The Cave and the Light: Plato Versus Aristotle, and the Struggle for the Soul of Western Civilization

by Arthur Herman

He wanted to know everything about everything, including the history of the Bible.

hidden secrets of religion.

“There are two modes of acquiring knowledge,” he wrote, “namely by reasoning and experience. Reason draws a conclusion … but does not make it certain [but] the mind may rest on the intuition of truth

Universals are nothing more than signs to Ockham—useful shorthand. They mean nothing in themselves, but as signs they empower us to manipulate concepts and form general hypotheses in our mind, without bothering to refer to every individual who makes up the class, whether it’s men or dogs or meteors or souls. In an important sense, the world we understand through reason is a fiction (at one point in his early writings, Ockham even uses the word). It is a mental construct that we have built up from the raw data supplied by our perception of those individual men and dogs and meteors that form the stuff of reality. Ockham didn’t use the term fiction to suggest that what we say about the world isn’t true; just the opposite. Science deals with real life; and logic is the language of science. But we shouldn’t mistake the logical gymnastics going on inside our heads for the reality going on outside. Science is about real things; logic, surprisingly perhaps, is not.10 Ockham saw this discovery as a return to the genuine Aristotle, shorn of the Neoplatonic excrescences of previous scholars like Aquinas and Duns Scotus. Getting rid of the notion that classes of objects and persons have some meaningful existence outside the individuals who make it up will be liberating, Ockham said. It makes life, and truth, simpler.11

Ockham took it for granted that absolutely nothing could be proved about God in the light of reason, not even His existence.13 At best, we get probable hints of His existence when we examine nature. Otherwise, nature is a closed book as far as theology and dogma are concerned.

Accordingly, there was a sudden new burst of interest in natural philosophy and science in Europe’s universities in the 1300s.

Clement V. His most urgent task was to clean up the mess left by an ugly two-decade conflict between his predecessor and the king of France over taxation of church revenues,

“and the temporal power under the spiritual power.” He even stated that as spiritual intermediary, the lowliest parish priest was a higher power than the greatest king or emperor, and he quoted the Pseudo-Dionysius to that effect.16

for the pope’s protection but in reality so he could keep Christendom’s supreme pontiff under his thumb.

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Cesena asserted that it was perfectly orthodox to teach that Jesus and the apostles owned nothing as their own. So why should his successors not do the same? The pope, for reasons obvious to any visitor to Rome or the sumptuous papal palace at Avignon, thought this a dangerous heresy and innovation.

doctrine of apostolic poverty was sound.

by daring to impose papal authority over a matter outside his jurisdiction, namely a matter of provable fact, it was Pope John XXII who was the real heretic, not

21 All mortals who are born free have the power voluntarily to put a ruler over themselves, including the Church and the pope. But the final power remained with the people. So having put the pope in office, the

people were now free to end “his raging tyranny over the faithful” and push him out.

Newly enriched by the rebirth of trade and industry in their corner of Europe, every port and market town saw the same unprecedented explosion of private piety,

Meister Eckhart

Church was either too timid or too arrogant to change, or both.

merchants in these towns had formed self-governing communes

Florence, Venice, Bologna, Padua, Pisa, Genoa, and the rest had enjoyed virtual sovereignty over their territories, in defiance of both the pope in Rome and the Holy Roman Emperor. The coming of the Crusades had made them rich as well as independent, and made each city envious of its equally affluent neighbors.

The coming of the Crusades had made them rich as wel...

Dante and Marco Polo.

But then the trend changed. The days of affluence and confidence ebbed away. The coming of the Black Death in 1348, which killed off at least one-third of Italy’s population, was the coup de grâce. The wars became more desperate and the mercenary captain or condottiere, who led a city’s army to plunder its neighbors, more necessary. In one city after another, economic depression triggered social unrest and polarized communal politics. Self-government gave way to government by a single individual—the condottiere, who turned his success on the battlefield into absolute power, sometimes even a reign of terror, over the local citizenry. By the time of the Great Schism, Italy had descended back into gangster politics, as in the days of Caesar and Pompey.

The coming of the Black Dea...

They condemned Florence “in the name of every true Italian” for upholding the “enemy of quietude and peace,

which they call liberty.”

Dante, who wrote a treatise on the subject.

Furthermore, the citizen contributed to this free self-governing community in not one but two ways.

it was due to the city’s freedom, which inspired the spirit of criticism:

history,

rhetoric

Greek and Roman literature

moral philosophy, which meant above all Aristotle’s Ethics.18 Studia humanitatis were the four parts of the essential tools of freedom,

secretly controlling the city for almost a decade.

they spent lavishly to give Florence a new civic splendor and became great patrons of the arts.

If Aristotle had been right and it was man’s destiny to be free, if our nature as human beings makes us fit to govern our lives as we see fit, then why is it that everywhere we look human beings are unfree and submit to various forms of tyranny and slavery, including now in Florence? Why did freedom fail, not only in Florence but throughout history—even ancient Greece and Rome?

economic sanctions on the city that hurt Florence’s wealthy merchants.

will fight only if they think they can win.

Leonardo Bruni enough to inspire his treatise On the Militia,

but everyone knew that they would dominate the city more harshly than ever.

History, people like to say, is written by the winners. The truth is, some of the most profound works on the past were written by those who considered themselves history’s losers. They are men and women trying to figure out what went wrong; what was the turning point when optimistic hopes were dashed and the forces of doom and destruction inevitably closed in.

This was true of ancient historians like Thucydides; Tacitus and Sallust (widely read in Medici Florence); and to a degree Polybius.

History teaches us what human beings are like in reality rather than what we would like them to be. And when we deal with the sum total of history’s record, high-minded ideals like those of Plato’s Philosopher Rulers have to be pushed off over the side. Reality teaches a very different set of lessons about politics—and Machiavelli’s ambition was to present them to posterity.

The result was the Discourses, a much longer work than The Prince but crucial for understanding that more celebrated book. For in writing the Discourses, Machiavelli discovered a basic paradox: When it comes to liberty, nothing fails like success. The freer a society becomes, the more prosperous and more arrogant it becomes as well. Like ancient Rome or Renaissance Florence, it sows the seeds of its own servitude. Although self-government and liberty are the highest forms of political life, Machiavelli revealed that human nature also makes them the most unstable.

“All human affairs are ever in a state of flux and cannot stand still,” the Discourses explains, meaning that every society will experience either constant improvement or decline.

To Machiavelli, the very things that give a free republic like ancient Rome or Athens or pre-Medici Florence verve and energy—prowess in war, a vigorous politics, the accumulation of riches from trade and empire—ultimately turn back on themselves. Prosperity and success turn men’s passions toward self-enrichment rather than service to the State. The battle of conflicting interests between rich and poor, which Machiavelli shrewdly points to as the real source of the Roman republic’s dynamism,36 degenerates into bitter factionalism. Under these circumstances, the very things that are supposed to preserve liberty become a trap. Each group in the mix of One, Few, and Many is determined to gain power at the expense of the other. Politics becomes a cycle of vendetta and payback.37 Meanwhile, the habits of wealth and luxury undermine the important virtues necessary to sustain free institutions, including honor and service in arms—even the passion for freedom itself. Men become soft and effeminate, like the bakers and tinkers of Machiavelli’s failed militia.38 People prefer the comfortable life to the stern sacrifices of their forefathers. New legislation on Plato’s model won’t help, either: “The modification of the laws did not suffice to keep men good.” On the contrary, Machiavelli declared, “the new laws are ineffectual, because the [society’s] institutions, which remain constant, are corrupt.”39

there is no hope left.

such a man will not be greeted as a messiah.

“It is better to be feared than loved if one cannot be both.”

The good life presupposes the virtuous life. However, in order to survive, free societies sometimes have to violate the very values they profess to uphold. They have to wage war and kill innocents; they have

Instead, they will maintain the status quo, the false façade of normal politics, just as the Medici did in order to dupe the public into believing they were still free when in fact they were not.