from among the practical-minded Romans. One thinks at once of
Cicero’s splendid breadth of humane and literary interest. His friend
Terentius Varro was a more encyclopaedic personality, and an eager student
in all fields of knowledge. Although not an investigator of nature he
wrote on agriculture, on navigation, on geometry, as well as the Latin
tongue, and on Antiquities, divine and human, even on philosophy.[36]
Another lover of knowledge was the elder Pliny, who died from venturing
too near to observe the eruption which destroyed Pompeii. He was an
important functionary under the emperor Vespasian, just as Varro had held
offices of authority in the time of the Republic. Pliny’s _Historia
naturalis_ was an astounding compilation, intended to cover the whole
plain of common and uncommon knowledge. The compiler neither observed for
himself nor weighed the statements of others. His compilation is a happy
harbourage for the preposterous as well as reasonable, where the
traveller’s tale of far-off wonders takes its place beside the testimony
of Aristotle. All is fish that comes to the net of the good Pliny, though
it be that wonderful _piscis_, the _Echinus_, which though but a cubit
long has such tenacity of grip and purpose that it holds fast the largest
galley, and with the resistance of its fins, renders impotent the efforts
of a hundred rowers. Fish for Pliny also are all the stories of antiquity,
of dog-headed, one-legged, big-footed men, of the Pigmies and the Cranes,
of the Phoenix and the Basilisk. He delights in the more intricate
causality of nature’s phenomena, and tells how the bowels of the
field-mouse increase in number with the days of the moon, and the energy
of the ant decreases as the orb of Venus wanes.[37] But this credulous
person was a marvel of curiosity and diligence, and we are all his debtors
for an acquaintance with the hearsay opinions current in the antique
world.
Varro and Pliny were encyclopaedists. Yet before, as well as after them,
the men possessed by the passion for knowledge of the natural world, were
frequently devoted to some branch of inquiry, rather than encyclopaedic
gleaners, or universal philosophers. Hippocrates, Socrates’s contemporary,
had left a name rightly enduring as the greatest of physicians. In the
third century before Christ Euclid is a great mathematician, and
Hipparchus and Archimedes have place for ever, the one among the great
astronomers, the other among the great terrestrial physicists. All these
men represent reflection and theory, as well as investigation and
experiment. Leaping forward to the second century A.D., we find among
others two great lovers of science. Galen of Pergamos was a worthy
follower, if not a peer, of the great physician of classic Greece; and
Ptolemy of Alexandria emulated the Alexandrian Hipparchus, whose fame he
revered, and whose labours (with his own) he transmitted to posterity.
Each of these men may be regarded as advancing some portion of the
universal plan of Aristotle.
Another philosophy, Stoicism, had already reached a wide acceptance. As
for the causes of this, doubtless the decline of Greek civic freedom
before the third century B.C., had tended to throw thoughtful men back
upon their inner life; and those who had lost their taste for the popular
religion, needed a philosophy to live by. Stoicism became especially
popular among the Romans. It was ethics, a philosophy of practice rather
than of knowledge. The Stoic looked out upon the world from the inner
fortress of the human will. That guarded or rather constituted his
well-being. He cared for such knowledge, call it instruction rather, as
would make good the principle that human well-being lay in the rightly
self-directing will. He did not seriously care for metaphysics, or for
knowledge of the natural world, save as one or the other subserved the
ends of his philosophy as a guide of life. Thus the Stoic physics, so
important a part in the Stoic system, was inspired by utilitarian motives
and deflected from unprejudiced observation by teleological considerations
and reflections on the dispensations of Providence. Of course, some of the
Stoics show a further range of intellectual interest; Seneca, for example,
who was a fine moralist and wrote beautiful essays upon the conduct of
life. He, like a number of other people, composed a book of _Quaestiones
naturales_, which was chiefly devoted to the weather, a subject always
very close to man. But he was not a serious meteorologist. For him the
interest of the fact lay rather in its use or in its moral bearing. After
Seneca the Stoic interest in fact narrows still further, as with Epictetus
and Marcus Aurelius.
Like things might be said of the school of Epicurus, a child of different
colour, yet birthmate of the Stoa. For in that philosophy as in Stoicism,
all knowledge beyond ethics had a subordinate rôle. As a Stoic or
Epicurean, a man was not likely to contribute to the advance of any branch
of science. Yet habits of eclectic thought and common curiosity, or call
it love of knowledge, made many nominal members of these schools eager
students and compilers from the works of others.
We have yet to speak of the system most representative of latter-day
paganism, and of enormous import for the first thousand years of Christian
thought. Neo-Platonism was the last great creation of Greek philosophy.
More specifically, it was the noblest product of that latter-day paganism
which was yearning somewhat distractedly, impelled by cravings which
paganism could neither quench nor satisfy.
Spirit is; it is the Real. It makes the body, thereby presenting itself in
sensible form; it is not confined by body or dependent on body as its
cause or necessary ground. In many ways men have expressed, and will
express hereafter, the creative or causal antecedence of the spiritual
principle. In many ways they have striven to establish this principle in
God who is Spirit, or in the Absolute One. Many also have been the
processes of individualization and diverse the mediatorial means, through
which philosopher, apostle, or Church Doctor has tried to bring this
principle down to man, and conceive him as spirit manifesting an
intelligible selfhood through the organs of sense. Platonism was a
beautiful, if elusive, expression of this endeavour, and Neo-Platonism a
very palpable although darkening statement of the same.
All men, except fools, have their irrational sides. Who does not believe
what his reason shall labour in vain to justify? Such belief may have its
roots spread through generalizations broader than any specific rational
processes of which the man is conscious. And a man is marked by the
character of his supra-rational convictions, or beliefs or credulous
conjectures. One thinks how Plato wove and coloured his dialectic, and
angled with it, after those transcendencies that he well knew could never
be so hooked and taken. His conviction--non-dialectical--of the supreme
and beautiful reality of spirit led him on through all his arguments, some
of which appear as playful, while others are very earnest.
Less elusive than Plato’s was the supra-rationality of his distant
disciple, the Egyptian Plotinus (died 270), creator of Neo-Platonism. With
him the supra-rational represented an _élan_, a reaching beyond the
clearly seen or clearly known, to the Spirit itself. He had a disciple
Porphyry, like himself a sage--and yet a different sage. Porphyry’s
supra-rationalities hungered for many things from which his rational
nature turned askance. But he has a disciple, Iamblicus by name, whose
rational nature not only ceases to protest, but of its free will
prostitutes itself in the service of unreason.
The synthetic genius of Plotinus enabled him to weave into his system
valuable elements from Aristotle and the Stoics. But he was above all a
Platonist. He presents the spiritual triad: the One, the Mind, the Soul.
From the One comes the Mind, that is, the Nous, which embraces the
totality of the knowable or intelligible, to wit, the Cosmos of Ideas.
From that, come the Soul of the World and the souls of men. Matter, which
is no-thing, gains form and partial reality when _informed_ with soul.
Plotinus’s attitude toward knowledge of the concrete natural or historic
fact, displays a transcendental indifference exceeding that of Plato.
Perceptible facts with him are but half-real manifestations of the
informing spirit. They were quite plastic, malleable, reducible. Moreover,
thoughts of the evil of the multiple world of sense held for Plotinus and
his followers a bitterness of ethical unreality which Plato was too great
an Athenian to feel.
Dualistic ethics which find in matter the principle of unreality or evil,
diminish the human interest in physical fact. The ethics of Plotinus
consisted in purification and detachment from things of sense. This is
asceticism. And Plotinus was an ascetic, not through endeavour, but from
contempt. He did not struggle to renounce the world, but despised it with
the spontaneity of a sublimated temperament. He seemed like a man ashamed
of being in the body, Porphyry says of him. Nor did he wish to cure any
contemptible bodily ailments, or wash his wretched body.
Plotinus’s Absolute, the First or One, might not be grasped by reason. Yet
to approach and contemplate It was the best for man. Life’s crown was the
ecstasy of the supra-rational and supra-intelligible vision of It. This
Plotinean irrationality was lofty; but it was too transcendent, too
difficult, and too unrelated to the human heart, to satisfy other men. No
fear but that his followers would bring it down to the level of _their_
irrational tendencies.
The borrowed materials of this philosophy were made by its founder into a
veritable system. It included, potentially at least, the popular beliefs,
which, however, interested this metaphysical Copt very little. But in
those superstitious centuries, before as well as after him, these cruder
elements were gathered and made much of by men of note. There was a
tendency to contrast the spiritual and real with the manifold of material
nonentity, and a cognate tendency to emphasize the opposition between the
spiritual and good, and the material and evil, or between opposing
spiritual principles. With less metaphysical people such opposition would
take more entrancing shapes in the battles of gods and demons. Probably it
would cause ascetic repression of the physical passions. Both tendencies
had shown themselves before Plotinus came to build them into his system.
Friend Plutarch, for instance, of Chaeroneia, was a man of pleasant temper
and catholic curiosity. His philosophy was no great matter. He was gently
credulous, and interested in anything marvellous and every imaginable god
and demon. This good Greek was no ascetic, and yet had much to say of the
strife between the good and evil principle. Like thoughts begat asceticism
in men of a different temperament; for instance in the once famous
Apollonius of Tyana and others, who were called Neo-Pythagoreans, whatever
that meant. Such men had also their irrationalities, which perhaps made up
the major part of their natures. They did indeed belong to those centuries
when Astrology flourished at the imperial Court,[38] and every mode of
magic mystery drew its gaping votaries; when men were ravenously drawing
toward everything, except the plain concrete fact steadily viewed and
quietly reasoned on.
But it was within the schools of Neo-Platonism, in the generations after
Plotinus, that these tendencies flourished, beneath the shelter of his
elastic principles. Here three kindred currents made a resistless stream:
a transcendental, fact-compelling dialectic; unveiled recognition of the
supreme virtue of supra-rational convictions and experiences; and an
asceticism which contemned matter and abhorred the things of sense. What
more was needed to close the faculties of observation, befool the reason,
and destroy knowledge in the end?
Porphyry and Iamblicus show the turning of the tide. The first of these
was a Tyrian, learned, intelligent, austere. His life extends from about
the year 232 to the year 300. His famous _Introduction_ to the
_Categories_ of Aristotle was a corner-stone of the early mediaeval
knowledge of logic. He wrote a keenly rational work against the
Christians, in which his critical acumen pointed out that the Book of
Daniel was not composed before the reign of Antiochus Epiphanes. He did
much to render intelligible the writings of his master Plotinus, and made
a compend of Neo-Platonism in the form of _Sentences_. These survive, as
well as his work on _Abstinence from Eating Flesh_, and other treatises,
allegorical and philosophic.
He was to Plotinus as Soul, in the Neo-Platonic system, was to Mind--Soul
which somehow was darkly, passionately tangled in the body of which it was
the living principle. The individual soul of Porphyry wrestled with all
the matters which the mind of Plotinus made slight account of. Plotinus
lived aloof in a region of metaphysics warmed with occasional ecstasy.
Porphyry, willy nilly, was drawn down to life, and suffered all the pain
of keen mentality when limed and netted with the anxieties of common
superstitions. He was forever groping in a murky atmosphere. He could not
clear himself of credulity, deny and argue as he might. Nor could
asceticism pacify his mind. Philosophically he followed Plotinus’s
teachings, and understood them too, which was a marvel. Many of his own,
or possibly reflected, thoughts are excellent. No Christian could hold a
more spiritual conception of sacrifice than Porphyry when thinking of the
worship of the Mind--the Nous or Second God. Offer to it silence and
chaste thought, which will unite us to it, and make us like itself. The
perfect sacrifice is to disengage the soul from passions.[39] What could
be finer? And again says Porphyry: The body is the soul’s garment, to be
laid aside; the wise man needs only God; evil spirits have no power over a
pure soul. But, but, but--at his last statement Porphyry’s confidence
breaks. He is worried because it is so hard to know the good from evil
demons; and the latter throng the temples, and must be exorcised before
the true God will appear. This same man had said that God’s true temple
was the wise man’s soul! Alas! Porphyry’s nature reeks with
contradictions. His letter to the Egyptian priest, Anebo, consists of
sharply-put questions as to the validity of any kind of theurgy or
divination. How can men know anything as to these things? What reason to
suppose that this, that, or the other rite--all anxiously enumerated--is
rightly directed or has effect? None! none! none! such is the answer
expected by the questions.
But Porphyry’s own soul answers otherwise. His works--the _De abstinentia_
for example--teem with detailed and believing discussion of every kind of
theurgic practice and magic rite, whereby the divine and demonic natures
may be moved. He believed in oracles and sorcery. Vainly did the more
keenly intellectual side of his nature seek to hold such matters at arm’s
length; his other instincts hungered for them, craved to touch and taste
and handle, as the child hankers for what is forbidden. There is
angel-lore, but far more devil-lore, in Porphyry, and below the earth the
demons have their realm, and at their head a demon-king. Thus organized,
these malformed devil-shapes torment the lives of men, malignant
deceivers, spiteful trippers-up, as they are.
Such a man beset by demons (which his intelligence declares to have no
power over him!), such a man, austere and grim, would practise fanatically
the asceticism recognized so calmly by the system of Plotinus. With
Porphyry, strenuously, anxiously, the upper grades of virtue become
violent purification and detachment from things of sense. Here he is in
grim earnest.
It is wonderful that this man should have had a critical sense of historic
fact, as when he saw the comparatively late date of the Book of Daniel. He
could see the holes in others’ garments. But save for some such polemic
purpose, the bare, crude fact interests him little. He is an elaborate
fashioner of allegory, and would so interpret the fictions of the poets.
Plotinus, when it suited him, had played with myths, like Plato. No such
light hand, and scarcely concealed smile, has Porphyry. As for physical
investigations, they interest him no more seriously than they did his
master, and when he touches upon natural fact he is as credulous as Pliny.
“The Arabians,” says he, “understand the speech of crows, and the
Tyrrhenians that of eagles; and perhaps we and all men would understand
all living beings if a dragon licked our ears.”[40]
These inner conflicts darkened Porphyry’s life, and doubtless made some of
the motives which were turning his thoughts to suicide, when Plotinus
showed him that this was not the true way of detachment. There was no
conflict, but complete surrender, and happy abandonment in Iamblicus the
Divine (θεῖος) who when he prayed might be lifted ten cubits from the
ground--so thought his disciples--and around whose theurgic fingers,
dabbling in a magic basin of water, Cupids played and kissed each other.
His life, told by the Neo-Platonic biographer, Eunapius, is as full of
miracle as the contemporary Life of St. Antony by Athanasius. Iamblicus
floats before us a beautiful and marvellously garbed priest, a dweller in
the recesses of temples. He frankly gave himself to theurgy, convinced
that the Soul needs the aid of every superhuman being--hero, god, demon,
angel.[41] He was credulous on principle. It is of first importance, he
writes, that the devotee should not let the marvellous character of an
occurrence arouse incredulity within him. He needs above all a “science”
(ἐπιστήμη) which shall teach him to disbelieve nothing as to the gods.[42]
For the divine principle is essentially miraculous, and magic is the open
door, yes, and the way up to it, the anagogic path.
All this and more besides is set forth in the _De mysteriis_, the chief
composition of his school. It was the answer to that doubting letter of
Porphyry to Anebo, and contains full proof and exposition of the occult
art of moving god or demon. We all have an inborn knowledge (ἔμφυτος
γνῶσις)[43] of the gods. But it is not thought or contemplation that
unites us to them; it is the power of the theurgic rite or cabalistic
word, understood only by the gods. We cannot understand the reason of
these acts and their effects.[44]
There is no lower depth. Plotinus’s reason-surpassing vision of the One
(which represents in him the principle of irrationality) is at last
brought down to the irrational act, the occult magic deed or word. Truly
the worshipper needs his best credulity--which is bespoken by Iamblicus
and by this book. The work seems to argue, somewhat obscurely, that the
prayer or invocation or rite, does not actually draw the god to us, but
draws us toward the god, making our wills fit to share in his. The writer
of such a work is likely to be confused in his statement of principles;
but will expand more genially when expounding the natures of demons,
heroes, angels, and gods, and the effect of them upon humanity. Perhaps
the matter still seems dark; but the picturesque details are bright
enough. For the writer describes the manifestations and apparitions of
these beings--their ἐπιφανείαι and φάσματα. The apparitions of the gods
are μονοειδῆ, simple and uniform: those of the demons are ποικίλα, that
is, various and manifold; those of the angels are more simple than those
of the demons, but inferior to those of the gods. The archangels in their
apparitions are more like the gods; while the ἄρχοντες, the “governors,”
have variety and yet order. The gods as they appear to men, are radiant
with divine effulgence, the archangels terrible yet kind; the demons are
frightful, producing perturbation and terror--on all of which the work
enlarges. Speaking more specifically of the effect of these apparitions on
the thaumaturgist, the writer says that visions of the gods bring a mighty
power, and divine love and joy ineffable; the archangels bring
steadfastness and power of will and intellectual contemplation; the angels
bring rational wisdom and truth and virtue. But the vision of demons
brings the desires of sense and the vigour to fulfil them.
So low sank Neo-Platonism in pagan circles. Of course it did not create
this mass of superstitious fantasy. It merely fell in cordially, and over
every superstition flung the justification of its principles. In the
process it changed from a philosophy to a system of theurgic practice. The
common superstitions of the time, or their like, were old enough. But
now--and here was the portentous fact--they had wound themselves into the
natures of intellectual people; and Neo-Platonism represents the chief
formal facilitation of this result.
A contemporary phenomenon, and perhaps the most popular of pagan cults in
the third and fourth centuries, was the worship of Mithra, around which
Neo-Platonism could throw its cloak as well as around any other form of
pagan worship. Mithraism, a partially Hellenized growth from the old
Mazdaean (even Indo-Iranian) faith, had been carried from one boundary of
the Empire to the other, by soldiers or by merchants who had imbibed its
doctrines in the East. It shot over the Empire like a flame. A warrior
cult, the late pagan emperors gave it their adhesion. It was, in fine, the
pagan Antaeus destined to succumb in the grasp of the Christian Hercules.
With it, or after it, came Manicheism, also from the East. This was quite
as good a philosophy as the Neo-Platonism of Iamblicus. The system called
after Manes was a crass dualism, containing fantastic and largely borrowed
speculation as to the world and man. Satan was there and all his devils.
He was the begetter of mankind, in Adam. But Satan himself, in previous
struggles with good angels, had gained some elements of light; and these
passed into Adam’s nature. Eve, however, is sensuality. After man’s
engendering, the strife begins between the good and evil spirits to
control his lot. In ethics, of course, Manicheism was dualistic and
ascetic, like Neo-Platonism, and also like the Christianity of the Eastern
and Western Empire. Manicheism, unlike Mithraism, was not to succumb, but
merely to retreat before Christianity. Again and again from the East,
through the lower confines of the present Russia, through Hungary, it made
advance. The Bogomiles were its children; likewise the Cathari in the
north of Italy, and the Albigenses of Provence.[45]
Platonism, Stoicism, Neo-Platonism, Mithraism, and Manicheism, these
names, taken for simplicity’s sake, serve to indicate the mind and temper
of the educated world in which Christianity was spreading. Obviously the
Christian Fathers’ ways of thinking were given by all that made up their
environment, their education, their second natures. They were men of
their period, and as Christians their intellectual standards did not rise
nor their understanding of fact alter, although their approvals and
disapprovals might be changed. Their natures might be stimulated and
uplifted by the Faith and its polemic ardours, and yet their manner of
approaching and apprehending facts, _its_ facts, for example, might
continue substantially those of their pagan contemporaries or
predecessors.
In the fourth century the leaders of the Church both in the East and West
were greater men than contemporary pagan priests or philosophers or
rhetoricians. For the strongest minds had enlisted on the Christian side,
and a great cause inspired their highest energies with an efficient
purpose. There is no comparison between Athanasius, Basil, Gregory
Nazianzen, Gregory of Nyssa and Chrysostom in the East; Ambrose, Jerome,
and Augustine in the West; and pagans, like Libanius, the favourite of the
Emperor Julian, or even Julian himself, or Symmachus, the opponent of St.
Ambrose in the cause of the pagan Altar of Victory. That was a lost cause,
and the cause of paganism was becoming more and more broken, dissipated,
uninspiring. Nevertheless, in spite of the superiority of the Christian
doctors, in spite also of the mighty cause which marshalled their
endeavours so efficiently, they present, both in their higher intelligence
and their lower irrationalities, abundant likeness to the pagans.
It has appeared that metaphysical interests absorbed the attention of
Plotinus, who has nevertheless his supreme irrationality atop of all.
Porphyry also possessed a strong reasoning nature, but was drawn
irresistibly to all the things, gods, demons, divination and theurgy, of
which one half of him disapproved. Plotinus, quite in accordance with his
philosophic principles, has an easy contempt for physical life. With
Porphyry this has become ardent asceticism. It was also remarked that
Plotinus’s system was a synthesis of much antecedent thought; and that its
receptivity was rendered extremely elastic by the Neo-Platonic principle
that man’s ultimate approach to God lay through ecstasy and not through
reason. Herein, rather latent and not yet sorely taxed, was a broad
justification of common beliefs and practices. To all these Iamblicus
gladly opened the door. Rather than a philosopher, he was a priest, a
thaumaturgist and magician. Finally, it is obvious that neither Iamblicus
nor Porphyry nor Plotinus was primarily or even seriously interested in
any clear objective knowledge of material facts. Plotinus merely noticed
them casually in order to illustrate his principles, while Iamblicus
looked to them for miracles.
Christianity as well as Neo-Platonism was an expression of the principle
that life’s primordial reality is spirit. And likewise with Christians, as
with Neo-Platonists, phases of irrationality may be observed in ascending
and descending order. At the summit the sublimest Christian
supra-rationality, the love of God, uplifts itself. From that height the
irrational conviction grades down to credulity preoccupied with the
demoniacal and miraculous. Fruitful comparisons may be drawn between
Neo-Platonists and Christian doctors.[46]
Origen (died 253), like Plotinus, of Coptic descent, and the most
brilliant genius of the Eastern Church, was by some fifteen years the
senior of the Neo-Platonist. It is not certain that either of them
directly influenced the other. In intellectual power the two were peers.
Both were absorbed in the higher phases of their thought, but neither
excluded the more popular beliefs from the system which he was occupied in
constructing. Plotinus had no mind to shut the door against the beliefs of
polytheism; and Origen accepted on his part the demons and angels of
current Christian credence.[47] In fact, he occupied himself with them
more than Plotinus did with the gods of the Hellenic pantheon. Of course
Origen, like every other Christian doctor, had his fundamental and saving
irrationality in his acceptance of the Christian revelation and the risen
Christ. This had already taken its most drastic form in the _credo quia
absurdum_ of Tertullian the Latin Father, who was twenty-five years his
senior. Herein one observes the acceptance of the miraculous on principle.
That the great facts of the Christian creed were beyond the proof or
disproof of reason was a principle definitely accepted by all the Fathers.
Further, since all Catholic Christians accepted the Scriptures as revealed
truth, they were obliged to accept many things which their reason,
unaided, might struggle with in vain. Here was a large opportunity, as to
which Christians would act according to their tempers, in emphasizing and
amplifying the authoritative or miraculous, _i.e._ irrational, element.
And besides, outside even of these Scriptural matters and their
interpretations, there would be the general question of the educated
Christian’s interest in the miraculous. Great mental power and devotion to
the construction of dogma by no means precluded a lively interest in this,
as may be seen in that very miraculous life of St. Anthony, written
probably by Athanasius himself. This biography is more preoccupied with
the demoniacal and miraculous than Porphyry’s _Life of Plotinus_; indeed
in this respect it is not outdone by Eunapius’s _Life of Iamblicus_.
Turning to the Latin West, one may compare with them that charming
prototypal Vita Sancti, the _Life of St. Martin_ by Sulpicius Severus.[48]
A glance at these writings shows a similarity of interest with Christian
and Neo-Platonist, and in both is found the same unquestioning acceptance
of the miraculous.
Thus one observes how the supernatural manifestation, the miraculous
event, was admitted and justified on principle in both the Neo-Platonic
and the Christian system. In both, moreover, metaphysical or symbolizing
tendencies had withdrawn attention from a close scrutiny of any fact,
observed, imagined, or reported. With both, the primary value of
historical or physical fact lay in its illumination of general convictions
or accepted principles. And with both, the supernatural fact was the fact
_par excellence_, in that it was the direct manifestation of the divine or
spiritual power.
Iamblicus had announced that man must not be incredulous as to superhuman
beings and their supernatural doings. On the Christian side, there was no
bit of popular credence in miracle or magic mystery, or any notion as to
devils, angels, and departed saints, for which justification could not be
found in the writings of the great Doctors of the Church. These learned
and intellectual men evince different degrees of interest in such matters;
but none stands altogether aloof, or denies _in toto_. No evidence is
needed here. A broad illustration, however, lies in the fact that before
the fourth century the chief Christian rites had become sacramental
mysteries, necessarily miraculous in their nature and their efficacy. This
was true of Baptism; it was more stupendously true of the Eucharist.
Mystically, but none the less really, and above all inevitably, the bread
and wine have miraculously become the body and the blood. The process, one
may say, began with Origen; with Cyril of Jerusalem it is completed;
Gregory of Nyssa regards it as a continuation of the verity of the
Incarnation, and Chrysostom is with him.[49] One pauses to remark that the
relationship between the pagan and Christian mysteries was not one of
causal antecedence so much as one of analogous growth. A pollen of terms
and concepts blew hither and thither, and effected a cross-fertilization
of vigorously growing plants. The life-sap of the Christian mysteries, as
with those of Mithra, was the passion for a symbolism of the unknown and
the inexpressible.
But one must not stop here. The whole Christian Church, as well as
Porphyry and Iamblicus, accepted angels and devils, and recognized their
intervention or interference in human affairs. Then displacing the local
pagan divinities come the saints, and Mary above all. They are honoured,
they are worshipped. Only an Augustine has some gentle warning to utter
against carrying these matters to excess.
In connection with all this, one may notice an illuminating point, or
rather motive. In the third and fourth centuries the common yearning of
the Graeco-Roman world was for an approach to God; it was looking for the
anagogic path, the way up from man and multiplicity to unity and God. An
absorbing interest was taken in the means. Neo-Platonism, the creature of
this time, whatever else it was, was mediatorial, a system of mediation
between man and the Absolute First Principle. Passing halfway over from
paganism to Christianity, the Celestial Hierarchy of Pseudo-Dionysius is
also essentially a system of mediation, which has many affinities (as well
it might!) with the system of Plotinus.[50] Within Catholic Christianity
the great work of Athanasius was to establish Christ’s sole and
all-sufficient mediation. Catholicism was permanently set upon the
mediatorship of Christ, God and man, the one God-man reconciling the
nature which He had veritably, and not seemingly, assumed, to the divine
substance which He had never ceased to be. Athanasius’s struggle for this
principle was bitter and hard-pressed, because within Christianity as well
as without, men were demanding easier and more tangible stages and means
of mediation.
Of such, Catholic Christianity was to recognize a vast multitude, perhaps
not dogmatically as a necessary part of itself; but practically and
universally. Angels, saints, the Virgin over all, are mediators between
man and God. This began to be true at an early period, and was established
before the fourth century.[51] Moreover, every bit of rite and mystery and
miracle, as in paganism, so in Catholicism, was essentially a means of
mediation, a way of bringing the divine principle to bear on man and his
affairs, and so of bringing man within the sphere of the divine
efficiency.
Let us make some further Christian comparisons with our Neo-Platonic
friends Plotinus, Porphyry, and Iamblicus. As we have adduced Origen, it
would also be easy to find other parallels from the Eastern Church. But as
the purpose is to mark the origin of the intellectual tendencies of the
Western Middle Ages, we may at once draw examples from the Latin Fathers.
For their views set the forms of mediaeval intellectual interests, and for
centuries directed and even limited the mediaeval capacity for
apprehending whatever it was given to the Middle Ages to set themselves to
know. To pass thus from the East to the West is permissible, since the
same pagan cults and modes of thought passed from one boundary of the
Empire to the other. Plotinus himself lived and taught in Rome for the
last twenty-five years of his life, and there wrote his _Enneads_ in
Greek. So on the Christian side, the Catholic Church throughout the East
and West presents a solidarity of development, both as to dogma and
organization, and also as to popular acceptances.
Let us train our attention upon some points of likeness between Plotinus
and St. Augustine. The latter’s teachings contain much Platonism; and with
this greatest of Latin Fathers, who did not read much Greek, Platonism was
inextricably mingled with Neo-Platonism. It is possible to search the
works of Augustine and discover this, that, or the other statement
reflecting Plato or Plotinus.[52] Yet their most interesting effect on
Augustine will not be found in Platonic theorems consciously followed or
abjured by the latter. Platonism was “in the air,” at least was in the air
breathed by an Augustine. Our specific bishop of Hippo knew little of
Plato’s writings. But Plato had lived: his thoughts had influenced many
generations, and in their diffusion had been modified, and had lost many a
specific feature. Thereafter Plotinus had constructed Neo-Platonism; that
too had permeated the minds of many, itself loosened in the process. These
views, these phases of thought and mood, were held or felt by many men,
who may not have known their source. And Augustine was not only part of
all this, but in mind and temper was Platonically inclined. Thus the most
important elements of Platonism and Neo-Platonism in Augustine were his
cognate spiritual mood and his attitude toward the world of physical fact.
Note the personal affinity between Augustine and Plotinus. Both are
absorbed in the higher pointings of their thought; neither is much
occupied with its left-handed relationships, which, however, are by no
means to be disowned. The minds and souls of both are set upon God the
Spirit; the minds and eyes of both are closed to the knowledge of the
natural world. Thus neither Plotinus nor Augustine was much affected by
the popular beliefs of Christianity or paganism. The former cared little
for demon-lore or divination, and was not seriously touched by polytheism.
No more was the latter affected by the worship of saints and relics, or by
other elements of Christian credulity, which when brought to his attention
pass from his mind as quickly as his duties of Christian bishop will
permit.
But it was _half_ otherwise with Porphyry, and altogether otherwise with
Iamblicus. The first of these was drawn, repelled, and tortured by the
common superstitions, especially the magic and theurgy which made men
gape; but Iamblicus gladly sported in these mottled currents. On the
Christian side, Jerome might be compared with them, or a later man, the
last of the Latin Fathers, Gregory the Great. Clear as was the temporal
wisdom of this great pope, and heavy as were his duties during the
troubled times of his pontificate (590-604), still his mind was busy with
the miraculous and diabolic. His mind and temperament have absorbed at
least the fruitage of prior superstitions, whether Christian or pagan need
not be decided. He certainly was not influenced by Iamblicus. Nor need one
look upon these phases of his nature as specifically the result of the
absorption of pagan elements. He and his forebears had but gone the path
of credulity and mortal blindness, thronged by both pagans and Christians.
And so in Gregory the tendencies making for intellectual obliquity do
their perfect work. His religious dualism is strident; his resultant
ascetism is extreme; and finally the symbolical, the allegorical, habit
has shut his mind to the perception of the literal (shall we say, actual)
meaning, when engaged with Scripture, as his great Commentary on Job bears
witness. The same tendencies, but usually in milder type, had shown
themselves with Augustine, who, in these respects, stands to Gregory as
Plotinus to Iamblicus. Augustine can push allegory to absurdity; he can
be ascetic; he is dualistic. But all these things have not barbarized his
mind, as they have Gregory’s.[53] Similarly the elements, which in
Plotinus’s personality were held in innocuous abeyance, dominated the
entire personality of Iamblicus, and made him a high priest of folly.
Thus we have observed the phases of thought which set the intellectual
conditions of the later pagan times, and affected the mental processes of
the Latin Fathers. The matter may be summarized briefly in conclusion.
Platonism had created an intellectual and intelligible world, wherein a
dissolving dialectic turned the cognition of material phenomena into a
reflection of the mind’s ideals. This was more palpable in Neo-Platonism
than it had been in Plato’s system. Stoicism on the other hand represented
a rule of life, the sanction of which was inner peace. Its working
principle was the rightly directed action of the self-controlling will.
Fundamentally ethical, it set itself to frame a corresponding conception
of the universe. Platonism and Neo-Platonism found in material facts
illustrations or symbols of ideal truths and principles of human life.
Stoicism was interested in them as affording a foundation for ethics. None
of these systems was seriously interested in facts apart from their
symbolical exemplification of truth, or their bearing on the conduct of
life; and the same principles that affected the observation of nature were
applied to the interpretation of myth, tradition, and history.
In the opening centuries of the Christian Era the world was becoming less
self-reliant. It was tending to look to authority for its peace of mind.
In religion men not only sought, as formerly, for superhuman aid, but were
reaching outward for what their own rational self-control no longer gave.
They needed not merely to be helped by the gods, but to be sustained and
saved. Consequently, prodigious interest was taken in the means of
bringing man to the divine, and obtaining the saving support which the
gods alone could give. The philosophic thought of the time became palpably
mediatorial. Neo-Platonism was a system of mediation between man and the
Absolute First Principle; and soon its lower phases became occupied with
such palpable means as divination and oracles, magic and theurgy.
The human reason has always proved unable to effect this mediation between
man and God. The higher Neo-Platonism presented as the furthest goal a
supra-rational and ecstatic vision. This was its union with the divine.
The lower Neo-Platonism turned this lofty supra-rationality into a
principle of credulity more and more agape for fascinating or helpful
miracles. Thus a constant looking for divine or demonic action became
characteristic of the pagan intelligence.
The Gospel of Christ, in spreading throughout the pagan world, was certain
to gather to itself the incidents of its apprehension by pagans, and take
various forms, one of which was to become the dominant or Catholic.
Conversely, Christians (and we have in mind the educated people) would
retain their methods of thinking in spite of change in the contents of
their thought. This would be true even of the great and learned Christian
leaders, the Fathers of the Church. At the same time the Faith reinspired
and redirected their energies. Yet (be it repeated for the sake of
emphasis) their mental processes, their ways of apprehending and
appreciating facts, would continue those of that paganism which in them
had changed to Christianity.
Every phase of intellectual tendency just summarized as characteristic of
the pagan world, entered the modes in which the Fathers of the Latin
Church apprehended and built out their new religion. First of all, the
attitude toward knowledge. No pagan philosophy, not Platonism or any
system that came after it, had afforded an incentive for concentration of
desire equal to that presented in the person and the precepts of Jesus.
The desire of the Kingdom of Heaven was a master-motive such as no
previous idealism had offered. It would bring into conformity with itself
not only all the practical considerations of life, but verily the whole
human desire to know. First it mastered the mind of Tertullian; and in
spite of variance and deviation it endured through the Middle Ages as the
controlling principle of intellectual effort. Its decree was this: the
knowledge which men need and should desire is that which will help them
to save and perfect their souls for the Kingdom of God. Some would
interpret this broadly, others narrowly; some would actually be
constrained by it, and others merely do it a polite obeisance. But
acknowledged it was by well-nigh all men, according to their individual
tempers and the varying times in which they lived.
Platonism was an idealistic cosmos; Stoicism a cosmos of subjective ethics
and teleological conceptions of the physical world. The furthest outcome
of both might be represented by Augustine’s cosmos of the soul and God. As
for reasoning processes, inwardly inspired and then applied to the world
of nature and history, Christianity combined the idealizing,
fact-compelling ways of Platonic dialectic with the Stoical interest in
moral edification. And, more utterly than either Platonist or Stoic, the
Christian Father lacked interest in knowledge of the concrete fact for its
own sake. His mental glance was even more oblique than theirs, fixed as it
was upon the moral or spiritual--the anagogic--inference. Of course he
carried symbolism and allegory further than Stoic and Platonist had done,
one reason being that he was impelled by the specific motive of
harmonizing the Old Testament with the Gospel, and thereby proving the
divine mission of Jesus.
Idealism might tend toward dualistic ethics, and issue in asceticism, as
was the tendency in Stoicism and the open result with Plotinus and his
disciples. Such, with mightier power and firmer motive, was the outcome of
Christian ethics, in monasticism. Christianity was not a dualistic
philosophy; but neither was Stoicism nor Neo-Platonism. Yet, like them, it
was burningly dualistic in its warfare against the world, the flesh, and
the devil.
We turn to other but connected matters: salvation, mediatorship, theory
and practice. The need of salvation made men Christians; the God-man was
the one and sufficient mediator between man and God. Such was the high
dogma, established with toil and pain. And the practice graded downward to
mediatorial persons, acts, and things, marvellous, manifold, and utterly
analogous to their pagan kin. The mediatorial persons were the Virgin and
the saints; the sacraments were the magic mediatorial acts; the relic was
the magic mediatorial thing. And, as with Neo-Platonism, there was in
Christianity a principle of supra-rational belief in all these matters. At
the top the revelation of Christ, and the high love of God which He
inspired. This was not set on reason, but above it. And, as with
Neo-Platonism, the supra-rational principle of Christianity was led down
through conduits of credulity, resembling those we have become familiar
with in our descent from Plotinus to Iamblicus.