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religion (religio) comes from the verb religare, meaning “to tie or bind.”
Religion is about bonds between God and man, but also between man and man.
Boethius is the first Christian thinker to realize that Plato and Aristotle were still indispensable to Western civilization. They still provided an essential and rational framework for dealing with the real world—and also dying in it.
The Consolation of Philosophy became an imperishable part of Boethius’s legacy to the emergent culture of the Middle Ages.
Above all, Boethius treated Plato and Aristotle as the essential anchors of a civilized education. It’s a point of view that linked Boethius not only to the Middle Ages, which read his works with passionate devotion, but indirectly to every college and university today that still teaches what his world, and ours, call the liberal arts.
If we are going to deal with a complex and dangerous world, he believed, we had better be prepared. That means above all reading Aristotle.
They are either deductive, meaning that given one or more true premises, the conclusion we draw is necessary; or they are inductive, meaning that given one or more facts—such as the things we know through observation—the conclusion we draw is reasonable.
Crucial articulation of the main distinction.
“liberal arts” (so called because it was the education fit for liberi, or free men, as opposed to slaves)
the techniques by which theology could become as rational and logically disciplined a subject as philosophy—the techniques later called scholasticism.27
For the fact remains that without Arab help, western Europe would never have recovered its knowledge of Greek science and mathematics—still the foundations of modern science today—or understood how to interpret it.
Lex naturalis, natural law, is a cornerstone of Aquinas’s system and his most consequential contribution to Western thought. Natural law, he says, is apparent in the regular workings of nature, including the movements of the planets and in the growth and formation of living things; in the self-evident truths of mathematics and geometry; and in the logical workings of the human mind. However, it takes reason to see them and recognize them as laws.
The Augustinian and the Neoplatonist mind passively contemplates the world and waits for a connection to a higher truth to be revealed. Aquinas saw the mind as Aristotle did, as actively analyzing that world in order to forge those connections for itself.
Aquinas had achieved what no one had before or since: a fusion of Platonized Christianity with Aristotle’s science of man. It is one of the great achievements of Western civilization. But it didn’t last. Even before Aquinas’s death, the old opposition would reassert itself.
Before he died, Ockham’s razor would undercut the foundations of the medieval Church.
No, Ockham concluded, there is no common nature shared by individual dogs or men that we call by a common name. No universal exists outside the mind; everything that is real exists only as individuals. When I say, “All men are mortal,” this is shorthand for saying, “Socrates is mortal,” “Plato is mortal,” and so on.
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.
Ockham’s famous “razor” principle extended the same principle to every branch of knowledge. If any idea or proposition is not required either as a matter of observation and demonstration or as a matter of religious faith, then scratch it out. Don’t clutter our brains with unneeded baggage; and don’t clutter our discussion about the world with them, either.
As for the rest of us, let’s get on with life: freed of the burden of trying to reconcile faith with reason, we can plunge into the world with a new optimism and gusto—but also with the sense that we have been left pretty much to ourselves.
This was a radical new position for the mind of the Middle Ages. The intimate connection between God and nature, and God and reason, had finally, decisively been severed.14 The prospect seemed both exhilarating and nerve-racking. Ockham, however, was unworried. We’ll let the Church worry about matters above, he told his followers. Let’s concentrate on understanding the world down here. Accordingly, there was a sudden new burst of interest in natural philosophy and science in Europe’s universities in the 1300s.
“To understand this it must first be known that the power of making human laws and rights was first and principally in the people,” Ockham wrote in 1328, “and hence the people transferred the power of making the law to the emperor,” or whomever else they choose to exercise authority over them.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.
By 1400, the authority of Aristotle closed virtually every argument. Once a student learned his view on a subject, whether it was a fine point in logic or the number of planets or the functions of body organs, there was no point in going any further. Someone wanting to know how many udders a cow had would be pointed to the relevant passage in Aristotle instead of being sent out to a field to count for himself.
Aristotle had become so indispensable to the life of the European mind that it seemed impossible he could ever be yanked out. However, what the medieval mind gained in certainty, it gave up in terms of curiosity and innovation. The study of nature was reduced to a science of final causes, and the last word on that subject, as on all subjects, was Aristotle, now dead for one thousand years. Imagination and creativity fled. The Aristotelian empirical spirit of Ockham and Roger Bacon was replaced by the dead letter of Aristotle himself. By the end of the Middle Ages, it had hardened into an arid
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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.34
“Platonism,” writes historian Sem Dresden, “became the Renaissance philosophy.”6 This was in part because it came with the shock of the familiar. And no one contributed more to pointing out what was familiar but also what was new in Plato than Cosimo’s studious protégé Marsilio Ficino.
Platonic love is supposed to be about far more than two friends not sleeping together. As the great Ficino scholar Paul Oskar Kristeller explained, “There can never be two friends only; there must always be three: two human beings and God.”13
through the power of love we become fully conscious of our powers as spiritual beings.
What Ficino had proved (or at least seemed to prove) was that there was no real clash between Christian and pagan systems of theology. In the end, they arose from the same source: the soul’s love of beauty and perfection and its relentless aspiration for knowledge of God and therefore of ourselves.
Historians have labeled several scholars in the Renaissance as being “the last man to know everything,” including Erasmus and Francis Bacon. Giovanni Pico is the true owner of the title. His staggering range of interests and his inexhaustible scholarly energy were aimed at a single mission. This was to prove that all religions and philosophies, ancient and modern, pagan and Christian, actually formed a single body of knowledge.
His first breach with the Church did not come with his famous Ninety-five Theses, which he posted on the Wittenberg church door on October 31, 1517. It came almost two months earlier, on September 4, when he published another set of theses, Disputation Against Scholastic Theology, which are less well-known but nearly as explosive. They asserted that a Christianity founded on the spiritual power of God’s grace—in effect Christianity in its Platonized form as received from Saint Augustine—and the view of law and nature derived from Aristotle could never be reconciled.
“The whole Aristotelian ethic,” Luther wrote, “is grace’s worst enemy.”
Now, thanks to Erasmus’s In Praise of Folly, a contempt for universities and their Aristotle-centered curriculum acquired intellectual chic. It has left its trace to this day, as when we talk about something being “trivial” (derived from trivium) or call someone a “dunce” (after the original “dunce,” John Duns Scotus).
the Allegory of the Cave, describing a four-step ascent for truth that matches almost exactly the ascent of love in the Symposium.
the old idea that the rise of modern science involved a struggle between reason and religion is not merely wrong but misleading. It was really about the perpetual struggle between Plato and Aristotle.
This was perhaps the final irony. Galileo the obedient Roman Catholic became an overnight Protestant hero. He would be remembered as a champion not only of science, but of the principle of free inquiry versus papist tyranny,
Like divine law, this natural law reflects God’s will. But instead of learning His will directly through the Bible and revelation, we learn this natural aspect of His will through our reason. Wherever men use their reason, Aquinas concluded, we will see them respect the laws of nature; and wherever we see the practice of lex naturalis in human affairs, then we know we are dealing with rational beings like ourselves.27
The answer the followers of Aquinas developed was that my natural rights are my claims against the community to protect and defend my person and those things essential to my well-being.
In a pristine “state of nature,” they decided, man was totally free but totally unsafe. He was prey not only to the elements and wild animals, but to his fellow man, for whom freedom was license to act not as zoon politikon, but as homo lupus. In Thomas Hobbes’s famous formulation, life ends up being “nasty, brutish, and short.” To correct this, right reason dictates a solution. To avoid killing one another off, men make an agreement. They trade in their natural rights in exchange for civil rights, which are now recognized and protected by the community and those who wield authority in its
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Steeped in the Latin of Roman law, Europe’s jurists branded this agreement the pactum societatis. In their minds, it marked the birth of legitimate government. A couple of centuries later, Jean-Jacques Rousseau gave it a more famous name: the social contract. It’s not based on a signed piece of paper or original physical act. Like the axis of Galileo’s rotating earth, the social contract is imaginary, but it is still there, exerting its influence and power. Like any contract, it imposes obligations both on me and on my rulers. I am bound to obey the laws of the society in which I choose to
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Locke’s conclusion was startling, not to say world shattering. A monarch like Louis XIV, or any of his would-be imitators, in effect is at war with his subjects.§ When that happens, Locke asserted, then lawful government is at an end. We are all thrown back into the original state of nature. “Where the government is dissolved,” Locke explained, “the people are at liberty to provide for themselves, by erecting a new legislative” body to act in their name.38 The social contract starts over from scratch. Government by popular consent is not just a good idea, as it was for Aristotle and Ockham.
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Politics and moral thinking—and the Enlightenment was the century of great moral debates—were also dominated by the problem of how to reconcile the social virtues described in Aristotle’s Ethics with the political processes set forth in his Politics. The result was Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, not to mention the American Constitution.
As Adam Smith pointed out in his Wealth of Nations, “the experience of all agents and nations … [is] that the work done by freemen comes cheaper in the end than that performed by slaves.” The reason is “the slave consults his own ease by making the land produce as little as possible,” while the free worker has a self-interested stake in making it more productive, or any other trade he is engaged in, even at the most menial level—and production was at the heart and soul of the new capitalist order.
what had made the Florence of 1402 free wasn’t Divine Providence or even its laws, but how it made its money through trade and industry—which in turn made men change the laws to accommodate their new sense of freedom.
For Plato, Sparta’s constitution came the closest in reality to his own political ideal, that of a “total community,” as he puts it in the Laws, in which “everybody feels pleasure and pain at the same things, so that they all praise and blame with complete unanimity.” It is also the one most able to hold corruption in check, by banishing its primary source: individuality. In war and in peace, Plato argued, no citizen should “get in the habit of acting alone and independently” and instead must obey his leaders “even in tiny details, just as they did in Sparta.”16
Strength through joy; work makes you free. It is Rousseau who first points the way toward those chilling formulations. Today we are only too aware of where this story ends. But it is important to realize that those who read him in the three decades before the French Revolution did not. They saw only a refreshing new political vision, a way to think about man’s progress apart from the materialistic values of commercial society—in short, a vision of humanity freed from the ever-expanding “getting and spending” that the neo-Aristotelians of the Enlightenment had seemed to forecast for Europe’s
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With the fusion of Kant and Rousseau, the European mind was on the brink of a new way of visualizing the direction and purpose of civil society: toward the abolition of the self-interested individual, instead of his ultimate triumph.
it became apparent something was missing. It took some time, but they eventually found it, perhaps not surprisingly, in the pages of Plato. The source was Plato’s dialogue Ion, and Percy Bysshe Shelley was the first to stumble on it one afternoon in Pisa, in the early winter of 1821.
Whether a society knows it or not, its artists are the advance guard of the human spirit (avant-garde was coming into vogue in the 1820s as an artistic rather than military term).
“There is a specter haunting Europe,” the Communist Manifesto began, “the specter of Communism.” In truth it was the specter of Book VIII of Plato’s Republic. Those pages first spawned the idea of history as class struggle,
Instead of making human beings happier, commercial society only makes them feel alone and resentful—or to use a term Hegelians would make famous, alienated.
That someone, Hegel declared, is the State. Its development as an autonomous actor in history is in fact the next and final stage of freedom beyond commercial society. It smooths out all the problems of capitalism, with its “atomistic principle
