Athens and Jerusalem E-Book

Gerald Bray

• Herausgeber: Lexham Press
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 732

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

A journey through the tangled history of philosophy and theology - Trace the history of Western thought - Engage in modern theological debates - Grasp the influence of philosophy on theology Is theology incomprehensible without philosophy? Is philosophy merely human folly? Most take a middle ground, believing that the two can be reconciled. In Athens and Jerusalem, Gerald Bray shows how history has been shaped by a myriad of attempts to relate philosophy and theology. Bray's tour spans from the early church to the present, pointing out impacts on the church, academy, and society. Athens and Jerusalem offers a lively and accessible chronicle of the relationship between philosophy and theology and how we can think about both today.

Leseprobe

ATHENS & JERUSALEM

Philosophy, Theology, and the Mind of Christ

Gerald Bray

Athens and Jerusalem: Philosophy, Theology, and the Mind of Christ

Copyright 2024 Gerald Bray

Lexham Press, 1313 Commercial St., Bellingham, WA 98225

LexhamPress.com

You may use brief quotations from this resource in presentations, articles, and books. For all other uses, please write Lexham Press for permission. Email us at [email protected].

Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are the author’s own translation or are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Print ISBN 9781683597728

Digital ISBN 9781683597735

Library of Congress Control Number 2024930867

Lexham Editorial: Todd Hains, Elliot Ritzema, Katrina Smith, Mandi Newell

Cover Design: Sarah Brossow

O Almighty God, you make the minds of all faithful believers to be of one will; grant that your people may love what you command and desire what you promise, so that despite the many and varied changes of the world, our hearts may be fixed where true joys are to be found, through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Amen.

—Adapted from the collect for the Fourth Sunday after Easter in the Book of Common Prayer (1549)

CONTENTS

I.A TALE OF TWO CITIES

II.ATHENS

III.JERUSALEM

IV.ATHENS MEETS JERUSALEM

V.JERUSALEM TRIUMPHANT

VI.THE REVENGE OF ATHENS

VII.WAR—AND PEACE?

VIII.THE TWO CITIES TODAY

IX.WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?

FOR FURTHER READING

SUBJECT INDEX

NAMES AND PLACES INDEX

SCRIPTURE INDEX

I

A TALE OF TWO CITIES

Sometime around the year AD 200, Tertullian of Carthage (ca. 160–ca. 220), a convert to Christianity who became one of its greatest apologists, wrote in exasperation: “What has Athens got to do with Jerusalem?”1 Tertullian was a master of the pithy statement, and his outburst has become famous over time. For him “Athens,” the university town of ancient Greece, stood for philosophy in all its many shapes and sizes. Not all the Greek philosophers came from Athens, and many never went there, but the city was famous as the meeting place of ideas. The New Testament (NT) writer Luke captured its aura very well when he wrote: “All the Athenians and the foreigners who lived there would spend their time in nothing except telling or hearing something new” (Acts 17:21). The occasion was the visit of the apostle Paul to the city, when he was able to present the gospel of Christ to an eager crowd of listeners on the Areopagus (Mars Hill), the ancient equivalent of the courthouse. Paul had no trouble at all in getting an audience and nobody tried to drive him away, which is more than can be said of his attempts to preach in most other places. The Athenians were remarkably polite and inquisitive, but at the same time they were also noncommittal. To them, Paul was just one more eccentric who had come to share his ideas with people who would listen to anything—and believe nothing. The visit was not entirely fruitless, but neither was it a great success. In other places, like Thessalonica, Corinth, and Philippi, Paul had left a thriving church behind, but in Athens there were only a handful of converts—Dionysius, who was a lawyer on the Areopagus, a woman called Damaris, and a handful of others whom Luke does not name (Acts 17:34).

Jerusalem, on the other hand, was a completely different story. For Paul, it was the center of his cultural universe, the ancestral capital of Israel, the site of the temple, which lay at the heart of Jewish worship, and the place where Jesus of Nazareth had been crucified. Even when he was wandering around Greece, Paul’s thoughts were never far from the place where Christianity had originated, and one of his last recorded journeys was largely devoted to raising funds for the support of the local church there. It was in Jerusalem that Paul had been educated at the feet of Gamaliel, one of the great rabbis of his time, and it was there that he was arrested, put on trial, and eventually dispatched to Rome on appeal. But to the wider world, Jerusalem was a provincial backwater. The Greco-Roman world was a maritime civilization, linked by great port cities that hugged the Mediterranean shoreline. But Jerusalem was inland, high up in the mountains, and largely cut off from the great trade routes that bound the Roman Empire together. By Tertullian’s day it had been razed to the ground—not once but twice—and its Jewish character had been obliterated. It continued to exist under the name Aelia Capitolina, but as a religious and cultural center it survived mainly in the imagination of both Jews and Christians, whose holy writings made it out to be a kind of foretaste of the kingdom of heaven on earth.

By Tertullian’s time, while Athens too had long since lost its political significance, the monuments of its ancient glory were still there to be seen and it continued to attract intellectuals from all over the Roman world. Jerusalem, by contrast, had already become something of a myth—idealized in prophecy and poetry but a small town that few people visited and that had almost nothing to show for its illustrious past. Yet Tertullian was in no doubt about which of the two was more important. Not only did he think it fitting to compare the two cities, apparently so different from one another, but his preference (as a Christian) was clearly for Jerusalem. He never went to either place, but that did not matter to him. As far as he was concerned, Athens represented the crowning achievement of Greek culture, the de facto capital of civilization. But Jerusalem was the place where God had revealed himself to humanity and where he had come down to earth in the person of Jesus Christ.2 For Tertullian there was no contest—Jerusalem won hands down. His contemporaries must have thought it was an odd choice, and Tertullian knew that he was confronting the main intellectual currents of his time, but history was on his side. It would take some time, but in AD 529 the Emperor Justinian I (527–565) closed the philosophical schools in Athens because they were the last remaining source of opposition to Christianity. In the meantime, Jerusalem had come back from oblivion and was home to one of the five patriarchal churches of the Roman world, alongside Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, and Antioch.3

The contrasting fortunes of the two cities mirrors the relationship between Christianity and Greek philosophy in the early centuries of the church’s existence. As geographical locations, neither one plays a significant role in Western intellectual thought nowadays, but in metaphorical terms—which was the dimension that appealed to Tertullian—their names are still instantly recognizable and they continue to symbolize two very different approaches to human life and thought. At times it has seemed that one has virtually absorbed the other, while at other times they have appeared to be in conflict. Both have exerted a powerful influence on the world, and modern civilization cannot be understood if one of them is disregarded. The two strands belong together, however much purist devotees might try to separate them and (usually) emphasize one at the expense of the other. Can they live in harmony with one another, or must we conclude, as Tertullian did, that they are mutually incompatible?

Different answers to that question have been given in the course of time, though it must be said that few Christians have adopted Tertullian’s position, which they have usually regarded as extreme. Broadly speaking, most observers would probably agree that the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox traditions place a greater emphasis on philosophy, and especially on Greco-Roman philosophy, than most Protestants do, but this broad characterization must be treated with caution. It is not true to say that the Protestant Reformation was a revolt from the side of Jerusalem against a church that had fallen captive to Athens. None of the magisterial Reformers (or their opponents) thought in that way. Both sides regarded the Bible and the theological tradition that had grown up as a means of interpreting it as primary for the doctrine and worship of the church, and it was because the Reformers believed that the church had gone astray on significant theological matters that they protested in the way they did. As far as philosophy was concerned, both were ready to use Greek categories of thought, derived mainly from Aristotle, but with strong elements of Plato as well, as the framework for expressing their ideas.

This meant that in a real sense they were speaking the same language and could express their differences in ways that made it possible for debate to take place. The significance of this can be seen when we consider the effect that the Reformation had on the Eastern Orthodox churches, which had not experienced the revival of Aristotelianism that had so affected the medieval West. The Eastern churches did not know how to respond to the Reformation because they did not understand the concepts that were being debated. This did not mean that the Reformation passed them by completely, though. In fact, what happened was that the Eastern churches developed a pattern of theological education that was closely modeled on that of the West and learned to express their own theology in essentially Aristotelian categories. Sometimes this led them in the direction of Protestantism, in particular a Protestantism of the Reformed (Calvinist) type, but more often the Easterners were shaped by Roman Catholicism, to the extent that many Protestants came to perceive them as little more than “Catholics with beards.”

In the twentieth century there was a reaction in the Eastern churches against this, but it is one that has divided the Orthodox world. The theological academies have leaned more toward Protestantism, particularly of the liberal German variety, but there has also been a powerful movement seeking to recover what is perceived as the authentic tradition of the early church. In practice, this has led to a new emphasis on mystical theology, which has been (wrongly) celebrated as the essence of Eastern Orthodoxy in contrast to the more academic approach of the West. This claim has even influenced some Westerners who are dissatisfied with the approach taken by their own theological traditions to turn to Orthodoxy, which they imagine is somehow more spiritual and therefore more authentic.

In reality, the Eastern churches are divided between those who continue to revere the Greek philosophical tradition and those who reject it. The chief proponent of the former was Georges Florovsky (1893–1979), who went so far as to write a detailed history of ancient Greek theology in order to emphasize the importance of what he called “Hellenism” for understanding it. The Hellenism of which he spoke was what we would call Neoplatonism (not Aristotelianism), which meant that while it could be seen as a break with the more recent Orthodox past, it remained within the parameters of the classical philosophical tradition. Much more recently, the Protestant theologian Hans Boersma (1961–) has claimed that Christianity would not exist in its present form without the input of what he calls “Christian Platonism,” and has even gone so far as to say that without it the Bible cannot be properly understood.4 He thinks that biblical scholars generally, and Protestant ones in particular, have discounted the importance of philosophy for understanding the Bible and wants them to be more open to what amounts to an allegorical reading of the text.

Not surprisingly, this suggestion has not made much of an impression on biblical scholars, nor is it likely to. Boersma cites a number of ancient Christian writers in support of his thesis, but ignores the evidence that disagrees with it. Justin Martyr (100–165), for example, was a critic of the philosophers, in particular of Plato, whom he regarded as a brilliant but blind guide to the truth, but Boersma does not mention this. He does, however, quote Origen (185–254) with approval, though Origen was eventually repudiated and even condemned as a heretic for his rather too enthusiastic willingness to accept certain philosophical principles for the interpretation of Christian theology. Neither Justin nor the accusers of Origen went as far as Tertullian, but they were more sympathetic to his position than proponents of a “Hellenic” Christianity are prepared to admit.

Who is right? What options are open to us, and which should we prefer? Are different choices equally valid? Whether we like it or not, we live in a world where a plurality of voices on this subject can be heard and where it is rare to find people who are genuinely willing to consider options other than their own. A book like this one can hardly aim to provide definitive answers to a question that is now nearly two millennia old, but at least I can try to clear the air and provide a guide, if not a generally agreed solution, to the problems involved in reconciling philosophy and theology to each other.

SUMMARY

1.In ancient times, Athens and Jerusalem were the recognized centers of Greek philosophy and Jewish religion, respectively. Their names were first used metaphorically by the Christian writer Tertullian and are still encountered today as symbols of philosophy and theology generally.

2.Christians have long had an ambiguous relationship to “Athens.” Everyone agrees that philosophy, and especially classical Greek philosophy, has influenced Christianity, but there are different interpretations of what this means. Some regard its influence on the church as pernicious and a few have tried to dispense with it altogether. Others see it as essential for the construction of Christian theology, which they believe must be described in basically philosophical terms. Most people are somewhere in the middle—they recognize that philosophy and theology have many things in common, but also that there are important differences between them that should not be underestimated or neglected.

II

ATHENS

What exactly is philosophy, and where did it come from? The word itself is Greek for “love of wisdom,” and most accounts trace its origin to about 700 BC. Many societies in human history have had their wise people who have occupied a special position. Very often they have been what we would now call magicians, claiming the ability to control the elements for the benefit of the tribe of country to which they belonged. In many cases, they were religious leaders who professed a knowledge of the supernatural that they could use to frighten people into submission. In some cases, they were able to develop genuine skills that served to develop what we would now call civilization. In ancient China and Babylonia, elite groups of wise men acquired a knowledge of astronomy that made it possible for them to predict the movement of the stars, which they believed influenced human destiny. Some developed mathematical abilities that they put to good use in geometry, leading to the development of architectural skills that continue to impress us today as we contemplate the magnificent structures that they left behind. Over time, they accumulated a store of learning that they passed on to their successors, both orally and in writing. It is in the latter form that most of what we know about them has been preserved. Much of it is what we would now call practical information, including incantations and rituals that were supposed to produce the desired effects. Sometimes their wisdom was condensed into proverbs—pithy sayings that were designed to impart wisdom to the young as they sought to master the secrets of a good and successful life.1

Wisdom of this kind is known to have flourished in many different places, including China and India as well as Mesopotamia and Egypt. The first two of these had great influence in south and east Asia, but were largely unknown to the rest of the world until relatively recent times. The ancient lore of Mesopotamia and Egypt, however, spread across the Mediterranean, where it was absorbed and transformed as it went. A good indication of this is the system of writing that originated in Egypt as hieroglyphics, was simplified in western Asia into phonetic symbols, and migrated from there to Greece, where it developed into the alphabet as we know it. For centuries, writing was a skill mastered by only a few, and those who were capable of it were regarded as especially gifted. In China, writing never really got past the hieroglyphic stage, and even today the Chinese use a complex system of characters that bears no relation to the sounds of their language. Elsewhere, in India they developed various scripts that were based on syllables rather than simple sounds, and in the Middle East the Egyptian hieroglyphs were turned into consonants that were written without the accompanying vowels.

It was in the Greek world that a truly phonetic alphabet was first produced, allowing the language to be recorded in a way that was relatively easy for most people to master. That does not mean that literacy was widespread, but writing was no longer a sacred mystery reserved to a few. The acquisition and transmission of learning was democratized to a previously unknown degree, and although there were still oracles and religious officials who claimed to possess superior intelligence and to have access to hidden knowledge, they were no longer unique. People with inquiring minds could develop intellectual skills on their own and transmit them to others as part of a common fund of human wisdom. Those who did this were few in number, and at first not many people appreciated their significance, but their approach bore fruit in the form of mental constructions that they promoted as the key to understanding the world around them. As always, some people were better at doing this than others, and their thoughts and sayings were copied and handed on, sometimes by disciples who formed a school to perpetuate their memory and study their ways of thinking. These men were the first who can properly be called philosophers.

Where they got their knowledge from is not easy to determine. They undoubtedly observed the world around them and drew conclusions from what they saw as to how it operated, but they did not usually go beyond observation to experiment. In other words, they produced theories about how the world works without testing them to see whether they were right. Instead, they preferred to use their minds to create logical paradigms that they imagined were the foundation of reality. They were particularly good at mathematics, a discipline that requires great mental agility and is relatively free of the need to experiment. In their heads they could create squares, triangles, and circles that did not exist as such in the material world, and with those shapes in mind they could refashion matter and subdue it.

Mind over matter was what it was all about, and in some cases it worked fairly well. Stones could be cut into cubes and used for building, and mathematical calculations enabled people to create complex structures, using columns and the like. Eventually they were able to perfect the dome, the single most outstanding achievement of ancient architecture. They were even able to speculate about the possibility of flying, but they never got beyond thinking about it, and it was not until modern times that their theories were turned into realities. One outstanding example of this tendency was Democritus, who lived in the fifth century BC. Democritus is famous today because he believed that the universe was composed of atoms, a theory that he got from his teacher Leucippus that has turned out to be true. But Democritus and Leucippus were only guessing at that, and for centuries their beliefs remained just one possibility among many—nobody did anything to try to figure out whether they were right! They had no way of demonstrating that their theory was correct, and so we should not be surprised that they were largely ignored in ancient times. After all, why should anyone take seriously something that claimed to be both material and invisible at the same time? It was only when modern scientists discovered atomic theory that Democritus was remembered—and credited by some with a genius that he did not really possess.2

Democritus was one of a group of thinkers who were making their mark in the years before 400 BC. Very little is known about them because their teachings have survived only in fragmentary quotes, often in the writings of people who wanted to refute their ideas. As far as we can tell, the earliest of these thinkers was Thales of Miletus, who lived more than a century before Democritus. He was supposed to have predicted the eclipse of the sun that occurred on May 28, 585 BC, which he could only have done by a sophisticated use of astronomy and mathematics. Where did Thales get that knowledge? Some of it may have come from Babylon, but most scholars think Egypt was the more likely source. According to later legend, Thales went there and learned the art of geometry from the Egyptians. He is said to have calculated the height of the pyramids by measuring the shadow they cast at the time of day when the length of his own shadow was equal to his height. Whether that is true or not, Thales is credited with having been the first Greek to have rejected the myths of ancient tradition in favor of what we would now call scientific experiment, and for that reason he has often been hailed as the “father of modern science.”

Thales seems to have believed that the world was made up of four elements—earth, air, fire, and water—and that water was the first and most important of these.3 Other thinkers agreed with him in principle but debated which of the four elements was the most important. Anaximenes, one of Thales’s disciples, apparently tried to move beyond this debate by suggesting that all four elements held together in a kind of proportional balance, which he suggested was the basis of cosmic justice, whatever that was supposed to be. Neither Anaximenes nor anyone else could say for sure, but what mattered for subsequent thought was that he connected the structure of the universe with the concepts of right and wrong. To understand how the world worked was the basis for knowing how to live in it, and to go against its supposedly natural laws was to court disaster. The order of nature was not arbitrary, and could not be, because if it were, life on earth would be impossible. There would be no good and bad, no principle of existence against which everything could be measured. It was the task of the philosophers to find out what that principle was and to apply it to the needs of everyday life. One way or another, the whole of classical philosophy can be understood as an attempt to answer that quest for meaning in the universe.

One important though little-known figure in this quest was Xenophanes (sixth century BC), who seems to have been the first Greek thinker to challenge the traditional view of the gods. Xenophanes realized that the Greeks, like other peoples, had created a pantheon in their own image. The gods of Olympus and of the great Homeric poems (the Iliad and the Odyssey) were superhuman figures but they were just like the Greeks themselves—brilliant in some ways but highly immoral and untrustworthy in others. He knew that this had to be wrong, if only because every other nation did the same thing, with the result that the gods of one people reflected its particular characteristics and none of them could claim to be truly transcendent. To resolve this problem, Xenophanes came up with the idea that there is only one supreme God, who is completely detached from the world as we know it. This detachment was necessary, Xenophanes thought, because if God were involved with the world he would be taking sides in any number of conflicts and would lose any claim to be an absolute, independent sovereign. Apparently, Xenophanes believed that his God had only one thing in common with humanity—the power to think. Of course, he had no idea what God would be thinking about, except that whatever it was, it would be quite unlike any form of human thought.4

The difficulty with Xenophanes’s assertion was that although his hunch about God was logical, there was no way he could prove it. A God who was completely cut off from the world could not be known at all, and so what Xenophanes had to say about him (or it?) was essentially meaningless. It was pure speculation on his part, as his many critics were quick to point out. Today we may be impressed by his intelligence, but his contemporaries were not. To them, a theory that was unprovable by definition could not be the basis for rational argument and so it was dismissed, even by people who might in principle have been sympathetic to it. It was not the end of the search for a single ultimate Being who lies beyond the material universe, but later generations would try to explain how that Being could be known, if only to a limited degree, and so Xenophanes’s basic assumption would of necessity be discarded.

A generation or so after Thales, there appeared another gifted mathematician called Pythagoras. He lived in the latter half of the sixth century BC, but almost everything we know about him comes from Plato (427–347 BC), who was writing more than a century after Pythagoras’s death. Whether Pythagoras knew of Thales is uncertain, though if he came from the island of Samos, which is near Miletus, he probably did. Like Thales, he is also supposed to have absorbed Babylonian and Egyptian learning, though how that came to him is unknown. At some point, Pythagoras left his homeland and went to Croton (Crotona), one of the Greek colonies in southern Italy, where he rose to prominence before being driven out by a popular revolt. He ended his days in an obscure place called Metapontion or Metapont(i)um, also in southern Italy, but not before he had founded a guild of mathematicians who preserved both his memory and his theorems.

Pythagoras was convinced that numbers were the key to understanding reality. Earlier thinkers had used mathematics as a tool for understanding matter, but Pythagoras turned their theories on their head by claiming that numbers are reality. He began with the number one, which he called the Monad, and which formed the basis of everything else that exists. Reproducing the Monad led to the existence of two principles, or the Dyad, from which everything else derived. Putting the Monad and the Dyad together resulted in the Triad, which led naturally to the construction of a triangle. Thanks to the famous theorem that says that the square of the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle is equal to the square of the opposite two sides, Pythagoras came to be recognized as the founder of geometry, even if it is far from certain that he invented the theorem. Pythagoras, or at least those who called themselves Pythagoreans, did not stop there, but added a fourth principle, which stood above the other three and formed a pyramid. His followers later named this the Tetrad, which they claimed was indicative of the perfect harmony that can be found in the world around us—examples of this are the musical scale, which contains four intervals, and the four seasons of the year.

Pythagoras’s reputation as a mathematician and theorist of music remains high to this day, even if little of what he supposedly taught actually goes back to him, but his belief in numerology has fallen victim to widespread skepticism.5 Nevertheless, Pythagoreanism did not carry all before it in his own time, and had Plato not drawn attention to it, it is possible that little or nothing of Pythagoras’s achievement would have survived. The problem was that for the Greeks, the ideas of men like Thales, Xenophanes, and Pythagoras had to be accepted as articles of faith—or not at all. Other opinions were equally possible and were put forward by different thinkers whose theories were just as credible—or incredible—as those of their contemporaries.

One of the most important of these was Heraclitus (535–465 BC), whose view of things was completely different from anything that Thales or Pythagoras would have recognized. Heraclitus had no interest in finding a fixed principle around which a coherent vision of reality could be constructed. As far as he was concerned, order and stability did not exist. His famous motto was panta rhei (“all things are in flux”). To his mind, permanent, never-ending change was the order of the day, and conflict between moving objects was inevitable—the very stuff of life, in fact. Notions of good and evil were entirely relative. Those who went with the flow found it good, whereas those who were overwhelmed by it did not. If this view sounds curiously modern in some respects, it is because Heraclitus’s approach to reality was revived in the late nineteenth century by Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), who regarded him as the greatest philosopher of antiquity. To “go with the flow” has become a commonplace expression and reflects the sort of relativism that is often associated with Nietzsche, but how far it represents the view of Heraclitus is another question entirely.

Heraclitus believed that there was a fundamental principle underlying material reality, without being part of it. This principle he called the logos, a Greek word that is notoriously difficult to translate but that was to become one of the most important terms of both classical philosophy and Christian theology. logos conveys a range of meanings, from speech to reason. It is the subject of the prologue to John’s Gospel, where it is normally translated as “Word,” but it is Word with a mind and a purpose and not just a collection of sounds and syllables (John 1:1–14). Like John, Heraclitus believed that the logos inhabits every human being and that it can be relied on to guide us through the ever-changing ups and downs of life. If we rely on it, instead of on material objects (including wealth, fame, power, and so on), we shall be unsettled by nothing. The logos will give us understanding, and with understanding will come peace of mind. It is this aspect of his teaching that differs most strikingly from Nietzsche and from the nihilism of modern times, and makes an appeal to Heraclitus as the father of modern relativism difficult to justify.

Heraclitus was strikingly different from Pythagoras, but he was not alone in that. Another contemporary thinker, Parmenides (fl. ca. 515–485 BC), also rejected the mathematical approach but did so in a completely different way. Whereas Heraclitus thought that stability was an illusion, Parmenides said the exact opposite. To analyze reality into the four elements of earth, air, fire, and water was a mistake, he claimed, because ultimately all four are the same. What we perceive as change is just another window revealing the underlying permanence of reality. To put it in scientific terms, matter can neither be created nor destroyed. It is always there in its basic sameness because it belongs to the fundamental reality of Being. Change is therefore an illusion—it is just a reordering of what is permanent and therefore real. Where Heraclitus and Parmenides are at one is in their belief that we cannot base our lives on what we see around us. Those who put their trust in material objects will either be swept away by the forces of change (Heraclitus) or be forced to watch as their perception dissolves into a different form of reality (Parmenides). Either way, the only permanence that can be relied on is something metaphysical, whether we call it the logos or not. We have to stand back from what we see around us, rise above it and live our lives in relation to a principle that transcends it. Whether we can escape from the illusions that surround us is another matter entirely. Physically speaking, that may be impossible, but in the mind it can (and must) be done.

This is the legacy that these early Greek philosophers left to their successors. The quest for meaning in life would still be pursued, but answers would not be forthcoming within the parameters of the visible, material world that we see around us. How we can (or should) resolve the problem of our own finitude remained an unanswered question, but it would not sit still for long. Within a generation, a new breed of philosopher would appear, and it is with them that the history of classical philosophy may properly be said to begin.

PLATO

By common consent, the man who marked the transition from the early stage of Greek philosophy to its more mature flowering was Socrates (470–399 BC), the notorious “gadfly” (his own self-description) who self-consciously tormented the Athenian elite during the difficult days of the Peloponnesian War and its aftermath, when a defeated Athens was casting around for a scapegoat on whom it could lay the blame for the catastrophe. Socrates, who had little time for the Greek gods, was duly accused of atheism and of corrupting the youth of the city, and was sentenced to death by drinking poisonous hemlock.

Socrates has often been compared to Jesus, and there are indeed some similarities between them. Both men were at odds with the leadership of their society. Both criticized the hypocrisy that they saw in official religion. Both gathered disciples whom they taught to think in a different way—an activity that could easily be interpreted by their opponents as a form of sedition. Neither one wrote anything, but their character and teaching has come down to us from a variety of witnesses, giving us a fair impression of what they were like and how they affected those with whom they came into contact. The similarities are striking, but they are also superficial. Socrates questioned everything about his society and taught others to do the same. He stirred things up but had no real answer to what he perceived to be wrong with Athens. Jesus denounced the priests and religious leaders of his time, but he did not leave his disciples without an alternative. “I am the way, the truth and the life,” he said (John 14:6). Those who followed him would not walk in the darkness but have the light of eternal life. In sharp contrast to that, Socrates had nothing comparable to offer—his horizons were limited to this world.

Socrates attributed his thinking to what he called his inner daimōn, a word that has come into English as “demon” but should probably be translated as “conscience” or something like it. Whether this daimōn can be identified as a divine power akin to what Christians would call “God” is an interesting question, and perhaps it can be. But if Socrates believed in a Supreme Being with which he had direct contact, he never explained how it related to the world in which he lived. Jesus said that he had come to do the will of his Father who had sent him, and who was clearly to be identified with the God of Israel, who was also the Creator of the universe. There was no inner daimōn in his life, guiding him as he went along, but rather a clear mandate with a set purpose that was known from the beginning. Both men were unjustly condemned to death, but Socrates’s last moments were pure theater, clearly designed for posterity and remembered by his disciples as such. Jesus was taken away to be crucified when his disciples had run away. There was no staged dialogue about the meaning of life, only the agony of a death made necessary in order to atone for the sins of the world—a dimension utterly foreign to Socrates and his companions. Above all, there was no coming back from the dead in Socrates’s case, and no ongoing movement dedicated to propagating his mission. Socrates was remembered, to be sure, but his disciples moved on and Plato (at least) formed a school to propagate his ideas, not those of his master. Jesus’s disciples did more than remember him—they proclaimed that he was still alive in their midst and preached that those who believed in him would be united with him in eternity. Today, Socrates is a name known to a relative few and his teachings remain obscure even to most of them, whereas Jesus is worshiped as God by perhaps a third of the human race and his teaching has spread even further than that.6 In that respect, there is no similarity between the two men at all.

Our portrait of Socrates is mostly filtered through the lens of Plato, to the extent that it is difficult to know what comes from him and what has been put in his mouth by his most prominent disciple. Even if Plato’s reporting is basically accurate, it is also doctored in ways that suit what he wanted to say. Socrates was probably far less organized and systematic than Plato made him out to be, but that hardly matters now. What has come down to us may ultimately derive from Socrates, but it is undoubtedly the teaching of Plato, and it is as Platonism that Socrates’s thought is generally expounded today.

From the standpoint of his philosophical inheritance, Plato may be said to have reconciled Heraclitus and Parmenides in an overarching synthesis. Heraclitus described the world of existence in which we live. It is constantly changing. Parmenides therefore looked beyond it to find a deeper stability, which Plato conceived as the world of Being. The link between them was the human soul (psychē), which was more or less the equivalent of Heraclitus’s logos. According to Plato, the rational soul (logikē psychē) is present in every human being and gives us our identity. It is the tool we must use to probe the secrets of the universe and come to terms with them. In a word, it is the presence of Being in the realm of Existence. The duty of the philosopher is to explain how we can rise above the limitations of Existence and experience pure Being. To illustrate this, Plato came up with the idea that human beings are imprisoned in a cave, where there is little light and things appear only in shadows. These shadows represent something that is real, but the darkness of the cave prevents us from gaining access to that reality.

If we are to see what the shadows represent, we have to come into the light, but as anyone who has emerged from a cave can testify, that is not easy. Far from giving us knowledge, the light blinds us because we are not used to it. We may adjust to it in time, but many people do not want to make that effort. They prefer to live in the darkness and not ask too many questions. But for the few who persevere with the light, the experience is transformative. No longer are they content to live in the shadows. They want to explore the light in all its many possibilities, rising from the objects on which its rays shine to the source of light itself. Just as no one can look straight at the sun, so no one can achieve perfect knowledge in this life, but the philosopher can come close. At least he knows what the source of light is, even if he cannot perceive it directly. This is the way of enlightenment to which the true philosopher aspires.

In the realm of light, the shadows of the cave take on clearly defined shapes. These are what Plato called the “forms.” These forms are not material objects but ideas that only the rational soul can perceive. Plato did not know how many forms or ideas there are, but he was convinced that everything we perceive in the world of Existence has its prototype in the realm of pure light. Sometimes they take on a particular shape, and we identify them as visible objects—tables, for example, or human beings. But often they retain their abstract character, even in our material universe. This is true of things like justice, beauty, honesty, and so on. We have some notion of what these are, even though we cannot see them or isolate them as such. It is relatively easy to identify a table, a tree, or a man, but whether I think something is just or beautiful depends entirely on my mental judgment. That in turn is shaped by my knowledge of the realm of light. If I have perceived the forms of justice and beauty in the abstract, then I have a standard by which to measure what I see around me.

Most importantly, these abstractions can be graded. Some actions are more just than others; some phenomena are more beautiful than others. Plato did not believe that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, as we might say today. If a man thinks that something is beautiful when in fact it is not, it is because he lacks the understanding that knowledge of the idea of beauty gives. Most of us have a sliding scale of beauty, which we apply to different objects. For example, I might think that a hammer is beautiful but that a rose is more beautiful, and that a newborn child is the most beautiful of all. This gradation of beauty is not a personal prejudice but an evaluation of different things according to a scale of values known only in the realm of light. A hammer may be beautiful because it is useful, but a rose is more beautiful because of its color and the complexity of its design, which no human being can imitate. A child is more beautiful still because a child possesses a rational soul, even if that is not immediately apparent, and is therefore potentially able to ascend to the form that gives beauty its meaning.

The highest of all the forms is the Good. All the other forms point toward it and illustrate particular aspects of it, but in themselves they are not the ultimate Good. Indeed, the Good may be practically unknowable. Like the sun, we know it is there but cannot perceive it directly because its light is too bright for us. But at the same time, we are well aware of the gradations of goodness that we perceive all around us. Some things are better than others, and we are all looking for the best insofar as we can find it. This is especially true in human life. I may be a competent ice skater, for example, and that is good. But there is always room for improvement, and when I watch figure skating competitions I realize that in my case, the best is still a long way off. Every once in a while, a figure skater will master the technique so skillfully that the judges will give his performance ten out of ten—as near to perfection as it is possible to get. Whether that is really true, though is open to doubt, since the most accomplished athletes know that an even higher achievement is possible and will aim for that, but the judges (who after all are limited, finite human beings) find that hard to imagine. As far as they are concerned, perfection, or the next thing to it, has been realized and that is good—good enough for them at least, and certainly more than good enough for me.

The ultimate Good is perfect—that is what makes it good. In the world of Existence, perfection is unattainable because our knowledge is always partial and incomplete. But perfection is also unattainable because it is One, and we live in a plural universe. The only way we could ever achieve perfect goodness would be by losing our identity as distinct individuals and dissolving our particularity into the one Supreme Being. Whether that is possible or not does not really matter, because if it is, we shall lose any consciousness of our own being and the philosophical quest will be over.

Plato believed that all human beings have a rational soul, but where did that come from and how did it operate? It was clearly not part of the material universe but shared something in common with the realm of light. As Plato understood it, the human soul originates in that realm and comes into particular human beings at birth. When we die, our soul goes back to where it came from and gets recycled in another human being who comes along after us. We are familiar with this as reincarnation, which is the belief of certain Eastern religions. The Dalai Lama, for example, is thought to be the reincarnation of the previous one, who died at the moment of his birth. When a Dalai Lama passes away, Tibetans go searching for a newly born infant who has inherited his soul, and so the line of lamas carries on through time. Plato’s vision was similar to this, though it was not so specific. After Socrates died, Plato did not go looking for a reincarnation of his master but thought only that his soul would return—in whom or to what purpose he could not say. Thus it is better to speak of his view as the transmigration of souls rather than as reincarnation in the strict sense, although the underlying principle is much the same.

If the soul of every child is the soul of an adult who has died, it follows that the knowledge of that adult is present in the child, even though the child is not naturally capable of expressing it. For that reason, the dormant knowledge has to be teased out of him by a process that we still call “education,” a word that literally means “leading out.” By a series of questions and tests, the child is challenged to become conscious of what he already knows and to reveal it. Education is therefore a kind of tug-of-war between the questioning teacher and the questioned student, the object of which is to extract as much hidden knowledge from the latter as possible. The great weakness of this approach is that, according to it, there is no such thing as progress because there is no new knowledge. Everything is simply recycled from one generation to the next. Our knowledge can be truncated by poor education and thus lost as far as we are concerned, but it can never be increased beyond what is already there. There is quite literally nothing new under the sun, and to go in pursuit of the unknown is a delusional waste of time. The ancient Greeks and Romans had no conception of the Americas, for example, but sailing west to see what might be there was pointless. As far as they were concerned, there was nothing to be discovered, and so they did not bother!

Plato was well aware that the quest for enlightenment was a minority interest, but he did not think that philosophers should live in isolation from the rest of society. On the contrary, he believed that they were the natural rulers of the state, an intellectual aristocracy whose special gift was to guide everyone else in the way of justice and truth. This view was a hard sell in Athens, where every citizen had a voice in the city’s government whether he was educated or not. Plato’s vision was only practicable in a place where one man, or perhaps a small oligarchy, already controlled the levers of government. He found what he wanted in Syracuse, a Greek colony in Sicily; he went there at the invitation of Dionysius I, the city’s dictator, or “tyrant” as the Greeks called such people. Plato made a great impression on Dionysius’s brother-in-law Dion, but that merely made Dionysius jealous. He had Plato arrested and sold into slavery, though Dion was able to rescue him and send him back to Athens. After Dionysius’s death, his son and successor Dionysius II, tutored by his uncle Dion, was set to become the philosopher-king of Plato’s dreams, and Plato went back again to supervise the operation. But it turned out badly once more, and the experiment had to be abandoned.

That might have been the end of it, but Plato was a gifted writer, and thanks to his books, theories that were inapplicable in practice became widely accepted. In his Republic and again in his Laws, Plato laid out the principles by which he believed society ought to be governed. Despite their idealism, both books (but especially the Republic) have become classics of world literature and have influenced countless generations of statesmen through the ages. It was in these works that Plato got to grips with the problem of religion. Earlier philosophers had rejected the myths of the gods as recounted by poets like Homer, but they generally avoided the subject because it was too dangerous. Socrates, after all, was put to death because he was an atheist who rejected the Athenian gods, and few people wanted to share his fate. Plato did not have to worry about that—the death of Socrates was such a scandal, and Plato’s hero worship of his master was so influential, that nobody would have dared to subject him to trial and execution for his beliefs.

But Plato was no less critical of the gods than Socrates and others had been. Like his predecessors, he rejected popular religious practices, which he regarded as superstitious and ignorant. But unlike them, he sought to explain the traditional stories of the gods in a way that made some kind of sense. It was he who invented the term theologia, the study of the gods, which we would do better to translate as “mythology” rather than “theology” in the modern sense.7 The myths of Greece and of other nations were attempts to explain how the world works to people who were incapable of pure rational thought. They needed stories to help them understand, and stories were what they got. They were far from perfect, of course, but unenlightened people could hardly be expected to rise above them. In a state run by philosophers, mythology and religion would be redundant because logical explanation would suffice to explain everything. That in itself would not be enough to get rid of religion, so in the Laws Plato advocated banning it altogether. People who clung to their outdated myths would have to be coerced into accepting the unvarnished truth, and the whole panoply of rites, sacrifices, and temple worship would be dismantled. Once all that was out of the way, nobody would have a choice. Reason would rule them, and those who could not (or would not) accept it would be punished for their recalcitrance. That this was undemocratic did not bother Plato in the slightest—democracy was not conducive to science as he conceived it. Nor was he worried that religion might address questions that surpassed the competence of reason, because there was no such thing. Reason was the entry into the realm of light, and anything else was a dangerous distraction from the pursuit of truth.

Modern readers are familiar with Plato’s attacks on religion because they were recycled by atheist governments in the twentieth century in their attempts to suppress traditional religious observances. But it would be a great mistake to conclude from this that Plato was an atheist in the modern sense. He portrayed Socrates as a man who believed in a transcendent Deity who dwelt in the realm of the forms and ideas. That realm was akin to the rational soul and was necessary in order to make sense of the transmigration of souls in which Plato believed. How much of this goes back to Socrates is impossible to say for sure, but it seems clear that the charge of “atheism” leveled against him was false—at least from a modern perspective. Whatever we think about that, there is no reason to doubt that Plato believed what he put in the mouth of Socrates, and the charge of atheism cannot be made against him.

More importantly, there is evidence that Plato had a vision of the Deity that went well beyond anything Socrates might have thought and that comes close in many respects to what Jews and Christians believe about God. The main source for our knowledge of this is the Timaeus, one of Plato’s later dialogues that reflects the time he spent in southern Italy and Sicily. The fictional Timaeus was portrayed as an Italian Greek, more attuned to the ideas of Pythagoras than to those of Socrates or anyone else. Plato used Timaeus to expound his own adoption of Pythagorean numerology as the basis of the entire universe.8 What he came up with was the picture of a Supreme Creator (dēmiourgos), who used the forms/ideas as a kind of blueprint to fashion our world. These forms/ideas were not created by him but already existed as numbers. Nor could the Creator invent or even modify the four elements, which also predated his activity. He created by reproducing himself, the only way that he could ensure that his creation would be as perfect as possible. From there, Plato followed Pythagoras’s geometry and produced a scheme that embraced the four traditional elements. The triangle, which was the basis of the pyramid, was also the shape of fire. The cube (four squares or eight triangles) was earth, the octahedron (eight squares) was air, and finally the twenty-sided icosahedron—an elaborate combination of squares and triangles—was water.

In addition to these four “solids,” as Plato called them, there was a fifth, which was the twelve-sided dodecahedron. This was not made from triangles but from what Pythagoras called the pentagon, a device by which he could shape squares and triangles into spheres—the perfect shapes, which the Creator, operating through his agents the Olympian gods, used to build both heaven and earth. The result was a universe that is a perfect mathematical construction. Moreover, it is the only universe that can exist, since it is modeled on the image of the Creator himself. The spheres move (or stay put) in different measures, but there is a perfect harmony among them, which later generations would call “the music of the spheres.” The Creator of this perfect system dwells above and beyond it, but presides over it and maintains it in being. Matter has no significance in itself unless and until the rational Creator sets to work on it. That is what gives it its meaning, and when we study it that is what we should be looking for. In line with what Heraclitus had said, the world that appears to us to be constantly changing is in fact a unity that does not change but stays eternally the same. Our senses do not perceive this, but by the use of our reason we can attain to that knowledge and be at peace with the universe.

The Timaeus was the one dialogue of Plato’s that was translated (badly and only partially) into Latin and was read in Western Europe throughout the Middle Ages.9 Christian theologians and philosophers naturally interpreted it in the light of the Bible. Not surprisingly, Plato seemed to them to be a kind of Christian before the coming of Christ, one of the few gentiles on whom the light of truth had shone. There is indeed a remarkable similarity between much of what Plato said and what the Bible teaches, but there are also differences that cannot be ignored. The Platonic Creator was not the originator of all things—both the forms and the matter on which he worked were already in existence and their limitations constrained his activity to a large extent. Even more importantly, Plato’s Creator was not a person with whom it was possible to have a relationship. The Platonic Creator certainly acted in what to us would be personal ways, so it is easy for us to think in those terms, but Plato did not. Whatever the Creator was, he (or it) operated exclusively through mathematical reason. The Creator had no love or emotion, and no interaction with the created order of the kind that we find in the Bible. At best, the Creator might be equated with the God of natural theology, but not with the Father of Jesus Christ, who sacrificed himself for the sins of the world. That was a dimension of divine activity that was alien to Plato and remains problematic for all forms of Platonism, including Christian ones that try to harmonize his views with those of the apostles and prophets in the Holy Scriptures. But whatever conclusions we come to about that, it is safe to say that Plato was not an atheist and that claims to that effect, based on his opposition to religion, are wide of the mark.

ARISTOTLE

Plato’s most famous pupil was Aristotle (384–322 BC), a Greek from the borders of Macedonia in the north who came to Athens to sit at his feet. Aristotle learned a good deal from Plato, and his thought reflects his master in many ways, but he is famous not because he was Plato’s disciple but because he rejected many of the principles that Plato taught and went a different way. As a result, students of the history of Western philosophy are accustomed to dividing the subject into contrasting emphases, the Platonic and the Aristotelian—and in the minds of many, never the twain shall meet. This is an exaggeration, because there is much that unites the two men and their ways of thinking. They both based their interpretation of the world on reason. They agreed that the material world is shaped by immutable, eternal forms that transcend matter. But where Plato thought that those forms had to be found above and beyond matter, Aristotle insisted that they only had meaning within it. To put it a different way, for Plato the world we see around us was always under judgment from a higher authority. For Aristotle, it was under investigation instead.

Legend tells us that Plato and Aristotle fell out while the latter was the former’s student, but that does not appear to have been the case. Most likely it was only after Plato’s death that Aristotle went his own way, though doubtless the seeds of disagreement with his master were being sown long before that. Aristotle accepted the Pythagorean notion that mathematics is a logically pure and exact science, and that philosophical principles ought likewise to be logically consistent, but he did not conclude from this that philosophy is a form of mathematics. If it were, as Plato thought, then a proposition could be shown to be true without experiment—mathematical certainty would allow us to predict what the outcome of our experience would be, and if things did not add up the way they should, the fault would be in us and not in the theory that governed our calculations. Aristotle rejected that. He said that reality is what we see around us and that its meaning and coherence had to be discovered by experiment. Only once the experiment has been conducted and its results analyzed could a theory be constructed that would explain the process at work. By following this method, Aristotle was able to classify different species of creatures and examine their interrelationships.