Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (6 page)

Democracies such as that of Athens notoriously had their limits. Many of the great and wealthy families in city-states had survived ejection from power and continued to be a significant force in public affairs, as great families always will. They were particularly dominant in office-holding in Athens, where their continuing aristocratic ethos meant that snobbery and respect for elite lifestyles always competed with the democratic impulse. Democracy gave no role to half the population: women, who in a culture which took far more interest in the emotional and intellectual relationships formed between males, were generally secluded in the domestic sphere - in the funeral oration for the great Athenian Pericles, it was said that the greatest Athenian woman was she who was spoken about least by men, whether in praise or criticism.
¹⁴
Given that life expectancy was low, a threshold of thirty years of age for participation also excluded a majority of males. Democratic participation excluded all Greeks who were not born citizens of the
polis
in which they now lived, and participation also relied on the body of enfranchised citizens having enough leisure time to listen to debates on policy and then take a part in decision-making. This required a large body of slaves to do a great deal of work for citizens, and naturally slaves had no useful opinions. Take all these factors together and perhaps only around a fifth of the adult inhabitants of proudly democratic Classical Athens could actually be described as active citizens: those who were considered best to represent the community of the
polis.
Nevertheless, with all these caveats, large numbers of ordinary people who were not privileged by birth or divine favour were indeed charged with responsibility for their own future and the future of their community.

This was a frightening responsibility. Could frail human beings bear the emotional load? This is surely one of the chief reasons why the Greeks searched for meaning in cosmos and society with an intensity unparalleled elsewhere in Mediterranean civilization, and why they were more inclined than others to detach that search from structures of traditional religion. Philosophers involved themselves intimately in debate about what society should be like and how it should govern itself. Some did this through deliberately aggressive and paradoxical distancing from everyday life, brutally to present reality to their fellow citizens, particularly the complacently wealthy. So Diogenes of Sinope, whom the philosopher Plato nicknamed 'Socrates gone mad', became a wandering beggar and, when infesting Athens with his presence, he slept in a large wine jar (he was sufficiently appreciated by the citizenry that when a teenage vandal broke his jar the
ekklesia
is said to have bought him a replacement and to have had the boy flogged). His lifestyle was an enacted reminder that although human beings were rational animals, they were still animals - he was nicknamed 'the dog', from which his admirers and imitators took the name Cynics ('those like dogs'). Christianity has at various stages produced saints in his mould, holy fools and others openly contemptuous of worldly wealth, although they have rarely shared Diogenes's propensity for masturbation in public as a symbol of detachment from conventional values.
¹⁵

At the other extreme, there were philosophers who plunged into practical politics. Followers of the mystical mathematician Pythagoras seized power in a number of Greek cities in south Italy during the late sixth and the fifth centuries BCE, but they generally do not seem to have made a great success of their activism, which included an alarming tendency to live by intricate binding rules - this, not surprisingly, caused violent resentment among fellow citizens who did not share their obsessions.
¹⁶
Most philosophers would not take such risks, and saw their calling as to offer comment on and analysis of the society around them, as part of a wider exploration of humanity and its environment. Much of their comment was openly critical. Patterns were provided by three philosophers who taught in Athens: Socrates (
c
. 469-399 BCE), Plato (428/7-348/7 BCE) and Aristotle (384-322 BCE). This trio are foundational to the Western philosophical tradition, first Greek, then Roman. Christians inherited Graeco-Roman culture and thought, and when they have talked about questions of faith or morals or have tried to make sense of their sacred books, it has taken an extraordinary effort of will and original imagination to avoid doing so in ways already created by the Greeks. It was particularly difficult in the early centuries, when Christianity was so much dominated by the Classical thought-world around it, at the very time when it was having to do a great deal of hard thinking as to what it actually believed.

Socrates wrote nothing himself and we hear his voice mediated through writings of his pupil and admirer Plato, mostly in dialogue form. While he was teaching in Athens, his was an insistently and infuriatingly questioning voice, embodying the conviction that questions can never cease to be asked if human beings are to battle with any success against the constant affliction of public and private problems. At Socrates's trial, Plato portrays the philosopher as insisting in his speech of defence that 'the unexamined life is not worth living'.
¹⁷
It was Socrates's questioning of the half-century-old Athenian democracy which was a major cause of his trial and execution; his trial is the central event around which Plato's dialogues are focused, making it as much a trial of Athenian society and thought as it was of Socrates. The grotesque absurdity of killing a man who was arguably Athens's greatest citizen on charges of blasphemy and immorality impelled Plato to see a discussion of politics as one facet of discussions of justice, the nature of morality and divine purpose - in fact to see the two discussions as interchangeable. Western religion and philosophy have remained in the shadow of those exchanges: Western culture has borrowed the insistence of Socrates that priority should be given over received wisdom to logical argument and rational procession of thought, and the Western version of the Christian tradition is especially prone to this Socratic principle. Yet he was also to find his most mischievous disciple in a nineteenth-century Danish Lutheran who overturned even the systematic pursuit of rationality: Soren Kierkegaard (see pp. 833-5).

Plato's influence on Christianity was equally profound in two other directions. First, his view of reality and authenticity propelled one basic impulse in Christianity, to look beyond the immediate and everyday to the universal or ultimate. In his dialogue
The Republic
, he represents Socrates as telling a story which in more than one sense illuminates the Platonic view of the human condition. Prisoners are chained in a cave, facing a wall; their bonds are fixed in such a way that the wall is all they can see. Behind them a great fire roars, but between them and the fire is a walkway, on which people parade a series of objects, such as carved images of animals or humans, whose shadows fall on the wall under the prisoners' gaze. The bearers pronounce the names of the objects as they pass and the echoes of the names bounce off the wall. All the prisoners can experience, therefore, are shadows and echoes. That is what they understand to be reality. If any of them are released, the brightness of the sun's real light is blinding, and makes their sight of any of the real objects less convincing than the shadows which they have come to know so well, and the echoing names which they have heard.
¹⁸
Human life is an imprisonment in the cave. The particular phenomena we perceive in our lives are shadows of their ideal 'Forms', which represent truer and higher versions of reality than the ones which we can readily know. We should not be content with these shadows. An individual human soul should do its best to find its way back to the Forms which lie behind the world of our clouded senses, because there we may find
arete
- excellence or virtue. The path is through the intellect. 'Excellence [
arete
] of soul' is our chief purpose or direction, because beyond even the Forms is the Supreme Soul, who is God and who is ultimate
arete
.

Plato's second major contribution to Christian discussion is his conception of what God's nature encompasses: oneness and goodness. Plato took his cue from Socrates's radical rethinking on the traditional Greek range of gods (the 'pantheon'), looked beyond it and made ethics central to his discussion of divinity. The pantheon portrayed in both Greek myth and the Homeric epics can hardly be said to exemplify virtue: the origins of the gods in particular make up an extraordinary catalogue of horrors and violence. Hesiod's
Theogony
named the first divinity as Chaos; among the divinities who emerged from him, representing the cosmos spawned out of chaos, was Gaia, the Earth. Gaia's son Ouranos/ Uranus (the Sky) incestuously mated with his mother and had twelve children, whom he forced back into Gaia's womb; Gaia's youngest son, Kronos/Cronus, castrated his father, Ouranos, before in turn committing incest with his sister and attempting to murder all their children. How unlike the home life of the Christian Trinity. Matters only marginally improved in the generation of Zeus. If one were compiling a school report on the behaviour of the Olympian gods, it would have to include comments on their lack of moral responsibility, consistent pity or compassion.

Greeks generally looked on this disconcerting lack of moral predictability among their divinities with cheerful resignation and did their best to secure the best bargain available from them by due ceremonial observances at home or in temples or shrines. Now Plato presented a very different picture of the ultimate God. His perspective looking beyond the traditional pantheon has a further dimension, which does actually in effect limit the way in which he envisaged the goodness of God. Although Plato's supreme God is unlike the fickle, jealous, quarrelsome gods of the Greek pantheon, his God is distanced from compassion for human tragedy, because compassion is a passion or emotion. For Plato, the character of true deity is not merely goodness, but also oneness. Although Plato nowhere explicitly draws the conclusion from that oneness, it points to the proposition that God also represents perfection. Being perfect, the supreme God is also without passions, since passions involve change from one mood to another, and it is in the nature of perfection that it cannot change. This passionless perfection contrasts with the passion, compassion and constant intervention of Israel's God, despite the fact that both the Platonic and the Hebrew views of God stress transcendence. There is a difficulty in envisaging how Plato's God could create the sort of changeable, imperfect, messy world in which we live - indeed, have any meaningful contact with it. Even the created wholeness of the Forms would most appropriately have been created by one other than the God who is the Supreme Soul: perhaps an image of the Supreme Soul, an image which Plato describes in one of the most influential of his dialogues,
Timaeus
, as a craftsman or artificer (
demiourgos
, from which comes the English term 'demiurge').
¹⁹
Creation was likely to extend away from God in a hierarchy of emanations from the supreme reality of the divine.

Plato's discussion of God fed into the commonplaces of discussion of divinity in the ancient world, and that, as we will see, became a problem for Christians as they tried to talk about their faith. But equally influential was the work of Plato's pupil Aristotle. He was led in a very different direction in his quest for truth. While Plato had sought for reality in the ideals beyond the particular - feeling, for instance, that an ultimate Form of 'treeness' was more real than any individual tree - Aristotle sought for reality in individual and observable objects. He classified different sorts of tree. For him, the path to knowledge lay in searching out as much information and opinion as possible about the objects and forms which exist and can be described in the world of human senses. The difference can be seen by comparing the ways in which the two philosophers approached that perennial Greek preoccupation, government. Plato in his
Republic
presents an elite-dominated, authoritarian society. Although apparently an ideal, it directly confronts, indeed subverts, the Athenian democracy which Plato had observed descending, through its petty politicking and distorted judgement, into authorizing the execution of Socrates. No one sane has sought to replicate Plato's picture of government in the real world - although some insane societies have warmed to his recommendation that the activities of musicians should be curbed and all poets expelled. One hopes that Plato did not intend it to be more than a mirror for societies, including his own, to contemplate.
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By contrast, Aristotle organized a research team to gather data on as many different existing governments as possible from which to produce potted descriptions of them. Only one remains, rediscovered in the nineteenth century, and, as luck would have it, it is the description of the constitution of Athens.
²¹

This was characteristic of Aristotle's approach. He applied the same technique to all branches of knowledge, from subjects like biology and physics to theories of literature and rhetoric (the art of public speaking and debate). Equally, he discussed abstract matters such as logic, meaning and causation in a series of texts which, being placed in his collected works after his treatise on physics, were given the functional label
meta ta physica
, 'After
The Physics
'. And so the name of metaphysics, the study of the nature of reality, was born in an accident. Aristotle's work therefore resembles a gigantic filing system, and what survives to us from it is not in the polished form of dialogues, like most of Plato's writings, but lecture notes taken down by his pupils and assistants. Those unnamed assistants, had they known it, were wielding an intoxicating power over the future, because for two thousand years after his death Aristotle would set the way in which Christians and Muslims alike shaped their thoughts about the best way to organize and think about the physical world, about the arts and the pursuit of virtue.