FIVE
In the early Middle Ages, something curious happened to the ideas of faith and philosophy. For the first time, belief itself became the central religious duty. A new kind of doubt appears here, in response. This new doubt doubts the other side of the equation—us. This one is believer’s doubt, and it hurts more. Whereas before there was not much reason to try to believe (it was more a question of what to say in public), now the religion is set up around the idea that belief is difficult and that we must work toward it. Doubt will never be the same. We hear the cries of wretched doubt in this period, and we are reminded that the Book of Job is the only place we have heard such wailing before. We will have to look at how belief changed within Judaism just before Jesus, and then turn to see how Jesus, and then Saint Paul and Saint Augustine, so altered the nature of belief in religion that doubt was never the same again. Then we will take a look at two very important figures in the story of doubt: Rabbi Elisha ben Abuyah, the most notorious doubter in the whole Jewish tradition, and Hypatia, a woman renowned as the last secular philosopher of the ancient world. Last, we will turn to the Far East for a look at Zen Buddhism, which arose and flourished during this period, and created a dedication to doubt all its own.
THE JEWS AT THE TIME OF JESUS
Reflect now on how Judaism’s certain and passionate commitment to God must have looked, and felt, in the midst of pagan Rome and her philosophers of resignation. While the Romans kept their gods for the sake of the state, the Jewish religion held that the people’s ability to follow God’s law was more important than the state: the state was there to serve that primary task. Judaism, at this point, offered one God, reigning over an orderly, just universe; and an afterlife. It had not always been so. As we observed earlier, Judaism began like many other “temple religions” with priests who carried out a series of washing and eating rituals and sacrificed to their God in a temple—though the God Jews worshiped was invisible. The disaster of the Babylonian captivity changed the religion forever. Through the invention of the synagogue system and the common keeping of the laws, the returned exiled Jews had recreated Judaism so that it was not necessarily attached to the Temple proper. They had managed their sense of having been punished by a just God by developing and obeying what they took to be his commandments. They could survive without the Temple as their local source of identity, and they could come to a new understanding of themselves as God’s chosen people, for now they behaved as a nation of priests. Within that idea, they became interested in seeing the whole world brought together under their one, transcendent God.
At about this same period, the Hebrew people had come in contact with Persian Zoroastrianism and become influenced by that religion’s vision of the world as divided between the truth and the lie—good and evil—the forces of light and the forces of darkness. The Jews were beginning to think of their God as all-powerful and all-good, and that raised the problem of where bad things come from. Many peoples see that as a problem wrongly put—there is disjuncture and sorrow and heartache, but there is not a force that is evil. So it was distinctive when the Jews took on this Zoroastrian idea. They did not yet believe in an afterlife, but good and evil were forces in the living human world. By the period of the Second Temple, the age of the prophets was understood to be over and new inspiration took the form of apocalyptic literature in which good and evil finally go to war and Israel finally converts all the pagans and enters its age of triumph and happiness. The kingdom of God was coming. Jews served God’s law, had an explanation for sorrow, felt that they had recourse in the universe, and had something to look forward to.
The dynasty of the Maccabees then converted the gentile populations living in Palestine to Judaism. The large territory of Idumea, in the south, was converted as a whole and annexed to Judea, and the Idumeans became an integral part of the Jewish nation.1 The Jews were evangelical in this period. The Maccabee period ended because the governing Jews fought among themselves: the powerful Queen Alexandra managed to expand the Jewish territory and to keep Rome at bay, but when she died her sons battled each other for her throne and eventually Rome intervened to decide the succession. Not surprisingly, having resolved the civil war, the Romans stayed. These Roman governors taxed the Jews, and now and again provoked an uprising by breaking the Jewish laws—as when Pompey had imperial guards march through Jerusalem even though their shields were decorated with animal images, or when Caligula tried to put a golden statue of himself, as a god, in the Temple. In such encounters, Jews were martyred and Rome backed down with stunned respect and some disgust. All this while, after the Maccabees’ victory and through the rise of the Roman Empire, some Jews were convinced that God was soon going to send another great warrior who would chase out the Romans, convert all the Jews in the area, and bring on the next, and perhaps last, great phase of Jewish history. Historians widely agree that when the Jews of this period spoke of waiting for a Messiah, an anointed one, they were waiting for a king, a worldly leader who would give them back their own powerful independent state.
Along very different lines, the Jews had also been growing increasingly convinced that some kind of afterlife was in store for the pious Jew. The idea of an afterlife had arisen and grown strong after the Maccabean period began in 168 BCE. It was a result of the outside influence of the Mystery Religions, as well as the internal logic of Judaism, sparked especially by the prophet Isaiah. At the same time, the notion of “believing” arose as a criterion for being in God’s good grace. At its very beginnings this believing was contrasted with Greek rationalism. There is evidence of this new challenge to believe in the text known as the Mishnah. The Hebrew word mishnah means “study,” and the title refers to the first postbiblical codification of Jewish oral law. During and after the Babylonian captivity, the biblical laws had been intensely studied, and all sorts of decisions had been made about their meaning. The laws were updated by prominent leaders and supplemented by traditions of popular observance. All this had been known as the Oral Torah. It was finally collected in writing, as the Mishnah, about 200 CE. Along with the Gemara—later commentaries on the Mishnah itself—it forms the Talmud. In the tractate Sanhedrin of the Mishnah, there is a remarkable statement about the afterlife and, also, the only mention in the whole Talmud of a Greek philosophy or philosopher:
All Israel has a share in the world to come, as Isaiah said: And all of your people who are righteous will merit eternity and inherit the land. And these are the people who do not merit the world to come: The ones who say that there is no resurrection of the dead, and those who deny the Torah is from the heavens, and Epicureans.
Modern Jews use “apikoros” as a generic term for atheist, but even if the author was speaking broadly of unbelievers here, he was singling out followers of Epicurus to do it. This passage, then, makes very clear that at the beginning of the Common Era, Jews were developing a notion of belief—belief in life after death, in the idea that their text was received from God, and in God himself—as a major human responsibility for the reward of eternity. Note that the afterlife was seen as a given for the whole group. The individual’s sole responsibility was to not step out of the group by rejecting the doctrine. We are reminded that the Hebrew notion of divine justice also started out referring only to the fortunes of the group and later became meaningful for individuals. This excerpt also makes it clear that some Jews were Epicureans or otherwise engaged in Greek doubt. This one line from the Mishnah tantalizingly suggests that Jewish doubt, although severely frowned upon by those who kept the records, did exist. There were Jews who doubted life after death, there were Jews who doubted that the Torah came from the heavens, and there were Jews who were Epicureans. It is an amazing little passage for its annunciation of the afterlife, for its requiring only belief for that afterlife, and for its evidence of unbelief. So now along with ethical monotheism, the Jewish religion offered an afterlife. Such bounty did not go unenvied.
Jews made up 10 percent of the Roman Empire and 40 percent of the great city of Alexandria. There was a lot of integration and mutual assimilation between Jews and the other populations of the empire. There were Romans who added the Jewish God and Jewish rituals to their own cycle of worship. We have explicit evidence of a systematic attempt to propagate Judaism in the city of Rome itself as early as 139 BCE. Many non-Jews were interested. They were attracted by the religion’s antiquity, by its intellectualism and philosophy, by its transcendent God, by its already ancient texts, by its sense of righteousness and loyalty, by the welfare system it had developed through its synagogues (the only one like it), and by its jubilant feasts and festivals. Most Jewish families in the Diaspora sent a regular contribution to the Temple and made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem for at least one of the three major yearly festivals. They reported a mood of relaxation and rejoiced to be among like-minded people, at their own temple, celebrating their mutual support. That seems to have carried over to sympathetic non-Jews who joined them at these events, for many seem to have made a point of joining the Jews year after year, assisting at the sacrifices and honoring the rules. There was a whole class of semiconverts who had done everything short of circumcision; these were sometimes called God-fearers.
In the colder religious world of the Roman Empire, Judaism could be very attractive. In the Septuagint, Jews had a venerated Bible that had been translated into the common Greek of the Hellenistic world. Although the West would lose its Greek literary fluency in favor of Latin during the Roman period, across centuries many in the Eastern empire could read the Hebrew Bible because there was a Greek version. In the early second century, the poet Juvenal recorded that Roman families “degenerated” into Judaism when fathers allowed themselves to take on some of its customs, and the sons then became Jews in every respect.2 In the great urban centers of Syria there were also numerous converts to Judaism. Most remarkably, the Adiabene royal house in Mesopotamia converted to the Jewish faith.3 Their Queen Helena was particularly active in Jerusalem, and the dynasty became a permanent factor in the Jewish social world.
In 70 CE, the more pious and disaffected Jews in Jerusalem again became thoroughly convinced that God was leading them to their long-awaited golden period, and they revolted against Rome. So many Jews got swept up in this that their forces did well against the Roman troops, at first. When the Romans finally diverted enough legions to beat them, the Jewish state ended, not to appear again until the twentieth century. Almost a thousand Jews slaughtered themselves and their families at Masada rather than surrender to the Romans, and the Romans, outraged by this obstinacym, destroyed the Temple. In 135 CE there was a final revolt, and after it the Romans forbade Jews to enter Jerusalem. All Jews were in diaspora now. Many newly converted Jews, such as certain members of the Adiabene royal family, participated in the revolts against Rome. After these revolts, however, the Jewish religion lost a great deal of its appeal for pagans because the Jews had been traitorous to the Empire. Judaism entered its Rabbinic period: the synagogue replaced the Temple, and Torah study replaced sacrifice. The religion grew insular. Yet, in the last decades of the Jewish state, two Jewish men, Jesus and Paul, carried the Jewish God and their version of Judaism to a much wider world. What had happened between the Romans and the Greeks happened again between the Romans and the Jews: the Romans crushed the Jewish state and then willingly converted the great Roman Empire to a sect of the Jewish God.
It was not as unlikely as it sounds. The fight had started because this group believed terrifically in a terrifically powerful God, and that was appealing, especially in a place where many people had come to think of religion as a dry matter of fulfilling social and political rituals. Weary paganism was tinder to Judaism’s flame, but the rites of circumcision and the legalist, separatist mood had always kept these two elements too far apart for any real ignition. Paul of Tarsus lit the blaze. He broke away from the singularly Jewish worship of Jesus, led by Jesus’ brother James, by preaching to the gentiles and by declaring that circumcision and other Jewish rites and laws had been supplanted by the death of Jesus. Everything about Jesus’ life and ministry would suggest that he did not have this in mind: he had been a practicing Jew his entire life, honoring all the common and active commandments, prayers, fasts, and rituals, and he spent his short ministry preaching to the Jews. Furthermore, several members of the singularly Jewish Jesus community had known Jesus personally and well, whereas Paul had never met him. But Paul offered something much more practicable and enticing to the vast gentile world. The Romans destroyed James’s group in 70 CE, because they were Jews in Jerusalem, and that made it all the easier for Paul’s alternative group to get a foothold. It was in this situation that Paul developed and evangelized some of the amazing new ideas that were brewing in the Judaism that raised him.
THE WORRIED GOD
One of the fascinating things about the new Jesus religion is that its central figure was, several times in his short and deeply convicted life, quite wracked with doubt. These moments of doubt—and the weight of the new religious idea that had given rise to them—permanently changed the history of doubt. Forever after, we have had an image of agonizing doubt as part of our model of a religious life. This was not framed as doubt in the existence of God. It was doubt in the ability of the human being to inhabit his or her side of the new equation. It could be very hard to bear.
It is not uncommon for religions to have stories of doubt in their periods of origin, when God or gods first introduced themselves. When Abraham and Sarah met the Hebrew God for the first time, he promised them a child, and Sarah doubted. The beginnings of Christianity had its conversion doubt, too. But Sarah was well convinced by the time she felt the first kick. By the time of early Christianity, the level of the human relationship with God had been stepped up a notch and confirmation was no longer so easily imagined. The part about divine justice for all individuals had not been around in Sarah’s time, and had since given Job many agonized days and nights. Now there was the matter of an afterlife as well. It was a lot to believe, and there was more. The God who talked to doubting Sarah all those years ago did not claim to be the ultimate truth toward whom one struggled one’s whole life, as toward the sun—that was a Neoplatonic idea that suffused all later talk of a transcendent God. Sarah was not asked to see God as the living intelligence of the universe, nor to accept the brotherhood of humanity—these were Stoic ideas that became enmeshed with the Jewish God.
By the time of Jesus, the Jewish God was firmly connected to the idea of an afterlife, but no precise details had been worked out. The Jews have generally avoided the logical messiness of detailed theology. We’ve seen what was required to enter the Jewish afterlife: you should not reject the community’s belief in an afterlife. The doctrine was passive and expectant, and there were few specifics about splendor in heaven. In Judaism, the afterlife never became central, and neither did the idea of belief. Another quote from the Mishnah tells this: “Better that they [the Jews] abandon Me, but follow My laws.”4 The Greeks and Romans had said that belief was not as important as practicing the rites of the local gods; the Jews here said that belief was not as important as following the laws of their God, notwithstanding location; the Christians had neither rites and location nor the Law to bind them. They focused instead on belief. Doubt was thus an accepted aspect of Greek and Jewish life, but not the center of it. With Christianity, managing one’s doubt, that is, husbanding one’s faith, became the central drama. Search the Hebrew Bible for the word belief and it shows up rarely in this meaning—belief in God. Daniel got out of the lion’s den because he believed in his God, and here and there people are said to not believe what a given prophet has said, but that’s it. Then, when Jesus appears, the word believe blooms like a patch of poppies in a great green field. Suddenly, it is the heart of the matter.
Jesus is a difficult historical figure, but not impossibly difficult. We have no indication that he wrote anything, and our earliest descriptions of his life and work, the first three Gospels, were written about half a century after he died. These make an interesting historical source because they are synoptic (they tell the same story and can be compared piece by piece), but they vary in the order and meaning given to the various events. It seems that after Jesus was gone, a community of believers told stories about him, and as time went on these stories became quite anecdotal, divorced from any definite setting: “once a woman came to Jesus and said … and he said…” When people finally got down to writing about Jesus, they no longer knew much detail; they did not know the real order of these stories or how much time had passed between them. Because of the structure of the synoptic Gospels, historians believe they were constructed out of these pericopes, or “cut out” minidramas.5 John’s Gospel, the fourth, does not fit with these, but given our knowledge of the cultures involved, we see it as superior on some matters. Later Christians wrote all sorts of things about Jesus’ life, and this material holds much less sway with historians. So we do have some historically decent material to work with, and we have developed linguistic and culturally based techniques for figuring out what likely happened and what likely was written in later or misconstrued. We may thus proceed, if with caution.
Jesus seems to have called for reform in the practice of Judaism—his angry scene with the money changers is suggestive—but many historians have argued that a reformer would have left more evidence of having been one.6 It is reasonable to think of such religious reform in terms of doubt. Historians have also argued that Jesus’ doubting of establishment values had so much in common with the Cynic way of life that he was quite possibly influenced by them. Religious historians Burton Mack and John Dominic Crossan have both championed this view; wrote Crossan, “Maybe Jesus is what peasant Jewish Cynicism looked like.”7 This vision of Jesus as a part of the tradition of graceful-life philosophies is fascinating, but there is much that is difficult to know. What we can know better is what the earliest Gospels report that Jesus said about doubt and the way that they describe the doubts Jesus had in his own mission.
Jesus, who would come to be understood as one with the God of this new religion, had a moment at which he doubted his ability to do what was asked of him and another moment when he doubted God’s loyalty. The first moment was in Gethsemane. The scene is after the Passover meal: Jesus has taken a few of his disciples and asked them to keep watch while he goes off a little way to pray. Jesus, who is feeling “sorrowful and troubled,” turns to Peter and the two sons of Zebedee and tells them, “My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death. Stay here and keep watch with me.” Then Jesus walked a little farther off, “he fell with his face to the ground and prayed, ‘My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me. Yet not as I will, but as you will.’”8 He asks three times if he really had to allow himself to be brutally sacrificed, and before each new plea, he goes back to check on the boys. Each time, they’ve all fallen asleep and no one is watching. Jesus rebukes them at first, but by the last time he simply tells them to get their rest. Then Judas comes and kisses him, and he is delivered into the hands of the authorities. He is calmly resolved in their hands, but we see him doubt one more time: on the cross, suffering, after he has been up there for many hours, he calls out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” In two out of three of the synoptic Gospels (Mark and Matthew), these are the last words Jesus says before he dies. It sounds like he was expecting something that did not seem to be happening.
Jesus’ final question is the first line of Psalm 22, the second line of which is “Why are you so far from saving me, so far from the words of my groaning?” Psalm 22 is written in the person of a pious yet suffering man, or nation, frustrated by waiting for God’s redemption, but it closes with a certainty that God will indeed come through. Thus, many people have interpreted this final cry as a gesture of faith—Jesus was referring to the whole psalm and therefore never really doubted God. It has been posited that someone added these words to Jesus’ story since they provided another connection between Jesus and the Hebrew Bible. Another interpretation is that such scenes of doubt sat so uncomfortably with the idea of Jesus as God that they had to be true and well known, or they would never have been left in the text.
The Christian world that we are about to enter had at its very center two images of a man, who was a God, in an agony of doubt. The stakes had been raised to such a degree that doubt would now be part of religion in a way it had not been before; for many people, their very God had wailed of it. For Jews, the encounter with the Mystery Religions, with Platonism, and with Stoicism melded with the developing logic of their own idea of theocracy. Now along with his old persona of a warrior god of one nation, the Jewish God had taken on qualities of the ultimate truth of Plato; the distant, universal, logical God of the Stoics; the caretaking genies and daemons; and the provider of an afterlife, like the gods of the Mysteries. For Jesus the stakes had been raised because he believed that something very big was about to happen to all of creation, or rather, was already happening: John the Baptist, a prophet who was Jesus’ teacher, had announced that the kingdom of God was actually coming, and very soon. Jesus proclaimed that it had already begun; all you need do, to see it, is to believe it. Even with the caveat that unbelievers are not able to see the change (at least at first), people are going to have expectations; either something happens, or it doesn’t. Furthermore, Jesus was aware that if he went into Jerusalem and preached, in the way he planned to, he would likely be tortured and killed, and he seems to have been upset about it. For those who followed him, his anxieties became their own, for he sent them out to tell the world that an imminent change was already unfolding, and he told them to let themselves be abused and persecuted in his name.9 Suddenly the question of how much one believed became the central religious issue and one that was going to be tested in the most dramatic ways: the world was either going to change or not, and the believer was either going to withstand torture and submit to martyrdom or not. There were two more major factors contributing to the heightened focus on belief: Jesus’ magic is one. The other mostly comes along after Jesus, and that is the struggle to have enough belief to conquer one’s sexual and material lusts. We will begin with Jesus and, later, the heresies. And Augustine will explain the problem of doubt and the taming of our inner beasts.
Jesus worked miracles and his apostles doubted them and, indeed, his whole mission, repeatedly. Just as the word belief becomes important in the Bible only when Jesus arrives, the word doubt is hardly ever mentioned in the Hebrew Bible—and is almost always tucked in an innocuous phrase—“no doubt” this or “no doubt” that—but is prevalent in the Christian New Testament. In the whole Bible, “doubt” mostly comes up in direct reference to the claims and behaviors of Jesus. He was always doing things that some people did not believe. We will take a few examples. First, in Matthew 14 the disciples are keeping watch in a boat on a lake. Jesus walks out to them on the water and they “cry out in fear.”
But Jesus immediately said to them: “Take courage! It is I. Don’t be afraid.” “Lord if it’s you,” Peter replied, “tell me to come to you on the water.” “Come,” He said. Then Peter got down out of the boat, walked on the water and came toward Jesus. But when he saw the wind, he was afraid and beginning to sink, cried out, “Lord save me!” Immediately, Jesus reached out His hand and caught him. “You of little faith,” He said, “why did you doubt?”10
Jesus spoke of doubt as a force that could erase the support beneath one’s feet. Belief is very powerful in this world, which means doubt is very powerful here, too. Consider the Gospel of Mark’s version of a story about a boy afflicted with terrible fits, because, as his father explains, he is possessed by an evil spirit:
Jesus asked the boy’s father, “How long has he been like this?” “From childhood,” he answered. “It has often thrown him into fire or water to kill him. But if you can do anything, take pity on us and help us.” “‘If you can’?” said Jesus. “Everything is possible for him who believes.” Immediately the boy’s father exclaimed, “I do believe; help me overcome my unbelief!”11
In Matthew 17 this same story is told, but here, the unbelief mentioned above is missing, and there is another. The disciples had tried to cure the boy and now they ask Jesus why they could not. “So Jesus said to them, ‘Because of your unbelief; for assuredly, I say to you, if you have faith as a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, “Move from here to there,” and it will move; and nothing will be impossible for you.’”12
Consider how belief is set up here not as a matter of belonging to a group but in terms of winning the battle against one’s unbelief. Another clue to the nature of belief here is that Jesus’ experience of preaching on his home turf was so disappointing. We think of it as a lesson in how things are if your audience knew you when, because when he began to preach they dismissed him, saying, “Is this not the carpenter, the Son of Mary, and brother of James, Joses, Judas, and Simon? And are not His sisters here with us?” But it is also about the function of belief in Jesus’ teaching—what in Mark is beautifully called his “mighty work”: “He could do no mighty work there, except that He laid His hands on a few sick people and healed them. And He marveled because of their unbelief. Then He went about the villages in a circuit, teaching.”13
The unbelief shut him down and he was unabashed about it, that is, he took it as public knowledge that for his explanations to work the people had to bring some belief to the equation. The Buddha, too, was never embarrassed when an audience had a closed mind to his teaching—he knew he needed them to work hard so there was no point in haranguing anyone too resistant.
Then there is the disciple who has been known these last millennia only by his doubting. John 20 tells of Thomas, one of the twelve apostles, remembered ever after as Doubting Thomas:
Now Thomas (called Didymus), one of the Twelve, was not with the disciples when Jesus came. So the other disciples told him, “We have seen the Lord!” But he said to them, “Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe it.” A week later his disciples were in the house again, and Thomas was with them. Though the doors were locked, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you!” Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here; see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side. Stop doubting and believe.” Thomas said to him, “My Lord and my God!” Then Jesus told him, “Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”14
Yet in Luke 24, other disciples also need some hands-on proof that he had risen again:
Now as they said these things, Jesus Himself stood in the midst of them, and said to them, “Peace to you.” But they were terrified and frightened, and supposed they had seen a spirit. And He said to them, “Why are you troubled? And why do doubts arise in your hearts? Behold My hands and My feet, that it is I Myself. Handle Me and see, for a spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see I have.” When He had said this, He showed them His hands and His feet. But while they still did not believe for joy, and marveled, He said to them, “Have you any food here?” So they gave Him a piece of a broiled fish and some honeycomb. And He took it and ate in their presence.15
The odd note about Jesus’ needing a snack was significant. Ghosts, it was said, could not eat, so the meal was a proof offered to the reader—lest he or she have any doubt.
Jesus’ miracles have been interpreted by myriad scholars and theologians. I will here merely note that he was a powerful teacher who created events in which belief and doubt were purposefully thrown into confusion. Miracles were a common feature of the wandering Jewish preacher of the time. Still, Jesus’ miracles were delivered with more authority than usual, and people were often genuinely surprised by them—so much so that they asked him to leave or gave some other telling hint of actual amazement. The miracles functioned to show people that Jesus was someone worth listening to, but they were also a way of starting a conversation about belief and doubt. What this conversation meant to Jesus is difficult to say, but it is clear that he saw some connection between belief in his miracles and belief in the arrival of the kingdom of God. Following him, in the coming centuries, the descendants of the ancient Greeks and the inhabitants of the Late Roman world would once again worship a god with a face and other human features; a miracle worker. But this time, the questions of swallowing the mythology and believing the promises of justice and an afterlife were right out in the open—front and center. This time, when the religion was born, the culture was already in possession of a large, written tradition of doubt.
Jesus himself was a Jew speaking to Jews and not promoting much of a mythology—and, of course, his conversation about belief and doubt was not about Greek philosophical objections to faith. But his ideas and his image came to the real attention of the Roman Empire after he was long gone. He came to Rome in a story from the East, told in common Greek and already incorporating major tenets of religions that were familiar throughout the empire. The ubiquitous image of Isis holding her divine son Horus was transformed into Mary and the infant Jesus. How did it come to be that the far-flung cities that had once sold, bought, and borrowed the works of Cicero and Lucretius could now lose every sign of such doubt and apparently take on universal belief in an anthropomorphic God? The philosophers had even rejected the idea that a God could move or change in any way. The philosophers and the Jews had both rejected the idea of any God with a biography: a face and a mother, a handshake and a style of speech. And then here was God, a man. It is a stunning shift. Jesus presented a leap of belief: in the invitation to believe that the kingdom of God had come, and in the miracles, but also in the predictions and claims to be able to forgive sins. That leap was made even more explicit after Paul reimagined the religion in terms of the magic of resurrection and life everlasting.
Jews were very wary of magicians and messiahs after the rise of Christianity and no longer encouraged them. Although the afterlife did remain a factor in Jewish ideas, for the most part this new emphasis on belief was a gentle shift in Judaism, whereas Christianity took it and ran.
PAUL: FOLLOWING ABRAHAM ALL MORNING
Through Paul, God was so connected with the afterlife that the story of Jesus’ miracles grew increasingly symbolic for this one great miracle: he was going to save humanity from death. Not from hell, mind you. Before they were offered eternal life through Jesus, people throughout the empire were not worried about being judged and damned; they were afraid of death, of rotting in the ground. In Paul’s hands, Jesus’ death and resurrection became the center of the new religion.
Paul was convinced that human beings could not earn their way to heaven; they could get there only through the strength of their faith. In an attempt to fortify his interpretation that the Jewish law no longer needed to be followed, Paul looked back to the Hebrew Bible. In Romans 4:11, Paul said that Abraham’s blessing from God was not “justified by works” but because he had faith in God. The Hellenistic Jews had looked back to Abraham as a model of Jewish piety without Mosaic law. Paul stretched this even further, taking as his model Abraham in the period after he had met God but before he was circumcised. It was a few hours. God first told Abraham that he would be mightily blessed in the future, and later that day Abraham had himself and all the males in his household circumcised. Paul wrote triumphantly of that blessing, “Under what circumstances was it credited? Was it after he was circumcised, or before? It was not after, but before!”16 Thus Abraham “is the father of all who believe but have not been circumcised,” as well as those “who not only are circumcised but who also walk in the footsteps of the faith that our father Abraham had before he was circumcised.” His language here emphasized that faith is what is most important; it is needed even by the circumcised. Keep in mind that “the footsteps of the faith that our father Abraham had before he was circumcised” wouldn’t get you down your garden path.
When God said to do it, Abraham cut himself and his kin, with no proof yet of God’s power but only the claim of it. “Against all hope, Abraham in hope believed,” says Paul, and that was enough. This is stirring because it marks the moment when the world shifts into the new concentration on faith. We have seen it announced in the Mishnah and variously discussed by Jesus, but until Paul, there was still the law. Paul says, “It was not through law that Abraham and his offspring received the promise that he would be heir of the world, but through the righteousness that comes by faith.” And further: “Therefore, the promise comes by faith, so that it may be by grace and may be guaranteed to all Abraham’s offspring—not only to those who are of the law but also to those who are of the faith of Abraham. He is the father of us all.”17
Now the law has been deemed unnecessary. Why? Paul explains: “We know that the law is spiritual; but I am unspiritual, sold as a slave to sin. I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.… I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out.… What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God—through Jesus Christ our Lord!”18 So the law is too hard, but he also argues that not only is it too hard, it is a hindrance:
What then shall we say? That the Gentiles, who did not pursue righteousness, have obtained it, a righteousness that is by faith; but Israel, who pursued a law of righteousness, has not attained it. Why not? Because they pursued it not by faith but as if it were by works. They stumbled over the “stumbling stone.”19
Belief is everything. Jesus had made belief and doubt matters of philosophical and religious importance by challenging people to believe by fiat—to have faith. Paul said that this faith could function instead of the Jewish law, instead of Torah, instead of circumcision. Belief had never been so charged with redemptive power. “Christ is the end of the law so that there may be righteousness for everyone who believes,” he says.20 Naturally, there was new anxiety over the quality of one’s belief.
To speak of Paul in the history of doubt, we must glance at two statements of his that did a lot to stifle doubt in the coming years. In the first, Paul shut down the questioning of divine justice, one of the most obvious forms of doubt in the world. How can the world be called just when there are innocents suffering unthinkable deprivation and horror every hour of every day on earth? Romans 9:14–15 says, “What then shall we say? Is God unjust? Not at all! For he says to Moses, ‘I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion.’ It does not, therefore, depend on man’s desire or effort, but on God’s mercy.” And Paul swept up with a little humbling: “But who are you, O man, to talk back to God? ‘Shall what is formed say to him who formed it, Why did you make me like this?’ Does not the potter have the right to make out of the same lump of clay some pottery for noble purposes and some for common use?” Divine justice, according to Paul, is not ours to ponder. Second, Romans 13 extols obedience to authority: “Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God. Consequently, he who rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted.” Paul said that is why we have to pay our taxes—because governors are God’s servants and deserve obedience. Faith was going to protect the temporal authorities, and the temporal authorities, in turn, were going to protect faith. Belief was going to become part of the structure of the state in much the same way that ritual had.
How did such talk fall upon the ears of the people who had been Cynics, Stoics, Epicureans, and Skeptics? How did the average intelligent thinker in the Christian world come to think of philosophy as a thing that stopped short at faith in a mythological god, i.e., a detailed and anthropomorphic figure? Well, at first such talk didn’t fall on their ears. This was a Jewish conversation in the beginning (but even then it took place in Greek, in the Hellenistic world, quoting from a Greek Bible). At that time, the meaning of Jesus was understood in terms of the Jewish categories of the Law and the Prophets and within the Jewish Messianic tradition. When Paul began preaching to the gentiles and the Greek-speaking eastern Roman Empire did hear of the new religion, he already had a common language with them and there was a central text in that language. Moreover, his message was Hellenized to suit them: in Acts 17, when Paul goes to Athens and delivers a lecture to Epicurean and Stoic philosophers, he puts his religion into terms designed to convince an educated philosophical audience.21
After Paul, many early Christian texts were composed with the intention of convincing wise and careful rulers, like Marcus Aurelius (to whom some such texts were dedicated), to end the persecution of the Christians. They were being persecuted because, having broken away from the Jews, they no longer had special dispensation from worshiping the Roman Imperial gods. They were an emotional cult that had arisen among the poor, and, to many citizens of the empire, the salient fact about the Christians was that they scorned the state symbols and regularly broke the law by dishonoring them. So the early Church Fathers’ “apologies,” their defenses of Christianity, tended to address the problem in terms that would mean something to the philosophical men whose opinion meant nothing less than life or death.22 In the second century, Justin’s Apology defended Christianity by suggesting that Jesus should be seen in the tradition of Socrates since both had died for a more powerful vision of God. Justin pointed out that the Christians were being persecuted as atheists because they denied the state gods, and that, of course, had been Socrates’ crime as well. This made sense to the Greeks, who had always understood the Jews as a “philosophical race” and were open to understanding this offshoot, with its parallels to Stoicism and Platonism, as a kind of philosophy.
Another link between Stoicism and Christianity came from the Christian adoption of some tenets of Epictetus (ca. 50–ca. 138 CE), a man who started out as a slave in Rome and ended up a Stoic philosopher in Greece. He lived about four hundred years after the Stoic school of Zeno was established in Athens. Epictetus’s work concentrated almost exclusively on how to live: the Stoic teacher was to encourage his students to live the philosophic life according to virtue, reason, and nature. The point of it all was to be happy, to flourish. Imperturbability and freedom from passion were the route. On these themes, his is the best Stoic writing to survive down to us. Far in the future, Thomas Jefferson would admire Epictetus as creating an exemplary ethos for the secular citizen. Epictetus’s Stoicism was also outstanding in its insistence on the doctrine of the brotherhood of man, and it was this aspect of it that was incorporated into Christianity.
That’s what happened to philosophy. Judaism, in its Christian form, became the dominant philosophy, and it did so by taking on large aspects of the old philosophies. Because they were persecuted, Christian thinkers found that they had to justify the Jewish God in terms of Greek philosophy. They did not much mention the old Jewish story, which had, at its base, a mythic, anthropomorphic warrior God who had opinions, traded favors, and loved to hear of his fame. Although the Jews had grown far beyond that, they had not really theorized the experience of their universal God. Plato had. Platonism could not give you the whole experience of Judaism—the imminent yet transcendent god, the beauty and antiquity of the Bible, the songs and the psalms, the nurturing ethics of the creator—but it could express the central tenet in solidly philosophical terms. The secret was in the mix.
If Christianity swallowed philosophy, we may mourn philosophy, but we should remember also that in matters of the mind, eventually you are what you eat. By calling upon philosophical precedent in their life-and-death struggle, the early Church Fathers let philosophy into their concerns. One early figure, Tertullian, argued against it, famously asking, “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” But by now the answer was: a lot. Tertullian’s opinion would echo in the medieval West, but most of the early Church Fathers supported the notion of Christianity as a philosophy, or at least as a continuation of philosophy, and considered that it might well make use of the wisdom that had come before. They delighted in saying that the Greek philosophical past was their own early history in much the same way they claimed the Hebrew Bible as their own. Beyond the threat of persecution, the early Church Fathers had been educated in philosophy, often before they came to be Christians, and they felt they had to speak to it. Then, too, every aspect of Greek education and pedagogy was attached to the great philosophical and pagan texts. How would one even think of teaching rhetoric or grammar without them? So they kept them. The early Church Fathers were not the first to take such a position: Philo (ca. 25 BCE–ca. 50 CE), the Jewish philosopher who lived in Alexandria and wrote the history of his people in Hellenized terms, had also advocated the study of the seven liberal arts in order to study philosophy, and the study of philosophy in order to study theology.
Meanwhile, something very strange happened in the history of religion. We have seen that Plato and Aristotle provided some philosophical arguments for the idea of a single, unfathomably great God. Yet they also spoke of many other gods. Also, Plato’s most emotive and creative vision of God was offered only in the Timeaus; elsewhere, ideas of religious ascent and the Forms suggested other kinds of “other” worlds. Aristotle’s first cause was very remote and did not even know us. Five hundred years later, a man named Plotinus changed everything.23 We do not have many details about his life. We know that he was born in 205 and that as a young man he wanted to study philosophy in India. We also know that he thought Christianity was an offensive, mythic little cult. For a while he studied in Alexandria with the same teacher as had Origen, and later he joined the Roman army hoping it would take him to India, where he still hoped to find a teacher. The army was routed, though, so Plotinus ran to Antioch, continued to study, and later started what became a prestigious school of philosophy in Rome.
What he taught came to be known as Neoplatonism. It described Plato and Aristotle using only those parts that added up to a God. Highlighting Aristotle’s rational arguments for the first cause, it had the best time with Plato’s descriptions of communing with the other world and of working to find one’s deepest self. This was mostly Aristotle’s God: he had no personality did not know of us, had not created the world, took no interest in it, and would never judge it or anyone. One could not even say that he had being. Yet Plotinus took Plato’s idea of “emanation” and said that, in a sense, God emanated the world into being and was the world. Plotinus’s descriptions of communing with this God and finding the true self were full of trance states and ecstatic meditations, and surely drew on whatever he knew of Indian philosophy and religion. He did mention that he managed to reach such ecstatic communion only a few times, but it was enough. Neoplatonism became a tremendous force and remained so for centuries upon centuries.
Plotinus wrote it up in a book called the Enneads. Even today, religions call it philosophy and philosophy calls it religion, so it does not usually take center stage in histories. Yet Plotinus’s creation of Neoplatonism was one of the most important events in the history of both philosophy and religion. It was the single most powerful conduit by which monotheism drew upon philosophy. Neoplatonism drew on the authority of the great philosophers and it was emotionally satisfying. In creating it, Plotinus invented a mixed, reshaped version of Plato and Aristotle that would change forever the way everyone would see those philosophers. We have seen that Plato and Aristotle had religious beliefs and contentions, but we have also seen that these were conflicted, and more searching than believing. It was Plotinus who made Plato and Aristotle seem religious.
So far, Christianity was a mix of the Greek culture and the Jewish tradition, with their two universalist ideas. It had a cosmology that, although based ultimately in faith, was complex and philosophically Greek in tone, and it had the passion and commitment of the Jews. Built right into the very nature of Christianity, then, were the doubts of both these traditions: the Greek questions about truth, science, and reality, and the Jewish worry about the unjust world. These would not come to light for a while, but it is good to notice the idea here, as we watch these two traditions jockey and jerk into alignment, merging in a way that felt right to the inheritors, that converted the people into the religion, and that kept individuals from a martyr’s death.
EASTERN INFLUENCES,
GNOSTICISM, AND THE HERESIES
Christianity found an increasingly large following in the Roman Empire. Members’ willingness to accept martyrdom, borrowed from their parent religion, Judaism, drew attention and vigor to the new cult. We do not know if Emperor Constantine converted Rome to Christianity because the Christians seemed an unstoppable force, or if Christianity only became an unstoppable force because Constantine—whose mother had been a Christian but who was raised pagan at pagan courts—had a genuine conversion. In any case, in 313, having seen a cross in the sun (and having previously worshiped Apollo), Constantine made Christianity a lawful religion in Rome and set out to strengthen it through the construction of churches, the calling of councils and synods, and the elaboration of church networks. He himself continued to worship Apollo as well as Jesus and did not accept baptism until he was on his deathbed. But publicly he and his followers promoted the notion of “one God, one Empire.” Everyone was supposed to believe and practice in much the same way, but they never came close. Over the coming centuries the intellectual and religious life of the Roman Empire would become increasingly dedicated to ascertaining just what the rules and beliefs of Christianity ought to be, and converting the population to them. The ancient world had few doctrinal disputes, yet had room to doubt the gods in general. In early Christendom the energy that would have gone to doubt was channeled to “heresy,” i.e., doctrinal disputes.
In 270, the year that Constantine was born, a Christian Syrian farmer named Anthony did what preachers in that area of the world had long done: he gave up the world. This meant celibacy and a wandering, lonesome life, and the name such people earned, monachos—which became monk—simply meant solitary one. Anthony wandered into the desert and stayed for decades, emerging about 310 as the first “man of the desert,” erémétikos, which became hermit, a Christian monk. Christians in the West found this a fascinating option of total commitment.
Meanwhile, in the villages of Persia, east of the Roman Empire, a new religion was on the rise and it brought about a mighty fusion between the great traditions we have so far been considering. This new religion was Manichaeism, started by Mani, who lived between 216 and 277. Mani knew Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, and Christianity and he thought they were all magnificent, but also that they were flawed because each was confined to particular languages and locations and because each had long ago bastardized the true teaching of its founder. He reenvisioned them as one and saw himself as the final successor in a long line of prophets, beginning with Adam and including Buddha, Zoroaster, and Jesus. He made his text canonical in his lifetime, to ensure that his teachings did not degenerate, and the religion spread dramatically through Persia, through the Roman Empire (and as far west as Spain), and into India and China. It would be stomped out by Christians in the West, but not before it profoundly altered the young religion by adding a tremendous dose of Eastern asceticism. Meanwhile, in the East, Manichaeism remained vibrant for a millennium and a half.
At first, Manichaeism was understood in the West as a Christian religion. It was a mix, as Mani had wanted it to be. Like Zoroastrianism, it understood the moral world as a battle between good and evil. Like Buddhism, it was devoted to strict religious exercises, silence, stillness, and solitude, coaxing inner transformation. Manichaeism was only gradually cut off from the fold, but once it was, its dualism and its emphasis on Mani rather than Jesus made it particularly abhorrent to mainstream Christians. By that time, though, Manichaeism had profoundly infused Christianity with Eastern asceticism. This is when Christianity learned the immense power of a fevered ascetic movement that called on people to dedicate themselves entirely to the spirit. There were glimmers of an ascetic movement in the life of Jesus—but forty days in the desert does not a hermit make. Jesus ate heartily and fed others when they were hungry. He told people to give up their goods and their families, but not in a purposeful attempt to strain the body and thereby enter a new consciousness or purified state. That came to Christianity from a good deal farther East.
Manichaeism was a type of Gnosticism—a dualistic religion that offered salvation through special knowledge, gnosis, of spiritual truth—and it is to Gnosticism that we now turn. Gnosticism grew up within Judaism, the mystery religion Orphism, and Plotinus’s Neoplatonism, and it had a particularly rich career in Christianity. Gnostics in any of these groups tended to see themselves as the elite of that group. In fact, they were often the community leaders. But like many mystics before and after them, they believed that not everyone could handle the secret truth of the world: in this case, that the creator God was not good. With Gnosticism, the whole question of doubt gets spun on its head. The Gnostic idea was that human beings have within them the spark of something absolutely transcendent, something completely alien to this world. This spark, our consciousness, is a spark off the fire of an unimaginable God. Our humanity is the same stuff as this entirely distant, otherworldly God. This God did not make the world. Instead, the world was made by a creator God, a much less extraordinary figure. In many interpretations, the creator God was downright evil. Human beings have been worshiping this creator God by mistake, explained the Gnostics, but they should not do so. Gnostics called this creator God “Saklas,” the Blind One; or “Samael,” God of the Blind; or “the Demiurge,” the Lesser Power. As Gnostics saw it, human beings are of more value than the creator God since we contain a spark of what is true, good, and transcendent.
Whereas religions generally looked at the cosmos and reported that such a wonderful world must have been made by an amazing intelligence, the Greek and Roman philosophers had wondered if there could be a God since the world was such a cruel series of ruptures and distress. The Gnostics took this idea in another direction: they saw the world as a limiting, nasty, frustrating cage and assumed a cruel God had made it. They cursed this God and felt superior to him. His limitations or villainy explained evil in the world, and his lack of the transcendent spark made a new kind of sense of our alienation from the world. Humanity has humanness—meaning, compassion, and love—and the universe does not, but just outside the universe, somehow, lives the true God and this true God has humanness, too. In fact, that is where we got ours. Gnostics were believers. They belong to the history of doubt because over the centuries, within the history of Judaism and Christianity, Gnostics doubted all of the personal characteristics of that God. Doubting God’s benevolence is as fundamental a matter as doubting God as thinking, creating, all-powerful, or eternal.
For the Gnostics, all the crowing about the magnificent order of the cosmos was suddenly cast as wrongheaded: order and natural law were not to be celebrated, they were to be derided. Why marvel at the economy or grace of a law that effectively keeps you trapped on the surface of the planet, destined to die and rot in the ground or go up in smoke? Why marvel that God made beaches, wheat, and honeycombs if, on the important questions, any fairly decent human being would have done a better job; would, for instance, neither invent torture nor allow it to be invented? That would go for any kind of torture, and meanwhile, look how many kinds there are. They were very clear on the point that human beings owe no allegiance to the creator God. Our sense of ethics, pity, and care makes us far superior to the universe in which we are trapped.
It is a celebration of the human. Our only mission is to come to know who we are, to realize that we belong elsewhere, and to try to find our way back to our home outside this world. We find our way back by cultivating our alienation here below. People were to wean themselves from life—not to reconcile themselves to it, but rather actively to seek alienation from it. Most religions suggest that there is something to be learned from the observation that, for the great material universe, all our striving, our vanity, our longing, is meaningless. The Gnostic paradigm says No, there is no lesson there for us. Whatever we have inside us, whatever is most like us and least like the rest of the known universe, that is the actual reality, and all we have of truth.
Gnosticism was in the mainstream of early Christianity: about 140 CE, one of the most prominent and influential early Gnostic teachers, Valentinus, seems to have been under consideration for election as the Bishop of Rome. By the end of his life some twenty years later, he had been forced from the public eye and branded a heretic. There was growing hostility to Gnosticism’s secret knowledge and its continuous creation of new scripture. By 180 CE, Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyon, was attacking Gnosticism as heresy. By the end of the fourth century Gnosticism was eradicated, its remaining teachers were murdered or driven into exile, and its sacred books were destroyed. Until recent finds, all we knew of it was the polemical denunciations and fragments preserved in the Christian documents on heresies. But thrilling new finds have given us the other side of the story. The newest finds include the Nag Hammadi collection, discovered in 1945 by an Arab peasant digging in his field. In the large earthenware jar he uncovered were a library of texts that Gnostic monks had buried sometime around the year 390 to save them from the hands of the orthodox Church. Elaine Pagels, one of Gnosticism’s most eminent scholars, has written that “to know oneself, at the deepest level, is simultaneously to know God: this is the secret of gnosis.… Self-knowledge is knowledge of God; the self and the divine are identical.”24 There is something very individualist in a doctrine that allows each person to access truth.
It was an odd choice, dogma over mysticism, because the mystic vision is less susceptible to doubt. It makes few universal claims about details—meaning there is little to be contradicted; it encourages self-altering practices that try to bring the adherent to God through experience, not reason; and last, it never claims that philosophy or texts are proof of anything, so that whole approach to questioning religion is invalidated. So the mystic position would have been easy to defend but, as I noted, it afforded each believer a lot of interpretive power. Gnosticism recreated the problem of doubt by imagining a way to find the world woefully beneath humane standards, reject the Creator God in those terms, and yet preserve belief in God. It cursed the Judeo-Christian God for death and disease, heartache and loss, drought, fire, flood, and famine, all that has gone wrong with history all these many years. Furthermore, it left room for men and women to do their own thinking, to work out their own relationship to their inner self and the strangely hostile world in which it finds itself.
Along with Epicureanism and Stoicism, Manichaeism and the larger world of Gnosticism were the major competitors of mainstream Christianity. Then there were the heresies. These took over huge swaths of Christendom, sometimes for many centuries, because the people who followed them believed that the orthodox Church was wrong and that following it would lead to damnation. These heresies were about several major things. Here are a few: some people thought that sacraments performed by sinful priests were worthless and thus saw the orthodox Church as horribly corrupt because a lot of priests were caught sinning; some people did not believe that Jesus could have been all God and all man at the same time, and they worked out some other way to understand him; and some people saw Jesus, who was not around from the time of creation, as a somewhat junior partner to God. Those who followed Nestorius—the Nestorian Christians—were horrified at the idea that God had ever suffered and claimed that God’s human son and servant, not God himself, had died on the cross. When the Nestorian teachings were condemned at the Council of Ephesus, Nestorius reported that the foolish crowds of Constantinople mocked him by dancing around bonfires, chanting that they had won the point: “God has been crucified. God is dead.”25 The Nestorian issue began over what to call the Virgin Mary: even today Nestorians venerate Mary, but they do not speak of her as the mother of God.
To note another important example, Pelagianism suggested that human beings were quite capable of deserving heaven by leading reasonably good lives—there was no need for chastity, poverty, or extensive fasting, nor was there a need for infant baptism, since children were considered to be born without sin. There was also no need for God’s grace; people could earn heaven themselves through “works.” Variously interpreting Paul and Jesus, supporters of acts and supporters of grace as the determining factor in salvation began a tug-of-war that would never leave Christendom.
By the time we get to the thinker who most shaped Christianity for the six centuries of the early Middle Ages, orthodox Christianity had already had to reconcile itself not only with the ancient philosophers but also with diverse variations of the Christian vision. Furthermore, although Paul had insisted on faith over law and works, various factors—most notably the influence of the Manichaean religion—had placed faith in the context of strict physical challenges, beginning with chastity, poverty, and fasting and eventually including self-flagellation and the wearing of hair shirts. Christianity inaugurated a harrowing new form of doubt: doubting one’s ability to believe enough, and to enact that belief in dramatically painful processes. The story of doubt would now include all those who struggled to meet these challenges and who, at least for a while, found that they could not do it. It was doubt’s time for dark nights of the soul.
AUGUSTINE (354–430)
Christian writers leapt away from the Classical world on only one issue, the definite existence of one transcendent God. In every other feature they did not leap but crawled cautiously, continuing to respect the questions of the past and their forms of expression as the highest achievements of humanity, and seeking only to reframe them in this new condition of unimpeachable faith in God.
The most famous scene in Augustine’s marvelous Confessions is his conversion, and it comes late, in the eighth of thirteen chapters. He spends the chapters up to that point wrestling with doubt and temptation. At the beginning of the book, Augustine struggles with whether to be a Christian, as his mother, Monica, was and heartily wished him to be, or to continue to be a Manichaean. He had lived in a Manichaean community for nine years and was struggling now, among other things, with his discomfort with the Manichaean solution to the problem of evil, with some of their more fabulous astronomical claims, and with his knowledge that his dear mother wanted him to be a Christian. Augustine also had a lot of trouble with lust before and after becoming a Christian. He enjoyed worldly pleasures, from poetry prizes and important career appointments, to sex and food.
In an early chapter called “My consort sent home,” Augustine had to part with the woman with whom he “had slept for many years,” and with whom he’d had a son. She was sent away so that a proper marriage could be made for him, and he tells us that this was his mother’s idea, in the hope that the married state would lead him to Christianity. Augustine did not take it well. “My heart which was deeply attached was cut and wounded, and left a trail of blood.” But his parentally arranged marriage had to wait two years for the girl to come of age (he liked the look of her and was willing to wait), and in the meantime he could not resist his passions and descended further into sin than before. In commenting on this, Augustine offered his thoughts on Hellenistic graceful-life philosophy, and it is worth hearing the passage in his words:
Nothing kept me from an even deeper whirlpool of erotic indulgence except fear of death and of your coming judgment which, through the various opinions I had held, never left my breast. With my friends Alypius and Nebridius I discussed the ultimate nature of good and evil. To my mind Epicurus would have been awarded the palm of victory, had I not believed that after death the life of the soul remains with the consequences of our acts, a belief which Epicurus rejected; and I asked: If we were immortal and lived in unending bodily pleasure, with no fear of losing it, why should we not be happy? What else should we be seeking for?26
So the only thing keeping him from embracing Epicurean happiness was his belief in a life after death, and that one received reward or punishment there.
It was in this state of physical indulgence and emotional anguish that he read the works of Plotinus and became devoted to Neoplatonism. Many people were now reading Plato only in terms of Plotinus’s interpretation, and many Neoplatonists did not even do that; they just read Plotinus. Before being won over to Neoplatonism, Augustine had always thought, like Cotta in Cicero’s study of the gods, that there could be no noncorporeal mind. Neoplatonism convinced him that such a thing was conceivable and that seeking it out is the path to wisdom. He later hypothesized that if God had given him the Holy Books before he had read “the Platonist books,” he would have been seduced by their sweetness and hence never would have learned the “solid foundation of piety.”27 But it was not enough on its own. It was at this juncture that “with avid intensity,” Augustine “seized the sacred writings of your Spirit and especially the apostle Paul.” For Augustine, Plato had solved the problem of an intelligence without a body, so what had always seemed contradictory in Paul’s vision now made perfect sense. Augustine said that what Paul had that was missing from Plato, was that Plato wasn’t offering tenderness and attention. Plato’s God was too far off.
None of this is in the Platonist books. Those pages do not contain the face of this devotion, tears of confession, your sacrifice, a troubled spirit, a contrite and humble spirit, the salvation of your people, the espoused city, the guarantee of your Holy Spirit, the cup of our redemption. In the Platonic books no one sings: “Surely my soul will be submissive to our God? From him is my salvation; he is also my God and my savior who upholds me; I shall not be moved any more.”
No one there hears him who calls “Come to me, you who labor.”…
It is one thing from a wooded summit to catch a glimpse of the homeland of peace and not to find a way up to it, but vainly to attempt the journey along an impracticable route surrounded by the ambushes and assaults of fugitive deserters with their chief, “the lion and the dragon.” It is another thing to hold on to the way that leads there, defended by the protection of the heavenly emperor.28
Augustine’s description of what it is like to try to come to true insight by Plato’s route was alarmingly torturous—even the sentence that houses it clangs around breathlessly. The philosophical religion of Neoplatonism offered him tiny glimpses of “the homeland of peace” but was too hard. Under the protection of the “heavenly emperor,” the journey suddenly seemed possible.
Augustine’s intellectual and emotional acceptance of Christianity did not quite add up to a conversion experience in his own appraisal. He did not feel he was a Christian until he could give up all sex, all food beyond his barest needs, and all worldly enterprise, including his job as a teacher. The day came in a chapter called “The birth pangs of conversion,” and the pangs hurt. Our famous image of Augustine’s conversion begins with his learning of the Life of Anthony from a friend. After hearing the story, Augustine hollered at himself:
Many years of my life had passed by—about twelve—since in my nineteenth year I had read Cicero’s Hortensius, and had been stirred to a zeal for wisdom. But although I came to despise earthly success, I put off giving time to the quest for wisdom. For “it is not the discovery but the mere search for wisdom which should be preferred even to the discovery of treasures …” But I was an unhappy young man, wretched as at the beginning of my adolescence when I prayed you for chastity and said: “Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet.” I was afraid you might hear my prayer quickly, and that you might too rapidly heal me of the disease of lust which I preferred to satisfy rather than suppress.29
Along with the great joke at the end, note the terms in which Augustine credited Cicero with having awakened in him the search for meaning—not the finding, but the searching. Augustine was reeling from Anthony’s story, and wished he himself had made such progress. He wailed to his friend, “What is wrong with us? What is this that you have heard? Uneducated people are rising up and taking heaven by force while we, with all our high culture and without any heart—see where we roll in the mud of flesh and blood.” Alone with his friend, Augustine was suddenly weeping, agonized by his inability to choose the holy life: He had recognized that worldly contests brought only strife and anxiety, and yet he still sought after such victories and so many other pleasures. Would he ever fully convert? He ran out to the garden to be alone, but his friend, who was having similar problems, followed him and looked on as Augustine thrashed around. As Augustine described it:
I was deeply disturbed in spirit, angry with indignation and distress that I was not entering into my pact and covenant with you, my God, when all my bones were crying out that I should enter into it and were exalting it to heaven with praises.…
Finally in the agony of hesitation I made many physical gestures of the kind men make when they want to achieve something and lack the strength, either because they lack the actual limbs or because their limbs are fettered with chains or weak with sickness or in some way hindered. If I tore my hair, if I struck my forehead, if I intertwined my fingers and clasped my knee, I did that because to do so was my will.… Yet I was not doing what with an incomparably greater longing I yearned to do, and could have done the moment I so resolved.30
This is one of the most beautifully written scenes of Christian doubt: it was an “agony of hesitation,” and he went through a series of gestures and facial expressions that reminded him of nothing less than the look of amputees, shackled men, or men faint from disease when they struggle to do something beyond their strength. He tore his hair, struck his forehead, and folded himself over his knees. In this ecstasy of externalized pain he realizes that his will could move his body in an instant, but that his will could not command itself. We are now around the other side of doubt for the first time, hearing not from someone whose doubt is all about getting to the bottom of what’s real, but rather from someone whose doubt is all about actively trying to commit oneself to belief and, momentarily at least, failing.
He called it a sickness and a torture; he berated himself for his continuing connection to doubt. “I was twisting and turning in my chain until it would break completely: I was now only a little bit held by it, but I was still held.” God was pressuring him, “wielding the double whip of fear and shame,” trying to keep him from succumbing to that last-holding chain. In his mind he cried out, “Let it be now. Let it be now.”31 But he could not actually make the decision. “The nearer approached the moment of time when I would become different, the greater the horror of it struck me.” His old passions and “empty-headed” desires pulled him back. “They tugged at the garment of my flesh and whispered: ‘Are you getting rid of us?’ And ‘from this moment this and that are forbidden for ever and ever.’…What filth, what disgraceful things they were suggesting!” He was already mostly past these desires, he said—they were not confronting him face-to-face but whispering behind his back. But still “the overwhelming force of habit was saying to me: ‘Do you think you can live without them?’”32
Then “Lady Continence” appeared to him and reminded him of how many people, young and old, male and female, have lived chaste lives, and told him that none of them could have managed it without God’s help. That is, there was a leap to be made here. Lady Continence asked, “Why are you relying on yourself, only to find yourself unreliable? Cast yourself upon him, do not be afraid. He will not withdraw himself so that you fall. Make the leap without anxiety; he will catch you and heal you.” But Augustine was still listening to the mutterings of impure desires while Lady Continence lectured him to ignore them. “This debate in my heart was a struggle of myself against myself.” The friend stood waiting in the silence.
Now Augustine, choking with tears, again retreated from his friend, threw himself under a certain fig tree, and yelled out to God, “How long, how long is it to be? Tomorrow, tomorrow. Why not an end to my impure life in this very hour?” And then he heard “from the nearby house” a little boy or girl chanting over and over: “Pick up and read, pick up and read.”33 Augustine thought about it and could not remember a game in which that chant was used. He stopped crying, stood up, went over to the book of the apostle Paul that he had left by his friend’s side, and read a line in which Paul counsels to “make no provision for the flesh in its lusts.” The line is from Romans 13, a few lines after the instruction to respect authority and pay one’s taxes that we saw earlier. Luckily, Augustine looked at the passage more pertinent to his problem. It was the sign he needed: “I neither wished nor needed to read further. At once, with the last words of this sentence, it was as if a light of relief from all anxiety flooded into my heart. All the shadows of doubt were dispelled.”34
For Augustine, doubt had reigned for years, and now it was over. Following his lead, other Christians would see this wrangling with doubt, even to smacking oneself on the head and screaming, as an integral part of religious experience. And what was the hope? That all shadows of doubt would disappear.
In the very next paragraph of Augustine’s Confessions, two interesting things happen: first, Augustine shows the book to his friend, who notices a further passage on the page that reads “receive the person who is weak in faith,” and the friend takes that to mean himself and he converts, too; and second, the two young men run off to tell Monica, Augustine’s mother, of the conversion. It is more than she had ever hoped, for Augustine “did not now seek a wife and had no ambition of success in this world.” This, he declares, is a far greater joy than the grandchildren she had been looking forward to. There is a family drama in this doubt story about which we cannot hazard much, but we can notice that some problems in accepting one’s parent’s idea of the world are being acted out in this scene of doubt and conversion. With Augustine—because he passed through a period of being Manichaean, with its Far Eastern influences; and a period of Neoplatonism; and also knew the philosophers and sympathized with Epicurus—we have finally come to a moment when all the major traditions we have been following—the Greek, Hebrew, Far Eastern, and Roman—are represented in this one harrowed soul. Meanwhile, the whole conversion scene is understood as questionable autobiography, since so much of it was lifted straight from the Enneads of Plotinus. Augustine may have simply had a similar experience and borrowed phrases and structure to tell the story, but the connection reminds us of the importance of Neoplatonism here. Just after his conversion, Augustine and his mother, Monica, have an ecstatic experience together, which has had great meaning for Christianity. It too was written in language borrowed directly from Plotinus: “Our minds were lifted up by an ardent affection towards eternal being itself.” Then, “Step by step we climbed beyond all corporate objects” and beyond the sun, moon, and stars.
After the conversion scenes, the rest of Augustine’s book is about wrestling with the intellectual problems presented by the idea of God. In this struggle, Augustine shadows Cicero’s concerns, but, unlike Cicero, he finds answers that satisfy him. These answers are viable because they do not try to give proof of the existence of God; rather, they are predicated on the existence of God. It is as if Cicero asked the question “How can it be?” in a tone that made it clear the question meant “Clearly, it cannot be.” Augustine asks the same question but is already devoted to figuring out how it can be. He would either come to an answer or declare that he did not know how it worked, but still, so “it is.” Velleius, Cicero’s Epicurean character, had laughed at the idea that God created the world, pointing out the enormity of the task by inviting his listener to imagine the construction site. He had argued that no God made the world, it made itself. Augustine was not asking these questions to debate the existence of God. He was certain that the scripture was true, but he did not understand how it could be true. Indeed, he devoted the final three chapters of this thirteen-chapter book to an analysis of Genesis, all in an attempt to discover why God did not need a construction site.
Speaking directly to God, Augustine asks Velleius’s questions. “How did you make heaven and earth, and what machine did you use for so vast an operation?” God could not have made these things in air or on land since neither had been made yet. “Nor did you make the universe within the framework of the universe. There was nowhere for it to be made before it was brought into existence. Nor did you have any tool in your hand to make heaven and earth.… Therefore you spoke and they were made, and by your word you made them. But how did you speak?” God had called out to Augustine, through words, in the garden; there was the child’s rhyme and the apostle’s book. Drawing on the description of Jesus as “the Word” and on the one line in Genesis that suggests that God spoke the world into existence, Augustine answers Cicero’s question to his own satisfaction: creation was managed through words.
Cicero had also asked what God was doing before he made heaven and earth. Augustine presents the question and then mentions a snide answer that he has heard around, to wit: “He [God] was preparing hells for people who inquire into profundities.” Augustine saw the humor, but says the question deserves a better answer. “I would have preferred him to answer ‘I am ignorant of what I do not know’ rather than reply so as to ridicule someone who has asked a deep question and to win approval for an answer which is a mistake.” Humanity was allowed to question why and how, but not to question the revealed facts themselves. Augustine then asserts that he, for one, is absolutely certain that before God made the universe he did not make anything. If anyone else is surprised at God’s apparent sloth, as Cicero had allowed it to be characterized, he will have misunderstood the question. Before the universe existed, Augustine explains, there was no time—time is not absolute; it is a feature of the universe. Also, for God, all time exists at once, eternally.
Within these and other investigations, Augustine advanced important philosophical ideas on the nature of time and the meaning of consciousness and the will. With Augustine, we have entered into another place in history, a place in which generation after generation will take Augustine’s assumption for granted, as once the Greek gods had been taken as a fact of the natural world. But this time, thoughts of God were fraught from the beginning with the issue of belief and doubt. There was never an original time when everyone believed the same thing in Christianity, as if it were as obvious as the rocks and the trees. It always had within it the muscles of philosophy, of doubt, which it had incorporated into its doctrines back when having a philosophical justification for God was a matter of life and death for Christians. The myths of the ancient Greeks of the Archaic and Early Classical periods were not full of stories about belief and faith, and in the period when these myths were most generally believed, nobody talked about believing in them, or about how some things have to be taken on faith. There is no such period for Christianity: even in its origins, and even in the medieval period, Christians always discussed the work of belief and the problems of doubt. They did so because they had on their bookshelves remnants of a world that had already come to value rationalism, proof, and logic.
In an odd twist, Augustine praised doubt as the road to knowing anything, as long as it does not question God. It is a curious argument, not least because it preempts Descartes’s cogito ergo sum (“I think, therefore I am”). The issue was that Stoics insist on determinism, yet Christians insist on free will, and Skeptics insist that one cannot know anything. Augustine says that he knows that he thinks, and from that he knows that he is, and that he has a will. But he puts the matter in terms of doubt: no one, he concedes, agrees on the true nature of the force behind “living and remembering and understanding and willing and thinking and knowing and judging.”
Nobody surely doubts, however, that he lives and remembers and understands and wills and thinks and knows and judges. At least, even if he doubts, he lives, if he doubts, he remembers why he is doubting; if he doubts he has a will to be certain; if he doubts, he thinks; if he doubts, he knows he does not know; if he doubts, he judges he ought not to give a hasty assent. You may have your doubts about anything else, but you should have no doubts about these; if they were not certain, you would not be able to doubt anything.35
And elsewhere he writes:
I am quite certain that I am, that I know that I am, and that I love this being and this knowing. Where these truths are concerned I need not quail before the Academicians [Skeptics] when they say: “What if you should be mistaken?” Well, if I am mistaken, I exist. For a man who does not exist can surely not be mistaken either, and if I am mistaken, therefore I exist.36
Even within the increasingly closed system of Christianity, doubt was understood as the only way to know anything.
Augustine clearly does not reject philosophy. Instead, he furthers the argument of the early Church Fathers, claiming that philosophy is a gift of God and should be used when it is useful. His rationale for studying philosophy was put in terms of a metaphor anchored by the scene in the Hebrew Bible in which God told the Israelites to “despoil the Egyptians” as they left their bondage by taking gold and silver statuary or other works that had been pagan or profane and using the metal for their own, finer purposes. “If those… who are called philosophers happen to have said anything that is true and agreeable to our faith, the Platonists above all, not only should we not be afraid of them, but we should even claim back for our own use what they have said, as from its unjust possessors.”37 “Despoiling the Egyptians” has come to mean any use of another culture’s art and ideas for purposes that may wholly contradict their original intention. The key to Augustine’s use of philosophy is that his use of logic is beautiful, but it keeps certain propositions outside the rules. For example, if someone does not believe there can be resurrection from the dead, then they won’t believe that Christ has risen. “But this consequent is false, because Christ has risen again. Therefore the antecedent is also false.… If there is no resurrection of the dead, then neither has Christ risen again; but Christ has risen again; therefore there is a resurrection of the dead.”38
The other thing we need to notice is that Augustine ushers in this new period with a very mixed message, for as much as he was fighting against much of ancient philosophy, he was also fighting against the Christian heresies. At several junctures in Augustine’s writings it is clear that he contributed to the exclusivity of the Catholic position: the persecution of non-Christians, nonorthodox Christians, and heretics, and the suppression, in the late fourth century, of all these people’s writings. Augustine struggled to win over the Pelagians and other heretics, but ultimately he threw his weight behind violent repression. On the suppression of the philosophers, consider Augustine’s letter to Dioscorus:
If, however, in order to secure not only the demolition of open errors, but also the rooting out of those which lurk in darkness, it is necessary for you to be acquainted with the erroneous opinions which others have advanced, let both eye and ear be wakeful, I beseech you, —look well and listen well whether any of our assailants bring forward a single argument from Anaximenes and from Anaxagoras, when, though the Stoic and Epicurean philosophies were more recent and taught largely, even their ashes are not so warm as that a single spark can be struck out from them against the Christian faith.
By Augustine’s time, Christianity was the religion of Rome in the West and Byzantium in the East, and it had power, money, and status to back up such calls for exclusivity. About 391, rioting Christians destroyed Alexandria’s Sarapeum, a pagan temple that housed a branch of the Great Library. We don’t know what was lost in that fire. It gets worse.
We are slipping now into the world that stopped speaking of doubt and lost touch with most philosophy. There was, however, a narrow corridor of continuous memory of philosophy and much of that corridor was provided by Boethius, the “last of the Romans, first of the Scholastics.” Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius lived from ca. 480 to 524 and did more to carry the old learning through the Middle Ages than anyone else. The emperor Theodoric praised him for his translations and interpretation of philosophy in no less terms than these: “From far away you entered the schools of Athens; you introduced a Roman toga into the throng of Greek cloaks.… Thanks to your translations, Pythagorus the musician and Ptolemy the astronomer may be read as Italians.… It is by your sole exertions that Rome may now cultivate in her mother tongue all those arts and skills which the fertile minds of Greece discovered.”39 It was hardly an exaggeration. Consider his work on the subject of logic alone: Boethius translated at least five of Aristotle’s works on logic as well as a famous study of Aristotle by Porphyry, and he also wrote four commentaries of his own, two on Aristotle’s works, one on the famous study, and one on a work by Cicero. As one historian has put it, “By his monumental achievement, Boethius guaranteed that logic, the most visible symbol of reason and rationality, remained alive at the lowest ebb of European civilization, between the fifth and tenth centuries.”40
Boethius also wrote five independent treatises on logic and five tractates on theology and in all of them used the tools of reason and logic to elucidate Christian ideas, such as the Trinity. It is then more interesting to note that Boethius’s most famous book today, The Consolation of Philosophy, completely ignored Christianity. Boethius had been charged with treason by the same Theodoric who had praised him, and he wrote the Consolation of Philosophy while in prison awaiting execution. It has often been regarded as a tremendous mystery that a man condemned to death would write a treatise that did not fall into faith, but the Consolation said nothing at all of Christ, Church, or doctrine. Instead, the book claims that in Boethius’s despair, Philosophy showed up to comfort him. She appears to him both as a woman of normal human form and a kind of shimmering incorporeal being of such stature that her crown pierces the sky.
I recognized my nurse, Philosophy, in whose chambers I had spent my life from earliest manhood. And I asked her, “Wherefore have you, mistress of all virtues, come down from heaven above to visit my lonely place of banishment? Is it that you, as well as I, may be harried, the victim of false charges?” “Should I,” said she, “desert you, my nursling? Should I not share and bear my part of the burden which has been laid upon you from spite against my name? Surely Philosophy never allowed herself to let the innocent go upon their journey un-befriended.”
Philosophy tells a heartening tale of her career, reminding him that, “though Plato did survive, did not his master, Socrates, win his victory of an unjust death, with me present at his side?” She mentions “the followers of Epicurus and in turn the Stoics” as plunderers who stole pieces of her for the masses and then wandered off. She recounts the exile of Anaxagoras, the poison drunk by Socrates, and the torture of Zeno and laments that “Naught else brought them to ruin but that, being built up in my ways, they appeared at variance with the desires of unscrupulous men.” If these grow too strong, she explains, “our leader, Reason, gathers her forces into her citadel, while the enemy are busied in plundering useless baggage. As they seize the most worthless things, we laugh at them from above, untroubled by the whole band of mad marauders.” Try as they may, the enemies of philosophy cannot crush reason.
Boethius had Philosophy explain that there was an intelligence to the universe, that which was once called fate, and that now we understood it to be the universal force. Philosophy thus described an ultimate governance to the universe, but Jesus’ name was not mentioned. Throughout the Middle Ages, The Consolations of Philosophy was the most widely circulated of all early medieval writings. This rational, undogmatic, philosophical belief was a major part of the narrow path that leads continuously from the doubt of the ancient world to the doubt of the modern. When philosophy awakens in Europe, it will find Boethius near to hand.
THE JEWISH DOUBT OF ELISHA BEN ABUYAH
The early centuries of the first millennium CE produced a towering figure in the history of Jewish doubt. The Talmud tells of a heretic Jew, Elisha ben Abuyah, so violently renounced by the sages of old that his nickname is Aher, “the Other.” He was one of a tiny number of rabbis excommunicated during the eight centuries of the Rabbinic period. He was more than that, though—from his time forward, in the Jewish texts, his name has been the byword of doubt. Elisha had been a beloved rabbi, renown for his insight and wisdom, and he had come to deny God and reject religion. The Talmud does not tell us much, but he was born sometime before 70 CE and died sometime after 135, and his father appears to have been a wealthy landowner of Jerusalem. We know Elisha trained in talmudic studies and became a highly respected rabbi—some of his judgments and comments appear in the classical rabbinic texts. But the Talmud tells us: “Aher’s tongue was never tired of singing Greek songs.”41 He was a student of Greek and a lover of Greek poetry. The Babylonian Talmud says that Elisha, while still a religious teacher, kept forbidden books hidden in his clothes. He apparently had some significant knowledge of horses, architecture, and wine. Elisha is also said to have walked outside the distance permitted on the Sabbath and ridden through town on a holy day. The Talmud describes the event that precipitated his excommunication. One day Elisha ben Abuyah saw a man send his young son up into the branches of a tree to perform a mitzvah: before one gathers eggs from a nest, one should shoo away the mother bird. The performance of this particular mitzvah, according to the Bible, brings long life.42The child did the mitzvah, then fell from the tree and died. Elisha called out: “There is no justice, and there is no Judge.” From previous comments and behavior, everyone knew he meant it, and he was excommunicated.
The Talmud also tells this story: There was a group of rabbis in the years before the revolt (the last against Rome) who tried to see into the mysteries of the universe—they were likely exploring Gnosticism, and perhaps Greek philosophies as well. The rabbis were Azzai, Ben Zoma, Elisha ben Abuyah, and Akiva. They all “entered paradise” in these studies, and the result was that Azzai “looked and went mad” and “Ben Zoma died.” As for Elisha: “Aher destroyed the plants”—this is generally understood to refer to his rejection of Judaism. Only Rabbi Akiva “entered in peace and left in peace.” It is an important story in the history of Jewish doubt because it was ever afterward used to point to the dangers of outside learning and of mysticism (if practiced by those not prepared). The sole person to defend Elisha after his apostasy was his old student the rabbi Meir. Meir’s wife, Beruriah, was the only woman to be treated as a person of learning and halakah decision in the Talmud. The daughter of a great rabbi, she was praised not only for scriptural knowledge and wisdom but for her unconventional spirit and intellectual wit. Among her keen talmudic comments: Rabbi Yosi the Galilean was once on a journey when he met Beruriah. He asked her, “By what road do I go to Lod?” She answered, “Foolish Galilean, did not the rabbis say ‘Engage not in much talk with women’? You should have asked, ‘Which to Lod?’”43 Now that’s comedy. We do not know if Beruriah and Elisha were partaking in a shared and perhaps common culture of questioning old beliefs, but it certainly seems possible. Beruriah stayed within the fold; Elisha’s doubt and eventual disbelief haunt the texts of Judaism. The Babylonian Talmud tells a story in which a heavenly voice calls out: “Turn, O backsliding children (Jer. iii. 14), with the exception of Aher.”
HYPATIA AND THE END
OF SECULAR PHILOSOPHY
We turn now to the terrible story of Hypatia, long told as the defining moment in the death of ancient philosophy at the hands of Christian orthodoxy. We learn the story from the Ecclesiastical History by Socrates Scholasticus, a fifth-century church historian: “There was a woman at Alexandria named Hypatia, daughter of the philosopher Theon, who made such attainments in literature and science, as to far surpass all the philosophers of her own time.”44 She became head of the Platonist school at Alexandria in about 400 CE. There she lectured on mathematics and philosophy, in particular Neoplatonism. “She explained the principles of philosophy to her auditors, many of whom came from a distance to receive her instructions. On account of the self-possession and ease of manner which she had acquired in consequence of the cultivation of her mind, she not infrequently appeared in public in presence of the magistrates.” She was not frightened to go “to an assembly of men,” for she was widely admired for her extraordinary dignity and virtue. But trouble came. Hypatia was friends with the Roman prefect of Alexandria, Orestes. Apparently because of her counsel, Orestes would not reconcile with the future Saint Cyril, patriarch of Alexandria (the two were locked in a struggle over church and state power). And Cyril had a gang of followers.
Some of them, therefore, hurried away by a fierce and bigoted zeal, whose ringleader was a reader named Peter, waylaid her returning home, and dragging her from her carriage, they took her to the church called Caesareum, where they completely stripped her, and then murdered her with roof tiles. After tearing her body in pieces, they took her mangled limbs to a place called Cinaron, and there burnt them.… And surely nothing can be farther from the spirit of Christianity than the allowance of massacres, fights, and transactions of that sort.
She was about forty-five when it happened. We get a slightly different story from a tenth-century Byzantine encyclopedia called The Suda:
Hypatia, daughter of Theon the geometer and philosopher of Alexandria, was herself a well-known philosopher. She was the wife of the philosopher Isidorus, and she flourished under the Emperor Arcadius. Author of a commentary on Diophantus, she also wrote a work called The Astronomical Canon and a commentary on The Conics of Apollonius. She was torn apart by the Alexandrians and her body was mocked and scattered through the whole city. This happened because of envy and her outstanding wisdom especially regarding astronomy.
Hypatia was born, reared, and educated in Alexandria. Since she had greater genius than her father, she was not satisfied with his instruction in mathematical subjects; she also devoted herself diligently to all of philosophy.
The woman used to put on her philosopher’s cloak and walk through the middle of town and publicly interpret Plato, Aristotle, or the works of any other philosopher to those who wished to hear her. In addition to her expertise in teaching she rose to the pinnacle of civic virtue.
The Suda’s version leaves out the story of Cyril and Orestes. Here Cyril kills Hypatia simply because she is the learned pagan opposition:
For even if philosophy itself had perished, nevertheless, its name still seems magnificent and venerable to the men who exercise leadership in the state. Thus it happened one day that Cyril, bishop of the opposition sect [Christianity], was passing by Hypatia’s house, and he saw a great crowd of people and horses in front of her door. Some were arriving, some departing, and others standing around. When he asked why there was a crowd there and what all the fuss was about, he was told by her followers that it was the house of Hypatia the philosopher and she was about to greet them. When Cyril learned this he was so struck with envy that he immediately began plotting her murder and the most heinous form of murder at that.
And The Suda tells a similar brutal story, adding that “The memory of these events is still vivid among the Alexandrians.” It was five centuries later. We know from the correspondence of the Bishop of Ptolemais that Hypatia had admiring Christian students among her other pupils—he had been one. His many letters to her have in large part survived, and they glow with admiration and reverence. He asked her advice on the construction of an astrolabe and a hydroscope.
Nonetheless, the overall idea was not lost on anyone: the age of philosophy was over. Hypatia’s father was the last director of the Museum. After she was murdered so many scholars left Alexandria that it marks the beginning of the end of Alexandria as a major center of ancient wisdom. A bribe saved the killers from prosecution, and after Hypatia’s murder no non-Christian in the Roman Empire actively attempted to propagate secular philosophy. Hypatia died in 415 CE. The same Cyril who killed her was the one who attacked the Nestorian idea—also, it would seem, in a bit of a jealous snit of rivalry. Cyril went to the Bishop of Rome (the office was gaining importance, although only with Leo I [440–461]—often called the first pope—would the Bishop of Rome claim authority over the whole Church) and insisted that Nestorius’s opinions had to be stomped out. They were condemned in 431. The result was that the Nestorians broke off from Rome, set up their own patriarchy in Baghdad, and spread eastward—to the Far East, even: Nestorian missionaries were in China by the seventh century. This had extraordinary importance for the history of doubt, because the Nestorians left the West when the texts and legacy of ancient philosophy were still part of an educated person’s world. They would keep those texts, some in continued use, in remote Eastern monasteries while the same texts were driven out of the West and eventually forgotten there. Cyril, by the way, also drove the Jews from Alexandria.
The exile of doubt from the West reached its completion in 529 CE. That year, fearing the anger of God, the Christian emperor Justinian outlawed paganism and closed the Epicurean Garden, the Skeptic Academy, the Lyceum, and the Stoic Porch. After more than eight hundred years, they no longer existed. The graceful-life philosophies, with their beacons of doubt and rationalism, were banished from all Europe.
Pagan practices hung on for centuries longer and many were eventually stirred into Christianity. Christian bishops preached all over the empire against the Roman Feast of Kalends in January. In Carthage, on the day of that feast, Augustine himself preached for more than two and a half hours in an attempt to divert the crowd’s attention, but as one historian has put it, Augustine’s congregation, “though good Christians, were also loyal members of their city: they would not forgo that great moment of euphoria in which the fortune of the city, and all that was within it, was renewed.”45 By the late sixth century in Spain the clergy merely added the chant of “Alleluia” to the Feast of Kalends and jubilantly participated in the ancient rites. Christianity was steeped in Rome: saints came to be understood as members of a “celestial Senate house,” invisible, but modeled on Roman “patrons” and thus patron saints. In the city of Rome in 495, Pope Gelasius fought against the Lupercalia, an ancient pagan ceremony that involved young men running naked through the streets. He lost and the festival went on as planned. All over the empire, people still bowed to the Sun in the morning. In Coptic Egypt the head of the great White Monastery despaired of changing the practices of the surrounding populace: “Even if I take away all your household idols, am I able to cover up the sun?… Shall I stand watch on the banks of the Nile, and in every lagoon, lest you make libations on its waters?”46 Caesarius, Bishop of Arles, tried to get all Christians to refer to the days of the week numerically, starting from the Sabbath, in order to shake off the Mars, for example, hidden in mardi, martedi, and martes. Only Portugal did; their Tuesday is terça-feira.
By the sixth century, Christians in the West had won over the cities, but the countryside was still a place of almost endless supernatural energies, and even city dwellers saw the natural world in this spirited way. The great God of the Christians was too far away for farmers, and the Son may have been human but he was not available for watering the fields or fending off locusts. In parts of Spain the practice of leaving little piles of votive candles near springs, in trees, and on hilltops and crossroads was still so rampant that as late as the 690s dramatic Church ceremonies were staged to transfer the candles to the local churches and announce that idolatry was finally dead. What actually worked was not sermons against the enchanted natural world, but rather the reenchantment of the world in Christian terms. Gregory of Tours (538–594) was most responsible for the reinterpretation of the Christian saints as capable of helping average people in their relationship with the natural world; through them springs and crossroads once again became sanctioned places for worship. The saints brought healing, mercy, and fertility to the small places of field and hearth, and brought safety on byroads and high seas. In myriad ways, water was holy again, and trees might spring up on the graves of saints.
As the Roman Empire declined, it split: the wealthy eastern part gradually became the Byzantine Empire. Meanwhile, the West slipped away from its identity with the Roman Empire and fell into local struggles among barbarian tribes. In some cases, these tribes had converted to one or another version of Christianity in order to live comfortably with Rome; in other cases, the conversion came after Rome had receded and was more about alliances of tribes. The East and West inheritors of the Roman Empire were both Christian, but Rome had the pope—predominantly because the Bishop of Rome had been the bishop of the capital city (succession from Peter was touted later, when the position was challenged)—so, using the same argument by location, Constantinople elevated its bishop to patriarch, and the patriarch ran the Eastern Church.
In what became the Byzantine Empire, the central government remained relatively stable and consistent. Its religion was free to be religious. As historian Karen Armstrong has shown, in the Eastern Church rationalism was not taken on as a goal for religion; the Trinity, for example, was celebrated as a mystery rather than regarded as something to be interpreted until it made sense.47 In the West it was different. The Roman government disappeared. Areas of the world that had seen no city life before Rome fell back into tribal farming or grazing. Western urban centers shrank dramatically, like puddles in the sun. What remained in these cities was generally the Bishopric and the churches, and the clergy maintained a neat hierarchy, continuously based in Rome. Although Rome’s great buildings would begin to fall into ruins in this period, the steady hierarchy of the clergy did not. With the Roman Empire retreating and then gone, the Church took on secular and administrative roles. Literate education dwindled away with the suppression of the classical teachers and the shrinking of cities, and soon only the educated of the Roman Church could read and write. The language of literacy was a Latin that was frozen in its texts. Outside the monasteries, Latin transformed into the languages of modern Europe, or gave way to Celtic, Frankish, Saxon, and other spoken languages. Eventually, learning to read required learning Latin. In the West, the literature and philosophy of humanity was locked up in the Church and in its language.
As we turn from western Europe for a quick look at the Far East, we leave a tribal world that had been overlain with a sophisticated empire, then significantly overrun by new Germanic tribes, and was now slipping again into a state of kinship, farming, and warfare. This tribal world, however, was one informed by the texts of a sophisticated civilization, although those texts dwindled to just a few. The various tribes were often contentiously unified through allegiance to the borrowed tribal God of the Hebrews. Christian doctrine tended to take second place to the idea of God as bellicose, jealous, and judging. The early Middle Ages saw tremendous changes in western Christianity. The rise of monasticism for both men and women became a major factor of Christendom. Slave traders moved people around and thereby Christianized whole populations and some key individuals: Patrick, the son of a genteel family in England, was captured and sold into slavery to work in the bracing rain of the Irish coast, from which he escaped and to which he later returned—as a missionary. By the seventh century the intellectual concerns of Christianity turned to describing the world after death, detailing the delights of heaven and the torments of hell; by the early eighth century the local “mass priest” became an established feature of communities.
Charlemagne once again put the West under an empire in the late eighth and early ninth centuries. It is telling that he did not want his lands understood as a new Rome, but rather as a new Israel. His tribal people and their religious and political problems seemed more aptly reflected in the Old Testament societies and the drama of ancient Israel and her God than in the sophisticated world empire of Rome. Indeed, Charlemagne saw his empire as a theodicy, dedicated above all to stewarding the people’s souls into heaven. With this in mind, in 789 he called for the monasteries and cathedrals of his empire to open schools for the exploration and proper dissemination of the faith. These schools were the intellectual centers of the West for centuries. Their subjects were always Latin, law, and theology, but laymen and clerics also came to learn medicine, or civil or ecclesiastical administration. Students also read pagan literature subsumed under grammar and rhetoric. But aside from the Bible, what were their texts?
They were limited. Beyond the translations and commentaries made by Cicero and Boethius, the Romans had never done much to translate the tremendous heritage of Greek thought into Latin, and by the fifth century, knowledge of Greek was rare in the West. The schools survived in the West on this spare diet: First, all they had of Plato was the Timaeus—the one book in which he gave a sustained and somewhat mythic discussion of God. Even that was only partially translated and embedded in the text of a fourth- or fifth-century commentary on it by a scholar called Chalcidius. The cathedral schools also had access to the commentary of another writer of the early fifth century, Macrobius, this one on the sixth book of Cicero’s Republic. They had the Natural Questions by Seneca (ca. 4 BCE–64 CE), as well as Boethius’s translations of Aristotle’s elementary logical works and some of Boethius’s original works on music and arithmetic. Then there were a few texts by important intellectual figures of the early Middle Ages, like Isidore of Seville and the Venerable Bede—all of which were derived from the ancient writers. In this way, and only in this way, texts by Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, and the Stoics, which were no longer available, were read about, but not read, for centuries. If we ask ourselves how the great minds of the West came to understand philosophy as a thing that stopped, necessarily, at questions of God, even though their world had already had a rationalist revolution, we have to answer by taking Charlemagne at his word: this was, to a degree, a new Israel, a tribal people, with only a strange and tangential relationship to the legacy of thought that had once flooded the land where they lived, and had since receded eastward. The West came to doubt again from within the logic of its own internal history in the eleventh century, and also from outside that logic, in the twelfth century, as the great flood of ideas came splashing back upon them from the other direction, having looped around the Mediterranean Sea.
Before we leave the early Middle Ages, we need to look farther east yet—to where the story of that other world of doubt had taken a stunning little turn.
ZEN AND THE GREAT DOUBT
In the early Middle Ages, soon after Justinian and Theodora closed the pagan schools in Byzantium (529 CE), there were some fascinating changes in Eastern doubt. From the beginning of the Common Era, the Buddhism that grew and dominated China was a theistic vision of the master’s idea. For the most part, when Buddhism spread to other countries in this period, it was Mahayana Buddhism—the big raft—and it had gods. But even so, the basic idea often led, not only to theism, but also to the idea of physiological and intellectual practices that depended on theism very little and often not at all. Consider the case of Tibet, which fashioned the third great school of Buddhism through a kind of fusion and reinterpretation of Theravada and Mahayana.
The traditional story of the origin of Tibetan Buddhism is that Buddhism was introduced into Tibet in the seventh century CE by two devout Buddhist princesses, one Nepali and one Chinese, who became the wives of a Tibetan king. The new religion was actually established by one of the successors of that king who brought an Indian monk, Padmasambhava, to found a Buddhist monastery near Lhasa about 750. Tibetan Buddhism incorporated Tibet’s pre-Buddhist gods as well as the gods it came with. But what most separated Tibetan Buddhism from any other was its profound incorporation of the Hindu doctrine of tantra. The tantra texts concentrate on the interconnectedness of all things and, not unlike Taoism, they advise using all the body’s powers to reach nirvana. They said that by these means practitioners could speed up the process dynamically and also obtain a degree of superpower in this life. In the West we are most aware of the tantric sexual practices, but these are only a portion of the tantra. Tibetan monks sing, move, and chant. They also intensely visualize a variety of gods in order to invoke certain states. This was yet another example of the transformation that many strands of Buddhism underwent, shifting from the nontheism of the Buddha into traditions of gods that supported or personified the Buddhist journey to peace. But not all Mahayana Buddhism slipped over to the worship of gods, Buddhas, or bodhisattvas.
Zen Buddhism is Mahayana, and it is essentially early Buddhism translated through Taoism in China (and then further influenced by its later diffusion into Japan). The founder of Zen in China was called the Bodhidharma, and he came to China from India in the late fifth century CE. He taught the practice of “wall-gazing” and promulgated the Lanka-Vatara Sutra, the chief doctrine of which is “consciousness-only,” which means that consciousness is real but its objects are constructed by it, and unreal. Mixing with Chinese Taoism, Zen grew in the coming centuries, and the eighth and ninth centuries were its golden age. Zen bases itself on a moment when the Buddha answered a disciple’s question by holding up a lotus flower and saying nothing. The idea was that the wonder of being can only be experienced, not explained. No logical descriptions could be of any use. The only thing to do was to get oneself shocked out of the normal human assumptions about the world by asking questions that are impossible to answer within our normal human assumptions.
These questions are koans—famous ones include “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” and “What did your face look like before your ancestors were born?” The Zen master saw the adept twice a day to hear his or her latest answer, generally sending the adept back to work with a gentle prod in the right direction. Apparently, the master was hardly necessary when the right answer had finally come, because, like so many other realizations in this kind of practice, when the answer came it was as certain and as clear as any radical change in the physical universe. There was a clatter of recognition. Zen was as empirical as Siddhartha’s Buddhism was: it made no claims to knowledge that could not be discovered by each individual. There was nothing to take on faith.
One way of characterizing the difference between Zen and other forms of Buddhism is to note that the Buddha offered a technique, a distinct and progressive therapy, to bring the individual follower to the awakening, whereas Zen stresses a nonprogressive vision of awakening: one suddenly snaps out of one’s dream. It’s the difference between, say, learning to walk again after an accident, where your daily work is cumulative and likely to take a set amount of time, and snapping out of a hysterical paralysis because of a sudden confrontation with the triggering experience. Zen works to pop you into enlightenment.
The result is that there is even less to believe in here, in a way, than in other versions of Buddhism, which at the very least give the adherent a progressive program of internal exercise. Unlike many other programs of enlightenment, Zen Buddhism specifically cultivates doubt.48 The cultivation of doubt on such primary matters is a cultivation not of a problem, but of the great mystery. In Stephen Batchelor’s words, “A problem once solved ceases to be a problem; but the penetration of a mystery does not make it any less mysterious. The more intimate one is with a mystery, the greater shines the aura of its secret. The intensification of a mystery leads not to frustration (as does the increasing of a problem) but to release.”49 That’s the idea: Hum in the middle of the universe created by your mind and let yourself not understand it. Coax out the experience of not recognizing the universe as familiar.
The great teachers of Zen have urged keeping oneself in a constant state of unknowing, and they have excelled in generating an attitude of questioning that is sustained and vivid in its wonder, yet blank and unhopeful in relation to answers. Zen literature tends to be full of succinct, even terse, “case studies” of awakenings; koan actually means “public cases” and derives from this legal usage. Many of these hit a similar note: an adept meets a teacher, the teacher says something to him—“What is it?” is common—and nine years later (or right away, or any amount of time) the adept is awakened or enlightened by this question, and stays awake ever after. Other public cases are about extremely odd or seemingly ridiculous gestures by a great teacher. The point of strange antics—a sudden scream, a question answered with a tweak to the nose—is to unhinge the sense of normality and assumption; that is, to create a profound and transformative doubt. There is a famous Zen dictum that encapsulates the notion: “Great doubt: great awakening. Little doubt: little awakening. No doubt: no awakening.” The greatness of the doubt here is said to rely not only on its magnitude but on its subject as well: for a great awakening, one must first doubt the primary issues of life, the nature of existence, and the character of meaning.50 Note that neither scholarly knowledge, nor performing good deeds, nor prayer, nor ritual were considered of spiritual value here. There arose two main schools of Zen, the Lin-chi (Rinzai in Japan), which placed greater emphasis on the use of the koan, and the Ts’ao-tung (Soto), which emphasized sitting in meditation without expectation and with faith in one’s own intrinsic state of enlightenment.
Meanwhile, the atheist doctrine of Carvaka and the materialist philosophy of Samkhya were still going strong all these centuries later. In the seventh century, the sage Purandara made an important adjustment to Carvaka’s insistence that valid inference was impossible.51 He argued that inferences based on a great many repeated experiences of things—inferences one can make about the physical world, for example—are reasonable, whereas inferences about the transcendental world, whatever that might be or not be, cannot be considered reasonable since they are not based on sense experience at all, let alone repeated sense experience. The eighth-century philosopher Sankara described the Samkhya as holding that nature made itself in the same way that “non-sentient milk flows forth from its own nature” and as “non-sentient water, from its own nature” flows along to our benefit, so the non-sentient matter of the world “although non-intelligent, may be supposed to move from its own nature.”52
Christianity and Zen both arose out of doubt’s questions. Jesus’ exhortations to faith and Zen’s lunging, leaping, seeking after uncertainty were both tremendously fruitful innovations in the history of doubt. They also provide some of that great history’s best images, gestures, poems, howls of woe, and radical solutions. These were religions with doubt at their hearts.