[Apparently there is a size limit of around 10,000 words on individual posts. What follows is a continuation of the previous post, my notes on Watson's 'Ideas From Fire To Freud']

In India during this period, it is instructive to notice both similarities and differences between the Greek and Christian traditions. Bihar in the fourth century BC was a major centre of intellectual activity, and to begin with the curriculum was organized around ‘grammar, politics, and caste law’. But at a slightly later period, this exclusively practical focus was modified by the introduction of ‘medicine, fine arts, logic and philosophy’ (p. 188). Though Indian thought is not as well known as Greek thought in the West, it would seem foolish to deny that there too, the revolutionary change in which a truly theoretic culture was generated took place. Additionally, the Indians discovered things which the West never knew in any form, or which at any rate were lost very early; ‘in the second century BC, Patanjali, a Sanskrit grammarian, compiled the standard text on yoga…defined as a cessation of mental states’ (p. 189).

It is no coincidence that the classical institution of the gymnasium finally died out in the late fourth century AD when Christianity finally triumphed in the old Roman empire (p. 225). Yet while it is easy to chastise Christianity for its denigration of the body and to wish that authors like St. Paul had not been so unforgiving of the flesh, it must also be acknowledged that it was from within the Christian intellectual tradition that theoretical thought eventually re-emerged. Theology, while not entirely rational, was at least literary, speculative, and to a degree, critical and argumentative. There is no question that elements within Christianity were overtly hostile to intellectual endeavours but it is not true to say that all of Christianity took this attitude. Moreover, it is not actually clear that the yogic tradition is any friendlier to intellectual speculation than Christianity, though it has a much more positive attitude to the body; it is just as possible to become devoted to yogic practice to the exclusion of critical thinking as it is to disappear into a life of prayer. And in the last analysis, it was in Europe, not in India or elsewhere, that critical thinking was reborn.

Why the great European revival should have occurred, when none of the great centres of civilisation (Alexandria, Cordoba) were in Catholic Europe remains a hotly debated subject. The thirteenth century appears as another pivotal period. First of all, the black death may have affected other areas more severely than it did Europe, even though in Europe around 1/3 of the population died from it. Second, Europe benefited from a shared intellectual heritage of Roman law which meant that the memory of the classical world was kept alive in a very practical way. We will return to this in more detail later.

We have hardly mentioned the Romans so far, but in this context there is actually very little for us to do say, except insofar as we are concerned with elements of practical thought such as law and politics. The genius of Rome lay entirely in this worldly direction, which of course deserves the greatest respect. Nevertheless, no-one will mistake the Institutes, written c. 150 AD, or the Code of Justinian (compiled in the sixth century) for works of philosophy, though they are full of ideas (p. 202); and no-one will argue that in the theoretical or indeed the aesthetic sphere the Romans managed anything other than successful imitations of what had gone before, whether we are concerned with history or rhetoric. This is of course no mean achievement, particularly since without them we would not know of the Greek originals which have often been lost.

What the Romans did was to bring their talent for order to intellectual matters: ‘the life of the mind, the world of ideas, was more widespread, and more organised, than ever before’ (p. 204). Unlike Athens, there were public libraries, and at least one book was produced in an edition of 1,000 copies (p. 209). The growth of the Empire meant the diffusion of Latin, an incalculable benefit to medieval Europe which was thus able to share, thanks to the adoption of Latin by the Church, a single language for critical thinking even when, in the fifth century and after, ‘the speech of ordinary peoples in Europe changed and diversified into the various “Roman vernaculars”’ (p. 207). The Bible itself was translated into Latin around the end of the fourth century.

As a language, Latin was ‘concrete, specific, avoiding abstractions’ (p. 206). But such comments should not be taken as ingratitude for the literature that the Romans left, or an underestimation of its subsequent historical significance. Romans like Cicero and Aurelius were great writers and remarkable characters, but in the main they simply imparted their own colour to ideas that were already to hand; this remains true even though over a thousand years later their works would inspire generations of Europeans and their legal system the idea of the modern republican constitution. While Cicero may be ‘the greatest ancestor of [the] liberal tradition in Western life’ and ‘widely regarded as second only to Aristotle among the contributors to the intellectual content of the Western cultural tradition’ (p. 213), the founder of a tradition of humanitas in which education was vital, we are not interested in the content of Roman thought, but its form. Of course, no distinction is ever absolute; we owe to Cicero such useful neologisms as qualitas and quantitas, coined as part of his effort to import Greek ideas into the Latin vocabulary (p. 213).

With regard to form, it is interesting to note that Roman education was not narrowly practical in any functionalist sense. Virgil’s Aeneid was the staple of adolescent Roman boys, who ‘read aloud from this and other works and developed their skills at criticism, commenting on grammar, figures of speech, and the writer’s use of mythology’. Nevertheless, this remains only ambiguously or intermittently concerned with aesthetic matters, as the purpose was to produce citizens who understood Rome’s history and could form part of its destiny. This was the production of a shared ‘myth’ or as we might say, national identity, in action. The epitome and the compendium, the province of the person seeking knowledge in a hurry, an abridgment, were the products of the declining phase of the Roman Empire when classical culture as a whole began to come under threat (p. 211).

This phase of Roman thought actually produced many of the works which impacted most closely on medieval thought and education. For example, Martianus Capella’s De nuptiis Mercurii, part of the Roman tradition of liberal arts first formalised by Varro in Nine Books of Disciplines. These nine arts, grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, geometry, musical theory, medicine, and architecture, were later revised to seven, medicine and architecture being admitted, and in this form were transmitted to medieval Europe as the trivium and quadrivium. Though early Christians ‘often paraded their ignorance and lack of education, associating independent philosophical thinking with the sin of pride’, a posture that is still encountered today (p. 220) this thankfully proved difficult, indeed impossible, to sustain on a collective long-term basis. In the medium term, however, it remained very influential; of the seven deadly sins, Watson points out, ‘the sins of the intellect were more serious than sins of the flesh’, pride being conceived as the worst of them all (p. 233).

The remarkable transformation of ‘a Jewish Messianic sect’ into ‘a universal salvation religion propagated in the Hellenistic world of the Mediterranean’ made such a transmission both necessary and desirable (p. 219). The injunctions of Jesus (‘love thy neighbour as thyself’) not only left plenty of scope for interpretation of their content, they were entirely non-specific as to the form of the institutions required for their implementation. Indeed, such institutions were not really even a consideration for the early Christians, who lived in apocalyptic expectation of the imminent end of all things. It was only when this cherished hope disappointingly failed to materialise that they were forced to turn their attention to more mundane questions of organisation, spurred on by the kind of increasing disagreements that provoked Paul’s letters. In the Roman empire, they found the perfect vehicle.

A vital unintended long-term consequence of the way in which Christianity moved in to fill the vacuum left by the crumbling Roman state was the separation of religious and political authority. In Rome, there had been no such divide; the state was both at once. But the Church was never, except faute de mieux, concerned with worldly things, even if it tried always to ensure temporal authority remained subject to it. Control of the body was always less important than control of the soul and of access to salvation. In the long term, this meant the secular state would acquire the ability to shelter the intellectual prepared to make utterances the Church found inconvenient. Constantine granted Christian priests the same privileges as pagan ones, including freedom from taxation and conscription, and one of his successors, Gratian (375–83), sanctioned a parallel structure of Church courts so far as civil (though not criminal) jurisdiction was concerned.

By the fifth century Christian bishops were ‘a privileged class: they were rich, they were firmly in charge of church doctrine, and they were very largely a law unto themselves’ (p. 226). For many hundreds of years thereafter, the life of free intellectual enquiry which had been able to flourish in cities like Athens and Alexandria was subordinate to the dogma of scripture and the concept of a holy book. One must not overstate this position; given the inevitable limits imposed by theology, Christian writers at their best were capable of remarkable philosophical feats, as Augustine, Aquinas, and many others can testify. The more astute amongst them were always painfully aware of the gap between ancient thought and Biblical dogma, and did their best to find ways to bridge it, even if it mean stretching their beliefs to breaking point.

A good early example is Origen (c.185–254), who suggested that ‘everything in the Bible has three meanings–the literal, the moral and the allegorical and that only the last of these is the revealed truth’, so that, for example, the virgin birth is really to be taken as representing ‘the birth of divine wisdom in the soul’ (p. 230). Moreover (taking a position that was effectively to be revived by Aquinas 1000 years later) Origen argued that God ‘was knowable in two ways–through nature, the rationally ordered universe, and through Christ, who was the full revelation of his mercy and wisdom’. There is a clear parallel here with the classical distinction of nomos and phusis in which a plurality of forms of knowledge is acknowledged, but this never became the norm in Christian thought. Origen’s level of sophistication, however, always remained out of reach of large numbers of the faithful, and the possibility of a conflict between scientific and religious thought increased after the fourth century as Paul’s influence rose (p. 231).

One consequence of Christianity that has often been pointed out is a change in the meaning of time, that is, in the way it was conceived for practical purposes. The change is usually summed up as from the cyclical to the progressive. Whereas the Greeks and Romans tended to think in terms of inevitable cycles of decline and rebirth, Christianity conceived of humanity as on a journey towards a final redemption, an ultimately progressive and optimistic conception. All would be well at last. It is this vision that gave rise to the secular belief in ‘progress’ of an increasingly material sort which is only now ending in the face of the environmental destruction wrought by the industrial and technological processes which since at least the sixteenth century it had been hoped would liberate us.