The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization (Politically Incorrect Guides) (22 page)

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Authors: Anthony Esolen

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If the Romans were suspicious of the Christians, the Christians too were divided on what to make of Roman ways. Many saw no reason to withdraw from Roman civic life. At the time of Marcus Aurelius, the philosopher and emperor who permitted a terrible persecution of Christians—wherein Saint Justin earned his honorific title as Martyr—many of the soldiers in the Roman legions were Christian. The African theologian Tertullian (c. 160–235) relates an account, probably fictitious, of a letter in which Marcus himself “testifies that the great drought in Germany was broken by rain obtained through the prayers of Christians, who, as it chanced, were among his soldiers” (
Apology,
5.6). The point is not whether the miracle happened, but that it was uncontroversial for Tertullian to remark that Christians served in the Roman armies. The Christian loved his country too, and would fight to defend it against invaders.
 
But many Christians saw wisdom in isolation. The intellectuals divided according to whether they thought pagan learning was worthwhile, or ought to be rejected altogether. Tertullian, in his fiery way, flung the most famous cry of scorn:
 
What indeed has Athens to do with Jerusalem? What concord is there between the Academy and the Church? what between heretics and Christians? (
Against the Heresies,
ch. 7)
 
 
 
 
Faith and Reason
 
If the fathers thought of revealed truth as the more certain knowledge, the early Christian father, and [the Jewish philosopher] Philo before him, often made the important supplementary assumption that there is really only one truth, and properly conducted philosophy or human reason will also arrive at that truth.
Marshall Clagett
,
Greek Science in
Antiquity
 
 
Or will arrive at as much of the truth as it can, given the limits of reason and the matter under investigation. Clagett is not sympathetic to Christian theology, but he is an honest historian. Such confidence in reason will allow for the “virility of the Hellenistic tradition in the thirteenth century in mathematics, mechanics, and other subjects” (168). The Greek spirit of brave inquiry, central to the West’s intellectual heritage, was
more
characteristic of the University of Paris in the days of Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventure than it is now, anywhere in America.
 
 
Saint Jerome, translator of the Latin or “Vulgate” Bible, was a classically trained writer and rhetorician. Perhaps he had a bad conscience about it, because he dreamed one night that Christ appeared to him to ask, sternly, “Are you a Ciceronian, or are you a Christian?”
8
,
9
 
But Jerome continued to write in Ciceronian prose. And most Christians decided to take what the pagan culture offered, on the principle that God grants to all peoples some knowledge of the truth, as incomplete as that knowledge must be, and as distorted by bad customs and error. In this regard they did not break with the Scriptures or with Jewish practice. For Jews dwelling in Alexandria and elsewhere in the Greek-speaking world had, in the two centuries before Christ, become familiar with Greek philosophy, and used its terms, and sometimes its ideas, to illuminate their sacred writings. The Book of Wisdom (c. 150 BC), though profoundly Hebrew in its conception of a personal God who makes covenants with a chosen people, is indebted to Platonic and Pythagorean philosophy, even as it boldly claims to correct that philosophy, particularly by founding wisdom in a relationship with its Giver:
 
For both we and our words are in his hand,
 
as are all understanding and skill in crafts.
 
For it is he who gave me unerring knowledge of what exists, to know the structure of the world and the activity of the elements;
 
the beginning and end and middle of times, the alternations of the solstices and the changes of the seasons, the cycles of the year and the constellations of the stars, the natures of animals and the tempers of wild beasts, the powers of spirits and the reasonings of men. (Wis. 7:16–20)
 
 
The apostle John, writing from the Greek city of Ephesus, follows the same strategy. His gospel is an answer both to Jewish commitment to the Law of Moses and to the Greek search for the fundamental order of the cosmos. The Stoics had called that order the
logos,
meaning “structure” or “logic” or “word.” John seems to agree with them: and then stuns them by declaring not simply that the logos underlay the world, but that
through it the world was made,
and that (most unbecoming of a Greek principle) it entered the world in the flesh: “And the
Word
was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth” (Jn. 1:14).
 
It is the same confidence and judicious generosity that moved Augustine to see in Platonism a preparation for the New Testament. In the Platonists, he says, “I read, not indeed in these words but much the same thought, enforced by many varied arguments, that ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God’” (
Confessions
, 7.9; citing John 1:1). Much else he found there, and yet much he did not find, particularly regarding the salvation of sinners. Augustine, like Jerome, could acknowledge the greatness of the pagan philosophers, and, like Jerome, was ready to affirm that greatness is perhaps not the finest thing in the world: “For ‘you have hidden these things from the wise, and have revealed them to little ones,’ so that they who labor and are burdened might come to him and he would refresh them. For he is meek and humble of heart, and he guides the meek in judgment.” (cf. Matt. 11:29–30)
 
So the Christian thinkers neither rejected the pagan philosophers nor accepted them simply. They engaged them, and breathed life back into them. For, except for the half-mystical development of Neoplatonism, pagan philosophy was as stale and old as pagan religion. If Jerusalem could get along without Athens, Athens could no longer get along without Jerusalem. Philosophy derived the powerful understanding of God not simply as supreme among beings, but as
the Being
whose essence it is to exist; or what “person” means; or the role of free will in the choice between good and evil. The results far extended philosophy’s reach. Augustine, for one, is our first great examiner of the nature of time. He is our first philosopher of history. He affirms a distinction between two kinds of love, in the Platonist fashion, but with Christian meanings attached to them: lust and charity. That distinction will remain fruitful in philosophy and art for over a thousand years. You cannot understand Chaucer or Dante or Shakespeare without it.
 
A few Christian writers, revering the old philosophy, tried to preserve it in its own right. Here the politically correct historian will scoff, noting that in 529 the eastern emperor Justinian shut down the old Platonic Academy. But if that school had burned to the ground three hundred years before, Western civilization would not have been the worse. The school had long been committed to a sterile skepticism, and produced no work of note. Besides, we are the last people who should complain about discarding ancient curricula. We cannot manage to preserve the teaching of grammar, let alone the metaphysical flights of Plato.
 
So then, after the fall of Rome in the West in 476, the most learned man of his age, Boethius, deeply influenced by the Platonists and the Stoics, by the writings of Augustine and other Church fathers, did all he could to preserve and develop the ancient philosophy. It was already difficult to procure Greek texts in the West, given the political upheavals, so he translated into Latin several of Aristotle’s works on logic and linguistics. He attempted to show a deep harmony between Plato and Aristotle. He wrote a treatise on music, inspired by Pythagoras, that became the standard textbook until the eighteenth century. And as he awaited a horrible execution for a trumped-up charge of treason (the ruling Goths feared that a patriotic old Roman might betray them to the Emperor in the East), he wrote his masterpiece,
The Consolation of Philosophy
. For the next thousand years, only the Bible was translated more often. In it, this orthodox Christian scholar employs Platonic dialogue, with classical poetry, to prove that the wicked do not prosper, and that the just cannot be harmed by the evil that men do to them. It is steeped in the lessons of the Book of Job and the Gospel of John, but it does not cite Scripture. By then, it did not need to.
 
How Christians elevated culture
 
What did the Christians cherish from the pagan traditions, and what did they change?
 
They raised the status of women.
 
It’s dogma in our public schools today that women in ancient times were oppressed, because women had no voting rights, women had not the same opportunities as men, and so forth. You will be mocked if you deny that this spells oppression. If you’re a college professor and you deny it, get ready for the stake.
 
But the charges are anachronistic and chauvinist. People who make them never imagine what it was like for people of another culture to put food on the table, a roof over their heads, and clothes on their backs, never mind bearing enough children to keep the population stable. The Romans in general treated their wives with esteem. The matron of the house had better be consulted along with the important males if the paterfamilias was going to make a decision. Still, the Christians preached that there was no separate baptism for men and women. All were one in Christ. If Christ was Himself the Holy of Holies, then that inner sanctum was thrown open for all. Jesus had been seen on Easter first by women, then by his apostles. The Gnostic heretics, who disdained the body, have Jesus saying that one could not be blessed unless one were made male; Christians condemned that nonsense. They did not expose baby girls (or boys, either). They did not divorce their wives. They shunned sexual practices that put them and their spouses at risk. They honored women who defied emperors, centurions and soldiers to witness to the faith. In his
Confessions,
Saint Augustine wrote the first tribute in history to an ordinary woman, his mother Monica, without whose love and faithful prayer he would never have known the love of God. (9.8–13)
 
Even so, early Christians were sexist because they, like everybody else who has walked the earth until now, did not treat women as indistinguishable from men. That indifference is our politically correct ideal, though it’s hard to name a time and place wherein women would not have decried such treatment as insulting.
 
They palliated pagan cruelties.
 
Christians did not take part in the blood sports of the arena. That does not mean that all of them kept away from the stands; but the Christian attitude toward the gladiatorial combats is well captured by, again, the irrepressible Tertullian:
 
And are we to wait now for a scriptural condemnation of the amphitheatre? If we can plead that cruelty is allowed us, if impiety, if brute savagery, by all means let us go to the amphitheatre. (
De Spectaculis
)
 
 
Those games were as popular then as football in America is now, or soccer in Europe; but Christ’s injunction to love one’s enemy would eventually put to death the sport of death.
 
Christians were forbidden to help riddle the whores with diseases. We can’t attribute moral degeneracy to the whole Roman empire; but the most populous cities really were sinkholes of depravity, if we can trust pagan and Christian testimony. Here’s Clement of Alexandria again, describing how low the debauchery descended:
 
Such are the trophies of your social licentiousness which are exhibited: the evidence of these deeds are the prostitutes. Alas for such wickedness!...For fathers, unmindful of children of theirs that have been exposed, often without their knowledge, have intercourse with a son that has debauched himself, and daughters that are prostitutes. (
Paedogogus,
3.3)
 

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