A Brief History of Thought: A Philosophical Guide to Living

A

BRIEF HISTORY

OF

THOUGHT

A PHILOSOPHICAL GUIDE TO LIVING

Luc Ferry

Translated by Theo Cuffe

Dedication

For Gabrielle, Louise and Clara

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Introduction

Chapter 1: What is Philosophy?

Chapter 2: ‘The Greek Miracle’

Chapter 3: The Victory of Christianity over Greek Philosophy

Chapter 4: Humanism, or the Birth of Modern Philosophy

Chapter 5: Postmodernity: The Case of Nietzsche

Chapter 6: After Deconstruction: Contemporary Philosophy

In Conclusion

Further Reading

Index

About the Author

Also by Luc Ferry, available in English

Credits

Copyright

Back Ads

About the Publisher

Introduction

While chatting over supper on holiday, some friends asked me to improvise a philosophy course for adults and children alike. I decided to accept the challenge and came to relish it. The exercise forced me to stick to essentials – no complicated words, no learned quotations and no references to obscure theories. As I worked through my account of the history of ideas, without access to a library, it occurred to me that there is nothing comparable in print. There are many histories of philosophy, of course; some are excellent, but even the best ones are a little dry for someone who has left university behind, and certainly for those yet to enter a university. And the rest of us are not particularly concerned.

This book is the direct result of those evenings amongst friends, so I have tried to preserve the original impromptu style. Its objective is both modest and ambitious: modest, because it is addressed to a nonacademic audience; ambitious, because I have not permitted myself any concession to simplification where it would involve distortion of the philosophical ideas at its heart. I feel too much respect for the masterpieces of philosophy to caricature them. Clarity should be the primary responsibility of a work addressed to beginners, but it must be achieved without compromising the truth of its subject; otherwise it is worthless.

With that in mind, I have tried to offer a rite of passage, which aims to be as straightforward as possible, without bypassing the richness and profundity of philosophical ideas. My aim is not merely to give a taste, a superficial gloss, or a survey influenced by popular trends; on the contrary I want to lay bare these ideas in their integrity, in order to satisfy two needs: that of an adult who wants to know what philosophy is about, but does not necessarily intend to proceed any further; and that of a young person who hopes eventually to further their study, but does not as yet have the necessary bearings to be able to read these challenging authors for herself or himself.

I have attempted to give an account of everything that I consider to be truly indispensable in the history of thought – all that I would like to pass on to family and those whom I regard as friends.

But why undertake this endeavour? First, because even the most sublime spectacle begins to pall if one lacks a companion with whom to share it. I am increasingly aware that philosophy no longer counts as what is ordinarily thought of as ‘general knowledge’. An educated person is supposed to know his or her national history, a few standard literary and artistic references, even a few odds and ends of biology or physics, yet they most likely have no inkling of Epictetus, Spinoza or Kant. I am convinced that everyone should study just a little philosophy, if only for two simple reasons.

First of all, without it we can make no sense of the world in which we live. Philosophy is the best training for living, better even than history and the human sciences. Why? Quite simply because virtually all of our thoughts, convictions and values exist and have meaning – whether or not we are conscious of it – within models of the world that have been developed over the course of intellectual history. We must understand these models in order to grasp their reach, their logic and their consequences.

Many individuals spend a considerable part of their lives anticipating misfortune and preparing for catastrophe – loss of work, accident, illness, death of loved ones, and so on. Others, on the contrary, appear to live in a state of utter indifference, regarding such fears as morbid and having no place in everyday life. Do they realise, both of these character-types, that their attitudes have already been pondered with matchless profundity by the philosophers of ancient Greece?

The choice of an egalitarian rather than an aristocratic ethos, of a romantic aesthetic rather than a classical one, of an attitude of attachment or non-attachment to things and to beings in the face of death; the adoption of authoritarian or liberal political attitudes; the preference for animals and nature over mankind, for the call of the wild over the cities of man – all of these choices and many more were considered long before they became opinions available, as in a marketplace, to the citizen. These divisions, conflicts and issues continue to determine our thoughts and our words, whether we are aware of them or not. To study them in their pure form, to grasp their deepest origins, is to arm oneself with not only the means of becoming more intelligent, but also more independent. Why would one deprive oneself of such tools?

Second, beyond coming to an understanding of oneself and others through acquaintance with the key texts of philosophy, we come to realise that these texts are able, quite simply, to help us live in a better and freer way. As several contemporary thinkers note: one does not philosophise to amuse oneself, nor even to better understand the world and one’s own place in it, but sometimes literally to ‘save one’s skin’. There is in philosophy the wherewithal to conquer the fears which can paralyse us in life, and it is an error to believe that modern psychology, for example, can substitute for this.

Learning to live; learning to fear no longer the various faces of death; or, more simply, learning to conquer the banality of everyday life – boredom, the sense of time slipping by: these were already the primary motivations of the schools of ancient Greece. Their message deserves to be heard, because, contrary to what happens in history and in the human sciences, the philosophers of time past speak to us in the present tense. And this is worth contemplating.

When a scientific theory is revealed to be false, when it is refuted by another manifestly truer theory, it becomes obsolete and is of no further interest except to a handful of scientists and historians. However, the great philosophical questions about how to live life remain relevant to this day. In this sense, we can compare the history of philosophy to that of art, rather than of the sciences: in the same way that paintings by Braque or Kandinsky are not ‘less beautiful’ than those by Vermeer or Manet, so too the reflections of Kant or Nietzsche on the sense or non-sense of life are not inferior – or superior – to those of Epictetus, Epicurus or the Buddha. They all furnish propositions about life, attitudes in the face of existence, that continue to address us across the centuries. Whereas the scientific theories of Ptolemy or Descartes may be regarded as ‘quaint’ and have no further interest other than the historical, we can still draw upon the collective wisdom of the ancients as we can admire a Greek temple or a Chinese scroll – with both feet planted firmly in the twenty-first century.

Following the lead of the earliest manual of philosophy ever written, The Discourses of Epictetus from c. 100 AD, this little book will address its readers directly. I hope the reader may take my tone as a sign of complicity rather than familiarity.

Chapter 1

What is Philosophy?

I am going to tell you the story as well as the history of philosophy. Not all of it, of course, but its five great moments. In each case, I will give you an example of one or two transforming visions of the world or, as we say sometimes, one or two great ‘systems of thought’. I promise that, if you take the trouble to follow me, you will come to understand this thing called philosophy and you will have the means to investigate it further – for example, by reading in detail some of the great thinkers of whom I shall be speaking.

The question ‘What is philosophy?’ is unfortunately one of the most controversial (although in a sense that is a good thing, because we are forced to exercise our ability to reason) and one which the majority of philosophers still debate today, without finding common ground.

When I was in my final year at school, my teacher assured me that it referred ‘quite simply’ to the ‘formation of a critical and independent spirit’, to a ‘method of rigorous thought’, to an ‘art of reflection’, rooted in an attitude of ‘astonishment’ and ‘enquiry’ … These are the definitions which you still find today in most introductory works. However, in spite of the respect I have for my teacher, I must tell you from the start that, in my view, such definitions have nothing to do with the question.

It is certainly preferable to approach philosophy in a reflective spirit; that much is true. And that one should do so with rigour and even in a critical and interrogatory mood – that is also true. But all of these definitions are entirely non-specific. I’m sure that you can think of an infinite number of other human activities about which we should also ask questions and strive to argue our way as best we can, without their being in the slightest sense philosophical.

Biologists and artists, doctors and novelists, mathematicians and theologians, journalists and even politicians all reflect and ask themselves questions – none of which makes them, for my money, philosophers. One of the principal errors of the contemporary world is to reduce philosophy to a straightforward matter of ‘critical reflection’. Reflection and argument are worthy activities; they are indispensable to the formation of good citizens and allow us to participate in civic life with an independent spirit. But these are merely the means to an end – and philosophy is no more an instrument of politics than it is a prop for morality.

I suggest that we accept a different approach to the question ‘What is philosophy?’ and start from a very simple proposition, one that contains the central question of all philosophy: that the human being, as distinct from God, is mortal or, to speak like the philosophers, is a ‘finite being’, limited in space and time. As distinct from animals, moreover, a human being is the only creature who is aware of his limits. He knows that he will die, and that his near ones, those he loves, will also die. Consequently he cannot prevent himself from thinking about this state of affairs, which is disturbing and absurd, almost unimaginable. And, naturally enough, he is inclined to turn first of all to those religions which promise ‘salvation’.

The Question of Salvation

Think about this word – ‘salvation’. I will show how religions have attempted to take charge of the questions it raises. Because the simplest way of starting to define philosophy is always by putting it in relation to religion.

Open any dictionary and you will see that ‘salvation’ is defined first and foremost as ‘the condition of being saved, of escaping a great danger or misfortune’. But from what ‘great danger’, from what ‘misfortune’ do religions claim to deliver us? You already know the answer: from the peril of death. Which is why all religions strive, in different ways, to promise us eternal life; to reassure us that one day we will be reunited with our loved ones – parents and friends, brothers and sisters, husbands and wives, children and grandchildren – from whom life on earth must eventually separate us.

In the Gospel According to St John, Jesus experiences the death of a dear friend, Lazarus. Like every other human being since the dawn of time, he weeps. He experiences, like you or I, the grief of separation. But unlike you or I, simple mortals, it is in Jesus’s power to raise his friend from the dead. And he does this in order to prove that, as he puts it, ‘love is stronger than death’. This fundamental message constitutes the essence of the Christian doctrine of redemption: death, for those who love and have faith in the word of Christ, is but an appearance, a rite of passage. Through love and through faith, we shall gain immortality.

Which is fortunate for us, for what do we truly desire, above all else? To be understood, to be loved, not to be alone, not to be separated from our loved ones – in short, not to die and not to have them die on us. But daily life will sooner or later disappoint every one of these desires, and, so it is, that by trusting in a God some of us seek salvation, and religion assures us that those who do so will be rewarded. And why not, for those who believe and have faith?

But for those who are not convinced, and who doubt the truth of these promises of immortality, the problem of death remains unresolved. Which is where philosophy comes in. Death is not as simple an event as it is ordinarily credited with being. It cannot merely be written off as ‘the end of life’, as the straightforward termination of our existence. To reassure themselves, certain wise men of antiquity (Epicurus for one) maintained that we must not think about death, because there are only two alternatives: either I am alive, in which case death is by definition elsewhere; or death is here and, likewise by definition, I am not here to worry about it! Why, under these conditions, would you bother yourself with such a pointless problem?

This line of reasoning, in my view, is a little too brutal to be honest. On the contrary, death has many different faces. And it is this which torments man: for only man is aware that his days are numbered, that the inevitable is not an illusion and that he must consider what to do with his brief existence. Edgar Allan Poe, in one of his most famous poems, ‘The Raven’, conveys this idea of life’s irreversibility in a sinister raven perched on a window ledge, capable only of repeating ‘Nevermore’ over and over again.

Poe is suggesting that death means everything that is unrepeatable. Death is, in the midst of life, that which will not return; that which belongs irreversibly to time past, which we have no hope of ever recovering. It can mean childhood holidays with friends, the divorce of parents, or the houses or schools we have to leave, or a thousand other examples: even if it does not always mean the disappearance of a loved one, everything that comes under the heading of ‘Nevermore’ belongs in death’s ledger.

In this sense, you can see how far death is from a mere biological ending. We encounter an infinite number of its variations, in the midst of life, and these many faces of death trouble us, even if we are not always aware of them. To live well, therefore, to live freely, capable of joy, generosity and love, we must first and foremost conquer our fear – or, more accurately, our fears of the irreversible. But here, precisely, is where religion and philosophy pull apart.

Philosophy versus Religion

Faced with the supreme threat to existence – death – how does religion work? Essentially, through faith. By insisting that it is faith, and faith alone, which can direct the grace of God towards us. If you believe in Him, God will save you. The religions demand humility, above and beyond all other virtues, since humility is in their eyes the opposite – as the greatest Christian thinkers, from Saint Augustine to Pascal, never stop telling us – of the arrogance and the vanity of philosophy. Why is this accusation levelled against free thinking? In a nutshell, because philosophy also claims to save us – if not from death itself, then from the anxiety it causes, and to do so by the exercise of our own resources and our innate faculty of reason.Which, from a religious perspective, sums up philosophical pride: the effrontery evident already in the earliest philosophers, from Greek antiquity, several centuries before Christ.

Unable to bring himself to believe in a God who offers salvation, the philosopher is above all one who believes that by understanding the world, by understanding ourselves and others as far our intelligence permits, we shall succeed in overcoming fear, through clear-sightedness rather than blind faith.

In other words, if religions can be defined as ‘doctrines of salvation’, the great philosophies can also be defined as doctrines of salvation (but without the help of a God). Epicurus, for example, defined philoso phy as ‘medicine for the soul’, whose ultimate aim is to make us understand that ‘death is not to be feared’. He proposes four principles to remedy all those ills related to the fact that we are mortal: ‘The gods are not to be feared; death cannot be felt; the good can be won; what we dread can be conquered.’ This wisdom was interpreted by his most eminent disciple, Lucretius, in his poem De rerum natura (‘On the Nature of Things’):

The fear of Acheron [the river of the Underworld] must first and foremost be dismantled; this fear muddies the life of man to its deepest depths, stains everything with the blackness of death, leaves no pleasure pure and clear.

And Epictetus, one of the greatest representatives of another of the ancient Greek philosophical schools – Stoicism – went so far as to reduce all philosophical questions to a single issue: the fear of death. Listen for a moment to him addressing his disciple in the course of his dialogues or Discourses:

Keep well in mind, then, that this epitome of all human evils, of mean-spiritedness and cowardice, is not death as such, but rather the fear of death. Discipline yourself, therefore, against this. To which purpose let all your reasonings, your readings, all your exercises tend, and you will know that only in this way are human beings set free. (

Discourses,

III

, 26, 38–9)

The same theme is encountered in Montaigne’s famous adage – ‘to philosophise is to learn how to die’; and in Spinoza’s reflection about the wise man who ‘dies less than the fool’; and in Kant’s question, ‘What are we permitted to hope for?’ These references may mean little to you, because you are only starting out, but we shall come back to each of them in turn. Bear them in mind. All that matters, now, is that we understand why, in the eyes of every philosopher, fear of death prevents us from living – and not only because it generates anxiety. Most of the time, of course, we do not meditate on human mortality. But at a deeper level the irreversibility of things is a kind of death at the heart of life and threatens constantly to steer us into time past – the home of nostalgia, guilt, regret and remorse, those great spoilers of happiness.

Perhaps we should try not to think of these things, and try to confine ourselves to happy memories, rather than reflecting on bad times. But paradoxically those happy memories can become transformed, over time, into ‘lost paradises’, drawing us imperceptibly towards the past and preventing us from enjoying the present.

Greek philosophers looked upon the past and the future as the primary evils weighing upon human life, and as the source of all the anxieties which blight the present. The present moment is the only dimension of existence worth inhabiting, because it is the only one available to us. The past is no longer and the future has yet to come, they liked to remind us; yet we live virtually all of our lives somewhere between memories and aspirations, nostalgia and expectation. We imagine we would be much happier with new shoes, a faster computer, a bigger house, more exotic holidays, different friends … But by regretting the past or guessing the future, we end up missing the only life worth living: the one which proceeds from the here and now and deserves to be savoured.

Faced with these mirages which distract us from life, what are the promises of religion? That we don’t need to be afraid, because our hopes will be fulfilled. That it is possible to live in the present as it is – and expect a better future! That there exists an infinitely benign Being who loves us above all else and will therefore save us from the solitude of ourselves and from the loss of our loved ones, who, after they die in this world, will await us in the next.

What must we do to be ‘saved’? Faced with a Supreme Being, we are invited to adopt an attitude framed entirely in two words: trust (Latin fides, which also means ‘faith’) and humility. In contrast, philosophy, by following a different path, verges on the diabolical. Christian theology developed a powerful concept of ‘the temptations of the devil’. Contrary to the popular imagery which frequently served the purposes of a Church in need of authority, the devil is not one who leads us away from the straight and narrow, morally speaking, by an appeal to the weaknesses of the flesh. The devil is rather one who, spiritually speaking, does everything in his power to separate us (dia-bolos in Greek meaning ‘the who who divides’) from the vertical link uniting true believers with God, and which alone saves them from solitude and death. The diabolos is not content with setting men against each other, provoking them to hatred and war, but much more ominously, he cuts man off from God and thus delivers him back into the anguish that faith had succeeded in healing.

For a dogmatic theologian, philosophy is the devil’s own work, because by inciting man to turn aside from his faith, to exercise his reason and give rein to his enquiring spirit, philosophy draws him imperceptibly into the realm of doubt, which is the first step beyond divine supervision.

In the account of Genesis, with which the Bible opens, the serpent plays the role of Devil by encouraging Adam and Eve – the first human beings – to doubt God’s word about the forbidden fruit. The serpent wants them to ask questions and try the apple, so that they will disobey God. By separating them from Him, the Devil can then inflict upon them – mere mortals – all the torments of earthly existence. The ‘Fall’ of Adam and Eve and their banishment from the first Paradise is the direct consequence of doubting divine edicts; thus, men became mortal.

All philosophies, however divergent they may sometimes be in the answers they bring, promise us an escape from primitive fears. They possess in common with religions the conviction that anguish prevents us from leading good lives: it stops us not only from being happy, but also from being free. This is an ever present theme amongst the earliest Greek philosophers: we can neither think nor act freely when we are paralysed by the anxiety provoked – even unconsciously – by fear of the irreversible. The question becomes one of how to persuade humans to ‘save’ themselves.

Salvation must proceed not from an Other – from some Being supposedly transcendent (meaning ‘exterior to and superior to’ ourselves) – but well and truly from within. Philosophy wants us to get ourselves out of trouble by utilising our own resources, by means of reason alone, with boldness and assurance. And this of course is what Montaigne meant when, characterising the wisdom of the ancient Greeks, he assured us that ‘to philosophise is to learn how to die’.

Is every philosophy linked therefore to atheism? Can there not be a Christian or a Jewish or a Muslim philoso phy? And if so, in what sense? In other words, what are we to make of those philosophers, like Descartes or Kant, who believed in God? And you may ask why should we refuse the promise of religion? Why not submit with humility to the requirements of salvation ‘in God’?

For two crucial reasons, which lie at the heart of all philosophy. First and foremost, because the promise of religions – that we are immortal and will encounter our loved ones after our own biological demise – is too good to be true. Similarly hard to believe is the image of a God who acts as a father to his children. How can one reconcile this with the appalling massacres and misfortunes which overwhelm humanity: what father would abandon his children to the horror of Auschwitz, or Rwanda, or Cambodia? A believer will doubtless respond that that is the price of freedom, that God created men as equals and evil must be laid at their door. But what about the innocent? What about the countless children martyred in the course of these crimes against humanity? A philosopher begins to doubt that the religious answers are adequate. (Undoubtedly this argument engages only with the popular image of religion, but this is nonetheless the most widespread and influential version available.) Almost invariably the philosopher comes to think that belief in God, which usually arises as an indirect consequence, in the guise of consolation, perhaps makes us lose in clarity what we gain in serenity. He respects all believers, it goes without saying. He does not claim that they are necessarily wrong, that their faith is absurd, or that the non-existence of God is a certainty. (How would one set about proving that God does not exist?) Simply, that in his case there is a failure of faith; therefore he must look elsewhere.

Wellbeing is not the only ideal in life. Freedom is another. And if religion calms anguish by making death into an illusion, it risks doing so at the price of freedom of thought. For it demands, more or less, that we abandon reason and the enquiring spirit in return for faith and serenity. It asks that we conduct ourselves, before God, like little children, not as curious adults.

Ultimately, to philosophise, rather than take on trust, is to prefer lucidity to comfort, freedom rather than faith. It also means, of course, ‘saving one’s skin’, but not at any price. You might ask, if philosophy is essentially a quest for a good life beyond the confines of religion – a search for salvation without God – why is it so frequently presented in books as the art of right-thinking, as the exercise of the critical faculty and freedom of conscience? Why, in civic life, on television and in the press, is philosophy so often reduced to moral engagement, casting the vote for justice and against injustice? The philosopher is portrayed as someone who understands things as they are, who questions the evils of the day. What are we to make of the intellectual and moral life, and how do we reconcile these imperatives with the definition of philosophy I have just outlined?

The Three Dimensions of Philosophy

If the quest for a salvation without God is at the heart of every great philosophical system, and that is its essential and ultimate objective, it cannot be accomplished without deep reflection upon reality, or things as they are – what is ordinarily called ‘theory’ – and consideration of what must be or what ought to be – which is referred to as ‘morals’ or ‘ethics’.

(Note: ‘Morals’ and ‘ethics’: what difference is there between these terms? The simplest answer is: none whatsoever. The term ‘morals’ derives from the Latin word for ‘manners, customs’, and ‘ethics’ derives from the Greek term for ‘manners, customs’. They are therefore perfectly synonymous. Having said this, some philo sophers have assigned different meanings to the two terms. In Kant, for example, ‘morals’ designates the ensemble of first principles, and ‘ethics’ refers to their application. Other philosophers refer to ‘morals’ as the theory of duties towards others, and to ‘ethics’ as the doctrine of salv ation and wisdom. Indeed, there is no reason why different meanings should not be assigned to these terms, but, unless I indicate otherwise, I shall use them synonymously in the following pages.)

If philosophy, like religion, has its deepest roots in human ‘finiteness’ – the fact that for us mortals time is limited, and that we are the only beings in this world to be fully aware of this fact – it goes without saying that the question of what to do with our time cannot be avoided. As distinct from trees, oysters and rabbits, we think constantly about our relationship to time: about how we are going to spend the next hour or this evening, or the coming year. And sooner or later we are confronted – sometimes due to a sudden event that breaks our daily routine – with the question of what we are doing, what we should be doing, and what we must be doing with our lives – our time – as a whole.

This combination of the fact of mortality with our awareness of mortality contains all the questions of philosophy. The philosopher is principally not someone who believes that we are here as ‘tourists’, to amuse ourselves. Even if he does come to believe that amusement alone is worth experiencing, it will at least be the result of a process of thought, a reflection rather than a reflex. This thought process has three distinct stages: a theoretical stage, a moral or ethical stage, and a crowning conclusion as to salvation or wisdom.

The first task of philosophy is that of theory, an attempt to gain a sense of the world in which we live. Is it hostile or friendly, dangerous or docile, ordered or chaotic, mysterious or intelligible, beautiful or ugly? Any philosophy therefore takes as its starting point the natural sciences which reveal the structure of the universe – physics, mathematics, biology, and so on – and the disciplines which enlighten us about the history of the planet as well as our own origins. ‘Let no one ignorant of geometry enter here,’ said Plato to his students, referring to his school, the Academy; and thereafter no philosophy has ever seriously proposed to ignore scientific knowledge. But philosophy goes further and examines the means by which we acquire such knowledge. Philosophy attempts to define the nature of knowledge and to understand its methods (for example, how do we establish the causes of a natural phenomenon?) and its limits (for example, can one prove, yes or no, the existence of God?).

These two questions – the nature of the world, and the instruments for understanding it at our disposal as humans – constitute the essentials of the theoretical aspect of philosophy.

Besides our knowledge of the world and of its history, we must also interest ourselves in other people – those with whom we are going to share this existence. For not only are we not alone, but we could not be born and survive without the help of others, starting with our parents. How do we co-exist with others,what rules of the game must we learn, and how should we conduct ourselves – to be helpful, dignified and ‘fair’ in our dealings with others? This question is addressed by the second part of philosophy; the part which is not theoretical but practical, and which broadly concerns ethics.

But why should we learn about the world and its history, why bother trying to live in harmony with others? What is the point of all this effort? And does it have to make sense? These questions, and some others of a similar nature, bring us to the third dimension of philosophy, which touches upon the ultimate question of salvation or wisdom. If philosophy is the ‘love’ (philo) of ‘wisdom’ (sophia), it is at this point that it must make way for wisdom, which surpasses all philosophical understanding. To be a sage, by definition, is neither to aspire to wisdom or seek the condition of being a sage, but simply to live wisely, contentedly and as freely as possible, having finally overcome the fears sparked in us by our own finiteness.

I am aware this is becoming rather abstract, so I would like to offer some examples of the three aspects I have touched upon – theory, ethics and the quest for salvation or wisdom – in action.

The best course is therefore to plunge into the heart of the matter, to begin at the beginning; namely the philosophical schools which flourished in Greek antiquity. Let’s consider the case of the first of the great philosophical movements, which passes through Plato and Aristotle to find its most perfected – or at least its most ‘popular’ – form in Stoicism. This is our way into our subject, after which we can explore the other major epochs in philosophy. We must also try to understand why and how men pass from one model of reality to another. Is it because the accepted version no longer satisfies, no longer convinces? After all, several versions of reality are inherently plausible.

You must understand that philosophy is an art not of questions but rather of answers. And as you are going to judge these things for yourself – this being another crucial promise of philosophy, because it is not religion, because it is not answerable to the truth of an Other – you will quickly see how profound these answers have been, how gripping, and how inspired.

Chapter 2

‘The Greek Miracle’

Most historians agree that philosophy first saw the light of day in Greece, some time around the sixth century BC. So sudden and so astonishing was its manifestation, it has become known as ‘the Greek miracle’. But what was available, philosophically speaking, before the sixth century and in other civilisations? Why this sudden breakthrough?

I believe that two straightforward answers can be offered. The first is that, as far as we know, in all civil-isations prior to and other than Greek antiquity, religion was a substitute for philosophy. An almost infinite variety of cults bears witness to this monopoly of meaning. It was in the protection of the gods, not in the free play of reason, that men traditionally sought their salvation. It also seems likely that the partially democratic nature of the political organisation of the city-state played some role in ‘rational’ investigation becoming emancipated from religious belief. Among the Greek elite, un-precedented freedom and autonomy of thought were favoured, and in their assemblies, the citizens acquired the habit of uninterrupted public debate, deliberation and argument.

Thus, in Athens, as early as the fourth century BC, a number of competing philosophical schools came to exist. Usually they were referred to by the name of the place where they first established themselves: Zeno of Citium (c. 334–262 BC), the founding father of the Stoic school, held forth beneath colonnades covered with frescoes (the word ‘stoicism’ derives from the Greek word stoa meaning ‘porch’).

The lessons dispensed by Zeno beneath his famous ‘painted porch’ were open and free to all-comers. They were so popular that, after his death, the teachings were continued and extended by his disciples. His first successor was Cleanthes of Assos (c. 331–230 BC) followed by Chrysippus of Soli (c. 280–208 BC). Zeno, Cleanthes and Chrysippus are the three great names of what is called ‘Early Greek Stoicism’. Aside from a short poem, the Hymn to Zeus by Cleanthes, almost nothing survives of the numerous works written by the first Stoics. Our knowledge of their philosophy comes by indirect means, through later writers (notably Cicero). Stoicism experienced a second flourishing, in Greece, in the second century BC, and a third, much later, in Rome. The major works of this third Roman phase no longer come down by word of mouth from Athenian philosophers succeeding each other at the head of the school; rather they come from a member of the imper ial Roman court, Seneca (c. 8 BC–AD 65), who was also a tutor and advisor to Nero; from Musonius Rufus (AD 25–80) who taught Stoicism at Rome and was persecuted by the same Nero; from Epictetus (c. AD 50–130), a freed slave whose oral teachings were faithfully transmitted to posterity by his disciples – notably by Arrian, author of two works which were to travel down the ages, the Discourses and the Enchiridion or Manual of Epictetus (the title was said to derive from the fact that the maxims of Epictetus should be at every moment ‘to hand’ for those wanting to learn how to live – ‘manual’ coming from the Latin manualis, ‘of or belonging to the hand’); and lastly, this body of Stoic teaching was disseminated by the Emperor Marcus Aurelius himself (AD 121–180).

I would now like to show you how a particular philosophy – in this case Stoicism – can address the challenge of human salvation quite differently to religions; how it can try to explain the need for us to conquer the fears born of our mortality, by employing the tools of reason alone. I shall pursue the three main lines of enquiry – theory, ethics and wisdom – outlined earlier. I shall also make plenty of room for quotations from the writers in question; while quotations can slow one down a little, they are essential to enable you to exercise your critical spirit. You need to get used to verifying for yourself whether what you are told is true or not, and for that, you need to read the original texts as early on as possible.

Theory, or the Contemplation of a Cosmic Order

To find one’s place in the world, to learn how to live and act, we must first obtain knowledge of the world in which we find ourselves. This is the first task of a philosophical ‘theory’.

In Greek, this activity calls itself theoria, and the origins of the word deserve our attention: to theion or ta theia orao means ‘I see (orao) the divine (theion)’ or ‘divine things’ (theia). And for the Stoics, the-oria is indeed a striving to contemplate that which is ‘divine’ in the reality surrounding us. In other words, the primary task of philosophy is to perceive what is intrinsic about the world: what is most real, most important and most meaningful. Now, in the tradition of Stoicism, the innermost essence of the world is harmony, order – both true and beautiful – which the Greeks referred to by the term kosmos.

If we want to form a simple idea of what was meant by kosmos, we must imagine the whole of the universe as if it were both ordered and animate. For the Stoics, the structure of the world – the cosmic order – is not merely magnificent, it is also comparable to a living being. The material world, the entire universe, fundamentally resembles a gigantic animal, of which each element – each organ – is conceived and adapted to the harmonious functioning of the whole. Each part, each member of this immense body, is perfectly in place and functions impeccably (although disasters do occur, they do not last for long, and order is soon restored) in the most literal sense: without fault, and in harmony with the other parts. And it is this that theoria helps us to unravel and understand.

In English, the term cosmos has resulted in, among other words, ‘cosmetic’. Originally, this science of the body beautiful related to justness of proportions, then to the art of make-up, which sets off that which is ‘well-made’ and, if necessary, conceals that which is less so. It is this order, or cosmos, this ordained structure of the universe in its entirety that the Greeks named ‘divine’ (theion), and not – as with the Jews and Christians – a Being apart from or external to the universe, existing prior to and responsible for the act of its creation.

It is this divinity, therefore (nothing to do with a personal Godhead), inextricably caught up with the natural order of things, that the Stoics invite us to contemplate (theorein), for example, by the study of sciences such as physics, astronomy or biology, which show the universe in its entirety to be ‘well-made’: from the regular movement of the planets down to the tiniest organisms. We can therefore say that the structure of the universe is not merely ‘divine’ and perfect of itself, but also ‘rational’, consonant with what the Greeks termed the Logos (from which we derive ‘logic’ and ‘logical’), which exactly describes this admirable order of things. Which is why our human reason is capable of understanding and fathoming reality, through the exercise of theoria, as a biologist comes to comprehend the function of the organs of a living creature he dissects.

For the Stoics, opening one’s eyes to the world was akin to the biologist examining the body of a mouse or a rabbit to find that everything therein is perfectly ‘well-made’: the eye admirably adapted for ‘seeing well’, the heart and the arteries for pumping blood through the entire body to keep life going; the stomach for digesting food, the lungs for oxygenating the muscles, and so on. All of which, in the eyes of the Stoic, is both ‘logical’ and ‘divine’. Why divine? Not because a personal God is responsible for these marvels, but because these marvels are ready-made. Nor are we humans in any sense the inventors of this reality. On the contrary, we merely discover it.

It is here that Cicero, one of our principal sources for understanding the thought of the early Stoics, intervenes, in his On the Nature of the Gods. He scorns those thinkers, notably Epicurus, who think the world is not a cosmos, an order, but on the contrary a chaos. To which Cicero retorts:

Let Epicurus mock as much as he likes … It remains no less true that nothing is more perfect than this world, which is an animate being, endowed with awareness, intelligence and reason.

This little excerpt gives us a sense of just how remote this way of thinking is from our own. If anyone claimed today that the world is alive, animate – that it possesses a soul and is endowed with reason – he would be considered crazy. But if we understand the Ancients correctly, what they are trying to say is by no means absurd: they were convinced that a ‘logical’ order was at work behind the apparent chaos of things and that human reason was able to discern the divine character of the universe.

It was this same idea, that the world possesses a soul of sorts, like a living being, which would later be termed ‘animism’ (Latin anima, meaning soul ). This ‘cosmology’(or conception of the cosmos) was also described as ‘hylozoism’, literally meaning that matter (hyle) is analogous to what is animal (zoon): that it is alive, in other words. The same doctrine would also be described by the term ‘pantheism’ (the doctrine that nature and the physical universe are constituents of the essence of God; from Greek pan, ‘all’, and theos, meaning ‘God’): that all is God, since it is the totality of the universe that is divine, rather than there being a God beyond the world, creating it by remote control, so to speak. If I dwell on this vocabulary it is not out of a fondness for philosophical jargon (which often impresses more than it enlightens), but rather to enable you to approach these great philosophical texts for yourself, without grinding to a halt whenever you encounter these supposedly ‘technical’ terms.

From the point of view of Stoic theoria, then – and ignoring those temporary manifestations known as catastrophes – the cosmos is essentially harmonious. And, as we shall see, this would have important consequences for the ‘practical’ sphere (moral, legal and political). For if nature as a whole is harmonious, then it can serve as a model for human conduct, and the order of things must be just and good, as Marcus Aurelius insists in his Meditations:

‘All that comes to pass comes to pass with justice.’ You will find this to be so if you watch carefully. I do not mean only in accordance with the ordered nature of events, but in accordance with justice and as it were by someone who assigns to each thing its value. (

IV

.10)

What Marcus Aurelius suggests amounts to the idea that nature – when it functions normally and aside from the occasional accidents and catastrophes that occur – renders justice finally to each of us. It supplies to each of us our essential needs as individuals: a body which enables us to move about the world, an intelligence which permits us to adapt to the world, and natural resources which enable us to survive in the world. So that, in this great cosmic sharing out of goods, each receives his due.

This theory of justice ushers in what served as a first principle of all Roman law: ‘to render to each what is his due’ and to assign each to his proper place (which assumes, of course, that for each person and thing there is such a thing) – what the Greeks thought of as a ‘natural place’ in the cosmos, and that this cosmos was itself just and good.

You can see how, in this perspective, one of the ultimate aims of a human life is to find its rightful place within the cosmic order. For the majority of Greek thinkers – with the exception of the Epicureans whom we shall discuss later – it was through the pursuit of this quest, or, better, its accomplishment, that we attain happiness and the good life. From a similar perspective, the theoria itself implicitly possesses an aesthetic dimension, since the harmony of the universe which it reveals to us becomes for humans a model of beauty. Of course, just as there are natural catastrophes which seem to invalidate the idea of a good and just cosmos – although we are told that these are never more than temporary aberrations – so too there exist within nature things that are at first sight ugly, or even hideous. In their case, we must learn how to go beyond first impressions, the Stoics maintain, rather than remain content with appearances. Marcus Aurelius makes the point forcefully in his Meditations:

The lion’s wrinkled brow, the foam flowing from the boar’s mouth, and many other phenomena that are far from beautiful if we look at them in isolation, do neverthe less because they follow from Nature’s processes lend those a further ornament and fascination. And so, if a man has a feeling for, and a deeper insight into the processes of the Universe, there is hardly any of these but will somehow appear to present itself pleasantly to him … Even an old man or old woman will be seen to possess a certain perfection, a bloom, in the eyes of the sage, who will look upon the charms of his own boy slaves with sober eyes. (

III

, 2)

This is the same idea already expressed by one of the greatest Greek philosophers and model for the Stoics, Aristotle, when he denounced those who judge the world to be evil, ugly or disjointed: because they are looking only at a detail, without an adequate intelligence of the whole. If ordinary people think, in effect, that the world is imperfect, it is because, according to Aristotle, they commit the error ‘of extending to the universe as a whole observations which bear only upon physical phenomena, and then only upon a small proportion of these. In fact, the physical world that surrounds us is the only one dominated by generation and corruption, but this world does not, one might say, constitute even a small part of the whole: so that it would be fairer to absolve the physical world in favour of the celestial world, than to condemn the latter on account of the former.’ Naturally, if we restrict ourselves to examining our little corner of the cosmos, we shall not perceive the beauty of the whole, whereas the philosopher who contemplates, for example, the admirably regular movement of the planets will be able to raise himself to a higher plane through an understanding of the perfection of the whole, of which we are but an infinitesimal fragment.

Thus, the divine nature of the world is both immanent and transcendent. Again, I have used these philosophical terms because they will be useful to us later. Something that is immanent can be found nowhere else other than in this world. We say it is transcendent when the contrary applies. In this sense, the Christian God is transcendent in relation to the world, whereas the divine according to the Stoics, which is not to be located in some ‘beyond’ – being none other than the harmonious structure, cosmic or cosmetic, of the world as it is – is wholly immanent. Which does not prevent Stoic divinity from being defined equally as ‘transcendent’: not in relation to the world, of course, but in relation to man, given that it is radically superior and exterior to him. Men may discover it – with amazement – but in no sense do they invent it or produce it.

Chrysippus, the student of Zeno who succeeded Cleanthes as the third head of the Stoic school notes: ‘Celestial things and those whose order is unchanging cannot be made by men.’ These words are reported by Cicero, who adds in his commentary on the thought of the early Stoics:

Wherefore the universe must be wise, and nature which holds all things in its embrace must excel in the perfection of reason [Logos]; and therefore the universe must be a God, and all the force of the universe must be held together by nature, which is divine. (On the Nature of the Gods, II, 11, 29–30)

We can therefore say of the divine, according to the Stoics, that it represents ‘transcendence within immanence’; we can grasp the sense in which theoria is the contemplation of ‘divine things’ which, for all that they do not exist elsewhere than in the dimension of the real, are nonetheless entirely foreign to human activity.

I would like you to note again a difficult idea, to which we shall return in more detail: the theoria of the Stoics reveals that which is most perfect and most ‘real’ – most ‘divine’, in the Greek sense – in the universe. In effect, what is most real, most essential, in their account of the cosmos, is its ordonnance, its harmony – and not, for example, the fact that at certain moments it has its defects, such as monsters or natural disasters. In this respect, theoria, which shows us all of this and gives us the means to understand it, is at once an ‘ontology’ (a doctrine which defines the innermost structure or ‘essence’ of being), and also a theory of knowledge (the study of the intellectual means by which we arrive at this understanding of the world).

What is worth trying to understand, here, is that philosophical theoria cannot be reduced to a specific science such as biology, astronomy, physics or chemistry. For, although it has constant recourse to these sciences, it is neither experimental, nor limited to a particular branch or object of study. For example, it is not interested solely in what is alive (like biology), or in the heavenly bodies (like astronomy), nor is it solely interested in inanimate matter (like physics); on the other hand it tries to seize the essence or inner structure of the world as a totality. This is ambitious, no doubt, but philosophy is not a science among other sciences, and even if it does take account of scientific findings, its fundamental intent is not of a scientific order. What it searches for is a meaning in this world and a means of relating our existence to what surrounds us, rather than a solely objective (scientific) understanding.

However, let us leave this aspect of things to one side for the time being. We shall return to it later when we need to define more closely the difference between philoso phy and the exact sciences. I hope that you will sense already that this theoria – so different to our modern sciences and their supposedly ‘neutral’ principles, in that they describe what is and not what ought to be – must have practical implications in terms of morality, legality and politics. How could this description of the cosmos not have had implications for men who were asking themselves questions as to the best way of leading their lives?

Ethics: a System of Justice Based on Cosmic Order

What kind of ethics corresponds to the theoria that we have sketched so far? The answer is clear: one which encourages us to adjust and orientate ourselves to the cosmos, which for the Stoics was the watchword of all just actions, the very basis of all morals and all politics. For justice was, above all, adjustment – as a cabinetmaker shapes a piece of wood within a larger structure, such as a table – so our best efforts should be spent in striving to adjust ourselves to the harmonious and just natural order of things revealed to us by theoria. Knowledge is not entirely disinterested, as you see, because it opens directly onto ethics. Which is why the philosophical schools of antiquity, contrary to what happens today in schools and universities, placed less emphasis on speech than on actions, less on concepts than on the exercise of wisdom.

I will relate a brief anecdote so that you might fully understand the implications. Before Zeno founded the Stoic school, there was another school in Athens, from which the Stoics drew a great deal of their inspiration: that of the Cynics. Today the word ‘cynic’ implies something negative. To say that someone is ‘cynical’ is to say that he believes in nothing, acts without principles, doesn’t care about values, has no respect for others, and so on. In antiquity, in the third century before Christ, it was a very different business, and the Cynics were, in fact, the most exacting of moralists.

The word has an interesting origin, deriving directly from the Greek word for ‘dog’. What connection can there be between dogs and a school of philosophical wisdom? Here is the connection: the Cynics had a fundamental code of behaviour and strived to live according to nature, rather than according to artificial social conventions which they never stopped mocking. One of their favourite activities was needling the good citizens of Athens, in the streets and market squares, deriding their attitudes and beliefs – playing shock-the-bourgeois, as we might say today. Because of this behaviour they were frequently compared to those nasty little dogs who nip your ankles or start barking around your feet as if to deliberately annoy you.

It is also said that the Cynics – one of the most eminent of whom, Crates of Thebes, was Zeno’s teacher – forced their students to perform practical exercises, encouraging them to discount the opinions of others in order to focus on the essential business of living in harmony with the cosmic order. They were told, for example, to drag a dead fish attached to a piece of string across the town square. You can imagine how the unhappy man forced to carry out this prank immediately found himself the target of mockery and abuse. But it taught him a lesson or two! First, not to care for the opinions of others, or be deflected from pursuing what Cynic believers described as ‘conversion’: not conversion to a god, but to the cosmic reality from which human folly should never deflect us.

And, another more outrageous example: Crates occasionally made love in public with his wife Hipparchia. At the time, such behaviour was profoundly shocking, as it would be today. But he was acting in accordance with what might be termed ‘cosmic ethics’: the idea that morality and the art of living should borrow their principles from the harmonic law which regulates the entire cosmos. This rather extreme example suggests how theoria was for the Stoics a discipline to acquire, given that its practical consequences could be quite risky!

Cicero explains this cast of mind lucidly when summarising Stoic thought in another of his works, On Moral Ends:

The starting-point for anyone who is to live in accordance with nature is the universe as a whole and its governance. Moreover, one cannot make correct judgements about good and evil unless one understands the whole system of nature, and even of the life of the gods, not know whether or not human nature is in harmony with that of the universe. Similarly, those ancient precepts of the wise that bid us to ‘respect the right moment’, to ‘follow God’, to ‘know thyself ’, and ‘do nothing to excess’ cannot be grasped in their full force (which is immense) without a knowledge of physics. This science alone can reveal to us the power of nature to foster justice, and preserve friendship and other bonds of affection. (

III

, 73)

In which respect, according to Cicero, nature is ‘the best of all governments’. You may consider how very different this antique vision of morality and politics is to what we believe today in our democracies, in which it is the will of men and not the natural order that must prevail. Thus we have adopted the principle of the majority to elect our representatives or make our laws. Conversely, we often doubt whether nature is even intrinsically ‘good’: when she is not confirming our worst suspicions with a hurricane or a tsunami, nature has become for us a neutral substance, morally indifferent, neither good nor bad.

For the Ancients, not only was nature before all else good, but in no sense was a majority of humans called upon to decide between good and evil, between just and unjust, because the criteria which enabled those distinctions all stemmed from the natural order, which was both external to and superior to men. Broadly speaking, the good was what was in accord with the cosmic order, whether one willed it or not, and what was bad was what ran contrary to this order, whether one liked it or not. The essential thing was to act, situation-by-situation, moment-by-moment, in accordance with the harmonious order of things, so as to find our proper place, which each of us was assigned within the Universal.

If you want to compare this conception of morality to something familiar and current in our society, think of ecology. For ecologists – and in this sense their ideas are akin to aspects of ancient Greek thought, without their necessarily realising it – nature forms a harmonious totality which it is in our interest to respect and even to imitate. In this sense the ecologists’ conception of the ‘biosphere’, or of ‘ecosystems’, is close in spirit to that of the cosmos. In the words of the German philosopher Hans Jonas, a great theorist of contemporary ecology, ‘the ends of man are at home in nature’. In other words, the objectives to which we ought to subscribe on the ethical plane are already inscribed, as the Stoics believed, in the natural order itself, so that our duty – the moral imperative – is not cut off from being, from nature as such.

As Chrysippus said, more than two thousand years before Hans Jonas, ‘there is no other or more appropriate means of arriving at a definition of good or evil things, virtue or happiness, than to take our bearings from common nature and the governance of the universe’, a proposition which Cicero in turn related in these terms: ‘As for man, he was born to contemplate [theorein] and imitate the divine world … The world has virtue, and is also wise, and is consequently a Deity.’ (On the Nature of the Gods II, 14).

Is this, then, the last word of philosophy? Does it reach its limits, in the realm of theory, by offering ‘a vision of the world’, from which moral principles are then deduced and in agreement with which humans should act? Not in the slightest! For we are still only on the threshold of the quest for salvation, of that attempt to raise ourselves to the level of true wisdom by abolishing all fears originating in human mortality, in time’s passage, in death itself. It is only now, therefore, on the basis of a theory and a praxis (the translation of an idea into action; the practical side of an art or science, as distinct from its theoretical side) that we have just outlined, that Stoic philosophy approaches its true destination.

From Love of Wisdom to the Practice of Wisdom

Why bother with a theoria, or even an ethics? What is the point, after all, in taking all this trouble to contemplate the order of the universe, to grasp the innermost essence of being? Why try so doggedly to adjust ourselves to the world? No one is obliged to be a philosopher … And yet it is here that we touch on the deepest question of all, the ultimate end of all philosophy: the question of salvation.

As with all philosophies, there is for the Stoics a realm ‘beyond’ morality. To use philosophers’ jargon, this is what is termed ‘soteriology’, from the Greek soterios which means, quite simply, ‘salvation’. As I have already suggested, this presents itself in relation to the fact of death, which leads us, sooner or later, to wonder about the irreversible nature of time and, consequently, about the best use we can make of it. Even if all humans do not become philosophers, all of us are one day or another affected by philosophical questions. As I have suggested, philosophy, unlike the great religions, promises to help us to ‘save’ ourselves, to conquer our fears, not through an Other, a God, but through our own strength and the use of our reason.

As the philosopher Hannah Arendt noted in Between Past and Future (1961), the Ancients, even before the birth of philosophy, traditionally found two ways of taking up the challenge of the inescapable fact of human mortality; two strategies, if you like, of attempting to outflank death, or at least, of outflanking the fear of death.

The first, quite naturally, resides in the simple fact of procreation: by having children, humans assure their ‘continuity’: becoming in a sense a part of the eternal cycle of nature, of a universe of things that can never die. The proof lies in the fact that our children resemble us physic ally as well as mentally. They carry forwards, through time, something of us. The drawback, of course, is that this way of accessing eternity really only benefits the species: if the latter appears to be potentially immortal as a result, the individual on the other hand is born, matures and dies. So, by aiming at self-perpetuation through the means of reproduction, not only does the individual human fall short, he fails to rise above the condition of the rest of brute creation. To put it plainly: however many children I have, it will not prevent me from dying, nor, worse still, from seeing them die before me. Admittedly, I will do my bit to ensure the survival of the species, but in no sense will I save the individual, the person. There is therefore no true salvation by means of procreation.

The second strategy was rather more elaborate: it consisted of performing heroic and glorious deeds to become the subject of an epic narrative, the written trace having as its principal virtue the conquest of transitory time. One might say that works of history – and in ancient Greece there already flourished some of the greatest historians, such as Thucydides and Herodotus – by recording the exceptional deeds accomplished by certain men, saved them from the oblivion which threatens everything that does not belong to the realm of nature.

Natural phenomena are cyclical. They repeat themselves indefinitely: night follows day; winter follows autumn; a clear day follows a storm. And this repetition guarantees that they cannot be forgotten: the natural world, in a peculiar but comprehensible way, effortlessly achieves a kind of ‘immortality’, whereas ‘all things that owe their existence to men, such as works, deeds and words, are perishable, infected as it were, by the mortality of their authors’ (Arendt). It is precisely this empire of the perishable, which glorious deeds, at least in theory, allowed the hero to combat. Thus, according to Hannah Arendt, the ultimate purpose of works of history in antiquity was to report ‘heroic’ deeds, such as the behaviour of Achilles during the Trojan war, in an attempt to rescue them from the world of oblivion and align them to events within the natural order:

If mortals succeeded in endowing their works, deeds and words with some permanence and in arresting their perishability, then these things would, to a degree at least, enter and be at home in the world of everlasting ness, and mortals themselves would find their place in the cosmos, where everything is immortal except men. (‘The Concept of History, Ancient and Modern’, in

Between Past and Future

, 1961)

This is true. In certain respects – thanks to writing, which is more stable and permanent than speech – the Greek heroes are not wholly dead, since we continue today to read accounts of their exploits. Glory can thus seem to be a form of personal immortality, which is no doubt why it was, and continues to be, coveted by so many. Although one must add that, for many others, it will never be more than a minor consolation, if not a form of vanity.

With the coming of philosophy, a third way of confronting the challenge of human mortality declared itself. I have already remarked how fear of death was, according to Epictetus – and all the great cosmologists – the ultimate motive for seeking philosophical wisdom. According to the Stoics, the sage is one who, thanks to a just exercise of thought and action, is able to attain a human version – if not of immortality – then at least of eternity. Admittedly, he is going to die, but death will not be for him the absolute end of everything. Rather it will be a transformation, a ‘rite of passage’, if you like, from one state to another, within a universal order whose perfection possesses complete stability, and by the same token possesses divinity.

We are going to die: this is a fact. The ripened corn will be harvested; this is a fact. Must we then, asks Epictetus, conceal the truth and refrain superstitiously from airing such thoughts because they are ‘ill omens’? No, because ‘ears of wheat may vanish, but the world remains’. The way in which this thought is expressed is worth our contemplation:

You might just as well say that the fall of leaves is illomened, or for a fresh fig to change into a dried one, and a bunch of grapes into raisins. For all these changes are from a preceding state into a new and different state; and thus not destruction, but an ordered management and governance of things. Travelling abroad is likewise, a small change; and so is death, a greater change, from what presently is – and here I should not say: a change into what is not, but rather: into what presently is not. – In which case, then, shall I cease to be? – Yes, you will cease to be what you are, but become something else of which the universe then has need. (Epictetus,

Discourses,

III

, 24, 91–4)

Or, according to Marcus Aurelius: ‘You came into this world as a part: you will vanish into the whole which gave you birth, or rather you will be gathered up into its generative principle by the process of change.’ (Meditations, IV,14)

What do such texts mean? They mean simply this: that having reached a certain level of wisdom, theoretical and practical, the human individual understands that death does not really exist, that it is but a passage from one state to the next; not an annihilation but a different state of being. As members of a divine and stable cosmos, we too can participate in this stability and this divinity. As soon as we understand this, we will become aware simultaneously how unjustified is our fear of death, not merely subjectively but also – in a pantheistic sense – objectively. Because the universe is eternal, we will remain for ever a fragment – we too will never cease to exist!

To arrive at a proper sense of this transformation is, for Epictetus, the object of all philosophical activity. It will allow each of us to attain a good and happy existence, by teaching us (according to the beautiful Stoic formula), ‘to live and die like a God’ – that is, to live and die as one who, perceiving his privileged connection with all other beings inside the cosmic harmony, attains a serene consciousness of the fact that, mortal in one sense, he is no less immortal in another. This is why, as in the case of Cicero, the Stoic tradition tended to ‘deify’ certain illustrious men such as Hercules or Aesculapius: these men, because their souls ‘survived and enjoyed immortality, were rightly regarded as gods, for they were of the noblest nature and also immortal’.

These were the words of Cicero in On the Nature of the Gods. We might almost say that, according to this ancient concept of salvation, there are degrees of death: as if one died more or less, depending on whether one displayed more or less wisdom or ‘illumin ation’. From this perspective, the good life was one which, despite the disappointed acknowledgement of one’s finiteness, maintained the most direct possible link with eternity; in other words, with the divine ordin ance to which the sage accedes through theoria or contemplation.

But let us first listen to Plato, in this lengthy passage from the Timaeus, which evokes the sublime power of man’s sovereign faculty, his intellect (nous):

God gave this sovereign faculty to be the divinity in each of us, being that part which, as we say, dwells at the top of the body, and inasmuch as we are a plant not of an earthly but of a heavenly growth, raises us from the earth to our kindred who are in heaven. For the divinity suspended the head and root of us from that place where the generation of the soul first began, and thus made the whole body upright. Now when a man gives himself over to the cravings of desire and ambition, and is eagerly striving to satisfy them, all his thoughts necessarily become mortal, and, as far as it is possible altogether to become such, he must become entirely mortal, because he has cherished his mortal part. But he who has been earnest in the love of knowledge and of true wisdom, and has exercised his intellect more than any other part of him, must have thoughts immortal and divine, if he attain truth, and in so far as human nature is capable of sharing in immortality, he must altogether be immortal. (90b–c)

And must also achieve a higher condition of happiness, adds Plato. To attain a successful life – one which is at once good and happy – we must remain faithful to the divine part of our nature, namely our intellect. For it is through the intellect that we attach ourselves, as by ‘heavenly roots’, to the divine and superior order of celestial harmony: ‘Therefore must we attempt to flee this world as quickly as possible for the next; and such flight is to become like God, to the extent that we can. And becoming like God is becoming just and wholesome, by means of intellect.’ (Theaetetus, 176a–b).

And we find a comparable statement in one of the most noted passages of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, where he too defines the good life, ‘the contemplative life’, the only life which can lead us to perfect happiness, as a life by which we escape, at least in part, the condition of mere mortality. Some will perhaps claim that

such a life is too rarefied for man’s condition; for it is not in so far as he is man that he can live so, but in so far as something divine is present in him … If reason is divine, then, in comparison with man, the life according to reason is divine in comparison with human life. So we must not follow those who advise us, being human, to think only of human things, and, being mortal, of mortal things; but must, so far as we can, make ourselves immortal, and strain every nerve to live in accordance with what is best in us.’ (

X

, 7)

Of course, this objective is by no means easy, and if philosophy is to be more than mere aspiration to wisdom – a genuine conquering of our fears – then it must be embodied in practical exercises.

Even though I am not myself a Stoic by inclination and am not convinced by this way of philosophical thinking, I must acknowledge the grandeur of its project and the formidable set of answers which it tries to bring. I would like to look at these now, by evoking a few of the exercises in wisdom to which Stoicism opens the way. For philosophy, as the word itself indicates, is not quite wisdom but only the love (philo) of wisdom (sophia). And, according to the Stoics, it is through practical exercise that one passes from one to the other. These exercises are intended to eradicate the anxiety associated with mortality – and in this respect they still retain, in my view, an inestim able value.

A Few Exercises in Wisdom

These almost exclusively concern our relation to time, for it is in the folds of time that these anxieties establish themselves, generating remorse and nostalgia for the past, and false hopes for the future. The exercises are all the more interesting and significant in that we encounter them time and again throughout the history of philosophy, in the thought of philosophers who are in other respects quite distant from the Stoics – in Epicurus and Lucretius, but also, curiously, in Spinoza and Nietzsche, and even in traditions remote from Western philosophy, such as Tibetan Buddhism. I will restrict myself to four examples.

The Burden of the Past and the Mirages of the Future

Let us begin with the essentials: in the eyes of the Stoics, the two great ills which prevent us from achieving fulfilment are nostalgia and hope, specifically attachment to the past and anxiety about the future. These block our access to the present moment, and prevent us from living life to the full. It has been said that Stoicism here anticipated one of the most profound insights of psychoanalysis: that he who remains the prisoner of his past will always be incapable of ‘acting and enjoying’, as Freud said; that the nostalgia for lost paradises, for the joys and sorrows of childhood, lays upon our lives a weight as heavy as it is unknown to us.

Marcus Aurelius expresses this conviction, perhaps better than anyone else, at the beginning of Book XII of his Meditations:

It is in your power to secure at once all the objects which you dream of reaching by a roundabout route, if you will be fair to yourself: if you will leave all the past behind, commit the future to Providence, and direct the present alone, towards piety and justice. To piety, so that you may be content with what has been assigned to you – for Nature designed it for you and you for it; to justice, that you may freely and without circumlocution speak the truth and do those things that are in accord with law and in accord with the worth of each. (

XII

.1)

To be saved, to attain the wisdom that surpasses all philosophy, we must school ourselves to live without vain fears or pointless nostalgias. Once and for all we must stop living in the dimensions of time past and time future, which do not exist in reality, and adhere as much as possible to the present:

Do not let your picture of the whole of your life confuse you, do not dwell upon all the manifold troubles which have come to pass and will come to pass; but ask yourself in regard to every passing moment: what is there here that cannot be borne and cannot be endured? Then remind yourself that it is not the future or the past that weighs heavy upon you, but always the present, and that this gradually grows less. (

Meditations,

VIII

, 36)

Marcus Aurelius is quite insistent on this point: ‘Remember that each of us lives only in the present moment, in the instant. All the rest is the past, or an uncertain future. The extent of life is therefore brief.’ This is what we must confront. Or as Seneca expresses it, in the Letters to Lucilius: ‘You must dispense with these two things: fear of the future, and the recollection of ancient ills. The latter no longer concerns me, the former has yet to concern me.’ To which one might add, for good measure, that it is not only ‘ancient ills’ that spoil the present life of the unwise, but perversely and perhaps to a greater degree, the recollection of happy days irrevocably lost and which will return ‘never more’.

If should now be clear why, paradoxically (and contrary to popular opinion), Stoicism would teach its disciples to part ways with those ideologies that promote the virtue of hope.

‘Hope a Little Less, Love a Little More’

As one contemporary philosopher, André Comte-Sponville, has emphasised, Stoicism here is very close to one of the most subtle tenets of Oriental wisdom, and of Tibetan Buddhism in particular: contrary to the commonplace idea that one ‘cannot live without hope’, hope is the greatest of misfortunes. For it is by nature an absence, a lack, a source of tension in our lives. For we live in terms of plans, chasing after objectives located in a more or less distant future, and believing that our happiness depends upon their accomplishment.

What we forget is that there is no other reality than the one in which we are living here and now, and that this strange headlong flight from the present can only end in failure. The objective accomplished, we almost invariably experience a puzzling sense of indifference, if not disappointment. Like children who become bored with their toys the day after Christmas, the possession of things so ardently coveted makes us neither better nor happier than before. The difficulties of life and the tragedy of the human condition are not modified by ownership or success and, in the famous phrase of Seneca, ‘while we wait for life, life passes’.

Perhaps you like imagining what you would do if you were to win the lottery: you would buy this and that; you would give some of it to this friend or that cousin; you would definitely give some of it to charity; and then you would take off on a trip around the world. And then what? In the end, it is always the gravestone that is silhouetted against the horizon, and you come to realise soon enough that the accumulation of all imaginable worldly goods solves nothing (although let us not be hypocrites: as the saying goes, money certainly does make poverty bearable).

Which is also why, according to a celebrated Buddhist proverb, you must learn to live as if this present moment were the most vital of your whole life, and as if those people in whose company you find yourself were the most important in your life. For nothing else exists, in truth: the past is no longer and the future is not yet. These temporal dimensions are real only to the imagination, which we ‘shoulder’ – like the ‘beasts of burden’ mocked by Nietzsche – merely to justify our incapacity to embrace what Nietzsche called (in entirely Stoic mode) amor fati: the love of reality for itself. Happiness lost, bliss deferred, and, by the same token, the present receding, consigned to nothingness whereas it is the only true dimension of existence.

It is with this perspective that the Discourses of Epictetus aimed to develop one of the more celebrated themes of Stoicism: namely, that the good life is a life stripped of both hopes and fears. In other words, a life reconciled to what is the case, a life which accepts the world as it is. As you can see, this reconciliation cannot sit alongside the conviction that the world is divine, harmonious and inherently good.

Here is how Epictetus puts the matter to his pupil: you must chase from your ‘complaining’ spirit

all grief, fear, desire, envy, malice, avarice, effeminacy and in temperance. But these can be expelled only by looking to God, and attaching yourself to him alone, and con secrating yourself to his commands. If you wish for anything else, you will only be following what is stronger than you, with sighs and groans, always seeking happiness outside yourself, and never able to find it: for you seek it where it is not, and neglect to seek it where it is. (

Discourses

,

II

, 16, 45–7)

This passage must of course be read in a ‘cosmic’ or pantheistic sense, rather than in a monotheistic sense (monotheism: the belief in only one God).

Let us be very clear about this: the God of whom Epictetus speaks is not the personal God of Christianity, but merely an embodying of the cosmos, another name for the principle of universal reason which the Greeks named the Logos: the true face of destiny, that we have no choice but to accept, and should yearn for with our entire soul. Whereas, in fact, victims as we are of commonplace illusions, we keep thinking that we must oppose it so as to bend it to our purposes. As the master advises his pupil, once more:

We must bring our own will into harmony with whatever comes to pass, so that none of the things which happen may occur against our will, nor those which do not happen be wished for by us. Those who have settled this as the philosopher’s task have it in their power never to be disappointed in their desires, or fall prey to what they wish to avoid, but to lead personal lives free from sorrow, fear and perturbation. (

Discourses

,

II

, 14, 7–8)

Of course, such advice seems absurd to ordinary mortals: amounting to an especially insipid version of fatalism. This sort of wisdom might pass for folly, because it is based upon a vision of the world which requires a conceptual effort out of the ordinary to be grasped. But this is precisely what distinguishes philosophy from ordinary discussion, and, to me, why it possesses an irreplaceable charm.

I am far from being an advocate of Stoic resignation, and later on, when we touch upon contemporary mater ialism, I will explain more fully why this is so. However, I admire the fact that – when things are going well! – Stoicism can seem to offer a form of wisdom. There are moments when we seem to be here not to transform the world, but simply to be part of it, to experience the beauty and joy that it offers to us. For example, you are in the sea, scuba diving, and you put on your mask to look at the fish. You are not there to change things, to improve them, or to correct them; you are there to admire and accept things. It is somewhat in this spirit that Stoicism encourages us to reconcile ourselves to what is, to the present as it occurs, without hopes and regrets. Stoicism invites us to enjoy these moments of grace, and, to make them as numerous as possible, it suggests that we change ourselves rather than the order of things.

To move on from this concept to another essential Stoic counsel: because the only dimension of reality is the present, and because, of its nature, the present is in constant flux, it is wise for us to cultivate indifference or non-attachment to what is transient. Otherwise we store up the worst sufferings for ourselves.

Non-attachment

Stoicism, in a spirit remarkably close to that of Buddhism, appeals for an attitude of ‘non-attachment’ towards the things of this world. The Tibetan masters would no doubt have approved of this text from Epictetus:

The principal and highest form of training, and one that stands at the very entrance to happiness, is, that when you become attached to something, let it not be as to something which cannot be taken away, but rather, as to something like an earthenware pot or crystal goblet, so that if it breaks, you may remember what kind of thing it was and not be distressed. So in this, too, when you kiss your child, or your brother, or your friend, never give way entirely to your affections, nor free rein to your imagination; but curb it, restrain it, like those who stand behind generals when they ride in triumph and remind them that they are but men. Remind yourself likewise that what you love is mortal, that what you love is not your own. It is granted to you for the present, and not irrevocably, not for ever, but like a fig or a bunch of grapes in the appointed season … What harm is there while you are kissing your child to murmur softly, ‘Tomorrow you will die’? (

Discourses

,

III

, 24 84–8)

Let us be clear about what Epictetus is saying: it is not in any sense a case of being indifferent, as we might know it, and even less of lacking in the obligations which compassion imposes upon us in respect of others and, most importantly, of those close to us. He is saying that we must distrust all attachments that make us forget what the Buddhists call ‘impermanence’: the fact that nothing is stable in this world, that everything passes and changes, and that not to understand this is to create for oneself a hopelessness about what is past and a hope of what is yet to come. We must learn to content ourselves with the present, to love the present to the point of desiring nothing else and of regretting nothing whatsoever. Reason, which is our guide and which invites us to live in accordance with the harmony of the cosmos, must therefore be purified of that which weighs it down and falsifies it, whenever it strays into the unreal dimensions of time past and time future.

But once the truth of this is grasped we are still far from putting it into practice. Which is why Marcus Aurelius invites his disciples to embody it practically:

So, if you separate, as I say, from this governing self [i.e. the mind] what is attached to it by passions, and what of time is left to run or has already flown, and make yourself like the sphere of Empedocles, ‘rounded, rejoicing in the solitude which is about it’, and practise only to live the life you are living, that is the present, then it will be in your power at least to live out the time that is left until you die, untroubled and dispensing kindness, and reconciled with your own good daemon. (

Meditations,

XII

, 3)

As we shall see, this is precisely what Nietzsche refers to in his suggestive phrase, ‘the innocence of becoming’. To attain this level of wisdom, we must have the courage to live our lives under the guidance of the ‘future perfect’ tense.

‘When Catastrophe Strikes, I Will Be Ready’

What might this mean? Epictetus is speaking about his child, and what is at stake is once again death and the victories that philosophy can enable us to gain over (fear of ) death. It is in this sense that the most practical of exercises connect to the most exalted spirituality. To live in the present and detach oneself from the regrets and anguish that define the past and the future is indeed to savour each moment of existence as it merits; in the full awareness that, for us mortals, it may be our last.

Your time is circumscribed, and unless you use it to attain calm of mind, time will be gone and you will be gone and the opportunity to use it will not be yours again … Perform each action in life as though it were your last. (Epictetus,

Meditations,

II

, 4, 5)

What is at issue spiritually in this exercise, where the subject shakes off all attachments to past and future, is therefore clear. It is a question of conquering the fears associated with our mortality, thanks to the use of an intuition that is not intellectual but intimate and almost physical.

There are moments of grace in our lives, instants when we have the rare experience of being completely reconciled to the world. Just now I gave the example of swimming underwater. Perhaps this doesn’t mean anything to you or seems an odd choice, but I am sure you can imagine for yourself many other examples: a walk in a forest, a sunset, being in love, the calm and yet heightened state of something accomplished well – any of these experiences. In each case, we experience a feeling of serenity, of being at one with the world in which we find ourselves, where harmony occurs of its own accord, without being forced, so that time seems to stop, making room for the enduring present, a present which cannot be undermined by anything in the past or future.

To see to it that life as a whole resembles such moments: that is the fundamental project of Stoic wisdom. It is at this point that we touch on something resembling salvation, in the sense that nothing further can trouble a serenity which comes from the extinguishing of fears concerning other dimensions of time. When he achieves this degree of enlightenment, the sage does indeed live ‘like a god’, in the eternity of an instant that nothing can diminish.

From which you can understand how, for Stoicism as for Buddhism, the tense in which the struggle against anxiety is to be waged is indeed the ‘future perfect’. In effect: ‘When destiny strikes, I shall have been prepared for it.’ When catastrophe – be it illness, poverty or death, all the ills linked to the irreversible nature of time – will have taken place, I shall be able to confront it thanks to the ability I have acquired to live in the present. In other words one can love the world as it is, no matter what transpires:

If some so-called ‘undesirable’ event should befall you, it will in the first place be an immediate relief to you that it was not unexpected … You will say to yourself, ‘I knew all along that I am mortal. I knew that in this life I might have to go away, that I might be cast into exile. I knew that I might be thrown into prison.’ Then if you reflect within yourself and ask from what quarter the accident has come, you will at once remember that it comes from the region of things outside our will, which are not ours. (Epictetus,

Discourses,

III

, 105–6)

This wisdom still speaks to us today, through the centuries and overarching many cultures. However, we no longer inhabit the world of Greek antiquity, and the great cosmologies have for the most part vanished, together with the ‘wisdom of the ages’. This raises an important question: why and how do we pass from one vision of the world to another? Or, in other words, why are there different philosophies which seem to follow on from one another in the history of ideas, rather than a single system of thought which survives the passage of time and suffices us once and for all?

Let’s examine this question in detail through looking at the most recent example: that of the doctrines of salvation associated with the great cosmologies. Why was Stoic wisdom not enough to stifle the emergence of competing systems of thought, and, specifically, to prevent the spread of Christianity? After all, Christianity was to deal Stoicism a lethal blow, relegating it to a marginal position for centuries.

By taking a specific example of how one vision of the world yields to another, we may learn lessons of a more general kind about the development of philosophy. As far as Stoicism goes, we recognise that, however grandiose the positions it advocated, a major weakness affected its response to the question of salvation – one which was to leave room for a competing version to establish itself, and which consequently allowed the machine of history to set off again.

As you have probably noticed, the Stoic doctrine of salvation is resolutely anonymous and impersonal. It promises us eternity, certainly, but of a non-personal kind, as an oblivious fragment of the cosmos: death, for the Stoic, is a mere rite of passage, which involves a transition from a state of individual consciousness – you and I, as living and thinking beings – to a state of oneness with the cosmos, in the course of which we lose everything that constitutes our self-awareness and individuality. It is by no means certain, therefore, that this doctrine can fully answer the questions raised by our anxiety about human finiteness. Stoicism tries valiantly to relieve us of the fears linked to death, but at the cost of obliterating our individual identity. What we would like above all is to be reunited with our loved ones, and, if possible, with their voices, their faces – not in the form of undifferentiated cosmic fragments, such as pebbles or vegetables. In this arena, Christianity might be said to have used its big guns. It promises us no less than everything that we would wish for: personal immortality and the salvation of our loved ones. Exploiting what it saw as a weakness in Greek wisdom, Christianity created a new doctrine of salvation so ‘effective’ it opened a chasm in the philosophies of Antiquity and dominated the Occidental world for nearly fifteen hundred years.

Chapter 3

The Victory of Christianity Over Greek Philosophy

When I was a student – in 1968, when religious questions were not the most fashionable – we basically ignored the medieval frame of mind. In other words, we lumped together and cheerfully channel-hopped our way through the great monotheist religions. It was possible to pass our exams and even become a philosophy professor by knowing next to nothing about Judaism, Islam or Christianity. Of course, we had to attend lectures on ancient thought – Greek thought, above all – after which we could cut straight to Descartes. Without any transition, we leapt fifteen centuries, broadly speaking from the end of the second century (the late Stoics) to the beginning of the seventeenth century. As a result, for years I knew more or less nothing about the intellectual history of Christianity, beyond the cultural commonplaces.

This strikes me as absurd, and I would not wish you to repeat this mistake. Even if one is not a believer, and all the more so if one is hostile to religion – as we shall see in the case of Nietzsche – we have no right to ignorance. If only to oppose it, we must at least be familiar with religion in its various forms, and understand what we are opposing. At the least, it explains many facets of the world in which we live, which is the direct product of a religious world-view. There is not a museum of art, even of contemporary art, which does not require a minimum of theological understanding, if one is to fully understand its contents; and there is no single conflict in the world today that is not more or less linked to the history of religious communities: Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland; Muslims, Orthodox and Catholics in the Balkans; Animists, Christians and Islamists in Africa, and so on.

Yet, according to the definition of philosophy given at the start of this book, you would not normally expect it to include a chapter on Christianity. The notion of a ‘Christian philosophy’ might seem out of place and contradictory to what I have been proposing at length. Religion is the prime example of a non-philosophical quest for salvation – given its assumption of God and a need for faith – rather than by means of human reason. So, why discuss it here? For four simple reasons, which I will now set out briefly.

First, as I suggested at the end of the last chapter, the doctrine of Christian salvation, although fundamentally non-philosophical, even anti-philosophical, found itself in direct competition with Greek philosophy. It was to profit, so to speak, from the flaws which weakened the Stoic response to the question of salvation. The Christian solution even appropriated the vocabulary of philosophy for its own ends, assigning new religious meanings, and put forward an entirely fresh response to the question of our relation to death and to time. Its approach supplanted more or less entirely the answers supplied by the philosophy of the preceding centuries. This merits our attention.

The second reason is that even if the doctrine of Christian salvation is not a philosophy, there remains nonetheless a place for the exercise of reason at the heart of Christianity: on the one hand, to reflect on the great evangelical texts – to interpret the message of Christ; on the other hand, to gain an understanding of the natural order which, in so far as it is God’s work, must surely bear some mark of its creator. We shall return to this question, but it will suffice for now to understand that, paradoxically, there was to be a place after all – subordinate and modest, certainly, but nonetheless real – for philosophical activity at the heart of Christianity: a role for human reason to clarify and reinforce a doctrine of salvation, even if the latter would remain fundamentally religious and founded on faith.

The third reason proceeds directly from the second: that there is no more illuminating way of understanding philosophy than to compare it with what it is not; to place it in relation to that to which it is most firmly opposed and yet most closely linked, namely religion. Ultimately setting their sights on the glittering prize of salvation, both religion and philosophy are closely linked, through their attempt to conquer anxiety over human mortality. They are at the same time opposed, because the means used by each are not merely different but irreconcilable. The Gospels, the Gospel of John in particu lar, reveal a level of familiarity with Greek philosophy, notably Stoicism. There can be no doubt, therefore, as to the confrontation and competition between opposing doctrines of salvation – Christian and Greek. An examination of the reason why the former prevailed over the latter is essential for an understanding not only of the nature of philosophy, but also for an understanding of how, after the long epoch during which Christian ideas were dominant, philosophy was able to re-emerge and set off for new horizons – those of modern thought.

Finally, there are in Christian thought, above all in the realm of ethics, ideas which are of great significance even today, and even for non-believers; ideas which, once detached from their purely religious origins, acquired an autonomy that came to be assimilated into modern philosophy. For example, the idea that the moral worth of a person does not lie in his inherited gifts or natural talents, but in the free use he makes of them, is a notion which Christianity gave to the world, and which many modern ethical systems would adopt for their purposes. It would be obtuse to try and pass from the Greek experience to modern philosophy without any mention of Christian thought.

I would like to explain why Christian thought gained the upper hand over Greek thought and dominated Europe until the Renaissance. This is no small achievement: there must surely be reasons for this hegemony. In fact, as we shall see, Christians came up with answers to human questions about mortality which have no equivalent in Greek thought – answers so ‘successful’, if you like, so ‘attractive’ and so indispensable that they convinced a large proportion of humanity.

To compare this doctrine of salvation and those philosophies of salvation which dispensed with God, I am going to follow once more the formula of theory, ethics and wisdom. To keep to essentials, I will first summarise the key characteristics which marked the radical rupture of Christianity with the Greek world – five characteristics which will allow you to understand how, based on a new theoria, Christianity was able to outline a new morality and a doctrine of salvation based on love. Thus did religion capture the hearts of men.

How Religion Replaced Reason with Faith

Firstly, and most fundamentally: the Logos, which as we as have seen for the Stoics merged with the impersonal, harmonious and divine structure of the cosmos as a whole, came to be identified for Christians with a single and unique personality, that of Christ. To the horror of the Greeks, the new believers maintained that the Logos – in other words the divine principle – was in no sense identical with the harmonious order of the world, but was incarnated in one outstanding individual, namely Christ.

Perhaps this distinction leaves you stone cold. After all, what does it matter – for us, today – that the Logos (for the Stoics a ‘logical’ ordering of the world) came to mean Christ as far as Christians were concerned? I might reply that today there exist more than a thousand million Christians – and that for this reason alone, to understand what drives them, their motives, the content and meaning of their faith, is not absurd for anyone with a modicum of interest in their fellow men. But this answer would be inadequate. For what is at stake in this seemingly abstract debate as to where the divine principle resides – whether in the structure of the universe or in the personality of one exceptional man – is no less than the transition from an anonymous and blind doctrine of salvation to one that promises not only that we shall be saved by one person, Christ, but that we shall be saved as individuals in our own right: for what we are, and as we are.

This ‘personalising’ of salvation allows us firstly to comprehend – by means of a concrete example – how mankind can pass from one vision of the world to another: how a new response to reality comes to prevail over an older response because it ‘adds’ something: a greater power of conviction, but also considerable advantages over what had preceded it. But there is more: by resting its case upon a definition of the human person and an unprecedented idea of love, Christianity was to have an incalculable effect upon the history of ideas. To give one example, it is quite clear that, in this Christian re-evaluation of the human person, of the individual as such, the philosophy of human rights to which we subscribe today would never have established itself. It is essential therefore that we have a more or less accurate idea of the chain of reasoning which led Christianity to break so radically with the Stoic past. And to have such an understanding, we must first grasp that in the vernacular translations of the Gospels which narrate the life of Jesus, the term Logos – borrowed directly from the Stoics – is translated by ‘word’. For Greek thought in general, and for Stoicism in particular, the idea that the Logos could designate anything other than the rational (therefore true, therefore beautiful) order of the universe was unthinkable. In their eyes, to claim that a mere mortal could constitute the Logos, or ‘the word incarnate’, as the Gospels express it, was insanity. It was to assign the attribute of divinity to a mere human being, whereas the divine, as you will recall, is interchangeable with the universal cosmic order, and can in no sense be identified with a single puny individual, whatever his credentials.

The Romans – notably under Marcus Aurelius, Roman Emperor at the close of the second century and the last great Stoic thinker – did not hold back from massacring Christians on account of their intolerable ‘deviance’. For this was a time when ideas were not playthings.

What exactly was at issue in this apparently innocent change in the meaning of a single word? The answer: nothing less than a revolution in the definition of divinity. And as we know, revolutions do not take place without suffering.

Let us return for a moment to the text in which John, author of the Fourth Gospel, effects this diversion of meaning away from the Stoic sense. Here is what he says – with my comments italicised inside brackets:

In the beginning was the Word [

Logos

], and the Word was with God, and the Word was God … All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made. [

Up to this point, all is well, and the Stoics could still be in agreement with John, especially with the notion that the

Logos

and the divine are one and the same reality.

] And the Word was made flesh [

things start to take a turn for the worse!

] and dwelt among us [

quite unacceptable – the divine has become

man, as incarnated in Jesus, none of which makes sense to a Stoic

]. And we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth. [

sheer madness, for the Greek sages: the followers of Christ are now presented as witnesses of the transformation of the

Logos

/

Word

(or Godhead) – into Mankind (or Christ) as if the latter were son of the former.

] (1 John 1)

What is the meaning of this? To put it simply now – although at the time it was a matter of life or death – the divine had shifted ground: it was no longer an impersonal structure, but an extraordinary individual, in the form of Jesus, the ‘Man-God’. This was an unfathom able shift, which was to direct European humanity along a quite different path than that set out by the Greeks. In a few lines of text, the very opening lines of his Gospel, John invites us to believe that the incarnate Word, the divine as such, no longer designates the rational and harmonious structure of the cosmos, the universal order as such, but refers instead to a simple individual.

We shall see how Marcus Aurelius would order the death of Saint Justin Martyr, a former Stoic who became the first Father of the Church and the first philosopher to convert to Christianity, but let us continue for a moment to explore the new aspects of this entirely original theoria. You will recall that theoria always comprises two aspects: on the one hand an unveiling of the essential structure of the universe (the divine); on the other hand the instruments of knowledge which it employs to arrive at this understanding (the vision or contemplation). Now it is not simply the divine, the theion, which is utterly changed here by becoming an individual being; but also the orao, the fashion of seeing, or act of contemplating, understanding and approaching reality that is transformed. From now on, it is no longer reason that will be the theoretical faculty par excellence, but faith. In which respect, religion will soon declare its opposition to the rationality at the heart of philosophy, and, by these means, depose philosophy itself.

And so, faith begins to supplant reason. For Christians, truth is no longer accessed through the exercise of a human reason which can grasp the rational and ‘logical’ order of the cosmic totality by virtue of its being an eminent component of that same order. From now on, what will permit man to approach the divine, to know it and to contemplate it, belongs to a quite different order. What will count here, above all, is no longer intelligence but trust in the word of a man, the Man-God, Christ, who claims to be the son of God, the Logos incarnate. We are going to believe Him, because He is worthy of this act of faith – and the miracles He accomplishes will play their part in the credit which is accorded to Him.

You will recall that trust originally meant ‘faith’. To contemplate God, the appropriate theoretical instrument is faith, not reason, and this means placing all our confidence in the words of Christ announcing the ‘good news’: according to which we shall be saved by faith and not by ‘works’; in other words, our all too human actions, however admirable these might be. It is no longer a case of thinking for oneself, but rather of placing trust in another. And in that, no doubt, lies the most profound and significant difference between philosophy and religion.

From which proceeds the importance of bearing witness, as the First Epistle of Saint John makes clear:

That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, of the Word [

Logos

] of life – for the life was manifested, and we have seen it, and bear witness, and shew unto you that eternal life, which was with the Father, and was manifested unto us – that which we have seen and heard declare we unto you, that you also may have fellowship with us. (1 John 1)

Of course, it is of Christ that John is speaking, and you will see that his words rest upon a quite different logic to that of reflection and reason: it is not a case of arguing for or against the existence of a God – such a topic for argument goes beyond human reason – but a case of bearing witness and believing, of declaring that we have seen ‘the Word made flesh’, Christ; that we have ‘handled’, touched, heard, spoken with Him, and that this witness is to be trusted. You are free to believe or not to believe that the divine Logos, the life eternal which was with the Father, has been incarnated in a Man-God who came down to Earth. But it is no longer a case of working this out by intelligence and reason. If anything, the reverse is the case: ‘Happy the poor in spirit’, as Christ says in the Gospels, for they will believe and consequently see God. Whereas the ‘confident’, the ‘haughty’ – as Augustine described the philosophers – will walk past the truth in all the finery of their pride and arrogance.

Third: what is required to put into practice the new theoria is not the comprehension of philosophers, but the humility of simple folk. It is no longer a question of thinking for oneself but of believing in and through another. The theme of humility is omnipresent in the critiques of the two greatest Christian philosophers: St Augustine, who lived in the Roman Empire in the fourth century after Christ, and Pascal, who lived in seventeenth-century France. Each based their attack on philosophy (which they never missed an opportunity to criticize, to the point that it seems for them to have been the great enemy) on the fact that it was an exercise of pride.

There is no shortage of passages from St Augustine denouncing the pride and vanity of philosophers who refused to accept that Christ could be the incarnation of the Word, of the divine principle and who could not tolerate the modesty of a Godhead reduced to the status of a humble mortal, vulnerable to suffering and death. As he says in The City of God, taking aim at philosophers: ‘The haughty disdained to accept this God as their master, because “the Word was made flesh and dwelt amongst us”.’ This was intolerable to philosophers. Why? Because it required that they hang up their intelligence and their reason in the church vestibule to make room for faith and belief.

There is, then, a double humility in religion, which opposes it to Greek philosophy from the outset, and which corresponds to the two aspects of the theoria, that of the divinit (theion) and that of contemplative seeing (orao). On the one hand there is the humility, ‘objective’ if you like, of a divine Logos which finds itself ‘reduced’ in the person of Jesus to the status of a lowly mortal (too lowly, for the Greeks). On the other hand, there is the subjective humility of our being enjoined by believers to ‘let go’ of our own thinking faculty, to forsake reason for trust, so as to make place for faith. Nothing is more significant in this respect than the terms employed by Augustine in The City of God:

Swollen with pride by the high opinion they had of their science, they [philosophers] did not hear Christ when he said: ‘Learn of Me, because I am meek, and humble of heart, and you shall find peace.’

The founding text of Christianity, here, occurs in the New Testament, in the First Epistle to the Corinthians, written by St Paul. It is a difficult text, but it was to have such a profound influence on the subsequent history of Christianity, it demands to be read with some care. It shows how the idea of the incarnation of the Word – the idea, therefore, that the divine Logos was made man, and that Christ, in this sense, is the son of God – is unacceptable, as much for the Jews as for the Greeks: unacceptable to the Jews, because a diminished God, who lets himself be put to death on a cross without defending himself seems contemptible, and contrary to their image of an all-powerful and angry Jahweh; unacceptable to the Greeks, too, because an incarnation as mundane as this diminishes the grandeur of the Logos as conceived by the ‘wisdom of the ages’ of Stoic philosophy. Here is the text:

Hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world? For after that in the wisdom of God the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe. For the Jews require a sign, and the Greeks seek after wisdom. But we preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumbling-block, and unto the Greeks foolishness; but unto them which are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God, and the wisdom of God. Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men; and the weakness of God is stronger than men. (1 Corinthians 1: 20–25)

Here Paul traces the image, incredible at this time, of a God who is no longer bombastic: neither angry, nor terrifying, nor all-powerful, like the God of the Jews; rather he is meek and forgiving to the point of allowing himself to be crucified – which to the Jews of the time only went to show that he definitely had no divine attributes! Nor was this God cosmic and sublime, like the divinity of the Greeks, who identified God with the perfect structure of the entire universe. And yet it was through the humility of this new God, and His demanding humility of those who would follow Him, that he became the representative of the weak, the lowly, the excluded. Hundreds of millions of people recognised themselves, and still do so today, in the strange power of this very weakness.

According to believers, it was this, specifically, that the philosophers could not stomach. I would like to dwell on this for a moment, so that you can assess this theme of religious humility opposed to philosophical arrogance. The opposition is everywhere to be found in The City of God where Augustine takes a poke at the most important philosophers of his time (distant disciples of Plato, to be precise) who refuse to accept that the divine could become human. According to Augustine, their intelligence should have led them to the same conclusion as the Christians:

But humility was the necessary condition for submission to this truth; and it is no easy task to persuade the proud necks of you philosophers to accept this yoke. For what is there incredible – especially for you who hold certain opinions which should encourage you to belief – what is there incredible in the assertion that God has assumed a human soul and body? … Why is it, then, that when the Christian faith is urged upon you, you straightaway forget, or pretend to have no knowledge of, your customary arguments and doctrines? What reason is there for your refusal to become Christians on account of opinions which are your own, though you yourselves attack them? It can only be that Christ came in humility, and that you are proud. (

The City of God

,

X

, 29)

This articulates the double-humility of which I spoke a moment ago: that of a God who agrees to ‘abase himself ’ to the point of becoming a man amongst men; and that of the believer who renounces his reasoning to place all his trust in the word of Jesus, and thereby make room for faith.

As is now clear, the two aspects of Christian theoria – the definition of the divine and the definition of the intellectual attitude which allows contact with it – are poles apart from those of Greek philosophy. This leads us into the fourth characteristic.

Fourth: in a perspective which accords primacy to humility and to faith over reason – to ‘thinking through an other’ rather than ‘thinking for oneself ’ – philosophy does not vanish entirely but becomes the ‘handmaiden’ to religion. This view appears first in the eleventh century, in the writings of Peter Damian, a Christian apologist close to the papacy. It had an immense impact because it indicated that, henceforth, in Christian doctrine, reason would be entirely subjected to the faith which guides it.

So, is there a Christian philosophy? The response must be ‘yes’ and ‘no’. No, in the sense that the highest truths in Christianity, as in all of the major monotheistic religions, are termed ‘revealed truths’: that is, truths transmitted by the word of Christ, the son of God himself. These truths become an active belief system. We might then be tempted to say that there is no further role for philosophy within Christianity, because the essentials are decided by faith. However, one might also assert that in spite of everything there remains a Christian philosophical activity, although relegated to second place. Saint Paul emphasises repeatedly in his Epistles that there remains a dual role for reason and consequently for purely philosophical activity. On the one hand, Christ expresses himself in terms of symbols and parables (the latter in particular need interpreting, if we are to draw out their deeper sense). Even if the words of Christ have the distinction, a little like the great orally transmitted myths, legends and fairytales, of speaking to everyone, they do require the effort of reflection and intelligence to decipher their more hidden meanings.

But this is not simply a matter of interpreting the Scriptures. Nature too – ‘the created order’ – needs to be read; a rational approach to which must be capable of showing how it ‘demonstrates’ the existence of God through the beauty and goodness of His works. From St Thomas Aquinas onwards, in the thirteenth century, this aspect of Christian philosophy was to become more and more important. And it would lead to what theologians refer to as ‘the proofs for the existence of God’; in particular, the proof which shows that the world is perfectly constructed – the Greeks did not get everything wrong, after all!

You can see now why one might say that there both is and is not a Christian philosophy. There must clearly be a place for rational activity – to interpret Scripture and comprehend the natural order sufficiently to draw the correct conclusions as to the Christian divinity. But the doctrine of salvation is no longer the prerogative of philosophy, and, even if they do not in principle contradict one another, the truths revealed by faith take precedence over those deduced by reason.

This leads us to the fifth and last characteristic: no longer the master of the doctrine of salvation, philosophy must become ‘scholastic’; a dry discipline and not a body of wisdom or a living principle. This point is crucial, for it explains why, even today, at a time when many people think they have definitely left behind the Christian era, the majority of philosophers continue to reject the idea that philosophy can be a doctrine of salvation, or even an apprenticeship to wisdom. At school as at university, philosophy has become essentially the history of ideas, a purely ‘discursive’ apprenticeship, contrary to what it had been in ancient Greece.

With Christianity this rupture was introduced, whereby the Greek philosopher ceased to invite his disciple to practise those exercises in wisdom which were the basis of teaching in the academies. This is quite understandable, since the doctrine of salvation, founded on faith and on revelation, no longer belonged to the domain of reason. Philosophy for the most part evolved into a learned commentary upon realities which transcended philosophy and were removed from its sphere of practice: one philosophises about the meaning of the Scriptures, or about nature as a work of God, but not about the ultimate ends and purposes of human life. Even today, it seems that philosophy starts from and speaks about realities exterior to itself: the philosophy of science, of law, of language, of politics, of art, of morals and so on, but almost never philo-sophia: the love of wisdom. With a few rare exceptions, contemporary philosophy still assumes the secondary status to which it was relegated by the victory of Christianity over Greek thought. Personally, I find this regrettable – I shall try to explain why in the chapter devoted to contemporary philosophy.

But for the present, let us trace how Christianity would also evolve a new ethics which was in several respects at odds with the Greeks’ consensus.

The Birth of the Modern Idea of Humanity

One might have expected that the stranglehold of religion over thought would have as a consequence a reduction of the ethical plane. However, one could argue that the reverse happened. Christianity was to bring to ethical thought at least three novel ideas, none of which was Greek – or not essentially Greek – and all of which directly linked to the theoretical revolution we have just observed in action. These new ideas were arresting in their modernity. It is probably impossible for us, no matter how much effort we make, to imagine just how disruptive they must have seemed to contemporaries. The Greek world was fundamentally an aristocratic world, a universe organised as a hierarchy in which those most endowed by nature should in principle be ‘at the top’, while the less endowed saw themselves occupying inferior ranks. And we should not forget that the Greek city-state was founded on slavery.

In direct contradiction, Christianity was to introduce the notion that humanity was fundamentally identical, that men were equal in dignity – an unprecedented idea at the time, and one to which our world owes its entire democratic inheritance. But this notion of equality did not come from nowhere.

Here, I shall restrict myself to describing the three characteristics which are critical for an understanding of early Christian ethics. First: freedom of choice, ‘free will’, became the foundation of morals, and the notion of the equal dignity of all human beings made its first appearance. The natural (Greek) order is fundamentally hierarchical: for each category of beings, nature displays a full range, from the most sublime excellence to the deepest mediocrity. It is evident that if nature is our guide, we are endowed unequally: we are more or less strong, swift, tall, beautiful, intelligent etc. All natural gifts are unequally distributed. In the moral vocabulary of the ancient Greeks, the notion of ‘virtue’ was always directly linked to those of talent or natural endowment. Which is why, to give a typical example of Greek thought, Aristotle can tranquilly speak of a ‘virtuous eye’ in one of his works devoted to ethics, by which he simply meant an ‘excellent’ eye, a perfectly functioning eye, neither long-sighted nor short-sighted.

To explain further: the Greek world is an aristocratic world, one which rests entirely upon the conviction that there exists a natural hierarchy, of organs of sight, of plants, or of animals, but also of men: some men are born to command, others to obey, which is why Greek political life accommodates itself easily to the notion of slavery.

For Christians, this belief in a natural hierarchy has no legitimacy. To speak of a ‘virtuous’ eye no longer makes any sense, because the gifts received at birth are unequally distributed among men; some men are much stronger or more intelligent than others, just as there exist in nature sharper eyes and less sharp eyes. These inequalities have no bearing on morals. Here all that counts is how we use the qualities with which we have been endowed, not the qualities themselves. What counts as moral or immoral is the act of choice, what philosophers began to call ‘free will’. This may seem self-evident, but it was literally unheard-of at the time, and it turned an entire world-order upside down. To summarise: we exit an aristocratic universe and we enter a ‘meritocratic’ universe, a world which first and foremost values not natural or inherited qualities, but the merit which each of us displays in making use of them. We leave behind a natural order of inequality and enter a constructed order (in the sense that it is devised by us) of equality; human dignity is the same for everyone, whatever their actual inequalities, because it is connected to our freedom to choose how to act, not upon our innate endowments.

The Christian argument is at once very simple and very powerful. It says the following: there is indisputable proof that the talents bestowed by nature are not intrinsically virtuous, that they are in no sense inherently moral, because, without exception, they can be employed as much for ill as for good. Strength, beauty, intelligence – all natural gifts received at birth – are self-evidently qualities, but not on a moral plane. You can use your strength, your beauty or your intelligence to commit the most wicked crime, and you demonstrate by this alone that there is nothing inherently virtuous about natural gifts. Therefore, you can choose what use to make of them, whether good or bad, but it is the use that is moral or immoral, not the gifts themselves. ‘Free will’ becomes the determining factor of the morality of an action. With this idea, Christianity revolutionised the history of thought. For the first time in human history, liberty rather than nature had become the foundation of morality.

At the same time, the idea of the equal dignity of all human beings makes its first appearance: and Christianity was to become the precursor of modern democracy. Although at times hostile to the Church, the French Revolution – and, to some extent, the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man – owes to Christianity an essential part of its egalitarian message. We see today how civilisations that have not experienced Christianity have great difficulties in fostering democratic regimes, because the notion of equality is not so deep-rooted.

The second upheaval is directly linked to the first: that, in the moral sphere, the spirit is more important than the letter, the ‘inner forum’ of conscience more decisive than the ‘outward forum’ of secular law, which can never be more than an external imposition. Here, a passage from the Gospels may serve as a model: it concerns the famous episode where Christ comes to the defence of a woman accused of adultery, whom the crowd is preparing to stone to death. At this time adultery, the deception of a husband or a wife, was universally regarded as a sin, and the law stated that an adulteress should be stoned to death. But what about the spirit, the ‘inner conscience’? Christ steps out from the God-fearing crowd and appeals directly to their conscience, saying

In your heart of hearts (

inner forum

), are you sure that all is well? And were you to examine yourselves, are you certain that what you would find would be better than this woman whom you are preparing to kill and who, perhaps, has sinned only through love? He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her …

And all these men, instead of following the letter of the law, look into themselves, into their hearts, and reflect on their own defects. And they begin to doubt that they should act as merciless judges.

It is difficult at first to grasp the immense novelty of Christianity, not merely in relation to Greek thought, but even more so perhaps in relation to the Jewish world. Because Christianity placed so much weight on conscience, on the spirit over the letter, it imposed almost no jurisdiction over everyday life. Rituals such as eating no fish on Fridays are mostly modern, dating back no further than the nineteenth century and having no origins whatsoever in the Gospels. You can read and re-read the Gospels, and find next to nothing about what you should or should not eat, how and to whom you should get married; there are hardly any rituals required for proving to yourself and others that you are a good and committed believer. While the lives of Orthodox Jews and Muslims are filled with duties to be carried out in civil society, Christianity left everything up to the individual as to whether something is good or not.

This attitude smoothed the passage to democracy, and the arrival of secular rather than religious societies: as morality was essentially a matter of internal conscience, it had less reason to come into conflict with external conventions. It mattered little whether one prayed once or a hundred times daily, or that one was forbidden to eat this or that: all laws, more or less, became acceptable if they did not infringe the spirit of the Christian message.

And now to the third fundamental innovation: the modern notion of humanity makes its entrance. Not, of course, that this notion was unknown to the Greeks, or to other civilisations: there existed an awareness of a ‘human species’, as distinct from other animal species – the Stoics in particular were especially attached to the idea that all men formed a single community. They were true ‘cosmopolitans’.

But with Christianity, the idea of a common humanity acquired a new strength. Based on the equal dignity of all human beings, it was to take on an ethical aspect. As soon as free will becomes the foundation of moral action and virtue is located not in natural, ‘unequal’ gifts, but in the use to which they are put, then it goes without saying that all men are of equal merit. Humanity would never again be able to divide itself (philosophically) according to a natural and aristocratic hierarchy of beings: between superior and inferior, gifted and less gifted, masters and slaves. From then on, according to Christians, we were all ‘brothers’, on the same level as creatures of God and endowed with the same capacity to choose whether to act well or badly. Rich or poor, intelligent or simple; it no longer holds any importance. And this idea of equality leads to a primarily ethical conception of humanity. The Greek concept of ‘barbarian’ – synonymous with ‘stranger’ (‘anyone not Greek’) – will slowly disappear to be replaced by the conviction that humanity is ONE. To conclude, we could say that Christianity is the first universalist ethos; universalism meaning the doctrine or belief in universal salvation.

In a wholly unprecedented manner, Christianity responded forcefully to the fundamental question of how to conquer the fears aroused in man by the sense of his own mortality. Whereas the Stoics represent death as a transition from a personal to an impersonal state of existence (from a condition of individual consciousness to that of a cosmic fragment without consciousness), the Christian version of salvation promises us nothing less than individual immortality. The idea of which is not easy to resist.

This promise is not superficial: on the contrary it is part of a coherent intellectual framework – a concept of love and the resurrection of the body – and one of extraordinary profundity.

Salvation through Love

The heart of the Christian doctrine of salvation is directly linked to the transition from a cosmic to a personal conception of the Logos, of divinity as such. Its three most characteristic traits stem from this transformation, and it becomes clear how the Christian arguments came to prevail over the Stoic doctrine of salvation.

First: if the Logos, or divine principle, is incarnated in the person of Christ, the idea of providence changes its meaning. Instead of a blind and anonymous destiny, as with the Stoics, it becomes a personal and benevolent act, comparable to that of a father for his children. The salvation to which we can now aspire – based no longer on a cosmic order but on the commandments of this personal divinity – is personal. Individual immortality is promised to us. This turning point was described in 160 AD in a work by the first Father of the Church, Saint Justin. What is so unusual about this Dialogue is that it is written in a surprisingly familiar style, for its time: Justin was well versed in Greek thought and studied the Christian doctrine of salvation in relation to the great texts of Plato, Aristotle and the Stoics. He also describes how he has been variously a Stoic, an Aristotelian, a Pythagorean, and a fervent Platonist – before eventually becoming a Christian! His testimony is therefore extremely valuable to us and worth spending some time on.

Justin belonged to a group of early Christians known as the ‘Apologists’ and was their prime mover during the second century. At this time the persecution of Christians was still a feature of daily life in the Roman Empire. The first Christian theologians began to compile ‘apologias’ or ‘reasoned defences’ of their religion, which were addressed to the Roman emperors, in the hope of defending their community against hostile rumours about their form of worship. Christians were regularly accused of the most bizarre behaviour, for example, that they worshipped a God with the head of a donkey, indulged in cannibalistic sacrifice and ritual murders, or were involved in such debauched acts as incest. None of which was true.

The apologias compiled by Justin were intended to testify to the reality of Christian practices and to counter malicious gossip. The first apologia, dating from 150 AD, was sent to the Emperor Antoninus; the second to Marcus Aurelius, one of the greatest representatives of Stoic thought and also, curiously, a statesman. Roman law decreed that Christians could not be harrassed unless they were denounced by an individual ‘of credibility’. It fell to a philosopher of the Cynic school named Crescens to take on this sinister role: a staunch adversary of Justin, and one who was jealous of his public repute. Crescens had Justin and six of his pupils condemned, and they were decapitated in AD 165 – under the reign of Marcus Aurelius. The transcript of Justin’s trial has survived, the only primary document relating to the martyrdom of a Christian thinker in Rome during this period.

It is especially interesting to read what Justin professes, as he is confronted by Stoics intent on executing him. The bone of contention, unsurprisingly, concerned the doctrine of salvation. According to Justin, the Christian version of salvation wins out over that of the Stoics:

They [the Greek thinkers] attempt moreover to persuade us that God takes care of the universe with its genera and species, but not of you and I, and each of us individually, since otherwise we would surely not need to pray to Him night and day! (

Dialogue with Trypho

, 1)

The implacable and blind Fate of the Ancients gives way to the benevolent wisdom of an individual who loves us as individuals, and in a way that no one else loves us. It is love that becomes the key to salvation. But, this is not love in the usual sense; it is what Christian thinkers will call ‘love in God’.

This leads us to the second characteristic: love is stronger than death. What link can there be between the sentiment of love and the question of what can save us from mortality and death? It is simplest to start from the Christian proposition that there are, fundamentally, three faces of love, which between them form a coherent ‘system’. First, there is the love that we might call ‘love-as-attachment’: in the sense that we are bound to another, to the point of not being able to imagine life without this other. We can experience this love as much within a family as with a lover. On this point, Christians were united with Stoics and Buddhists in viewing this love as the most dangerous and the least enlightened of all. Not only because it risks diverting us from our true duties towards God, but also because it cannot survive death and it cannot tolerate rupture and change. Aside from the fact that it is usually possessive and jealous, love-as-attachment stores up for us the worst of all sufferings – the loss of loved ones. At the opposite extreme is what we might call ‘compassion’: a love that drives us to care for strangers when they are in need. We still encounter this today, in the form of Christian charity, or, for example, the work of a humanitarian agency. And, finally, there is ‘love-in-God’. Here and only here is the ultimate source of salvation, which, for Christians, will prove stronger than death.

Let us examine these definitions of love a little more closely. They are fascinating, because they have all endured for centuries and remain as active today as at the time when they first came into being.

You will remember that Stoicism regards the fear of death as the greatest obstacle to the happy life (likewise in Buddhism). And this anxiety is not without its connection to love. In simple terms there is an apparently insurmountable contradiction between love, which leads to attachment, and death, which leads to separation. If the law of this world is one of finiteness and mutability, and if, as the Buddhists maintain, everything is ‘impermanent’ – changing and perishable – then we sin by lack of wisdom if we attach ourselves to things or persons that are mortal. Not that we must resort to indifference, of course, which neither Stoic sage nor Buddhist monk would for a moment countenance: compassion and benevolence to others, indeed to all other forms of life, must remain the highest ethical imperative of our behaviour. But passion is not acceptable in the home of the wise man, and familial ties, when they become too binding, must be loosened. Which is why, like the Greek sage, the Buddhist monk lives, as much as possible, in a condition of solitude. (The word ‘monk’ derives from the Greek monos, meaning ‘alone’.) It is truly in solitude that wisdom can bloom, uncompromised by the difficulties associated with all forms of attachment. It is impossible, in effect, to have a wife or husband, children or friends without becoming in some degree attached to them. We must free ourselves of these ties if we wish to overcome the fear of death. As Buddhist wisdom reminds us:

The ideal condition in which to die is one where you have abandoned everything, inwardly and outwardly, so that there should be, at this crucial moment, the least possible longing, desire or attachment to which the soul can cling. This is why, before dying, we should free ourselves from all our goods, friends and family. (Sogyal Rinpoche,

The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying

)

Or, as the New Testament expresses it:

For he that soweth to his flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption; but he that soweth to the Spirit shall of the Spirit reap life everlasting. (Epistle to the Galatians,

VI

, 8)

From the same perspective, Saint Augustine condemns those who attach themselves to mortal creatures through bonds of love:

You seek a happy life in the region of death. How can there be a happy life where there is not even life? (

Confessions

IV

, 12)

Similarly, Pascal, in his Pensées (1658–62), brilliantly elaborates the reasons why it is unworthy not only to attach oneself to others, but to allow another to attach himself or herself to one. I strongly recommend reading the whole of this profoundly important text:

It is unjust that men should attach themselves to me, even though they do it with pleasure and voluntarily. I should deceive those in whom I evince this desire; for I am an end for no person, and have not the where-withal to satisfy them. Am I not about to die? And thus the object of their attachment will die. Therefore, as I would be culpable in causing a falsehood to be believed, though I should employ gentle persuasion, though it should be believed with pleasure, and though it should give me pleasure; even so I am culpable in making myself loved. And if I attract persons to attach themselves to me, I should warn those who are ready to consent to such a lie that they should not believe it, whatever advantage I might derive from it; and likewise that they ought not to attach themselves to me; for they should be spending their life and their efforts in pleasing God, or in seeking Him. (

Pensées

, 471)

In the same vein, Augustine describes how, when he was a young man and still a pagan, he let his heart be broken by attaching himself to a friend who suddenly died. He believed that his grief was caused entirely by this lack of wisdom:

The reason why this grief had penetrated me so easily and so deeply, was that I had poured my soul out onto quicksand by loving a person sure to die, as if he would never die. (

Confessions

,

IV

, 8)

He describes a human love as seeking in the other only those ‘marks of affection’ which increase our standing, reassure us and satisfy our own ego:

Hence the mourning when a friend dies, the darkness of grief. And as the sweetness is turned to bitterness the heart is flooded with tears. The lost life of those who die becomes the death of those still living. (

Confessions

,

IV

, 9)

We must therefore learn how to resist exclusive attachments, since ‘everything perishes in this world, everything is subject to failure and death’. As soon as it involves mortal creatures, we must ensure that

our soul does not become stuck and glued to these transient things by loving them through the physical senses. For as these perishable creatures pass along the path of things that race towards non-existence, they rend the soul with pestilential desires, and torment it without cease; for the soul loves to be in them and take its repose among the objects of its love. But in these things there is no point of rest, for they are impermanent, they flee away and cannot be followed with the bodily senses. No one can fully grasp them even while they are present. (

Confessions

,

IV

, 10)

This is beautifully expressed, and it seems to me that the Stoic sage as well as the Buddhist would agree wholeheartedly with these words from a Christian convert.

On the other hand, who says man is mortal? The entire originality of the Christian message resides in ‘the good news’ of literal immortality – resurrection, in other words, and not merely of souls but of individual human bodies. If humans are immortal as long as they obey the commandments of God and if we suppose that this immortality is not merely compatible with earthly love but possibly one of its consequences, then why deprive ourselves? Why not become attached to our nearest and dearest, if Christ promises that we shall be reunited after our biological death?

Thus, between ‘love-as-attachment’ and love as simple universal compassion towards others, a place opens up for a third form of love: the love ‘in’ God of creatures who are themselves eternal. And it is here that Augustine wishes to lead us:

Happy, my God, is the person who loves you, and his friend in you, and his enemy for your sake. Though left alone, he loses none who are dear to him; for all are dear in the one who cannot be lost. Who is that but God, our God … No one can lose you, my God, unless he abandons you. (

Confessions

,

IV

, 9)

To which we might add, that no one can lose the individuals he loves, unless he ceases to love them in God; in other words, ceases to love what is eternal in them, bound to God and protected by Him. This promise is, to say the least, tempting. And it was to find its most complete form in that ultimate statement of the Christian doctrine of salvation: that of resurrection, unique amongst all of the major religions.

To the third trait: personal immortality at last – the resurrection of the flesh as the culmination of the Christian doctrine of salvation. For the Buddhist, the individual is but an illusion, something destined for dissolution and impermanence; for the Stoic the individual self is destined to merge into the totality of the cosmos; Christianity on the contrary promises immortality of the individual person: his soul, his body, his face, his beloved voice – as long as he is saved by the grace of God. Now here is a seductive promise, since it is through love, and not only love of God, not only of one’s neighbour, but most particularly love of one’s nearest and dearest that salvation is to be gained. Thus does love become the solution for Christians.

This is why Augustine, having conducted a radical critique of ‘love-as-attachment’ in general, does not banish it when its object is divine – is God himself, and God’s creatures:

If souls please you, they are being loved in God; for they too are mutable and acquire stability by being established in him. Otherwise they go their way and perish … Stand with him and you will stand fast. (

Confessions

,

IV

, 12)

Nothing is mores striking than the serenity with which Augustine evokes the bereavements he has suffered, not prior to his conversion, but after his conversion – starting with the death of his mother, to whom he was very close:

Then when she breathed her last, the boy Adeodatus cried out in sorrow and was pressed by all of us to be silent. In this way too something of the child in me, which had slipped towards weeping, was checked and silenced by the voice of reason. For we did not think it right to accompany her obsequies with tearful dirges and lamentations, since in most cases it is customary to use such mourning to imply sorrow for the miserable state of those who die, or even to assume their complete extinction. Whereas my mother’s dying meant neither that her state was miserable nor that she was suffering extinction, of which we were confident because of the evidence of her virtuous life. (

Confessions

,

IX

, 12)

In the same way, Augustine does not hesitate to evoke ‘the happy deaths of two friends’, whom he also had the happiness of seeing converted and who consequently would benefit in turn from ‘the resurrection of the just’ (Confessions, IX, 3). As always, Augustine finds the apt word, for it is indeed the resurrection which ultimately founds this third kind of love – the love of God. Neither attachment to worldly things – which is doomed to endure the worst sufferings, on which Stoics and Buddhists agree – nor a vague compassion towards the much vaunted ‘neighbour’, meaning the world and his wife; but rather a love which is attached, physical and personal, towards other individuals, those nearest as well as neighbouring, provided that this love is founded ‘in God’, that is, in the context of a faith which makes real the possibility of resurrection.

From which emerges the direct link between love and the doctrine of salvation. For it is through love in God that Christ alone proves to be the one who, making ‘death itself die’ and ‘making this mortal flesh put on immortality’, promises that the life of our loves will not come to an end with earthly death.

We should not forget that the idea of personal immortality was already present in a number of philosophies and religions prior to Christianity, nonetheless, the Christian version of resurrection is unique in closely associating three fundamental themes for its doctrine of the happy life: that of the personal immortality of the soul, the resurrection of the body and of salvation through love. Without resurrection – significantly designated as ‘the good news’ in the Acts of the Apostles – the whole message of Christ collapses, as the New Testament makes unambiguously clear:

Now if it be preached that Christ rose from the dead, how say some among you that there is no resurrection of the dead? But if there be no resurrection of the dead, then is Christ not risen: And if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain. Yea, and we are found false witnesses of God; because we have testified of God that he raised up Christ: whom he raised not up, if so be that the dead rise not. (1 Corinthians 15: 12‒15)

The resurrection is, so to speak, the alpha and omega of the Christian doctrine of salvation: it stands not only at the end of our earthly life, but equally so at the beginning, in the liturgy of the baptism, considered as a first death and symbolised as such by immersion in water, and as a first entrance to true life, one of a community wedded as individuals to eternity.

This cannot be emphasised too much: that it is not merely the soul that is resuscitated, but the ‘soul-body’ in its entirety; and therefore the individual. When Jesus reappears to his disciples after his death, he suggests – to remove all doubts – that they touch him, and, as proof of his ‘materiality’, he asks for a little food, which he eats before them:

So that if the Spirit of Him that raised up Jesus from the dead dwell in you, He that raised up Christ from the dead shall also quicken your mortal bodies by his Spirit that dwelleth in you. (Romans, 8:11)

While it is difficult, even impossible, to imagine the resurrection of the flesh – With which body shall we be reborn, and at what age? What is meant by a ‘spirit ual body’, a ‘glorious’ body, and so on?, and for all that this doctrine is one of the unfathomable mysteries of a Revelation which goes far beyond our powers of reason, even as Christians – the difficulty changes nothing. The teaching is entirely unambiguous.

Although atheists would have us believe otherwise, the Christian religion is not entirely given over to waging war against the body, the flesh, the senses. If that were so, how would Christianity have accepted that the divine principle be incarnated in the person of Christ, that the Logos take on the physical aspect of a simple mortal? Even the official catechism of the Church, perhaps not the most boldly original of texts, insists:

The flesh is the hinge of salvation. We believe in God who is creator of the flesh; we believe in the Word made flesh in order to redeem the flesh; we believe in the resurrection of the flesh, the fulfillment of both the creation and the redemption of the flesh … We believe in the true resurrection of this flesh that we now possess. We sow a corruptible body in the tomb, but he raises up an incorruptible body, a spiritual body. (

Catechism of the Catholic Church

, 1015–17)

One can be a non-believer, but one cannot maintain that Christianity is a religion dedicated to contempt for the flesh. Because this is simply not the case.

Taking resurrection as the end-point of the doctrine of salvation, we can begin to understand what enabled Christianity to rule more or less unchallenged over philosophy for nearly fifteen hundred years.

The Christian response to mortality, for believers at least, is without question the most ‘effective’ of all responses: it would seem to be the only version of salvation that enables us not only to transcend the fear of death, but also to beat death itself. And by doing so in terms of individual identity, rather than anonymity or abstraction, it seems to be the only version that offers a truly definitive victory of personal immortality over our condition as mortals.

The personalising of the Logos changes all factors in the equation. If the promises made to me by Christ are genuine; and if divine providence takes me in hand as an individual, however humble, then my immortality will also, in turn, be personal. In which case, death itself is finally overcome, and not merely the fears it arouses in me. Immortality is no longer the anonymous and cosmic event proposed by Stoicism, but the individual and conscious resurrection of souls together with their ‘glorious’ bodies. In this sense, it is ‘love in God’ which confers its ultimate meaning upon this revolution effected by Christianity in relation to Greek thought. It is this new definition of love, found at the heart of the new doctrine of salvation, which finally turns out to be ‘stronger than death’.

How and why did this doctrine begin to recede with the Renaissance? How and why did philosophy succeed in gaining the upper hand once more over religion, from the seventeenth century onwards? What was philoso phy able to propose in its place? It is to the birth of modern philosophy we must now turn our attention.

Chapter 4

Humanism, or The Birth of Modern Philosophy

Let us retrace our steps for a moment. We have seen how ancient philosophy founded a doctrine of salvation in terms of a consideration of the cosmos. In the eyes of a pupil of the Stoic schools, it went without saying that, to be saved – in other words, to overcome the fear of death – we must in the first place endeavour to understand the cosmic order; secondly, do our utmost to imitate it; and thirdly, merge ourselves in it, by finding our rightful place therein, and thus succeed in attaining a kind of eternity.

We have also analysed the ways in which Christian doctrine prevailed over Greek thought, and how, to attain salvation, a Christian was required to acknowledge the Word, through the humility of faith, observe the commandments, and finally to practise love in God in order to enter the kingdom of eternal life.

The modern world arose out of the collapse of ancient cosmology and a new questioning of religious authority, and eventually a scientific revolution un precedented in the history of humanity, which occurred in Europe over the course of one hundred and fifty years. To my knowledge, no other civilisation has undergone such a radical upheaval in the fabric of its culture.

This upheaval began with the publication of Copernicus’s work On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Bodies in 1543, continued with that of Newton’s Principia Mathematica in 1687, and took in Descartes’ Principles of Philosophy (1644) and Galileo’s Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (1632). These four dates and these four authors were to mark the history of thought as no other thinkers before them. A new era was established, which, in many respects, we still inhabit today. It was not only man who ‘lost his place’ in the world, as is often said, but the cosmos itself – the enclosed and harmonious frame of human existence since antiquity – quite simply evaporated; leaving the intellects of the time in a state of confusion it is virtually impossible for us to imagine today.

Modern physics annihilated the foundations of the ancient world-picture – through its assertion, for example, that the world is not round, enclosed, hierarchical and divinely ordered, but rather is an infinite chaos devoid of sense; a field of forces and objects jostling for place without harmony – and weakened considerably the foundations of Christian religion.

Science called into question issues that the Church had unwisely adopted – the age of the Earth, its relation to the Sun, the date of birth of mankind and of animal species etc – and invited men to adopt an attitude of doubt and a critical spirit incompatible with respect for religious authority. Belief, at this time fettered in shackles rigidly imposed by the Church, started to waver, so that the most enlightened individuals found themselves dramatically at odds with ancient doctrines of salvation which were becoming less and less credible.

Nowadays we speak of a loss of bearings, together with the suggestion that amongst the young in particular, things are falling apart – manners and knowledge, the sense of history, interest in politics, minimal acquaintance with literature, religion and art – but I would suggest that this harking back to ‘the good old days’ is as nothing compared to the disorientation men in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries must have felt. This is why we speak of ‘Humanism’ in relation to this period: man found himself for the first time alone, deprived of the support of both cosmos and God.

To try to imagine the abyss which opened at this time, we need to put ourselves in the shoes of someone who is beginning to realise that the most recent scientific discoveries have just invalidated the idea of the cosmos as just and good; that in consequence it is going to be impossible for him to take the cosmos as his ethical model; and, for good measure, that the belief in God which might have served as his life-raft is taking in water! Our seventeenth-century friend is going to have to rethink, from scratch, the question of theoria, that of ethical conduct and that of salvation.

First, on the theoretical level: if the world is no longer finite, ordered and harmonious, and is instead infinite and chaotic, according to the new physics, how can he make sense of this world and his place in it? One of the greatest modern historians of science, Alexander Koyré, describes the scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries so well, that I will simply quote his account here:

the destruction of the idea of a

Cosmos

; that is, the disappearance, from philosophically and scientifically valid concepts, of the conception of the world as a finite, closed, and hierarchically ordered whole … and its replacement by an indefinite and even infinite universe which is bound together by the identity of its fundamental components and laws, and in which all these components are placed on the same level of being … The immediate effect of the Copernican revolution was to spread scepticism and bewilderment, to which the famous verses of John Donne (written in 1611) give such striking expression:

… new Philosophy calls all in doubt,

The Element of fire is quite put out;

The Sun is lost, and th’Earth, and no man’s wit

Can well direct him where to looke for it.

’Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone;

All just supply, and all Relation. (Alexander Koyré,

From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe,

11

,

47

)

‘All coherence gone’: no harmonious cosmos and no natural moral order. How can we comprehend the anguish which must have possessed Renaissance men?

Second, in terms of ethics, this theoretical revolution has an effect as obvious as it is devastating: if the universe no longer has any of the attributes of a cosmos, it cannot serve as a model for imitation within the moral sphere. And if Christianity itself is unsure of its foundations, if obedience to God is no longer a given, where then are we to look for the principles of a new relationship between men, and a new foundation for the common life? We are going to have to rebuild the morality which has served as a model for centuries. Nothing less.

Third, the doctrine of salvation: you can see for yourself that, for the same reasons, neither the ancient model nor the Christian model remain credible for anyone of a critical and informed disposition.

The challenges taken up by modern philosophy on these three fronts were of an unprecedented scale and complexity – and urgency, too: as the verses by Donne suggest, never had humanity been so convulsed and at the same time rendered so resourceless, intellectually, morally and spiritually. But, as we shall see, the greatness of modern philosophy is to have been equal to these challenges.

A New Theory of Knowledge

As you may imagine, numerous factors played a role in the passage from a closed world to infinite space. Of key importance was technological progress, notably the development of new astronomical instruments such as the telescope, which enabled observations that could not be reconciled with the framework of existing and ancient models of cosmology. One example which made a strong impression on contemporaries was the discovery of the novae – new stars – or conversely, the disappearance of existing stars, neither of which conformed with the dogma of ‘celestial immutability’ so dear to the ancients. Their notion of the ultimate perfection of the cosmos resided in the fact that it was eternal and immutable, that nothing within it could change. For the Greeks, this orthodoxy represented something absolutely essential – human salvation depended on it – yet contemporary astronomers were revealing that this belief was false: quite simply, it was contradicted by the facts.

There were of course many other causes for the decline of the old cosmologies, notably economic and social, but the new scientific discoveries were the most critical. Before we can even begin to consider the upheavals which this eclipse of the cosmos was to cause within the moral sphere, we must understand that it was above all the theoria which had wholly changed its meaning and direction.

The book that was to underpin the whole of modern philosophy and one that remains a monument in the history of thought, was Emmanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781). I am not going to attempt to summarise it here in a few sentences, but, although it is challenging work, I would like to try to give you an idea of how it came to reformulate in totally novel terms the question of the theoria.

If the world is no longer a cosmos but a chaos, a field of forces engaged in constant conflict with each other, it becomes clear that knowledge can no longer take the form of contemplation (theoria). One might say that, after the collapse of a beautiful cosmic order and its replacement by a nature devoid of sense and at war with itself, there is nothing divine about the universe. Order, harmony, beauty and goodness are no longer the first principles. Consequently, to re-establish a degree of coherence, so that the world in which men live continues to have a meaning, it was going to require man himself, or at least men of learning, to introduce some order into a universe which seemed no longer to offer any of its own. The new task of contemporary science was no longer to frame itself as the passive contemplation of a beauty inscribed beforehand in nature; it was to do a job of work, namely the active construction of laws which would endow a disenchanted universe with meaning. Science was no longer a passive spectacle; it was an activity of the mind.

I would like to give at least one example of this transition from passive to active knowledge, from assumption to construction, from ancient theoria to modern science. Let us consider the principle of causality – the principle according to which every effect has a cause or, if you prefer, every phenomenon must have a rational explanation. Instead of being content with discovering the order of the world through contemplation, the ‘modern’ philosopher or savant (scholar; learned person) would attempt to introduce, by means of a principle of causality, some coherence and sense into the chaos of natural phenomena. He would try actively to make logical connections between certain phenomena, which he was to consider as effects, and others which he succeeded in detecting as causes. In other words, thought was no longer a ‘seeing’, an orao, as the word ‘theoria’ suggests, but an ‘acting’, a work which consists in relating natural phenomena to each other, so that they form a chain of connections: and thus explain each other. This is what will come to be termed ‘scientific method’, virtually unknown as such to the ancients, and which would become the fundamental building block of modern science.

An example of this ‘acting’ is Claude Bernard, the great nineteenth-century French doctor and biologist, who published his celebrated Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine in 1865. He illustrates perfectly the theory of knowledge elaborated by Kant which replaced the ancient theoria.

Claude Bernard provides a detailed account of his discovery of ‘the glycogenetic function of the liver’ – the capacity of the liver to produce sugar. Bernard had observed, while carrying out tests, that there was sugar in the blood of the rabbits he dissected. He wondered about the origin of this sugar: did it come from ingested food or was it produced by the body, and, if so, which organ was responsible? He separated his rabbits into three groups: some were given food containing sugar; others were given food with no sugar; and the least fortunate were placed on a starvation diet. After several days, he analysed the blood of the rabbits, only to discover that, in every case, there was the same amount of sugar in their blood. This indicated that glucose did not derive from food, but was produced by the body.

The work of contemplation, the theoria, has changed completely since the Greeks: it is no longer a question of contemplation; science is no longer a spectacle but a job of work, an activity which consists of making connections between phenomena, in associating an effect (sugar) with a cause (the liver). And this is precisely what Kant, before Claude Bernard, had already formulated and analysed in the Critique of Pure Reason; namely the idea that science must define itself henceforth as a work of the associative faculty, or, to use his vocabulary, as a work of ‘synthesis’ – a word which in Greek means ‘to put together’, to ‘combine’; just as an explanation in terms of cause and effect connects two phenomena: in this instance, sugar and the liver.

When I was young and I opened the Critique of Pure Reason for the first time, I was deeply dis appointed. I had been told that he was perhaps the greatest philosopher of all time. Not only did I understand nothing, literally nothing, of what I read, nor could I understand why, from the opening pages of this mythical work, Kant was so preoccupied by a question which seemed to me trivial and uninteresting: ‘How are synthetic a priori (not supported by fact; based on hypothesis or theory rather than experiment) judgments possible?’ This does not at first seem an especially fertile subject for reflection – nor even, perhaps, at second sight.

For several years, I understood almost nothing of Kant. I was able to interpret the words and sentences, of course, and was able to give a plausible account of each concept, but the whole continued to make no sense. It was only when I realised the radically novel problem which Kant tried to address, in the wake of the collapse of inherited cosmologies, that I grasped the stakes raised by his opening question, which had previously struck me as purely ‘technical’. In asking himself about our capacity to create ‘syntheses’, or ‘synthetic judgements’, Kant formulated the problem confronting modern science, that of scientific method: how does one devise laws which lay the ground for associations, that is, for coherent and revealing connections between phenomena whose ordinance or organising principle is no longer a given but must be introduced by us as an intervention, from outside.

A Revolution in the Moral Life

The theoretical revolution that Kant inaugurated was to have considerable consequences in the moral sphere. The new vision of the world forged by modern science had almost nothing in common with that of the Ancients. The universe as described by Newton, particularly, is no longer in any sense a place of peace and harmony; rather it is a world of blind forces and collision, in which we no longer know where to place ourselves, for the simple reason that it is infinite, without boundaries in space or time. As a result, it can no longer serve in any sense as a guide for morality. All of the questions of philosophy must therefore be completely reformulated.

We might say that modern thought puts mankind in the place of cosmos and divinity. It was on the rock of humanity that philosophers must build a new edifice of theory, of morality, and even new doctrines of salvation. It was up to man to introduce, by means of his intellectual labour, sense and coherence into a world which seemed no longer to possess meaning.

In terms of morality, you have only to consider the Declaration of Human Rights of 1789, the most visible and familiar external sign of a revolution without precedent in the history of ideas. It placed man at the centre of the world, whereas for the Greeks the world had been the centre of attention. Moreover, it not only made humans the sole beings on Earth worthy of full respect, but it proposed the equality of all humans, whether rich or poor, man or woman, white or black. In this case, modern philosophy is in the first place a humanism.

This transformation posed a significant question: if the ancient principles, cosmological and religious, had had their day, and men understood why this was the case, what new theoria, new ethics and new doctrine of salvation could take the place of those which had produced a cosmos and a divinity?

To answer this, modern philosophy placed at the centre of its cogitations a question which may seem very strange: what is the difference between men and animals? The philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were fascinated by the definition of what is an animal, believing that if they could establish the differences between man and beast, they could better discern man’s ‘specific difference’, that which defines and is proper to him.

In the words of the great nineteenth-century historian, Jules Michelet, animals are ‘our humbler brothers’. They are the beings closest to us; we can readily see how, from the moment that the idea of religion begins to falter and be replaced by the idea of man as centre of the world and subject of philosophical reflection, the question of what is ‘proper to man’ becomes intellectually crucial.

Modern philosophers now shared the notion not only that man had rights, but that he was the sole being to have rights – as the Declaration of 1789 affirms. If they now placed man above all other beings and assigned vastly increased importance to him, not merely over other animals, but also over a defunct cosmos and an increasingly doubtful divinity, then there must logically be something about man that distinguishes him from the rest of creation.

By starting with the debate about animals and, at the same time, the debate about man and the nature of humanity, we enter directly the key concepts of modern philosophy, and especially those of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who, in the eighteenth century, would make the most decisive contribution.

The Difference between Animals and Humans According to Rousseau

If I were allowed to take only one text of modern philosophy to a desert island, then I would undoubtedly choose a passage from Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, published in 1755. We will come to the passage in a moment, but in order to understand it fully, you must first be aware that at the time of its writing there existed two classic criteria for distinguishing men from beasts: intelligence and sensibility (meaning affect, soci ability, which included language).

In Aristotle, for example, man is defined as ‘the rational animal’, by which was meant a living being who possessed – as his ‘specific’ difference – an additional characteristic: the capacity for reason. For Descartes, the criterion of reason or intelligence was joined by a further property: that of affectivity (the emotion that lies behind action). He believed that animals are comparable to machines, or automata – machines that imitate the movement of a living creature, such as a clock – and it was an error to think of them as experiencing emotions. This would explain why they do not speak, even though they are equipped with organs which would make speech possible. They have nothing to express.

Rousseau proposed a radically new solution. His new definition of the human person was to prove inspirational, in that it enabled the founding of a new morality that was no longer ‘cosmic’ or religious but humanist – and ‘a-theist’. For Rousseau, animals clearly possessed intelligence, sensibility, even the faculty of communication. Therefore it is not reason, or affectivity, or even language that differentiates the human being. On the contrary, everyone who has a dog knows perfectly well that the dog is more sociable and even more intelligent than, in some cases, certain human beings. In terms of sociability and intelligence, we barely differ from animals. Contemporary ethology – the scientific study of the function and evolution of animal behaviour – broadly confirms this diagnosis. We know today with certainty that there exists a highly developed animal intelligence and affectivity, which in the case of the great apes includes the acquisition of fairly sophisticated language-learning skills.

The true criteria for differentiating man and animal were to be sought elsewhere. Rousseau came to locate the difference in terms of man’s liberty of action, what he called ‘perfectibility’ – broadly speaking, the capacity to improve oneself over the course of a lifetime; whereas the animal is guided from the outset by ‘instinct’ – is, in a manner of speaking, perfect ‘from the start’, from birth. It is clear that an animal is led by an unerring instinct, common to all members of his species, from which it can never really deviate. It is in this respect that the individual animal is deprived both of liberty and of the capacity to improve itself. It is ‘programmed’ by nature and, unlike man, cannot evolve further. Man, on the contrary, has the capacity to forge a personal history, whose progress is by definition open-ended and unlimited.

Rousseau expresses these ideas in a lucid passage, which should be read carefully before proceeding further:

I see in every animal merely an ingenious machine to which nature has given senses to keep it going by itself and to protect itself, up to a certain point, from everything likely to distress or annihilate it. I see precisely the same things in the human machine, with the difference that nature alone brings everything to the activities of a beast whereas man contributes to his own, in his capacity as a free agent. The beast chooses or rejects by instinct, meaning that it cannot deviate from the rule prescribed for it, even when it might benefit from doing so, whereas man often deviates from such laws to his own detriment. This is why a pigeon would die of hunger next to a dish filled with choice meats and a cat next to a heap of fruit or grain, though either of them could get nourishment from the foods it disdains if only it had thought of trying them. This is why dissolute men give themselves over to the excesses that bring on fevers and death, because the mind perverts the senses and the will continues to speak when nature falls silent … Although the difficulties surrounding all these questions leave room for disagreement about this difference between man and beast, there is one further highly specific, distinctive and indisputable feature of man, namely his faculty for self-improvement – a faculty that, with the help of circumstances, successively develops all the others and that in man inheres as much in the species as in the individual; whereas an animal at the end of a few months has already become what it will remain for the rest of its life, and its species will be at the end of a thousand years what it was in the first year of that millennium. Why is only man prone to turn senile? Is it not the case that he thus returns to his primitive state and that, while the beast that has acquired nothing and hence has nothing to lose is always left with its instincts, man, losing through age or some accident all that his ‘perfectibility’ has enabled him to acquire, ends by sinking lower than the beast? the origin of (

Discourse on the Origin of Inequality

)

What exactly is Rousseau saying? Let us begin with the example of the cat and the pigeon. He is saying that animals operate within a framework of invisible codes, a kind of ‘software’ from which they are unable to escape. It is as if the pigeon is the prisoner of his programming because it can only eat grain, and the cat likewise because it is a carnivore. There is little possibility, if any, for them to depart from these scripts. No doubt a pigeon could ingest a very small quantity of meat, and the cat could nibble at a few blades of grass, but, all in all, their natural programme leaves them almost no room for manoeuvre.

The human condition is very different, because he is capable of change. In fact, he can deviate from all the rules prescribed for animals. For example, he can commit excess: drink and smoke, to the point of killing himself, which is impossible in nature. Or, as Rousseau says in a formula which announces the whole of modern politics, in man ‘the will continues to speak when nature falls silent’. In the case of animals, nature speaks continually and forcibly, so much so, that the animal can do nothing but obey this voice. In man, it is a certain lack of determination that speaks loudest: although nature does, of course speak, as we are constantly reminded by biologists: we too have bodies, genetic programming, the rule of DNA, of the genome transmitted by our parents. Nevertheless, man can disregard these natural rules and even create a culture which opposes them virtually point by point – as we see in the culture of democracy which tried to thwart the logic of natural selection so as to secure the safety of the weakest.

One example of the transcendence of human will over natural programming and its capacity for devi ation or excess is far more striking: the phenomenon of evil. It powerfully confirms Rousseau’s argument about the anti-natural and therefore non-animal character of human will. It is as if only mankind is capable of behaving in what might be termed a diabolical manner.

But are animals not as capable of aggression and cruelty as man? At first sight, this might appear true, and one could give several examples which animal lovers usually prefer not to discuss. When I was a child, living in the country, there were dozens of cats, which I would regularly see destroying their prey with what seemed great cruelty: eating mice alive, toying for hours with a bird whose wings they had broken …

But radical evil, which in Rousseau’s perspective is unknown to the animal order and a specifically human invention, is to be found elsewhere: it consists not simply of ‘doing ill’, but of adopting evil as its project, which is a quite different proposition. The cat mistreats the mouse, but this is not the purpose of its natural instinct to hunt mice. On the other hand, everything suggests that the human being is capable of consciously organising himself so as to inflict the greatest possible evil upon his neigh-bour – what traditional theology designates malice: the evil spirit within us.

This malice, unfortunately, seems to be unique to man. There is an absence in the animal world, in the natural order, of anything resembling the phenomenon of torture. Today one can visit in Ghent, in Belgium, a mind-boggling museum: a museum of torture. Here, exhibited in glass cases, are the appalling products of the human imagination: chisels, knives, pliers, head-clamps, instruments for pulling nails and crushing fingers, and a thousand other devices.

Admittedly, animals frequently eat each other alive, which strikes us as cruel, but evil as such is not their intention, and their apparent cruelty stems from their indifference to the suffering of others. Even when they appear to kill ‘for pleasure’, they are only exercising their instinct. Anyone who has owned cats will have seen them ‘torturing’ their prey, but it is because in doing so they exercise and perfect their hunting skills. What seems like cruelty is linked to the relations between predator and prey.

But the human is not subject to a rule of indifference. He commits evil knowingly and, on occasion, enjoys it. Contrary to the animal, the human can make a conscious choice to do evil. Everything would seem to indicate that torture goes beyond the logic of any situation. Some would argue that sadism is a pleasure like any other, and that it must be encoded somewhere in human nature. But this explanation explains nothing. It is intentionally deceptive: as if sadism can be justified by evoking the pleasure taken in the suffering of another. The real question is the following: why is there so much gratuitous pleasure in transgression, even when it serves no end?

Man tortures man for no reason, other than torture itself. Why did a Serb militia (as noted in one report on war crimes committed in the Balkans) force a Croat grandfather to eat the liver of his still living grandson? Why, for that matter, do some cooks happily dismember live frogs and eels, when it would be simpler and more logical to kill them first? The fact is that humans take it out on animals when the human material is in short supply, but never on automata that do not suffer: have you ever seen a man take pleasure in torturing a watch or a pendulum clock? I do not believe there is a convincing ‘natural’ explanation for committing evil; it seems to belong to another order than that of nature. It serves no purpose, and is in most cases counter-productive.

It is this anti-natural vocation, this constant possibility of excess that we see in the human eye: because it reflects not only nature, it can seem to express the worst; but equally, and for the same reason, the best: absolute evil or an astonishing capacity for selflessness. It is this principle of excess that Rousseau refers to as liberty.

Three Consequences of the New Distinction between Man and Beast

The consequences of this redefinition of man are enormous, and three aspects were to have considerable consequences for the ethical and political spheres.

First: humans, contrary to beasts, become invested with what might be called a double historicity: there is the history of the individual, which is referred to as education; and there is the history of the human species, or human societies, their culture and politics. When we consider animals, the case is quite different. From Antiquity onwards we have descriptions of ‘animal societies’, a perfect example being a bee colony. From these we can deduce that their behaviour has been the same, exactly the same, for thousands of years: their habitat has not changed and neither has their method of gathering pollen, nourishing the queen and dividing responsibilities. Human societies change incessantly: if we could travel back in time two hundred years we would not recognise Paris or London or New York. But we would have no difficulty in recognising an anthill or a cat chasing a mouse.

You might wonder about animals learning to hunt with their parents. Is that not a form of education? Yes, but it is a short-term ‘apprenticeship’ that stops as soon as the objective has been attained; a human education is unlimited, ending only with death.

Some animals don’t even serve an apprenticeship; they behave as miniature adults from the moment of their birth. In the case of young marine turtles, as soon as they emerge from the egg they know instinctively how to find their way unaided to the ocean. They are immediately able to walk, swim and eat – everything they need to survive. Whereas my children have remained happily at home until their twenties!

So, Rousseau touched on an important issue when he spoke of liberty and perfectibility. How can we explain this difference between the young turtle and the human infant if we do not accept some form of liberty. The baby turtle possesses neither a personal history (an education) nor a political and cultural history, and is from its birth and for always driven by the regime of nature, by instinct. The human individual can evolve indefinitely, educate himself ‘for life’, and embark on a personal history of which nobody can say how or when it will end.

Second: Jean-Paul Sartre said that if man is free, there is therefore no ‘human nature’, no human ‘essence’, no definition of humanity which precedes and determines his individual existence. In a little book, Existentialism is a Humanism, which I would advise everyone to read, Sartre develops this idea by asserting that, in the case of man, ‘existence precedes essence’. This is pure Rousseau, almost word for word. Animals have an ‘essence’, common to their entire species, which precedes their existence as individuals: there is a cat essence, an essence of pigeon – and this instinct or ‘essence’ is common to the entire species, so much so that the individual identity and existence of each individual is wholly determined by it: no cat, no pigeon, can swerve away from this essence which suppresses all individual action.

But, with humans, the opposite is true: no essence predetermines it, no programme can ever succeed in entirely hemming it in; no system can imprison it so absolutely that it cannot emancipate itself. I am born into a society: as a man or woman, native or immigrant, rich or poor, aristocrat or labourer, but these initial categories do not define me for the rest of my life. I can be a woman and decide not to have children; I can be born poor and underprivileged, but become rich; I can be born French, but adopt another language and change nationality, and so on.

From this notion that there is no human nature, that man’s existence precedes his essence – according to Sartre – we arrive at an unanswerable debate about racism and sexism. What is racism? What is sexism? It is the idea that there exists an essence exclusive to each race, or to each sex, and that individual members are wholly contained by it. The racist says that ‘the African is childlike’, ‘the Jew is intelligent’, ‘the Arab is lazy’; and from this use of the definite article – ‘the’ – we know that we are dealing with a racist, someone who believes that all individuals of the same group share the same traits, or ‘essence’. Likewise for the sexist, who believes that it is part of the ‘natural’ essence of a woman to be more emotional than intelligent, more kind-hearted than courageous, whose duty it is to have children and stay in the kitchen.

Rousseau destroyed this type of reasoning at the root. The human individual is free: endlessly improvable, and in no sense programmed by characteristics supposedly linked to race or gender. Of course, the individual is born into a particular ‘situation’, but that is not equivalent to a software programme with no margin for manoeuvre. It is this margin, this gap, which is the distinctive property of mankind, and which racism – ‘inhuman’ as it is – would destroy at all cost.

Third: because he is free, because he is not imprisoned by any natural code or historical determinant, the human is a moral being who can choose freely to act in a good way or an evil way. Who would dream of accusing a shark who has just eaten a surfer of acting badly? When a lorry causes an accident, it is the driver whom we judge, not the vehicle. Neither the fish nor the vehicle are responsible for the effects, however harmful, they have upon a human being.

From Rousseau’s perspective one must distance oneself from the real in order to judge well or poorly, just as one must distance oneself from appearances – natural or historical – to acquire what is termed the ‘critical spirit’, without which no value judgement is possible. Kant once said of Rousseau that he was ‘the Newton of the moral universe’, in that man is unendingly torn between egotism and altruism, just as the Newtonian universe is pulled between centripetal and centrifugal forces. He meant primarily that with his invention of human freedom, Rousseau was to modern ethics what Newton had been to the new physics: a pioneer, a founding father without whom we would never have been able to free ourselves from ancient ideas regarding the cosmos and the divine principle. By identifying the principle of a differentiation between animal and human, Rousseau finally made possible a new moral vision of the world.

The Heritage of Rousseau: Man as a ‘Denatured Animal’

In the 1953 novel You Shall Know Them, by Vercors (the pseudonym of Jean Bruller, who worked in the French Resistance), there is an interesting interpretation of these notions of Rousseau. Here is a brief summary of the plot: in the 1950s, a team of British scientists sets out for New Guinea, in search of the celebrated ‘missing link’ – the primate that links man and animal. They hope to discover some unknown great ape fossil but by sheer chance they come upon an entire colony of evolutionary ‘intermediates’, which they call ‘Tropis’. These are quadrupeds – monkeys – but they live, like the troglodytes, in caves, and, most importantly, they bury their dead. This perplexes our explorers because it does not resemble any known animal custom, and the Tropis seem to speak a rudimentary language.

Where do they sit on the imaginary ladder between the human and the animal? The answer to this question becomes urgent when an unscrupulous businessman plans to domesticate the Tropis in order to make slaves of them. If they are animals he can get away with it, but if they were classified as human it would be unacceptable, as well as illegal. How can the question be resolved?

The hero of the novel makes the necessary sacrifice: he gets a female Tropi pregnant, the act itself proving that this species is closer to the human species (biologists agree that, with rare exceptions, only members of the same species can reproduce). Is the child to be classified as human or animal? A decision must be taken, for the father has decided to kill his child, in an attempt to force the law to make a decision. A legal case gets underway, which grips the entire nation, and very soon involves the world’s press. The most eminent specialists are summoned to appear: anthropologists, biologists, palaeontologists, philosophers, theologians … All of them disagree with each other, but their respective arguments are so persuasive that none succeeds in winning over the others.

At last, the judge’s wife comes up with the decisive criterion: if they bury their dead, she argues, the Tropis must be human. And the reason is that this ritual indicates a metaphysical awareness of reality. As she expresses it to her husband: ‘In order to ask a question, one must be two: the one who asks, and the one who is asked. Because he is part of nature, the animal cannot question nature. It seems to me that this is the distinction we are looking for. The animal is one with nature; whereas man and nature make two.’ This is a perfect translation of Rousseau’s insight: the animal is a natural creature, and merged completely with nature; man on the contrary is beyond nature.

This needs further refinement. Why, in these circumstances should the criterion of distance from nature be more important than any other? After all, animals do not wear watches or carry umbrellas, do not drive cars or listen to MP3s, do not smoke cigarettes or drink wine. There can be no doubting the answer: distance from nature is the only criterion that counts decisively on both an ethical and cultural plane: this distance makes it possible for us to engage with the history of culture, rather than remaining the hostages of nature. This distance enables us to interrogate reality, to judge and transform the world, to invent ‘ideals’, to distinguish between good and evil. Without it, no morality would be possible. If nature were our code, no ethical decision could ever have occurred – the Tropis would not even consider burying their dead. While human beings concern themselves with the fate of animals, trying to save the whales, for example, have you ever known a whale show any interest in the fate of a human being, except in fairy tales?

With this new ‘anthropology’, this new definition of what is peculiar to man, Rousseau prepared the way for modern philosophy. And from here the dominant secular morality of the past two hundred years came into being: namely, the ethical system of the greatest German philosopher of the eighteenth century, Immanuel Kant, the repercussions of which were to have considerable impact within the French republican tradition.

Kantian Ethics and the Foundations of the Republican Ideal

It was Kant who illustrated the two most striking consequences, for morality, of this new definition of man as a free agent: first, the idea that moral virtue resides in actions that are disinterested and not for private or selfish gain; and second, that these are directed towards the common and ‘universal’ good. These are the two principal pillars – disinterestedness and universality – of the ethics Kant was to set forth in his famous Critique of Practical Reason (1788). They were to become so generally accepted – especially by the French republicans – that they came to define what might be termed the modern morality.

The truly moral – truly ‘human’ – action (and it is significant that the two terms begin to overlap) becomes first and foremost the disinterested action: in other words, man’s capacity to act independently of his natural urges, which leads him inexorably in the direction of egotism. The decision to resist egotistical temptations is described by Kant as ‘Good Will’: although I am inclined (since I am also an animal) to satisfy my personal interests, I am equally able to ignore them and to act disinterestedly and altruistically.

What is perhaps most striking about this new moral perspective – both anti-naturalist and anti-aristocratic (since, contrary to the distribution of natural talents, the talent for freedom is supposedly innate in all of us), is that the ethical value of disinterestedness seems self-evident, so that we do not even pause to reflect upon it. If I discover, for example, that somebody who appears kindly and generous towards me is doing so in the hope of obtaining some advantage or other which they conceal from me (the hope of inheriting my fortune, perhaps), the presumed moral value attributed to their actions immediately disappears. In the same sense, I attribute no especial moral value to the taxi-driver who agrees to take me somewhere, because I know that he does it for money. On the other hand, I would be very grateful to the cabbie who picks me up, without any motive of self-interest, when I am hitching to work on a day of transport strikes.

These examples all point towards the same conclusion for the new Humanist: that virtue and disinterested action are inseparable. We must be capable of acting freely, without being programmed by any natural or historical codes, to attain to the sphere of disinterestedness and unscripted generosity towards others.