A History of Western Philosophy: And Its Connection with Political and Social Circumstances from the Earliest Times to the Present Day

by Bertrand Russell

The Roman system was to allow local self-government to the towns, and to leave their officials to collect the taxes, of which only the total amount due from any one town was fixed by the central authorities.

Constantine’s most important innovation was the adoption of Christianity as the State religion, apparently because a large proportion of the soldiers were Christian.II The result of this was that when, during the fifth century, the Germans destroyed the Western Empire, its prestige caused them to adopt the Christian religion, thereby preserving for western Europe so much of ancient civilization as had been absorbed by the Church.

The Eastern Empire, though continually diminishing in extent (except for the transient conquests of Justinian in the sixth century), survived until 1453, when Constantinople was conquered by the Turks. But most of what had been Roman provinces in the east, including also Africa and Spain in the west, became Mohammedan. The Arabs, unlike the Germans, rejected the religion, but adopted the civilization, of those whom they had conquered. The Eastern Empire was Greek, not Latin, in its civilization; accordingly, from the seventh to the eleventh centuries, it was the Arabs who preserved Greek literature and whatever survived of Greek, as opposed to Latin, civilization.

Rome still had, what Greece had lost, the hopefulness connected with the opportunity for political activity.

The recognized schools of philosophy—the Academy, the Peripatetics, the Epicureans, and the Stoics—continued to exist until they were closed by Justinian, from Christian bigotry, in the year A.D. 529.

II. The influence of Greece and the East in Rome. There are here two very different things to consider: first, the influence of Hellenic art and literature and philosophy on the most cultivated Romans; second, the spread of non-Hellenic religions and superstitions throughout the Western world.

The only things in which the Romans were superior were military tactics and social cohesion.

After the Punic Wars, young Romans conceived an admiration for the Greeks. They learnt the Greek language, they copied Greek architecture, they employed Greek sculptors.

The Trojan origin of the Romans was invented to make a connection with the Homeric myths. Latin poets adopted Greek metres, Latin philosophers took over Greek theories. To the end, Rome was culturally parasitic on Greece.

CHAPTER XXX Plotinus PLOTINUS (A.D. 204-270), the founder of Neoplatonism, is the last of the great philosophers of antiquity. His life is almost coextensive with one of the most disastrous periods in Roman history.

Shortly before his birth, the army had become conscious of its power, and had adopted the practice of choosing emperors in return for monetary rewards, and assassinating them afterwards to give occasion for a renewed sale of the Empire. These preoccupations unfitted the soldiers for the defence of the frontier, and permitted vigorous incursions of Germans from the north and Persians from the East. War and pestilence diminished the population of the Empire by about a third, while increased taxation and diminished resources caused financial ruin in even those provinces to which no hostile forces penetrated. The cities, which had been the bearers of culture, were especially hard hit; substantial citizens, in large numbers, fled to escape the tax-collector.

It was not till after the death of Plotinus that order was re-established and the Empire temporarily saved by the vigorous mea...

Plotinus is both an end and a beginning—an end as regards the Greeks, a beginning as regards Christendom. To the ancient world, weary with centuries of disappointment, exhausted by despair, his doctrine might be acceptable, but could not be stimulating. To the cruder barbarian world, where superabundant energy needed to be restrained and regulated rather than stimulated, what could penetrate in his teaching was beneficial, since the evil to be combated was not languor but brutality. The work of transmitting what could survive of his philosophy was performed by the Christian philosophers of the last age of Rome.

Introduction CATHOLIC philosophy, in the sense in which I shall use the term, is that which dominated European thought from Augustine to the Renaissance. There have been philosophers, before and after this period of ten centuries, who belonged to the same general school. Before Augustine there were the early Fathers, especially Origen; after the Renaissance there are many, including, at the present day, all orthodox Catholic teachers of philosophy, who adhere to some medieval system, especially that of Thomas Aquinas. But it is only from Augustine to the Renaissance that the greatest philosophers of the age are concerned in building up or perfecting the Catholic synthesis. In the Christian centuries before Augustine, Stoics and Neoplatonists outshine the Fathers in philosophic ability; after the Renaissance, none of the outstanding philosophers, even among those who were orthodox Catholics, were concerned to carry on the Scholastic or the Augustinian tradition.

The Church brought philosophic beliefs into a closer relation to social and political circumstances than they have ever had before or since the medieval period, which we may reckon from about A.D. 400 to about A.D. 1400.

The Church is a social institution built upon a creed, partly philosophic, partly concerned with sacred history.

There were traditions, Roman and Germanic, against which the Church had to fight. The Roman tradition was strongest in Italy, especially among lawyers; the German tradition was strongest in the feudal aristocracy that arose out of the barbarian conquest.

CHAPTER I The Religious Development of the Jews THE Christian religion, as it was handed over by the late Roman Empire to the barbarians, consisted of three elements: first, certain philosophical beliefs, derived mainly from Plato and the Neoplatonists, but also in part from the Stoics; second, a conception of morals and history derived from the Jews; and thirdly, certain theories, more especially as to salvation, which were on the whole new in Christianity, though in part traceable to Orphism, and to kindred cults of the Near East. The most important Jewish elements in Christianity appear to me to be the following: 1. A sacred history, beginning with the Creation, leading to a consummation in the future, and justifying the ways of God to man. 2. The existence of a small section of mankind whom God specially loves. For Jews, this section was the Chosen People; for Christians, the elect. 3. A new conception of “righteousness.” The virtue of almsgiving, for example, was taken over by Christianity from later Judaism. The importance attached to baptism might be derived from Orphism or from oriental pagan mystery religions, but practical philanthropy, as an element in the Christian conception of virtue, seems to have come from the Jews.

The early history of the Israelites cannot be confirmed from any source outside the Old Testament, and it is impossible to know at what point it ceases to be purely legendary. David and Solomon may be accepted as kings who probably had a real existence, but at the earliest point at which we come to something certainly historical there are already the two kingdoms of Israel and Judah. The first person mentioned in the Old Testament of whom there is an independent record is Ahab, King of Israel, who is spoken of in an Assyrian letter of 853 B.C. The Assyrians finally conquered the Northern kingdom in 722 B.C., and removed a great part of the population. After this time, the kingdom of Judah alone preserved the Israelite religion and tradition. The kingdom of Judah just survived the Assyrians, whose power came to an end with the capture of Nineveh by the Babylonians and Medes in 606 B.C. But in 586 B.C. Nebuchadrezzar captured Jerusalem, destroyed the Temple, and removed a large part of the population to Babylon. The Babylonian kingdom fell in 538 B.C., when Babylon was taken by Cyrus, king of the Medes and Persians. Cyrus, in 537 B.C., issued an edict allowing the Jews to return to Palestine. Many of them did so, under the leadership of Nehemiah and Ezra; the Temple was rebuilt, and Jewish orthodoxy began to be crystallized.

In the period of the captivity, and for some time before and after this period, Jewish religion went through a very important development. Originally, there appears to have been not very much difference, from a religious point of view, between the Israelites and surrounding tribes. Yahweh was, at first, only a tribal god who favoured the children of Israel, but it was not denied that there were other gods, and their worship was habitual. When the first Commandment says, “Thou shalt have none other gods but me,” it is saying something which was an innovation in the time immediately preceding the captivity. This is made evident by various texts in the earlier prophets. It was the prophets at this time who first taught that the worship of heathen gods was sin. To win the victory in the constant wars of that time, they proclaimed, the favour of Yahweh was essential; and Yahweh would withdraw his favour if other gods were also honoured. Jeremiah and Ezekiel, especially, seem to have invented the idea that all religions except one are false, and that the Lord punishes idolatry.

There was a growth of every form of exclusiveness. “I am the Lord your God, which have separated you from other people.”VI “Ye shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy.”VII The Law is a product of this period. It was one of the chief forces in preserving national unity.

What we have as the Book of Isaiah is the work of two different prophets, one before the exile and one after. The second of these, who is called by Biblical students Deutero-Isaiah, is the most remarkable of the prophets. He is the first who reports the Lord as saying “There is no god but I.” He believes in the resurrection of the body, perhaps as a result of Persian influence. His prophecies of the Messiah were, later, the chief Old Testament texts used to show that the prophets foresaw the coming of Christ.

In Christian arguments with both pagans and Jews, these texts from Deutero-Isaiah played a very important part, and for this reason I shall quote the most important of them. All nations are to be converted in the end: “They shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more” (Is. II, 4). “Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.”VIII (As to this text, there was a controversy between Jews a...

A better text was produced by the labours of Origen in the third century, but those who only knew Latin had very defective versions until Jerome, in the fifth century, produced the Vulgate.

This was, at first, received with much criticism, because he had been helped by Jews in establishing the text, and many Christians thought that Jews had deliberately falsified the prophets in order that they should not seem to foretell Christ.

While his influence among the Jews ceased after the fall of Jerusalem, the Christian Fathers found that he had shown the way to reconcile Greek philosophy with acceptance of the Hebrew Scriptures.

CHRISTIANITY, at first, was preached by Jews to Jews, as a reformed Judaism. Saint James, and to a lesser extent Saint Peter, wished it to remain no more than this, and they might have prevailed but for Saint Paul, who was determined to admit gentiles without demanding circumcision or submission to the Mosaic Law.

The communities of Christians that Saint Paul established in many places were, no doubt, composed partly of converts from among the Jews, partly of gentiles seeking a new religion.

Christianity, owing to Saint Paul, retained what was attractive in the doctrines of the Jews, without the features that gentiles found hardest to assimilate.

The same was true, later, of Manichæism, through which Saint Augustine came to the Catholic Faith.

In proportion as Christianity became hellenized, it became theological. Jewish theology was always simple.

This Jewish simplicity, on the whole, still characterizes the synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke), but has already disappeared in Saint John, where Christ is identified with the Platonic-Stoic Logos.

It is less Christ the Man than Christ the theological figure that interests the fourth evangelist. This is still more true of the Fathers; you will find, in their writings, many more allusions to Saint John than to the other three gospels put together.

The synthesis of Greek philosophy and Hebrew scriptures remained more or less haphazard and fragmentary until the time of Origen (A.D. 185-254). Origen, like Philo, lived in Alexandria, which, owing to commerce and the university, was, from its foundation to its fall, the chief centre of learned syncretism. Like his contemporary Plotinus, he was a pupil of Ammonius Saccas, whom many regard as the founder of Neoplatonism. His doctrines, as set forth in his work De Principiis, have much affinity to those of Plotinus—more, in fact, than is compatible with orthodoxy.

Christians, we are told, should not take part in the government of the State, but only of the “divine nation,” i.e., the Church.VII This doctrine, of course, was somewhat modified after the time of Constantine, but something of it survived. It is implicit in Saint Augustine’s City of God.

Church government developed slowly during the first three centuries, and rapidly after the conversion of Constantine. Bishops were popularly elected; gradually they acquired considerable power over Christians in their own dioceses, but before Constantine there was hardly any form of central government over the whole Church.

Constantine was annoyed by the quarrel between Catholics and Arians; having thrown in his lot with the Christians, he wanted them to be a united party. For the purpose of healing dissensions, he caused the convening of the oecumenical Council of Nicæa, which drew up the Nicene Creed,VIII and, so far as the Arian controversy was concerned, determined for all time the standard of orthodoxy.

The growth of Christianity before Constantine, as well as the motives of his conversion, have been variously explained by various authors. Gibbon IX assigns five causes: “1. The inflexible, and, if we may use the expression, the intolerant zeal of the Christians, derived, it is true, from the Jewish religion, but purified from the narrow and unsocial spirit which, instead of inviting, had deterred the Gentiles from embracing the law of Moses. “2. The doctrine of a future life, improved by every additional circumstance which could give weight and efficacy to that important truth. “3. The miraculous powers ascribed to the primitive Church. “4. The pure and austere morals of the Christians. “5. The union and discipline of the Christian republic, which gradually formed an independent and increasing state in the heart of the Roman empire.”

As regards the doctrine of a future life, in the West it was first taught by the Orphics and thence adopted by Greek philosophers.

The doctrine of immortality, in Greece, had a popular form in Orphism and a learned form in Platonism.

Elements of mystery religions, both Orphic and Asiatic, enter largely into Christian theology; in all of them, the central myth is that of the dying god who rises again.

Miracles certainly played a very large part in Christian propaganda. But miracles, in later antiquity, were very common, and were not the prerogative of any one religion.

They believed in the Homeric account of the siege of Troy, in Romulus and Remus, and so on; why, asks Origen, should you accept these traditions and reject those of the Jews?

It was therefore natural to accept Old Testament miracles, and, when they had been admitted, those of more recent date became credible, especially in view of the Christian interpretation of the prophets.

Gibbon puts last “the union and discipline of the Christian republic.” I think, from a political point of view, this was the most important of his five causes.

Probably Rostovtseff is right in holding that a large part of the army was Christian, and that this was what most influenced Constantine.

However that may be, the Christians, while still a minority, had a kind of organization which was then new, though now common, and which gave them all the political influence of a pressure group to which no other pressure groups are opposed. This was the natural consequence of their virtual monopoly of zeal, and their zeal was an inheritance from the Jews.

The doctrines of Arius were condemned by the Council of Nicæa (325) by an overwhelming majority.

Constantinople and Asia inclined to Arianism; Egypt was fanatically Athanasian; the West steadfastly adhered to the decrees of the Council of Nicæa.

After the Arian controversy was ended, new controversies, of a more or less kindred sort, arose, in which Egypt became heretical in one direction and Syria in another. These heresies, which were persecuted by the orthodox, impaired the unity of the Eastern Empire, and facilitated the Mohammedan conquest.