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

by Arthur Herman

The Crusades were a notorious waste of lives and reputations. However, economically and culturally they were an undeniable success.

taking regular baths, a custom borrowed from the East.4

the idea that man has an obligation to search out the truth about the natural realm as well as the divine one.

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.

Arabs supplied Europe with a new scientific vocabulary, with words like algebra, zero, cipher, almanac, and alchemy; and a new system of recording numbers that we still call Arabic numerals. Arab tables of astronomic observation and mathematical calculation, as well as manuals on medicine, introduced the Western mind to the great discoveries of the Greeks—as did the works of Arab commentators on Aristotle.

For almost a century the Christian and Islamic worldviews overlapped, especially their view of nature. The seam along that overlap was Aristotle, whom Arab scholars dubbed the Master of Those Who Know and whom Christian scholars would come to know as the Philosopher, as if there were no others of any lasting value.

The “truths” of divine revelation might satisfy the curiosity of some, they alleged. The genuine intellectual, however, won’t be satisfied until he gets to the bottom of those truths revealed by his own reason.

summed up perfectly by Voltaire more than five centuries later: “I don’t believe in God, but I hope my valet does so he won’t steal my spoons.”

To fall for the notion of a “double truth” and argue there was one set of truths for reason and another for faith and never the two shall meet made nonsense of the idea of truth itself.

To deny the power of our own reason is in effect throwing away one of God’s greatest gifts.

For Aquinas as for Aristotle, human freedom boils down to the power to make choices. In the end, the morality of our actions must always be judged by the active will and the intentions behind them. It also implies the freedom to choose good over evil and the mental capacity to know the one from the other (which is why dogs and infants can’t commit mortal sins).

What can be explained on fewer principles is explained needlessly by more. —William of Ockham, Sum of All Logic

I’ve just employed Ockham’s razor, the most useful philosophical discovery of the fourteenth century.

Why use two (or more) when one (or fewer) will do, is the principle that William of Ockham introduced into the medieval thought process. It grew out of his refinement of Aristotle’s logic and set off a revolution not only in philosophy, but in politics and religion. Before he died, Ockham’s razor would undercut the foundations of the medieval Church.

Bacon grasped the empirical aspect of Aristotle’s thought: that knowledge ultimately comes to the knower via the senses, which supply the raw data that reason sorts and disentangles in order to arrive at the truth.

“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 when it discovers it by the path of experience.” It’s a sentence that might have been written by John Locke or even David Hume.6

For Bacon, it was the inner light of reason that stirs our desire to unlock the mysteries of nature and art, including the divine light around us:

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.

Religion is a matter of belief and will, not of reason or logical truth.

By claiming broad authority, as Boniface had done, popes had in effect turned their office into an illegitimate enterprise. What could the congregation of the faithful (congregatio fidelium) do about it? To Ockham, the answer was clear. Because it exists in the temporal realm, the rules of that realm as described by Aristotle must apply. If those appointed to head the Church fail to do their job, then the members of the congregatio have the power to choose a new one—just as they have the power to invest every ruler with his authority over them.

“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.22

Ockham himself had said that protecting the public interest was the primary function of any government, not just the Catholic Church.

If the pope’s powers were granted only as a matter of convenience, not as a permanent handover of sovereignty, then the same principle applied by analogy to lay rulers.

In 1518, Ockham’s admirer Jacques Almain would write, “All sovereignty, lay as well as ecclesiastical, is instituted for the benefit not of the ruler but of the people.” The power to decide what that benefit is ultimately belongs to the people themselves. For a “free people is not subjected to any...

Thus over time, the idea slowly took root that “governments are instituted among men deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” However, its advocates argued, “whenever any form of government becomes destructive of those ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it” through their representatives “and institute new government,” organizing it as they see fit to provide for their safety and happiness.

If these words have a familiar sound, it is because they are not from Ockham or Gerson, but from Thomas Jefferson. They come from the most influential summary of medieval conciliarist doctrine in its secular form: the American Declaration of Independence.

Aristotle was, in the Arab phrase made famous by the poet Dante, “the Master of Those Who Know.”

He was also the supreme teacher of all those who wanted to know.

The standard way to learn any subject was first to read Aristotle’s own works on it line by line from cover to cover, then pore over the commentaries on the work by Boethius, Duns Scotus, Peter Lombard, and Thomas Aquinas (wh...

The fact is that a man who wants to act virtuously in every way necessarily comes to grief among so many who are not virtuous. —Niccolò Machiavelli, 1513

Instead of the old trivium and quadrivium, the Renaissance humanist focused on only four subjects. The first was the study of history, in order to understand free nations in the past, especially ancient Greece and Rome. The second was the study of rhetoric in order to make men fit to lead a free society—not surprisingly, since the typical humanist saw Cicero as well as Aristotle as his ancient mentor. Then there was Greek and Roman literature to raise men’s standard of eloquence, and finally moral philosophy, which meant above all Aristotle’s Ethics.18 Studia humanitatis were the four parts of the essential tools of freedom, training the minds of men to see the pursuit of excellence as an expression of their essential nature, whether in the past or the future.

We have been trained to think of Machiavelli as the apologist for power politics. In fact, his passion for the ideal of liberty was so strong, it cost him his career and almost cost him his life. It had made him a follower of Savonarola; paradoxically, it also made him the author of his most notorious work, The Prince. Some would insist that the book was inspired by the devil.25 But Machiavelli was only a close student of Aristotle’s version of civic liberty, which led him in the wake of Savonarola’s fall to ask some uncomfortable questions.

What if God really didn’t care whether Florence survived as a republic or not? What if God didn’t really care whether men lived as free men or slaves? And what if human nature suits us as much for servitude as it does for liberty?

Young Niccolò had been bred to read the classics and believe in the ideal of civic humanism, even though that ideal was contradicted everywhere he looked.

when one is fighting for one’s homeland, “flight is disgraceful and death preferable to safety.”

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.

We think of his books, particularly The Prince, as works of political theory. They are above all works of history.

History was always for Machiavelli a rich storehouse of the past experience of others, far richer than anything anyone could accumulate in a single lifetime.

And for the student of Aristotle, the touchstone of understanding reality...

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.

Machiavelli’s fusion of Polybius and Aristotle yielded a future of gloom. The Romans had read Polybius to discover how a great empire would be doomed if it failed to keep Aristotle’s balance of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy—the One, the Few, and the Many. Machiavelli’s reading was far more pessimistic. Not just Rome, but every free society is doomed from the start. Real republics exist in real time, not on some eternal plane like Plato’s literary version.

“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.

When a republic organized around Aristotle’s principle of balance expands its power and place in the world, as it must, it becomes rich and powerful. But in the process, the balance is lost: a free society’s “basic principles will be subvert...

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...

Under these circumstances, the very things that are supposed to preserve ...

Each group in the mix of One, Few, and Many is determined to gain power at th...

Politics becomes a cycle of vendetta...