Philosophy in the Hellenistic and Roman Worlds (A History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps #2)

by Peter S. Adamson

When he, Porphyry, fell into a bout of suicidal depression, Plotinus recommended that he should go abroad to a better climate, and this indeed cured him

For Plotinus, then, eternity is not simply unending time. On his theory, if you pledge to love someone forever you aren’t, strictly speaking, pledging to love them “eternally.” You’re only promising to love them at every moment of future time. Plotinian eternity, by contrast, doesn’t mean “at every moment,” whether past, present, or future. It means timelessness.

The starker of these two is called the “logical” problem of evil, and claims that there is a straightforward contradiction between the existence of evil and the existence of a perfectly good, all-powerful, and all-knowing God. The thought is that a God who was perfectly good would want to avoid any evil that He knew about and could avoid. But the God we’re considering knows everything and can do anything, so there can’t be any evil that escapes His notice or His power. Yet we see that there is evil. Thus God, at least as described, doesn’t exist. Since the God of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam seems to fit the description—perfectly good, omniscient, and omnipotent—the logical problem of evil accuses adherents of these faiths of a rather fundamental error. They believe both that God exists and that evil exists, which is simply a contradiction.

There is another irony here, namely that Porphyry was also known for his critique of the religion which he considered the greatest abomination of his age: Christianity.

For that, we need more rules, and Proclus provides them. Most notoriously, he uses triadic or threefold structures to introduce complexity at every level. (To use a joke that is not original with me: Proclus demands that Forms be filled out in triplicate.)

And now, we’ve come to the real core of his disagreement with Proclus. Philoponus objects to the idea that God is forced to create a universe at all, that he produces what comes after him necessarily, as Neoplatonists have been saying since Plotinus. This explains Philoponus’ relentless attention to the eternity question: he is trying to safeguard the idea that God freely bestows existence on a universe that would otherwise not exist.

As a historian of philosophy it’s somewhat embarrassing for me to admit this, but I’m pretty bad with dates. I don’t mean the dried fruits, or romantic encounters, though to be honest neither of those was ever my strong point either. I mean when things happened, when famous people were born, and for that matter, birthdays and anniversaries. So I’m always grateful when a historical figure has a really memorable birth- or death-date. The best example has to be al-Ghazālī, the great Muslim philosopher and theologian, who did people like me the favor of dying in the year 1111.

There’s no real room for doubt, then, that the Church Fathers made extensive use of philosophical ideas. But I suspect some may be skeptical as to whether they made any contributions to philosophy. Did they have ideas of their own, of philosophical and not just religious and historical interest? In the rest of this book I hope to convince you that they did.

Origen, the greatest of the early Greek Fathers, wrote a letter to a friend urging him to greet his probable impending martyrdom with eagerness rather than reluctance. (You can see why he wrote a letter: they don’t make greetings-cards for occasions like this.)

Free of persecution by pagans, the Christians wasted little time in turning upon one another, as they engaged in doctrinal disputes with increasing fervor.

Already within the reign of Constantine, doctrinal clashes were causing headaches for the emperor. He was the first, but far from the last, emperor to attempt a peaceful resolution of the heated theological debates. In due course disagreements over such issues as the Trinity and the Incarnation would lead to street violence, would inspire insurrection against emperors of the East, and would provoke the leading intellectuals of the empire to write massive works of mutual refutation.

The Christians recognized that philosophers had always been pursuing truth, and sometimes praised them for this. But the philosophers were doomed to fail, at least in part, since perfect truth is given to man only in the Bible and in the person of Christ. Divine revelation opens a path to the wisdom that philosophers had been trying to achieve with the power of human reason alone.

Often, it must be said, the supposed demonstration of agreement between his conclusions and Scriptural authority is the least convincing part of Origen’s presentation.

Especially in the hands of more adventurous and exploratory authors, like Origen and Augustine, philosophy could be an instrument for solving difficulties not settled unambiguously by Scripture. As a result of all this, we can indeed find innovative philosophical ideas in ancient Christian texts, ideas that should be of interest even to the most confirmed atheist.

Now, pumpkins are not the most philosophical of vegetables. That distinction surely belongs to the tomato, because everyone thinks it is a vegetable, but actually it is a fruit. Nonetheless, the humble pumpkin has played an occasional role in the writings of philosophers. Seneca wrote a satirical attack on the emperor Claudius called the Apocolokyntosis, which means something like “pumpkinification.” (The title is a pun on the term “apotheosis,” applied to emperors when they become gods.)

But, sorry Irenaeus—I’m not buying it. No amount of sexual misbehavior could explain the detailed exposition and refutation of Gnostic theory presented by Irenaeus. I suspect that he attacked the Gnostics because he feared they might appeal to his own audience. They were that most dangerous of opponents: the enemy who agrees with you just enough to seduce your friends.

Clement’s answer will be repeated by Christian, Jewish, and Muslim philosophers for the next millenium and more. We use philosophy to prepare ourselves for faith, to understand more fully what we believe by faith, and to defend the faith against its enemies. Those who proceed straightaway to faith without study are like those who want to harvest pumpkins without first caring for the patch,

Thus Clement contrasts faith to mere opinion, where one’s belief is still open to doubt. He adds, though, that faith is not just what we helplessly find ourselves believing. To have faith involves an act of the will, so that we are responsible for what we believe

It’s remarkable to see here how the imperfection of mankind is explained through metaphysical necessity, rather than the doctrine of original sin that will be expounded by Augustine. This is a road that Christianity could have taken, but did not.

All of which prompts the following thought: if we humans were indeed created by a just and loving God, then why weren’t we created equal? It’s patently obvious that we come into this world with radically different talents and capacities. Some are naturally intelligent, others are not.

In the ancient world it was, if anything, taken for granted that all men—to say nothing of women—are not created equal.

Celsus painted adherents of this new faith in the most unflattering of terms, accusing them of deliberate secrecy born out of cowardice and describing them as vermin. The apostles, he said, were a low-born rabble, and Jesus was not the son of a virgin but the illegitimate child of a Roman soldier

He disdained their reliance on faith, their habit of discouraging questions and demanding unthinking acceptance of doctrine.

For one thing, as Basil points out, we have a conception of God through His workings, without knowing His substance.

But for Gregory, love and desire go hand in hand. Perfect love is love for a beloved object that can never be fully attained, so that the flame of desire is never quenched by the satisfaction of that desire.

Here we might pause to think of staunch anti-Christian Neoplatonists like Porphyry and, yes, Proclus spinning in their pagan graves as Dionysius rewrites their metaphysics as a structure for Christian theology.

Negative theology, meanwhile, is sometimes called “apophatic,” because the Greek word for denial is apophasis. Negative theologians are more pessimistic about the prospects of naming, describing, and conceiving God. They point out that if God utterly transcends us and the other things God has created, then our language and concepts are unlikely to apply to Him fully, if at all. In their most pessimistic moments, negative theologians may go so far as to say that we are utterly ignorant concerning God and doomed to remain so.

In his Mystical Theology, for instance, Dionysius compares God to darkness beyond all light.

The much later philosopher and occasional mystic Ludwig Wittgenstein had some advice that would seem applicable here: “whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”

The most famous philosophical treatment of asceticism is not an ancient one but Nietzsche’s withering critique of the ascetic impulse in Christianity. You might be familiar with his complaint that asceticism is a denial of life itself, a nihilistic rejection of embodied existence.

We do, however, need to be taught, indeed constantly reminded and persuaded, to love God and our fellow man. This message is conveyed so clearly and emphatically in the Bible that it can serve as a measuring-stick against which to assess interpretations of any specific passage. If the overall point of the Bible is to lead us to charity, we can be certain that no interpretation inconsistent with charity could be correct. Most obviously, if a passage seems to imply that we should harm our fellow man, then we must resort to allegorical interpretation

Now, in On Christian Teaching, Augustine not only rejects readings of Scripture inconsistent with charity. He seems to dismiss any intellectual activity that fails to help us achieve this aim.

Likewise, he believes that we cannot be good without the assistance of God. All humans are born into a state of sin, and no matter how admirable their intentions, they will fall back into sin over and over again if left to their own resources.

In Augustine’s view the Pelagians, like the Donatists, were undermining the whole point of the Christian faith. If, as they claimed, the human will is sovereign and capable of resisting sin all on its own, then why does God need to send His son and allow him to be sacrificed? In fact God doesn’t need to do anything at all. He can just wait to see who achieves goodness and who doesn’t, through the exercise of free will, and then dispense reward and punishment as appropriate. On the Pelagian view, Christ seems to be sent as a moral teacher who encourages us towards virtue, rather than as the indispensable source of salvation.

Only the sacrifice of God’s son and, more generally, His gift of divine grace can allow humans to overcome their fallen state. Thus Augustine argued, in direct opposition to the Pelagian view, that we humans do not have the capacity to merit salvation on our own. We can only follow God’s command to be good if God helps us to do so.

As Epictetus already pointed out, no one, not even God, can force you to will anything. The fact that you were not in a position to have a better will does not absolve you of the disgrace, the moral failure, and hence the blameworthiness of willing evil.

This puts the Augustinian soul right where it is for other late ancient Platonists, from Plutarch to Plotinus to Proclus (you don’t have to have a name starting with P to be a Platonist, but it helps).

If you think that two of the indispensable philosophical authors of all time are Calcidius and Martianus Capella, you are probably a monk living in the tenth or eleventh century. In which case you most likely aren’t reading this.

He was a Roman aristocrat, whose thought-world was still more like that of Cicero than that of Anselm, Abelard, or Aquinas (you don’t have to have a name starting with A to be a medieval philosopher, but it helps).