Pagans and Philosophers: The Problem of Paganism from Augustine to Leibniz - Hardcover

Marenbon, John

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0691142556 ISBN 13: 9780691142555

Publisher: Princeton University Press, 2015

Synopsis

From the turn of the fifth century to the beginning of the eighteenth, Christian writers were fascinated and troubled by the "Problem of Paganism," which this book identifies and examines for the first time. How could the wisdom and virtue of the great thinkers of antiquity be reconciled with the fact that they were pagans and, many thought, damned? Related questions were raised by encounters with contemporary pagans in northern Europe, Mongolia, and, later, America and China. Pagans and Philosophers explores how writers--philosophers and theologians, but also poets such as Dante, Chaucer, and Langland, and travelers such as Las Casas and Ricci--tackled the Problem of Paganism. Augustine and Boethius set its terms, while Peter Abelard and John of Salisbury were important early advocates of pagan wisdom and virtue. University theologians such as Aquinas, Scotus, Ockham, and Bradwardine, and later thinkers such as Ficino, Valla, More, Bayle, and Leibniz, explored the difficulty in depth. Meanwhile, Albert the Great inspired Boethius of Dacia and others to create a relativist conception of scientific knowledge that allowed Christian teachers to remain faithful Aristotelians. At the same time, early anthropologists such as John of Piano Carpini, John Mandeville, and Montaigne developed other sorts of relativism in response to the issue. A sweeping and original account of an important but neglected chapter in Western intellectual history, Pagans and Philosophers provides a new perspective on nothing less than the entire period between the classical and the modern world.

About this title

About the Author

John Marenbon is a senior research fellow at Trinity College, University of Cambridge, honorary professor of medieval philosophy at Cambridge, and a fellow of the British Academy. He is the author and editor of many books, including Abelard in Four Dimensions, The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Philosophy, The Cambridge Companion to Boethius, and Medieval Philosophy: An Historical and Philosophical Introduction.

From the Back Cover

"In this book, John Marenbon exhibits remarkable erudition and a formidable command of the relevant texts, both scholastic and literary. He is adept at setting out complex issues in a clear way, and his book incorporates much little-known and fascinating material in the history of ideas."--Anthony Kenny, author of A New History of Western Philosophy

"With this book, Marenbon creates rather than contributes to a field, framing the problem of paganism in a new way for medievalists and early modern specialists in particular. It is not a historical study of the gradual development of the notion of paganism in late antiquity, but an overview of the patterns in which medieval and early modern thinkers interpreted and responded to the notion for themselves. Few scholars write with such elegance; the style is uncluttered, clear, and fast-paced, keeping the bigger picture in view throughout."--John Magee, University of Toronto

From the Inside Flap

"In this book, John Marenbon exhibits remarkable erudition and a formidable command of the relevant texts, both scholastic and literary. He is adept at setting out complex issues in a clear way, and his book incorporates much little-known and fascinating material in the history of ideas."--Anthony Kenny, author of A New History of Western Philosophy

"With this book, Marenbon creates rather than contributes to a field, framing the problem of paganism in a new way for medievalists and early modern specialists in particular. It is not a historical study of the gradual development of the notion of paganism in late antiquity, but an overview of the patterns in which medieval and early modern thinkers interpreted and responded to the notion for themselves. Few scholars write with such elegance; the style is uncluttered, clear, and fast-paced, keeping the bigger picture in view throughout."--John Magee, University of Toronto

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Pagans and Philosophers

The Problem of Paganism from Augustine to Leibniz

By John Marenbon

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2015 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-691-14255-5

Contents

Preface, ix, 
A Note on References and Citations, xi, 
Introduction: The Problem of Paganism, 1, 
Part I: The Problem Takes Shape, 
CHAPTER 1 Prelude: Before Augustine, 19, 
CHAPTER 2 Augustine, 23, 
CHAPTER 3 Boethius, 42, 
Part II: From Alcuin to Langland, 
CHAPTER 4 The Early Middle Ages and the Christianization of Europe, 57, 
CHAPTER 5 Abelard, 73, 
CHAPTER 6 John of Salisbury and the Encyclopaedic Tradition, 95, 
CHAPTER 7 Arabi, Mongolia and Beyond: Contemporary Pagans in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries, 109, 
CHAPTER 8 Aristotelian Wisdom: Unity, Rejection or Relativism, 127, 
CHAPTER 9 University Theologians on Pagan Virtue and Salvation, 160, 
CHAPTER 10 Dante and Boccaccio, 188, 
CHAPTER 11 Langland and Chaucer, 214, 
Part III: The Continuity of the Problem of Paganism, 1400–1700, 
CHAPTER 12 Pagan Knowledge, 1400–1700, 235, 
CHAPTER 13 Pagan Virtue, 1400–1700, 263, 
CHAPTER 14 The Salvation of Pagans, 1400–1700, 281, 
Epilogue: Leibniz and China, 301, 
General Conclusion, 304, 
Bibliography, 307, 
Index, 339, 

CHAPTER 1

Prelude: Before Augustine

THE TERMS OF THE PROBLEM OF PAGANISM, AS IT WOULD BE DISCUSSED in the West until the end of the seventeenth century, were set above all by two late ancient writers, Augustine and Boethius, the subjects of the two chapters following. This chapter provides a prelude. It begins by looking at the earliest Christian reaction to ancient paganism, in the New Testament texts which became points of reference in later discussions, before offering a glimpse of how the problem was addressed by Christians in the ancient world, before Augustine transformed it for the Latin tradition.

The Problem of Paganism in the New Testament

Elements of the Problem of Paganism are found from very early in the Christian tradition: not in the Gospels, set in their firmly Jewish environment, but in the Acts of the Apostles and in Paul's letter to the Romans. Luke's account, in the Acts, of Paul's time in Athens has the apostle appalled by the idolatry of the inhabitants, scoffed at by Epicurean and Stoic philosophers (xvii, 18), but willing to concede a share of wisdom to the Athenians by identifying the unknown God to whom they had dedicated an altar with the true God he was preaching: 'what therefore you worship, without knowing it, that I preach to you'. When Paul preached the resurrection of the dead, Luke writes (xvii, 32–34), some mocked him, some wanted to hear more, and 'certain men adhering to him, did believe', including an Areopagite (a member of the court which sat there) called Dionysius. (Sometime in the fifth century, a Christian writer heavily influenced by Neoplatonism supplied this Areopagite with a set of writings, which were intensively studied in the Middle Ages.)

Paul's own attitude, as expressed in his letter to the Romans, was both more complex and less friendly to pagans than what Luke attributed to him:

For the invisible things of him, from the creation of the world, are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made; his eternal power also, and divinity: so that they are inexcusable. Because that, when they knew God, they have not glorified him as God, or given thanks; but became vain in their thoughts, and their foolish heart was darkened. For professing themselves to be wise, they became fools. And they changed the glory of the incorruptible God into the likeness of the image of a corruptible man, and of birds, and of four-footed beasts, and of creeping things. Wherefore God gave them up to the desires of their heart, unto uncleanness, to dishonour their own bodies among themselves. Who changed the truth of God into a lie; and worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed for ever. Amen. (Romans i, 20–25)

Paul regards the pagans as corrupt and idolatrous, and he wants to condemn them. But he has in mind the unspoken objection that, if they had no knowledge of the true God and his law, they could not be blamed, and so he suggests that the pagans did know God through his visible creation but did not properly glorify him and became vain and immoral. In the same vein, in the next chapter he talks of Gentiles who lack revealed law but have 'the law written in their hearts'. This passage therefore, despite its hostile tone, could—and would—be used to give biblical authority to the idea that wise pagans knew the true God through his creation.

Paul influenced not only views about pagans' virtue and wisdom, but also the discussion about their salvation. Indeed, it was he—and the way he would be read by Augustine—who made it a problem. Christian doctrine might well have developed in such a way that the salvation of just pagans, at least in the period before Christ, was a matter of course, had it not been for Paul's emphasis on justification by faith in Christ, and on the gratuitousness of God's choice of whom to save. As reconstructed by scholars today, Paul's concern was to lessen the importance of the Jewish Law as part of his efforts to convert non-Jews. But his repeated statements that we can be justified only by faith in Christ made it seem difficult or impossible to explain how anyone who did not believe in Christ—such as a virtuous pagan, even a monotheistic one—could be saved. And the rhetoric of Romans ix, which proclaims God's freedom, as creator, to show mercy to one person, and harden the heart of another, to cast away a human as a potter might a vessel of clay, seemed to explain how such seeming injustice befits the divinity.

The Problem of Paganism in the Early Church: A Sketch

Paul's letters date from the middle of the first century, the Acts from ten to twenty years later. When, in the early second century, converts started to include men with a philosophical and literary education, they developed a much more unambiguously positive view of the wisdom of pagan philosophers, though one which—understandably in the polemical context—was none the less designed to show its inferiority to the Christianity which they preached. Justin, who was martyred in 160, presented Christianity as the true philosophy. Basing himself on an idea which probably owed more to Jewish than Greek tradition, he explained that through the seed of the logos (the Word) naturally implanted in them, the pagan philosophers had gained a partial grasp of the truth; it was available fully to the Christians through the logos itself, Christ. Justin also explained parallels between Plato and other Greek philosophers and Christian teaching by the idea, which Jewish thinkers had already proposed, that the pagan thinkers had read Moses.

Clement of Alexandria (c. 150–c. 215) developed Justin's approach to pagan philosophy. Guided by the reason implanted in us, we are able, he thought, to pick out what is good in the various traditions—Platonism, Aristotelianism, Stoicism and Epicureanism. This philosophy offers some, but incomplete, knowledge of the true God (VI.5), and—as Clement stresses—much of it is taken from the 'barbarians', non-Greeks, most especially the Jews (V.14; VI.3). Clement also has an ingenious way, already adumbrated by Justin, of resolving the problem of how just pagans who lived before Christ's time could be saved. In his first epistle, Peter talks of Christ going, after his Crucifixion, to the prison (Hell) where all humans who had died until then were held and preaching to them (1 Peter iii, 19–20). On Clement's reading, this preaching in Hell gave those who died before Christian times the same chance to believe in Christ and so be saved by faith as those able to hear the Christian message in their lifetimes (VI.6). Although this idea was widely adopted by Greek thinkers, Augustine would reject it, and it never formed part of the Latin discussion.

The tradition of 'apologetic' writing begun by Justin and Clement (and other writers, less friendly to classical culture, such as Athenagoras and Tatian) was continued in the third century by Tertullian, Minucius Felix, Origen and Eusebius, and by Arnobius and Lactantius in the fourth. It was directly concerned to confront paganism, whether with the philosophical learning and depth of Origen writing against the pagan Platonist Celsus, or the elegance of Minucius Felix's Platonic dialogue, or in the more embattled tones of Athenagoras and Tertullian. More generally, all the more educated and thoughtful Church Fathers, such as Basil and Gregory of Nyssa among the Greeks, Ambrose and Jerome among the Latins, had to think about the relationship between the pagan philosophy or literature they knew well and the Christian teaching they were giving. Unlike the works of Justin and Clement of Alexandria, which were not generally known until the sixteenth century (when they were often cited to counter Augustine's severe views on pagan virtue and salvation), much of this other material was widely read in the Middle Ages. But even widely read and highly respected Latin Fathers, such as Ambrose and Jerome, had little voice once the distinctive form of the Problem of Paganism was formulated by Augustine and, though much less obviously, moulded by the influence of Boethius.

CHAPTER 2

Augustine

On 24 August 410, the Gothic leader Alaric and his army entered Rome and sacked it. Palaces were looted and burned, prisoners taken, women raped, bodies left to rot in the streets. Although the Goths withdrew after just three days, the fall of the Eternal City shocked educated Romans throughout the empire.

Why had such a disaster taken place? The discussion centred on the place of Christianity and the abandonment of the policy of toleration towards paganism, culminating in the Emperor Theodosius's ban on pagan cults in 391 and his order for the destruction of the great temple of Serapis in Alexandria. This focus may seem surprising, since the Goths who ransacked Rome were Christians, though adherents of what the Catholic Church regarded as the Arian heresy, which denied the divinity of Christ. But it was argued by the few remaining pagans that the Goths had been able to enter Rome because the public worship of the gods had been abandoned, and so the city no longer enjoyed their protection.

By this time most Romans were Christians, including the members of the senatorial aristocracy who had once been the guardians of paganism. Yet their Christianity was often superficial. Worried that their weak faith would be challenged by the pagan argument, Augustine set out to reply to it, and in doing so produced his most ambitious work, a Christian rethinking, not just of the history of Rome, but of the relationship between God and the course of human history. Written in the safety of North Africa (where, however, the influx of refugees kept the events in Italy vividly present), the City of God (CG), begun probably in 412 but not finished until about fourteen years later, is not merely an intellectual masterpiece; it is a foundational book for the Problem of Paganism. Although the problem has somewhat different contours for him from those it would take on in the Middle Ages, from the time of Abelard onwards, when pagan antiquity was no longer even a moribund reality, in the City of God and other works Augustine looks closely at three of the main strands of the problem—wisdom, salvation and virtue—and takes positions which set the agenda for almost all subsequent discussion.

The vicissitudes of Augustine's own life had put him in the position to play this foundational role. Son of (probably) a pagan father and a Christian mother, his education as a rhetorician instilled in him the values of classical Roman civilization, but he shared a widespread discontent with them. In his Confessions (397–401), he tells of his long search for a set of firm beliefs. For a time, he became a follower of Manichaeism, a dualist religion which he may have regarded as a type of Christianity. Then he transferred his intellectual allegiance to Platonism, before finally, in his early thirties (386), in an experience of conversion which he presents as both miraculous and transformational, he committed himself fully to Christianity, the religion he had known from birth, and gave up his secular ambitions. None of the writings from before his conversion survives, but chronological study of his works shows that, in a sense, the process of Christianization continued. At first, Augustine wrote in a manner close to that of a philosopher in the Platonic mould, but he came to take on specifically Christian subjects and sources, especially the Bible. By the time he came to write the City of God, in the last two decades of his life, he seems to look out from the stronghold of Christian teaching to the pagan culture which had formed him as something alien, but his own intellectual and spiritual journey never ceases to complicate this perspective.

Pagan Wisdom

Augustine's response to the pagans' arguments about the fall of Rome led him to rewrite Roman history. He shows with a wealth of historical evidence that the pagan gods were never the protectors of Rome their upholders claimed. The story of Rome is one of disasters and bloodshed, which the public worship of the gods did nothing to prevent (II.3; III). The only difference between the most recent calamity, the Gothic sack of Rome, and those of the past tells in favour of Christianity: the Goths respected the churches as places of sanctuary, in a way which no invader had treated pagan temples (I.1–2). On a second level, Augustine argues that it is wrong to think that God acts simply by rewarding those he has chosen, let alone some particular nation or empire, with worldly prosperity. Nations and empires flourish and decline as God wills, but often God's design is inscrutable. God may, indeed, repay good behaviour with success, as he did in the case of the Rome of Cato, where a few men, at least, showed high moral qualities in their devotion to public life (V.12, 15). But he sends affliction equally to the good and wicked, partly to emphasize that it is in the hereafter that reward and punishment will be given, partly because even good people are too attached to worldly things, and partly because the same adversities will be used differently by the wicked, whom they punish, and the good, whom they chasten and improve (I.8–10). Augustine rejects, then, any historiography that sees the Roman Empire in either pagan or Christian triumphal terms. It had been tempting for Augustine's Christian predecessors, who witnessed the empire convert more and more fully to Christianity, to discern in its flourishing the workings of God's plan. For Augustine, too, divine providence controls the Roman Empire, but not in any easily discernible way. Yet he does not believe that God's providence is hidden. On a third level, Augustine answers the pagans by replacing a secular (though sometimes Christianized) historiography with a theology of history. The first ten books of the City of God discuss Rome, its gods and its history. The final twelve trace out the plan of sacred history, from the creation to the last judgement. The City of God—not a physical city but the community of those who are, or will be, in Heaven—has a clear history and future. They are set out, not in the books of Roman history, but in the Bible. The past which Christians should make their own is not that of Roman triumph and Roman virtue—which, in any case, are illusory—but that of the Old Testament and its fulfilment in Christ.

Given this outlook, it might be expected that Augustine would think that pagans, even the philosophers, were merely victims and purveyors of false beliefs, not sources of knowledge. He did indeed dismiss the claims of any sort of polytheism, even Varro's sophisticated presentation of it, to be taken seriously. But his approach to the dominant pagan philosophical school was very different: personally engaged, nuanced and, though with qualifications, highly appreciative.

During the first two centuries of Christianity, the leading school of philosophy in the Roman Empire had been Stoicism. Its adherents might, in some sense, be considered worshippers of one God, and there was room for some of the earliest Christian thinkers to see Greek philosophy as a preparation for their own doctrine. But the type of philosophy which became dominant from the third century onwards had a relationship with Christianity at once closer and yet far more conflicted.

Plotinus (c. 204–70) presented himself as an interpreter of Plato's philosophy, but the ideas he advanced, often labelled 'Neoplatonism', owed much also to Aristotle, earlier followers of Plato and Plotinus's own philosophical genius. Like Plato, Plotinus believed that the world we perceive with our senses must be explained by what we can grasp only with our intellects. He distinguished three levels of explanation: the One, because the ultimate source of things must be entirely unitary; then Intellect, in which he places Plato's Ideas; and finally Soul, which accounts for movement and life in the universe. These three levels of explanation are not, however, constructs, but hierarchically ordered realities—indeed, they are alone what is truly real. There is (and was always for Christian readers) a temptation to see in these so-called hypostases Plotinus's God, which thereby turns out to be, not merely immaterial and ineffable, but also triune. Yet many interpreters would say that there is nothing in Plotinus's universe very similar to God in the Christian sense. Moreover, unlike Plotinus himself, his followers, Porphyry (c. 232–c. 305) and Iamblichus (c. 240–c. 325), considered pagan religious practices indispensable for the philosopher's intellectual ascent, and they linked Platonism with defence of the classical gods and opposition to Christianity.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0691142556
• ISBN 13: 9780691142555
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 368