The History of Philosophy Summary: Christianity and the Invention of the Self – Discourses on Minerva
The most monumental shift in the history of philosophy is one that is the least known and the most misunderstood: Christianity. People with no knowledge of philosophy or theology are, sadly, the people who most often speak on the subject matter. One can think of imbeciles like Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, or Neil deGrasse Tyson as a few examples. But in philosophy and history, Christianity proved to be the most significant development in human consciousness, providing for the birth of the self and the philosophies of individuality that we have 2,000 years later. How did this happen?
We previously explained how out of the Greek poetic tradition the philosophic traditions of Platonism, Aristotelianism, and Stoicism all emerged. What united the Greek philosophies was their emphasis on understanding the outer world, their primacy of reason over love, of rational observation instead of pathological eroticism. The erotic world was associated with Hesiod, Homer, and the playwrights. That was a world that ultimately led to violence, the irrational, and death and destruction writ large. But by observing the order and movement of the cosmos, the Greek philosophers argued, we would realize the poets were wrong and could escape the chaos and violence around us.
Christianity rejected this view. By its own theology it had to: God is not just Truth and Reason as was the case in Greek philosophy. God was also, and primarily, Love. God is Love itself. Christianity, then, attempts to bridge the gap between rationality and love, between the rational cosmos we can know and the human passions that stir and govern the human heart. You are probably familiar with this dichotomy. Saint Thomas Aquinas, for instance, the most famous of the Scholastics, giving all of his rational arguments for the existence of God and how we can know everything about the world. Then there are the Renaissance Humanists, like Nicholas Cusa, turning our mind back to the human heart, inner nature, and the self, a celebration of human nature and human love which led to the Renaissance artists and their paintings and sculptures. The history of Christianity oscillates between the celebration of God as Reason (Thomas and the Scholastics) and the celebration of God as Love (Dante and the Renaissance Humanists).
The one figure who is the most important to the history of Christian philosophy is the man who influenced both the Scholastics and Humanists, then later the Protestant Reformers: Saint Augustine. For it was Saint Augustine who declared, in De Trinitate, that the soul is “the rational intellect” and the rational intellect in man was the image of God in us. But it was also Augustine who said the most radical statement in western cultural and intellectual history, one that we are still living in the wake of: dilectio Deus est. Love is God. Love is Divine. In Latin, if you literally translated one word at a time: Love God is. In his homilies on the epistles of John, Augustine extended the formulation of “God is Love” (1 John 4:16), he literally said that all love is Divine and wherever love is found, God is found. In the Confessions, he also famously remarked “I was in love with the idea of love.” Augustine was obsessed with love.
In the beginning, Love created the heavens and the earth. That was Augustine’s understanding of Genesis 1. Love is the beginning of everything, not chaos. Love is also knowable, knowable through experience but not rational observation. Thus, with Augustine, and the rest of Christianity influenced by him, Christianity becomes the philosophy of love, and the philosophy of love is found in people, in the human heart, and in our relations and interactions with others and the world. Christianity lays the seeds for the philosophies of existentialism, phenomenology, even psychology, since it is principally concerned with the world of human experience.
The most famous question asked by Augustine in the Confessions was mihi quaestio factus sum: I have become a question even to myself.
Augustine asserted many things in his life that are worth knowing: That God is an Artist, that the cosmos is a poetic creation, that our souls are notes in the music of existence. All, though, are simply expressions of love. Love is the basis of all things.
But in trying to understand the nature of love, the rational trying to understand the irrational, Augustine goes beyond the Platonism that saved him from Manichaeism. The Greek philosophical tradition, as we explained in episode one, ultimately looked outward for answers. Even Platonism, though it can be described as the philosophy of the intelligible world (which is why Platonism always had a close relationship to Christianity), looked outward to the Realm of the Forms. Aristotelianism looked outward to the world of immediate nature, the material world that we ourselves are imitative creatures of. Stoicism looked outward to the cosmos, recognizing that we cannot control the movement of the heavens, that everything was in flux, and that once we accepted this principle, we could conform to the movement of the cosmos and control our own passions—the only thing we have direct control over. Christianity’s revolution in philosophy is the creation of the self, as William Barrett explained in Irrational man. Why? Because Christianity turned inward and not outward for its answers. Rather than looking outward for God and Reason, Augustine turned inward, looking into the heart, into the soul, into the mind. As he also famously said in the Confessions, when he discovered God he discovered God within him, it was only after turning inward that God was found. God was not a body to be found in the universe. This is why even Slavoj Zizek explains Christianity and Augustine as the beginning of “psychological interiority,” and why other noted scholars and psychologists have said the rise of modern psychology is Christianity without its concern for God.
Reason itself, since God is Reason, is found within us. Reason doesn’t exist in the realm of the Forms as it does in Plato. Reason is found in our minds, for our mind is the soul and the soul possesses reason—a vestige ruin of the God who created us in love. Augustine explained this in De Trinitate, that the image of God in man is found in his mind: God is Reason and God is Truth is found in the soul and memory of the human mind. God is Love and Love is God is also to be found in the human heart. To know reason and to know love we must turn inward and try and unite the mind (the soul) and the heart (love).
Augustine, therefore, begins his wrestling with rationality and love, the two great poles that occupy Christian philosophy. Moreover, because humans possess rationality and are also erotic, loving, animals, this tension between reason and love is the tension that defines human existence. And since Love, God, is found in humans and not out there in the material world, Christianity primarily becomes concerned with the question of humanity: what does it mean to be human?
We should now begin to see the dramatic turn in philosophy that Christianity begets. Plato looked to the realm of the Forms. Aristotle to the material world. The Stoics to the heavens. Augustine turned to himself, to us, to human beings. Christianity, as a result, looked to the answers of philosophy within human beings, human actions, and what motivates them rather than the outer world of the universe and observable nature. As Hannah Arendt said of Augustine, “he was the only philosopher the Romans ever produced.” Why? Because he was unique, original, innovative. The other Roman philosophers, like Cicero and Seneca, were just Roman variations of Platonism and Stoicism. Augustine, Arendt reminds us, was a philosopher of the heart, of the will, thus begetting the tradition of voluntarism to the Western tradition to which more famous modern philosophers like Nietzsche and Foucault also belong.
The inward turn to the self, the incurvatus in se as Augustine called it, is what would eventually lead to the proliferation of the liberal arts in late medieval Europe with the Scholastics and Renaissance Humanists. The discovery, or rediscovery, of the classics told us about ourselves which the Scholastics endless poured over because these were works of the human heart and mind that we could unlock to learn about ourselves. The dialogue and engagement with Islam, one of the positive and unintended outcomes of the Crusades, caused the Renaissance Humanists to look into their own hearts and the hearts of Muslims to try and discover the universal human nature that unites all human beings regardless of religious confession and devotion. Christianity became the philosophy of us whereas Greek philosophy was the philosophy of the cosmos; Christianity gave us theories of the self, the soul, the body, sin, love, goodness, and sanctification. It also led to the rise of a new form of empiricism, radically different than the empiricism of the Greeks.
In De Veritate, or On Truth, Saint Anselm declared that “since God is Truth” God could be known by our senses. Anselm turns the attention of understanding human sensations inward to us rather than the material world. He is not concerned with why the objects of the world move or sound the way they do, he isn’t concerned with why certain things smell the way they do, he is concerned with the how and why we interpret these senses the way we do. Sensations, although caused by the material world, are interpreted by us. Sensations are otherwise irrelevant without humans to experience and interpret them. If tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? This is one of the silly questions of medieval philosophy but now you can understand why it is asked: Christian philosophy isn’t about the world it is about us, so if we’re not around to hear sounds then sounds is an irrelevant subject matter. Because of this, the true study of empirical science is actually a study of humanity. Humans do the interpreting. Can interpretations be wrong? Of course, Anselm tells his pupil in the dialogue. However, Anselm also asserts that this is a deficiency in human reasoning and not the senses themselves. The senses are never wrong, properly speaking, only the human interpretation of the senses are—when we smell the smell is real, when we hear, the hearing is real—whether we smelled the proper scent or heard the music from the right direction didn’t have to do with the senses but how we interpreted them. The eye sees, the ear hears, the tongue tastes. But whether we see properly, or hear the music from the correct direction, or whether the tongue tastes the correct ingredients, is a product of rational interpretation.
But to end with are summarizing of Christian philosophy: God is Reason and God is Love. This God of Reason and God of Love is found in us rather than the outer world. Christianity creates the philosophy of the self, of inner subjectivity and inner nature. Christianity’s concern is the self, that inner subjectivity and inner nature that contains the residue of God, the image of the Divine. The attempt to square the rational and the erotic is found, ultimately, in God. Without God there is no rationality and no true love; there is only be the irrational and lust.
Christianity, then, attempted to bridge the gap between reason and love, the reason extoled by the Greek philosophers and the love sung of by the Greek poets. This is why Dante unites reason and poetry in The Divine Comedy. It attempted to do so by not looking to the outer world but the inner world, the inner world of human nature. However, Christianity’s invention of the self, its concentration on the human being, turned our attention away from the material world. The rise of modern philosophy with Machiavelli, Francis Bacon, and the so-called Enlightenment thinkers, would rise in opposition to this insular philosophizing of Christianity. The end of Christian philosophy is marked by the rise of modern science, the philosophy of scientific conquest and investigation by Francis Bacon, and that is what we shall explore next. No longer would philosophy be concerned with questions of the self and inner subjectivity and inner nature, but with the material world and outer nature, the nature of things and objects, thus giving rise to the explosive revolutions of industry, science, and commerce that defined the modern world. The rise of practical philosophy is next.
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Hesiod, Paul Krause in real life, is the editor-in-chief of VoegelinView. He is writer, classicist, and historian. He has written on the arts, culture, classics, literature, philosophy, religion, and history for numerous journals, magazines, and newspapers. He is the author of Finding Arcadia, The Odyssey of Love and the Politics of Plato, and a contributor to the College Lecture Today and Making Sense of Diseases and Disasters. He holds master’s degrees in philosophy and religious studies (biblical studies & theology) from the University of Buckingham and Yale, and a bachelor’s degree in economics, history, and philosophy from Baldwin Wallace University.
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